diff --git "a/iwslt17/concatenated_en2de_dev_en.txt" "b/iwslt17/concatenated_en2de_dev_en.txt" new file mode 100644--- /dev/null +++ "b/iwslt17/concatenated_en2de_dev_en.txt" @@ -0,0 +1,9060 @@ + +Last year I showed these two slides so that demonstrate that the arctic ice cap, which for most of the last three million years has been the size of the lower 48 states, has shrunk by 40 percent. +But this understates the seriousness of this particular problem because it doesn't show the thickness of the ice. +The arctic ice cap is, in a sense, the beating heart of the global climate system. +It expands in winter and contracts in summer. +The next slide I show you will be a rapid fast-forward of what's happened over the last 25 years. +The permanent ice is marked in red. +As you see, it expands to the dark blue -- that's the annual ice in winter, and it contracts in summer. +The so-called permanent ice, five years old or older, you can see is almost like blood, spilling out of the body here. +In 25 years it's gone from this, to this. +This is a problem because the warming heats up the frozen ground around the Arctic Ocean, where there is a massive amount of frozen carbon which, when it thaws, is turned into methane by microbes. +Compared to the total amount of global warming pollution in the atmosphere, that amount could double if we cross this tipping point. +Already in some shallow lakes in Alaska, methane is actively bubbling up out of the water. +Professor Katey Walter from the University of Alaska went out with another team to another shallow lake last winter. +Video: Whoa! Al Gore: She's okay. The question is whether we will be. +And one reason is, this enormous heat sink heats up Greenland from the north. +This is an annual melting river. +But the volumes are much larger than ever. +This is the Kangerlussuaq River in southwest Greenland. +If you want to know how sea level rises from land-base ice melting this is where it reaches the sea. +These flows are increasing very rapidly. +At the other end of the planet, Antarctica the largest mass of ice on the planet. +Last month scientists reported the entire continent is now in negative ice balance. +And west Antarctica cropped up on top some under-sea islands, is particularly rapid in its melting. +That's equal to 20 feet of sea level, as is Greenland. +In the Himalayas, the third largest mass of ice: at the top you see new lakes, which a few years ago were glaciers. +40 percent of all the people in the world get half of their drinking water from that melting flow. +In the Andes, this glacier is the source of drinking water for this city. +The flows have increased. +But when they go away, so does much of the drinking water. +In California there has been a 40 percent decline in the Sierra snowpack. +This is hitting the reservoirs. +And the predictions, as you've read, are serious. +This drying around the world has lead to a dramatic increase in fires. +And the disasters around the world have been increasing at an absolutely extraordinary and unprecedented rate. +Four times as many in the last 30 years as in the previous 75. +This is a completely unsustainable pattern. +If you look at in the context of history you can see what this is doing. +In the last five years we've added 70 million tons of CO2 every 24 hours -- 25 million tons every day to the oceans. +Look carefully at the area of the eastern Pacific, from the Americas, extending westward, and on either side of the Indian subcontinent, where there is a radical depletion of oxygen in the oceans. +The biggest single cause of global warming, along with deforestation, which is 20 percent of it, is the burning of fossil fuels. +Oil is a problem, and coal is the most serious problem. +The United States is one of the two largest emitters, along with China. +And the proposal has been to build a lot more coal plants. +But we're beginning to see a sea change. +Here are the ones that have been cancelled in the last few years with some green alternatives proposed. +However there is a political battle in our country. +And the coal industries and the oil industries spent a quarter of a billion dollars in the last calendar year promoting clean coal, which is an oxymoron. +That image reminded me of something. +Around Christmas, in my home in Tennessee, a billion gallons of coal sludge was spilled. +You probably saw it on the news. +This, all over the country, is the second largest waste stream in America. +This happened around Christmas. +One of the coal industry's ads around Christmas was this one. +Video: ♪♫ Frosty the coal man is a jolly, happy soul. +He's abundant here in America, and he helps our economy grow. +Frosty the coal man is getting cleaner everyday. +He's affordable and adorable, and workers keep their pay. +Al Gore: This is the source of much of the coal in West Virginia. +The largest mountaintop miner is the head of Massey Coal. +Video: Don Blankenship: Let me be clear about it. Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, they don't know what they're talking about. +Al Gore: So the Alliance for Climate Protection has launched two campaigns. +This is one of them, part of one of them. +Video: Actor: At COALergy we view climate change as a very serious threat to our business. +That's why we've made it our primary goal to spend a large sum of money on an advertising effort to help bring out and complicate the truth about coal. +The fact is, coal isn't dirty. +We think it's clean -- smells good, too. +So don't worry about climate change. +Leave that up to us. +Video: Actor: Clean coal -- you've heard a lot about it. +So let's take a tour of this state-of-the-art clean coal facility. +Amazing! The machinery is kind of loud. +But that's the sound of clean coal technology. +And while burning coal is one of the leading causes of global warming, the remarkable clean coal technology you see here changes everything. +Take a good long look: this is today's clean coal technology. +Al Gore: Finally, the positive alternative meshes with our economic challenge and our national security challenge. +Video: Narrator: America is in crisis -- the economy, national security, the climate crisis. +The thread that links them all: our addiction to carbon based fuels, like dirty coal and foreign oil. +But now there is a bold new solution to get us out of this mess. +Repower America with 100 percent clean electricity within 10 years. +A plan to put America back to work, make us more secure, and help stop global warming. +Finally, a solution that's big enough to solve our problems. +Repower America. Find out more. +Al Gore: This is the last one. +Video: Narrator: It's about repowering America. +One of the fastest ways to cut our dependence on old dirty fuels that are killing our planet. +Man: Future's over here. Wind, sun, a new energy grid. +Man #2: New investments to create high-paying jobs. +Narrator: Repower America. It's time to get real. +Al Gore: There is an old African proverb that says, "If you want to go quickly, go alone. +If you want to go far, go together." +We need to go far, quickly. +Thank you very much. + +Last year at TED I gave an introduction to the LHC. +And I promised to come back and give you an update on how that machine worked. +So this is it. And for those of you that weren't there, the LHC is the largest scientific experiment ever attempted -- 27 kilometers in circumference. +Its job is to recreate the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began, up to 600 million times a second. +It's nothing if not ambitious. +This is the machine below Geneva. +We take the pictures of those mini-Big Bangs inside detectors. +This is the one I work on. It's called the ATLAS detector -- 44 meters wide, 22 meters in diameter. +Spectacular picture here of ATLAS under construction so you can see the scale. +On the 10th of September last year we turned the machine on for the first time. +And this picture was taken by ATLAS. +It caused immense celebration in the control room. +It's a picture of the first beam particle going all the way around the LHC, colliding with a piece of the LHC deliberately, and showering particles into the detector. +In other words, when we saw that picture on September 10th we knew the machine worked, which is a great triumph. +I don't know whether this got the biggest cheer, or this, when someone went onto Google and saw the front page was like that. +It means we made cultural impact as well as scientific impact. +About a week later we had a problem with the machine, related actually to these bits of wire here -- these gold wires. +Those wires carry 13 thousand amps when the machine is working in full power. +Now the engineers amongst you will look at them and say, "No they don't. They're small wires." +They can do that because when they are very cold they are what's called superconducting wire. +So at minus 271 degrees, colder than the space between the stars, those wires can take that current. +In one of the joints between over 9,000 magnets in LHC, there was a manufacturing defect. +So the wire heated up slightly, and its 13,000 amps suddenly encountered electrical resistance. +This was the result. +Now that's more impressive when you consider those magnets weigh over 20 tons, and they moved about a foot. +So we damaged about 50 of the magnets. +We had to take them out, which we did. +We reconditioned them all, fixed them. +They're all on their way back underground now. +By the end of March the LHC will be intact again. +We will switch it on, and we expect to take data in June or July, and continue with our quest to find out what the building blocks of the universe are. +Now of course, in a way those accidents reignite the debate about the value of science and engineering at the edge. It's easy to refute. +I think that the fact that it's so difficult, the fact that we're overreaching, is the value of things like the LHC. +I will leave the final word to an English scientist, Humphrey Davy, who, I suspect, when defending his protege's useless experiments -- his protege was Michael Faraday -- said this, "Nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete, and that there are no new worlds to conquer." +Thank you. + +I want to start out by asking you to think back to when you were a kid, playing with blocks. +As you figured out how to reach out and grasp, pick them up and move them around, you were actually learning how to think and solve problems by understanding and manipulating spatial relationships. +Spatial reasoning is deeply connected to how we understand a lot of the world around us. +So, as a computer scientist inspired by this utility of our interactions with physical objects -- along with my adviser Pattie, and my collaborator Jeevan Kalanithi -- I started to wonder -- what if when we used a computer, instead of having this one mouse cursor that was a like a digital fingertip moving around a flat desktop, what if we could reach in with both hands and grasp information physically, +arranging it the way we wanted? +This question was so compelling that we decided to explore the answer, by building Siftables. +In a nutshell, a Siftable is an interactive computer the size of a cookie. +They're able to be moved around by hand, they can sense each other, they can sense their motion, and they have a screen and a wireless radio. +Most importantly, they're physical, so like the blocks, you can move them just by reaching out and grasping. +And Siftables are an example of a new ecosystem of tools for manipulating digital information. +And as these tools become more physical, more aware of their motion, aware of each other, and aware of the nuance of how we move them, we can start to explore some new and fun interaction styles. +So, I'm going to start with some simple examples. +This Siftable is configured to show video, and if I tilt it in one direction, it'll roll the video this way; if I tilt it the other way it rolls it backwards. +And these interactive portraits are aware of each other. +So if I put them next to each other, they get interested. +If they get surrounded, they notice that too, they might get a little flustered. +And they can also sense their motion and tilt. +One of the interesting implications on interaction, we started to realize, was that we could use everyday gestures on data, like pouring a color the way we might pour a liquid. +So in this case, we've got three Siftables configured to be paint buckets and I can use them to pour color into that central one, where they get mixed. +If we overshoot, we can pour a little bit back. +There are also some neat possibilities for education, like language, math and logic games where we want to give people the ability to try things quickly, and view the results immediately. +So here I'm -- This is a Fibonacci sequence that I'm making with a simple equation program. +Here we have a word game that's kind of like a mash-up between Scrabble and Boggle. +Basically, in every round you get a randomly assigned letter on each Siftable, and as you try to make words it checks against a dictionary. +Then, after about 30 seconds, it reshuffles, and you have a new set of letters and new possibilities to try. +Thank you. +So these are some kids that came on a field trip to the Media Lab, and I managed to get them to try it out, and shoot a video. +They really loved it. +And, one of the interesting things about this kind of application is that you don't have to give people many instructions. +All you have to say is, "Make words," and they know exactly what to do. +So here's another few people trying it out. +That's our youngest beta tester, down there on the right. +Turns out, all he wanted to do was to stack the Siftables up. +So to him, they were just blocks. +Now, this is an interactive cartoon application. +And we wanted to build a learning tool for language learners. +And this is Felix, actually. +And he can bring new characters into the scene, just by lifting the Siftables off the table that have that character shown on them. +Here, he's bringing the sun out. +David Merrill: Now he's brought a tractor into the scene. +Good job! Yeah! +DM: So by shaking the Siftables and putting them next to each other he can make the characters interact -- Video: Woof! +DM: inventing his own narrative. +DM: It's an open-ended story, and he gets to decide how it unfolds. +DM: So, the last example I have time to show you today is a music sequencing and live performance tool that we've built recently, in which Siftables act as sounds like lead, bass and drums. +Each of these has four different variations, you get to choose which one you want to use. +And you can inject these sounds into a sequence that you can assemble into the pattern that you want. +And you inject it by just bumping up the sound Siftable against a sequence Siftable. +There are effects that you can control live, like reverb and filter. +You attach it to a particular sound and then tilt to adjust it. +And then, overall effects like tempo and volume that apply to the entire sequence. +So let's have a look. +Video: DM: We'll start by putting a lead into two sequence Siftables, arrange them into a series, extend it, add a little more lead. +Now I put a bass line in. +Video: DM: Now I'll put some percussion in. +Video: DM: And now I'll attach the filter to the drums, so I can control the effect live. +Video: DM: I can speed up the whole sequence by tilting the tempo one way or the other. +Video: DM: And now I'll attach the filter to the bass for some more expression. +Video: DM: I can rearrange the sequence while it plays. +So I don't have to plan it out in advance, but I can improvise, making it longer or shorter as I go. +And now, finally, I can fade the whole sequence out using the volume Siftable, tilted to the left. +Thank you. +So, as you can see, my passion is for making new human-computer interfaces that are a better match to the ways our brains and bodies work. +And today, I had time to show you one point in this new design space, and a few of the possibilities that we're working to bring out of the laboratory. +So the thought I want to leave you with is that we're on the cusp of this new generation of tools for interacting with digital media that are going to bring information into our world on our terms. +Thank you very much. +I look forward to talking with all of you. + +I am a writer. +Writing books is my profession but it's more than that, of course. +It is also my great lifelong love and fascination. +And I don't expect that that's ever going to change. +But, that said, something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career, which has caused me to have to recalibrate my whole relationship with this work. +And the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote this book, this memoir called "Eat, Pray, Love" which, decidedly unlike any of my previous books, went out in the world for some reason, and became this big, mega-sensation, international bestseller thing. +The result of which is that everywhere I go now, people treat me like I'm doomed. +Seriously -- doomed, doomed! +Like, they come up to me now, all worried, and they say, "Aren't you afraid you're never going to be able to top that? +Aren't you afraid you're going to keep writing for your whole life and you're never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all, ever again?" +So that's reassuring, you know. +But it would be worse, except for that I happen to remember that over 20 years ago, when I was a teenager, when I first started telling people that I wanted to be a writer, I was met with this same sort of fear-based reaction. +And people would say, "Aren't you afraid you're never going to have any success? +Aren't you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you? +Aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it and you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure?" +Like that, you know. +The answer -- the short answer to all those questions is, "Yes." +Yes, I'm afraid of all those things. +And I always have been. +And I'm afraid of many, many more things besides that people can't even guess at, like seaweed and other things that are scary. +But, when it comes to writing, the thing that I've been sort of thinking about lately, and wondering about lately, is why? +You know, is it rational? +Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do. +And what is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health in a way that other careers kind of don't do, you know? +Like my dad, for example, was a chemical engineer and I don't recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer, you know? +"That chemical-engineering block, John, how's it going?" +It just didn't come up like that, you know? +But to be fair, chemical engineers as a group haven't really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic-depressives. +We writers, we kind of do have that reputation, and not just writers, but creative people across all genres, it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable. +And all you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone, of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands, you know? +And even the ones who didn't literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts, you know. +Norman Mailer, just before he died, last interview, he said, "Every one of my books has killed me a little more." +An extraordinary statement to make about your life's work. +But we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this, because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we've completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish. +And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea? +Are you comfortable with that? +Because you look at it even from an inch away and, you know -- I'm not at all comfortable with that assumption. +I think it's odious. +And I also think it's dangerous, and I don't want to see it perpetuated into the next century. +I think it's better if we encourage our great creative minds to live. +And I definitely know that, in my case -- in my situation -- it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption, particularly given the circumstance that I'm in right now in my career. +Which is -- you know, like check it out, I'm pretty young, I'm only about 40 years old. +I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. +And it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right? +I should just put it bluntly, because we're all sort of friends here now -- it's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. +So Jesus, what a thought! +That's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning, and I don't want to go there. +I would prefer to keep doing this work that I love. +And so, the question becomes, how? +And so, it seems to me, upon a lot of reflection, that the way that I have to work now, in order to continue writing, is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct, right? +I have to sort of find some way to have a safe distance between me, as I am writing, and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is going to be, from now on. +And, as I've been looking, over the last year, for models for how to do that, I've been sort of looking across time, and I've been trying to find other societies to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we have about how to help creative people sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of creativity. +And that search has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. +So stay with me, because it does circle around and back. +But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome -- people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? +People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. +The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity "daemons." +Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar. +The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. +Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. +They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work. +So brilliant -- there it is, right there, that distance that I'm talking about -- that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. +And everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? +So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism, right? +If your work was brilliant, you couldn't take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. +If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? +Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame. +And this is how people thought about creativity in the West for a really long time. +And then the Renaissance came and everything changed, and we had this big idea, and the big idea was, let's put the individual human being at the center of the universe above all gods and mysteries, and there's no more room for mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine. +And it's the beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. +And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius, rather than having a genius. +And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. +You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel, you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. +It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. +It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. +And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years. +And, if this is true, and I think it is true, the question becomes, what now? +Can we do this differently? +Maybe go back to some more ancient understanding about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery. +Maybe not. +Maybe we can't just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought in one 18 minute speech. +And there's probably people in this audience who would raise really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of, basically, fairies who follow people around rubbing fairy juice on their projects and stuff. +I'm not, probably, going to bring you all along with me on this. +But the question that I kind of want to pose is -- you know, why not? +Why not think about it this way? +Because it makes as much sense as anything else I have ever heard in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process. +A process which, as anybody who has ever tried to make something -- which is to say basically everyone here --- knows does not always behave rationally. +And, in fact, can sometimes feel downright paranormal. +I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. +And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. +And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. +And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. +She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, "run like hell." +And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. +And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it "for another poet." +And then there were these times -- this is the piece I never forgot -- she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? +So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. +She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. +And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first. +So when I heard that I was like -- that's uncanny, that's exactly what my creative process is like. +That's not at all what my creative process is -- I'm not the pipeline! +I'm a mule, and the way that I have to work is I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. +But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. +And I would imagine that a lot of you have too. +You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. +And what is that thing? +And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane? +And for me, the best contemporary example that I have of how to do that is the musician Tom Waits, who I got to interview several years ago on a magazine assignment. +And we were talking about this, and you know, Tom, for most of his life, he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist, trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses that were totally internalized. +But then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles, and this is when it all changed for him. +And he's speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, it's gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. +He doesn't have a piece of paper, or a pencil, or a tape recorder. +So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, "I'm going to lose this thing, and I'll be be haunted by this song forever. +I'm not good enough, and I can't do it." +And instead of panicking, he just stopped. +He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. +He just looked up at the sky, and he said, "Excuse me, can you not see that I'm driving?" +"Do I look like I can write down a song right now? +If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. +Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. +Go bother Leonard Cohen." +And his whole work process changed after that. +Not the work, the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever. +But the process, and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie, the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it back where it came from, and realized that this didn't have to be this internalized, tormented thing. +It could be this peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration, kind of conversation between Tom and the strange, external thing that was not quite Tom. +When I heard that story, it started to shift a little bit the way that I worked too, and this idea already saved me once. +It saved me when I was in the middle of writing "Eat, Pray, Love," and I fell into one of those sort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we're working on something and it's not coming and you start to think this is going to be a disaster, the worst book ever written. +Not just bad, but the worst book ever written. +And I started to think I should just dump this project. +But then I remembered Tom talking to the open air and I tried it. +So I just lifted my face up from the manuscript and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room. +And I said aloud, "Listen you, thing, you and I both know that if this book isn't brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right? +Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this, I don't have any more than this. +If you want it to be better, you've got to show up and do your part of the deal. +But if you don't do that, you know what, the hell with it. +I'm going to keep writing anyway because that's my job. +And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job." +Because -- Because in the end it's like this, OK -- centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. +They were always magnificent, because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? +But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. +And I know you know what I'm talking about, because I know you've all seen, at some point in your life, a performance like this. +It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. +And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. +He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity. +And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. +They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, "Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God." +That's God, you know. +Curious historical footnote: when the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from "Allah, Allah, Allah," to "Olé, olé, olé," which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances. +In Spain, when a performer has done something impossible and magic, "Allah, olé, olé, Allah, magnificent, bravo," incomprehensible, there it is -- a glimpse of God. +Which is great, because we need that. +But, the tricky bit comes the next morning, for the dancer himself, when he wakes up and discovers that it's Tuesday at 11 a.m., and he's no longer a glimpse of God. +He's just an aging mortal with really bad knees, and maybe he's never going to ascend to that height again. +And maybe nobody will ever chant God's name again as he spins, and what is he then to do with the rest of his life? +This is hard. +This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life. +But maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. +But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished, with somebody else. +And, you know, if we think about it this way, it starts to change everything. +This is how I've started to think, and this is certainly how I've been thinking in the last few months as I've been working on the book that will soon be published, as the dangerously, frighteningly over-anticipated follow up to my freakish success. +And what I have to sort of keep telling myself when I get really psyched out about that is don't be afraid. +Don't be daunted. Just do your job. +Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. +If your job is to dance, do your dance. +If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then "Olé!" +And if not, do your dance anyhow. +And "Olé!" to you, nonetheless. +I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. +"Olé!" to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up. +Thank you. +Thank you. +June Cohen: Olé! + +You know, I've talked about some of these projects before -- about the human genome and what that might mean, and discovering new sets of genes. +We're actually starting at a new point: we've been digitizing biology, and now we're trying to go from that digital code into a new phase of biology with designing and synthesizing life. +So, we've always been trying to ask big questions. +"What is life?" is something that I think many biologists have been trying to understand at various levels. +We've tried various approaches, paring it down to minimal components. +We've been digitizing it now for almost 20 years; when we sequenced the human genome, it was going from the analog world of biology into the digital world of the computer. +Now we're trying to ask, "Can we regenerate life or can we create new life out of this digital universe?" +This is the map of a small organism, Mycoplasma genitalium, that has the smallest genome for a species that can self-replicate in the laboratory, and we've been trying to just see if we can come up with an even smaller genome. +We're able to knock out on the order of 100 genes out of the 500 or so that are here. +When we look at its metabolic map, it's relatively simple compared to ours -- trust me, this is simple -- but when we look at all the genes that we can knock out one at a time, it's very unlikely that this would yield a living cell. +So we decided the only way forward was to actually synthesize this chromosome so we could vary the components to ask some of these most fundamental questions. +And so we started down the road of: can we synthesize a chromosome? +Can chemistry permit making these really large molecules where we've never been before? +And if we do, can we boot up a chromosome? +A chromosome, by the way, is just a piece of inert chemical material. +So, our pace of digitizing life has been increasing at an exponential pace. +Our ability to write the genetic code has been moving pretty slowly but has been increasing, and our latest point would put it on, now, an exponential curve. +We started this over 15 years ago. +It took several stages, in fact, starting with a bioethical review before we did the first experiments. +But it turns out synthesizing DNA is very difficult. +There are tens of thousands of machines around the world that make small pieces of DNA -- 30 to 50 letters in length -- and it's a degenerate process, so the longer you make the piece, the more errors there are. +So we had to create a new method for putting these little pieces together and correct all the errors. +And this was our first attempt, starting with the digital information of the genome of phi X174. +It's a small virus that kills bacteria. +We designed the pieces, went through our error correction and had a DNA molecule of about 5,000 letters. +The exciting phase came when we took this piece of inert chemical and put it in the bacteria, and the bacteria started to read this genetic code, made the viral particles. +The viral particles then were released from the cells and came back and killed the E. coli. +I was talking to the oil industry recently and I said they clearly understood that model. +They laughed more than you guys are. And so, we think this is a situation where the software can actually build its own hardware in a biological system. +But we wanted to go much larger: we wanted to build the entire bacterial chromosome -- it's over 580,000 letters of genetic code -- so we thought we'd build them in cassettes the size of the viruses so we could actually vary the cassettes to understand what the actual components of a living cell are. +Design is critical, and if you're starting with digital information in the computer, that digital information has to be really accurate. +When we first sequenced this genome in 1995, the standard of accuracy was one error per 10,000 base pairs. +We actually found, on resequencing it, 30 errors; had we used that original sequence, it never would have been able to be booted up. +Part of the design is designing pieces that are 50 letters long that have to overlap with all the other 50-letter pieces to build smaller subunits we have to design so they can go together. +We design unique elements into this. +You may have read that we put watermarks in. +Think of this: we have a four-letter genetic code -- A, C, G and T. +Triplets of those letters code for roughly 20 amino acids, such that there's a single letter designation for each of the amino acids. +So we can use the genetic code to write out words, sentences, thoughts. +Initially, all we did was autograph it. +Some people were disappointed there was not poetry. +We designed these pieces so we can just chew back with enzymes; there are enzymes that repair them and put them together. +And we started making pieces, starting with pieces that were 5,000 to 7,000 letters, put those together to make 24,000-letter pieces, then put sets of those going up to 72,000. +At each stage, we grew up these pieces in abundance so we could sequence them because we're trying to create a process that's extremely robust that you can see in a minute. +We're trying to get to the point of automation. +So, this looks like a basketball playoff. +When we get into these really large pieces over 100,000 base pairs, they won't any longer grow readily in E. coli -- it exhausts all the modern tools of molecular biology -- and so we turned to other mechanisms. +We knew there's a mechanism called homologous recombination that biology uses to repair DNA that can put pieces together. +Here's an example of it: there's an organism called Deinococcus radiodurans that can take three millions rads of radiation. +You can see in the top panel, its chromosome just gets blown apart. +Twelve to 24 hours later, it put it back together exactly as it was before. +We have thousands of organisms that can do this. +These organisms can be totally desiccated; they can live in a vacuum. +I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment. +In fact, NASA has shown a lot of this is out there. +Here's an actual micrograph of the molecule we built using these processes, actually just using yeast mechanisms with the right design of the pieces we put them in; yeast puts them together automatically. +This is not an electron micrograph; this is just a regular photomicrograph. +It's such a large molecule we can see it with a light microscope. +These are pictures over about a six-second period. +So, this is the publication we had just a short while ago. +This is over 580,000 letters of genetic code; it's the largest molecule ever made by humans of a defined structure. +It's over 300 million molecular weight. +If we printed it out at a 10 font with no spacing, it takes 142 pages just to print this genetic code. +Well, how do we boot up a chromosome? How do we activate this? +Obviously, with a virus it's pretty simple; it's much more complicated dealing with bacteria. +It's also simpler when you go into eukaryotes like ourselves: you can just pop out the nucleus and pop in another one, and that's what you've all heard about with cloning. +With bacteria and Archaea, the chromosome is integrated into the cell, but we recently showed that we can do a complete transplant of a chromosome from one cell to another and activate it. +We purified a chromosome from one microbial species -- roughly, these two are as distant as human and mice -- we added a few extra genes so we could select for this chromosome, we digested it with enzymes to kill all the proteins, and it was pretty stunning when we put this in the cell -- and you'll appreciate our very sophisticated graphics here. +The new chromosome went into the cell. +In fact, we thought this might be as far as it went, but we tried to design the process a little bit further. +This is a major mechanism of evolution right here. +We find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere, adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species. +So, people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology. +There are enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA. +The chromosome that was in the cell doesn't have one; the chromosome we put in does. +It got expressed and it recognized the other chromosome as foreign material, chewed it up, and so we ended up just with a cell with the new chromosome. +It turned blue because of the genes we put in it. +And with a very short period of time, all the characteristics of one species were lost and it converted totally into the new species based on the new software that we put in the cell. +All the proteins changed, the membranes changed; when we read the genetic code, it's exactly what we had transferred in. +So, this may sound like genomic alchemy, but we can, by moving the software of DNA around, change things quite dramatically. +Now I've argued, this is not genesis; this is building on three and a half billion years of evolution. +And I've argued that we're about to perhaps create a new version of the Cambrian explosion, where there's massive new speciation based on this digital design. +Why do this? +I think this is pretty obvious in terms of some of the needs. +We're about to go from six and a half to nine billion people over the next 40 years. +To put it in context for myself: I was born in 1946. +There are now three people on the planet for every one of us that existed in 1946; within 40 years, there'll be four. +We have trouble feeding, providing fresh, clean water, medicines, fuel for the six and a half billion. +It's going to be a stretch to do it for nine. +We use over five billion tons of coal, 30 billion-plus barrels of oil -- that's a hundred million barrels a day. +When we try to think of biological processes or any process to replace that, it's going to be a huge challenge. +Then of course, there's all that CO2 from this material that ends up in the atmosphere. +We now, from our discovery around the world, have a database with about 20 million genes, and I like to think of these as the design components of the future. +The electronics industry only had a dozen or so components, and look at the diversity that came out of that. +We're limited here primarily by a biological reality and our imagination. +We now have techniques, because of these rapid methods of synthesis, to do what we're calling combinatorial genomics. +We have the ability now to build a large robot that can make a million chromosomes a day. +When you think of processing these 20 million different genes or trying to optimize processes to produce octane or to produce pharmaceuticals, new vaccines, we can just with a small team, do more molecular biology than the last 20 years of all science. +And it's just standard selection: we can select for viability, chemical or fuel production, vaccine production, etc. +This is a screen snapshot of some true design software that we're working on to actually be able to sit down and design species in the computer. +You know, we don't know necessarily what it'll look like: we know exactly what their genetic code looks like. +We're focusing on now fourth-generation fuels. +You've seen recently, corn to ethanol is just a bad experiment. +We have second- and third-generation fuels that will be coming out relatively soon that are sugar, to much higher-value fuels like octane or different types of butanol. +But the only way we think that biology can have a major impact without further increasing the cost of food and limiting its availability is if we start with CO2 as its feedstock, and so we're working with designing cells to go down this road. +And we think we'll have the first fourth-generation fuels in about 18 months. +Sunlight and CO2 is one method ... +but in our discovery around the world, we have all kinds of other methods. +This is an organism we described in 1996. +It lives in the deep ocean, about a mile and a half deep, almost at boiling-water temperatures. +It takes CO2 to methane using molecular hydrogen as its energy source. +We're looking to see if we can take captured CO2, which can easily be piped to sites, convert that CO2 back into fuel to drive this process. +So, in a short period of time, we think that we might be able to increase what the basic question is of "What is life?" +We truly, you know, have modest goals of replacing the whole petrol-chemical industry -- Yeah. If you can't do that at TED, where can you? -- become a major source of energy ... +But also, we're now working on using these same tools to come up with instant sets of vaccines. +You've seen this year with flu; we're always a year behind and a dollar short when it comes to the right vaccine. +I think that can be changed by building combinatorial vaccines in advance. +Here's what the future may begin to look like with changing, now, the evolutionary tree, speeding up evolution with synthetic bacteria, Archaea and, eventually, eukaryotes. +We're a ways away from improving people: our goal is just to make sure that we have a chance to survive long enough to maybe do that. Thank you very much. + +What I'm going to show you first, as quickly as I can, is some foundational work, some new technology that we brought to Microsoft as part of an acquisition almost exactly a year ago. +This is Seadragon, and it's an environment in which you can either locally or remotely interact with vast amounts of visual data. +We're looking at many, many gigabytes of digital photos here and kind of seamlessly and continuously zooming in, panning through it, rearranging it in any way we want. +And it doesn't matter how much information we're looking at, how big these collections are or how big the images are. +Most of them are ordinary digital camera photos, but this one, for example, is a scan from the Library of Congress, and it's in the 300 megapixel range. +It doesn't make any difference because the only thing that ought to limit the performance of a system like this one is the number of pixels on your screen at any given moment. +It's also very flexible architecture. +This is an entire book, so this is an example of non-image data. +This is "Bleak House" by Dickens. Every column is a chapter. +To prove to you that it's really text, and not an image, we can do something like so, to really show that this is a real representation of the text; it's not a picture. +Maybe this is an artificial way to read an e-book. +I wouldn't recommend it. +This is a more realistic case, an issue of The Guardian. +Every large image is the beginning of a section. +And this really gives you the joy and the good experience of reading the real paper version of a magazine or a newspaper, which is an inherently multi-scale kind of medium. +We've done something with the corner of this particular issue of The Guardian. +We've made up a fake ad that's very high resolution -- much higher than in an ordinary ad -- and we've embedded extra content. +If you want to see the features of this car, you can see it here. +Or other models, or even technical specifications. +And this really gets at some of these ideas about really doing away with those limits on screen real estate. +We hope that this means no more pop-ups and other rubbish like that -- shouldn't be necessary. +Of course, mapping is one of those obvious applications for a technology like this. +And this one I really won't spend any time on, except to say that we have things to contribute to this field as well. +But those are all the roads in the U.S. +superimposed on top of a NASA geospatial image. +So let's pull up, now, something else. +This is actually live on the Web now; you can go check it out. +This is a project called Photosynth, which marries two different technologies. +One of them is Seadragon and the other is some very beautiful computer-vision research done by Noah Snavely, a graduate student at the University of Washington, co-advised by Steve Seitz at U.W. +and Rick Szeliski at Microsoft Research. A very nice collaboration. +And so this is live on the Web. It's powered by Seadragon. +You can see that when we do these sorts of views, where we can dive through images and have this kind of multi-resolution experience. +But the spatial arrangement of the images here is actually meaningful. +The computer vision algorithms have registered these images together so that they correspond to the real space in which these shots -- all taken near Grassi Lakes in the Canadian Rockies -- all these shots were taken. So you see elements here of stabilized slide-show or panoramic imaging, and these things have all been related spatially. +I'm not sure if I have time to show you any other environments. +Some are much more spatial. +I would like to jump straight to one of Noah's original data-sets -- this is from an early prototype that we first got working this summer -- to show you what I think is really the punch line behind the Photosynth technology, It's not necessarily so apparent from looking at the environments we've put up on the website. +We had to worry about the lawyers and so on. +This is a reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral that was done entirely computationally from images scraped from Flickr. +You just type Notre Dame into Flickr, and you get some pictures of guys in T-shirts, and of the campus and so on. +And each of these orange cones represents an image that was discovered to belong to this model. +And so these are all Flickr images, and they've all been related spatially in this way. +We can just navigate in this very simple way. +You know, I never thought that I'd end up working at Microsoft. +It's very gratifying to have this kind of reception here. +I guess you can see this is lots of different types of cameras: it's everything from cell-phone cameras to professional SLRs, quite a large number of them, stitched together in this environment. +If I can find some of the sort of weird ones -- So many of them are occluded by faces, and so on. +Somewhere in here there is actually a series of photographs -- here we go. +This is actually a poster of Notre Dame that registered correctly. +We can dive in from the poster to a physical view of this environment. +What the point here really is is that we can do things with the social environment. +This is now taking data from everybody -- from the entire collective memory, visually, of what the Earth looks like -- and link all of that together. +Those photos become linked, and they make something emergent that's greater than the sum of the parts. +You have a model that emerges of the entire Earth. +Think of this as the long tail to Stephen Lawler's Virtual Earth work. +And this is something that grows in complexity as people use it, and whose benefits become greater to the users as they use it. +Their own photos are getting tagged with meta-data that somebody else entered. +If somebody bothered to tag all of these saints and say who they all are, then my photo of Notre Dame Cathedral suddenly gets enriched with all of that data, and I can use it as an entry point to dive into that space, into that meta-verse, using everybody else's photos, and do a kind of a cross-modal and cross-user social experience that way. +And of course, a by-product of all of that is immensely rich virtual models of every interesting part of the Earth, collected not just from overhead flights and from satellite images and so on, but from the collective memory. +Thank you so much. +Chris Anderson: Do I understand this right? What your software is going to allow, is that at some point, really within the next few years, all the pictures that are shared by anyone across the world are going to link together? +BAA: Yes. What this is really doing is discovering, creating hyperlinks, if you will, between images. +It's doing that based on the content inside the images. +And that gets really exciting when you think about the richness of the semantic information a lot of images have. +Like when you do a web search for images, you type in phrases, and the text on the web page is carrying a lot of information about what that picture is of. +What if that picture links to all of your pictures? +The amount of semantic interconnection and richness that comes out of that is really huge. +It's a classic network effect. +CA: Truly incredible. Congratulations. + +You know, one of the intense pleasures of travel and one of the delights of ethnographic research is the opportunity to live amongst those who have not forgotten the old ways, who still feel their past in the wind, touch it in stones polished by rain, taste it in the bitter leaves of plants. +Just to know that Jaguar shamans still journey beyond the Milky Way, or the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning, or that in the Himalaya, the Buddhists still pursue the breath of the Dharma, is to really remember the central revelation of anthropology, and that is the idea that the world in which we live does not exist in some absolute sense, but is just one model of reality, +the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices that our lineage made, albeit successfully, many generations ago. +And of course, we all share the same adaptive imperatives. +We're all born. We all bring our children into the world. +We go through initiation rites. +We have to deal with the inexorable separation of death, so it shouldn't surprise us that we all sing, we all dance, we all have art. +But what's interesting is the unique cadence of the song, the rhythm of the dance in every culture. +And whether it is the Penan in the forests of Borneo, or the Voodoo acolytes in Haiti, or the warriors in the Kaisut desert of Northern Kenya, the Curandero in the mountains of the Andes, or a caravanserai in the middle of the Sahara -- this is incidentally the fellow that I traveled into the desert with a month ago -- or indeed a yak herder in the slopes of Qomolangma, +Everest, the goddess mother of the world. +All of these peoples teach us that there are other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other ways of orienting yourself in the Earth. +And this is an idea, if you think about it, can only fill you with hope. +Now, together the myriad cultures of the world make up a web of spiritual life and cultural life that envelops the planet, and is as important to the well-being of the planet as indeed is the biological web of life that you know as a biosphere. +And you might think of this cultural web of life as being an ethnosphere, and you might define the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. +The ethnosphere is humanity's great legacy. +It's the symbol of all that we are and all that we can be as an astonishingly inquisitive species. +And just as the biosphere has been severely eroded, so too is the ethnosphere -- and, if anything, at a far greater rate. +No biologists, for example, would dare suggest that 50 percent of all species or more have been or are on the brink of extinction because it simply is not true, and yet that -- the most apocalyptic scenario in the realm of biological diversity -- scarcely approaches what we know to be the most optimistic scenario in the realm of cultural diversity. +And the great indicator of that, of course, is language loss. +When each of you in this room were born, there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet. +Now, a language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. +A language is a flash of the human spirit. +It's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. +Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities. +And of those 6,000 languages, as we sit here today in Monterey, fully half are no longer being whispered into the ears of children. +They're no longer being taught to babies, which means, effectively, unless something changes, they're already dead. +What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your language, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the ancestors or anticipate the promise of the children? +And yet, that dreadful fate is indeed the plight of somebody somewhere on Earth roughly every two weeks, because every two weeks, some elder dies and carries with him into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue. +And I know there's some of you who say, "Well, wouldn't it be better, wouldn't the world be a better place if we all just spoke one language?" And I say, "Great, let's make that language Yoruba. Let's make it Cantonese. +Let's make it Kogi." +And you'll suddenly discover what it would be like to be unable to speak your own language. +And so, what I'd like to do with you today is sort of take you on a journey through the ethnosphere, a brief journey through the ethnosphere, to try to begin to give you a sense of what in fact is being lost. +Now, there are many of us who sort of forget that when I say "different ways of being," I really do mean different ways of being. +Take, for example, this child of a Barasana in the Northwest Amazon, the people of the anaconda who believe that mythologically they came up the milk river from the east in the belly of sacred snakes. +Now, this is a people who cognitively do not distinguish the color blue from the color green because the canopy of the heavens is equated to the canopy of the forest upon which the people depend. +They have a curious language and marriage rule which is called "linguistic exogamy:" you must marry someone who speaks a different language. +And this is all rooted in the mythological past, yet the curious thing is in these long houses, where there are six or seven languages spoken because of intermarriage, you never hear anyone practicing a language. +They simply listen and then begin to speak. +Or, one of the most fascinating tribes I ever lived with, the Waorani of northeastern Ecuador, an astonishing people first contacted peacefully in 1958. +In 1957, five missionaries attempted contact and made a critical mistake. +They dropped from the air 8 x 10 glossy photographs of themselves in what we would say to be friendly gestures, forgetting that these people of the rainforest had never seen anything two-dimensional in their lives. +They picked up these photographs from the forest floor, tried to look behind the face to find the form or the figure, found nothing, and concluded that these were calling cards from the devil, so they speared the five missionaries to death. +But the Waorani didn't just spear outsiders. +They speared each other. +54 percent of their mortality was due to them spearing each other. +We traced genealogies back eight generations, and we found two instances of natural death and when we pressured the people a little bit about it, they admitted that one of the fellows had gotten so old that he died getting old, so we speared him anyway. But at the same time they had a perspicacious knowledge of the forest that was astonishing. +Their hunters could smell animal urine at 40 paces and tell you what species left it behind. +In the early '80s, I had a really astonishing assignment when I was asked by my professor at Harvard if I was interested in going down to Haiti, infiltrating the secret societies which were the foundation of Duvalier's strength and Tonton Macoutes, and securing the poison used to make zombies. +In order to make sense out of sensation, of course, I had to understand something about this remarkable faith of Vodoun. And Voodoo is not a black magic cult. +On the contrary, it's a complex metaphysical worldview. +It's interesting. +If I asked you to name the great religions of the world, what would you say? +Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, whatever. +There's always one continent left out, the assumption being that sub-Saharan Africa had no religious beliefs. Well, of course, they did and Voodoo is simply the distillation of these very profound religious ideas that came over during the tragic Diaspora of the slavery era. +But, what makes Voodoo so interesting is that it's this living relationship between the living and the dead. +So, the living give birth to the spirits. +The spirits can be invoked from beneath the Great Water, responding to the rhythm of the dance to momentarily displace the soul of the living, so that for that brief shining moment, the acolyte becomes the god. +That's why the Voodooists like to say that "You white people go to church and speak about God. +We dance in the temple and become God." +And because you are possessed, you are taken by the spirit -- how can you be harmed? +So you see these astonishing demonstrations: Voodoo acolytes in a state of trance handling burning embers with impunity, a rather astonishing demonstration of the ability of the mind to affect the body that bears it when catalyzed in the state of extreme excitation. +Now, of all the peoples that I've ever been with, the most extraordinary are the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia. +Descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization which once carpeted the Caribbean coastal plain of Colombia, in the wake of the conquest, these people retreated into an isolated volcanic massif that soars above the Caribbean coastal plain. +In a bloodstained continent, these people alone were never conquered by the Spanish. +To this day, they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood but the training for the priesthood is rather extraordinary. +The young acolytes are taken away from their families at the age of three and four, sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness in stone huts at the base of glaciers for 18 years: two nine-year periods deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation they spend in their natural mother's womb; now they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother. +And for this entire time, they are inculturated into the values of their society, values that maintain the proposition that their prayers and their prayers alone maintain the cosmic -- or we might say the ecological -- balance. +And at the end of this amazing initiation, one day they're suddenly taken out and for the first time in their lives, at the age of 18, they see a sunrise. And in that crystal moment of awareness of first light as the Sun begins to bathe the slopes of the stunningly beautiful landscape, suddenly everything they have learned in the abstract is affirmed in stunning glory. And the priest steps back +and says, "You see? It's really as I've told you. +It is that beautiful. It is yours to protect." +They call themselves the "elder brothers" and they say we, who are the younger brothers, are the ones responsible for destroying the world. +Now, this level of intuition becomes very important. +Whenever we think of indigenous people and landscape, we either invoke Rousseau and the old canard of the "noble savage," which is an idea racist in its simplicity, or alternatively, we invoke Thoreau and say these people are closer to the Earth than we are. +Well, indigenous people are neither sentimental nor weakened by nostalgia. +There's not a lot of room for either in the malarial swamps of the Asmat or in the chilling winds of Tibet, but they have, nevertheless, through time and ritual, forged a traditional mystique of the Earth that is based not on the idea of being self-consciously close to it, but on a far subtler intuition: the idea that the Earth itself can only exist because it is breathed into being by human consciousness. +Now, what does that mean? +It means that a young kid from the Andes who's raised to believe that that mountain is an Apu spirit that will direct his or her destiny will be a profoundly different human being and have a different relationship to that resource or that place than a young kid from Montana raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock ready to be mined. +Whether it's the abode of a spirit or a pile of ore is irrelevant. +What's interesting is the metaphor that defines the relationship between the individual and the natural world. +I was raised in the forests of British Columbia to believe those forests existed to be cut. +That made me a different human being than my friends amongst the Kwagiulth who believe that those forests were the abode of Huxwhukw and the Crooked Beak of Heaven and the cannibal spirits that dwelled at the north end of the world, spirits they would have to engage during their Hamatsa initiation. +Now, if you begin to look at the idea that these cultures could create different realities, you could begin to understand some of their extraordinary discoveries. Take this plant here. +It's a photograph I took in the Northwest Amazon just last April. +This is ayahuasca, which many of you have heard about, the most powerful psychoactive preparation of the shaman's repertoire. +What makes ayahuasca fascinating is not the sheer pharmacological potential of this preparation, but the elaboration of it. It's made really of two different sources: on the one hand, this woody liana which has in it a series of beta-carbolines, harmine, harmaline, mildly hallucinogenic -- to take the vine alone is rather to have sort of blue hazy smoke drift across your consciousness -- but it's mixed with the leaves of a shrub in the coffee family +called Psychotria viridis. +This plant had in it some very powerful tryptamines, very close to brain serotonin, dimethyltryptamine, 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine. +If you've ever seen the Yanomami blowing that snuff up their noses, that substance they make from a different set of species also contains methoxydimethyltryptamine. +To have that powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity. It doesn't create the distortion of reality; it creates the dissolution of reality. +In fact, I used to argue with my professor, Richard Evan Shultes -- who is a man who sparked the psychedelic era with his discovery of the magic mushrooms in Mexico in the 1930s -- I used to argue that you couldn't classify these tryptamines as hallucinogenic because by the time you're under the effects there's no one home anymore to experience a hallucination. But the thing about tryptamines is they cannot be taken orally +because they're denatured by an enzyme found naturally in the human gut called monoamine oxidase. +They can only be taken orally if taken in conjunction with some other chemical that denatures the MAO. +Now, the fascinating things are that the beta-carbolines found within that liana are MAO inhibitors of the precise sort necessary to potentiate the tryptamine. So you ask yourself a question. +How, in a flora of 80,000 species of vascular plants, do these people find these two morphologically unrelated plants that when combined in this way, created a kind of biochemical version of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts? +Well, we use that great euphemism, "trial and error," which is exposed to be meaningless. +But you ask the Indians, and they say, "The plants talk to us." +Well, what does that mean? +This tribe, the Cofan, has 17 varieties of ayahuasca, all of which they distinguish a great distance in the forest, all of which are referable to our eye as one species. +And then you ask them how they establish their taxonomy and they say, "I thought you knew something about plants. +I mean, don't you know anything?" And I said, "No." +Well, it turns out you take each of the 17 varieties in the night of a full moon, and it sings to you in a different key. +Now, that's not going to get you a Ph.D. at Harvard, but it's a lot more interesting than counting stamens. Now -- -- the problem -- the problem is that even those of us sympathetic with the plight of indigenous people view them as quaint and colorful but somehow reduced to the margins of history as the real world, meaning our world, moves on. +Well, the truth is the 20th century, 300 years from now, is not going to be remembered for its wars or its technological innovations, but rather as the era in which we stood by the massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity on the planet. Now, the problem isn't change. +All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities of life. +And the problem is not technology itself. +The Sioux Indians did not stop being Sioux when they gave up the bow and arrow any more than an American stopped being an American when he gave up the horse and buggy. +It's not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere. It is power, the crude face of domination. +Wherever you look around the world, you discover that these are not cultures destined to fade away; these are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces that are beyond their capacity to adapt to: whether it's the egregious deforestation in the homeland of the Penan -- a nomadic people from Southeast Asia, from Sarawak -- a people who lived free in the forest until a generation ago, +and now have all been reduced to servitude and prostitution on the banks of the rivers, where you can see the river itself is soiled with the silt that seems to be carrying half of Borneo away to the South China Sea, where the Japanese freighters hang light in the horizon ready to fill their holds with raw logs ripped from the forest -- or, in the case of the Yanomami, +it's the disease entities that have come in, in the wake of the discovery of gold. +Or if we go into the mountains of Tibet, where I'm doing a lot of research recently, you'll see it's a crude face of political domination. +You know, genocide, the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of people's way of life, is not only not condemned, it's universally, in many quarters, celebrated as part of a development strategy. +And you cannot understand the pain of Tibet until you move through it at the ground level. +I once travelled 6,000 miles from Chengdu in Western China overland through southeastern Tibet to Lhasa with a young colleague, and it was only when I got to Lhasa that I understood the face behind the statistics you hear about: 6,000 sacred monuments torn apart to dust and ashes, 1.2 million people killed by the cadres during the Cultural Revolution. +This young man's father had been ascribed to the Panchen Lama. +That meant he was instantly killed at the time of the Chinese invasion. +His uncle fled with His Holiness in the Diaspora that took the people to Nepal. +His mother was incarcerated for the crime of being wealthy. +He was smuggled into the jail at the age of two to hide beneath her skirt tails because she couldn't bear to be without him. +The sister who had done that brave deed was put into an education camp. +One day she inadvertently stepped on an armband of Mao, and for that transgression, she was given seven years of hard labor. +The pain of Tibet can be impossible to bear, but the redemptive spirit of the people is something to behold. +And in the end, then, it really comes down to a choice: do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity? +Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, said, before she died, that her greatest fear was that as we drifted towards this blandly amorphous generic world view not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities. +And it's humbling to remember that our species has, perhaps, been around for [150,000] years. +The Neolithic Revolution -- which gave us agriculture, at which time we succumbed to the cult of the seed; the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the prose of the priesthood; we created hierarchy specialization surplus -- is only 10,000 years ago. +The modern industrial world as we know it is barely 300 years old. +Now, that shallow history doesn't suggest to me that we have all the answers for all of the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millennia. +When these myriad cultures of the world are asked the meaning of being human, they respond with 10,000 different voices. +And it's within that song that we will all rediscover the possibility of being what we are: a fully conscious species, fully aware of ensuring that all peoples and all gardens find a way to flourish. And there are great moments of optimism. +This is a photograph I took at the northern tip of Baffin Island when I went narwhal hunting with some Inuit people, and this man, Olayuk, told me a marvelous story of his grandfather. +The Canadian government has not always been kind to the Inuit people, and during the 1950s, to establish our sovereignty, we forced them into settlements. +This old man's grandfather refused to go. +The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his weapons, all of his tools. +Now, you must understand that the Inuit did not fear the cold; they took advantage of it. +The runners of their sleds were originally made of fish wrapped in caribou hide. +So, this man's grandfather was not intimidated by the Arctic night or the blizzard that was blowing. +He simply slipped outside, pulled down his sealskin trousers and defecated into his hand. And as the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of a blade. +He put a spray of saliva on the edge of the shit knife and as it finally froze solid, he butchered a dog with it. +He skinned the dog and improvised a harness, took the ribcage of the dog and improvised a sled, harnessed up an adjacent dog, and disappeared over the ice floes, shit knife in belt. +Talk about getting by with nothing. And this, in many ways -- -- is a symbol of the resilience of the Inuit people and of all indigenous people around the world. +The Canadian government in April of 1999 gave back to total control of the Inuit an area of land larger than California and Texas put together. +It's our new homeland. It's called Nunavut. +It's an independent territory. They control all mineral resources. +An amazing example of how a nation-state can seek restitution with its people. +And finally, in the end, I think it's pretty obvious at least to all of all us who've traveled in these remote reaches of the planet, to realize that they're not remote at all. +They're homelands of somebody. +They represent branches of the human imagination that go back to the dawn of time. And for all of us, the dreams of these children, like the dreams of our own children, become part of the naked geography of hope. +So, what we're trying to do at the National Geographic, finally, is, we believe that politicians will never accomplish anything. +We think that polemics -- -- we think that polemics are not persuasive, but we think that storytelling can change the world, and so we are probably the best storytelling institution in the world. We get 35 million hits on our website every month. +156 nations carry our television channel. +Our magazines are read by millions. +And what we're doing is a series of journeys to the ethnosphere where we're going to take our audience to places of such cultural wonder that they cannot help but come away dazzled by what they have seen, and hopefully, therefore, embrace gradually, one by one, the central revelation of anthropology: that this world deserves to exist in a diverse way, that we can find a way to live in a truly multicultural, pluralistic world +where all of the wisdom of all peoples can contribute to our collective well-being. +Thank you very much. + +I'm going to talk to you about some stuff that's in this book of mine that I hope will resonate with other things you've already heard, and I'll try to make some connections myself, in case you missed them. +But I want to start with what I call the "official dogma." +The official dogma of what? +The official dogma of all Western industrial societies. +And the official dogma runs like this: if we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens, the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom. +The reason for this is both that freedom is in and of itself good, valuable, worthwhile, essential to being human. +And because if people have freedom, then each of us can act on our own to do the things that will maximize our welfare, and no one has to decide on our behalf. +The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice. +The more choice people have, the more freedom they have, and the more freedom they have, the more welfare they have. +This, I think, is so deeply embedded in the water supply that it wouldn't occur to anyone to question it. +And it's also deeply embedded in our lives. +I'll give you some examples of what modern progress has made possible for us. +This is my supermarket. Not such a big one. +I want to say just a word about salad dressing. +175 salad dressings in my supermarket, if you don't count the 10 extra-virgin olive oils and 12 balsamic vinegars you could buy to make a very large number of your own salad dressings, in the off-chance that none of the 175 the store has on offer suit you. +So this is what the supermarket is like. +And then you go to the consumer electronics store to set up a stereo system -- speakers, CD player, tape player, tuner, amplifier -- and in this one single consumer electronics store, there are that many stereo systems. +We can construct six-and-a-half-million different stereo systems out of the components that are on offer in one store. +You've got to admit that's a lot of choice. +In other domains -- the world of communications. +There was a time, when I was a boy, when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted, as long as it came from Ma Bell. +You rented your phone. You didn't buy it. +One consequence of that, by the way, is that the phone never broke. +And those days are gone. +We now have an almost unlimited variety of phones, especially in the world of cell phones. +These are cell phones of the future. +My favorite is the middle one -- the MP3 player, nose hair trimmer, and crème brûlée torch. +And if by some chance you haven't seen that in your store yet, you can rest assured that one day soon, you will. +And what this does is it leads people to walk into their stores asking this question. +And do you know what the answer to this question now is? +The answer is "no." +It is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn't do too much. +So, in other aspects of life that are much more significant than buying things, the same explosion of choice is true. +Health care. It is no longer the case in the United States that you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you what to do. +Instead, you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you, "Well, we could do A, or we could do B. +A has these benefits, and these risks. +B has these benefits, and these risks. What do you want to do?" +And you say, "Doc, what should I do?" +And the doc says, "A has these benefits and risks, and B has these benefits and risks. +What do you want to do?" +And you say, "If you were me, Doc, what would you do?" +And the doc says, "But I'm not you." +And the result is -- we call it "patient autonomy," which makes it sound like a good thing, but it really is a shifting of the burden and the responsibility for decision-making from somebody who knows something -- namely, the doctor -- to somebody who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick and thus not in the best shape to be making decisions -- namely, the patient. +There's enormous marketing of prescription drugs to people like you and me, which, if you think about it, makes no sense at all, since we can't buy them. +Why do they market to us if we can't buy them? +The answer is that they expect us to call our doctors the next morning and ask for our prescriptions to be changed. +Something as dramatic as our identity has now become a matter of choice, as this slide is meant to indicate. +We don't inherit an identity; we get to invent it. +And we get to re-invent ourselves as often as we like. +And that means that every day, when you wake up in the morning, you have to decide what kind of person you want to be. +With respect to marriage and family, there was a time when the default assumption that almost everyone had is that you got married as soon as you could, and then you started having kids as soon as you could. +The only real choice was who, not when, and not what you did after. +Nowadays, everything is very much up for grabs. +I teach wonderfully intelligent students, and I assign 20 percent less work than I used to. +And it's not because they're less smart, and it's not because they're less diligent. +It's because they are preoccupied, asking themselves, "Should I get married or not? Should I get married now? +Should I get married later? Should I have kids first, or a career first?" +All of these are consuming questions. +And they're going to answer these questions, whether or not it means not doing all the work I assign and not getting a good grade in my courses. +And indeed they should. These are important questions to answer. +Work -- we are blessed, as Carl was pointing out, with the technology that enables us to work every minute of every day from any place on the planet -- except the Randolph Hotel. +There is one corner, by the way, that I'm not going to tell anybody about, where the WiFi actually works. +I'm not telling you about it because I want to use it. +So what this means, this incredible freedom of choice we have with respect to work, is that we have to make a decision, again and again and again, about whether we should or shouldn't be working. +We can go to watch our kid play soccer, and we have our cell phone on one hip, and our Blackberry on our other hip, and our laptop, presumably, on our laps. +And even if they're all shut off, every minute that we're watching our kid mutilate a soccer game, we are also asking ourselves, "Should I answer this cell phone call? +Should I respond to this email? Should I draft this letter?" +And even if the answer to the question is "no," it's certainly going to make the experience of your kid's soccer game very different than it would've been. +So everywhere we look, big things and small things, material things and lifestyle things, life is a matter of choice. +And the world we used to live in looked like this. +That is to say, there were some choices, but not everything was a matter of choice. +And the world we now live in looks like this. +And the question is, is this good news, or bad news? +And the answer is, "yes." +We all know what's good about it, so I'm going to talk about what's bad about it. +All of this choice has two effects, two negative effects on people. +One effect, paradoxically, is that it produces paralysis, rather than liberation. +With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all. +I'll give you one very dramatic example of this: a study that was done of investments in voluntary retirement plans. +A colleague of mine got access to investment records from Vanguard, the gigantic mutual-fund company of about a million employees and about 2,000 different workplaces. +And what she found is that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down two percent. +You offer 50 funds -- 10 percent fewer employees participate than if you only offer five. Why? +Because with 50 funds to choose from, it's so damn hard to decide which fund to choose, that you'll just put it off until tomorrow. +And then tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and of course tomorrow never comes. +Understand that not only does this mean that people are going to have to eat dog food when they retire because they don't have enough money put away, it also means that making the decision is so hard that they pass up significant matching money from the employer. +By not participating, they are passing up as much as 5,000 dollars a year from the employer, who would happily match their contribution. +So paralysis is a consequence of having too many choices. +And I think it makes the world look like this. [And lastly, for all eternity, French, bleu cheese, or ranch?] You really want to get the decision right if it's for all eternity, right? +You don't want to pick the wrong mutual fund, or the wrong salad dressing. +So that's one effect. The second effect is that even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from. +And there are several reasons for this. +is that with a lot of different salad dressings to choose from, if you buy one, and it's not perfect -- and what salad dressing is? -- it's easy to imagine you could have made a different choice that would have been better. And what happens is this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made, +even if it was a good decision. +The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose. +Second, what economists call "opportunity costs." +Dan Gilbert made a big point this morning of talking about how much the way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to. +Well, when there are lots of alternatives to consider, it is easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you've chosen. +Here's an example. [I can't stop thinking about those other available parking spaces on W 85th street] Sorry if you're not New Yorkers. +Here's what you're supposed to be thinking. +Here's this couple on the Hamptons. +Very expensive real estate. +Gorgeous beach. Beautiful day. They have it all to themselves. +What could be better? +"Well, damn it," this guy is thinking, "It's August. Everybody in my Manhattan neighborhood is away. +I could be parking right in front of my building." +And he spends two weeks nagged by the idea that he is missing the opportunity, day after day, to have a great parking space. +subtract from the satisfaction we get out of what we choose, even when what we choose is terrific. +And the more options there are to consider, the more attractive features of these options are going to be reflected by us as opportunity costs. +Here's another example. +Now this cartoon makes a lot of points. +It makes points about living in the moment as well, and probably about doing things slowly. +But one point it makes is that whenever you're choosing one thing, you're choosing not to do other things that may have lots of attractive features, and it's going to make what you're doing less attractive. +Third: escalation of expectations. +This hit me when I went to replace my jeans. +I wear jeans almost all the time. +There was a time when jeans came in one flavor, and you bought them, and they fit like crap, they were incredibly uncomfortable, if you wore them and washed them enough times, they started to feel OK. +I went to replace my jeans after years of wearing these old ones, and I said, "I want a pair of jeans. Here's my size." +And the shopkeeper said, "Do you want slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit? +You want button fly or zipper fly? You want stonewashed or acid-washed? +Do you want them distressed? +You want boot cut, tapered, blah blah." On and on he went. +My jaw dropped. And after I recovered, I said, "I want the kind that used to be the only kind." +He had no idea what that was, so I spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans, and I walked out of the store -- truth! -- with the best-fitting jeans I had ever had. +I did better. All this choice made it possible for me to do better. +But -- I felt worse. +Why? I wrote a whole book to try to explain this to myself. +The reason I felt worse is that, with all of these options available, my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up. +I had very low, no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor. +When they came in 100 flavors, damn it, one of them should've been perfect. +And what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect. +And so I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I expected. +Adding options to people's lives can't help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be. +And what that's going to produce is less satisfaction with results, even when they're good results. +Nobody in the world of marketing knows this. +[It all looks so great. I can't wait to be disappointed.] Because if they did, you wouldn't all know what this was about. +The truth is more like this. +[Everything was better back when everything was worse] The reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse, it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise. +Nowadays, the world we live in -- we affluent, industrialized citizens, with perfection the expectation -- the best you can ever hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be. +You will never be pleasantly surprised because your expectations, my expectations, have gone through the roof. +The secret to happiness -- this is what you all came for -- the secret to happiness is low expectations. +I want to say -- just a little autobiographical moment -- that I actually am married to a wife, and she's really quite wonderful. +I couldn't have done better. I didn't settle. +But settling isn't always such a bad thing. +Finally -- One consequence of buying a bad-fitting pair of jeans when there is only one kind to buy is that when you are dissatisfied, and you ask why, who's responsible, the answer is clear: the world is responsible. +What could you do? +When there are hundreds of different styles of jeans available, and you buy one that is disappointing, and you ask why, who's responsible? +It is equally clear that the answer to the question is "you." +You could have done better. +With a hundred different kinds of jeans on display, there is no excuse for failure. +And so when people make decisions, and even though the results of the decisions are good, they feel disappointed about them; they blame themselves. +Clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation. +I believe a significant -- not the only, but a significant -- contributor to this explosion of depression, and also suicide, is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high, and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves, they think they're at fault. +And so the net result is that we do better in general, objectively, and we feel worse. +So let me remind you. +This is the official dogma, the one that we all take to be true, and it's all false. It is not true. +There's no question that some choice is better than none, but it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better than some choice. +There's some magical amount. I don't know what it is. +I'm pretty confident that we have long since passed the point where options improve our welfare. +Now, as a policy matter -- I'm almost done -- as a policy matter, the thing to think about is this: what enables all of this choice in industrial societies is material affluence. +There are lots of places in the world, and we have heard about several of them, where their problem is not that they have too much choice. +Their problem is that they have too little. +So the stuff I'm talking about is the peculiar problem of modern, affluent, Western societies. +And what is so frustrating and infuriating is this: Steve Levitt talked to you yesterday about how these expensive and difficult-to-install child seats don't help. +It's a waste of money. +What I'm telling you is that these expensive, complicated choices -- it's not simply that they don't help. +They actually hurt. +They actually make us worse off. +If some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options, not only would those people's lives be improved, but ours would be improved also, which is what economists call a "Pareto-improving move." +Income redistribution will make everyone better off -- not just poor people -- because of how all this excess choice plagues us. +So to conclude. [You can be anything you want to be -- no limits] You're supposed to read this cartoon, and, being a sophisticated person, say, "Ah! What does this fish know? +You know, nothing is possible in this fishbowl." +Impoverished imagination, a myopic view of the world -- and that's the way I read it at first. +The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to the view that this fish knows something. +Because the truth of the matter is that if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible, you don't have freedom. You have paralysis. +If you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible, you decrease satisfaction. +You increase paralysis, and you decrease satisfaction. +Everybody needs a fishbowl. +This one is almost certainly too limited -- perhaps even for the fish, certainly for us. +But the absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery, and, I suspect, disaster. +Thank you very much. + +Several years ago here at TED, Peter Skillman introduced a design challenge called the marshmallow challenge. +And the idea's pretty simple: Teams of four have to build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one yard of tape, one yard of string and a marshmallow. +The marshmallow has to be on top. +And, though it seems really simple, it's actually pretty hard because it forces people to collaborate very quickly. +And so, I thought this was an interesting idea, and I incorporated it into a design workshop. +And it was a huge success. +And since then, I've conducted about 70 design workshops across the world with students and designers and architects, even the CTOs of the Fortune 50, and there's something about this exercise that reveals very deep lessons about the nature of collaboration, and I'd like to share some of them with you. +So, normally, most people begin by orienting themselves to the task. +They talk about it, they figure out what it's going to look like, they jockey for power. +Then they spend some time planning, organizing, they sketch and they lay out spaghetti. +They spend the majority of their time assembling the sticks into ever-growing structures. +And then finally, just as they're running out of time, someone takes out the marshmallow, and then they gingerly put it on top, and then they stand back, and -- ta-da! -- they admire their work. +But what really happens, most of the time, is that the "ta-da" turns into an "uh-oh," because the weight of the marshmallow causes the entire structure to buckle and to collapse. +So there are a number of people who have a lot more "uh-oh" moments than others, and among the worst are recent graduates of business school. +They lie, they cheat, they get distracted and they produce really lame structures. +And of course there are teams that have a lot more "ta-da" structures, and among the best are recent graduates of kindergarten. +And it's pretty amazing. +As Peter tells us, not only do they produce the tallest structures, but they're the most interesting structures of them all. +So the question you want to ask is: How come? Why? What is it about them? +And Peter likes to say that none of the kids spend any time trying to be CEO of Spaghetti, Inc. Right? +They don't spend time jockeying for power. +But there's another reason as well. +And the reason is that business students are trained to find the single right plan, right? +And then they execute on it. +And then what happens is, when they put the marshmallow on the top, they run out of time and what happens? +It's a crisis. +Sound familiar? Right. +What kindergarteners do differently is that they start with the marshmallow, and they build prototypes, successive prototypes, always keeping the marshmallow on top, so they have multiple times to fix when they build prototypes along the way. +Designers recognize this type of collaboration as the essence of the iterative process. +And with each version, kids get instant feedback about what works and what doesn't work. +So the capacity to play in prototype is really essential, but let's look at how different teams perform. +So the average for most people is around 20 inches; business schools students, about half of that; lawyers, a little better, but not much better than that, kindergarteners, better than most adults. +Who does the very best? +Architects and engineers, thankfully. +Thirty-nine inches is the tallest structure I've seen. +And why is it? Because they understand triangles and self-reinforcing geometrical patterns are the key to building stable structures. +So CEOs, a little bit better than average, but here's where it gets interesting. +If you put you put an executive admin. on the team, they get significantly better. +It's incredible. You know, you look around, you go, "Oh, that team's going to win." +You can just tell beforehand. And why is that? +Because they have special skills of facilitation. +They manage the process, they understand the process. +And any team who manages and pays close attention to work will significantly improve the team's performance. +Specialized skills and facilitation skills are the combination that leads to strong success. +If you have 10 teams that typically perform, you'll get maybe six or so that have standing structures. +And I tried something interesting. +I thought, let's up the ante, once. +So I offered a 10,000 dollar prize of software to the winning team. +So what do you think happened to these design students? +What was the result? +Here's what happened: Not one team had a standing structure. +If anyone had built, say, a one inch structure, they would have taken home the prize. +So, isn't that interesting? That high stakes have a strong impact. +We did the exercise again with the same students. +What do you think happened then? +So now they understand the value of prototyping. +So the same team went from being the very worst to being among the very best. +They produced the tallest structures in the least amount of time. +So there's deep lessons for us about the nature of incentives and success. +So, you might ask: Why would anyone actually spend time writing a marshmallow challenge? +And the reason is, I help create digital tools and processes to help teams build cars and video games and visual effects. +And what the marshmallow challenge does is it helps them identify the hidden assumptions. +Because, frankly, every project has its own marshmallow, doesn't it? +The challenge provides a shared experience, a common language, a common stance to build the right prototype. +And so, this is the value of the experience, of this so simple exercise. +And those of you who are interested may want to go to MarshmallowChallenge.com. +It's a blog that you can look at how to build the marshmallows. +There's step-by-step instructions on this. +There are crazy examples from around the world of how people tweak and adjust the system. +There's world records that are on this as well. +And the fundamental lesson, I believe, is that design truly is a contact sport. +It demands that we bring all of our senses to the task, and that we apply the very best of our thinking, our feeling and our doing to the challenge that we have at hand. +And sometimes, a little prototype of this experience is all that it takes to turn us from an "uh-oh" moment to a "ta-da" moment. +And that can make a big difference. +Thank you very much. + +Let's pretend right here we have a machine. +A big machine, a cool, TED-ish machine, and it's a time machine. +And everyone in this room has to get into it. +And you can go backwards, you can go forwards; you cannot stay where you are. +And I wonder what you'd choose, because I've been asking my friends this question a lot lately and they all want to go back. +I don't know. They want to go back before there were automobiles or Twitter or "American Idol." +I don't know. +I'm convinced that there's some sort of pull to nostalgia, to wishful thinking. +And I understand that. +I'm not part of that crowd, I have to say. +I don't want to go back, and it's not because I'm adventurous. +It's because possibilities on this planet, they don't go back, they go forward. +So I want to get in the machine, and I want to go forward. +This is the greatest time there's ever been on this planet by any measure that you wish to choose: health, wealth, mobility, opportunity, declining rates of disease ... +There's never been a time like this. +My great-grandparents died, all of them, by the time they were 60. +My grandparents pushed that number to 70. +My parents are closing in on 80. +So there better be a nine at the beginning of my death number. +But it's not even about people like us, because this is a bigger deal than that. +A kid born in New Delhi today can expect to live as long as the richest man in the world did 100 years ago. +Think about that, it's an incredible fact. +And why is it true? +Smallpox. Smallpox killed billions of people on this planet. +It reshaped the demography of the globe in a way that no war ever has. +It's gone. It's vanished. +We vanquished it. Puff. +In the rich world, diseases that threatened millions of us just a generation ago no longer exist, hardly. +Diphtheria, rubella, polio ... +does anyone even know what those things are? +Vaccines, modern medicine, our ability to feed billions of people, those are triumphs of the scientific method. +And to my mind, the scientific method -- trying stuff out, seeing if it works, changing it when it doesn't -- is one of the great accomplishments of humanity. +So that's the good news. +Unfortunately, that's all the good news because there are some other problems, and they've been mentioned many times. +And one of them is that despite all our accomplishments, a billion people go to bed hungry in this world every day. +That number's rising, and it's rising really rapidly, and it's disgraceful. +And not only that, we've used our imagination to thoroughly trash this globe. +Potable water, arable land, rainforests, oil, gas: they're going away, and they're going away soon, and unless we innovate our way out of this mess, we're going away too. +So the question is: Can we do that? And I think we can. +I think it's clear that we can make food that will feed billions of people without raping the land that they live on. +I think we can power this world with energy that doesn't also destroy it. +I really do believe that, and, no, it ain't wishful thinking. +But here's the thing that keeps me up at night -- one of the things that keeps me up at night: We've never needed progress in science more than we need it right now. Never. +And we've also never been in a position to deploy it properly in the way that we can today. +We're on the verge of amazing, amazing events in many fields, and yet I actually think we'd have to go back hundreds, 300 years, before the Enlightenment, to find a time when we battled progress, when we fought about these things more vigorously, on more fronts, than we do now. +People wrap themselves in their beliefs, and they do it so tightly that you can't set them free. +Not even the truth will set them free. +And, listen, everyone's entitled to their opinion; they're even entitled to their opinion about progress. +But you know what you're not entitled to? +You're not entitled to your own facts. Sorry, you're not. +And this took me awhile to figure out. +About a decade ago, I wrote a story about vaccines for The New Yorker. A little story. +And I was amazed to find opposition: opposition to what is, after all, the most effective public health measure in human history. +I didn't know what to do, so I just did what I do: I wrote a story and I moved on. +And soon after that, I wrote a story about genetically engineered food. +Same thing, only bigger. +People were going crazy. +So I wrote a story about that too, and I couldn't understand why people thought this was "Frankenfoods," why they thought moving molecules around in a specific, rather than a haphazard way, was trespassing on nature's ground. +But, you know, I do what I do. I wrote the story, I moved on. +I mean, I'm a journalist. +We type, we file, we go to dinner. It's fine. +But these stories bothered me, and I couldn't figure out why, and eventually I did. +And that's because those fanatics that were driving me crazy weren't actually fanatics at all. +They were thoughtful people, educated people, decent people. +They were exactly like the people in this room. +And it just disturbed me so much. +But then I thought, you know, let's be honest. +We're at a point in this world where we don't have the same relationship to progress that we used to. +We talk about it ambivalently. +We talk about it in ironic terms with little quotes around it: "progress." +Okay, there are reasons for that, and I think we know what those reasons are. +We've lost faith in institutions, in authority, and sometimes in science itself, and there's no reason we shouldn't have. +You can just say a few names and people will understand. +Chernobyl, Bhopal, the Challenger, Vioxx, weapons of mass destruction, hanging chads. +You know, you can choose your list. +There are questions and problems with the people we used to believe were always right, so be skeptical. +Ask questions, demand proof, demand evidence. +Don't take anything for granted. +But here's the thing: When you get proof, you need to accept the proof, and we're not that good at doing that. +And the reason that I can say that is because we're now in an epidemic of fear like one I've never seen and hope never to see again. +About 12 years ago, there was a story published, a horrible story, that linked the epidemic of autism to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine shot. +Very scary. +Tons of studies were done to see if this was true. +Tons of studies should have been done; it's a serious issue. +The data came back. +The data came back from the United States, from England, from Sweden, from Canada, and it was all the same: no correlation, no connection, none at all. +It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because we believe anecdotes, we believe what we see, what we think we see, what makes us feel real. +We don't believe a bunch of documents from a government official giving us data, and I do understand that, I think we all do. +But you know what? +The result of that has been disastrous. +Disastrous because here's a fact: The United States is one of the only countries in the world where the vaccine rate for measles is going down. +That is disgraceful, and we should be ashamed of ourselves. +It's horrible. +What kind of a thing happened that we could do that? +Now, I understand it. I do understand it. +Because, did anyone have measles here? +Has one person in this audience ever seen someone die of measles? +Doesn't happen very much. +Doesn't happen in this country at all, but it happened 160,000 times in the world last year. +That's a lot of death of measles -- 20 an hour. +But since it didn't happen here, we can put it out of our minds, and people like Jenny McCarthy can go around preaching messages of fear and illiteracy from platforms like "Oprah" and "Larry King Live." +And they can do it because they don't link causation and correlation. +They don't understand that these things seem the same, but they're almost never the same. +And it's something we need to learn, and we need to learn it really soon. +This guy was a hero, Jonas Salk. +He took one of the worst scourges of mankind away from us. +No fear, no agony. Polio -- puff, gone. +That guy in the middle, not so much. +His name is Paul Offit. +He just developed a rotavirus vaccine with a bunch of other people. +It'll save the lives of 400 to 500,000 kids in the developing world every year. +Pretty good, right? +Well, it's good, except that Paul goes around talking about vaccines and says how valuable they are and that people ought to just stop the whining. +And he actually says it that way. +So, Paul's a terrorist. +When Paul speaks in a public hearing, he can't testify without armed guards. +He gets called at home because people like to tell him that they remember where his kids go to school. +And why? Because Paul made a vaccine. +I don't need to say this, but vaccines are essential. +You take them away, disease comes back, horrible diseases. And that's happening. +We have measles in this country now. +And it's getting worse, and pretty soon kids are going to die of it again because it's just a numbers game. +And they're not just going to die of measles. +What about polio? Let's have that. Why not? +A college classmate of mine wrote me a couple weeks ago and said she thought I was a little strident. +No one's ever said that before. +She wasn't going to vaccinate her kid against polio, no way. +Fine. +Why? Because we don't have polio. And you know what? +We didn't have polio in this country yesterday. +Today, I don't know, maybe a guy got on a plane in Lagos this morning, and he's flying to LAX, right now he's over Ohio. +And he's going to land in a couple of hours, he's going to rent a car, and he's going to come to Long Beach, and he's going to attend one of these fabulous TED dinners tonight. +And he doesn't know that he's infected with a paralytic disease, and we don't either because that's the way the world works. +That's the planet we live on. Don't pretend it isn't. +Now, we love to wrap ourselves in lies. We love to do it. +Everyone take their vitamins this morning? +Echinacea, a little antioxidant to get you going. +I know you did because half of Americans do every day. +They take the stuff, and they take alternative medicines, and it doesn't matter how often we find out that they're useless. +The data says it all the time. +They darken your urine. They almost never do more than that. +It's okay, you want to pay 28 billion dollars for dark urine? +I'm totally with you. +Dark urine. Dark. +Why do we do that? Why do we do that? +Well, I think I understand, we hate Big Pharma. +We hate Big Government. We don't trust the Man. +And we shouldn't: Our health care system sucks. +It's cruel to millions of people. +It's absolutely astonishingly cold and soul-bending to those of us who can even afford it. +So we run away from it, and where do we run? +We leap into the arms of Big Placebo. +That's fantastic. I love Big Placebo. +But, you know, it's really a serious thing because this stuff is crap, and we spend billions of dollars on it. +And I have all sorts of little props here. +None of it ... ginkgo, fraud; echinacea, fraud; acai -- I don't even know what that is but we're spending billions of dollars on it -- it's fraud. +And you know what? When I say this stuff, people scream at me, and they say, "What do you care? Let people do what they want to do. +It makes them feel good." +And you know what? You're wrong. +Because I don't care if it's the secretary of HHS who's saying, "Hmm, I'm not going to take the evidence of my experts on mammograms," or some cancer quack who wants to treat his patient with coffee enemas. +When you start down the road where belief and magic replace evidence and science, you end up in a place you don't want to be. +You end up in Thabo Mbeki South Africa. +He killed 400,000 of his people by insisting that beetroot, garlic and lemon oil were much more effective than the antiretroviral drugs we know can slow the course of AIDS. +Hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in a country that has been plagued worse than any other by this disease. +Please, don't tell me there are no consequences to these things. +There are. There always are. +Now, the most mindless epidemic we're in the middle of right now is this absurd battle between proponents of genetically engineered food and the organic elite. +It's an idiotic debate. It has to stop. +It's a debate about words, about metaphors. +It's ideology, it's not science. +Every single thing we eat, every grain of rice, every sprig of parsley, every Brussels sprout has been modified by man. +You know, there weren't tangerines in the garden of Eden. +There wasn't any cantaloupe. There weren't Christmas trees. We made it all. +We made it over the last 11,000 years. +And some of it worked, and some of it didn't. +We got rid of the stuff that didn't. +Now we can do it in a more precise way -- and there are risks, absolutely -- but we can put something like vitamin A into rice, and that stuff can help millions of people, millions of people, prolong their lives. +You don't want to do that? +I have to say, I don't understand it. +We object to genetically engineered food. +Why do we do that? +Well, the things I constantly hear are: Too many chemicals, pesticides, hormones, monoculture, we don't want giant fields of the same thing, that's wrong. +We don't companies patenting life. +We don't want companies owning seeds. +And you know what my response to all of that is? +Yes, you're right. Let's fix it. +It's true, we've got a huge food problem, but this isn't science. +This has nothing to do with science. +It's law, it's morality, it's patent stuff. +You know science isn't a company. +It's not a country. +It's not even an idea; it's a process. +It's a process, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but the idea that we should not allow science to do its job because we're afraid, is really very deadening, and it's preventing millions of people from prospering. +You know, in the next 50 years we're going to have to grow 70 percent more food than we do right now, 70 percent. +This investment in Africa over the last 30 years. +Disgraceful. Disgraceful. +They need it, and we're not giving it to them. +And why? Genetically engineered food. +We don't want to encourage people to eat that rotten stuff, like cassava for instance. +Cassava's something that half a billion people eat. +It's kind of like a potato. +It's just a bunch of calories. It sucks. +It doesn't have nutrients, it doesn't have protein, and scientists are engineering all of that into it right now. +And then people would be able to eat it and they'd be able to not go blind. +They wouldn't starve, and you know what? +That would be nice. It wouldn't be Chez Panisse, but it would be nice. +And all I can say about this is: Why are we fighting it? +I mean, let's ask ourselves: Why are we fighting it? +Because we don't want to move genes around? +This is about moving genes around. It's not about chemicals. +It's not about our ridiculous passion for hormones, our insistence on having bigger food, better food, singular food. +This isn't about Rice Krispies, this is about keeping people alive, and it's about time we started to understand what that meant. +Because, you know something? +If we don't, if we continue to act the way we're acting, we're guilty of something that I don't think we want to be guilty of: high-tech colonialism. +There's no other way to describe what's going on here. +It's selfish, it's ugly, it's beneath us, and we really have to stop it. +So after this amazingly fun conversation, you might want to say, "So, you still want to get in this ridiculous time machine and go forward?" +Absolutely. Absolutely, I do. +It's stuck in the present right now, but we have an amazing opportunity. +We can set that time machine on anything we want. +We can move it where we want to move it, and we're going to move it where we want to move it. +We have to have these conversations and we have to think, but when we get in the time machine and we go ahead, we're going to be happy we do. +I know that we can, and as far as I'm concerned, that's something the world needs right now. +Thank you. + +One day, Los Angeles Times columnist Steve Lopez was walking along the streets of downtown Los Angeles when he heard beautiful music. +And the source was a man, an African-American man, charming, rugged, homeless, playing a violin that only had two strings. +And I'm telling a story that many of you know, because Steve's columns became the basis for a book, which was turned into a movie, with Robert Downey Jr. acting as Steve Lopez, and Jamie Foxx as Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, the Juilliard-trained double bassist whose promising career was cut short by a tragic affliction with paranoid schizophrenia. +Nathaniel dropped out of Juilliard, he suffered a complete breakdown, and 30 years later he was living homeless on the streets of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. +I encourage all of you to read Steve's book or to watch the movie to understand not only the beautiful bond that formed between these two men, but how music helped shape that bond, and ultimately was instrumental -- if you'll pardon the pun -- in helping Nathaniel get off the streets. +I met Mr. Ayers in 2008, two years ago, at Walt Disney Concert Hall. +He had just heard a performance of Beethoven's First and Fourth symphonies, and came backstage and introduced himself. +He was speaking in a very jovial and gregarious way about Yo-Yo Ma and Hillary Clinton and how the Dodgers were never going to make the World Series, all because of the treacherous first violin passage work in the last movement of Beethoven's Fourth Symphony. +And we got talking about music, and I got an email from Steve a few days later saying that Nathaniel was interested in a violin lesson with me. +Now, I should mention that Nathaniel refuses treatment because when he was treated it was with shock therapy and Thorazine and handcuffs, and that scar has stayed with him for his entire life. +But as a result now, he is prone to these schizophrenic episodes, the worst of which can manifest themselves as him exploding and then disappearing for days, wandering the streets of Skid Row, exposed to its horrors, with the torment of his own mind unleashed upon him. +And Nathaniel was in such a state of agitation when we started our first lesson at Walt Disney Concert Hall -- he had a kind of manic glint in his eyes, he was lost. +And he was talking about invisible demons and smoke, and how someone was poisoning him in his sleep. +And I was afraid, not for myself, but I was afraid that I was going to lose him, that he was going to sink into one of his states, and that I would ruin his relationship with the violin if I started talking about scales and arpeggios and other exciting forms of didactic violin pedagogy. +So, I just started playing. +And I played the first movement of the Beethoven Violin Concerto. +And as I played, I understood that there was a profound change occurring in Nathaniel's eyes. +It was as if he was in the grip of some invisible pharmaceutical, a chemical reaction, for which my playing the music was its catalyst. +And Nathaniel's manic rage was transformed into understanding, a quiet curiosity and grace. +And in a miracle, he lifted his own violin and he started playing, by ear, certain snippets of violin concertos which he then asked me to complete -- Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius. +And we started talking about music, from Bach to Beethoven and Brahms, Bruckner, all the B's, from Bartók, all the way up to Esa-Pekka Salonen. +And I understood that he not only had an encyclopedic knowledge of music, but he related to this music at a personal level. +He spoke about it with the kind of passion and understanding that I share with my colleagues in the Los Angeles Philharmonic. +And through playing music and talking about music, this man had transformed from the paranoid, disturbed man that had just come from walking the streets of downtown Los Angeles to the charming, erudite, brilliant, Juilliard-trained musician. +Music is medicine. Music changes us. +And for Nathaniel, music is sanity. +Because music allows him to take his thoughts and delusions and shape them through his imagination and his creativity, into reality. +And that is an escape from his tormented state. +And I understood that this was the very essence of art. +This was the very reason why we made music, that we take something that exists within all of us at our very fundamental core, our emotions, and through our artistic lens, through our creativity, we're able to shape those emotions into reality. +And the reality of that expression reaches all of us and moves us, inspires and unites us. +And for Nathaniel, music brought him back into a fold of friends. +The redemptive power of music brought him back into a family of musicians that understood him, that recognized his talents and respected him. +And I will always make music with Nathaniel, whether we're at Walt Disney Concert Hall or on Skid Row, because he reminds me why I became a musician. +Thank you. +Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Thanks. +Robert Gupta. +Robert Gupta: I'm going to play something that I shamelessly stole from cellists. +So, please forgive me. + +I'm Jane McGonigal. I'm a game designer. +I've been making games online now for 10 years, and my goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games. +Now, I have a plan for this, and it entails convincing more people, including all of you, to spend more time playing bigger and better games. +Right now we spend three billion hours a week playing online games. +Some of you might be thinking, "That's a lot of time to spend playing games. +Maybe too much time, considering how many urgent problems we have to solve in the real world." +But actually, according to my research at the Institute for the Future, actually the opposite is true. +Three billion hours a week is not nearly enough game play to solve the world's most urgent problems. +In fact, I believe that if we want to survive the next century on this planet, we need to increase that total dramatically. +I've calculated the total we need at 21 billion hours of game play every week. +So, that's probably a bit of a counter-intuitive idea, so I'll say it again, let it sink in: If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, obesity, I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week, by the end of the next decade. +No. I'm serious. I am. +Here's why. +This picture pretty much sums up why I think games are so essential to the future survival of the human species. Truly. +This is a portrait by photographer Phil Toledano. +He wanted to capture the emotion of gaming, so he set up a camera in front of gamers while they were playing. +And this is a classic gaming emotion. +Now, if you're not a gamer, you might miss some of the nuance in this photo. +You probably see the sense of urgency, a little bit of fear, but intense concentration, deep, deep focus on tackling a really difficult problem. +If you are a gamer, you will notice a few nuances here: the crinkle of the eyes up, and around the mouth is a sign of optimism, and the eyebrows up is surprise. +This is a gamer who's on the verge of something called an "epic win." +Oh, you've heard of that. +OK, good, so we have some gamers among us. +An epic win is an outcome that is so extraordinarily positive, you had no idea it was even possible until you achieved it. +It was almost beyond the threshold of imagination, and when you get there, you're shocked to discover what you're truly capable of. +That's an epic win. +This is a gamer on the verge of an epic win. +And this is the face that we need to see on millions of problem-solvers all over the world as we try to tackle the obstacles of the next century -- the face of someone who, against all odds, is on the verge of an epic win. +Now, unfortunately this is more of the face that we see in everyday life now as we try to tackle urgent problems. +This is what I call the "I'm Not Good At Life" face. +This is actually me making it. Can you see? Yes. Good. +This is me making the "I'm Not Good At Life" face. +This is a piece of graffiti in my old neighborhood in Berkeley, California, where I did my PhD on why we're better in games than we are in real life. +And this is a problem that a lot of gamers have. +We feel that we are not as good in reality as we are in games. +I don't mean just good as in successful, although that's part of it. +We do achieve more in game worlds. +But I also mean good as in motivated to do something that matters -- inspired to collaborate and to cooperate. +And when we're in game worlds, I believe that many of us become the best version of ourselves -- the most likely to help at a moment's notice, the most likely to stick with a problem as long at it takes, to get up after failure and try again. +And in real life, when we face failure, when we confront obstacles, we often don't feel that way. +We feel overcome, we feel overwhelmed, we feel anxious, maybe depressed, frustrated or cynical. +We never have those feelings when we're playing games, they just don't exist in games. +So that's what I wanted to study when I was a graduate student. +What about games makes it impossible to feel that we can't achieve everything? +How can we take those feelings from games and apply them to real-world work? +So I looked at games like World of Warcraft, which is really the ideal collaborative problem-solving environment. +And I started to notice a few things that make epic wins so possible in online worlds. +The first thing is whenever you show up in one of these online games, especially in World of Warcraft, there are lots and lots of different characters who are willing to trust you with a world-saving mission, right away. +But not just any mission, it's a mission that is perfectly matched with your current level in the game. +Right? So you can do it. +They never give you a challenge you can't achieve. +But it is on the verge of what you're capable of, so you have to try hard. +But there's no unemployment in World of Warcraft; no sitting around, wringing your hands -- there's always something specific and important to be done. +There are also tons of collaborators. +Everywhere you go, hundreds of thousands of people ready to work with you to achieve your epic mission. +That's not something we have in real life that easily, this sense that at our fingertips are tons of collaborators. +And there's this epic story, this inspiring story of why we're there, and what we're doing, and we get all this positive feedback. +You guys have heard of leveling up, +1 strength, +1 intelligence. +We don't get that kind of constant feedback in real life. +When I get off this stage, I'm not going to have +1 speaking, and +1 crazy idea, +20 crazy idea. +I don't get that feedback in real life. +Now, the problem with collaborative online environments like World of Warcraft is that it's so satisfying to be on the verge of an epic win all the time, we decide to spend all our time in these game worlds. +It's just better than reality. +So, so far, collectively all the World of Warcraft gamers have spent 5.93 million years solving the virtual problems of Azeroth. +Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. +It might sound like it's a bad thing. +But to put that in context: 5.93 million years ago was when our earliest primate human ancestors stood up. +That was the first upright primate. +So when we talk about how much time we're currently investing in playing games, the only way it makes sense to even think about it is to talk about time at the magnitude of human evolution, which is an extraordinary thing. +But it's also apt, because it turns out that by spending all this time playing games, we're actually changing what we are capable of as human beings. +We're evolving to be a more collaborative and hearty species. +This is true. I believe this. +So, consider this really interesting statistic; it was recently published by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University: The average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games by the age of 21. +Now 10,000 hours is a really interesting number for two reasons. +First of all, for children in the United States, 10,080 hours is the exact amount of time you will spend in school, from fifth grade to high school graduation, if you have perfect attendance. +So, we have an entire parallel track of education going on, where young people are learning as much about what it takes to be a good gamer as they're learning about everything else in school. +Some of you have probably read Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Outliers," so you would have heard of his theory of success, the "10,000 hours" theory of success. +It's based on this great cognitive-science research that says if we can master 10,000 hours of effortful study at anything by the age of 21, we will be virtuosos at it. +We will be as good at whatever we do as the greatest people in the world. +And so, now what we're looking at is an entire generation of young people who are virtuoso gamers. +So, the big question is, "What exactly are gamers getting so good at?" +Because if we could figure that out, we would have a virtually unprecedented human resource on our hands. +This is how many people we now have in the world who spend at least an hour a day playing online games. +These are our virtuoso gamers, 500 million people who are extraordinarily good at something. +And in the next decade, we're going to have another billion gamers who are extraordinarily good at whatever that is. +If you don't know it already, this is coming. +The game industry is developing consoles that are low-energy and that work with the wireless phone networks instead of broadband Internet, so that gamers all over the world, particularly in India, China, Brazil, can get online. +They expect one billion more gamers in the next decade. +It will bring us up to 1.5 billion gamers. +So I've started to think about what these games are making us virtuosos at. +Here are the four things I came up with. The first is urgent optimism. +OK, think of this as extreme self-motivation. +Urgent optimism is the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success. +Gamers always believe that an epic win is possible, and that it's always worth trying, and trying now. +Gamers don't sit around. +Gamers are virtuosos at weaving a tight social fabric. +There's a lot of interesting research that shows we like people better after we play a game with them, even if they've beaten us badly. +And the reason is, it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone. +We trust that they will spend their time with us, that they will play by the same rules, value the same goal, stay with the game until it's over. +And so, playing a game together actually builds up bonds and trust and cooperation. +And we actually build stronger social relationships as a result. +Blissful productivity. I love it. +You know, there's a reason why the average World of Warcraft gamer plays for 22 hours a week -- kind of a half-time job. +It's because we know, when we're playing a game, that we're actually happier working hard than we are relaxing, or hanging out. +We know that we are optimized as human beings, to do hard and meaningful work. +And gamers are willing to work hard all the time, if they're given the right work. +Finally: epic meaning. +Gamers love to be attached to awe-inspiring missions to human planetary-scale stories. +So, just one bit of trivia that helps put that into perspective: So, you all know Wikipedia, biggest wiki in the world. +Second biggest wiki in the world, with nearly 80,000 articles, is the World of Warcraft wiki. +Five million people use it every month. +They have compiled more information about World of Warcraft on the Internet than any other topic covered on any other wiki in the world. +They are building an epic story. +They are building an epic knowledge resource about the World of Warcraft. +Okay, so these are four superpowers that add up to one thing: Gamers are super-empowered hopeful individuals. +These are people who believe that they are individually capable of changing the world. +And the only problem is, they believe that they are capable of changing virtual worlds and not the real world. +That's the problem that I'm trying to solve. +There's an economist named Edward Castronova. +His work is brilliant. +He looks at why people are investing so much time and energy and money in online worlds. +And he says, "We're witnessing what amounts to no less than a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments." +And he's an economist, so he's rational. +And he says -- Not like me, I'm a game designer; I'm exuberant. +But he says that this makes perfect sense, because gamers can achieve more in online worlds than they can in real life. +They can have stronger social relationships in games than they can have in real life; they get better feedback and feel more rewarded in games than they do in real life. +So he says, for now it makes perfect sense for gamers to spend more time in virtual worlds than the real world. +Now, I also agree that that is rational, for now. +But it is not, by any means, an optimal situation. +We have to start making the real world work more like a game. +I take my inspiration from something that happened 2,500 years ago. +These are ancient dice, made out of sheep's knuckles. +Before we had awesome game controllers, we had sheep's knuckles. +And these represent the first game equipment designed by human beings, and if you're familiar with the work of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, you might know this history, which is the history of who invented games and why. +Herodotus says that games, particularly dice games, were invented in the kingdom of Lydia, during a time of famine. +Apparently, there was such a severe famine that the king of Lydia decided they had to do something crazy. +People were suffering. People were fighting. +It was an extreme situation, they needed an extreme solution. +So, according to Herodotus, they invented dice games, and they set up a kingdom-wide policy: On one day, everybody would eat, and on the next day, everybody would play games. +And they would be so immersed in playing the dice games, because games are so engaging, and immerse us in such satisfying, blissful productivity, they would ignore the fact that they had no food to eat. +And then on the next day, they would play games; and on the next day, they would eat. +And according to Herodotus, they passed 18 years this way, surviving through a famine, by eating on one day, and playing games on the next. +Now, this is exactly, I think, how we're using games today. +We're using games to escape real-world suffering -- we're using games to get away from everything that's broken in the real environment, everything that's not satisfying about real life, and we're getting what we need from games. +But it doesn't have to end there. +This is really exciting. +According to Herodotus, after 18 years the famine wasn't getting better, so the king decided they would play one final dice game. +They divided the entire kingdom in half. +They played one dice game, and the winners of that game got to go on an epic adventure. +They would leave Lydia, and they would go out in search of a new place to live, leaving behind just enough people to survive on the resources that were available, and hopefully to take their civilization somewhere else where they could thrive. +Now, this sounds crazy, right? +But recently, DNA evidence has shown that the Etruscans, who then led to the Roman Empire, actually share the same DNA as the ancient Lydians. +And so, recently, scientists have suggested that Herodotus' crazy story is actually true. +And geologists have found evidence of a global cooling that lasted for nearly 20 years, that could have explained the famine. +So this crazy story might be true. +They might have actually saved their culture by playing games, escaping to games for 18 years, and then been so inspired, and knew so much about how to come together with games, that they actually saved the entire civilization that way. +Okay, we can do that. +We've been playing Warcraft since 1994. +That was the first real-time strategy game from the World of Warcraft series. +That was 16 years ago. +They played dice games for 18 years, we've been playing Warcraft for 16 years. +I say we are ready for our own epic game. +Now, they had half the civilization go off in search of a new world, so that's where I get my 21 billion hours a week of game-play from. +Let's get half of us to agree to spend an hour a day playing games, until we solve real-world problems. +Now, I know you're asking, "How are we going to solve real-world problems in games?" +Well, that's what I've devoted my work to over the past few years, at the Institute for the Future. +We have this banner in our offices in Palo Alto, and it expresses our view of how we should try to relate to the future. +We do not want to try to predict the future. +What we want to do is make the future. +We want to imagine the best-case scenario outcome, and then we want to empower people to make that outcome a reality. +We want to imagine epic wins, and then give people the means to achieve the epic win. +I'm just going to very briefly show you three games that I've made that are an attempt to give people the means to create epic wins in their own futures. +This is World Without Oil. +We made this game in 2007. +This is an online game in which you try to survive an oil shortage. +The oil shortage is fictional, but we put enough online content out there for you to believe that it's real, and to live your real life as if we've run out of oil. So when you come to the game, you sign up, tell us where you live, and then we give you real-time news videos, data feeds that show you exactly how much oil costs, what's not available, how food supply is being affected, +how transportation is being affected, if schools are closed, if there's rioting, and you have to figure out how you would live your real life as if this were true. And then we ask you to blog about it, to post videos, to post photos. +We piloted this game with 1,700 players in 2007, and we've tracked them for the three years since. +And I can tell you that this is a transformative experience. +Nobody wants to change how they live, just because it's good for the world, or because we're supposed to. +But if you immerse them in an epic adventure and tell them, "We've run out of oil. +This is an amazing story and adventure for you to go on. +Challenge yourself to see how you would survive," most of our players have kept up the habits that they learned in this game. +So for the next world-saving game, we decided to aim higher -- bigger problem than just peak oil. +We did a game called Superstruct at the Institute for the Future. +And the premise was, a supercomputer has calculated that humans have only 23 years left on the planet. +This supercomputer was called the Global Extinction Awareness System, of course. +We asked people to come online -- almost like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. +You know Jerry Bruckheimer movies, you form a dream team -- you've got the astronaut, the scientist, the ex-convict, and they all have something to do to save the world. +But in our game, instead of just having five people on the dream team, we said, "Everybody's on the dream team, and it's your job to invent the future of energy, the future of food, the future of health, the future of security and the future of the social safety net." +We had 8,000 people play that game for eight weeks. +They came up with 500 insanely creative solutions that you can go online, Google "Superstruct," and see. +So, finally, the last game, we're launching it March 3rd. This is a game done with the World Bank Institute. +If you complete the game, you will be certified by the World Bank Institute as a Social Innovator, class of 2010. +Working with universities all over sub-Saharan Africa, and we are inviting them to learn social innovation skills. +We've got a graphic novel, we've got leveling up in skills like local insight, knowledge networking, sustainability, vision and resourcefulness. +I would like to invite all of you to please share this game with young people, anywhere in the world, particularly in developing areas, who might benefit from coming together to try to start to imagine their own social enterprises to save the world. +So, I'm going to wrap up now. +I want to ask a question. +What do you think happens next? +We've got all these amazing gamers, we've got these games that are kind of pilots of what we might do, but none of them have saved the real world yet. +Well I hope you will agree with me that gamers are a human resource that we can use to do real-world work, that games are a powerful platform for change. +We have all these amazing superpowers: blissful productivity, the ability to weave a tight social fabric, this feeling of urgent optimism and the desire for epic meaning. +I really hope that we can come together to play games that matter, to survive on this planet for another century. +That's my hope, that you will join me in making and playing games like this. +When I look forward to the next decade, I know two things for sure: that we can make any future we can imagine, and we can play any games we want, so I say: Let the world-changing games begin. +Thank you. + +For some time I have been interested in the placebo effect, which might seem like an odd thing for a magician to be interested in, unless you think of it in the terms that I do, which is, "Something fake is believed in enough by somebody that it becomes something real." +In other words, sugar pills have a measurable effect in certain kinds of studies, the placebo effect, just because the person thinks that what's happening to them is a pharmaceutical or some sort of a -- for pain management, for example, if they believe it enough there is a measurable effect in the body called the placebo effect. +Something fake becomes something real because of someone's perception of it. +In order for us to understand each other, I want to start by showing you a rudimentary, very simple magic trick. +And I'm going to show you how it works. This is a trick that's been in every children's magic book since at least the 1950s. +I learned it myself from Cub Scout Magic in the 1970s. +I'll do it for you, and then I'll explain it. +And then I'll explain why I explained it. +So, here's what happens. +The knife, which you can examine; my hand, which you could examine. +I'm just going to hold the knife in my fist like this. +I'll get my sleeve back. +And to make sure nothing goes up or down my sleeve I'm just going to squeeze my wrist right here. +That way you can see that at no time can anything travel, as long as I'm squeezing there nothing can go up or down my sleeve. +And the object of this is quite simple. +I'm going to open my hand, and hopefully, if all is well, my pure animal magnetism will hold the knife. +In fact it's held so tightly in place that I can shake it, and the knife does not come off. +Nothing goes up or down my sleeve, no trickery. And you can examine everything. +Ta-da! +So, this is a trick that I often teach to young children that are interested in magic, because you can learn a great deal about deception by studying this very -- even though it's a very simple trick methodologically. +Probably many of you in the room know this trick. +What happens is this. +I hold the knife in my hand. +I say I'm going to grab hold of my wrist to make sure nothing goes up or down my sleeve, that is a lie. +The reason I'm holding onto my wrist is because that's actually the secret of the illusion. +In a moment when my hand moves from facing you to being away from you, this finger right here, my index finger is just going to shift from where it is, to a position pointing out like this. +Nice one. +Someone who didn't have a childhood is out there. +So, it goes like this, from here, right. +And as I move around my finger shifts. +And we could talk about why this is deceptive, why you don't notice there are only three fingers down here, because the mind, and the way it processes information, it doesn't count, one, two, three. It groups them. +But that's not really what this is about. Right? And then I open my hand up. +Obviously it's clinging there, not by animal magnetism, but by chicanery, my index finger being there. +And then when I close my finger, same thing, as I move back, this motion kind of covers the moving back of my finger. +I take this hand away. You give the knife out. +There is a trick you can do for your friends and neighbors. Thanks. +Now, what does that have to do with the placebo effect? +I read a study a year or so ago that really blew my mind wide open. +I'm not a doctor or a researcher, so this, to me, was an astonishing thing. +It turns out that if you administer a placebo in the form of a white pill, that's like aspirin shaped -- it's just a round white pill -- it has some certain measurable effect. +But if you change the form that you give the placebo in, like you make a smaller pill, and color it blue, and stamp a letter into it, it is actually measurably more effective. +Even though neither one of these things has any pharmaceutical -- they're sugar pills. +But a white pill is not as good as a blue pill. +What? That really flipped me out. +Turns out though, that that's not even where it stops. +If you have capsules, they're more effective than tablets in any form. +A colored capsule, that's yellow on one end and red on the other is better than a white capsule. +Dosage has something to do with this. +One pill twice a day is not as good at three pills -- I don't remember the statistic now. Sorry. +But the point is ... +... these dosages have something to do with it. +And the form has something to do with it. +And if you want the ultimate in placebo, you've go to the needle. +Right? A syringe with some inert -- a couple CCs of some inert something, and you inject this into a patient ... +Well this is such a powerful image in their mind, it's so much stronger than the white pill. +It's a really, this graph, well I'll show it to you some other time when we have slides. +The point is the white pill is not as good as the blue pill is not as good as the capsule is not as good as the needle. +And none of it has any real pharmaceutical quality, it's only your belief that makes it real in your body and makes a stronger effect. +I wanted to see if I could take that idea and apply it to a magic trick. +And take something that is obviously a fake trick and make it seem real. +And we know from that study that when you want reality, you go to the needle. +This is a seven-inch hatpin. It's very, very sharp, and I'm going to just sterilize it a tiny bit. +This is really my flesh. This is not Damian's special-grown flesh. +That's my skin right there. This is not a Hollywood special effect. +I'm going to pierce my skin and run this needle through to the other side. +If you're queasy -- if you faint easily -- I was doing this for some friends in the hotel room last night, and some people that I didn't know, and one woman almost passed out. +So, I suggest if you get queasy easy that you look away for about the next 30 -- in fact, you know what, I'll do the first bad part behind it. +You'll get to see, you can look away too if you'd like to. +So, here is what happens, right here, the beginning of my flesh at the lower part of my arm I just make a little pierce. +I'm sorry, man. Am I freaking you out? +OK, and then just through my skin a tiny bit, and then out the other side like this. +Now, essentially we're in the same position we were in with the knife trick. +Sort of. +But you can't count my fingers right now can you? +So, let me show them to you. That's one, two three, four, five. +Yes, well... +I know what people think when they see this. +They go, "Well, he's certainly not dumb enough to stab himself through the skin to entertain us for a few minutes. +So, let me give you a little peek. +How's that look out there? Pretty good. +Yeah, I know. And the people in the back go, "OK, I didn't really see that." +People in the satellite room are starting to move in now. +Let me give you good close look at this. +That really is my skin. That is not a Hollywood special effect. +That's my flesh, and I can twist that around. +I'm sorry. If you're getting queasy, look away, don't look at the thing. +People in the back or people on video years from now watching this will go, "Well yeah, that looks kind of neat in some sort of effect there, but if it were real he would be -- see there's a hole there and a hole there, if it were real he would be bleeding. +Well let me work up some blood for you. +Yes, there it is. +Normally now, I would take the needle out. +I would clean off my arm, and I would show you that there are no wounds. +But I think in this context and with the idea of taking something fake and making it into something real, I'm just going to leave it there, and walk off the stage. +I will be seeing you several times over the next few days. +I hope you're looking forward to that. Thank you very much. + +So, I've known a lot of fish in my life. +I've loved only two. +That first one, it was more like a passionate affair. +It was a beautiful fish: flavorful, textured, meaty, a bestseller on the menu. +What a fish. +Even better, it was farm-raised to the supposed highest standards of sustainability. +So you could feel good about selling it. +I was in a relationship with this beauty for several months. +One day, the head of the company called and asked if I'd speak at an event about the farm's sustainability. +"Absolutely," I said. +Here was a company trying to solve what's become this unimaginable problem for us chefs: How do we keep fish on our menus? +For the past 50 years, we've been fishing the seas like we clear-cut forests. +It's hard to overstate the destruction. +Ninety percent of large fish, the ones we love -- the tunas, the halibuts, the salmons, swordfish -- they've collapsed. +There's almost nothing left. +So, for better or for worse, aquaculture, fish farming, is going to be a part of our future. +A lot of arguments against it: Fish farms pollute -- most of them do anyway -- and they're inefficient. Take tuna, a major drawback. +It's got a feed conversion ratio of 15 to one. +That means it takes fifteen pounds of wild fish to get you one pound of farm tuna. +Not very sustainable. +It doesn't taste very good either. +So here, finally, was a company trying to do it right. +I wanted to support them. +The day before the event, I called the head of P.R. for the company. +Let's call him Don. +"Don," I said, "just to get the facts straight, you guys are famous for farming so far out to sea, you don't pollute." +"That's right," he said. "We're so far out, the waste from our fish gets distributed, not concentrated." +And then he added, "We're basically a world unto ourselves. +That feed conversion ratio? 2.5 to one," he said. +"Best in the business." +2.5 to one, great. +"2.5 what? What are you feeding?" +"Sustainable proteins," he said. +"Great," I said. Got off the phone. +And that night, I was lying in bed, and I thought: What the hell is a sustainable protein? +So the next day, just before the event, I called Don. +I said, "Don, what are some examples of sustainable proteins?" +He said he didn't know. He would ask around. +Well, I got on the phone with a few people in the company; no one could give me a straight answer until finally, I got on the phone with the head biologist. +Let's call him Don too. +"Don," I said, "what are some examples of sustainable proteins?" +Well, he mentioned some algaes and some fish meals, and then he said chicken pellets. +I said, "Chicken pellets?" +He said, "Yeah, feathers, skin, bone meal, scraps, dried and processed into feed." +I said, "What percentage of your feed is chicken?" +Thinking, you know, two percent. +"Well, it's about 30 percent," he said. +I said, "Don, what's sustainable about feeding chicken to fish?" +There was a long pause on the line, and he said, "There's just too much chicken in the world." +I fell out of love with this fish. +No, not because I'm some self-righteous, goody-two shoes foodie. +I actually am. +No, I actually fell out of love with this fish because, I swear to God, after that conversation, the fish tasted like chicken. +This second fish, it's a different kind of love story. +It's the romantic kind, the kind where the more you get to know your fish, you love the fish. +I first ate it at a restaurant in southern Spain. +A journalist friend had been talking about this fish for a long time. +She kind of set us up. +It came to the table a bright, almost shimmering, white color. +The chef had overcooked it. +Like twice over. +Amazingly, it was still delicious. +Who can make a fish taste good after it's been overcooked? +I can't, but this guy can. +Let's call him Miguel -- actually his name is Miguel. +And no, he didn't cook the fish, and he's not a chef, at least in the way that you and I understand it. +He's a biologist at Veta La Palma. +It's a fish farm in the southwestern corner of Spain. +It's at the tip of the Guadalquivir river. +Until the 1980s, the farm was in the hands of the Argentinians. +They raised beef cattle on what was essentially wetlands. +They did it by draining the land. +They built this intricate series of canals, and they pushed water off the land and out into the river. +Well, they couldn't make it work, not economically. +And ecologically, it was a disaster. +It killed like 90 percent of the birds, which, for this place, is a lot of birds. +And so in 1982, a Spanish company with an environmental conscience purchased the land. +What did they do? +They reversed the flow of water. +They literally flipped the switch. +Instead of pushing water out, they used the channels to pull water back in. +They flooded the canals. +They created a 27,000-acre fish farm -- bass, mullet, shrimp, eel -- and in the process, Miguel and this company completely reversed the ecological destruction. +The farm's incredible. +I mean, you've never seen anything like this. +You stare out at a horizon that is a million miles away, and all you see are flooded canals and this thick, rich marshland. +I was there not long ago with Miguel. +He's an amazing guy, like three parts Charles Darwin and one part Crocodile Dundee. +Okay? There we are slogging through the wetlands, and I'm panting and sweating, got mud up to my knees, and Miguel's calmly conducting a biology lecture. +Here, he's pointing out a rare Black-shouldered Kite. +Now, he's mentioning the mineral needs of phytoplankton. +And here, here he sees a grouping pattern that reminds him of the Tanzanian Giraffe. +It turns out, Miguel spent the better part of his career in the Mikumi National Park in Africa. +I asked him how he became such an expert on fish. +He said, "Fish? I didn't know anything about fish. +I'm an expert in relationships." +And then he's off, launching into more talk about rare birds and algaes and strange aquatic plants. +And don't get me wrong, that was really fascinating, you know, the biotic community unplugged, kind of thing. +It's great, but I was in love. +And my head was swooning over that overcooked piece of delicious fish I had the night before. +So I interrupted him. I said, "Miguel, what makes your fish taste so good?" +He pointed at the algae. +"I know, dude, the algae, the phytoplankton, the relationships: It's amazing. +But what are your fish eating? +What's the feed conversion ratio?" +Well, he goes on to tell me it's such a rich system that the fish are eating what they'd be eating in the wild. +The plant biomass, the phytoplankton, the zooplankton, it's what feeds the fish. +The system is so healthy, it's totally self-renewing. +There is no feed. +Ever heard of a farm that doesn't feed its animals? +Later that day, I was driving around this property with Miguel, and I asked him, I said, "For a place that seems so natural, unlike like any farm I'd ever been at, how do you measure success?" +At that moment, it was as if a film director called for a set change. +And we rounded the corner and saw the most amazing sight: thousands and thousands of pink flamingos, a literal pink carpet for as far as you could see. +"That's success," he said. +"Look at their bellies, pink. +They're feasting." +Feasting? I was totally confused. +I said, "Miguel, aren't they feasting on your fish?" +"Yes," he said. +"We lose 20 percent of our fish and fish eggs to birds. +Well, last year, this property had 600,000 birds on it, more than 250 different species. +It's become, today, the largest and one of the most important private bird sanctuaries in all of Europe." +I said, "Miguel, isn't a thriving bird population like the last thing you want on a fish farm?" +He shook his head, no. +He said, "We farm extensively, not intensively. +This is an ecological network. +The flamingos eat the shrimp. +The shrimp eat the phytoplankton. +So the pinker the belly, the better the system." +Okay, so let's review: a farm that doesn't feed its animals, and a farm that measures its success on the health of its predators. +A fish farm, but also a bird sanctuary. +Oh, and by the way, those flamingos, they shouldn't even be there in the first place. +They brood in a town 150 miles away, where the soil conditions are better for building nests. +Every morning, they fly 150 miles into the farm. +And every evening, they fly 150 miles back. +They do that because they're able to follow the broken white line of highway A92. +No kidding. +I was imagining a "March of the Penguins" thing, so I looked at Miguel. +I said, "Miguel, do they fly 150 miles to the farm, and then do they fly 150 miles back at night? +Do they do that for the children?" +He looked at me like I had just quoted a Whitney Houston song. +He said, "No; they do it because the food's better." +I didn't mention the skin of my beloved fish, which was delicious -- and I don't like fish skin; I don't like it seared, I don't like it crispy. +It's that acrid, tar-like flavor. +I almost never cook with it. +Yet, when I tasted it at that restaurant in southern Spain, it tasted not at all like fish skin. +It tasted sweet and clean, like you were taking a bite of the ocean. +I mentioned that to Miguel, and he nodded. +He said, "The skin acts like a sponge. +It's the last defense before anything enters the body. +It evolved to soak up impurities." +And then he added, "But our water has no impurities." +OK. A farm that doesn't feed its fish, a farm that measures its success by the success of its predators. +And then I realized when he says, "A farm that has no impurities," he made a big understatement, because the water that flows through that farm comes in from the Guadalquivir River. +It's a river that carries with it all the things that rivers tend to carry these days: chemical contaminants, pesticide runoff. +And when it works its way through the system and leaves, the water is cleaner than when it entered. +The system is so healthy, it purifies the water. +So, not just a farm that doesn't feed its animals, not just a farm that measures its success by the health of its predators, but a farm that's literally a water purification plant -- and not just for those fish, but for you and me as well. +Because when that water leaves, it dumps out into the Atlantic. +A drop in the ocean, I know, but I'll take it, and so should you, because this love story, however romantic, is also instructive. +You might say it's a recipe for the future of good food, whether we're talking about bass or beef cattle. +What we need now is a radically new conception of agriculture, one in which the food actually tastes good. +But for a lot people, that's a bit too radical. +We're not realists, us foodies; we're lovers. +We love farmers' markets, we love small family farms, we talk about local food, we eat organic. +And when you suggest these are the things that will ensure the future of good food, someone, somewhere stands up and says, "Hey guy, I love pink flamingos, but how are you going to feed the world?" +How are you going to feed the world? +Can I be honest? +I don't love that question. +No, not because we already produce enough calories to more than feed the world. +One billion people will go hungry today. +One billion -- that's more than ever before -- because of gross inequalities in distribution, not tonnage. +Now, I don't love this question because it's determined the logic of our food system for the last 50 years. +Feed grain to herbivores, pesticides to monocultures, chemicals to soil, chicken to fish, and all along agribusiness has simply asked, "If we're feeding more people more cheaply, how terrible could that be?" +That's been the motivation, it's been the justification: it's been the business plan of American agriculture. +We should call it what it is: a business in liquidation, a business that's quickly eroding ecological capital that makes that very production possible. +That's not a business, and it isn't agriculture. +Our breadbasket is threatened today, not because of diminishing supply, but because of diminishing resources. +Not by the latest combine and tractor invention, but by fertile land; not by pumps, but by fresh water; not by chainsaws, but by forests; and not by fishing boats and nets, but by fish in the sea. +Want to feed the world? +Let's start by asking: How are we going to feed ourselves? +Or better: How can we create conditions that enable every community to feed itself? +To do that, don't look at the agribusiness model for the future. +It's really old, and it's tired. +It's high on capital, chemistry and machines, and it's never produced anything really good to eat. +Instead, let's look to the ecological model. +That's the one that relies on two billion years of on-the-job experience. +Look to Miguel, farmers like Miguel. +Farms that aren't worlds unto themselves; farms that restore instead of deplete; farms that farm extensively instead of just intensively; farmers that are not just producers, but experts in relationships. +Because they're the ones that are experts in flavor, too. +And if I'm going to be really honest, they're a better chef than I'll ever be. +You know, I'm okay with that, because if that's the future of good food, it's going to be delicious. +Thank you. + +I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction. +In high school, I took a bus to school an hour each way every day. +And I was always absorbed in a book, science fiction book, which took my mind to other worlds, and satisfied, in a narrative form, this insatiable sense of curiosity that I had. +And you know, that curiosity also manifested itself in the fact that whenever I wasn't in school I was out in the woods, hiking and taking "samples" -- frogs and snakes and bugs and pond water -- and bringing it back, looking at it under the microscope. +You know, I was a real science geek. +But it was all about trying to understand the world, understand the limits of possibility. +And my love of science fiction actually seemed mirrored in the world around me, because what was happening, this was in the late '60s, we were going to the moon, we were exploring the deep oceans. +Jacques Cousteau was coming into our living rooms with his amazing specials that showed us animals and places and a wondrous world that we could never really have previously imagined. +So, that seemed to resonate with the whole science fiction part of it. +And I was an artist. +I could draw. I could paint. +And I found that because there weren't video games and this saturation of CG movies and all of this imagery in the media landscape, I had to create these images in my head. +You know, we all did, as kids having to read a book, and through the author's description, put something on the movie screen in our heads. +And so, my response to this was to paint, to draw alien creatures, alien worlds, robots, spaceships, all that stuff. +I was endlessly getting busted in math class doodling behind the textbook. +That was -- the creativity had to find its outlet somehow. +And an interesting thing happened: The Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there was an alien world right here on Earth. +I might not really go to an alien world on a spaceship someday -- that seemed pretty darn unlikely. +But that was a world I could really go to, right here on Earth, that was as rich and exotic as anything that I had imagined from reading these books. +So, I decided I was going to become a scuba diver at the age of 15. +And the only problem with that was that I lived in a little village in Canada, 600 miles from the nearest ocean. +But I didn't let that daunt me. +I pestered my father until he finally found a scuba class in Buffalo, New York, right across the border from where we live. +And I actually got certified in a pool at a YMCA in the dead of winter in Buffalo, New York. +And I didn't see the ocean, a real ocean, for another two years, until we moved to California. +Since then, in the intervening 40 years, I've spent about 3,000 hours underwater, and 500 hours of that was in submersibles. +And I've learned that that deep-ocean environment, and even the shallow oceans, are so rich with amazing life that really is beyond our imagination. +Nature's imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination. +I still, to this day, stand in absolute awe of what I see when I make these dives. +And my love affair with the ocean is ongoing, and just as strong as it ever was. +But when I chose a career as an adult, it was filmmaking. +And that seemed to be the best way to reconcile this urge I had to tell stories with my urges to create images. +And I was, as a kid, constantly drawing comic books, and so on. +So, filmmaking was the way to put pictures and stories together, and that made sense. +And of course the stories that I chose to tell were science fiction stories: "Terminator," "Aliens" and "The Abyss." +And with "The Abyss," I was putting together my love of underwater and diving with filmmaking. +So, you know, merging the two passions. +Something interesting came out of "The Abyss," which was that to solve a specific narrative problem on that film, which was to create this kind of liquid water creature, we actually embraced computer generated animation, CG. +And this resulted in the first soft-surface character, CG animation that was ever in a movie. +And even though the film didn't make any money -- barely broke even, I should say -- I witnessed something amazing, which is that the audience, the global audience, was mesmerized by this apparent magic. +You know, it's Arthur Clarke's law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. +They were seeing something magical. +And so that got me very excited. +And I thought, "Wow, this is something that needs to be embraced into the cinematic art." +So, with "Terminator 2," which was my next film, we took that much farther. +Working with ILM, we created the liquid metal dude in that film. The success hung in the balance on whether that effect would work. +And it did, and we created magic again, and we had the same result with an audience -- although we did make a little more money on that one. +So, drawing a line through those two dots of experience came to, "This is going to be a whole new world," this was a whole new world of creativity for film artists. +So, I started a company with Stan Winston, my good friend Stan Winston, who is the premier make-up and creature designer at that time, and it was called Digital Domain. +And the concept of the company was that we would leapfrog past the analog processes of optical printers and so on, and we would go right to digital production. +And we actually did that and it gave us a competitive advantage for a while. +But we found ourselves lagging in the mid '90s in the creature and character design stuff that we had actually founded the company to do. +So, I wrote this piece called "Avatar," which was meant to absolutely push the envelope of visual effects, of CG effects, beyond, with realistic human emotive characters generated in CG, and the main characters would all be in CG, and the world would be in CG. +And the envelope pushed back, and I was told by the folks at my company that we weren't going to be able to do this for a while. +So, I shelved it, and I made this other movie about a big ship that sinks. +You know, I went and pitched it to the studio as "'Romeo and Juliet' on a ship: "It's going to be this epic romance, passionate film." +Secretly, what I wanted to do was I wanted to dive to the real wreck of "Titanic." +And that's why I made the movie. +And that's the truth. Now, the studio didn't know that. +But I convinced them. I said, "We're going to dive to the wreck. We're going to film it for real. +We'll be using it in the opening of the film. +It will be really important. It will be a great marketing hook." +And I talked them into funding an expedition. +Sounds crazy. But this goes back to that theme about your imagination creating a reality. +Because we actually created a reality where six months later, I find myself in a Russian submersible two and a half miles down in the north Atlantic, looking at the real Titanic through a view port. +Not a movie, not HD -- for real. +Now, that blew my mind. +And it took a lot of preparation, we had to build cameras and lights and all kinds of things. +But, it struck me how much this dive, these deep dives, was like a space mission. +You know, where it was highly technical, and it required enormous planning. +You get in this capsule, you go down to this dark hostile environment where there is no hope of rescue if you can't get back by yourself. +And I thought like, "Wow. I'm like, living in a science fiction movie. +This is really cool." +And so, I really got bitten by the bug of deep-ocean exploration. +Of course, the curiosity, the science component of it -- it was everything. It was adventure, it was curiosity, it was imagination. +And it was an experience that Hollywood couldn't give me. +Because, you know, I could imagine a creature and we could create a visual effect for it. But I couldn't imagine what I was seeing out that window. +As we did some of our subsequent expeditions, I was seeing creatures at hydrothermal vents and sometimes things that I had never seen before, sometimes things that no one had seen before, that actually were not described by science at the time that we saw them and imaged them. +So, I was completely smitten by this, and had to do more. +And so, I actually made a kind of curious decision. +After the success of "Titanic," I said, "OK, I'm going to park my day job as a Hollywood movie maker, and I'm going to go be a full-time explorer for a while." +And so, we started planning these expeditions. +And we wound up going to the Bismark, and exploring it with robotic vehicles. +We went back to the Titanic wreck. +We took little bots that we had created that spooled a fiber optic. +And the idea was to go in and do an interior survey of that ship, which had never been done. +Nobody had ever looked inside the wreck. They didn't have the means to do it, so we created technology to do it. +So, you know, here I am now, on the deck of Titanic, sitting in a submersible, and looking out at planks that look much like this, where I knew that the band had played. +And I'm flying a little robotic vehicle through the corridor of the ship. +When I say, "I'm operating it," but my mind is in the vehicle. +I felt like I was physically present inside the shipwreck of Titanic. +And it was the most surreal kind of deja vu experience I've ever had, because I would know before I turned a corner what was going to be there before the lights of the vehicle actually revealed it, because I had walked the set for months when we were making the movie. +And the set was based as an exact replica on the blueprints of the ship. +So, it was this absolutely remarkable experience. +And it really made me realize that the telepresence experience -- that you actually can have these robotic avatars, then your consciousness is injected into the vehicle, into this other form of existence. +It was really, really quite profound. +And it may be a little bit of a glimpse as to what might be happening some decades out as we start to have cyborg bodies for exploration or for other means in many sort of post-human futures that I can imagine, as a science fiction fan. +So, having done these expeditions, and really beginning to appreciate what was down there, such as at the deep ocean vents where we had these amazing, amazing animals -- they're basically aliens right here on Earth. +They live in an environment of chemosynthesis. +They don't survive on sunlight-based system the way we do. +And so, you're seeing animals that are living next to water plumes. +You think they can't possibly exist. +At the same time I was getting very interested in space science as well -- again, it's the science fiction influence, as a kid. +And I wound up getting involved with the space community, really involved with NASA, sitting on the NASA advisory board, planning actual space missions, going to Russia, going through the pre-cosmonaut biomedical protocols, and all these sorts of things, to actually go and fly to the international space station with our 3D camera systems. +And this was fascinating. +But what I wound up doing was bringing space scientists with us into the deep. +And taking them down so that they had access -- astrobiologists, planetary scientists, people who were interested in these extreme environments -- taking them down to the vents, and letting them see, and take samples and test instruments, and so on. +So, here we were making documentary films, but actually doing science, and actually doing space science. +I'd completely closed the loop between being the science fiction fan, you know, as a kid, and doing this stuff for real. +And you know, along the way in this journey of discovery, I learned a lot. +I learned a lot about science. But I also learned a lot about leadership. +Now you think director has got to be a leader, leader of, captain of the ship, and all that sort of thing. +I didn't really learn about leadership until I did these expeditions. +Because I had to, at a certain point, say, "What am I doing out here? +Why am I doing this? What do I get out of it?" +We don't make money at these damn shows. +We barely break even. There is no fame in it. +People sort of think I went away between "Titanic" and "Avatar" and was buffing my nails someplace, sitting at the beach. +Made all these films, made all these documentary films for a very limited audience. +No fame, no glory, no money. What are you doing? +You're doing it for the task itself, for the challenge -- and the ocean is the most challenging environment there is -- for the thrill of discovery, and for that strange bond that happens when a small group of people form a tightly knit team. +Because we would do these things with 10, 12 people, working for years at a time, sometimes at sea for two, three months at a time. +And in that bond, you realize that the most important thing is the respect that you have for them and that they have for you, that you've done a task that you can't explain to someone else. +When you come back to the shore and you say, "We had to do this, and the fiber optic, and the attentuation, and the this and the that, all the technology of it, and the difficulty, the human-performance aspects of working at sea," you can't explain it to people. It's that thing that maybe cops have, or people in combat that have gone through something together and they know they can never explain it. +Creates a bond, creates a bond of respect. +So, when I came back to make my next movie, which was "Avatar," I tried to apply that same principle of leadership, which is that you respect your team, and you earn their respect in return. +And it really changed the dynamic. +So, here I was again with a small team, in uncharted territory, doing "Avatar," coming up with new technology that didn't exist before. +Tremendously exciting. +Tremendously challenging. +And we became a family, over a four-and-half year period. +And it completely changed how I do movies. +So, people have commented on how, "Well, you know, you brought back the ocean organisms and put them on the planet of Pandora." +To me, it was more of a fundamental way of doing business, the process itself, that changed as a result of that. +So, what can we synthesize out of all this? +You know, what are the lessons learned? +Well, I think number one is curiosity. +It's the most powerful thing you own. +Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. +And the respect of your team is more important than all the laurels in the world. +I have young filmmakers come up to me and say, "Give me some advice for doing this." +And I say, "Don't put limitations on yourself. +Other people will do that for you -- don't do it to yourself, don't bet against yourself, and take risks." +NASA has this phrase that they like: "Failure is not an option." +But failure has to be an option in art and in exploration, because it's a leap of faith. +And no important endeavor that required innovation was done without risk. +You have to be willing to take those risks. +So, that's the thought I would leave you with, is that in whatever you're doing, failure is an option, but fear is not. Thank you. + +If I can leave you with one big idea today, it's that the whole of the data in which we consume is greater that the sum of the parts, and instead of thinking about information overload, what I'd like you to think about is how we can use information so that patterns pop and we can see trends that would otherwise be invisible. +So what we're looking at right here is a typical mortality chart organized by age. +This tool that I'm using here is a little experiment. +It's called Pivot, and with Pivot what I can do is I can choose to filter in one particular cause of deaths -- say, accidents. +And, right away, I see there's a different pattern that emerges. +This is because, in the mid-area here, people are at their most active, and over here they're at their most frail. +We can step back out again and then reorganize the data by cause of death, seeing that circulatory diseases and cancer are the usual suspects, but not for everyone. +If we go ahead and we filter by age -- say 40 years or less -- we see that accidents are actually the greatest cause that people have to be worried about. +And if you drill into that, it's especially the case for men. +So you get the idea that viewing information, viewing data in this way, is a lot like swimming in a living information info-graphic. +And if we can do this for raw data, why not do it for content as well? +So what we have right here is the cover of every single Sports Illustrated ever produced. +It's all here; it's all on the web. +You can go back to your rooms and try this after my talk. +With Pivot, you can drill into a decade. +You can drill into a particular year. +You can jump right into a specific issue. +So I'm looking at this; I see the athletes that have appeared in this issue, the sports. +I'm a Lance Armstrong fan, so I'll go ahead and I'll click on that, which reveals, for me, all the issues in which Lance Armstrong's been a part of. +Now, if I want to just kind of take a peek at these, I might think, "Well, what about taking a look at all of cycling?" +So I can step back, and expand on that. +And I see Greg LeMond now. +And so you get the idea that when you navigate over information this way -- going narrower, broader, backing in, backing out -- you're not searching, you're not browsing. +You're doing something that's actually a little bit different. +It's in between, and we think it changes the way information can be used. +So I want to extrapolate on this idea a bit with something that's a little bit crazy. +What we're done here is we've taken every single Wikipedia page and we reduced it down to a little summary. +So the summary consists of just a little synopsis and an icon to indicate the topical area that it comes from. +I'm only showing the top 500 most popular Wikipedia pages right here. +But even in this limited view, we can do a lot of things. +Right away, we get a sense of what are the topical domains that are most popular on Wikipedia. +I'm going to go ahead and select government. +Now, having selected government, I can now see that the Wikipedia categories that most frequently correspond to that are Time magazine People of the Year. +So this is really important because this is an insight that was not contained within any one Wikipedia page. +It's only possible to see that insight when you step back and look at all of them. +Looking at one of these particular summaries, I can then drill into the concept of Time magazine Person of the Year, bringing up all of them. +So looking at these people, I can see that the majority come from government; some have come from natural sciences; some, fewer still, have come from business -- there's my boss -- and one has come from music. +And interestingly enough, Bono is also a TED Prize winner. +So we can go, jump, and take a look at all the TED Prize winners. +So you see, we're navigating the web for the first time as if it's actually a web, not from page-to-page, but at a higher level of abstraction. +And so I want to show you one other thing that may catch you a little bit by surprise. +I'm just showing the New York Times website here. +So Pivot, this application -- I don't want to call it a browser; it's really not a browser, but you can view web pages with it -- and we bring that zoomable technology to every single web page like this. +So I can step back, pop right back into a specific section. +Now the reason why this is important is because, by virtue of just viewing web pages in this way, I can look at my entire browsing history in the exact same way. +So I can drill into what I've done over specific time frames. +Here, in fact, is the state of all the demo that I just gave. +And I can sort of replay some stuff that I was looking at earlier today. +And, if I want to step back and look at everything, I can slice and dice my history, perhaps by my search history -- here, I was doing some nepotistic searching, looking for Bing, over here for Live Labs Pivot. +And from these, I can drill into the web page and just launch them again. +It's one metaphor repurposed multiple times, and in each case it makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts with the data. +So right now, in this world, we think about data as being this curse. +We talk about the curse of information overload. +We talk about drowning in data. +What if we can actually turn that upside down and turn the web upside down, so that instead of navigating from one thing to the next, we get used to the habit of being able to go from many things to many things, and then being able to see the patterns that were otherwise hidden? +If we can do that, then instead of being trapped in data, we might actually extract information. +And, instead of dealing just with information, we can tease out knowledge. +And if we get the knowledge, then maybe even there's wisdom to be found. +So with that, I thank you. + +Everybody talks about happiness these days. +I had somebody count the number of books with "happiness" in the title published in the last five years and they gave up after about 40, and there were many more. +There is a huge wave of interest in happiness, among researchers. +There is a lot of happiness coaching. +Everybody would like to make people happier. +But in spite of all this flood of work, there are several cognitive traps that sort of make it almost impossible to think straight about happiness. +And my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps. +This applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness, and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness, because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else is. +The first of these traps is a reluctance to admit complexity. +It turns out that the word "happiness" is just not a useful word anymore, because we apply it to too many different things. +I think there is one particular meaning to which we might restrict it, but by and large, this is something that we'll have to give up and we'll have to adopt the more complicated view of what well-being is. +The second trap is a confusion between experience and memory; basically, it's between being happy in your life, and being happy about your life or happy with your life. +And those are two very different concepts, and they're both lumped in the notion of happiness. +And the third is the focusing illusion, and it's the unfortunate fact that we can't think about any circumstance that affects well-being without distorting its importance. +I mean, this is a real cognitive trap. +There's just no way of getting it right. +Now, I'd like to start with an example of somebody who had a question-and-answer session after one of my lectures reported a story, and that was a story -- He said he'd been listening to a symphony, and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the recording, there was a dreadful screeching sound. +And then he added, really quite emotionally, it ruined the whole experience. +But it hadn't. +What it had ruined were the memories of the experience. +He had had the experience. +He had had 20 minutes of glorious music. +They counted for nothing because he was left with a memory; the memory was ruined, and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep. +What this is telling us, really, is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves. +There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present, is capable of re-living the past, but basically it has only the present. +It's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches -- you know, when the doctor asks, "Does it hurt now when I touch you here?" +And then there is a remembering self, and the remembering self is the one that keeps score, and maintains the story of our life, and it's the one that the doctor approaches in asking the question, "How have you been feeling lately?" +or "How was your trip to Albania?" or something like that. +Those are two very different entities, the experiencing self and the remembering self, and getting confused between them is part of the mess about the notion of happiness. +Now, the remembering self is a storyteller. +And that really starts with a basic response of our memories -- it starts immediately. +We don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories. +Our memory tells us stories, that is, what we get to keep from our experiences is a story. +And let me begin with one example. +This is an old study. +Those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure. +I won't go into detail. It's no longer painful these days, but it was painful when this study was run in the 1990s. +They were asked to report on their pain every 60 seconds. +Here are two patients, those are their recordings. +And you are asked, "Who of them suffered more?" +And it's a very easy question. +Clearly, Patient B suffered more -- his colonoscopy was longer, and every minute of pain that Patient A had, Patient B had, and more. +But now there is another question: "How much did these patients think they suffered?" +And here is a surprise. +The surprise is that Patient A had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than Patient B. +The stories of the colonoscopies were different, and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends. +And neither of these stories is very inspiring or great -- but one of them is this distinct ... but one of them is distinctly worse than the other. +And the one that is worse is the one where pain was at its peak at the very end; it's a bad story. +How do we know that? +Because we asked these people after their colonoscopy, and much later, too, "How bad was the whole thing, in total?" +And it was much worse for A than for B, in memory. +Now this is a direct conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self. +From the point of view of the experiencing self, clearly, B had a worse time. +Now, what you could do with Patient A, and we actually ran clinical experiments, and it has been done, and it does work -- you could actually extend the colonoscopy of Patient A by just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much. +That will cause the patient to suffer, but just a little and much less than before. +And if you do that for a couple of minutes, you have made the experiencing self of Patient A worse off, and you have the remembering self of Patient A a lot better off, because now you have endowed Patient A with a better story about his experience. +What defines a story? +And that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us, and it's also true of the stories that we make up. +What defines a story are changes, significant moments and endings. +Endings are very, very important and, in this case, the ending dominated. +Now, the experiencing self lives its life continuously. +It has moments of experience, one after the other. +And you can ask: What happens to these moments? +And the answer is really straightforward: They are lost forever. +I mean, most of the moments of our life -- and I calculated, you know, the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long; that means that, you know, in a life there are about 600 million of them; in a month, there are about 600,000 -- most of them don't leave a trace. +Most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self. +And yet, somehow you get the sense that they should count, that what happens during these moments of experience is our life. +It's the finite resource that we're spending while we're on this earth. +And how to spend it would seem to be relevant, but that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us. +So we have the remembering self and the experiencing self, and they're really quite distinct. +The biggest difference between them is in the handling of time. +From the point of view of the experiencing self, if you have a vacation, and the second week is just as good as the first, then the two-week vacation is twice as good as the one-week vacation. +That's not the way it works at all for the remembering self. +For the remembering self, a two-week vacation is barely better than the one-week vacation because there are no new memories added. +You have not changed the story. +And in this way, time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self; time has very little impact on the story. +Now, the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories. +It is actually the one that makes decisions because, if you have a patient who has had, say, two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose, then the one that chooses is the one that has the memory that is less bad, and that's the surgeon that will be chosen. +The experiencing self has no voice in this choice. +We actually don't choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. +And even when we think about the future, we don't think of our future normally as experiences. +We think of our future as anticipated memories. +And basically you can look at this, you know, as a tyranny of the remembering self, and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn't need. +I have that sense that when we go on vacations this is very frequently the case; that is, we go on vacations, to a very large extent, in the service of our remembering self. +And this is a bit hard to justify I think. +I mean, how much do we consume our memories? +That is one of the explanations that is given for the dominance of the remembering self. +And when I think about that, I think about a vacation we had in Antarctica a few years ago, which was clearly the best vacation I've ever had, and I think of it relatively often, relative to how much I think of other vacations. +And I probably have consumed my memories of that three-week trip, I would say, for about 25 minutes in the last four years. +Now, if I had ever opened the folder with the 600 pictures in it, I would have spent another hour. +Now, that is three weeks, and that is at most an hour and a half. +There seems to be a discrepancy. +Now, I may be a bit extreme, you know, in how little appetite I have for consuming memories, but even if you do more of this, there is a genuine question: Why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences? +So I want you to think about a thought experiment. +Imagine that for your next vacation, you know that at the end of the vacation all your pictures will be destroyed, and you'll get an amnesic drug so that you won't remember anything. +Now, would you choose the same vacation? And if you would choose a different vacation, there is a conflict between your two selves, and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict, and it's actually not at all obvious, because if you think in terms of time, then you get one answer, and if you think in terms of memories, you might get another answer. +Why do we pick the vacations we do is a problem that confronts us with a choice between the two selves. +Now, the two selves bring up two notions of happiness. +There are really two concepts of happiness that we can apply, one per self. +So you can ask: How happy is the experiencing self? +And then you would ask: How happy are the moments in the experiencing self's life? +And they're all -- happiness for moments is a fairly complicated process. +What are the emotions that can be measured? +And, by the way, now we are capable of getting a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experiencing self over time. +If you ask for the happiness of the remembering self, it's a completely different thing. +This is not about how happily a person lives. +It is about how satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her life. +Very different notion. +Anyone who doesn't distinguish those notions is going to mess up the study of happiness, and I belong to a crowd of students of well-being, who've been messing up the study of happiness for a long time in precisely this way. +The distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the remembering self has been recognized in recent years, and there are now efforts to measure the two separately. +The Gallup Organization has a world poll where more than half a million people have been asked questions about what they think of their life and about their experiences, and there have been other efforts along those lines. +So in recent years, we have begun to learn about the happiness of the two selves. +And the main lesson I think that we have learned is they are really different. +You can know how satisfied somebody is with their life, and that really doesn't teach you much about how happily they're living their life, and vice versa. +Just to give you a sense of the correlation, the correlation is about .5. +What that means is if you met somebody, and you were told, "Oh his father is six feet tall," how much would you know about his height? +Well, you would know something about his height, but there's a lot of uncertainty. +You have that much uncertainty. +If I tell you that somebody ranked their life eight on a scale of ten, you have a lot of uncertainty about how happy they are with their experiencing self. +So the correlation is low. +We know something about what controls satisfaction of the happiness self. +We know that money is very important, goals are very important. +We know that happiness is mainly being satisfied with people that we like, spending time with people that we like. +There are other pleasures, but this is dominant. +So if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves, you are going to end up doing very different things. +The bottom line of what I've said here is that we really should not think of happiness as a substitute for well-being. +It is a completely different notion. +Now, very quickly, another reason we cannot think straight about happiness is that we do not attend to the same things when we think about life, and we actually live. +So, if you ask the simple question of how happy people are in California, you are not going to get to the correct answer. +When you ask that question, you think people must be happier in California if, say, you live in Ohio. +And what happens is when you think about living in California, you are thinking of the contrast between California and other places, and that contrast, say, is in climate. +Well, it turns out that climate is not very important to the experiencing self and it's not even very important to the reflective self that decides how happy people are. +But now, because the reflective self is in charge, you may end up -- some people may end up moving to California. +And it's sort of interesting to trace what is going to happen to people who move to California in the hope of getting happier. +Well, their experiencing self is not going to get happier. +We know that. +But one thing will happen: They will think they are happier, because, when they think about it, they'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in Ohio, and they will feel they made the right decision. +It is very difficult to think straight about well-being, and I hope I have given you a sense of how difficult it is. +Thank you. +Chris Anderson: Thank you. I've got a question for you. +Thank you so much. +Now, when we were on the phone a few weeks ago, you mentioned to me that there was quite an interesting result came out of that Gallup survey. +Is that something you can share since you do have a few moments left now? +Daniel Kahneman: Sure. +I think the most interesting result that we found in the Gallup survey is a number, which we absolutely did not expect to find. +We found that with respect to the happiness of the experiencing self. +When we looked at how feelings, vary with income. +And it turns out that, below an income of 60,000 dollars a year, for Americans -- and that's a very large sample of Americans, like 600,000, so it's a large representative sample -- below an income of 600,000 dollars a year... +CA: 60,000. +DK: 60,000. +60,000 dollars a year, people are unhappy, and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get. +Above that, we get an absolutely flat line. +I mean I've rarely seen lines so flat. +Clearly, what is happening is money does not buy you experiential happiness, but lack of money certainly buys you misery, and we can measure that misery very, very clearly. +In terms of the other self, the remembering self, you get a different story. +The more money you earn, the more satisfied you are. +That does not hold for emotions. +CA: But Danny, the whole American endeavor is about life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. +If people took seriously that finding, I mean, it seems to turn upside down everything we believe about, like for example, taxation policy and so forth. +Is there any chance that politicians, that the country generally, would take a finding like that seriously and run public policy based on it? +DK: You know I think that there is recognition of the role of happiness research in public policy. +The recognition is going to be slow in the United States, no question about that, but in the U.K., it is happening, and in other countries it is happening. +People are recognizing that they ought to be thinking of happiness when they think of public policy. +It's going to take a while, and people are going to debate whether they want to study experience happiness, or whether they want to study life evaluation, so we need to have that debate fairly soon. +How to enhance happiness goes very different ways depending on how you think, and whether you think of the remembering self or you think of the experiencing self. +This is going to influence policy, I think, in years to come. +In the United States, efforts are being made to measure the experience happiness of the population. +This is going to be, I think, within the next decade or two, part of national statistics. +CA: Well, it seems to me that this issue will -- or at least should be -- the most interesting policy discussion to track over the next few years. +Thank you so much for inventing behavioral economics. +Thank you, Danny Kahneman. + +I'm going to talk today about energy and climate. +And that might seem a bit surprising because my full-time work at the Foundation is mostly about vaccines and seeds, about the things that we need to invent and deliver to help the poorest two billion live better lives. +But energy and climate are extremely important to these people -- in fact, more important than to anyone else on the planet. +The climate getting worse means that many years, their crops won't grow: There will be too much rain, not enough rain, things will change in ways that their fragile environment simply can't support. +And that leads to starvation, it leads to uncertainty, it leads to unrest. +So, the climate changes will be terrible for them. +Also, the price of energy is very important to them. +In fact, if you could pick just one thing to lower the price of, to reduce poverty, by far you would pick energy. +Now, the price of energy has come down over time. +Really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy. +The coal revolution fueled the Industrial Revolution, and, even in the 1900s we've seen a very rapid decline in the price of electricity, and that's why we have refrigerators, air-conditioning, we can make modern materials and do so many things. +And so, we're in a wonderful situation with electricity in the rich world. +But, as we make it cheaper -- and let's go for making it twice as cheap -- we need to meet a new constraint, and that constraint has to do with CO2. +CO2 is warming the planet, and the equation on CO2 is actually a very straightforward one. +If you sum up the CO2 that gets emitted, that leads to a temperature increase, and that temperature increase leads to some very negative effects: the effects on the weather; perhaps worse, the indirect effects, in that the natural ecosystems can't adjust to these rapid changes, and so you get ecosystem collapses. +Now, the exact amount of how you map from a certain increase of CO2 to what temperature will be and where the positive feedbacks are, there's some uncertainty there, but not very much. +And there's certainly uncertainty about how bad those effects will be, but they will be extremely bad. +I asked the top scientists on this several times: Do we really have to get down to near zero? +Can't we just cut it in half or a quarter? +And the answer is that until we get near to zero, the temperature will continue to rise. +And so that's a big challenge. +It's very different than saying "We're a twelve-foot-high truck trying to get under a ten-foot bridge, and we can just sort of squeeze under." +This is something that has to get to zero. +Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year, over 26 billion tons. +For each American, it's about 20 tons; for people in poor countries, it's less than one ton. +It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. +And, somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero. +It's been constantly going up. +It's only various economic changes that have even flattened it at all, so we have to go from rapidly rising to falling, and falling all the way to zero. +This equation has four factors, a little bit of multiplication: So, you've got a thing on the left, CO2, that you want to get to zero, and that's going to be based on the number of people, the services each person's using on average, the energy on average for each service, and the CO2 being put out per unit of energy. +So, let's look at each one of these and see how we can get this down to zero. +Probably, one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty near to zero. +Now that's back from high school algebra, but let's take a look. +First, we've got population. +The world today has 6.8 billion people. +That's headed up to about nine billion. +Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent, but there we see an increase of about 1.3. +The second factor is the services we use. +This encompasses everything: the food we eat, clothing, TV, heating. +These are very good things: getting rid of poverty means providing these services to almost everyone on the planet. +And it's a great thing for this number to go up. +In the rich world, perhaps the top one billion, we probably could cut back and use less, but every year, this number, on average, is going to go up, and so, over all, that will more than double the services delivered per person. +Here we have a very basic service: Do you have lighting in your house to be able to read your homework? +And, in fact, these kids don't, so they're going out and reading their school work under the street lamps. +Now, efficiency, E, the energy for each service, here finally we have some good news. +We have something that's not going up. +Through various inventions and new ways of doing lighting, through different types of cars, different ways of building buildings -- there are a lot of services where you can bring the energy for that service down quite substantially. +Some individual services even bring it down by 90 percent. +There are other services like how we make fertilizer, or how we do air transport, where the rooms for improvement are far, far less. +And so, overall here, if we're optimistic, we may get a reduction of a factor of three to even, perhaps, a factor of six. +But for these first three factors now, we've gone from 26 billion to, at best, maybe 13 billion tons, and that just won't cut it. +So let's look at this fourth factor -- this is going to be a key one -- and this is the amount of CO2 put out per each unit of energy. +And so the question is: Can you actually get that to zero? +If you burn coal, no. +If you burn natural gas, no. +Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. +And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. +And so, we need energy miracles. +Now, when I use the term "miracle," I don't mean something that's impossible. +The microprocessor is a miracle. The personal computer is a miracle. +The Internet and its services are a miracle. +So, the people here have participated in the creation of many miracles. +Usually, we don't have a deadline, where you have to get the miracle by a certain date. +Usually, you just kind of stand by, and some come along, some don't. +This is a case where we actually have to drive at full speed and get a miracle in a pretty tight timeline. +Now, I thought, "How could I really capture this? +Is there some kind of natural illustration, some demonstration that would grab people's imagination here?" +I thought back to a year ago when I brought mosquitos, and somehow people enjoyed that. +It really got them involved in the idea of, you know, there are people who live with mosquitos. +So, with energy, all I could come up with is this. +I decided that releasing fireflies would be my contribution to the environment here this year. +So here we have some natural fireflies. +I'm told they don't bite; in fact, they might not even leave that jar. +Now, there's all sorts of gimmicky solutions like that one, but they don't really add up to much. +We need solutions -- either one or several -- that have unbelievable scale and unbelievable reliability, and, although there's many directions people are seeking, I really only see five that can achieve the big numbers. +I've left out tide, geothermal, fusion, biofuels. +Those may make some contribution, and if they can do better than I expect, so much the better, but my key point here is that we're going to have to work on each of these five, and we can't give up any of them because they look daunting, because they all have significant challenges. +Let's look first at the burning fossil fuels, either burning coal or burning natural gas. +What you need to do there, seems like it might be simple, but it's not, and that's to take all the CO2, after you've burned it, going out the flue, pressurize it, create a liquid, put it somewhere, and hope it stays there. +Now we have some pilot things that do this at the 60 to 80 percent level, but getting up to that full percentage, that will be very tricky, and agreeing on where these CO2 quantities should be put will be hard, but the toughest one here is this long-term issue. +Who's going to be sure? +Who's going to guarantee something that is literally billions of times larger than any type of waste you think of in terms of nuclear or other things? +This is a lot of volume. +So that's a tough one. +Next would be nuclear. +It also has three big problems: Cost, particularly in highly regulated countries, is high; the issue of the safety, really feeling good about nothing could go wrong, that, even though you have these human operators, that the fuel doesn't get used for weapons. +And then what do you do with the waste? +And, although it's not very large, there are a lot of concerns about that. +People need to feel good about it. +So three very tough problems that might be solvable, and so, should be worked on. +The last three of the five, I've grouped together. +These are what people often refer to as the renewable sources. +And they actually -- although it's great they don't require fuel -- they have some disadvantages. +One is that the density of energy gathered in these technologies is dramatically less than a power plant. +This is energy farming, so you're talking about many square miles, thousands of time more area than you think of as a normal energy plant. +Also, these are intermittent sources. +The sun doesn't shine all day, it doesn't shine every day, and, likewise, the wind doesn't blow all the time. +And so, if you depend on these sources, you have to have some way of getting the energy during those time periods that it's not available. +So, we've got big cost challenges here, we have transmission challenges: for example, say this energy source is outside your country; you not only need the technology, but you have to deal with the risk of the energy coming from elsewhere. +And, finally, this storage problem. +And, to dimensionalize this, I went through and looked at all the types of batteries that get made -- for cars, for computers, for phones, for flashlights, for everything -- and compared that to the amount of electrical energy the world uses, and what I found is that all the batteries we make now could store less than 10 minutes of all the energy. +And so, in fact, we need a big breakthrough here, something that's going to be a factor of 100 better than the approaches we have now. +It's not impossible, but it's not a very easy thing. +Now, this shows up when you try to get the intermittent source to be above, say, 20 to 30 percent of what you're using. +If you're counting on it for 100 percent, you need an incredible miracle battery. +Now, how we're going to go forward on this -- what's the right approach? +Is it a Manhattan Project? What's the thing that can get us there? +Well, we need lots of companies working on this, hundreds. +In each of these five paths, we need at least a hundred people. +And a lot of them, you'll look at and say, "They're crazy." That's good. +And, I think, here in the TED group, we have many people who are already pursuing this. +Bill Gross has several companies, including one called eSolar that has some great solar thermal technologies. +Vinod Khosla's investing in dozens of companies that are doing great things and have interesting possibilities, and I'm trying to help back that. +Nathan Myhrvold and I actually are backing a company that, perhaps surprisingly, is actually taking the nuclear approach. +There are some innovations in nuclear: modular, liquid. +And innovation really stopped in this industry quite some ago, so the idea that there's some good ideas laying around is not all that surprising. +The idea of TerraPower is that, instead of burning a part of uranium -- the one percent, which is the U235 -- we decided, "Let's burn the 99 percent, the U238." +It is kind of a crazy idea. +In fact, people had talked about it for a long time, but they could never simulate properly whether it would work or not, and so it's through the advent of modern supercomputers that now you can simulate and see that, yes, with the right material's approach, this looks like it would work. +And, because you're burning that 99 percent, you have greatly improved cost profile. +You actually burn up the waste, and you can actually use as fuel all the leftover waste from today's reactors. +So, instead of worrying about them, you just take that. It's a great thing. +It breathes this uranium as it goes along, so it's kind of like a candle. +You can see it's a log there, often referred to as a traveling wave reactor. +In terms of fuel, this really solves the problem. +I've got a picture here of a place in Kentucky. +This is the leftover, the 99 percent, where they've taken out the part they burn now, so it's called depleted uranium. +That would power the U.S. for hundreds of years. +And, simply by filtering seawater in an inexpensive process, you'd have enough fuel for the entire lifetime of the rest of the planet. +So, you know, it's got lots of challenges ahead, but it is an example of the many hundreds and hundreds of ideas that we need to move forward. +So let's think: How should we measure ourselves? +What should our report card look like? +Well, let's go out to where we really need to get, and then look at the intermediate. +For 2050, you've heard many people talk about this 80 percent reduction. +That really is very important, that we get there. +And that 20 percent will be used up by things going on in poor countries, still some agriculture, hopefully we will have cleaned up forestry, cement. +So, to get to that 80 percent, the developed countries, including countries like China, will have had to switch their electricity generation altogether. +So, the other grade is: Are we deploying this zero-emission technology, have we deployed it in all the developed countries and we're in the process of getting it elsewhere? +That's super important. +That's a key element of making that report card. +So, backing up from there, what should the 2020 report card look like? +Well, again, it should have the two elements. +We should go through these efficiency measures to start getting reductions: The less we emit, the less that sum will be of CO2, and, therefore, the less the temperature. +But in some ways, the grade we get there, doing things that don't get us all the way to the big reductions, is only equally, or maybe even slightly less, important than the other, which is the piece of innovation on these breakthroughs. +These breakthroughs, we need to move those at full speed, and we can measure that in terms of companies, pilot projects, regulatory things that have been changed. +There's a lot of great books that have been written about this. +The Al Gore book, "Our Choice" and the David McKay book, "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air." +They really go through it and create a framework that this can be discussed broadly, because we need broad backing for this. +There's a lot that has to come together. +So this is a wish. +It's a very concrete wish that we invent this technology. +If you gave me only one wish for the next 50 years -- I could pick who's president, I could pick a vaccine, which is something I love, or I could pick that this thing that's half the cost with no CO2 gets invented -- this is the wish I would pick. +This is the one with the greatest impact. +If we don't get this wish, the division between the people who think short term and long term will be terrible, between the U.S. and China, between poor countries and rich, and most of all the lives of those two billion will be far worse. +So, what do we have to do? +What am I appealing to you to step forward and drive? +We need to go for more research funding. +When countries get together in places like Copenhagen, they shouldn't just discuss the CO2. +They should discuss this innovation agenda, and you'd be stunned at the ridiculously low levels of spending on these innovative approaches. +We do need the market incentives -- CO2 tax, cap and trade -- something that gets that price signal out there. +We need to get the message out. +We need to have this dialogue be a more rational, more understandable dialogue, including the steps that the government takes. +This is an important wish, but it is one I think we can achieve. +Thank you. +Thank you. +Chris Anderson: Thank you. Thank you. +Thank you. So to understand more about TerraPower, right -- I mean, first of all, can you give a sense of what scale of investment this is? +Bil Gates: To actually do the software, buy the supercomputer, hire all the great scientists, which we've done, that's only tens of millions, and even once we test our materials out in a Russian reactor to make sure that our materials work properly, then you'll only be up in the hundreds of millions. +The tough thing is building the pilot reactor; finding the several billion, finding the regulator, the location that will actually build the first one of these. +Once you get the first one built, if it works as advertised, then it's just clear as day, because the economics, the energy density, are so different than nuclear as we know it. +CA: And so, to understand it right, this involves building deep into the ground almost like a vertical kind of column of nuclear fuel, of this sort of spent uranium, and then the process starts at the top and kind of works down? +BG: That's right. Today, you're always refueling the reactor, so you have lots of people and lots of controls that can go wrong: that thing where you're opening it up and moving things in and out, that's not good. +So, if you have very cheap fuel that you can put 60 years in -- just think of it as a log -- put it down and not have those same complexities. +And it just sits there and burns for the 60 years, and then it's done. +CA: It's a nuclear power plant that is its own waste disposal solution. +BG: Yeah. Well, what happens with the waste, you can let it sit there -- there's a lot less waste under this approach -- then you can actually take that, and put it into another one and burn that. +And we start off actually by taking the waste that exists today, that's sitting in these cooling pools or dry casking by reactors -- that's our fuel to begin with. +So, the thing that's been a problem from those reactors is actually what gets fed into ours, and you're reducing the volume of the waste quite dramatically as you're going through this process. +CA: I mean, you're talking to different people around the world about the possibilities here. +Where is there most interest in actually doing something with this? +BG: Well, we haven't picked a particular place, and there's all these interesting disclosure rules about anything that's called "nuclear," so we've got a lot of interest, that people from the company have been in Russia, India, China -- I've been back seeing the secretary of energy here, talking about how this fits into the energy agenda. +So I'm optimistic. You know, the French and Japanese have done some work. +This is a variant on something that has been done. +It's an important advance, but it's like a fast reactor, and a lot of countries have built them, so anybody who's done a fast reactor is a candidate to be where the first one gets built. +CA: So, in your mind, timescale and likelihood of actually taking something like this live? +BG: Well, we need -- for one of these high-scale, electro-generation things that's very cheap, we have 20 years to invent and then 20 years to deploy. +That's sort of the deadline that the environmental models have shown us that we have to meet. +And, you know, TerraPower, if things go well -- which is wishing for a lot -- could easily meet that. +And there are, fortunately now, dozens of companies -- we need it to be hundreds -- who, likewise, if their science goes well, if the funding for their pilot plants goes well, that they can compete for this. +And it's best if multiple succeed, because then you could use a mix of these things. +We certainly need one to succeed. +CA: In terms of big-scale possible game changes, is this the biggest that you're aware of out there? +BG: An energy breakthrough is the most important thing. +It would have been, even without the environmental constraint, but the environmental constraint just makes it so much greater. +In the nuclear space, there are other innovators. +You know, we don't know their work as well as we know this one, but the modular people, that's a different approach. +There's a liquid-type reactor, which seems a little hard, but maybe they say that about us. +And so, there are different ones, but the beauty of this is a molecule of uranium has a million times as much energy as a molecule of, say, coal, and so -- if you can deal with the negatives, which are essentially the radiation -- the footprint and cost, the potential, in terms of effect on land and various things, is almost in a class of its own. +CA: If this doesn't work, then what? +Do we have to start taking emergency measures to try and keep the temperature of the earth stable? +BG: If you get into that situation, it's like if you've been over-eating, and you're about to have a heart attack: Then where do you go? You may need heart surgery or something. +There is a line of research on what's called geoengineering, which are various techniques that would delay the heating to buy us 20 or 30 years to get our act together. +Now, that's just an insurance policy. +You hope you don't need to do that. +Some people say you shouldn't even work on the insurance policy because it might make you lazy, that you'll keep eating because you know heart surgery will be there to save you. +I'm not sure that's wise, given the importance of the problem, but there's now the geoengineering discussion about -- should that be in the back pocket in case things happen faster, or this innovation goes a lot slower than we expect? +CA: Climate skeptics: If you had a sentence or two to say to them, how might you persuade them that they're wrong? +BG: Well, unfortunately, the skeptics come in different camps. +The ones who make scientific arguments are very few. +Are they saying that there's negative feedback effects that have to do with clouds that offset things? +There are very, very few things that they can even say there's a chance in a million of those things. +The main problem we have here, it's kind of like AIDS. +You make the mistake now, and you pay for it a lot later. +And so, when you have all sorts of urgent problems, the idea of taking pain now that has to do with a gain later, and a somewhat uncertain pain thing -- in fact, the IPCC report, that's not necessarily the worst case, and there are people in the rich world who look at IPCC and say, "OK, that isn't that big of a deal." +The fact is it's that uncertain part that should move us towards this. +But my dream here is that, if you can make it economic, and meet the CO2 constraints, then the skeptics say, "OK, I don't care that it doesn't put out CO2, I kind of wish it did put out CO2, but I guess I'll accept it because it's cheaper than what's come before." +CA: And so, that would be your response to the Bjorn Lomborg argument, that basically if you spend all this energy trying to solve the CO2 problem, it's going to take away all your other goals of trying to rid the world of poverty and malaria and so forth, it's a stupid waste of the Earth's resources to put money towards that when there are better things we can do. +BG: Well, the actual spending on the R&D piece -- say the U.S. should spend 10 billion a year more than it is right now -- it's not that dramatic. +It shouldn't take away from other things. +The thing you get into big money on, and this, reasonable people can disagree, is when you have something that's non-economic and you're trying to fund that -- that, to me, mostly is a waste. +Unless you're very close and you're just funding the learning curve and it's going to get very cheap, I believe we should try more things that have a potential to be far less expensive. +If the trade-off you get into is, "Let's make energy super expensive," then the rich can afford that. +I mean, all of us here could pay five times as much for our energy and not change our lifestyle. +The disaster is for that two billion. +And even Lomborg has changed. +His shtick now is, "Why isn't the R&D getting more discussed?" +He's still, because of his earlier stuff, still associated with the skeptic camp, but he's realized that's a pretty lonely camp, and so, he's making the R&D point. +And so there is a thread of something that I think is appropriate. +The R&D piece, it's crazy how little it's funded. +CA: Well Bill, I suspect I speak on the behalf of most people here to say I really hope your wish comes true. Thank you so much. +BG: Thank you. + +I'd like to share with you a discovery that I made a few months ago while writing an article for Italian Wired. +I always keep my thesaurus handy whenever I'm writing anything, but I'd already finished editing the piece, and I realized that I had never once in my life looked up the word "disabled" to see what I'd find. +Let me read you the entry. +"Disabled, adjective: crippled, helpless, useless, wrecked, stalled, maimed, wounded, mangled, lame, mutilated, run-down, worn-out, weakened, impotent, castrated, paralyzed, handicapped, senile, decrepit, laid-up, done-up, done-for, done-in cracked-up, counted-out; see also hurt, useless and weak. +Antonyms, healthy, strong, capable." +I was reading this list out loud to a friend and at first was laughing, it was so ludicrous, but I'd just gotten past "mangled," and my voice broke, and I had to stop and collect myself from the emotional shock and impact that the assault from these words unleashed. +You know, of course, this is my raggedy old thesaurus so I'm thinking this must be an ancient print date, right? +But, in fact, the print date was the early 1980s, when I would have been starting primary school and forming an understanding of myself outside the family unit and as related to the other kids and the world around me. +And, needless to say, thank God I wasn't using a thesaurus back then. +I mean, from this entry, it would seem that I was born into a world that perceived someone like me to have nothing positive whatsoever going for them, when in fact, today I'm celebrated for the opportunities and adventures my life has procured. +So, I immediately went to look up the 2009 online edition, expecting to find a revision worth noting. +Here's the updated version of this entry. +Unfortunately, it's not much better. +I find the last two words under "Near Antonyms," particularly unsettling: "whole" and "wholesome." +So, it's not just about the words. +It's what we believe about people when we name them with these words. +It's about the values behind the words, and how we construct those values. +Our language affects our thinking and how we view the world and how we view other people. +In fact, many ancient societies, including the Greeks and the Romans, believed that to utter a curse verbally was so powerful, because to say the thing out loud brought it into existence. +So, what reality do we want to call into existence: a person who is limited, or a person who's empowered? +By casually doing something as simple as naming a person, a child, we might be putting lids and casting shadows on their power. +Wouldn't we want to open doors for them instead? +One such person who opened doors for me was my childhood doctor at the A.I. duPont Institute in Wilmington, Delaware. +His name was Dr. Pizzutillo, an Italian American, whose name, apparently, was too difficult for most Americans to pronounce, so he went by Dr. P. +And Dr. P always wore really colorful bow ties and had the very perfect disposition to work with children. +I loved almost everything about my time spent at this hospital, with the exception of my physical therapy sessions. +I had to do what seemed like innumerable repetitions of exercises with these thick, elastic bands -- different colors, you know -- to help build up my leg muscles, and I hated these bands more than anything -- I hated them, had names for them. I hated them. +And, you know, I was already bargaining, as a five year-old child, with Dr. P to try to get out of doing these exercises, unsuccessfully, of course. +And, one day, he came in to my session -- exhaustive and unforgiving, these sessions -- and he said to me, "Wow. Aimee, you are such a strong and powerful little girl, I think you're going to break one of those bands. +When you do break it, I'm going to give you a hundred bucks." +Now, of course, this was a simple ploy on Dr. P's part to get me to do the exercises I didn't want to do before the prospect of being the richest five-year-old in the second floor ward, but what he effectively did for me was reshape an awful daily occurrence into a new and promising experience for me. +And I have to wonder today to what extent his vision and his declaration of me as a strong and powerful little girl shaped my own view of myself as an inherently strong, powerful and athletic person well into the future. +This is an example of how adults in positions of power can ignite the power of a child. +But, in the previous instances of those thesaurus entries, our language isn't allowing us to evolve into the reality that we would all want, the possibility of an individual to see themselves as capable. +Our language hasn't caught up with the changes in our society, many of which have been brought about by technology. +Certainly, from a medical standpoint, my legs, laser surgery for vision impairment, titanium knees and hip replacements for aging bodies that are allowing people to more fully engage with their abilities, and move beyond the limits that nature has imposed on them -- not to mention social networking platforms allow people to self-identify, to claim their own descriptions of themselves, +so they can go align with global groups of their own choosing. +So, perhaps technology is revealing more clearly to us now what has always been a truth: that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer our society, and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset. +The human ability to adapt, it's an interesting thing, because people have continually wanted to talk to me about overcoming adversity, and I'm going to make an admission: This phrase never sat right with me, and I always felt uneasy trying to answer people's questions about it, and I think I'm starting to figure out why. +Implicit in this phrase of "overcoming adversity" is the idea that success, or happiness, is about emerging on the other side of a challenging experience unscathed or unmarked by the experience, as if my successes in life have come about from an ability to sidestep or circumnavigate the presumed pitfalls of a life with prosthetics, or what other people perceive as my disability. +But, in fact, we are changed. We are marked, of course, by a challenge, whether physically, emotionally or both. +And I'm going to suggest that this is a good thing. +Adversity isn't an obstacle that we need to get around in order to resume living our life. +It's part of our life. +And I tend to think of it like my shadow. +Sometimes I see a lot of it, sometimes there's very little, but it's always with me. +And, certainly, I'm not trying to diminish the impact, the weight, of a person's struggle. +There is adversity and challenge in life, and it's all very real and relative to every single person, but the question isn't whether or not you're going to meet adversity, but how you're going to meet it. +So, our responsibility is not simply shielding those we care for from adversity, but preparing them to meet it well. +And we do a disservice to our kids when we make them feel that they're not equipped to adapt. +There's an important difference and distinction between the objective medical fact of my being an amputee and the subjective societal opinion of whether or not I'm disabled. +And, truthfully, the only real and consistent disability I've had to confront is the world ever thinking that I could be described by those definitions. +In our desire to protect those we care about by giving them the cold, hard truth about their medical prognosis, or, indeed, a prognosis on the expected quality of their life, we have to make sure that we don't put the first brick in a wall that will actually disable someone. +Perhaps the existing model of only looking at what is broken in you and how do we fix it, serves to be more disabling to the individual than the pathology itself. +By not treating the wholeness of a person, by not acknowledging their potency, we are creating another ill on top of whatever natural struggle they might have. +We are effectively grading someone's worth to our community. +So we need to see through the pathology and into the range of human capability. +And, most importantly, there's a partnership between those perceived deficiencies and our greatest creative ability. +So it's not about devaluing, or negating, these more trying times as something we want to avoid or sweep under the rug, but instead to find those opportunities wrapped in the adversity. +So maybe the idea I want to put out there is not so much overcoming adversity as it is opening ourselves up to it, embracing it, grappling with it, to use a wrestling term, maybe even dancing with it. +And, perhaps, if we see adversity as natural, consistent and useful, we're less burdened by the presence of it. +This year we celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, and it was 150 years ago, when writing about evolution, that Darwin illustrated, I think, a truth about the human character. +To paraphrase: It's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor is it the most intelligent that survives; it is the one that is most adaptable to change. +Conflict is the genesis of creation. +From Darwin's work, amongst others, we can recognize that the human ability to survive and flourish is driven by the struggle of the human spirit through conflict into transformation. +So, again, transformation, adaptation, is our greatest human skill. +And, perhaps, until we're tested, we don't know what we're made of. +Maybe that's what adversity gives us: a sense of self, a sense of our own power. +So, we can give ourselves a gift. +We can re-imagine adversity as something more than just tough times. +Maybe we can see it as change. +Adversity is just change that we haven't adapted ourselves to yet. +I think the greatest adversity that we've created for ourselves is this idea of normalcy. +Now, who's normal? +There's no normal. +There's common, there's typical. There's no normal, and would you want to meet that poor, beige person if they existed? +I don't think so. +If we can change this paradigm from one of achieving normalcy to one of possibility -- or potency, to be even a little bit more dangerous -- we can release the power of so many more children, and invite them to engage their rare and valuable abilities with the community. +Anthropologists tell us that the one thing we as humans have always required of our community members is to be of use, to be able to contribute. +There's evidence that Neanderthals, 60,000 years ago, carried their elderly and those with serious physical injury, and perhaps it's because the life experience of survival of these people proved of value to the community. +They didn't view these people as broken and useless; they were seen as rare and valuable. +A few years ago, I was in a food market in the town where I grew up in that red zone in northeastern Pennsylvania, and I was standing over a bushel of tomatoes. +It was summertime: I had shorts on. +I hear this guy, his voice behind me say, "Well, if it isn't Aimee Mullins." +And I turn around, and it's this older man. I have no idea who he is. +And I said, "I'm sorry, sir, have we met? I don't remember meeting you." +He said, "Well, you wouldn't remember meeting me. +I mean, when we met I was delivering you from your mother's womb." +Oh, that guy. +And, but of course, actually, it did click. +This man was Dr. Kean, a man that I had only known about through my mother's stories of that day, because, of course, typical fashion, I arrived late for my birthday by two weeks. +And so my mother's prenatal physician had gone on vacation, so the man who delivered me was a complete stranger to my parents. +And, because I was born without the fibula bones, and had feet turned in, and a few toes in this foot and a few toes in that, he had to be the bearer -- this stranger had to be the bearer of bad news. +He said to me, "I had to give this prognosis to your parents that you would never walk, and you would never have the kind of mobility that other kids have or any kind of life of independence, and you've been making liar out of me ever since." +The extraordinary thing is that he said he had saved newspaper clippings throughout my whole childhood, whether winning a second grade spelling bee, marching with the Girl Scouts, you know, the Halloween parade, winning my college scholarship, or any of my sports victories, and he was using it, and integrating it into teaching resident students, med students from Hahnemann Medical School and Hershey Medical School. +And he called this part of the course the X Factor, the potential of the human will. +No prognosis can account for how powerful this could be as a determinant in the quality of someone's life. +And Dr. Kean went on to tell me, he said, "In my experience, unless repeatedly told otherwise, and even if given a modicum of support, if left to their own devices, a child will achieve." +See, Dr. Kean made that shift in thinking. +He understood that there's a difference between the medical condition and what someone might do with it. +And there's been a shift in my thinking over time, in that, if you had asked me at 15 years old, if I would have traded prosthetics for flesh-and-bone legs, I wouldn't have hesitated for a second. +I aspired to that kind of normalcy back then. +But if you ask me today, I'm not so sure. +And it's because of the experiences I've had with them, not in spite of the experiences I've had with them. +And perhaps this shift in me has happened because I've been exposed to more people who have opened doors for me than those who have put lids and cast shadows on me. +See, all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your own power, and you're off. +If you can hand somebody the key to their own power -- the human spirit is so receptive -- if you can do that and open a door for someone at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best sense. +You're teaching them to open doors for themselves. +In fact, the exact meaning of the word "educate" comes from the root word "educe." +It means "to bring forth what is within, to bring out potential." +So again, which potential do we want to bring out? +There was a case study done in 1960s Britain, when they were moving from grammar schools to comprehensive schools. +It's called the streaming trials. We call it "tracking" here in the States. +It's separating students from A, B, C, D and so on. +And the "A students" get the tougher curriculum, the best teachers, etc. +Well, they took, over a three-month period, D-level students, gave them A's, told them they were "A's," told them they were bright, and at the end of this three-month period, they were performing at A-level. +And, of course, the heartbreaking, flip side of this study, is that they took the "A students" and told them they were "D's." +And that's what happened at the end of that three-month period. +Those who were still around in school, besides the people who had dropped out. +A crucial part of this case study was that the teachers were duped too. +The teachers didn't know a switch had been made. +They were simply told, "These are the 'A-students,' these are the 'D-students.'" And that's how they went about teaching them and treating them. +So, I think that the only true disability is a crushed spirit, a spirit that's been crushed doesn't have hope, it doesn't see beauty, it no longer has our natural, childlike curiosity and our innate ability to imagine. +If instead, we can bolster a human spirit to keep hope, to see beauty in themselves and others, to be curious and imaginative, then we are truly using our power well. +When a spirit has those qualities, we are able to create new realities and new ways of being. +I'd like to leave you with a poem by a fourteenth-century Persian poet named Hafiz that my friend, Jacques Dembois told me about, and the poem is called "The God Who Only Knows Four Words": "Every child has known God, not the God of names, not the God of don'ts, but the God who only knows four words and keeps repeating them, saying, 'Come dance with me. +Come, dance with me. Come, dance with me.'" Thank you. + +How would you like to be better than you are? +Suppose I said that, with just a few changes in your genes, you could get a better memory -- more precise, more accurate and quicker. +Or maybe you'd like to be more fit, stronger, with more stamina. +Would you like to be more attractive and self-confident? +How about living longer with good health? +Or perhaps you're one of those who's always yearned for more creativity. +Which one would you like the most? +Which would you like, if you could have just one? +Creativity. +How many people would choose creativity? +Raise your hands. Let me see. +A few. Probably about as many as there are creative people here. +That's very good. +How many would opt for memory? +Quite a few more. +How about fitness? +A few less. +What about longevity? +Ah, the majority. That makes me feel very good as a doctor. +If you could have any one of these, it would be a very different world. +Is it just imaginary? +Or, is it, perhaps, possible? +Evolution has been a perennial topic here at the TED Conference, but I want to give you today one doctor's take on the subject. +The great 20th-century geneticist, T.G. Dobzhansky, who was also a communicant in the Russian Orthodox Church, once wrote an essay that he titled "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution." +Now if you are one of those who does not accept the evidence for biological evolution, this would be a very good time to turn off your hearing aid, take out your personal communications device -- I give you permission -- and perhaps take another look at Kathryn Schultz's book on being wrong, because nothing in the rest of this talk is going to make any sense whatsoever to you. +But if you do accept biological evolution, consider this: is it just about the past, or is it about the future? +Does it apply to others, or does it apply to us? +This is another look at the tree of life. +In this picture, I've put a bush with a center branching out in all directions, because if you look at the edges of the tree of life, every existing species at the tips of those branches has succeeded in evolutionary terms: it has survived; it has demonstrated a fitness to its environment. +The human part of this branch, way out on one end, is, of course, the one that we are most interested in. +We branch off of a common ancestor to modern chimpanzees about six or eight million years ago. +In the interval, there have been perhaps 20 or 25 different species of hominids. +Some have come and gone. +We have been here for about 130,000 years. +It may seem like we're quite remote from other parts of this tree of life, but actually, for the most part, the basic machinery of our cells is pretty much the same. +Do you realize that we can take advantage and commandeer the machinery of a common bacterium to produce the protein of human insulin used to treat diabetics? +This is not like human insulin; this is the same protein that is chemically indistinguishable from what comes out of your pancreas. +And speaking of bacteria, do you realize that each of us carries in our gut more bacteria than there are cells in the rest of our body? +Maybe 10 times more. +I mean think of it, when Antonio Damasio asks about your self-image, do you think about the bacteria? +Our gut is a wonderfully hospitable environment for those bacteria. +It's warm, it's dark, it's moist, it's very cozy. +And you're going to provide all the nutrition that they could possibly want with no effort on their part. +It's really like an Easy Street for bacteria, with the occasional interruption of the unintended forced rush to the exit. +But otherwise, you are a wonderful environment for those bacteria, just as they are essential to your life. +They help in the digestion of essential nutrients, and they protect you against certain diseases. +But what will come in the future? +Are we at some kind of evolutionary equipoise as a species? +Or, are we destined to become something different -- something, perhaps, even better adapted to the environment? +Now let's take a step back in time to the Big Bang, 14 billion years ago -- the Earth, the solar system, about four and a half billion years -- the first signs of proto-life, maybe three to four billion years ago on Earth -- the first multi-celled organisms, perhaps as much as 800 or a billion years ago -- and then the human species, finally emerging in the last 130,000 years. +In this vast unfinished symphony of the universe, life on Earth is like a brief measure; the animal kingdom, like a single measure; and human life, a small grace note. +That was us. +That also constitutes the entertainment portion of this talk, so I hope you enjoyed it. +Now when I was a freshman in college, I took my first biology class. +I was fascinated by the elegance and beauty of biology. +I became enamored of the power of evolution, and I realized something very fundamental: in most of the existence of life in single-celled organisms, each cell simply divides, and all of the genetic energy of that cell is carried on in both daughter cells. +But at the time multi-celled organisms come online, things start to change. +Sexual reproduction enters the picture. +And very importantly, with the introduction of sexual reproduction that passes on the genome, the rest of the body becomes expendable. +In fact, you could say that the inevitability of the death of our bodies enters in evolutionary time at the same moment as sexual reproduction. +Now I have to confess, when I was a college undergraduate, I thought, okay, sex/death, sex/death, death for sex -- it seemed pretty reasonable at the time, but with each passing year, I've come to have increasing doubts. +I've come to understand the sentiments of George Burns, who was performing still in Las Vegas well into his 90s. +And one night, there's a knock at his hotel room door. +He answers the door. +Standing before him is a gorgeous, scantily clad showgirl. +She looks at him and says, "I'm here for super sex." +"That's fine," says George, "I'll take the soup." +I came to realize, as a physician, that I was working toward a goal which was different from the goal of evolution -- not necessarily contradictory, just different. +I was trying to preserve the body. +I wanted to keep us healthy. +I wanted to restore health from disease. +I wanted us to live long and healthy lives. +Evolution is all about passing on the genome to the next generation, adapting and surviving through generation after generation. +From an evolutionary point of view, you and I are like the booster rockets designed to send the genetic payload into the next level of orbit and then drop off into the sea. +I think we would all understand the sentiment that Woody Allen expressed when he said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. +I want to achieve it through not dying." +Evolution does not necessarily favor the longest-lived. +It doesn't necessarily favor the biggest or the strongest or the fastest, and not even the smartest. +Evolution favors those creatures best adapted to their environment. +That is the sole test of survival and success. +At the bottom of the ocean, bacteria that are thermophilic and can survive at the steam vent heat that would otherwise produce, if fish were there, sous-vide cooked fish, nevertheless, have managed to make that a hospitable environment for them. +So what does this mean, as we look back at what has happened in evolution, and as we think about the place again of humans in evolution, and particularly as we look ahead to the next phase, I would say that there are a number of possibilities. +The first is that we will not evolve. +We have reached a kind of equipoise. +And the reasoning behind that would be, first, we have, through medicine, managed to preserve a lot of genes that would otherwise be selected out and be removed from the population. +And secondly, we as a species have so configured our environment that we have managed to make it adapt to us as well as we adapt to it. +And by the way, we immigrate and circulate and intermix so much that you can't any longer have the isolation that is necessary for evolution to take place. +A second possibility is that there will be evolution of the traditional kind, natural, imposed by the forces of nature. +And the argument here would be that the wheels of evolution grind slowly, but they are inexorable. +And as far as isolation goes, when we as a species do colonize distant planets, there will be the isolation and the environmental changes that could produce evolution in the natural way. +But there's a third possibility, an enticing, intriguing and frightening possibility. +I call it neo-evolution -- the new evolution that is not simply natural, but guided and chosen by us as individuals in the choices that we will make. +Now how could this come about? +How could it be possible that we would do this? +Consider, first, the reality that people today, in some cultures, are making choices about their offspring. +They're, in some cultures, choosing to have more males than females. +It's not necessarily good for the society, but it's what the individual and the family are choosing. +Think also, if it were possible ever for you to choose, not simply to choose the sex of your child, but for you in your body to make the genetic adjustments that would cure or prevent diseases. +What if you could make the genetic changes to eliminate diabetes or Alzheimer's or reduce the risk of cancer or eliminate stroke? +Wouldn't you want to make those changes in your genes? +If we look ahead, these kind of changes are going to be increasingly possible. +The Human Genome Project started in 1990, and it took 13 years. +It cost 2.7 billion dollars. +The year after it was finished in 2004, you could do the same job for 20 million dollars in three to four months. +Today, you can have a complete sequence of the three billion base pairs in the human genome at a cost of about 20,000 dollars and in the space of about a week. +It won't be very long before the reality will be the 1,000-dollar human genome, and it will be increasingly available for everyone. +Just a week ago, the National Academy of Engineering awarded its Draper Prize to Francis Arnold and Willem Stemmer, two scientists who independently developed techniques to encourage the natural process of evolution to work faster and to lead to desirable proteins in a more efficient way -- what Frances Arnold calls "directed evolution." +A couple of years ago, the Lasker Prize was awarded to the scientist Shinya Yamanaka for his research in which he took an adult skin cell, a fibroblast, and by manipulating just four genes, he induced that cell to revert to a pluripotential stem cell -- a cell potentially capable of becoming any cell in your body. +These changes are coming. +The same technology that has produced the human insulin in bacteria can make viruses that will not only protect you against themselves, but induce immunity against other viruses. +Believe it or not, there's an experimental trial going on with vaccine against influenza that has been grown in the cells of a tobacco plant. +Can you imagine something good coming out of tobacco? +These are all reality today, and [in] the future, will be evermore possible. +Imagine then just two other little changes. +You can change the cells in your body, but what if you could change the cells in your offspring? +What if you could change the sperm and the ova, or change the newly fertilized egg, and give your offspring a better chance at a healthier life -- eliminate the diabetes, eliminate the hemophilia, reduce the risk of cancer? +Who doesn't want healthier children? +And then, that same analytic technology, that same engine of science that can produce the changes to prevent disease, will also enable us to adopt super-attributes, hyper-capacities -- that better memory. +Why not have the quick wit of a Ken Jennings, especially if you can augment it with the next generation of the Watson machine? +Why not have the quick twitch muscle that will enable you to run faster and longer? +Why not live longer? +These will be irresistible. +And when we are at a position where we can pass it on to the next generation, and we can adopt the attributes we want, we will have converted old-style evolution into neo-evolution. +We'll take a process that normally might require 100,000 years, and we can compress it down to a thousand years -- and maybe even in the next 100 years. +These are choices that your grandchildren, or their grandchildren, are going to have before them. +Will we use these choices to make a society that is better, that is more successful, that is kinder? +Or, will we selectively choose different attributes that we want for some of us and not for others of us? +Will we make a society that is more boring and more uniform, or more robust and more versatile? +These are the kinds of questions that we will have to face. +And most profoundly of all, will we ever be able to develop the wisdom, and to inherit the wisdom, that we'll need to make these choices wisely? +For better or worse, and sooner than you may think, these choices will be up to us. +Thank you. + +I want you now to imagine a wearable robot that gives you superhuman abilities, or another one that takes wheelchair users up standing and walking again. +We at Berkeley Bionics call these robots exoskeletons. +These are nothing else than something that you put on in the morning, and it will give you extra strength, and it will further enhance your speed, and it will help you, for instance, to manage your balance. +It is actually the true integration of the man and the machine. +But not only that -- it will integrate and network you to the universe and other devices out there. +This is just not some blue sky thinking. +To show you now what we are working on by starting out talking about the American soldier, that on average does carry about 100 lbs. on their backs, and they are being asked to carry more equipment. +Obviously, this is resulting in some major complications -- back injuries, 30 percent of them -- chronic back injuries. +So we thought we would look at this challenge and create an exoskeleton that would help deal with this issue. +So let me now introduce to you HULC -- or the Human Universal Load Carrier. +With the HULC exoskeleton, I can carry 200 lbs. over varied terrain for many hours. +Its flexible design allows for deep squats, crawls and high-agility movements. +It senses what I want to do, where I want to go, and then augments my strength and endurance. +We are ready with our industry partner to introduce this device, this new exoskeleton this year. +So this is for real. +Now let's turn our heads towards the wheelchair users, something that I'm particularly passionate about. +There are 68 million people estimated to be in wheelchairs worldwide. +This is about one percent of the total population. +And that's actually a conservative estimate. +We are talking here about, oftentimes, very young individuals with spinal cord injuries, that in the prime of their life -- 20s, 30s, 40s -- hit a wall and the wheelchair's the only option. +But it is also the aging population that is multiplying in numbers. +And the only option, pretty much -- when it's stroke or other complications -- is the wheelchair. +And that is actually for the last 500 years, since its very successful introduction, I must say. +So we thought we would start writing a brand new chapter of mobility. +Let me now introduce you to eLEGS that is worn by Amanda Boxtel that 19 years ago was spinal cord injured, and as a result of that she has not been able to walk for 19 years until now. +Thank you. +Amanda is wearing our eLEGS set. +It has sensors. +It's completely non-invasive, sensors in the crutches that send signals back to our onboard computer that is sitting here at her back. +There are battery packs here as well that power motors that are sitting at her hips, as well as her knee joints, that move her forward in this kind of smooth and very natural gait. +I was 24 years old and at the top of my game when a freak summersault while downhill skiing paralyzed me. +In a split second, I lost all sensation and movement below my pelvis. +Not long afterwards, a doctor strode into my hospital room, and he said, "Amanda, you'll never walk again." +And that was 19 yeas ago. +He robbed every ounce of hope from my being. +Adaptive technology has since enabled me to learn how to downhill ski again, to rock climb and even handcycle. +But nothing has been invented that enables me to walk, until now. +Thank you. +As you can see, we have the technology, we have the platforms to sit down and have discussions with you. +It's in our hands, and we have all the potential here to change the lives of future generations -- not only for the soldiers, or for Amanda here and all the wheelchair users, but for everyone. +Thanks. + +Back in New York, I am the head of development for a non-profit called Robin Hood. +When I'm not fighting poverty, I'm fighting fires as the assistant captain of a volunteer fire company. +Now in our town, where the volunteers supplement a highly skilled career staff, you have to get to the fire scene pretty early to get in on any action. +I remember my first fire. +I was the second volunteer on the scene, so there was a pretty good chance I was going to get in. +But still it was a real footrace against the other volunteers to get to the captain in charge to find out what our assignments would be. +When I found the captain, he was having a very engaging conversation with the homeowner, who was surely having one of the worst days of her life. +Here it was, the middle of the night, she was standing outside in the pouring rain, under an umbrella, in her pajamas, barefoot, while her house was in flames. +The other volunteer who had arrived just before me -- let's call him Lex Luther -- got to the captain first and was asked to go inside and save the homeowner's dog. +The dog! I was stunned with jealousy. +Here was some lawyer or money manager who, for the rest of his life, gets to tell people that he went into a burning building to save a living creature, just because he beat me by five seconds. +Well, I was next. +The captain waved me over. +He said, "Bezos, I need you to go into the house. +I need you to go upstairs, past the fire, and I need you to get this woman a pair of shoes." +I swear. +So, not exactly what I was hoping for, but off I went -- up the stairs, down the hall, past the 'real' firefighters, who were pretty much done putting out the fire at this point, into the master bedroom to get a pair of shoes. +Now I know what you're thinking, but I'm no hero. +I carried my payload back downstairs where I met my nemesis and the precious dog by the front door. +We took our treasures outside to the homeowner, where, not surprisingly, his received much more attention than did mine. +A few weeks later, the department received a letter from the homeowner thanking us for the valiant effort displayed in saving her home. +The act of kindness she noted above all others: someone had even gotten her a pair of shoes. +In both my vocation at Robin Hood and my avocation as a volunteer firefighter, I am witness to acts of generosity and kindness on a monumental scale, but I'm also witness to acts of grace and courage on an individual basis. +And you know what I've learned? +They all matter. +So as I look around this room at people who either have achieved, or are on their way to achieving, remarkable levels of success, I would offer this reminder: don't wait. +Don't wait until you make your first million to make a difference in somebody's life. +If you have something to give, give it now. +Serve food at a soup kitchen. Clean up a neighborhood park. +Be a mentor. +Not every day is going to offer us a chance to save somebody's life, but every day offers us an opportunity to affect one. +So get in the game. Save the shoes. +Thank you. +Mark, Mark, come back. +Thank you. + +I just came back from a community that holds the secret to human survival. +It's a place where women run the show, have sex to say hello, and play rules the day -- where fun is serious business. +And no, this isn't Burning Man or San Francisco. +Ladies and gentlemen, meet your cousins. +This is the world of wild bonobos in the jungles of Congo. +Bonobos are, together with chimpanzees, your living closest relative. +That means we all share a common ancestor, an evolutionary grandmother, who lived around six million years ago. +Now, chimpanzees are well-known for their aggression. +But unfortunately, we have made too much of an emphasis of this aspect in our narratives of human evolution. +But bonobos show us the other side of the coin. +While chimpanzees are dominated by big, scary guys, bonobo society is run by empowered females. +These guys have really worked something out, since this leads to a highly tolerant society where fatal violence has not been observed yet. +But unfortunately, bonobos are the least understood of the great apes. +They live in the depths of the Congolese jungle, and it has been very difficult to study them. +The Congo is a paradox -- a land of extraordinary biodiversity and beauty, but also the heart of darkness itself -- the scene of a violent conflict that has raged for decades and claimed nearly as many lives as the First World War. +Not surprisingly, this destruction also endangers bonobo survival. +Bushmeat trades and forest loss means we couldn't fill a small stadium with all the bonobos that are left in the world -- and we're not even sure of that to be honest. +Yet, in this land of violence and chaos, you can hear hidden laughter swaying the trees. +Who are these cousins? +We know them as the "make love, not war" apes since they have frequent, promiscuous and bisexual sex to manage conflict and solve social issues. +Now, I'm not saying this is the solution to all of humanity's problems -- since there's more to bonobo life than the Kama Sutra. +Bonobos, like humans, love to play throughout their entire lives. +Play is not just child's games. +For us and them, play is foundational for bonding relationships and fostering tolerance. +It's where we learn to trust and where we learn about the rules of the game. +Play increases creativity and resilience, and it's all about the generation of diversity -- diversity of interactions, diversity of behaviors, diversity of connections. +And when you watch bonobo play, you're seeing the very evolutionary roots of human laughter, dance and ritual. +Play is the glue that binds us together. +Now, I don't know how you play, but I want to show you a couple of unique clips fresh from the wild. +First, it's a ball game bonobo-style -- and I do not mean football. +So here, we have a young female and a male engaged in a chase game. +Have a look what she's doing. +It might be the evolutionary origin of the phrase, "she's got him by the balls." +Only I think that he's rather loving it here, right? +Yeah. +So sex play is common in both bonobos and humans. +And this video is really interesting because it shows -- this video's really interesting because it shows the inventiveness of bringing unusual elements into play -- such as testicles -- and also how play both requires trust and fosters trust -- while at the same time being tremendous fun. +But play's a shapeshifter. +Play's a shapeshifter, and it can take many forms, some of which are more quiet, imaginative, curious -- maybe where wonder is discovered anew. +And I want you to see, this is Fuku, a young female, and she is quietly playing with water. +I think, like her, we sometimes play alone, and we explore the boundaries of our inner and our outer worlds. +And it's that playful curiosity that drives us to explore, drives us to interact, and then the unexpected connections we form are the real hotbed for creativity. +So these are just small tasters into the insights that bonobo give us to our past and present. +But they also hold a secret for our future, a future where we need to adapt to an increasingly challenging world through greater creativity and greater cooperation. +The secret is that play is the key to these capacities. +In other words, play is our adaptive wildcard. +In order to adapt successfully to a changing world, we need to play. +But will we make the most of our playfulness? +Play is not frivolous. +Play's essential. +For bonobos and humans alike, life is not just red in tooth and claw. +In times when it seems least appropriate to play, it might be the times when it is most urgent. +And so, my fellow primates, let us embrace this gift from evolution and play together, as we rediscover creativity, fellowship and wonder. +Thank you. + +I want you to imagine two couples in the middle of 1979 on the exact same day, at the exact same moment, each conceiving a baby -- okay? +So two couples each conceiving one baby. +Now I don't want you to spend too much time imagining the conception, because if you spend all that time imagining that conception, you're not going to listen to me. +So just imagine that for a moment. +And in this scenario, I want to imagine that, in one case, the sperm is carrying a Y chromosome, meeting that X chromosome of the egg. +And in the other case, the sperm is carrying an X chromosome, meeting the X chromosome of the egg. +Both are viable; both take off. +We'll come back to these people later. +So I wear two hats in most of what I do. +As the one hat, I do history of anatomy. +I'm a historian by training, and what I study in that case is the way that people have dealt with anatomy -- meaning human bodies, animal bodies -- how they dealt with bodily fluids, concepts of bodies; how have they thought about bodies. +The other hat that I've worn in my work is as an activist, as a patient advocate -- or, as I sometimes say, as an impatient advocate -- for people who are patients of doctors. +In that case, what I've worked with is people who have body types that challenge social norms. +So some of what I've worked on, for example, is people who are conjoined twins -- two people within one body. +Some of what I've worked on is people who have dwarfism -- so people who are much shorter than typical. +And a lot of what I've worked on is people who have atypical sex -- so people who don't have the standard male or the standard female body types. +And as a general term, we can use the term intersex for this. +Intersex comes in a lot of different forms. +I'll just give you a few examples of the types of ways you can have sex that isn't standard for male or female. +So in one instance, you can have somebody who has an XY chromosomal basis, and that SRY gene on the Y chromosome tells the proto-gonads, which we all have in the fetal life, to become testes. +And so in the fetal life the testes are pumping out testosterone. +But because this individual lacks receptors to hear that testosterone, the body doesn't react to the testosterone. +And this is a syndrome called androgen insensitivity syndrome. +So lots of levels of testosterone, but no reaction to it. +As a consequence, the body develops more along the female typical path. +When the child is born, she looks like a girl. +She is a girl. She is raised as a girl. +And it's often not until she hits puberty and she's growing and developing breasts, but she's not getting her period, that somebody figures out something's up here. +And they do some tests and figure out that, instead of having ovaries inside and a uterus, she actually has testes inside, and she has a Y chromosome. +Now what's important to understand is you may think of this person as really being male, but they're really not. +Females, like males, have in our bodies something called the adrenal glands. +They're in the back of our body. +And the adrenal glands make androgens, which are a masculinizing hormone. +Most females like me -- I believe myself to be a typical female -- I don't actually know my chromosomal make-up but I think I'm probably typical -- most females like me are actually androgen-sensitive. +We're making androgen, and we're responding to androgens. +The consequence is that somebody like me has actually had a brain exposed to more androgens than the woman born with testes who has androgen insensitivity syndrome. +So sex is really complicated; it's not just that intersex people are in the middle of all the sex spectrum -- in some ways, they can be all over the place. +Another example: a few years ago I got a call from a man who was 19 years old, who was born a boy, raised a boy, had a girlfriend, had sex with his girlfriend, had a life as a guy and had just found out that he had ovaries and a uterus inside. +What he had was an extreme form of a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia. +He had XX chromosomes, and in the womb, his adrenal glands were in such high gear that it created, essentially, a masculine hormonal environment. +And as a consequence, his genitals were masculinzed, his brain was subject to the more typical masculine component of hormones. +And he was born looking like a boy -- nobody suspected anything. +And it was only when he had reached the age of 19 that he began to have enough medical problems actually from menstruating internally, that doctors figured out that, in fact, he was female internally. +Okay, so just one more quick example of a way you can have intersex. +Some people who have XX chromosomes develop what are called ovotestis, which is when you have ovarian tissue with testicular tissue wrapped around it. +And we're not exactly sure why that happens. +So sex can come in lots of different varieties. +The reason that children with these kinds of bodies -- whether it's dwarfism, or it's conjoined twinning, or it's an intersex type -- are often normalized by surgeons is not because it actually leaves them better off in terms of physical health. +In many cases, people are actually perfectly healthy. +The reason they're often subject to various kinds of surgeries is because they threaten our social categories. +Or system has been based typically on the idea that a particular kind of anatomy comes with a particular identity. +So we have the concept that what it means to be a woman is to have a female identity; what it means to be a black person is, allegedly, is to have an African anatomy in terms of your history. +And so we have this terribly simplistic idea. +And when we're faced with a body that actually presents us something quite different, it startles us in terms of those categorizations. +So we have a lot of very romantic ideas in our culture about individualism. +And our nation's really founded on a very romantic concept of individualism. +Well you can imagine how startling then it is when you have children that are born who are two people inside of one body. +Where I ran into the most heat from this most recently was last year the South African runner, Caster Semenya, had her sex called into question at the International Games in Berlin. +I had a lot of journalists calling me, asking me, "Which is the test they're going to run that will tell us whether or not Caster Semenya is male or female?" +And I had to explain to the journalists there isn't such a test. +In fact, we now know that sex is complicated enough that we have to admit nature doesn't draw the line for us between male and female, or between male and intersex and female and intersex; we actually draw that line on nature. +So what we have is a sort of situation where the farther our science goes, the more we have to admit to ourselves that these categories that we thought of as stable anatomical categories that mapped very simply to stable identity categories are a lot more fuzzy than we thought. +And it's not just in terms of sex. +It's also in terms of race, which turns out to be vastly more complicated than our terminology has allowed. +As we look, we get into all sorts of uncomfortable areas. +We look, for example, about the fact that we share at least 95 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. +What are we to make of the fact that we differ from them only really by a few nucleotides? +And as we get farther and farther with our science, we get more and more into a discomforted zone where we have to acknowledge that the simplistic categories we've had are probably overly simplistic. +So we're seeing this in all sorts of places in human life. +One of the places we're seeing it, for example, in our culture today, in the United States today, is battles over the beginning of life and the end of life. +We have difficult conversations about at what point we decide a body becomes a human, such that it has a different right than a fetal life. +We have very difficult conversations nowadays -- probably not out in the open as much as within medicine -- about the question of when somebody's dead. +In the past, our ancestors never had to struggle so much with this question of when somebody was dead. +At most, they'd stick a feather on somebody's nose, and if it twitched, they didn't bury them yet. +If it stopped twitching, you bury them. +But today, we have a situation where we want to take vital organs out of beings and give them to other beings. +And as a consequence, we're stuck with having to struggle with this really difficult question about who's dead, and this leads us to a really difficult situation where we don't have such simple categories as we've had before. +Now you might think that all this breaking-down of categories would make somebody like me really happy. +I'm a political progressive, I defend people with unusual bodies, but I have to admit to you that it makes me nervous. +Understanding that these categories are really much more unstable than we thought makes me tense. +And it makes me tense from the point of view of thinking about democracy. +So in order to tell you about that tension, I have to first admit to you that I'm a huge fan of the Founding Fathers. +I know they were racists, I know they were sexist, but they were great. +I mean, they were so brave and so bold and so radical in what they did that I find myself watching that cheesy musical "1776" every few years, and it's not because of the music, which is totally forgettable. +It's because of what happened in 1776 with the Founding Fathers. +The Founding Fathers were, for my point of view, the original anatomical activists, and this is why. +What they rejected was an anatomical concept and replaced it with another one that was radical and beautiful and held us for 200 years. +So as you all recall, what our Founding Fathers were rejecting was a concept of monarchy, and the monarchy was basically based on a very simplistic concept of anatomy. +The monarchs of the old world didn't have a concept of DNA, but they did have a concept of birthright. +They had a concept of blue blood. +They had the idea that the people who would be in political power should be in political power because of the blood being passed down from grandfather to father to son and so forth. +The Founding Fathers rejected that idea, and they replaced it with a new anatomical concept, and that concept was all men are created equal. +They leveled that playing field and decided the anatomy that mattered was the commonality of anatomy, not the difference in anatomy, and that was a really radical thing to do. +Now they were doing it in part because they were part of an Enlightenment system where two things were growing up together. +And that was democracy growing up, but it was also science growing up at the same time. +And it's really clear, if you look at the history of the Founding Fathers, a lot of them were very interested in science, and they were interested in a concept of a naturalistic world. +They were moving away from supernatural explanations, and they were rejecting things like a supernatural concept of power, where it transmitted because of a very vague concept of birthright. +They were moving towards a naturalistic concept. +And if you look, for example, in the Declaration of Independence, they talk about nature and nature's God. +They don't talk about God and God's nature. +They're talking about the power of nature to tell us who we are. +So as part of that, they were coming to us with a concept that was about anatomical commonality. +And in doing so, they were really setting up in a beautiful way the Civil Rights movement of the future. +They didn't think of it that way, but they did it for us, and it was great. +So what happened years afterward? +What happened was women, for example, who wanted the right to vote, took the Founding Fathers' concept of anatomical commonality being more important than anatomical difference and said, "The fact that we have a uterus and ovaries is not significant enough in terms of a difference to mean that we shouldn't have the right to vote, the right to full citizenship, the right to own property, etc., etc." +And women successfully argued that. +Next came the successful Civil Rights movement, where we found people like Sojourner Truth talking about, "Ain't I a woman?" +We find men on the marching lines of the Civil Rights movement saying, "I am a man." +Again, people of color appealing to a commonality of anatomy over a difference of anatomy, again, successfully. +We see the same thing with the disability rights movement. +The problem is, of course, that, as we begin to look at all that commonality, we have to begin to question why we maintain certain divisions. +Now mind you, I want to maintain some divisions, anatomically, in our culture. +For example, I don't want to give a fish the same rights as a human. +I don't want to say we give up entirely on anatomy. +I don't want to say five-year-olds should be allowed to consent to sex or consent to marry. +So there are some anatomical divisions that make sense to me and that I think we should retain. +But the challenge is trying to figure out which ones they are and why do we retain them and do they have meaning. +So let's go back to those two beings conceived at the beginning of this talk. +We have two beings, both conceived in the middle of 1979 on the exact same day. +Let's imagine one of them, Mary, is born three months prematurely, so she's born on June 1, 1980. +Henry, by contrast, is born at term, so he's born on March 1, 1980. +Simply by virtue of the fact that Mary was born prematurely three months, she comes into all sorts of rights three months earlier than Henry does -- the right to consent to sex, the right to vote, the right to drink. +Henry has to wait for all of that, not because he's actually any different in age, biologically, except in terms of when he was born. +We find other kinds of weirdness in terms of what their rights are. +Henry, by virtue of being assumed to be male -- although I haven't told you that he's the XY one -- by virtue of being assumed to be male is now liable to be drafted, which Mary does not need to worry about. +Mary, meanwhile, cannot in all the states have the same right that Henry has in all the states, namely, the right to marry. +Henry can marry in every state a woman, but Mary can only marry today in a few states a woman. +So we have these anatomical categories that persist that are in many ways problematic and questionable. +And the question to me becomes: What do we do, as our science gets to be so good in looking at anatomy, that we reach the point where we have to admit that a democracy that's been based on anatomy might start falling apart? +I don't want to give up the science, but at the same time it kind of feels sometimes like the science is coming out from under us. +So where do we go? +It seems like what happens in our culture is a sort of pragmatic attitude: "Well, we have to draw the line somewhere, so we will draw the line somewhere." +But a lot of people get stuck in a very strange position. +So for example, Texas has at one point decided that what it means to marry a man is to mean that you don't have a Y chromosome, and what it means to marry a woman means you do have a Y chromosome. +Now in practice they don't actually test people for their chromosomes. +But this is also very bizarre, because of the story I told you at the beginning about androgen insensitivity syndrome. +If we look at one of the founding fathers of modern democracy, Dr. Martin Luther King, he offers us something of a solution in his "I have a dream" speech. +He says we should judge people "based not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character," moving beyond anatomy. +And I want to say, "Yeah, that sounds like a really good idea." +But in practice, how do you do it? +How do you judge people based on the content of character? +I also want to point out that I'm not sure that is how we should distribute rights in terms of humans, because, I have to admit, that there are some golden retrievers I know that are probably more deserving of social services than some humans I know. +I also want to say there are probably also some yellow Labradors that I know that are more capable of informed, intelligent, mature decisions about sexual relations than some 40-year-olds that I know. +So how do we operationalize the question of content of character? +It turns out to be really difficult. +And part of me also wonders, what if content of character turns out to be something that's scannable in the future -- able to be seen with an fMRI? +Do we really want to go there? +I'm not sure where we go. +What I do know is that it seems to be really important to think about the idea of the United States being in the lead of thinking about this issue of democracy. +We've done a really good job struggling with democracy, and I think we would do a good job in the future. +We don't have a situation that Iran has, for example, where a man who's sexually attracted to other men is liable to be murdered, unless he's willing to submit to a sex change, in which case he's allowed to live. +We don't have that kind of situation. +I'm glad to say we don't have the kind of situation with -- a surgeon I talked to a few years ago who had brought over a set of conjoined twins in order to separate them, partly to make a name for himself. +But when I was on the phone with him, asking why he was going to do this surgery -- this was a very high-risk surgery -- his answer was that, in this other nation, these children were going to be treated very badly, and so he had to do this. +My response to him was, "Well, have you considered political asylum instead of a separation surgery?" +The United States has offered tremendous possibility for allowing people to be the way they are, without having them have to be changed for the sake of the state. +So I think we have to be in the lead. +Well, just to close, I want to suggest to you that I've been talking a lot about the fathers. +And I want to think about the possibilities of what democracy might look like, or might have looked like, if we had more involved the mothers. +And I want to say something a little bit radical for a feminist, and that is that I think that there may be different kinds of insights that can come from different kinds of anatomies, particularly when we have people thinking in groups. +Now for years, because I've been interested in intersex, I've also been interested in sex difference research. +And one of the things that I've been really interested in is looking at the differences between males and females in terms of the way they think and operate in the world. +And what we know from cross-cultural studies is that females, on average -- not everyone, but on average -- are more inclined to be very attentive to complex social relations and to taking care of people who are basically vulnerable within the group. +And so if we think about that, we have an interesting situation on our hands. +Years ago, when I was in graduate school, one of my graduate advisers who knew I was interested in feminism -- I considered myself a feminist, as I still do -- asked a really strange question. +He said, "Tell me what's feminine about feminism." +And I thought, "Well that's the dumbest question I've ever heard. +Feminism is all about undoing stereotypes about gender, so there's nothing feminine about feminism." +But the more I thought about his question, the more I thought there might be something feminine about feminism. +That is to say, there might be something, on average, different about female brains from male brains that makes us more attentive to deeply complex social relationships and more attentive to taking care of the vulnerable. +So whereas the fathers were extremely attentive to figuring out how to protect individuals from the state, it's possible that if we injected more mothers into this concept, what we would have is more of a concept of, not just how to protect, but how to care for each other. +And maybe that's where we need to go in the future, when we take democracy beyond anatomy, is to think less about the individual body, in terms of the identity, and think more about those relationships. +So that as we the people try to create a more perfect union, we're thinking about what we do for each other. +Thank you. + +I'm Jessi, and this is my suitcase. +But before I show you what I've got inside, I'm going to make a very public confession, and that is, I'm outfit-obsessed. +I love finding, wearing, and more recently, photographing and blogging a different, colorful, crazy outfit for every single occasion. +But I don't buy anything new. +I get all my clothes secondhand from flea markets and thrift stores. +Aww, thank you. +Secondhand shopping allows me to reduce the impact my wardrobe has on the environment and on my wallet. +I get to meet all kinds of great people; my dollars usually go to a good cause; I look pretty unique; and it makes shopping like my own personal treasure hunt. +I mean, what am I going to find today? +Is it going to be my size? +Will I like the color? +Will it be under $20? +If all the answers are yes, I feel as though I've won. +I want to get back to my suitcase and tell you what I packed for this exciting week here at TED. +I mean, what does somebody with all these outfits bring with her? +So I'm going to show you exactly what I brought. +I brought seven pairs of underpants and that's it. +Exactly one week's worth of undies is all I put in my suitcase. +I was betting that I'd be able to find everything else I could possible want to wear once I got here to Palm Springs. +And since you don't know me as the woman walking around TED in her underwear -- that means I found a few things. +And I'd really love to show you my week's worth of outfits right now. +Does that sound good? +So as I do this, I'm also going to tell you a few of the life lessons that, believe it or not, I have picked up in these adventures wearing nothing new. +So let's start with Sunday. +I call this "Shiny Tiger." +You do not have to spend a lot of money to look great. +You can almost always look phenomenal for under $50. +This whole outfit, including the jacket, cost me $55, and it was the most expensive thing that I wore the entire week. +Monday: Color is powerful. +It is almost physiologically impossible to be in a bad mood when you're wearing bright red pants. +If you are happy, you are going to attract other happy people to you. +Tuesday: Fitting in is way overrated. +I've spent a whole lot of my life trying to be myself and at the same time fit in. +Just be who you are. +If you are surrounding yourself with the right people, they will not only get it, they will appreciate it. +Wednesday: Embrace your inner child. +Sometimes people tell me that I look like I'm playing dress-up, or that I remind them of their seven-year-old. +I like to smile and say, "Thank you." +Thursday: Confidence is key. +If you think you look good in something, you almost certainly do. +And if you don't think you look good in something, you're also probably right. +I grew up with a mom who taught me this day-in and day-out. +But it wasn't until I turned 30 that I really got what this meant. +And I'm going to break it down for you for just a second. +If you believe you're a beautiful person inside and out, there is no look that you can't pull off. +So there is no excuse for any of us here in this audience. +We should be able to rock anything we want to rock. +Thank you. +Friday: A universal truth -- five words for you: Gold sequins go with everything. +And finally, Saturday: Developing your own unique personal style is a really great way to tell the world something about you without having to say a word. +It's been proven to me time and time again as people have walked up to me this week simply because of what I'm wearing, and we've had great conversations. +So obviously this is not all going to fit back in my tiny suitcase. +So before I go home to Brooklyn, I'm going to donate everything back. +Because the lesson I'm trying to learn myself this week is that it's okay to let go. +I don't need to get emotionally attached to these things because around the corner, there is always going to be another crazy, colorful, shiny outfit just waiting for me, if I put a little love in my heart and look. +Thank you very much. +Thank you. + +Good afternoon, everybody. +I've got something to show you. +Think about this as a pixel, a flying pixel. +This is what we call, in our lab, sensible design. +Let me tell you a bit about it. +Now if you take this picture -- I'm Italian originally, and every boy in Italy grows up with this picture on the wall of his bedroom -- but the reason I'm showing you this is that something very interesting happened in Formula 1 racing over the past couple of decades. +Now some time ago, if you wanted to win a Formula 1 race, you take a budget, and you bet your budget on a good driver and a good car. +And if the car and the driver were good enough, then you'd win the race. +Now today, if you want to win the race, actually you need also something like this -- something that monitors the car in real time, has a few thousand sensors collecting information from the car, transmitting this information into the system, and then processing it and using it in order to go back to the car with decisions and changing things in real time as information is collected. +This is what, in engineering terms, you would call a real time control system. +And basically, it's a system made of two components -- a sensing and an actuating component. +What is interesting today is that real time control systems are starting to enter into our lives. +Our cities, over the past few years, just have been blanketed with networks, electronics. +They're becoming like computers in open air. +And, as computers in open air, they're starting to respond in a different way to be able to be sensed and to be actuated. +If we fix cities, actually it's a big deal. +Just as an aside, I wanted to mention, cities are only two percent of the Earth's crust, but they are 50 percent of the world's population. +They are 75 percent of the energy consumption -- up to 80 percent of CO2 emissions. +So if we're able to do something with cities, that's a big deal. +Beyond cities, all of this sensing and actuating is entering our everyday objects. +That's from an exhibition that Paola Antonelli is organizing at MoMA later this year, during the summer. +It's called "Talk to Me." +Well our objects, our environment is starting to talk back to us. +In a certain sense, it's almost as if every atom out there were becoming both a sensor and an actuator. +And that is radically changing the interaction we have as humans with the environment out there. +In a certain sense, it's almost as if the old dream of Michelangelo ... +you know, when Michelangelo sculpted the Moses, at the end it said that he took the hammer, threw it at the Moses -- actually you can still see a small chip underneath -- and said, shouted, "Perché non parli? Why don't you talk?" +Well today, for the first time, our environment is starting to talk back to us. +And I'll show just a few examples -- again, with this idea of sensing our environment and actuating it. +Let's starting with sensing. +Well, the first project I wanted to share with you is actually one of the first projects by our lab. +It was four and a half years ago in Italy. +And what we did there was actually use a new type of network at the time that had been deployed all across the world -- that's a cellphone network -- and use anonymous and aggregated information from that network, that's collected anyway by the operator, in order to understand how the city works. +The summer was a lucky summer -- 2006. +It's when Italy won the soccer World Cup. +Some of you might remember, it was Italy and France playing, and then Zidane at the end, the headbutt. +And anyway, Italy won at the end. +Now look at what happened that day just by monitoring activity happening on the network. +Here you see the city. +You see the Colosseum in the middle, the river Tiber. +It's morning, before the match. +You see the timeline on the top. +Early afternoon, people here and there, making calls and moving. +The match begins -- silence. +France scores. Italy scores. +Halftime, people make a quick call and go to the bathroom. +Second half. End of normal time. +First overtime, second. +Zidane, the headbutt in a moment. +Italy wins. Yeah. +Well, that night, everybody went to celebrate in the center. +You saw the big peak. +The following day, again everybody went to the center to meet the winning team and the prime minister at the time. +And then everybody moved down. +You see the image of the place called Circo Massimo, where, since Roman times, people go to celebrate, to have a big party, and you see the peak at the end of the day. +Well, that's just one example of how we can sense the city today in a way that we couldn't have done just a few years ago. +Another quick example about sensing: it's not about people, but about things we use and consume. +Well today, we know everything about where our objects come from. +This is a map that shows you all the chips that form a Mac computer, how they came together. +But we know very little about where things go. +So in this project, we actually developed some small tags to track trash as it moves through the system. +So we actually started with a number of volunteers who helped us in Seattle, just over a year ago, to tag what they were throwing away -- different types of things, as you can see here -- things they would throw away anyway. +Then we put a little chip, little tag, onto the trash and then started following it. +Here are the results we just obtained. +From Seattle ... +after one week. +With this information we realized there's a lot of inefficiencies in the system. +We can actually do the same thing with much less energy. +This data was not available before. +But there's a lot of wasted transportation and convoluted things happening. +But the other thing is that we believe that if we see every day that the cup we're throwing away, it doesn't disappear, it's still somewhere on the planet. +And the plastic bottle we're throwing away every day still stays there. +And if we show that to people, then we can also promote some behavioral change. +So that was the reason for the project. +My colleague at MIT, Assaf Biderman, he could tell you much more about sensing and many other wonderful things we can do with sensing, but I wanted to go to the second part we discussed at the beginning, and that's actuating our environment. +And the first project is something we did a couple of years ago in Zaragoza, Spain. +It started with a question by the mayor of the city, who came to us saying that Spain and Southern Europe have a beautiful tradition of using water in public space, in architecture. +And the question was: How could technology, new technology, be added to that? +And one of the ideas that was developed at MIT in a workshop was, imagine this pipe, and you've got valves, solenoid valves, taps, opening and closing. +You create like a water curtain with pixels made of water. +If those pixels fall, you can write on it, you can show patterns, images, text. +And even you can approach it, and it will open up to let you jump through, as you see in this image. +Well, we presented this to Mayor Belloch. +He liked it very much. +And we got a commission to design a building at the entrance of the expo. +We called it Digital Water Pavilion. +The whole building is made of water. +There's no doors or windows, but when you approach it, it will open up to let you in. +The roof also is covered with water. +And if there's a bit of wind, if you want to minimize splashing, you can actually lower the roof. +Or you could close the building, and the whole architecture will disappear, You know, these days, you always get images during the winter, when they take the roof down, of people who have been there and said, "They demolished the building." +No, they didn't demolish it, just when it goes down, the architecture almost disappears. +Here's the building working. +You see the person puzzled about what was going on inside. +And here was myself trying not to get wet, testing the sensors that open the water. +Well, I should tell you now what happened one night when all of the sensors stopped working. +But actually that night, it was even more fun. +All the kids from Zaragoza came to the building, because the way of engaging with the building became something different. +Not anymore a building that would open up to let you in, but a building that would still make cuts and holes through the water, and you had to jump without getting wet. +And that was, for us, was very interesting, because, as architects, as engineers, as designers, we always think about how people will use the things we design. +But then reality's always unpredictable. +And that's the beauty of doing things that are used and interact with people. +Here is an image then of the building with the physical pixels, the pixels made of water, and then projections on them. +And this is what led us to think about the following project I'll show you now. +That's, imagine those pixels could actually start flying. +Imagine you could have small helicopters that move in the air, and then each of them with a small pixel in changing lights -- almost as a cloud that can move in space. +Here is the video. +So imagine one helicopter, like the one we saw before, moving with others, in synchrony. +So you can have this cloud. +You can have a kind of flexible screen or display, like this -- a regular configuration in two dimensions. +Or in regular, but in three dimensions, where the thing that changes is the light, not the pixels' position. +You can play with a different type. +Imagine your screen could just appear in different scales or sizes, different types of resolution. +But then the whole thing can be just a 3D cloud of pixels that you can approach and move through it and see from many, many directions. +Here is the real Flyfire control and going down to form the regular grid as before. +When you turn on the light, actually you see this. So the same as we saw before. +And imagine each of them then controlled by people. +You can have each pixel having an input that comes from people, from people's movement, or so and so. +I want to show you something here for the first time. +We've been working with Roberto Bolle, one of today's top ballet dancers -- the étoile at Metropolitan in New York and La Scala in Milan -- and actually captured his movement in 3D in order to use it as an input for Flyfire. +And here you can see Roberto dancing. +You see on the left the pixels, the different resolutions being captured. +It's both 3D scanning in real time and motion capture. +So you can reconstruct a whole movement. +You can go all the way through. +But then, once we have the pixels, then you can play with them and play with color and movement and gravity and rotation. +So we want to use this as one of the possible inputs for Flyfire. +I wanted to show you the last project we are working on. +It's something we're working on for the London Olympics. +It's called The Cloud. +And the idea here is, imagine, again, we can involve people in doing something and changing our environment -- almost to impart what we call cloud raising -- like barn raising, but with a cloud. +Imagine you can have everybody make a small donation for one pixel. +And I think what is remarkable that has happened over the past couple of years is that, over the past couple of decades, we went from the physical world to the digital one. +This has been digitizing everything, knowledge, and making that accessible through the Internet. +Now today, for the first time -- and the Obama campaign showed us this -- we can go from the digital world, from the self-organizing power of networks, to the physical one. +This can be, in our case, we want to use it for designing and doing a symbol. +That means something built in a city. +But tomorrow it can be, in order to tackle today's pressing challenges -- think about climate change or CO2 emissions -- how we can go from the digital world to the physical one. +So the idea that we can actually involve people in doing this thing together, collectively. +The cloud is a cloud, again, made of pixels, in the same way as the real cloud is a cloud made of particles. +And those particles are water, where our cloud is a cloud of pixels. +It's a physical structure in London, but covered with pixels. +You can move inside, have different types of experiences. +You can actually see from underneath, sharing the main moments for the Olympics in 2012 and beyond, and really using it as a way to connect with the community. +So both the physical cloud in the sky and something you can go to the top [of], like London's new mountaintop. +You can enter inside it. +And a kind of new digital beacon for the night -- but most importantly, a new type of experience for anybody who will go to the top. +Thank you. + +As an artist, connection is very important to me. +Through my work I'm trying to articulate that humans are not separate from nature and that everything is interconnected. +I first went to Antarctica almost 10 years ago, where I saw my first icebergs. +I was in awe. +My heart beat fast, my head was dizzy, trying to comprehend what it was that stood in front of me. +The icebergs around me were almost 200 feet out of the water, and I could only help but wonder that this was one snowflake on top of another snowflake, year after year. +Icebergs are born when they calve off of glaciers or break off of ice shelves. +Each iceberg has its own individual personality. +They have a distinct way of interacting with their environment and their experiences. +Some refuse to give up and hold on to the bitter end, while others can't take it anymore and crumble in a fit of dramatic passion. +It's easy to think, when you look at an iceberg, that they're isolated, that they're separate and alone, much like we as humans sometimes view ourselves. +But the reality is far from it. +As an iceberg melts, I am breathing in its ancient atmosphere. +As the iceberg melts, it is releasing mineral-rich fresh water that nourishes many forms of life. +I approach photographing these icebergs as if I'm making portraits of my ancestors, knowing that in these individual moments they exist in that way and will never exist that way again. +It is not a death when they melt; it is not an end, but a continuation of their path through the cycle of life. +Some of the ice in the icebergs that I photograph is very young -- a couple thousand years old. +And some of the ice is over 100,000 years old. +The last pictures I'd like to show you are of an iceberg that I photographed in Qeqetarsuaq, Greenland. +It's a very rare occasion that you get to actually witness an iceberg rolling. +So here it is. +You can see on the left side a small boat. +That's about a 15-foot boat. +And I'd like you to pay attention to the shape of the iceberg and where it is at the waterline. +You can see here, it begins to roll, and the boat has moved to the other side, and the man is standing there. +This is an average-size Greenlandic iceberg. +It's about 120 feet above the water, or 40 meters. +And this video is real time. +And just like that, the iceberg shows you a different side of its personality. +Thank you. + +I have had the distinct blessing in my life to have worked on a bunch of amazing projects. +But the coolest I ever worked on was around this guy. +This guy's name is TEMPT. +TEMPT was one of the foremost graffiti artists in the 80s. +And he came up home from a run one day and said, "Dad, my legs are tingling." +And that was the onset of ALS. +So TEMPT is now completely paralyzed. +He only has use of his eyes. +I was exposed to him. +I have a company that does design and animation, so obviously graffiti is definitely an intricate part of what we admire and respect in the art world. +And so we decided that we were going to sponsor Tony, TEMPT, and his cause. +So I went and met with his brother and father and said, "We're going to give you this money. +What are you going to do with it?" +And his brother said, "I just want to be able to talk to Tony again. +I just want to be able to communicate with him And I said, "Wait a second, isn't that -- I've seen Stephen Hawking -- don't all paralyzed people have the ability to communicate via these devices?" +And he said, "No, unless you're in the upper echelon and you've got really amazing insurance, you can't actually do that. +These devices aren't accessible to people." +And I said, "Well, how do you actually communicate?" +Has everyone seen the movie "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly?" +That's how they communicate -- so run their finger along. +I said, "That's archaic. How can that be?" +So I showed up with the desire to just write a check, and instead, I wrote a check that I had no freaking idea how I was going to cash. +I committed to his brother and his father right then and there -- I'm like, "All right, here's the deal: Tony's going to speak, we're going to get him a machine, and we're going to figure out a way for him to do his art again. +Because it's a travesty that someone who still has all of that in him isn't able to communicate it." +So I spoke at a conference a couple months after that. +I met these guys called GRL, Graffiti Research Lab, and they have a technology that allows them to project a light onto any surface and then, with a laser pointer, draw on it, and it just registers the negative space. +So they go around and do art installations like this. +All the things that go up there, they said there's a life cycle. +First it starts with the sexual organs, then it starts with cuss words, then it was Bush slanders and then people actually got to art. +But there was always a life cycle to their presentations. +So I went home and was having dinner with my wife and was telling her about this, and we were like, "Well wait a second. If we know that this technology exists where you can use your eyes to control things, why don't we figure out a way for TEMPT to control a laser and he could do graf again? Well that would be awesome." +So that started the journey. +And about two years later, about a year later, after a bunch of organization and a bunch of moving things around, we'd accomplished a couple things. +One, we battered down the doors of the insurance companies, and we actually got TEMPT a machine that let him communicate -- a Stephen Hawking machine. +Which was awesome. +And he's seriously one of the funniest -- I call him Yoda, because you talk to the guy, you get an email from him, and you're like, "I'm not worthy. This guy's so amazing." +The other thing we did is we flew seven programmers from all over the world -- literally every corner of the world -- into our house. +My wife and kids and I moved to our back garage, and these hackers and programmers and conspiracy theorists and anarchists took over our house. +A lot of our friends thought we were absolutely stupid to do that and that we were going to come back and all the pictures on the wall would be removed and graf on the walls. +But for over two weeks, we programmed, we went to the Venice boardwalk, my kids got involved, my dog got involved, and we created this. +This is called the EyeWriter, and you can see the description. +This is a cheap pair of sunglasses that we bought at the Venice Beach boardwalk, some copper wire and some stuff from Home Depot and Radio Shack. +We took a PS3 camera, hacked it open, mounted it to an LED light, and now there's a device that is free -- you build this yourself, we publish the code for free, you download the software for free. +And now we've created a device that has absolutely no limitations. +There's no insurance company that can say "No." +There's no hospital that can say "No." +Anybody who's paralyzed now has access to actually draw or communicate using only their eyes. +Thank you. +Thank you guys very much. That was awesome. +So at the end of the two weeks, we went back to TEMPT's room. +I love this picture, because this is someone else's room and that's his room. +So there's all this hustle and bustle going on for the big unveiling. +And after over a year of planning, two weeks of programming, carb-fest and all-night sessions, Tony drew again for the first time in seven years. +And this is an amazing picture, because this is his life support system, and he's looking over his life support system. +We kicked his bed so that he could see out. +And we set up a projector on a wall out in the parking lot outside of his hospital. +And he drew again for the first time, in front of his family and friends -- and you can only imagine what the feeling in the parking lot was. +The funny thing was, we had to break into the parking lot too, so we totally felt like we were legit in the whole graf scene too. +So at the end of this, he sent us an email, and this is what the email said: "That was the first time I've drawn anything for seven years. +I feel like I had been held underwater, and someone finally reached down and pulled my head up so I could breathe." +Isn't that awesome? +So that's kind of our battle cry. +That's what keeps us going and keeps us developing. +And we've got such a long way to go with this. +This is an amazing device, but it's the equivalent of an Etch A Sketch. +And someone who has that kind of artistic potential deserves so much more. +So we're in the process of trying to figure out how to make it better, faster, stronger. +Since that time, we've had all kinds of acknowledgment. +We've won a bunch of awards. +Remember, it's free; none of us are making any money on this thing. +It's all coming out of our own pockets. +So the awards were like, "Oh, this is fantastic." +Armstrong Twittered about us, and then in December, Time magazine honored us as one of the top 50 inventions of 2010, which was really cool. +The coolest thing about this -- and this is what's completing the whole circle -- is that in April of this year, at the Geffen MOCA in downtown Los Angeles, there's going to be an exhibition called "Art of the Streets." +And "Art of the Streets" is going to have pretty much the bad-asses of the street art scene -- Banksy, Shepard Fairey, KAWS -- all of these guys will be there. +TEMPT's going to be in the show, which is pretty awesome. +So basically this is my point: If you see something that's not possible, make it possible. +Everything in this room wasn't possible -- this stage, this computer, this mic, the EyeWriter -- wasn't possible at one point. +Make it possible, everyone in this room. +I'm not a programmer, never done anything with ocular recognition technology, but I just recognized something and associated myself with amazing people so that we could make something happen. +And this is the question I want everyone to ask yourself every single day when you come up with something you feel that needs to be done: if not now, then when? And if not me, then who? +Thank you guys. + +You know, what I do is write for children, and I'm probably America's most widely read children's author, in fact. +And I always tell people that I don't want to show up looking like a scientist. +You can have me as a farmer, or in leathers, and no one has ever chose farmer. +I'm here today to talk to you about circles and epiphanies. +And you know, an epiphany is usually something you find that you dropped someplace. +You've just got to go around the block to see it as an epiphany. +That's a painting of a circle. +A friend of mine did that -- Richard Bollingbroke. +It's the kind of complicated circle that I'm going to tell you about. +My circle began back in the '60s in high school in Stow, Ohio where I was the class queer. +I was the guy beaten up bloody every week in the boys' room, until one teacher saved my life. +She saved my life by letting me go to the bathroom in the teachers' lounge. +She did it in secret. +She did it for three years. +And I had to get out of town. +I had a thumb, I had 85 dollars, and I ended up in San Francisco, California -- met a lover -- and back in the '80s, found it necessary to begin work on AIDS organizations. +About three or four years ago, I got a phone call in the middle of the night from that teacher, Mrs. Posten, who said, "I need to see you. +I'm disappointed that we never got to know each other as adults. +Could you please come to Ohio, and please bring that man that I know you have found by now. +And I should mention that I have pancreatic cancer, and I'd like you to please be quick about this." +Well, the next day we were in Cleveland. +We took a look at her, we laughed, we cried, and we knew that she needed to be in a hospice. +We found her one, we got her there, and we took care of her and watched over her family, because it was necessary. +It's something we knew how to do. +And just as the woman who wanted to know me as an adult got to know me, she turned into a box of ashes and was placed in my hands. +And what had happened was the circle had closed, it had become a circle -- and that epiphany I talked about presented itself. +The epiphany is that death is a part of life. +She saved my life; I and my partner saved hers. +And you know, that part of life needs everything that the rest of life does. +It needs truth and beauty, and I'm so happy it's been mentioned so much here today. +It also needs -- it needs dignity, love and pleasure, and it's our job to hand those things out. +Thank you. + +Imagine a big explosion as you climb through 3,000 ft. +Imagine a plane full of smoke. +Imagine an engine going clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack. +It sounds scary. +Well I had a unique seat that day. I was sitting in 1D. +I was the only one who could talk to the flight attendants. +So I looked at them right away, and they said, "No problem. We probably hit some birds." +The pilot had already turned the plane around, and we weren't that far. +You could see Manhattan. +Two minutes later, three things happened at the same time. +The pilot lines up the plane with the Hudson River. +That's usually not the route. +He turns off the engines. +Now imagine being in a plane with no sound. +And then he says three words -- the most unemotional three words I've ever heard. +He says, "Brace for impact." +I didn't have to talk to the flight attendant anymore. +I could see in her eyes, it was terror. Life was over. +Now I want to share with you three things I learned about myself that day. +I learned that it all changes in an instant. +We have this bucket list, we have these things we want to do in life, and I thought about all the people I wanted to reach out to that I didn't, all the fences I wanted to mend, all the experiences I wanted to have and I never did. +As I thought about that later on, I came up with a saying, which is, "I collect bad wines." +Because if the wine is ready and the person is there, I'm opening it. +I no longer want to postpone anything in life. +And that urgency, that purpose, has really changed my life. +The second thing I learned that day -- and this is as we clear the George Washington Bridge, which was by not a lot -- I thought about, wow, I really feel one real regret. +I've lived a good life. +In my own humanity and mistakes, I've tried to get better at everything I tried. +But in my humanity, I also allow my ego to get in. +And I regretted the time I wasted on things that did not matter with people that matter. +And I thought about my relationship with my wife, with my friends, with people. +And after, as I reflected on that, I decided to eliminate negative energy from my life. +It's not perfect, but it's a lot better. +I've not had a fight with my wife in two years. +It feels great. +I no longer try to be right; I choose to be happy. +The third thing I learned -- and this is as your mental clock starts going, "15, 14, 13." +You can see the water coming. +I'm saying, "Please blow up." +I don't want this thing to break in 20 pieces like you've seen in those documentaries. +And as we're coming down, I had a sense of, wow, dying is not scary. +It's almost like we've been preparing for it our whole lives. +But it was very sad. +I didn't want to go; I love my life. +And that sadness really framed in one thought, which is, I only wish for one thing. +I only wish I could see my kids grow up. +About a month later, I was at a performance by my daughter -- first-grader, not much artistic talent ... +... yet. +And I'm bawling, I'm crying, like a little kid. +And it made all the sense in the world to me. +I realized at that point, by connecting those two dots, that the only thing that matters in my life is being a great dad. +Above all, above all, the only goal I have in life is to be a good dad. +I was given the gift of a miracle, of not dying that day. +I was given another gift, which was to be able to see into the future and come back and live differently. +I challenge you guys that are flying today, imagine the same thing happens on your plane -- and please don't -- but imagine, and how would you change? +What would you get done that you're waiting to get done because you think you'll be here forever? +How would you change your relationships and the negative energy in them? +And more than anything, are you being the best parent you can? +Thank you. + +The idea behind the Stuxnet computer worm is actually quite simple. +We don't want Iran to get the bomb. +Their major asset for developing nuclear weapons is the Natanz uranium enrichment facility. +The gray boxes that you see, these are real-time control systems. +Now if we manage to compromise these systems that control drive speeds and valves, we can actually cause a lot of problems with the centrifuge. +The gray boxes don't run Windows software; they are a completely different technology. +But if we manage to place a good Windows virus on a notebook that is used by a maintenance engineer to configure this gray box, then we are in business. +And this is the plot behind Stuxnet. +So we start with a Windows dropper. +The payload goes onto the gray box, damages the centrifuge, and the Iranian nuclear program is delayed -- mission accomplished. +That's easy, huh? +I want to tell you how we found that out. +When we started our research on Stuxnet six months ago, it was completely unknown what the purpose of this thing was. +The only thing that was known is it's very, very complex on the Windows part, the dropper part, used multiple zero-day vulnerabilities. +And it seemed to want to do something with these gray boxes, these real-time control systems. +So that got our attention, and we started a lab project where we infected our environment with Stuxnet and checked this thing out. +And then some very funny things happened. +Stuxnet behaved like a lab rat that didn't like our cheese -- sniffed, but didn't want to eat. +Didn't make sense to me. +And after we experimented with different flavors of cheese, I realized, well, this is a directed attack. +It's completely directed. +The dropper is prowling actively on the gray box if a specific configuration is found, and even if the actual program code that it's trying to infect is actually running on that target. +And if not, Stuxnet does nothing. +So that really got my attention, and we started to work on this nearly around the clock, because I thought, "Well, we don't know what the target is. +It could be, let's say for example, a U.S. power plant, or a chemical plant in Germany. +So we better find out what the target is soon." +So we extracted and decompiled the attack code, and we discovered that it's structured in two digital bombs -- a smaller one and a bigger one. +And we also saw that they are very professionally engineered by people who obviously had all insider information. +They knew all the bits and bites that they had to attack. +They probably even know the shoe size of the operator. +So they know everything. +And if you have heard that the dropper of Stuxnet is complex and high-tech, let me tell you this: the payload is rocket science. +It's way above everything that we have ever seen before. +Here you see a sample of this actual attack code. +We are talking about -- around about 15,000 lines of code. +Looks pretty much like old-style assembly language. +And I want to tell you how we were able to make sense out of this code. +So what we were looking for is, first of all, system function calls, because we know what they do. +And then we were looking for timers and data structures and trying to relate them to the real world -- to potential real world targets. +So we do need target theories that we can prove or disprove. +In order to get target theories, we remember that it's definitely hardcore sabotage, it must be a high-value target and it is most likely located in Iran, because that's where most of the infections had been reported. +Now you don't find several thousand targets in that area. +It basically boils down to the Bushehr nuclear power plant and to the Natanz fuel enrichment plant. +So I told my assistant, "Get me a list of all centrifuge and power plant experts from our client base." +And I phoned them up and picked their brain in an effort to match their expertise with what we found in code and data. +And that worked pretty well. +So we were able to associate the small digital warhead with the rotor control. +The rotor is that moving part within the centrifuge, that black object that you see. +And if you manipulate the speed of this rotor, you are actually able to crack the rotor and eventually even have the centrifuge explode. +What we also saw is that the goal of the attack was really to do it slowly and creepy -- obviously in an effort to drive maintenance engineers crazy, that they would not be able to figure this out quickly. +The big digital warhead -- we had a shot at this by looking very closely at data and data structures. +So for example, the number 164 really stands out in that code; you can't overlook it. +I started to research scientific literature on how these centrifuges are actually built in Natanz and found they are structured in what is called a cascade, and each cascade holds 164 centrifuges. +So that made sense, that was a match. +And it even got better. +These centrifuges in Iran are subdivided into 15, what is called, stages. +And guess what we found in the attack code? +An almost identical structure. +So again, that was a real good match. +And this gave us very high confidence for what we were looking at. +Now don't get me wrong here, it didn't go like this. +These results have been obtained over several weeks of really hard labor. +And we often went into just a dead end and had to recover. +Anyway, so we figured out that both digital warheads were actually aiming at one and the same target, but from different angles. +The small warhead is taking one cascade, and spinning up the rotors and slowing them down, and the big warhead is talking to six cascades and manipulating valves. +So in all, we are very confident that we have actually determined what the target is. +It is Natanz, and it is only Natanz. +So we don't have to worry that other targets might be hit by Stuxnet. +Here's some very cool stuff that we saw -- really knocked my socks off. +Down there is the gray box, and on the top you see the centrifuges. +Now what this thing does is it intercepts the input values from sensors -- so for example, from pressure sensors and vibration sensors -- and it provides legitimate program code, which is still running during the attack, with fake input data. +And as a matter of fact, this fake input data is actually prerecorded by Stuxnet. +So it's just like from the Hollywood movies where during the heist, the observation camera is fed with prerecorded video. +That's cool, huh? +The idea here is obviously not only to fool the operators in the control room. +It actually is much more dangerous and aggressive. +The idea is to circumvent a digital safety system. +We need digital safety systems where a human operator could not act quick enough. +So for example, in a power plant, when your big steam turbine gets too over speed, you must open relief valves within a millisecond. +Obviously, this cannot be done by a human operator. +So this is where we need digital safety systems. +And when they are compromised, then real bad things can happen. +Your plant can blow up. +And neither your operators nor your safety system will notice it. +That's scary. +But it gets worse. +And this is very important, what I'm going to say. +Think about this: this attack is generic. +It doesn't have anything to do, in specifics, with centrifuges, with uranium enrichment. +So it would work as well, for example, in a power plant or in an automobile factory. +It is generic. +And you don't have -- as an attacker -- you don't have to deliver this payload by a USB stick, as we saw it in the case of Stuxnet. +You could also use conventional worm technology for spreading. +Just spread it as wide as possible. +And if you do that, what you end up with is a cyber weapon of mass destruction. +That's the consequence that we have to face. +So unfortunately, the biggest number of targets for such attacks are not in the Middle East. +They're in the United States and Europe and in Japan. +So all of the green areas, these are your target-rich environments. +We have to face the consequences, and we better start to prepare right now. +Thanks. +I've got a question. +Ralph, it's been quite widely reported that people assume that Mossad is the main entity behind this. +Is that your opinion? +Okay, you really want to hear that? +Yeah. Okay. +My opinion is that the Mossad is involved, but that the leading force is not Israel. +So the leading force behind that is the cyber superpower. +There is only one, and that's the United States -- fortunately, fortunately. +Because otherwise, our problems would even be bigger. +Thank you for scaring the living daylights out of us. Thank you, Ralph. + +I have spent the past few years putting myself into situations that are usually very difficult and at the same time somewhat dangerous. +I went to prison -- difficult. +I worked in a coal mine -- dangerous. +I filmed in war zones -- difficult and dangerous. +And I spent 30 days eating nothing but this -- fun in the beginning, little difficult in the middle, very dangerous in the end. +In fact, most of my career, I've been immersing myself into seemingly horrible situations for the whole goal of trying to examine societal issues in a way that make them engaging, that make them interesting, that hopefully break them down in a way that make them entertaining and accessible to an audience. +So when I knew I was coming here to do a TED Talk that was going to look at the world of branding and sponsorship, I knew I would want to do something a little different. +So as some of you may or may not have heard, a couple weeks ago, I took out an ad on eBay. +I sent out some Facebook messages, some Twitter messages, and I gave people the opportunity to buy the naming rights to my 2011 TED Talk. +That's right, some lucky individual, corporation, for-profit or non-profit, was going to get the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity -- because I'm sure Chris Anderson will never let it happen again -- to buy the naming rights to the talk you're watching right now, that at the time didn't have a title, didn't really have a lot of content and didn't really give much hint as to what the subject matter would actually be. +So what you were getting was this: Your name here presents: My TED Talk that you have no idea what the subject is and, depending on the content, could ultimately blow up in your face, especially if I make you or your company look stupid for doing it. +But that being said, it's a very good media opportunity. +You know how many people watch these TED Talks? +It's a lot. +That's just a working title, by the way. +So even with that caveat, I knew that someone would buy the naming rights. +Now if you'd have asked me that a year ago, I wouldn't have been able to tell you that with any certainty. +But in the new project that I'm working on, my new film, we examine the world of marketing, advertising. +And as I said earlier, I put myself in some pretty horrible situations over the years, but nothing could prepare me, nothing could ready me, for anything as difficult or as dangerous as going into the rooms with these guys. +You see, I had this idea for a movie. +What I want to do is make a film all about product placement, marketing and advertising, where the entire film is funded by product placement, marketing and advertising. +So the movie will be called "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." +So what happens in "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold," is that everything from top to bottom, from start to finish, is branded from beginning to end -- from the above-the-title sponsor that you'll see in the movie, which is brand X. +Now this brand, the Qualcomm Stadium, the Staples Center ... +these people will be married to the film in perpetuity -- forever. +And so the film explores this whole idea -- It's what? In perpetuity, forever? +I'm a redundant person. +That was more for emphasis. +It was, "In perpetuity. Forever." +But not only are we going to have the brand X title sponsor, but we're going to make sure we sell out every category we can in the film. +So maybe we sell a shoe and it becomes the greatest shoe you ever wore ... +the greatest car you ever drove from "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold," the greatest drink you've ever had, courtesy of "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." +So the idea is, beyond just showing that brands are a part of your life, but actually get them to finance the film? +And actually we show the whole process of how does it work. +The goal of this whole film is transparency. +You're going to see the whole thing take place in this movie. +So that's the whole concept, the whole film, start to finish. +And I would love for CEG to help make it happen. +You know it's funny, because when I first hear it, it is the ultimate respect for an audience. +I don't know how receptive people are going to be to it, though. +Do you have a perspective -- I don't want to use "angle" because that has a negative connotation -- but do you know how this is going to play out? +How much money does it take to do this? +1.5 million. +I think that you're going to have a hard time meeting with them, but I think it's certainly worth pursuing a couple big, really obvious brands. +Who knows, maybe by the time your film comes out, we look like a bunch of blithering idiots. +What do you think the response is going to be? +The responses mostly will be "no." +But is it a tough sell because of the film or a tough sell because of me? +JK: Both. +... Meaning not so optimistic. +So, sir, can you help me? I need help. +I can help you. +Okay. +Awesome. +We've gotta figure out which brands. +Yeah. +When you look at the people you deal with .. +We've got some places we can go. +Turn the camera off. +I thought "Turn the camera off" meant, "Let's have an off-the-record conversation." +Turns out it really means, "We want nothing to do with your movie." +And just like that, one by one, all of these companies suddenly disappeared. +None of them wanted anything to do with this movie. +I was amazed. +They wanted absolutely nothing to do with this project. +And I was blown away, because I thought the whole concept, the idea of advertising, was to get your product out in front of as many people as possible, to get as many people to see it as possible. +Especially in today's world, this intersection of new media and old media and the fractured media landscape, isn't the idea to get that new buzz-worthy delivery vehicle that's going to get that message to the masses? +No, that's what I thought. +But the problem was, you see, my idea had one fatal flaw, and that flaw was this. +Actually no, that was not the flaw whatsoever. +That wouldn't have been a problem at all. +This would have been fine. +But what this image represents was the problem. +See, when you do a Google image search for transparency, this is --- This is one of the first images that comes up. +So I like the way you roll, Sergey Brin. No. +This is was the problem: transparency -- free from pretense or deceit; easily detected or seen through; readily understood; characterized by visibility or accessibility of information, especially concerning business practices -- that last line being probably the biggest problem. +You see, we hear a lot about transparency these days. +Our politicians say it, our president says it, even our CEO's say it. +But suddenly when it comes down to becoming a reality, something suddenly changes. +But why? Well, transparency is scary -- like that odd, still-screaming bear. +It's unpredictable -- like this odd country road. +And it's also very risky. +What else is risky? +Eating an entire bowl of Cool Whip. +That's very risky. +Now when I started talking to companies and telling them that we wanted to tell this story, and they said, "No, we want you to tell a story. +We want you to tell a story, but we just want to tell our story." +See, when I was a kid and my father would catch me in some sort of a lie -- and there he is giving me the look he often gave me -- he would say, "Son, there's three sides to every story. +There's your story, there's my story and there's the real story." +Now you see, with this film, we wanted to tell the real story. +But with only one company, one agency willing to help me -- and that's only because I knew John Bond and Richard Kirshenbaum for years -- I realized that I would have to go on my own, I'd have to cut out the middleman and go to the companies myself with all of my team. +So what you suddenly started to realize -- or what I started to realize -- is that when you started having conversations with these companies, the idea of understanding your brand is a universal problem. +I have friends who make great big, giant Hollywood films, and I have friends who make little independent films like I make. +And the friends of mine who make big, giant Hollywood movies say the reason their films are so successful is because of the brand partners that they have. +And then my friends who make small independent films say, "Well, how are we supposed to compete with these big, giant Hollywood movies?" +And the movie is called "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." +So how specifically will we see Ban in the film? +Any time I'm ready to go, any time I open up my medicine cabinet, you will see Ban deodorant. +While anytime I do an interview with someone, I can say, "Are you fresh enough for this interview? +Are you ready? You look a little nervous. +I want to help you calm down. +So maybe you should put some one before the interview." +So we'll offer one of these fabulous scents. +Whether it's a "Floral Fusion" or a "Paradise Winds," they'll have their chance. +We will have them geared for both male or female -- solid, roll-on or stick, whatever it may be. +That's the two-cent tour. +So now I can answer any of your questions and give you the five-cent tour. +We are a smaller brand. +Much like you talked about being a smaller movie, we're very much a challenger brand. +So we don't have the budgets that other brands have. +So doing things like this -- you know, remind people about Ban -- is kind of why were interested in it. +What are the words that you would use to describe Ban? +Ban is blank. +That's a great question. +Superior technology. +Technology's not the way you want to describe something somebody's putting in their armpit. +We talk about bold, fresh. +I think "fresh" is a great word that really spins this category into the positive, versus "fights odor and wetness." +It keeps you fresh. +How do we keep you fresher longer -- better freshness, more freshness, three times fresher. +Things like that that are more of that positive benefit. +And that's a multi-million dollar corporation. +What about me? What about a regular guy? +I need to go talk to the man on the street, the people who are like me, the regular Joes. +They need to tell me about my brand. +How would you guys describe your brand? +Um, my brand? +I don't know. +I like really nice clothes. +80's revival meets skater-punk, unless it's laundry day. +All right, what is brand Gerry? +Unique. +I guess what kind of genre, style I am would be like dark glamor. +I like a lot of black colors, a lot of grays and stuff like that. +But usually I have an accessory, like sunglasses, or I like crystal and things like that too. +If Dan were a brand, he might be a classic convertible Mercedes Benz. +The brand that I am is, I would call it casual fly. +Part hippie, part yogi, part Brooklyn girl -- I don't know. +I'm the pet guy. +I sell pet toys all over the country, all over the world. +So I guess that's my brand. +In my warped little industry, that's my brand. +My brand is FedEx because I deliver the goods. +Failed writer-alcoholic brand. +Is that something? +I'm a lawyer brand. +I'm Tom. +Well we can't all be brand Tom, but I do often find myself at the intersection of dark glamor and casual fly. +And what I realized is I needed an expert. +I needed somebody who could get inside my head, somebody who could really help me understand what they call your "brand personality." +And so I found a company called Olson Zaltman in Pittsburg. +They've helped companies like Nestle, Febreze, Hallmark discover that brand personality. +If they could do it for them, surely they could do it for me. +You brought your pictures, right? +I did. The very first picture is a picture of my family. +So tell me a little bit how it relates to your thoughts and feelings about who you are. +These are the people who shape the way I look at the world. +Tell me about this world. +This world? I think your world is the world that you live in -- like people who are around you, your friends, your family, the way you live your life, the job you do. +All those things stemmed and started from one place, and for me they stemmed and started with my family in West Virginia. +What's the next one you want to talk about? +The next one: This was the best day ever. +How does this relate to your thoughts and feelings about who you are? +It's like, who do I want to be? +I like things that are different. +I like things that are weird. I like weird things. +Tell me about the "why" phase -- what does that do for us? +What is the machete? What pupa stage are you in now? +Why is it important to reboot? What does the red represent? +Tell me a little bit about that part. +... A little more about you that is not who you are. +What are some other metamorphoses that you've had? +... Doesn't have to be fear. What kind of roller coaster are you on? +EEEEEE! No, thank you. +Thanks for you patience. +Yeah. All right. +Yeah, I don't know what's going to come of this. +There was a whole lot of crazy going on in there. +The first thing we saw was this idea that you had two distinct, but complementary sides to your brand personality -- the Morgan Spurlock brand is a mindful/play brand. +Those are juxtaposed very nicely together. +And I think there's almost a paradox with those. +And I think some companies will just focus on one of their strengths or the other instead of focusing on both. +Most companies tend to -- and it's human nature -- to avoid things that they're not sure of, avoid fear, those elements, and you really embrace those, and you actually turn them into positives for you, and it's a neat thing to see. +What other brands are like that? +The first on here is the classic, Apple. +And you can see here too, Target, Wii, Mini from the Mini Coopers, and JetBlue. +Now there's playful brands and mindful brands, those things that have come and gone, but a playful, mindful brand is a pretty powerful thing. +A playful, mindful brand. What is your brand? +If somebody asked you to describe your brand identity, your brand personality, what would you be? +Are you an up attribute? Are you something that gets the blood flowing? +Or are you more of a down attribute? +Are you something that's a little more calm, reserved, conservative? +Up attributes are things like being playful, being fresh like the Fresh Prince, contemporary, adventurous, edgy or daring like Errol Flynn, nimble or agile, profane, domineering, magical or mystical like Gandalf. +Or are you more of a down attribute? +Are you mindful, sophisticated like 007? +Are you established, traditional, nurturing, protective, empathetic like the Oprah? +Are you reliable, stable, familiar, safe, secure, sacred, contemplative or wise like the Dalai Lama or Yoda? +Over the course of this film, we had 500-plus companies who were up and down companies saying, "no," they didn't want any part of this project. +They wanted nothing to do with this film, mainly because they would have no control, they would have no control over the final product. +But we did get 17 brand partners who were willing to relinquish that control, who wanted to be in business with someone as mindful and as playful as myself and who ultimately empowered us to tell stories that normally we wouldn't be able to tell -- stories that an advertiser would normally never get behind. +They enabled us to tell the story about neuromarketing, as we got into telling the story in this film about how now they're using MRI's to target the desire centers of your brain for both commercials as well as movie marketing. +We went to San Paulo where they have banned outdoor advertising. +In the entire city for the past five years, there's no billboards, there's no posters, there's no fliers, nothing. +And we went to school districts where now companies are making their way into cash-strapped schools all across America. +What's incredible for me is the projects that I've gotten the most feedback out of, or I've had the most success in, are ones where I've interacted with things directly. +And that's what these brands did. +They cut out the middleman, they cut out their agencies and said, "Maybe these agencies don't have my best interest in mind. +I'm going to deal directly with the artist. +I'm going to work with him to create something different, something that's going to get people thinking, that's going to challenge the way we look at the world." +And how has that been for them? Has it been successful? +Well, since the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, let's take a look. +According to Burrelles, the movie premiered in January, and since then -- and this isn't even the whole thing -- we've had 900 million media impressions for this film. +That's literally covering just like a two and a half-week period. +That's only online -- no print, no TV. +The film hasn't even been distributed yet. +It's not even online. It's not even streaming. +It's not even been out into other foreign countries yet. +So ultimately, this film has already started to gain a lot of momentum. +And not bad for a project that almost every ad agency we talked to advised their clients not to take part. +What I always believe is that if you take chances, if you take risks, that in those risks will come opportunity. +I believe that when you push people away from that, you're pushing them more towards failure. +I believe that when you train your employees to be risk averse, then you're preparing your whole company to be reward challenged. +I feel like that what has to happen moving forward is we need to encourage people to take risks. +We need to encourage people to not be afraid of opportunities that may scare them. +Ultimately, moving forward, I think we have to embrace fear. +We've got to put that bear in a cage. +Embrace fear. Embrace risk. +One big spoonful at a time, we have to embrace risk. +And ultimately, we have to embrace transparency. +Today, more than ever, a little honesty is going to go a long way. +And that being said, through honesty and transparency, my entire talk, "Embrace Transparency," has been brought to you by my good friends at EMC, who for $7,100 bought the naming rights on eBay. +Turning big data into big opportunity for organizations all over the world. +EMC presents: "Embrace Transparency." +Thank you very much, guys. +So, Morgan, in the name of transparency, what exactly happened to that $7,100? +That is a fantastic question. +I have in my pocket a check made out to the parent organization to the TED organization, the Sapling Foundation -- a check for $7,100 to be applied toward my attendance for next year's TED. + +My name is Amit. +And 18 months ago, I had another job at Google, and I pitched this idea of doing something with museums and art to my boss who's actually here, and she allowed me to do it. +And it took 18 months. +A lot of fun, negotiations and stories, I can tell you, with 17 very interesting museums from nine countries. +But I'm going to focus on the demo. +There are a lot of stories about why we did this. +I think my personal story is explained very simply on the slide, and it's access. +And I grew up in India. +I had a great education -- I'm not complaining -- but I didn't have access to a lot of these museums and these artworks. +And so when I started traveling and going to these museums, I started learning a lot. +And while working at Google, I tried to put this desire to make it more accessible with technology together. +So we formed a team, a great team of people, and we started doing this. +I'm going to probably get into the demo and then tell you a couple of the interesting things we've had since launch. +So, simple: you come to GoogleArtProject.com. +You look around at all these museums here. +You've got the Uffizi, you've got the MoMA, the Hermitage, the Rijks, the Van Gogh. +I'm going to actually get to one of my favorites, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. +Two ways of going in -- very simple. +Click and, bang, you're in this museum. +It doesn't matter where you are -- Bombay, Mexico, it doesn't really matter. +You move around, you have fun. +You want to navigate around the museum? +Open the plan up, and, in one click, jump. +You're in there, you want to go to the end of the corridor. +Keep going. Have fun. +Explore. +Thanks. I haven't come to the best part. +So now I'm in front of one of my favorite paintings, "The Harvesters" by Pieter Bruegel at the Met. +I see this plus sign. +If the museum has given us the image, you click on it. +Now this is one of the images. +So this is all of the meta-data information. +For those of you who are truly interested in art, you can click this -- but I'm going to click this off right now. +And this is one of these images that we captured in what we call gigapixel technology. +So this image, for example, has close to, I think, around 10 billion pixels. +And I get a lot of people asking me: "What do you get for 10 billion pixels?" +So I'm going to try and show you what you really get for 10 billion pixels. +You can zoom around very simply. +You see some fun stuff happening here. +I love this guy; his expression is priceless. +But then you really want to go deep. +And so I started playing around, and I found something going on over here. +And I was like, "Hold on. That sounds interesting." +Went in, and I started noticing that these kids were actually beating something. +I did a little research, spoke to a couple of my contacts at the Met, and actually found out that this is a game called squall, which involves beating a goose with a stick on Shrove Tuesday. +And apparently it was quite popular. +I don't know why they did it, but I learned something about it. +Now just to get really deep in, you can really get to the cracks. +Now just to give you some perspective, I'm going to zoom out so you really see what you get. +Here is where we were, and this is the painting. +The best is yet to come -- so in a second. +So now let's just quickly jump into the MoMA, again in New York. +So another one of my favorites, "The Starry Night." +Now the example I showed you was all about finding details. +But what if you want to see brush strokes? +And what if you want to see how Van Gogh actually created this masterpiece? +You zoom in. You really go in. +I'm going to go to one of my favorite parts in this painting, and I'm really going to get to the cracks. +This is "The Starry Night," I think, never seen like this before. +I'm going to show you my other favorite feature. +There's a lot of other stuff here, but I don't have time. +This is the real cool part. It's called Collections. +Any one of you, anybody -- doesn't matter if you're rich, if you're poor, if you have a fancy house -- doesn't matter. +You can go and create your own museum online -- create your own collection across all these images. +Very simply, you go in -- and I've created this, called The Power of Zoom -- you can just zoom around. +This is "The Ambassadors," based in the National Gallery. +You can annotate the stuff, send it to your friends and really get a conversation going about what you're feeling when you go through these masterpieces. +So I think, in conclusion, for me, the main thing is that all the amazing stuff here does not really come from Google. +It doesn't, in my opinion, even come from the museums. +I probably shouldn't say that. +It really comes from these artists. +And that's been my humbling experience in this. +I mean, I hope in this digital medium that we do justice to their artwork and represent it properly online. +And the biggest question I get asked nowadays is, "Did you do this to replicate the experience of going to a museum?" +And the answer is no. +It's to supplement the experience. +And that's it. Thank you. +Thank you. + +This is a representation of your brain, and your brain can be broken into two parts. +There's the left half, which is the logical side, and then the right half, which is the intuitive. +And so if we had a scale to measure the aptitude of each hemisphere, then we can plot our brain. +And for example, this would be somebody who's completely logical. +This would be someone who's entirely intuitive. +So where would you put your brain on this scale? +Some of us may have opted for one of these extremes, but I think for most people in the audience, your brain is something like this -- with a high aptitude in both hemispheres at the same time. +It's not like they're mutually exclusive or anything. +You can be logical and intuitive. +And so I consider myself one of these people, along with most of the other experimental quantum physicists, who need a good deal of logic to string together these complex ideas. +But at the same time, we need a good deal of intuition to actually make the experiments work. +How do we develop this intuition? Well we like to play with stuff. +So we go out and play with it, and then we see how it acts, and then we develop our intuition from there. +And really you do the same thing. +So some intuition that you may have developed over the years is that one thing is only in one place at a time. +I mean, it can sound weird to think about one thing being in two different places at the same time, but you weren't born with this notion, you developed it. +And I remember watching a kid playing on a car stop. +He was just a toddler and he wasn't very good at it, and he kept falling over. +But I bet playing with this car stop taught him a really valuable lesson, and that's that large things don't let you get right past them, and that they stay in one place. +And so this is a great conceptual model to have of the world, unless you're a particle physicist. +It'd be a terrible model for a particle physicist, because they don't play with car stops, they play with these little weird particles. +And when they play with their particles, they find they do all sorts of really weird things -- like they can fly right through walls, or they can be in two different places at the same time. +And so they wrote down all these observations, and they called it the theory of quantum mechanics. +And so that's where physics was at a few years ago; you needed quantum mechanics to describe little, tiny particles. +But you didn't need it to describe the large, everyday objects around us. +This didn't really sit well with my intuition, and maybe it's just because I don't play with particles very often. +Well, I play with them sometimes, but not very often. +And I've never seen them. +I mean, nobody's ever seen a particle. +But it didn't sit well with my logical side either. +Because if everything is made up of little particles and all the little particles follow quantum mechanics, then shouldn't everything just follow quantum mechanics? +I don't see any reason why it shouldn't. +And so I'd feel a lot better about the whole thing if we could somehow show that an everyday object also follows quantum mechanics. +So a few years ago, I set off to do just that. +So I made one. +This is the first object that you can see that has been in a mechanical quantum superposition. +So what we're looking at here is a tiny computer chip. +And you can sort of see this green dot right in the middle. +And that's this piece of metal I'm going to be talking about in a minute. +This is a photograph of the object. +And here I'll zoom in a little bit. We're looking right there in the center. +And then here's a really, really big close-up of the little piece of metal. +So what we're looking at is a little chunk of metal, and it's shaped like a diving board, and it's sticking out over a ledge. +And so I made this thing in nearly the same way as you make a computer chip. +I went into a clean room with a fresh silicon wafer, and then I just cranked away at all the big machines for about 100 hours. +For the last stuff, I had to build my own machine -- to make this swimming pool-shaped hole underneath the device. +This device has the ability to be in a quantum superposition, but it needs a little help to do it. +Here, let me give you an analogy. +You know how uncomfortable it is to be in a crowded elevator? +I mean, when I'm in an elevator all alone, I do all sorts of weird things, but then other people get on board and I stop doing those things because I don't want to bother them, or, frankly, scare them. +So quantum mechanics says that inanimate objects feel the same way. +The fellow passengers for inanimate objects are not just people, but it's also the light shining on it and the wind blowing past it and the heat of the room. +And so we knew, if we wanted to see this piece of metal behave quantum mechanically, we're going to have to kick out all the other passengers. +And so that's what we did. +We turned off the lights, and then we put it in a vacuum and sucked out all the air, and then we cooled it down Now, all alone in the elevator, the little chunk of metal is free to act however it wanted. +And so we measured its motion. +We found it was moving in really weird ways. +Instead of just sitting perfectly still, it was vibrating, and the way it was vibrating was breathing something like this -- like expanding and contracting bellows. +And by giving it a gentle nudge, we were able to make it both vibrate and not vibrate at the same time -- something that's only allowed with quantum mechanics. +So what I'm telling you here is something truly fantastic. +What does it mean for one thing to be both vibrating and not vibrating at the same time? +So let's think about the atoms. +So in one case: all the trillions of atoms that make up that chunk of metal are sitting still and at the same time those same atoms are moving up and down. +Now it's only at precise times when they align. +The rest of the time they're delocalized. +That means that every atom is in two different places at the same time, which in turn means the entire chunk of metal is in two different places. +I think this is really cool. +Really. +It was worth locking myself in a clean room to do this for all those years because, check this out, the difference in scale between a single atom and that chunk of metal is about the same as the difference between that chunk of metal and you. +So if a single atom can be in two different places at the same time, that chunk of metal can be in two different places, then why not you? +I mean, this is just my logical side talking. +So imagine if you're in multiple places at the same time, what would that be like? +How would your consciousness handle your body being delocalized in space? +There's one more part to the story. +It's when we warmed it up, and we turned on the lights and looked inside the box, we saw that the piece metal was still there in one piece. +And so I had to develop this new intuition, that it seems like all the objects in the elevator are really just quantum objects just crammed into a tiny space. +You hear a lot of talk about how quantum mechanics says that everything is all interconnected. +Well, that's not quite right. +It's more than that; it's deeper. +It's that those connections, your connections to all the things around you, literally define who you are, and that's the profound weirdness of quantum mechanics. +Thank you. + +In 2007, I decided that we needed to reconceptualize how we thought about economic development. +Our new goal should be that when every family thinks about where they want to live and work, they should be able to choose between at least a handful of different cities that were all competing to attract new residents. +Now we're a long way away from that goal right now. +There are billions of people in developing countries who don't have even a single city that would be willing to welcome them. +But the amazing thing about cities is they're worth so much more than it costs to build them. +So we could easily supply the world with dozens, maybe hundreds, of new cities. +Now this might sound preposterous to you if you've never thought about new cities. +But just substitute apartment building for cities. +Imagine half the people who wanted to be in apartments already had them; the other half aren't there yet. +You could try and expand the capacity by doing additions on all the existing apartments. +But you know what you'd run into is those apartments and the surrounding areas have rules to avoid discomfort and the distractions of construction. +So it's extremely hard to do all of those additions. +But you could go out someplace brand new, build a brand new apartment building, as long as the rules there were ones that facilitated construction rather than getting in the way. +So I proposed that governments create new reform zones big enough to hold cities and gave them a name: charter cities. +Later I learned that at about this same time, Javier and Octavio were thinking about the challenge of reform in Honduras. +They knew that about 75,000 Hondurans every year would leave to go to the United States, and they wanted to ask, what could they do to make sure that those people could stay and do the same things in Honduras. +At one point, Javier said to Octavio, "What if we took some of our empty land -- what if we just gave it to an embassy -- give some to the U.S. embassy; give some to the Canadian embassy -- and then if people want to go work under the rules of Canada or under the rules of the United States, they can go get jobs, do everything they do on those embassy grounds that they would otherwise have to go to Canada or the U.S. to do?" +In the summer of 2009, Honduras went through a wrenching constitutional crisis. +At the next regularly scheduled election, Pepe Lobo won in a landslide on a platform that promised reform, but reconciliation as well. +He asked Octavio to be his chief of staff. +Meanwhile, I was getting ready to give a talk at TEDGlobal. +Through a process of refinement, trial and error, a lot of user testing, I tried to boil this complicated concept of charter city down to the bare essentials. +The first point was the importance of rules, like those rules that say you can't come in and disturb all the existing apartment holders. +We pay a lot of attention to new technologies, but it takes technologies and rules to get progress, and it's usually the rules that hold us back. +In the fall of 2010, a friend from Guatemala sent Octavio a link to the TEDTalk. +He showed it to Javier. +They called me. +They said, "Let's present this to the leaders of our country." +So in December we met in Miami, in a hotel conference room. +I tried to explain this point about how valuable cities are, how much more valuable they are than they cost. +And I used this slide showing how valuable the raw land is in a place like New York City: notice, land that's worth thousands of dollars, in some cases, per square meter. +But it was a fairly abstract discussion, and at some point when there was a pause, Octavio said, "Paul, maybe we could watch the TEDTalk." +So the TEDTalk laid out in very simple terms, a charter city is a place where you start with uninhabited land, a charter that specifies the rules that will apply there and then a chance for people to opt in, to go live under those rules or not. +So I was asked by the president of Honduras who said that we need to do this project, this is important, this could be the way forward for our country. +I was asked to come to Tegucigalpa and talk again on January fourth and fifth. +So I presented another fact-filled lecture that included a slide like this, which tried to make the point that, if you want to create a lot of value in a city, it has to be very big. +This is a picture of Denver, and the outline is the new airport that was built in Denver. +This airport alone covers more than 100 square kilometers. +So I was trying to persuade the Hondurans, if you build a new city, you've got to start with a site that's at least 1,000 square kilometers. +That's more than 250 hundred-thousand acres. +Everybody applauded politely. +The faces in the audience were very serious and attentive. +The leader of the congress came up on stage and said, "Professor Romer, thank you very much for your lecture, but maybe we could watch the TEDTalk. +I've got it here on my laptop." +So I sat down, and they played the TEDTalk. +And it got to the essence, which is that a new city could offer new choices for people. +There would be a choice of a city which you could go to which could be in Honduras, instead of hundreds of miles away in the North. +And it also involved new choices for leaders. +Because the leaders in the government there in Honduras would need help from partner countries, who could benefit from partner countries who help them set up the rules in this charter and the enforcement, so everybody can trust that the charter really will be enforced. +And the insight of President Lobo was that that assurance of enforcement that I was thinking about as a way to get the foreign investors to come in and build the city could be equally important for all the different parties in Honduras who had suffered for so many years from fear and distrust. +We went and looked at a site. +This picture's from there. +It easily could hold a thousand square kilometers. +And shortly thereafter, on January 19th, they voted in the congress to amend their constitution to have a constitutional provision that allows for special development regions. +In a country which had just gone through this wrenching crisis, the vote in the congress in favor of this constitutional amendment was 124 to one. +All parties, all factions in society, backed this. +To be part of the constitution, you actually have to pass it twice in the congress. +On February 17th they passed it again with another vote of 114 to one. +Immediately after that vote, on February 21st to the 24th, a delegation of about 30 Hondurans went to the two places in the world that are most interested in getting into the city building business. +One is South Korea. +This is a picture of a big, new city center that's being built in South Korea -- bigger than downtown Boston. +Everything you see there was built in four years, after they spent four years getting the permits. +The other place that's very interested in city building is Singapore. +They've actually built two cities already in China and are preparing the third. +So if you think about this practically, here's where we are. +They've got a site; they're already thinking about this site for the second city. +They're putting in place a legal system that could allow for managers to come in, and also an external legal system. +One country has already volunteered to let its supreme court be the court of final appeal for the new judicial system there. +There's designers and builders of cities who are very interested. +They even can bring with them some financing. +But the one thing you know they've already solved is that there's lots of tenants. +There's lots of businesses that would like to locate in the Americas, especially in a place with a free trade zone, and there's lots of people who'd like to go there. +Around the world, there's 700 million people who say they'd like to move permanently someplace else right now. +There's a million a year who leave Latin America to go to the United States. +Many of these are a father who has to leave his family behind to go get a job -- sometimes a single mother who has to get enough money to even pay for food or clothing. +Sadly, sometimes there are even children who are trying to get reunited with their parents that they haven't seen, in some cases, for a decade. +So what kind of an idea is it to think about building a brand new city in Honduras? +Or to build a dozen of these, or a hundred of these, around the world? +What kind of an idea is it to think about insisting that every family have a choice of several cities that are competing to attract new residents? +This is an idea worth spreading. +And my friends from Honduras asked me to say thank you, TED. + +Do you know how many choices you make in a typical day? +Do you know how many choices you make in typical week? +I recently did a survey with over 2,000 Americans, and the average number of choices that the typical American reports making is about 70 in a typical day. +There was also recently a study done with CEOs in which they followed CEOs around for a whole week. +And these scientists simply documented all the various tasks that these CEOs engaged in and how much time they spent engaging in making decisions related to these tasks. +And they found that the average CEO engaged in about 139 tasks in a week. +Each task was made up of many, many, many sub-choices of course. +50 percent of their decisions were made in nine minutes or less. +Only about 12 percent of the decisions did they make an hour or more of their time. +Think about your own choices. +Do you know how many choices make it into your nine minute category versus your one hour category? +How well do you think you're doing at managing those choices? +Today I want to talk about one of the biggest modern day choosing problems that we have, which is the choice overload problem. +I want to talk about the problem and some potential solutions. +Now as I talk about this problem, I'm going to have some questions for you and I'm going to want to know your answers. +So when I ask you a question, since I'm blind, only raise your hand if you want to burn off some calories. +Otherwise, when I ask you a question, and if your answer is yes, So for my first question for you today: Are you guys ready to hear about the choice overload problem? +Thank you. +So when I was a graduate student at Stanford University, I used to go to this very, very upscale grocery store; at least at that time it was truly upscale. +It was a store called Draeger's. +Now this store, it was almost like going to an amusement park. +They had 250 different kinds of mustards and vinegars and over 500 different kinds of fruits and vegetables and more than two dozen different kinds of bottled water -- and this was during a time when we actually used to drink tap water. +I used to love going to this store, but on one occasion I asked myself, well how come you never buy anything? +Here's their olive oil aisle. +They had over 75 different kinds of olive oil, including those that were in a locked case that came from thousand-year-old olive trees. +So I one day decided to pay a visit to the manager, and I asked the manager, "Is this model of offering people all this choice really working?" +And he pointed to the busloads of tourists that would show up everyday, with cameras ready usually. +We decided to do a little experiment, and we picked jam for our experiment. +Here's their jam aisle. +They had 348 different kinds of jam. +We set up a little tasting booth right near the entrance of the store. +We there put out six different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam, and we looked at two things: First, in which case were people more likely to stop, sample some jam? +More people stopped when there were 24, about 60 percent, than when there were six, about 40 percent. +The next thing we looked at is in which case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam. +Now we see the opposite effect. +Of the people who stopped when there were 24, only three percent of them actually bought a jar of jam. +Of the people who stopped when there were six, well now we saw that 30 percent of them actually bought a jar of jam. +Now if you do the math, people were at least six times more likely to buy a jar of jam if they encountered six than if they encountered 24. +Now choosing not to buy a jar of jam is probably good for us -- at least it's good for our waistlines -- but it turns out that this choice overload problem affects us even in very consequential decisions. +We choose not to choose, even when it goes against our best self-interests. +So now for the topic of today: financial savings. +Now I'm going to describe to you a study I did with Gur Huberman, Emir Kamenica, Wei Jang where we looked at the retirement savings decisions of nearly a million Americans from about 650 plans all in the U.S. +And what we looked at was whether the number of fund offerings available in a retirement savings plan, the 401 plan, does that affect people's likelihood to save more for tomorrow. +And what we found was that indeed there was a correlation. +So in these plans, we had about 657 plans that ranged from offering people anywhere from two to 59 different fund offerings. +And what we found was that, the more funds offered, indeed, there was less participation rate. +So if you look at the extremes, those plans that offered you two funds, participation rates were around in the mid-70s -- still not as high as we want it to be. +In those plans that offered nearly 60 funds, participation rates have now dropped to about the 60th percentile. +Now it turns out that even if you do choose to participate when there are more choices present, even then, it has negative consequences. +So for those people who did choose to participate, the more choices available, the more likely people were to completely avoid stocks or equity funds. +The more choices available, the more likely they were to put all their money in pure money market accounts. +Now neither of these extreme decisions are the kinds of decisions that any of us would recommend for people when you're considering their future financial well-being. +Well, over the past decade, we have observed three main negative consequences to offering people more and more choices. +They're more likely to delay choosing -- procrastinate even when it goes against their best self-interest. +They're more likely to make worse choices -- worse financial choices, medical choices. +They're more likely to choose things that make them less satisfied, even when they do objectively better. +The main reason for this is because, we might enjoy gazing at those giant walls of mayonnaises, mustards, vinegars, jams, but we can't actually do the math of comparing and contrasting and actually picking from that stunning display. +So what I want to propose to you today are four simple techniques -- techniques that we have tested in one way or another in different research venues -- that you can easily apply in your businesses. +The first: Cut. +You've heard it said before, but it's never been more true than today, that less is more. +People are always upset when I say, "Cut." +They're always worried they're going to lose shelf space. +But in fact, what we're seeing more and more is that if you are willing to cut, get rid of those extraneous redundant options, well there's an increase in sales, there's a lowering of costs, there is an improvement of the choosing experience. +When Proctor & Gamble went from 26 different kinds of Head & Shoulders to 15, they saw an increase in sales by 10 percent. +When the Golden Cat Corporation got rid of their 10 worst-selling cat litter products, they saw an increase in profits by 87 percent -- a function of both increase in sales and lowering of costs. +You know, the average grocery store today offers you 45,000 products. +The typical Walmart today offers you 100,000 products. +But the ninth largest retailer, the ninth biggest retailer in the world today is Aldi, and it offers you only 1,400 products -- one kind of canned tomato sauce. +Now in the financial savings world, I think one of the best examples that has recently come out on how to best manage the choice offerings has actually been something that David Laibson was heavily involved in designing, which was the program that they have at Harvard. +Every single Harvard employee is now automatically enrolled in a lifecycle fund. +For those people who actually want to choose, they're given 20 funds, not 300 or more funds. +You know, often, people say, "I don't know how to cut. +They're all important choices." +And the first thing I do is I ask the employees, "Tell me how these choices are different from one another. +And if your employees can't tell them apart, neither can your consumers." +Now before we started our session this afternoon, I had a chat with Gary. +And Gary said that he would be willing to offer people in this audience an all-expenses-paid free vacation to the most beautiful road in the world. +Here's a description of the road. +And I'd like you to read it. +And now I'll give you a few seconds to read it and then I want you to clap your hands if you're ready to take Gary up on his offer. +Okay. Anybody who's ready to take him up on his offer. +Is that all? +All right, let me show you some more about this. +You guys knew there was a trick, didn't you. +Now who's ready to go on this trip. +I think I might have actually heard more hands. +All right. +Now in fact, you had objectively more information the first time around than the second time around, but I would venture to guess that you felt that it was more real the second time around. +Because the pictures made it feel more real to you. +Which brings me to the second technique for handling the choice overload problem, which is concretization. +That in order for people to understand the differences between the choices, they have to be able to understand the consequences associated with each choice, and that the consequences need to be felt in a vivid sort of way, in a very concrete way. +Why do people spend an average of 15 to 30 percent more when they use an ATM card or a credit card as opposed to cash? +Because it doesn't feel like real money. +And it turns out that making it feel more concrete can actually be a very positive tool to use in getting people to save more. +So a study that I did with Shlomo Benartzi and Alessandro Previtero, we did a study with people at ING -- employees that are all working at ING -- and now these people were all in a session where they're doing enrollment for their 401 plan. +And during that session, we kept the session exactly the way it used to be, but we added one little thing. +The one little thing we added was we asked people to just think about all the positive things that would happen in your life if you saved more. +By doing that simple thing, there was an increase in enrollment by 20 percent and there was an increase in the amount of people willing to save or the amount that they were willing to put down into their savings account by four percent. +The third technique: Categorization. +We can handle more categories than we can handle choices. +So for example, here's a study we did in a magazine aisle. +It turns out that in Wegmans grocery stores up and down the northeast corridor, the magazine aisles range anywhere from 331 different kinds of magazines all the way up to 664. +But you know what? +If I show you 600 magazines and I divide them up into 10 categories, versus I show you 400 magazines and divide them up into 20 categories, you believe that I have given you more choice and a better choosing experience if I gave you the 400 than if I gave you the 600. +Because the categories tell me how to tell them apart. +Here are two different jewelry displays. +One is called "Jazz" and the other one is called "Swing." +If you think the display on the left is Swing and the display on the right is Jazz, clap your hands. +Okay, there's some. +If you think the one on the left is Jazz and the one on the right is Swing, clap your hands. +Okay, a bit more. +Now it turns out you're right. +The one on the left is Jazz and the one on the right is Swing, but you know what? +This is a highly useless categorization scheme. +The categories need to say something to the chooser, not the choice-maker. +And you often see that problem when it comes down to those long lists of all these funds. +Who are they actually supposed to be informing? +My fourth technique: Condition for complexity. +It turns out we can actually handle a lot more information than we think we can, we've just got to take it a little easier. +We have to gradually increase the complexity. +I'm going to show you one example of what I'm talking about. +Let's take a very, very complicated decision: buying a car. +Here's a German car manufacturer that gives you the opportunity to completely custom make your car. +You've got to make 60 different decisions, completely make up your car. +Now these decisions vary in the number of choices that they offer per decision. +Car colors, exterior car colors -- I've got 56 choices. +Engines, gearshift -- four choices. +So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to vary the order in which these decisions appear. +So half of the customers are going to go from high choice, 56 car colors, to low choice, four gearshifts. +The other half of the customers are going to go from low choice, four gearshifts, to 56 car colors, high choice. +What am I going to look at? +How engaged you are. +If you keep hitting the default button per decision, that means you're getting overwhelmed, that means I'm losing you. +What you find is the people who go from high choice to low choice, they're hitting that default button over and over and over again. +We're losing them. +They go from low choice to high choice, they're hanging in there. +It's the same information. It's the same number of choices. +The only thing that I have done is I have varied the order in which that information is presented. +If I start you off easy, I learn how to choose. +Even though choosing gearshift doesn't tell me anything about my preferences for interior decor, it still prepares me for how to choose. +It also gets me excited about this big product that I'm putting together, so I'm more willing to be motivated to be engaged. +So let me recap. +I have talked about four techniques for mitigating the problem of choice overload -- cut -- get rid of the extraneous alternatives; concretize -- make it real; categorize -- we can handle more categories, less choices; condition for complexity. +All of these techniques that I'm describing to you today are designed to help you manage your choices -- better for you, you can use them on yourself, better for the people that you are serving. +Because I believe that the key to getting the most from choice is to be choosy about choosing. +And the more we're able to be choosy about choosing the better we will be able to practice the art of choosing. +Thank you very much. + +Hi. I'm Kevin Allocca, I'm the trends manager at YouTube, and I professionally watch YouTube videos. +It's true. +So we're going to talk a little bit today about how videos go viral and then why that even matters. +We all want to be stars -- celebrities, singers, comedians -- and when I was younger, that seemed so very, very hard to do. +But now Web video has made it so that any of us or any of the creative things that we do can become completely famous in a part of our world's culture. +Any one of you could be famous on the Internet by next Saturday. +But there are over 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. +And of that, only a tiny percentage ever goes viral and gets tons of views and becomes a cultural moment. +So how does it happen? +Three things: tastemakers, communities of participation and unexpectedness. +All right, let's go. +Oh, my God. Oh, my God. +Oh, my God! +Wooo! +Ohhhhh, wowwww! +Last year, Bear Vasquez posted this video that he had shot outside his home in Yosemite National Park. +In 2010, it was viewed 23 million times. +This is a chart of what it looked like when it first became popular last summer. +But he didn't actually set out to make a viral video, Bear. +He just wanted to share a rainbow. +Because that's what you do when your name is Yosemite Mountain Bear. +And he had posted lots of nature videos in fact. +And this video had actually been posted all the way back in January. +So what happened here? +Jimmy Kimmel actually. +Jimmy Kimmel posted this tweet that would eventually propel the video to be as popular as it would become. +Because tastemakers like Jimmy Kimmel introduce us to new and interesting things and bring them to a larger audience. +It's Friday, Friday. Gotta get down on Friday. Everybody's looking forward to the weekend, weekend. Friday, Friday. Gettin' down on Friday. So you didn't think that we could actually have this conversation without talking about this video I hope. +Rebecca Black's "Friday" is one of the most popular videos of the year. +It's been seen nearly 200 million times this year. +This is a chart of what it looked like. +And similar to "Double Rainbow," it seems to have just sprouted up out of nowhere. +So what happened on this day? +Well it was a Friday, this is true. +And if you're wondering about those other spikes, those are also Fridays. +But what about this day, this one particular Friday? +Well Tosh.0 picked it up, a lot of blogs starting writing about. +Michael J. Nelson from Mystery Science Theater was one of the first people to post a joke about the video on Twitter. +But what's important is that an individual or a group of tastemakers took a point of view and they shared that with a larger audience, accelerating the process. +And so then this community formed of people who shared this big inside joke and they started talking about it and doing things with it. +And now there are 10,000 parodies of "Friday" on YouTube. +Even in the first seven days, there was one parody for every other day of the week. +Unlike the one-way entertainment of the 20th century, this community participation is how we become a part of the phenomenon -- either by spreading it or by doing something new with it. +So "Nyan Cat" is a looped animation with looped music. +It's this, just like this. +It's been viewed nearly 50 million times this year. +And if you think that that is weird, you should know that there is a three-hour version of this that's been viewed four million times. +Even cats were watching this video. +Cats were watching other cats watch this video. +But what's important here is the creativity that it inspired amongst this techie, geeky Internet culture. +There were remixes. +Someone made an old timey version. +And then it went international. +An entire remix community sprouted up that brought it from being just a stupid joke to something that we can all actually be a part of. +Because we don't just enjoy now, we participate. +And who could have predicted any of this? +Who could have predicted "Double Rainbow" or Rebecca Black or "Nyan Cat?" +What scripts could you have written that would have contained this in it? +In a world where over two days of video get uploaded every minute, only that which is truly unique and unexpected can stand out in the way that these things have. +When a friend of mine told me that I needed to see this great video about a guy protesting bicycle fines in New York City, I admit I wasn't very interested. +So I got a ticket for not riding in the bike lane, but often there are obstructions that keep you from properly riding in the bike lane. +By being totally surprising and humorous, Casey Niestat got his funny idea and point seen five million times. +And so this approach holds for anything new that we do creatively. +And so it all brings us to one big question ... +What does this mean? +Ohhhh. +What does it mean? +Tastemakers, creative participating communities, complete unexpectedness, these are characteristics of a new kind of media and a new kind of culture where anyone has access and the audience defines the popularity. +I mean, as mentioned earlier, one of the biggest stars in the world right now, Justin Bieber, got his start on YouTube. +No one has to green-light your idea. +And we all now feel some ownership in our own pop culture. +And these are not characteristics of old media, and they're barely true of the media of today, but they will define the entertainment of the future. +Thank you. + +How can I speak in 10 minutes about the bonds of women over three generations, about how the astonishing strength of those bonds took hold in the life of a four-year-old girl huddled with her young sister, her mother and her grandmother for five days and nights in a small boat in the China Sea more than 30 years ago, bonds that took hold in the life of that small girl and never let go -- that small girl now living in San Francisco and speaking to you today? +This is not a finished story. +It is a jigsaw puzzle still being put together. +Let me tell you about some of the pieces. +Imagine the first piece: a man burning his life's work. +He is a poet, a playwright, a man whose whole life had been balanced on the single hope of his country's unity and freedom. +Imagine him as the communists enter Saigon, confronting the fact that his life had been a complete waste. +Words, for so long his friends, now mocked him. +He retreated into silence. +He died broken by history. +He is my grandfather. +I never knew him in real life. +But our lives are much more than our memories. +My grandmother never let me forget his life. +My duty was not to allow it to have been in vain, and my lesson was to learn that, yes, history tried to crush us, but we endured. +The next piece of the jigsaw is of a boat in the early dawn slipping silently out to sea. +My mother, Mai, was 18 when her father died -- already in an arranged marriage, already with two small girls. +For her, life had distilled itself into one task: the escape of her family and a new life in Australia. +It was inconceivable to her that she would not succeed. +So after a four-year saga that defies fiction, a boat slipped out to sea disguised as a fishing vessel. +All the adults knew the risks. +The greatest fear was of pirates, rape and death. +Like most adults on the boat, my mother carried a small bottle of poison. +If we were captured, first my sister and I, then she and my grandmother would drink. +My first memories are from the boat -- the steady beat of the engine, the bow dipping into each wave, the vast and empty horizon. +I don't remember the pirates who came many times, but were bluffed by the bravado of the men on our boat, or the engine dying and failing to start for six hours. +But I do remember the lights on the oil rig off the Malaysian coast and the young man who collapsed and died, the journey's end too much for him, and the first apple I tasted, given to me by the men on the rig. +No apple has ever tasted the same. +After three months in a refugee camp, we landed in Melbourne. +And the next piece of the jigsaw is about four women across three generations shaping a new life together. +We settled in Footscray, a working-class suburb whose demographic is layers of immigrants. +Unlike the settled middle-class suburbs, whose existence I was oblivious of, there was no sense of entitlement in Footscray. +The smells from shop doors were from the rest of the world. +And the snippets of halting English were exchanged between people who had one thing in common, they were starting again. +My mother worked on farms, then on a car assembly line, working six days, double shifts. +Somehow she found time to study English and gain IT qualifications. +We were poor. +All the dollars were allocated and extra tuition in English and mathematics was budgeted for regardless of what missed out, which was usually new clothes; they were always secondhand. +Two pairs of stockings for school, each to hide the holes in the other. +A school uniform down to the ankles, because it had to last for six years. +And there were rare but searing chants of "slit-eye" and the occasional graffiti: "Asian, go home." +Go home to where? +Something stiffened inside me. +There was a gathering of resolve and a quiet voice saying, "I will bypass you." +My mother, my sister and I slept in the same bed. +My mother was exhausted each night, but we told one another about our day and listened to the movements of my grandmother around the house. +My mother suffered from nightmares all about the boat. +And my job was to stay awake until her nightmares came so I could wake her. +She opened a computer store then studied to be a beautician and opened another business. +And the women came with their stories about men who could not make the transition, angry and inflexible, and troubled children caught between two worlds. +Grants and sponsors were sought. +Centers were established. +I lived in parallel worlds. +In one, I was the classic Asian student, relentless in the demands that I made on myself. +In the other, I was enmeshed in lives that were precarious, tragically scarred by violence, drug abuse and isolation. +But so many over the years were helped. +And for that work, when I was a final year law student, I was chosen as the young Australian of the year. +And I was catapulted from one piece of the jigsaw to another, and their edges didn't fit. +Tan Le, anonymous Footscray resident, was now Tan Le, refugee and social activist, invited to speak in venues she had never heard of and into homes whose existence she could never have imagined. +I didn't know the protocols. +I didn't know how to use the cutlery. +I didn't know how to talk about wine. +I didn't know how to talk about anything. +I wanted to retreat to the routines and comfort of life in an unsung suburb -- a grandmother, a mother and two daughters ending each day as they had for almost 20 years, telling one another the story of their day and falling asleep, the three of us still in the same bed. +I told my mother I couldn't do it. +She reminded me that I was now the same age she had been when we boarded the boat. +No had never been an option. +"Just do it," she said, "and don't be what you're not." +So I spoke out on youth unemployment and education and the neglect of the marginalized and the disenfranchised. +And the more candidly I spoke, the more I was asked to speak. +I met people from all walks of life, so many of them doing the thing they loved, living on the frontiers of possibility. +And even though I finished my degree, I realized I could not settle into a career in law. +There had to be another piece of the jigsaw. +And I realized at the same time that it is okay to be an outsider, a recent arrival, new on the scene -- and not just okay, but something to be thankful for, perhaps a gift from the boat. +Because being an insider can so easily mean collapsing the horizons, can so easily mean accepting the presumptions of your province. +I have stepped outside my comfort zone enough now to know that, yes, the world does fall apart, but not in the way that you fear. +Possibilities that would not have been allowed were outrageously encouraged. +There was an energy there, an implacable optimism, a strange mixture of humility and daring. +So I followed my hunches. +I gathered around me a small team of people for whom the label "It can't be done" was an irresistible challenge. +For a year we were penniless. +At the end of each day, I made a huge pot of soup which we all shared. +We worked well into each night. +Most of our ideas were crazy, but a few were brilliant, and we broke through. +I made the decision to move to the U.S. +after only one trip. +My hunches again. +Three months later I had relocated, and the adventure has continued. +Before I close though, let me tell you about my grandmother. +She grew up at a time when Confucianism was the social norm and the local Mandarin was the person who mattered. +Life hadn't changed for centuries. +Her father died soon after she was born. +Her mother raised her alone. +At 17 she became the second wife of a Mandarin whose mother beat her. +With no support from her husband, she caused a sensation by taking him to court and prosecuting her own case, and a far greater sensation when she won. +"It can't be done" was shown to be wrong. +I was taking a shower in a hotel room in Sydney the moment she died 600 miles away in Melbourne. +I looked through the shower screen and saw her standing on the other side. +I knew she had come to say goodbye. +My mother phoned minutes later. +A few days later, we went to a Buddhist temple in Footscray and sat around her casket. +We told her stories and assured her that we were still with her. +At midnight the monk came and told us he had to close the casket. +My mother asked us to feel her hand. +She asked the monk, "Why is it that her hand is so warm and the rest of her is so cold?" +"Because you have been holding it since this morning," he said. +"You have not let it go." +If there is a sinew in our family, it runs through the women. +Given who we were and how life had shaped us, we can now see that the men who might have come into our lives would have thwarted us. +Defeat would have come too easily. +Now I would like to have my own children, and I wonder about the boat. +Who could ever wish it on their own? +Yet I am afraid of privilege, of ease, of entitlement. +Can I give them a bow in their lives, dipping bravely into each wave, the unperturbed and steady beat of the engine, the vast horizon that guarantees nothing? +I don't know. +But if I could give it and still see them safely through, I would. +And also, Tan's mother is here today in the fourth or fifth row. + +I'm here to share my photography. +Or is it photography? +Because, of course, this is a photograph that you can't take with your camera. +Yet, my interest in photography started as I got my first digital camera at the age of 15. +It mixed with my earlier passion for drawing, but it was a bit different, because using the camera, the process was in the planning instead. +And when you take a photograph with a camera, the process ends when you press the trigger. +So to me it felt like photography was more about being at the right place and the right time. +I felt like anyone could do that. +So I wanted to create something different, something where the process starts when you press the trigger. +Photos like this: construction going on along a busy road. +But it has an unexpected twist. +And despite that, it retains a level of realism. +Or photos like these -- both dark and colorful, but all with a common goal of retaining the level of realism. +When I say realism, I mean photo-realism. +Because, of course, it's not something you can capture really, but I always want it to look like it could have been captured somehow as a photograph. +Photos where you will need a brief moment to think to figure out the trick. +So it's more about capturing an idea than about capturing a moment really. +But what's the trick that makes it look realistic? +Is it something about the details or the colors? +Is it something about the light? +What creates the illusion? +Sometimes the perspective is the illusion. +But in the end, it comes down to how we interpret the world and how it can be realized on a two-dimensional surface. +It's not really what is realistic, it's what we think looks realistic really. +So I think the basics are quite simple. +I just see it as a puzzle of reality where you can take different pieces of reality and put it together to create alternate reality. +And let me show you a simple example. +Here we have three perfectly imaginable physical objects, something we all can relate to living in a three-dimensional world. +But combined in a certain way, they can create something that still looks three-dimensional, like it could exist. +But at the same time, we know it can't. +So we trick our brains, because our brain simply doesn't accept the fact that it doesn't really make sense. +And I see the same process with combining photographs. +It's just really about combining different realities. +So the things that make a photograph look realistic, I think it's the things that we don't even think about, the things all around us in our daily lives. +But when combining photographs, this is really important to consider, because otherwise it just looks wrong somehow. +So I would like to say that there are three simple rules to follow to achieve a realistic result. +As you can see, these images aren't really special. +But combined, they can create something like this. +So the first rule is that photos combined should have the same perspective. +Secondly, photos combined should have the same type of light. +And these two images both fulfill these two requirements -- shot at the same height and in the same type of light. +The third one is about making it impossible to distinguish where the different images begin and end by making it seamless. +Make it impossible to say how the image actually was composed. +So by matching color, contrast and brightness in the borders between the different images, adding photographic defects like depth of field, desaturated colors and noise, we erase the borders between the different images and make it look like one single image, despite the fact that one image can contain hundreds of layers basically. +So here's another example. +One might think that this is just an image of a landscape and the lower part is what's manipulated. +But this image is actually entirely composed of photographs from different locations. +I personally think that it's easier to actually create a place than to find a place, because then you don't need to compromise with the ideas in your head. +But it does require a lot of planning. +And getting this idea during winter, I knew that I had several months to plan it, to find the different locations for the pieces of the puzzle basically. +So for example, the fish was captured on a fishing trip. +The shores are from a different location. +The underwater part was captured in a stone pit. +And yeah, I even turned the house on top of the island red to make it look more Swedish. +So to achieve a realistic result, I think it comes down to planning. +It always starts with a sketch, an idea. +Then it's about combining the different photographs. +And here every piece is very well planned. +And if you do a good job capturing the photos, the result can be quite beautiful and also quite realistic. +So all the tools are out there, and the only thing that limits us is our imagination. +Thank you. + +I would like to talk to you about why many e-health projects fail. +And I really think that the most important thing of it is that we stopped listening to patients. +And one of the things we did at Radboud University is we appointed a chief listening officer. +Not in a very scientific way -- she puts up a little cup of coffee or cup of tea and asks patients, family, relatives, "What's up? +How could we help you?" +And we think, we like to think, that this is one of the major problems why all -- maybe not all -- but most of the e-health projects fail, since we stopped listening. +This is my WiFi scale. It's a very simple thing. +It's got one knob, on/off. +And every morning I hop on it. +And yes, I've got a challenge, as you might see. +And I put my challenge on 95 kg. +But the thing is that it's made this simple that whenever I hop on, it sends my data through Google Health as well. +And it's collected by my general practitioner as well, so he can see what's my problem in weight, not on the very moment that I need cardiologic support or something like it, but also looking backward. +But there's another thing. +As some of you might know, I've got more than 4,000 followers on Twitter. +So every morning I hop on my WiFi scale and before I'm in my car, people start talking to me, "I think you need a light lunch today, Lucien." +But that's the nicest thing that could happen, since this is peer pressure, peer pressure used to help patients -- since this could be used for obesity, it could be used to stop smoking in patients. +But on the other hand, it also could be used to get people from out of their chairs and try to work together in some kind of gaming activity to get more control of their health. +As of next week, it will soon be available. +There will be this little blood pressure meter connected to an iPhone or something or other. +And people will be able, from their homes, to take their blood pressure, send it into their doctor and eventually share it with others, for instance, for over a hundred dollars. +And this is the point where patients get into position and can collect, not only their own control again, be captain of their own ship, but also can help us in health care due to the challenges that we face, like health care cost explosion, doubled demand and things like that. +Make techniques that are easy to use and start with this to embrace patients in the team. +And you can do this with techniques like this, but also by crowd-sourcing. +And one of the things we did I would like to share with you introduced by a little video. +We've all got navigation controls in our car. +We maybe even [have] it in our cellphone. +We know perfectly where all the ATMs are about the city of Maastricht. +The other thing is we know where all the gas stations are. +And sure, we could find fast food chains. +But where would be the nearest AED to help this patient? +We asked around and nobody knew. +Nobody knew where the nearest life-saving AED was to be obtained right now. +So what we did, we crowdsourced The Netherlands. +We set up a website and asked the crowd, "If you see an AED, please submit it, tell us where it is, tell us when it's open," since sometimes in office hours sometimes it's closed, of course. +And over 10,000 AEDs already in The Netherlands already have been submitted. +The next step we took was to find the applications for it. +And we built an iPad application. +We made an application for Layar, augmented reality, to find these AEDs. +And whenever you are in a city like Maastricht and somebody collapses, you can use your iPhone, and within the next weeks also run your Microsoft cellphone, to find the nearest AED which can save lives. +And as of today, we would like to introduce this, not only as AED4EU, which is what the product is called, but also AED4US. +And we would like to start this on a worldwide level. +And [we're] asking all of our colleagues in the rest of the world, colleague universities, to help us to find and work and act like a hub to crowd-source all these AEDs all around the world. +That whenever you're on holiday and somebody collapses, might it be your own relative or someone just in front of you, you can find this. +The other thing we would like to ask is of companies also all over the world that will be able to help us validate these AEDs. +These might be courier services or cable guys for instance, just to see whether the AED that's submitted still is in place. +So please help us on this one and try to make not only health a little bit better, but take control of it. +Thank you. + +Today I'm going to talk about unexpected discoveries. +Now I work in the solar technology industry. +And my small startup is looking to force ourselves into the environment by paying attention to ... +... paying attention to crowd-sourcing. +It's just a quick video of what we do. +Huh. Hang on a moment. +It might take a moment to load. +We'll just -- we can just skip -- I'll just skip through the video instead ... +No. +This is not ... +Okay. +Solar technology is ... +Oh, that's all my time? +Okay. Thank you very much. + +So a couple of years ago I started a program to try to get the rockstar tech and design people to take a year off and work in the one environment that represents pretty much everything they're supposed to hate; we have them work in government. +The program is called Code for America, and it's a little bit like a Peace Corps for geeks. +We select a few fellows every year and we have them work with city governments. +Instead of sending them off into the Third World, we send them into the wilds of City Hall. +And there they make great apps, they work with city staffers. +But really what they're doing is they're showing what's possible with technology today. +So meet Al. +Al is a fire hydrant in the city of Boston. +Here it kind of looks like he's looking for a date, but what he's really looking for is for someone to shovel him out when he gets snowed in, because he knows he's not very good at fighting fires when he's covered in four feet of snow. +Now how did he come to be looking for help in this very unique manner? +We had a team of fellows in Boston last year through the Code for America program. +They were there in February, and it snowed a lot in February last year. +And they noticed that the city never gets to digging out these fire hydrants. +But one fellow in particular, a guy named Erik Michaels-Ober, noticed something else, and that's that citizens are shoveling out sidewalks right in front of these things. +So he did what any good developer would do, he wrote an app. +It's a cute little app where you can adopt a fire hydrant. +So you agree to dig it out when it snows. +If you do, you get to name it, and he called the first one Al. +And if you don't, someone can steal it from you. +So it's got cute little game dynamics on it. +This is a modest little app. +It's probably the smallest of the 21 apps that the fellows wrote last year. +But it's doing something that no other government technology does. +It's spreading virally. +There's a guy in the I.T. department of the City of Honolulu who saw this app and realized that he could use it, not for snow, but to get citizens to adopt tsunami sirens. +It's very important that these tsunami sirens work, but people steal the batteries out of them. +So he's getting citizens to check on them. +And then Seattle decided to use it to get citizens to clear out clogged storm drains. +And Chicago just rolled it out to get people to sign up to shovel sidewalks when it snows. +So we now know of nine cities that are planning to use this. +And this has spread just frictionlessly, organically, naturally. +If you know anything about government technology, you know that this isn't how it normally goes. +Procuring software usually takes a couple of years. +We had a team that worked on a project in Boston last year that took three people about two and a half months. +It was a way that parents could figure out which were the right public schools for their kids. +We were told afterward that if that had gone through normal channels, it would have taken at least two years and it would have cost about two million dollars. +And that's nothing. +There is one project in the California court system right now that so far cost taxpayers two billion dollars, and it doesn't work. +And there are projects like this at every level of government. +So an app that takes a couple of days to write and then spreads virally, that's sort of a shot across the bow to the institution of government. +It suggests how government could work better -- not more like a private company, as many people think it should. +And not even like a tech company, but more like the Internet itself. +And that means permissionless, it means open, it means generative. +And that's important. +But what's more important about this app is that it represents how a new generation is tackling the problem of government -- not as the problem of an ossified institution, but as a problem of collective action. +And that's great news, because, it turns out, we're very good at collective action with digital technology. +Now there's a very large community of people that are building the tools that we need to do things together effectively. +It's not just Code for America fellows, there are hundreds of people all over the country that are standing and writing civic apps every day in their own communities. +They haven't given up on government. +They are frustrated as hell with it, but they're not complaining about it, they're fixing it. +And these folks know something that we've lost sight of. +And that's that when you strip away all your feelings about politics and the line at the DMV and all those other things that we're really mad about, government is, at its core, in the words of Tim O'Reilly, "What we do together that we can't do alone." +Now a lot of people have given up on government. +And if you're one of those people, I would ask that you reconsider, because things are changing. +Politics is not changing; government is changing. +And because government ultimately derives its power from us -- remember "We the people?" -- how we think about it is going to effect how that change happens. +Now I didn't know very much about government when I started this program. +And like a lot of people, I thought government was basically about getting people elected to office. +Well after two years, I've come to the conclusion that, especially local government, is about opossums. +This is the call center for the services and information line. +It's generally where you will get if you call 311 in your city. +If you should ever have the chance to staff your city's call center, as our fellow Scott Silverman did as part of the program -- in fact, they all do that -- you will find that people call government with a very wide range of issues, including having an opossum stuck in your house. +So Scott gets this call. +He types "Opossum" into this official knowledge base. +He doesn't really come up with anything. He starts with animal control. +And finally, he says, "Look, can you just open all the doors to your house and play music really loud and see if the thing leaves?" +So that worked. So booya for Scott. +But that wasn't the end of the opossums. +Boston doesn't just have a call center. +It has an app, a Web and mobile app, called Citizens Connect. +Now we didn't write this app. +This is the work of the very smart people at the Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston. +So one day -- this is an actual report -- this came in: "Opossum in my trashcan. Can't tell if it's dead. +How do I get this removed?" +But what happens with Citizens Connect is different. +So Scott was speaking person-to-person. +But on Citizens Connect everything is public, so everybody can see this. +And in this case, a neighbor saw it. +And the next report we got said, "I walked over to this location, found the trashcan behind the house. +Opossum? Check. Living? Yep. +Turned trashcan on its side. Walked home. +Goodnight sweet opossum." +Pretty simple. +So this is great. This is the digital meeting the physical. +And it's also a great example of government getting in on the crowd-sourcing game. +But it's also a great example of government as a platform. +And I don't mean necessarily a technological definition of platform here. +I'm just talking about a platform for people to help themselves and to help others. +So one citizen helped another citizen, but government played a key role here. +It connected those two people. +And it could have connected them with government services if they'd been needed, but a neighbor is a far better and cheaper alternative to government services. +When one neighbor helps another, we strengthen our communities. +We call animal control, it just costs a lot of money. +Now one of the important things we need to think about government is that it's not the same thing as politics. +And most people get that, but they think that one is the input to the other. +That our input to the system of government is voting. +Now how many times have we elected a political leader -- and sometimes we spend a lot of energy getting a new political leader elected -- and then we sit back and we expect government to reflect our values and meet our needs, and then not that much changes? +That's because government is like a vast ocean and politics is the six-inch layer on top. +And what's under that is what we call bureaucracy. +And we say that word with such contempt. +But it's that contempt that keeps this thing that we own and we pay for as something that's working against us, this other thing, and then we're disempowering ourselves. +People seem to think politics is sexy. +If we want this institution to work for us, we're going to have to make bureaucracy sexy. +Because that's where the real work of government happens. +We have to engage with the machinery of government. +So that's OccupytheSEC movement has done. +Have you seen these guys? +It's a group of concerned citizens that have written a very detailed 325-page report that's a response to the SEC's request for comment on the Financial Reform Bill. +That's not being politically active, that's being bureaucratically active. +Now for those of us who've given up on government, it's time that we asked ourselves about the world that we want to leave for our children. +You have to see the enormous challenges that they're going to face. +Do we really think we're going to get where we need to go without fixing the one institution that can act on behalf of all of us? +We can't do without government, but we do need it to be more effective. +The good news is that technology is making it possible to fundamentally reframe the function of government in a way that can actually scale by strengthening civil society. +And there's a generation out there that's grown up on the Internet, and they know that it's not that hard to do things together, you just have to architect the systems the right way. +Now the average age of our fellows is 28, so I am, begrudgingly, almost a generation older than most of them. +This is a generation that's grown up taking their voices pretty much for granted. +They're not fighting that battle that we're all fighting about who gets to speak; they all get to speak. +They can express their opinion on any channel at any time, and they do. +So when they're faced with the problem of government, they don't care as much about using their voices. +They're using their hands. +They're using their hands to write applications that make government work better. +And those applications let us use our hands to make our communities better. +That could be shoveling out a hydrant, pulling a weed, turning over a garbage can with an opossum in it. +And certainly, we could have been shoveling out those fire hydrants all along, and many people do. +But these apps are like little digital reminders that we're not just consumers, and we're not just consumers of government, putting in our taxes and getting back services. +We're more than that, we're citizens. +And we're not going to fix government until we fix citizenship. +So the question I have for all of you here: When it comes to the big, important things that we need to do together, all of us together, are we just going to be a crowd of voices, or are we also going to be a crowd of hands? +Thank you. + +Because I usually take the role of trying to explain to people how wonderful the new technologies that are coming along are going to be, and I thought that, since I was among friends here, I would tell you what I really think and try to look back and try to understand what is really going on here with these amazing jumps in technology that seem so fast that we can barely keep on top of it. +So I'm going to start out by showing just one very boring technology slide. +And then, so if you can just turn on the slide that's on. +This is just a random slide that I picked out of my file. +What I want to show you is not so much the details of the slide, but the general form of it. +This happens to be a slide of some analysis that we were doing about the power of RISC microprocessors versus the power of local area networks. +And the interesting thing about it is that this slide, like so many technology slides that we're used to, is a sort of a straight line on a semi-log curve. +In other words, every step here represents an order of magnitude in performance scale. +And this is a new thing that we talk about technology on semi-log curves. +Something really weird is going on here. +And that's basically what I'm going to be talking about. +So, if you could bring up the lights. +If you could bring up the lights higher, because I'm just going to use a piece of paper here. +Now why do we draw technology curves in semi-log curves? +Well the answer is, if I drew it on a normal curve where, let's say, this is years, this is time of some sort, and this is whatever measure of the technology that I'm trying to graph, the graphs look sort of silly. +They sort of go like this. +And they don't tell us much. +Now if I graph, for instance, some other technology, say transportation technology, on a semi-log curve, it would look very stupid, it would look like a flat line. +But when something like this happens, things are qualitatively changing. +So if transportation technology was moving along as fast as microprocessor technology, then the day after tomorrow, I would be able to get in a taxi cab and be in Tokyo in 30 seconds. +It's not moving like that. +And there's nothing precedented in the history of technology development of this kind of self-feeding growth where you go by orders of magnitude every few years. +Now the question that I'd like to ask is, if you look at these exponential curves, they don't go on forever. +Things just can't possibly keep changing as fast as they are. +One of two things is going to happen. +Either it's going to turn into a sort of classical S-curve like this, until something totally different comes along, or maybe it's going to do this. +That's about all it can do. +Now I'm an optimist, so I sort of think it's probably going to do something like that. +If so, that means that what we're in the middle of right now is a transition. +We're sort of on this line in a transition from the way the world used to be to some new way that the world is. +And so what I'm trying to ask, what I've been asking myself, is what's this new way that the world is? +What's that new state that the world is heading toward? +Because the transition seems very, very confusing when we're right in the middle of it. +Now when I was a kid growing up, the future was kind of the year 2000, and people used to talk about what would happen in the year 2000. +Now here's a conference in which people talk about the future, and you notice that the future is still at about the year 2000. +It's about as far as we go out. +So in other words, the future has kind of been shrinking one year per year for my whole lifetime. +Now I think that the reason is because we all feel that something's happening there. +That transition is happening. We can all sense it. +And we know that it just doesn't make too much sense to think out 30, 50 years because everything's going to be so different that a simple extrapolation of what we're doing just doesn't make any sense at all. +So what I would like to talk about is what that could be, what that transition could be that we're going through. +Now in order to do that I'm going to have to talk about a bunch of stuff that really has nothing to do with technology and computers. +Because I think the only way to understand this is to really step back and take a long time scale look at things. +So the time scale that I would like to look at this on is the time scale of life on Earth. +So I think this picture makes sense if you look at it a few billion years at a time. +So if you go back about two and a half billion years, the Earth was this big, sterile hunk of rock with a lot of chemicals floating around on it. +And if you look at the way that the chemicals got organized, we begin to get a pretty good idea of how they do it. +And I think that there's theories that are beginning to understand about how it started with RNA, but I'm going to tell a sort of simple story of it, which is that, at that time, there were little drops of oil floating around with all kinds of different recipes of chemicals in them. +And some of those drops of oil had a particular combination of chemicals in them which caused them to incorporate chemicals from the outside and grow the drops of oil. +And those that were like that started to split and divide. +And those were the most primitive forms of cells in a sense, those little drops of oil. +But now those drops of oil weren't really alive, as we say it now, because every one of them was a little random recipe of chemicals. +And every time it divided, they got sort of unequal division of the chemicals within them. +And so every drop was a little bit different. +In fact, the drops that were different in a way that caused them to be better at incorporating chemicals around them, grew more and incorporated more chemicals and divided more. +So those tended to live longer, get expressed more. +Now that's sort of just a very simple chemical form of life, but when things got interesting was when these drops learned a trick about abstraction. +Somehow by ways that we don't quite understand, these little drops learned to write down information. +They learned to record the information that was the recipe of the cell onto a particular kind of chemical called DNA. +So in other words, they worked out, in this mindless sort of evolutionary way, a form of writing that let them write down what they were, so that that way of writing it down could get copied. +The amazing thing is that that way of writing seems to have stayed steady since it evolved two and a half billion years ago. +In fact the recipe for us, our genes, is exactly that same code and that same way of writing. +In fact, every living creature is written in exactly the same set of letters and the same code. +In fact, one of the things that I did just for amusement purposes is we can now write things in this code. +And I've got here a little 100 micrograms of white powder, which I try not to let the security people see at airports. +But this has in it -- what I did is I took this code -- the code has standard letters that we use for symbolizing it -- and I wrote my business card onto a piece of DNA and amplified it 10 to the 22 times. +So if anyone would like a hundred million copies of my business card, I have plenty for everyone in the room, and, in fact, everyone in the world, and it's right here. +If I had really been a egotist, I would have put it into a virus and released it in the room. +So what was the next step? +Writing down the DNA was an interesting step. +And that caused these cells -- that kept them happy for another billion years. +But then there was another really interesting step where things became completely different, which is these cells started exchanging and communicating information, so that they began to get communities of cells. +I don't know if you know this, but bacteria can actually exchange DNA. +Now that's why, for instance, antibiotic resistance has evolved. +Some bacteria figured out how to stay away from penicillin, and it went around sort of creating its little DNA information with other bacteria, and now we have a lot of bacteria that are resistant to penicillin, because bacteria communicate. +Now what this communication allowed was communities to form that, in some sense, were in the same boat together; they were synergistic. +So they survived or they failed together, which means that if a community was very successful, all the individuals in that community were repeated more and they were favored by evolution. +Now the transition point happened when these communities got so close that, in fact, they got together and decided to write down the whole recipe for the community together on one string of DNA. +And so the next stage that's interesting in life took about another billion years. +And at that stage, we have multi-cellular communities, communities of lots of different types of cells, working together as a single organism. +And in fact, we're such a multi-cellular community. +We have lots of cells that are not out for themselves anymore. +Your skin cell is really useless without a heart cell, muscle cell, a brain cell and so on. +So these communities began to evolve so that the interesting level on which evolution was taking place was no longer a cell, but a community which we call an organism. +Now the next step that happened is within these communities. +These communities of cells, again, began to abstract information. +And they began building very special structures that did nothing but process information within the community. +And those are the neural structures. +So neurons are the information processing apparatus that those communities of cells built up. +And in fact, they began to get specialists in the community and special structures that were responsible for recording, understanding, learning information. +And that was the brains and the nervous system of those communities. +And that gave them an evolutionary advantage. +Because at that point, an individual -- learning could happen within the time span of a single organism, instead of over this evolutionary time span. +So an organism could, for instance, learn not to eat a certain kind of fruit because it tasted bad and it got sick last time it ate it. +That could happen within the lifetime of a single organism, whereas before they'd built these special information processing structures, that would have had to be learned evolutionarily over hundreds of thousands of years by the individuals dying off that ate that kind of fruit. +So that nervous system, the fact that they built these special information structures, Because evolution could now happen within an individual. +It could happen in learning time scales. +But then what happened was the individuals worked out, of course, tricks of communicating. +And for example, the most sophisticated version that we're aware of is human language. +It's really a pretty amazing invention if you think about it. +Here I have a very complicated, messy, confused idea in my head. +I'm sitting here making grunting sounds basically, and hopefully constructing a similar messy, confused idea in your head that bears some analogy to it. +But we're taking something very complicated, turning it into sound, sequences of sounds, and producing something very complicated in your brain. +So this allows us now to begin to start functioning as a single organism. +And so, in fact, what we've done is we, humanity, have started abstracting out. +We're going through the same levels that multi-cellular organisms have gone through -- abstracting out our methods of recording, presenting, processing information. +So for example, the invention of language was a tiny step in that direction. +Telephony, computers, videotapes, CD-ROMs and so on are all our specialized mechanisms that we've now built within our society for handling that information. +And it all connects us together into something that is much bigger and much faster and able to evolve than what we were before. +So now, evolution can take place on a scale of microseconds. +And you saw Ty's little evolutionary example where he sort of did a little bit of evolution on the Convolution program right before your eyes. +So now we've speeded up the time scales once again. +So the first steps of the story that I told you about took a billion years a piece. +And the next steps, like nervous systems and brains, took a few hundred million years. +Then the next steps, like language and so on, took less than a million years. +And these next steps, like electronics, seem to be taking only a few decades. +The process is feeding on itself and becoming, I guess, autocatalytic is the word for it -- when something reinforces its rate of change. +The more it changes, the faster it changes. +And I think that that's what we're seeing here in this explosion of curve. +We're seeing this process feeding back on itself. +Now I design computers for a living, and I know that the mechanisms that I use to design computers would be impossible without recent advances in computers. +So right now, what I do is I design objects at such complexity that it's really impossible for me to design them in the traditional sense. +I don't know what every transistor in the connection machine does. +There are billions of them. +Instead, what I do and what the designers at Thinking Machines do is we think at some level of abstraction and then we hand it to the machine and the machine takes it beyond what we could ever do, much farther and faster than we could ever do. +And in fact, sometimes it takes it by methods that we don't quite even understand. +One method that's particularly interesting that I've been using a lot lately is evolution itself. +So what we do is we put inside the machine a process of evolution that takes place on the microsecond time scale. +So for example, in the most extreme cases, we can actually evolve a program by starting out with random sequences of instructions. +Say, "Computer, would you please make a hundred million random sequences of instructions. +Now would you please run all of those random sequences of instructions, run all of those programs, and pick out the ones that came closest to doing what I wanted." +So in other words, I define what I wanted. +Let's say I want to sort numbers, as a simple example I've done it with. +So find the programs that come closest to sorting numbers. +So of course, random sequences of instructions are very unlikely to sort numbers, so none of them will really do it. +But one of them, by luck, may put two numbers in the right order. +And I say, "Computer, would you please now take the 10 percent of those random sequences that did the best job. +Save those. Kill off the rest. +And now let's reproduce the ones that sorted numbers the best. +And let's reproduce them by a process of recombination analogous to sex." +Take two programs and they produce children by exchanging their subroutines, and the children inherit the traits of the subroutines of the two programs. +So I've got now a new generation of programs that are produced by combinations of the programs that did a little bit better job. +Say, "Please repeat that process." +Score them again. +Introduce some mutations perhaps. +And try that again and do that for another generation. +Well every one of those generations just takes a few milliseconds. +So I can do the equivalent of millions of years of evolution on that within the computer in a few minutes, or in the complicated cases, in a few hours. +At the end of that, I end up with programs that are absolutely perfect at sorting numbers. +In fact, they are programs that are much more efficient than programs I could have ever written by hand. +Now if I look at those programs, I can't tell you how they work. +I've tried looking at them and telling you how they work. +They're obscure, weird programs. +But they do the job. +And in fact, I know, I'm very confident that they do the job because they come from a line of hundreds of thousands of programs that did the job. +In fact, their life depended on doing the job. +I was riding in a 747 with Marvin Minsky once, and he pulls out this card and says, "Oh look. Look at this. +It says, 'This plane has hundreds of thousands of tiny parts working together to make you a safe flight.' Doesn't that make you feel confident?" +In fact, we know that the engineering process doesn't work very well when it gets complicated. +So we're beginning to depend on computers to do a process that's very different than engineering. +And it lets us produce things of much more complexity than normal engineering lets us produce. +And yet, we don't quite understand the options of it. +So in a sense, it's getting ahead of us. +We're now using those programs to make much faster computers so that we'll be able to run this process much faster. +So it's feeding back on itself. +The thing is becoming faster and that's why I think it seems so confusing. +Because all of these technologies are feeding back on themselves. +We're taking off. +And what we are is we're at a point in time which is analogous to when single-celled organisms were turning into multi-celled organisms. +So we're the amoebas and we can't quite figure out what the hell this thing is we're creating. +We're right at that point of transition. +But I think that there really is something coming along after us. +I think it's very haughty of us to think that we're the end product of evolution. +And I think all of us here are a part of producing whatever that next thing is. +So lunch is coming along, and I think I will stop at that point, before I get selected out. + +My story begins right here actually in Rajasthan about two years ago. +I was in the desert, under the starry skies with the Sufi singer Mukhtiar Ali. +And we were in conversation about how nothing had changed since the time of the ancient Indian epic "The Mahabharata." +So back in the day, when us Indians wanted to travel we'd jump into a chariot and we'd zoom across the sky. +Now we do the same with airplanes. +Back then, when Arjuna, the great Indian warrior prince, when he was thirsty, he'd take out a bow, he'd shoot it into the ground and water would come out. +Now we do the same with drills and machines. +The conclusion that we came to was that magic had been replaced by machinery. +And this made me really sad. +I found myself becoming a little bit of a technophobe. +I was terrified by this idea that I would lose the ability to enjoy and appreciate the sunset without having my camera on me, without tweeting it to my friends. +And it felt like technology should enable magic, not kill it. +When I was a little girl, my grandfather gave me his little silver pocket watch. +And this piece of 50-year-old technology became the most magical thing to me. +It became a gilded gateway into a world full of pirates and shipwrecks and images in my imagination. +So I felt like our cellphones and our fancy watches and our cameras had stopped us from dreaming. +They stopped us from being inspired. +And so I jumped in, I jumped into this world of technology, to see how I could use it to enable magic as opposed to kill it. +I've been illustrating books since I was 16. +And so when I saw the iPad, I saw it as a storytelling device that could connect readers all over the world. +It can know how we're holding it. +It can know where we are. +It brings together image and text and animation and sound and touch. +Storytelling is becoming more and more multi-sensorial. +But what are we doing with it? +So I'm actually just going to go in and launch Khoya, an interactive app for the iPad. +So it says, "Place your fingers upon each light." +And so -- It says, "This box belongs to ... " And so I type in my name. +And actually I become a character in the book. +At various points, a little letter drops down to me -- and the iPad knows where you live because of GPS -- which is actually addressed to me. +The child in me is really excited by these kinds of possibilities. +Now I've been talking a lot about magic. +And I don't mean wizards and dragons, I mean the kind of childhood magic, those ideas that we all harbored as children. +This idea of fireflies in a jar, for some reason, was always really exciting to me. +And so over here you need to tilt your iPad, take the fireflies out. +And they actually illuminate your way through the rest of the book. +Another idea that really fascinated me as a child was that an entire galaxy could be contained within a single marble. +And so over here, each book and each world becomes a little marble that I drag in to this magical device within the device. +And it opens up a map. +All along, all fantasy books have always had maps, but these maps have been static. +This is a map that grows and glows and becomes your navigation for the rest of the book. +It reveals itself to you at certain points in the book as well. +So I'm just going to enter in. +Another thing that's actually really important to me is creating content that is Indian and yet very contemporary. +Over here, these are the Apsaras. +So we've all heard about fairies and we've all heard about nymphs, but how many people outside of India know about their Indian counterparts, the Apsaras? +These poor Apsaras have been trapped inside Indra's chambers for thousands of years in an old and musty book. +And so we're bringing them back in a contemporary story for children. +And a story that actually deals with new issues like the environmental crisis. +Speaking of the environmental crisis, I think a big problem has been in the last 10 years is that children have been locked inside their rooms, glued to their PCs, they haven't been able to get out. +But now with mobile technology, we can actually take our children outside into the natural world with their technology. +One of the interactions in the book is that you're sent off on this quest where you need to go outside, take out your camera on the iPad and collect pictures of different natural objects. +When I was a child, I had multiple collections of sticks and stones and pebbles and shells. +And somehow kids don't do that anymore. +So in bringing back this childhood ritual, you need to go out and, in one chapter, take a picture of a flower and then tag it. +In another chapter, you need to take a picture of a piece of bark and then tag that. +And what happens is that you actually create a digital collection of photographs that you can then put up online. +A child in London puts up a picture of a fox and says, "Oh, I saw a fox today." +A child in India says, "I saw a monkey today." +And it creates this kind of social network around a collection of digital photographs that you've actually taken. +In the possibilities of linking together magic, the earth and technology, there are multiple possibilities. +In the next book, we plan on having an interaction where you take your iPad out with the video on and through augmented reality, you see this layer of animated pixies appear on a houseplant that's outside your house. +At one point, your screen is filled up with leaves. +And so you need to make the sound of wind and blow them away and read the rest of the book. +We're moving, we're all moving here, to a world where the forces of nature come closer together to technology, and magic and technology can come closer together. +We're harnessing energy from the sun. +We're bringing our children and ourselves closer to the natural world and that magic and joy and childhood love that we had through the simple medium of a story. +Thank you. + +Well this is a really extraordinary honor for me. +I spend most of my time in jails, in prisons, on death row. +I spend most of my time in very low-income communities in the projects and places where there's a great deal of hopelessness. +And being here at TED and seeing the stimulation, hearing it, has been very, very energizing to me. +And one of the things that's emerged in my short time here is that TED has an identity. +And you can actually say things here that have impacts around the world. +And sometimes when it comes through TED, it has meaning and power that it doesn't have when it doesn't. +And I mention that because I think identity is really important. +And we've had some fantastic presentations. +And I think what we've learned is that, if you're a teacher your words can be meaningful, but if you're a compassionate teacher, they can be especially meaningful. +If you're a doctor you can do some good things, but if you're a caring doctor you can do some other things. +And so I want to talk about the power of identity. +And I didn't learn about this actually practicing law and doing the work that I do. +I actually learned about this from my grandmother. +I grew up in a house that was the traditional African American home that was dominated by a matriarch, and that matriarch was my grandmother. +She was tough, she was strong, she was powerful. +She was the end of every argument in our family. +She was the beginning of a lot of arguments in our family. +She was the daughter of people who were actually enslaved. +Her parents were born in slavery in Virginia in the 1840's. +She was born in the 1880's and the experience of slavery very much shaped the way she saw the world. +And my grandmother was tough, but she was also loving. +When I would see her as a little boy, she'd come up to me and she'd give me these hugs. +And she'd squeeze me so tight I could barely breathe and then she'd let me go. +And an hour or two later, if I saw her, she'd come over to me and she'd say, "Bryan, do you still feel me hugging you?" +And if I said, "No," she'd assault me again, and if I said, "Yes," she'd leave me alone. +And she just had this quality that you always wanted to be near her. +And the only challenge was that she had 10 children. +My mom was the youngest of her 10 kids. +And sometimes when I would go and spend time with her, it would be difficult to get her time and attention. +My cousins would be running around everywhere. +And I remember, when I was about eight or nine years old, waking up one morning, going into the living room, and all of my cousins were running around. +And my grandmother was sitting across the room staring at me. +And at first I thought we were playing a game. +And I would look at her and I'd smile, but she was very serious. +And after about 15 or 20 minutes of this, she got up and she came across the room and she took me by the hand and she said, "Come on, Bryan. You and I are going to have a talk." +And I remember this just like it happened yesterday. +I never will forget it. +She took me out back and she said, "Bryan, I'm going to tell you something, but you don't tell anybody what I tell you." +I said, "Okay, Mama." +She said, "Now you make sure you don't do that." I said, "Sure." +Then she sat me down and she looked at me and she said, "I want you to know I've been watching you." +And she said, "I think you're special." +She said, "I think you can do anything you want to do." +I will never forget it. +And then she said, "I just need you to promise me three things, Bryan." +I said, "Okay, Mama." +She said, "The first thing I want you to promise me is that you'll always love your mom." +She said, "That's my baby girl, and you have to promise me now you'll always take care of her." +Well I adored my mom, so I said, "Yes, Mama. I'll do that." +Then she said, "The second thing I want you to promise me is that you'll always do the right thing even when the right thing is the hard thing." +And I thought about it and I said, "Yes, Mama. I'll do that." +Then finally she said, "The third thing I want you to promise me is that you'll never drink alcohol." +Well I was nine years old, so I said, "Yes, Mama. I'll do that." +I grew up in the country in the rural South, and I have a brother a year older than me and a sister a year younger. +When I was about 14 or 15, one day my brother came home and he had this six-pack of beer -- I don't know where he got it -- and he grabbed me and my sister and we went out in the woods. +And we were kind of just out there doing the stuff we crazily did. +And he had a sip of this beer and he gave some to my sister and she had some, and they offered it to me. +I said, "No, no, no. That's okay. You all go ahead. I'm not going to have any beer." +My brother said, "Come on. We're doing this today; you always do what we do. +I had some, your sister had some. Have some beer." +I said, "No, I don't feel right about that. Y'all go ahead. Y'all go ahead." +And then my brother started staring at me. +He said, "What's wrong with you? Have some beer." +Then he looked at me real hard and he said, "Oh, I hope you're not still hung up on that conversation Mama had with you." +I said, "Well, what are you talking about?" +He said, "Oh, Mama tells all the grandkids that they're special." +I was devastated. +And I'm going to admit something to you. +I'm going to tell you something I probably shouldn't. +I know this might be broadcast broadly. +But I'm 52 years old, and I'm going to admit to you that I've never had a drop of alcohol. +I don't say that because I think that's virtuous; I say that because there is power in identity. +When we create the right kind of identity, we can say things to the world around us that they don't actually believe makes sense. +We can get them to do things that they don't think they can do. +When I thought about my grandmother, of course she would think all her grandkids were special. +My grandfather was in prison during prohibition. +My male uncles died of alcohol-related diseases. +And these were the things she thought we needed to commit to. +Well I've been trying to say something about our criminal justice system. +This country is very different today than it was 40 years ago. +In 1972, there were 300,000 people in jails and prisons. +Today, there are 2.3 million. +The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. +We have seven million people on probation and parole. +And mass incarceration, in my judgment, has fundamentally changed our world. +In poor communities, in communities of color there is this despair, there is this hopelessness, that is being shaped by these outcomes. +One out of three black men between the ages of 18 and 30 is in jail, in prison, on probation or parole. +In urban communities across this country -- Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington -- 50 to 60 percent of all young men of color are in jail or prison or on probation or parole. +Our system isn't just being shaped in these ways that seem to be distorting around race, they're also distorted by poverty. +We have a system of justice in this country that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. +Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes. +And yet, we seem to be very comfortable. +The politics of fear and anger have made us believe that these are problems that are not our problems. +We've been disconnected. +It's interesting to me. +We're looking at some very interesting developments in our work. +My state of Alabama, like a number of states, actually permanently disenfranchises you if you have a criminal conviction. +Right now in Alabama 34 percent of the black male population has permanently lost the right to vote. +We're actually projecting in another 10 years the level of disenfranchisement will be as high as it's been since prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. +And there is this stunning silence. +I represent children. +A lot of my clients are very young. +The United States is the only country in the world where we sentence 13-year-old children to die in prison. +We have life imprisonment without parole for kids in this country. +And we're actually doing some litigation. +The only country in the world. +I represent people on death row. +It's interesting, this question of the death penalty. +In many ways, we've been taught to think that the real question is, do people deserve to die for the crimes they've committed? +And that's a very sensible question. +But there's another way of thinking about where we are in our identity. +The other way of thinking about it is not, do people deserve to die for the crimes they commit, but do we deserve to kill? +I mean, it's fascinating. +Death penalty in America is defined by error. +For every nine people who have been executed, we've actually identified one innocent person who's been exonerated and released from death row. +A kind of astonishing error rate -- one out of nine people innocent. +I mean, it's fascinating. +In aviation, we would never let people fly on airplanes if for every nine planes that took off one would crash. +But somehow we can insulate ourselves from this problem. +It's not our problem. +It's not our burden. +It's not our struggle. +I talk a lot about these issues. +I talk about race and this question of whether we deserve to kill. +And it's interesting, when I teach my students about African American history, I tell them about slavery. +I tell them about terrorism, the era that began at the end of reconstruction that went on to World War II. +We don't really know very much about it. +But for African Americans in this country, that was an era defined by terror. +In many communities, people had to worry about being lynched. +They had to worry about being bombed. +It was the threat of terror that shaped their lives. +And these older people come up to me now and they say, "Mr. Stevenson, you give talks, you make speeches, you tell people to stop saying we're dealing with terrorism for the first time in our nation's history after 9/11." +They tell me to say, "No, tell them that we grew up with that." +And that era of terrorism, of course, was followed by segregation and decades of racial subordination and apartheid. +And yet, we have in this country this dynamic where we really don't like to talk about our problems. +We don't like to talk about our history. +And because of that, we really haven't understood what it's meant to do the things we've done historically. +We're constantly running into each other. +We're constantly creating tensions and conflicts. +We have a hard time talking about race, and I believe it's because we are unwilling to commit ourselves to a process of truth and reconciliation. +In South Africa, people understood that we couldn't overcome apartheid without a commitment to truth and reconciliation. +In Rwanda, even after the genocide, there was this commitment, but in this country we haven't done that. +I was giving some lectures in Germany about the death penalty. +It was fascinating because one of the scholars stood up after the presentation and said, "Well you know it's deeply troubling to hear what you're talking about." +He said, "We don't have the death penalty in Germany. +And of course, we can never have the death penalty in Germany." +And the room got very quiet, and this woman said, "There's no way, with our history, we could ever engage in the systematic killing of human beings. +It would be unconscionable for us to, in an intentional and deliberate way, set about executing people." +And I thought about that. +What would it feel like to be living in a world where the nation state of Germany was executing people, especially if they were disproportionately Jewish? +I couldn't bear it. +It would be unconscionable. +And yet, in this country, in the states of the Old South, we execute people -- where you're 11 times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is black, 22 times more likely to get it if the defendant is black and the victim is white -- in the very states where there are buried in the ground the bodies of people who were lynched. +And yet, there is this disconnect. +Well I believe that our identity is at risk. +That when we actually don't care about these difficult things, the positive and wonderful things are nonetheless implicated. +We love innovation. +We love technology. We love creativity. +We love entertainment. +But ultimately, those realities are shadowed by suffering, abuse, degradation, marginalization. +And for me, it becomes necessary to integrate the two. +Because ultimately we are talking about a need to be more hopeful, more committed, more dedicated to the basic challenges of living in a complex world. +And for me that means spending time thinking and talking about the poor, the disadvantaged, those who will never get to TED. +But thinking about them in a way that is integrated in our own lives. +You know ultimately, we all have to believe things we haven't seen. +We do. As rational as we are, as committed to intellect as we are. +Innovation, creativity, development comes not from the ideas in our mind alone. +They come from the ideas in our mind that are also fueled by some conviction in our heart. +And it's that mind-heart connection that I believe compels us to not just be attentive to all the bright and dazzly things, but also the dark and difficult things. +Vaclav Havel, the great Czech leader, talked about this. +He said, "When we were in Eastern Europe and dealing with oppression, we wanted all kinds of things, but mostly what we needed was hope, an orientation of the spirit, a willingness to sometimes be in hopeless places and be a witness." +Well that orientation of the spirit is very much at the core of what I believe even TED communities have to be engaged in. +There is no disconnect around technology and design that will allow us to be fully human until we pay attention to suffering, to poverty, to exclusion, to unfairness, to injustice. +Now I will warn you that this kind of identity is a much more challenging identity than ones that don't pay attention to this. +It will get to you. +I had the great privilege, when I was a young lawyer, of meeting Rosa Parks. +And Ms. Parks used to come back to Montgomery every now and then, and she would get together with two of her dearest friends, these older women, Johnnie Carr who was the organizer of the Montgomery bus boycott -- amazing African American woman -- and Virginia Durr, a white woman, whose husband, Clifford Durr, represented Dr. King. +And these women would get together and just talk. +And every now and then Ms. Carr would call me, and she'd say, "Bryan, Ms. Parks is coming to town. We're going to get together and talk. +Do you want to come over and listen?" +And I'd say, "Yes, Ma'am, I do." +And she'd say, "Well what are you going to do when you get here?" +I said, "I'm going to listen." +And I'd go over there and I would, I would just listen. +It would be so energizing and so empowering. +And one time I was over there listening to these women talk, and after a couple of hours Ms. Parks turned to me and she said, "Now Bryan, tell me what the Equal Justice Initiative is. +Tell me what you're trying to do." +And I began giving her my rap. +I said, "Well we're trying to challenge injustice. +We're trying to help people who have been wrongly convicted. +We're trying to confront bias and discrimination in the administration of criminal justice. +We're trying to end life without parole sentences for children. +We're trying to do something about the death penalty. +We're trying to reduce the prison population. +We're trying to end mass incarceration." +I gave her my whole rap, and when I finished she looked at me and she said, "Mmm mmm mmm." +She said, "That's going to make you tired, tired, tired." +And that's when Ms. Carr leaned forward, she put her finger in my face, she said, "That's why you've got to be brave, brave, brave." +And I actually believe that the TED community needs to be more courageous. +We need to find ways to embrace these challenges, these problems, the suffering. +Because ultimately, our humanity depends on everyone's humanity. +I've learned very simple things doing the work that I do. +It's just taught me very simple things. +that each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done. +I believe that for every person on the planet. +I think if somebody tells a lie, they're not just a liar. +I think if somebody takes something that doesn't belong to them, they're not just a thief. +I think even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer. +And because of that there's this basic human dignity that must be respected by law. +I also believe that in many parts of this country, and certainly in many parts of this globe, that the opposite of poverty is not wealth. +I don't believe that. +I actually think, in too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice. +And finally, I believe that, despite the fact that it is so dramatic and so beautiful and so inspiring and so stimulating, we will ultimately not be judged by our technology, we won't be judged by our design, we won't be judged by our intellect and reason. +Ultimately, you judge the character of a society, not by how they treat their rich and the powerful and the privileged, but by how they treat the poor, the condemned, the incarcerated. +Because it's in that nexus that we actually begin to understand truly profound things about who we are. +I sometimes get out of balance. I'll end with this story. +I sometimes push too hard. +I do get tired, as we all do. +Sometimes those ideas get ahead of our thinking in ways that are important. +And I've been representing these kids who have been sentenced to do these very harsh sentences. +And I go to the jail and I see my client who's 13 and 14, and he's been certified to stand trial as an adult. +I start thinking, well, how did that happen? +How can a judge turn you into something that you're not? +And the judge has certified him as an adult, but I see this kid. +And I was up too late one night and I starting thinking, well gosh, if the judge can turn you into something that you're not, the judge must have magic power. +Yeah, Bryan, the judge has some magic power. +You should ask for some of that. +And because I was up too late, wasn't thinking real straight, I started working on a motion. +And I had a client who was 14 years old, a young, poor black kid. +And I started working on this motion, and the head of the motion was: "Motion to try my poor, 14-year-old black male client like a privileged, white 75-year-old corporate executive." +And I put in my motion that there was prosecutorial misconduct and police misconduct and judicial misconduct. +There was a crazy line in there about how there's no conduct in this county, it's all misconduct. +And the next morning, I woke up and I thought, now did I dream that crazy motion, or did I actually write it? +And to my horror, not only had I written it, but I had sent it to court. +A couple months went by, and I had just forgotten all about it. +And I finally decided, oh gosh, I've got to go to the court and do this crazy case. +And I got into my car and I was feeling really overwhelmed -- overwhelmed. +And I got in my car and I went to this courthouse. +And I was thinking, this is going to be so difficult, so painful. +And I finally got out of the car and I started walking up to the courthouse. +And as I was walking up the steps of this courthouse, there was an older black man who was the janitor in this courthouse. +When this man saw me, he came over to me and he said, "Who are you?" +I said, "I'm a lawyer." He said, "You're a lawyer?" I said, "Yes, sir." +And this man came over to me and he hugged me. +And he whispered in my ear. +He said, "I'm so proud of you." +And I have to tell you, it was energizing. +It connected deeply with something in me about identity, about the capacity of every person to contribute to a community, to a perspective that is hopeful. +Well I went into the courtroom. +And as soon as I walked inside, the judge saw me coming in. +He said, "Mr. Stevenson, did you write this crazy motion?" +I said, "Yes, sir. I did." And we started arguing. +And people started coming in because they were just outraged. +I had written these crazy things. +And police officers were coming in and assistant prosecutors and clerk workers. +And before I knew it, the courtroom was filled with people angry that we were talking about race, that we were talking about poverty, that we were talking about inequality. +And out of the corner of my eye, I could see this janitor pacing back and forth. +And he kept looking through the window, and he could hear all of this holler. +He kept pacing back and forth. +And finally, this older black man with this very worried look on his face came into the courtroom and sat down behind me, almost at counsel table. +About 10 minutes later the judge said we would take a break. +And during the break there was a deputy sheriff who was offended that the janitor had come into court. +And this deputy jumped up and he ran over to this older black man. +He said, "Jimmy, what are you doing in this courtroom?" +And this older black man stood up and he looked at that deputy and he looked at me and he said, "I came into this courtroom to tell this young man, keep your eyes on the prize, hold on." +I've come to TED because I believe that many of you understand that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. +That we cannot be full evolved human beings until we care about human rights and basic dignity. +That all of our survival is tied to the survival of everyone. +That our visions of technology and design and entertainment and creativity have to be married with visions of humanity, compassion and justice. +And more than anything, for those of you who share that, I've simply come to tell you to keep your eyes on the prize, hold on. +So you heard and saw an obvious desire by this audience, this community, to help you on your way and to do something on this issue. +Other than writing a check, what could we do? +Well there are opportunities all around us. +If you live in the state of California, for example, there's a referendum coming up this spring where actually there's going to be an effort to redirect some of the money we spend on the politics of punishment. +For example, here in California we're going to spend one billion dollars on the death penalty in the next five years -- one billion dollars. +And yet, 46 percent of all homicide cases don't result in arrest. +56 percent of all rape cases don't result. +So there's an opportunity to change that. +And this referendum would propose having those dollars go to law enforcement and safety. +And I think that opportunity exists all around us. +There's been this huge decline in crime in America over the last three decades. +And part of the narrative of that is sometimes that it's about increased incarceration rates. +What would you say to someone who believed that? +Well actually the violent crime rate has remained relatively stable. +The great increase in mass incarceration in this country wasn't really in violent crime categories. +It was this misguided war on drugs. +That's where the dramatic increases have come in our prison population. +And we got carried away with the rhetoric of punishment. +And so we have three strikes laws that put people in prison forever for stealing a bicycle, for low-level property crimes, rather than making them give those resources back to the people who they victimized. +I believe we need to do more to help people who are victimized by crime, not do less. +And I think our current punishment philosophy does nothing for no one. +And I think that's the orientation that we have to change. +Bryan, you've struck a massive chord here. +You're an inspiring person. +Thank you so much for coming to TED. Thank you. + +Threats, in the wake of Bin Laden's death, have spiked. +Famine in Somalia. Police pepper spray. +Vicious cartels. Announcer Five: Caustic cruise lines. +Societal decay. 65 dead. +Tsunami warning. Cyber-attacks. +Drug war. Mass destruction. Tornado. +Recession. Default. Doomsday. Egypt. Syria. +Crisis. Death. Disaster. +Oh, my God. +So those are just a few of the clips I collected over the last six months -- could have easily been the last six days or the last six years. +The point is that the news media preferentially feeds us negative stories because that's what our minds pay attention to. +And there's a very good reason for that. +Every second of every day, our senses bring in way too much data than we can possibly process in our brains. +And because nothing is more important to us than survival, the first stop of all of that data is an ancient sliver of the temporal lobe called the amygdala. +Now the amygdala is our early warning detector, our danger detector. +It sorts and scours through all of the information looking for anything in the environment that might harm us. +So given a dozen news stories, we will preferentially look at the negative news. +And that old newspaper saying, "If it bleeds it leads," is very true. +So given all of our digital devices that are bringing all the negative news to us seven days a week, 24 hours a day, it's no wonder that we're pessimistic. +It's no wonder that people think that the world is getting worse. +But perhaps that's not the case. +Perhaps instead, of what's really going on. +Perhaps the tremendous progress we've made over the last century by a series of forces are, in fact, accelerating to a point that we have the potential in the next three decades to create a world of abundance. +Now I'm not saying we don't have our set of problems -- climate crisis, species extinction, water and energy shortage -- we surely do. +And as humans, we are far better at seeing the problems way in advance, but ultimately we knock them down. +So let's look at what this last century has been to see where we're going. +Over the last hundred years, the average human lifespan has more than doubled, average per capita income adjusted for inflation around the world has tripled. +Childhood mortality has come down a factor of 10. +Add to that the cost of food, electricity, transportation, communication have dropped 10 to 1,000-fold. +Steve Pinker has showed us that, in fact, we're living during the most peaceful time ever in human history. +And Charles Kenny that global literacy has gone from 25 percent to over 80 percent in the last 130 years. +We truly are living in an extraordinary time. +And many people forget this. +And we keep setting our expectations higher and higher. +In fact, we redefine what poverty means. +Think of this, in America today, the majority of people under the poverty line still have electricity, water, toilets, refrigerators, television, mobile phones, air conditioning and cars. +The wealthiest robber barons of the last century, the emperors on this planet, could have never dreamed of such luxuries. +Underpinning much of this is technology, and of late, exponentially growing technologies. +My good friend Ray Kurzweil showed that any tool that becomes an information technology jumps on this curve, on Moore's Law, and experiences price performance doubling every 12 to 24 months. +That's why the cellphone in your pocket is literally a million times cheaper and a thousand times faster than a supercomputer of the '70s. +Now look at this curve. +This is Moore's Law over the last hundred years. +I want you to notice two things from this curve. +Number one, how smooth it is -- through good time and bad time, war time and peace time, recession, depression and boom time. +This is the result of faster computers being used to build faster computers. +It doesn't slow for any of our grand challenges. +And also, even though it's plotted on a log curve on the left, it's curving upwards. +The rate at which the technology is getting faster is itself getting faster. +And on this curve, riding on Moore's Law, are a set of extraordinarily powerful technologies available to all of us. +Cloud computing, what my friends at Autodesk call infinite computing; sensors and networks; robotics; 3D printing, which is the ability to democratize and distribute personalized production around the planet; synthetic biology; fuels, vaccines and foods; digital medicine; nanomaterials; and A.I. +I mean, how many of you saw the winning of Jeopardy by IBM's Watson? +I mean, that was epic. +In fact, I scoured the headlines looking for the best headline in a newspaper I could. +And I love this: "Watson Vanquishes Human Opponents." +Jeopardy's not an easy game. +It's about the nuance of human language. +And imagine if you would A.I.'s like this on the cloud available to every person with a cellphone. +Four years ago here at TED, Ray Kurzweil and I started a new university called Singularity University. +And we teach our students all of these technologies, and particularly how they can be used to solve humanity's grand challenges. +And every year we ask them to start a company or a product or a service that can affect positively the lives of a billion people within a decade. +Think about that, the fact that, literally, a group of students can touch the lives of a billion people today. +30 years ago that would have sounded ludicrous. +Today we can point at dozens of companies that have done just that. +When I think about creating abundance, it's not about creating a life of luxury for everybody on this planet; it's about creating a life of possibility. +It is about taking that which was scarce and making it abundant. +You see, scarcity is contextual, and technology is a resource-liberating force. +Let me give you an example. +So this is a story of Napoleon III in the mid-1800s. +He's the dude on the left. +He invited over to dinner the king of Siam. +All of Napoleon's troops were fed with silver utensils, Napoleon himself with gold utensils. +But the King of Siam, he was fed with aluminum utensils. +You see, aluminum was the most valuable metal on the planet, worth more than gold and platinum. +It's the reason that the tip of the Washington Monument is made of aluminum. +You see, even though aluminum is 8.3 percent of the Earth by mass, it doesn't come as a pure metal. +It's all bound by oxygen and silicates. +But then the technology of electrolysis came along and literally made aluminum so cheap that we use it with throw-away mentality. +So let's project this analogy going forward. +We think about energy scarcity. +Ladies and gentlemen, we are on a planet that is bathed with 5,000 times more energy than we use in a year. +16 terawatts of energy hits the Earth's surface every 88 minutes. +It's not about being scarce, it's about accessibility. +And there's good news here. +For the first time, this year the cost of solar-generated electricity is 50 percent that of diesel-generated electricity in India -- 8.8 rupees versus 17 rupees. +The cost of solar dropped 50 percent last year. +Last month, MIT put out a study showing that by the end of this decade, in the sunny parts of the United States, solar electricity will be six cents a kilowatt hour compared to 15 cents as a national average. +And if we have abundant energy, we also have abundant water. +Now we talk about water wars. +Do you remember when Carl Sagan turned the Voyager spacecraft back towards the Earth, in 1990 after it just passed Saturn? +He took a famous photo. What was it called? +"A Pale Blue Dot." +Because we live on a water planet. +We live on a planet 70 percent covered by water. +Yes, 97.5 percent is saltwater, two percent is ice, and we fight over a half a percent of the water on this planet, but here too there is hope. +And there is technology coming online, not 10, 20 years from now, right now. +There's nanotechnology coming on, nanomaterials. +And the conversation I had with Dean Kamen this morning, one of the great DIY innovators, I'd like to share with you -- he gave me permission to do so -- his technology called Slingshot that many of you may have heard of, it is the size of a small dorm room refrigerator. +It's able to generate a thousand liters of clean drinking water a day out of any source -- saltwater, polluted water, latrine -- at less than two cents a liter. +The chairman of Coca-Cola has just agreed to do a major test of hundreds of units of this in the developing world. +And if that pans out, which I have every confidence it will, Coca-Cola will deploy this globally to 206 countries around the planet. +This is the kind of innovation, empowered by this technology, that exists today. +And we've seen this in cellphones. +My goodness, we're going to hit 70 percent penetration of cellphones in the developing world by the end of 2013. +Think about it, that a Masai warrior on a cellphone in the middle of Kenya has better mobile comm than President Reagan did 25 years ago. +And if they're on a smartphone on Google, they've got access to more knowledge and information than President Clinton did 15 years ago. +They're living in a world of information and communication abundance that no one could have ever predicted. +Better than that, the things that you and I spent tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars for -- GPS, HD video and still images, libraries of books and music, medical diagnostic technology -- are now literally dematerializing and demonetizing into your cellphone. +Probably the best part of it is what's coming down the pike in health. +Last month, I had the pleasure of announcing with Qualcomm Foundation something called the $10 million Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize. +We're challenging teams around the world to basically combine these technologies into a mobile device that you can speak to, because it's got A.I., you can cough on it, you can do a finger blood prick. +And to win, it needs to be able to diagnose you better than a team of board-certified doctors. +So literally, imagine this device in the middle of the developing world where there are no doctors, 25 percent of the disease burden and 1.3 percent of the health care workers. +When this device sequences an RNA or DNA virus that it doesn't recognize, it calls the CDC and prevents the pandemic from happening in the first place. +But here, here is the biggest force for bringing about a world of abundance. +I call it the rising billion. +So the white lines here are population. +We just passed the seven billion mark on Earth. +And by the way, the biggest protection against a population explosion is making the world educated and healthy. +In 2010, we had just short of two billion people online, connected. +By 2020, that's going from two billion to five billion Internet users. +Three billion new minds who have never been heard from before are connecting to the global conversation. +What will these people want? +What will they consume? What will they desire? +And rather than having economic shutdown, we're about to have the biggest economic injection ever. +These people represent tens of trillions of dollars injected into the global economy. +And they will get healthier by using the Tricorder, and they'll become better educated by using the Khan Academy, and by literally being able to use 3D printing and infinite computing [become] more productive than ever before. +So what could three billion rising, healthy, educated, productive members of humanity bring to us? +How about a set of voices that have never been heard from before. +What about giving the oppressed, wherever they might be, the voice to be heard and the voice to act for the first time ever? +What will these three billion people bring? +What about contributions we can't even predict? +The one thing I've learned at the X Prize is that small teams driven by their passion with a clear focus can do extraordinary things, things that large corporations and governments could only do in the past. +Let me share and close with a story that really got me excited. +There is a program that some of you might have heard of. +It's a game called Foldit. +It came out of the University of Washington in Seattle. +And this is a game where individuals can actually take a sequence of amino acids and figure out how the protein is going to fold. +And how it folds dictates its structure and its functionality. +And it's very important for research in medicine. +And up until now, it's been a supercomputer problem. +And this game has been played by university professors and so forth. +And it's literally, hundreds of thousands of people came online and started playing it. +And it showed that, in fact, today, the human pattern recognition machinery is better at folding proteins than the best computers. +And when these individuals went and looked at who was the best protein folder in the world, it wasn't an MIT professor, it wasn't a CalTech student, it was a person from England, from Manchester, a woman who, during the day, was an executive assistant at a rehab clinic and, at night, was the world's best protein folder. +Ladies and gentlemen, what gives me tremendous confidence in the future is the fact that we are now more empowered as individuals to take on the grand challenges of this planet. +We have the tools with this exponential technology. +We have the passion of the DIY innovator. +We have the capital of the techno-philanthropist. +And we have three billion new minds coming online to work with us to solve the grand challenges, to do that which we must do. +We are living into extraordinary decades ahead. +Thank you. + +I think we have to do something about a piece of the culture of medicine that has to change. +And I think it starts with one physician, and that's me. +And maybe I've been around long enough that I can afford to give away some of my false prestige to be able to do that. +Before I actually begin the meat of my talk, let's begin with a bit of baseball. +Hey, why not? +We're near the end, we're getting close to the World Series. +We all love baseball, don't we? +Baseball is filled with some amazing statistics. +And there's hundreds of them. +"Moneyball" is about to come out, and it's all about statistics and using statistics to build a great baseball team. +I'm going to focus on one stat that I hope a lot of you have heard of. +It's called batting average. +So we talk about a 300, a batter who bats 300. +That means that ballplayer batted safely, hit safely three times out of 10 at bats. +That means hit the ball into the outfield, it dropped, it didn't get caught, and whoever tried to throw it to first base didn't get there in time and the runner was safe. +Three times out of 10. +Do you know what they call a 300 hitter in Major League Baseball? +Good, really good, maybe an all-star. +Do you know what they call a 400 baseball hitter? +That's somebody who hit, by the way, four times safely out of every 10. +Legendary -- as in Ted Williams legendary -- the last Major League Baseball player to hit over 400 during a regular season. +Now let's take this back into my world of medicine where I'm a lot more comfortable, or perhaps a bit less comfortable after what I'm going to talk to you about. +Suppose you have appendicitis and you're referred to a surgeon who's batting 400 on appendectomies. +Somehow this isn't working out, is it? +Now suppose you live in a certain part of a certain remote place and you have a loved one who has blockages in two coronary arteries and your family doctor refers that loved one to a cardiologist who's batting 200 on angioplasties. +But, but, you know what? +She's doing a lot better this year. She's on the comeback trail. +And she's hitting a 257. +Somehow this isn't working. +But I'm going to ask you a question. +What do you think a batting average for a cardiac surgeon or a nurse practitioner or an orthopedic surgeon, an OBGYN, a paramedic is supposed to be? +1,000, very good. +Now truth of the matter is, nobody knows in all of medicine what a good surgeon or physician or paramedic is supposed to bat. +What we do though is we send each one of them, including myself, out into the world with the admonition, be perfect. +Never ever, ever make a mistake, but you worry about the details, about how that's going to happen. +And that was the message that I absorbed when I was in med school. +I was an obsessive compulsive student. +In high school, a classmate once said that Brian Goldman would study for a blood test. +And so I did. +And I studied in my little garret at the nurses' residence at Toronto General Hospital, not far from here. +And I memorized everything. +I memorized in my anatomy class the origins and exertions of every muscle, every branch of every artery that came off the aorta, differential diagnoses obscure and common. +I even knew the differential diagnosis in how to classify renal tubular acidosis. +And all the while, I was amassing more and more knowledge. +And I did well, I graduated with honors, cum laude. +And I came out of medical school with the impression that if I memorized everything and knew everything, or as much as possible, as close to everything as possible, that it would immunize me against making mistakes. +And it worked for a while, until I met Mrs. Drucker. +I was a resident at a teaching hospital here in Toronto when Mrs. Drucker was brought to the emergency department of the hospital where I was working. +At the time I was assigned to the cardiology service on a cardiology rotation. +And it was my job, when the emergency staff called for a cardiology consult, to see that patient in emerg. +and to report back to my attending. +And I saw Mrs. Drucker, and she was breathless. +And when I listened to her, she was making a wheezy sound. +And when I listened to her chest with a stethoscope, I could hear crackly sounds on both sides that told me that she was in congestive heart failure. +This is a condition in which the heart fails, and instead of being able to pump all the blood forward, some of the blood backs up into the lung, the lungs fill up with blood, and that's why you have shortness of breath. +And that wasn't a difficult diagnosis to make. +I made it and I set to work treating her. +I gave her aspirin. I gave her medications to relieve the strain on her heart. +I gave her medications that we call diuretics, water pills, to get her to pee out the access fluid. +And over the course of the next hour and a half or two, she started to feel better. +And I felt really good. +And that's when I made my first mistake; I sent her home. +Actually, I made two more mistakes. +I sent her home without speaking to my attending. +I didn't pick up the phone and do what I was supposed to do, which was call my attending and run the story by him so he would have a chance to see her for himself. +And he knew her, he would have been able to furnish additional information about her. +Maybe I did it for a good reason. +Maybe I didn't want to be a high-maintenance resident. +Maybe I wanted to be so successful and so able to take responsibility that I would do so and I would be able to take care of my attending's patients without even having to contact him. +The second mistake that I made was worse. +In sending her home, I disregarded a little voice deep down inside that was trying to tell me, "Goldman, not a good idea. Don't do this." +In fact, so lacking in confidence was I that I actually asked the nurse who was looking after Mrs. Drucker, "Do you think it's okay if she goes home?" +And the nurse thought about it and said very matter-of-factly, "Yeah, I think she'll do okay." +I can remember that like it was yesterday. +So I signed the discharge papers, and an ambulance came, paramedics came to take her home. +And I went back to my work on the wards. +All the rest of that day, that afternoon, I had this kind of gnawing feeling inside my stomach. +But I carried on with my work. +And at the end of the day, I packed up to leave the hospital and walked to the parking lot to take my car and drive home when I did something that I don't usually do. +I walked through the emergency department on my way home. +And it was there that another nurse, not the nurse who was looking after Mrs. Drucker before, but another nurse, said three words to me that are the three words that most emergency physicians I know dread. +Others in medicine dread them as well, but there's something particular about emergency medicine because we see patients so fleetingly. +The three words are: Do you remember? +"Do you remember that patient you sent home?" +the other nurse asked matter-of-factly. +"Well she's back," in just that tone of voice. +Well she was back all right. +She was back and near death. +About an hour after she had arrived home, after I'd sent her home, she collapsed and her family called 911 and the paramedics brought her back to the emergency department where she had a blood pressure of 50, which is in severe shock. +And she was barely breathing and she was blue. +And the emerg. staff pulled out all the stops. +They gave her medications to raise her blood pressure. +They put her on a ventilator. +And I was shocked and shaken to the core. +And I went through this roller coaster, because after they stabilized her, she went to the intensive care unit, and I hoped against hope that she would recover. +And over the next two or three days, it was clear that she was never going to wake up. +She had irreversible brain damage. +And the family gathered. +And over the course of the next eight or nine days, they resigned themselves to what was happening. +And at about the nine day mark, they let her go -- Mrs. Drucker, a wife, a mother and a grandmother. +They say you never forget the names of those who die. +And that was my first time to be acquainted with that. +Over the next few weeks, I beat myself up and I experienced for the first time the unhealthy shame that exists in our culture of medicine -- where I felt alone, isolated, not feeling the healthy kind of shame that you feel, because you can't talk about it with your colleagues. +You know that healthy kind, when you betray a secret that a best friend made you promise never to reveal and then you get busted and then your best friend confronts you and you have terrible discussions, but at the end of it all that sick feeling guides you and you say, I'll never make that mistake again. +And you make amends and you never make that mistake again. +That's the kind of shame that is a teacher. +The unhealthy shame I'm talking about is the one that makes you so sick inside. +It's the one that says, not that what you did was bad, but that you are bad. +And it was what I was feeling. +And it wasn't because of my attending; he was a doll. +He talked to the family, and I'm quite sure that he smoothed things over and made sure that I didn't get sued. +And I kept asking myself these questions. +Why didn't I ask my attending? Why did I send her home? +And then at my worst moments: Why did I make such a stupid mistake? +Why did I go into medicine? +Slowly but surely, it lifted. +I began to feel a bit better. +And on a cloudy day, there was a crack in the clouds and the sun started to come out and I wondered, maybe I could feel better again. +And I made myself a bargain that if only I redouble my efforts to be perfect and never make another mistake again, please make the voices stop. +And they did. +And I went back to work. +And then it happened again. +Two years later I was an attending in the emergency department at a community hospital just north of Toronto, and I saw a 25 year-old man with a sore throat. +It was busy, I was in a bit of a hurry. +He kept pointing here. +I looked at his throat, it was a little bit pink. +And I gave him a prescription for penicillin and sent him on his way. +And even as he was walking out the door, he was still sort of pointing to his throat. +And two days later I came to do my next emergency shift, and that's when my chief asked to speak to me quietly in her office. +And she said the three words: Do you remember? +"Do you remember that patient you saw with the sore throat?" +Well it turns out, he didn't have a strep throat. +He had a potentially life-threatening condition called epiglottitis. +You can Google it, but it's an infection, not of the throat, but of the upper airway, and it can actually cause the airway to close. +And fortunately he didn't die. +He was placed on intravenous antibiotics and he recovered after a few days. +And I went through the same period of shame and recriminations and felt cleansed and went back to work, until it happened again and again and again. +Twice in one emergency shift, I missed appendicitis. +Now that takes some doing, especially when you work in a hospital that at the time saw but 14 people a night. +Now in both cases, I didn't send them home and I don't think there was any gap in their care. +One I thought had a kidney stone. +I ordered a kidney X-ray. When it turned out to be normal, my colleague who was doing a reassessment of the patient noticed some tenderness in the right lower quadrant and called the surgeons. +The other one had a lot of diarrhea. +I ordered some fluids to rehydrate him and asked my colleague to reassess him. +And he did and when he noticed some tenderness in the right lower quadrant, called the surgeons. +In both cases, they had their operations and they did okay. +But each time, they were gnawing at me, eating at me. +And I'd like to be able to say to you that my worst mistakes only happened in the first five years of practice as many of my colleagues say, which is total B.S. +Some of my doozies have been in the last five years. +Alone, ashamed and unsupported. +Here's the problem: If I can't come clean and talk about my mistakes, if I can't find the still-small voice that tells me what really happened, how can I share it with my colleagues? +How can I teach them about what I did so that they don't do the same thing? +If I were to walk into a room -- like right now, I have no idea what you think of me. +When was the last time you heard somebody talk about failure after failure after failure? +Oh yeah, you go to a cocktail party and you might hear about some other doctor, but you're not going to hear somebody talking about their own mistakes. +If I were to walk into a room filled with my colleages and ask for their support right now and start to tell what I've just told you right now, I probably wouldn't get through two of those stories before they would start to get really uncomfortable, somebody would crack a joke, they'd change the subject and we would move on. +And in fact, if I knew and my colleagues knew that one of my orthopedic colleagues took off the wrong leg in my hospital, believe me, I'd have trouble making eye contact with that person. +That's the system that we have. +It's a complete denial of mistakes. +It's a system in which there are two kinds of physicians -- those who make mistakes and those who don't, those who can't handle sleep deprivation and those who can, those who have lousy outcomes and those who have great outcomes. +And it's almost like an ideological reaction, like the antibodies begin to attack that person. +And we have this idea that if we drive the people who make mistakes out of medicine, what will we be left with, but a safe system. +But there are two problems with that. +In my 20 years or so of medical broadcasting and journalism, I've made a personal study of medical malpractice and medical errors to learn everything I can, from one of the first articles I wrote for the Toronto Star to my show "White Coat, Black Art." +And what I've learned is that errors are absolutely ubiquitous. +We work in a system where errors happen every day, where one in 10 medications are either the wrong medication given in hospital or at the wrong dosage, where hospital-acquired infections are getting more and more numerous, causing havoc and death. +In this country, as many as 24,000 Canadians die of preventable medical errors. +In the United States, the Institute of Medicine pegged it at 100,000. +In both cases, these are gross underestimates, because we really aren't ferreting out the problem as we should. +And here's the thing. +In a hospital system where medical knowledge is doubling every two or three years, we can't keep up with it. +Sleep deprivation is absolutely pervasive. +We can't get rid of it. +We have our cognitive biases, so that I can take a perfect history on a patient with chest pain. +Now take the same patient with chest pain, make them moist and garrulous and put a little bit of alcohol on their breath, and suddenly my history is laced with contempt. +I don't take the same history. +I'm not a robot; I don't do things the same way each time. +And my patients aren't cars; they don't tell me their symptoms in the same way each time. +Given all of that, mistakes are inevitable. +So if you take the system, as I was taught, and weed out all the error-prone health professionals, well there won't be anybody left. +And you know that business about people not wanting to talk about their worst cases? +On my show, on "White Coat, Black Art," I made it a habit of saying, "Here's my worst mistake," I would say to everybody from paramedics to the chief of cardiac surgery, "Here's my worst mistake," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, "What about yours?" and I would point the microphone towards them. +And their pupils would dilate, they would recoil, then they would look down and swallow hard and start to tell me their stories. +They want to tell their stories. They want to share their stories. +They want to be able to say, "Look, don't make the same mistake I did." +What they need is an environment to be able to do that. +What they need is a redefined medical culture. +And it starts with one physician at a time. +The redefined physician is human, knows she's human, accepts it, isn't proud of making mistakes, but strives to learn one thing from what happened that she can teach to somebody else. +She shares her experience with others. +She's supportive when other people talk about their mistakes. +And she points out other people's mistakes, not in a gotcha way, but in a loving, supportive way so that everybody can benefit. +And she works in a culture of medicine that acknowledges that human beings run the system, and when human beings run the system, they will make mistakes from time to time. +So the system is evolving to create backups that make it easier to detect those mistakes that humans inevitably make and also fosters in a loving, supportive way places where everybody who is observing in the health care system can actually point out things that could be potential mistakes and is rewarded for doing so, and especially people like me, when we do make mistakes, we're rewarded for coming clean. +My name is Brian Goldman. +I am a redefined physician. +I'm human. I make mistakes. +I'm sorry about that, but I strive to learn one thing that I can pass on to other people. +I still don't know what you think of me, but I can live with that. +And let me close with three words of my own: I do remember. + +I'm going to speak about a tiny, little idea. +And this is about shifting baseline. +And because the idea can be explained in one minute, I will tell you three stories before to fill in the time. +And the first story is about Charles Darwin, one of my heroes. +And he was here, as you well know, in '35. +And you'd think he was chasing finches, but he wasn't. +He was actually collecting fish. +And he described one of them as very "common." +This was the sailfin grouper. +A big fishery was run on it until the '80s. +Now the fish is on the IUCN Red List. +Now this story, we have heard it lots of times on Galapagos and other places, so there is nothing particular about it. +But the point is, we still come to Galapagos. +We still think it is pristine. +The brochures still say it is untouched. +So what happens here? +The second story, also to illustrate another concept, is called shifting waistline. +Because I was there in '71, studying a lagoon in West Africa. +I was there because I grew up in Europe and I wanted later to work in Africa. +And I thought I could blend in. +And I got a big sunburn, and I was convinced that I was really not from there. +This was my first sunburn. +And the lagoon was surrounded by palm trees, as you can see, and a few mangrove. +And it had tilapia about 20 centimeters, a species of tilapia called blackchin tilapia. +And the fisheries for this tilapia sustained lots of fish and they had a good time and they earned more than average in Ghana. +When I went there 27 years later, the fish had shrunk to half of their size. +They were maturing at five centimeters. +They had been pushed genetically. +There were still fishes. +They were still kind of happy. +And the fish also were happy to be there. +So nothing has changed, but everything has changed. +My third little story is that I was an accomplice in the introduction of trawling in Southeast Asia. +In the '70s -- well, beginning in the '60s -- Europe did lots of development projects. +Fish development meant imposing on countries that had already 100,000 fishers And this boat, quite ugly, is called the Mutiara 4. +And I went sailing on it, and we did surveys throughout the southern South China sea and especially the Java Sea. +And what we caught, we didn't have words for it. +What we caught, I know now, is the bottom of the sea. +And 90 percent of our catch were sponges, other animals that are fixed on the bottom. +And actually most of the fish, they are a little spot on the debris, the piles of debris, were coral reef fish. +Essentially the bottom of the sea came onto the deck and then was thrown down. +And these pictures are extraordinary because this transition is very rapid. +Within a year, you do a survey and then commercial fishing begins. +The bottom is transformed from, in this case, a hard bottom or soft coral into a muddy mess. +This is a dead turtle. +They were not eaten, they were thrown away because they were dead. +And one time we caught a live one. +It was not drowned yet. +And then they wanted to kill it because it was good to eat. +This mountain of debris is actually collected by fishers every time they go into an area that's never been fished. +But it's not documented. +We transform the world, but we don't remember it. +We adjust our baseline to the new level, and we don't recall what was there. +If you generalize this, something like this happens. +You have on the y axis some good thing: biodiversity, numbers of orca, the greenness of your country, the water supply. +And over time it changes -- it changes because people do things, or naturally. +Every generation will use the images that they got at the beginning of their conscious lives as a standard and will extrapolate forward. +And the difference then, they perceive as a loss. +But they don't perceive what happened before as a loss. +You can have a succession of changes. +At the end you want to sustain miserable leftovers. +And that, to a large extent, is what we want to do now. +We want to sustain things that are gone or things that are not the way they were. +Now one should think this problem affected people certainly when in predatory societies, they killed animals and they didn't know they had done so after a few generations. +Because, obviously, an animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct, it becomes rare. +So you don't lose abundant animals. +You always lose rare animals. +And therefore they're not perceived as a big loss. +Over time, we concentrate on large animals, and in a sea that means the big fish. +They become rarer because we fish them. +Over time we have a few fish left and we think this is the baseline. +And the question is, why do people accept this? +Well because they don't know that it was different. +And in fact, lots of people, scientists, will contest that it was really different. +And they will contest this because the evidence presented in an earlier mode is not in the way they would like the evidence presented. +For example, the anecdote that some present, as Captain so-and-so observed lots of fish in this area cannot be used or is usually not utilized by fishery scientists, because it's not "scientific." +So you have a situation where people don't know the past, even though we live in literate societies, because they don't trust the sources of the past. +And hence, the enormous role that a marine protected area can play. +Because with marine protected areas, we actually recreate the past. +We recreate the past that people cannot conceive because the baseline has shifted and is extremely low. +That is for people who can see a marine protected area and who can benefit from the insight that it provides, which enables them to reset their baseline. +How about the people who can't do that because they have no access -- the people in the Midwest for example? +There I think that the arts and film can perhaps fill the gap, and simulation. +This is a simulation of Chesapeake Bay. +There were gray whales in Chesapeake Bay a long time ago -- 500 years ago. +And you will have noticed that the hues and tones are like "Avatar." +And if you think about "Avatar," if you think of why people were so touched by it -- never mind the Pocahontas story -- why so touched by the imagery? +Because it evokes something that in a sense has been lost. +And so my recommendation, it's the only one I will provide, is for Cameron to do "Avatar II" underwater. +Thank you very much. + +In the 1980s in the communist Eastern Germany, if you owned a typewriter, you had to register it with the government. +You had to register a sample sheet of text out of the typewriter. +And this was done so the government could track where text was coming from. +If they found a paper which had the wrong kind of thought, they could track down who created that thought. +And we in the West couldn't understand how anybody could do this, how much this would restrict freedom of speech. +We would never do that in our own countries. +But today in 2011, if you go and buy a color laser printer from any major laser printer manufacturer and print a page, that page will end up having slight yellow dots printed on every single page in a pattern which makes the page unique to you and to your printer. +This is happening to us today. +And nobody seems to be making a fuss about it. +And this is an example of the ways that our own governments are using technology against us, the citizens. +And this is one of the main three sources of online problems today. +If we take a look at what's really happening in the online world, we can group the attacks based on the attackers. +We have three main groups. +We have online criminals. +Like here, we have Mr. Dimitry Golubov from the city of Kiev in Ukraine. +And the motives of online criminals are very easy to understand. +These guys make money. +They use online attacks to make lots of money, and lots and lots of it. +We actually have several cases of millionaires online, multimillionaires, who made money with their attacks. +Here's Vladimir Tsastsin form Tartu in Estonia. +This is Alfred Gonzalez. +This is Stephen Watt. +This is Bjorn Sundin. +This is Matthew Anderson, Tariq Al-Daour and so on and so on. +These guys make their fortunes online, but they make it through the illegal means of using things like banking trojans to steal money from our bank accounts while we do online banking, or with keyloggers to collect our credit card information while we are doing online shopping from an infected computer. +The U.S. Secret Service, two months ago, froze the Swiss bank account of Mr. Sam Jain right here, and that bank account had 14.9 million U.S. dollars on it when it was frozen. +Mr. Jain himself is on the loose; nobody knows where he is. +And I claim it's already today that it's more likely for any of us to become the victim of a crime online than here in the real world. +And it's very obvious that this is only going to get worse. +In the future, the majority of crime will be happening online. +The second major group of attackers that we are watching today are not motivated by money. +They're motivated by something else -- motivated by protests, motivated by an opinion, motivated by the laughs. +Groups like Anonymous have risen up over the last 12 months and have become a major player in the field of online attacks. +So those are the three main attackers: criminals who do it for the money, hacktivists like Anonymous doing it for the protest, but then the last group are nation states, governments doing the attacks. +And then we look at cases like what happened in DigiNotar. +This is a prime example of what happens when governments attack against their own citizens. +DigiNotar is a Certificate Authority from The Netherlands -- or actually, it was. +It was running into bankruptcy last fall because they were hacked into. +Somebody broke in and they hacked it thoroughly. +And I asked last week in a meeting with Dutch government representatives, I asked one of the leaders of the team whether he found plausible that people died because of the DigiNotar hack. +And his answer was yes. +So how do people die as the result of a hack like this? +Well DigiNotar is a C.A. +They sell certificates. +What do you do with certificates? +Well you need a certificate if you have a website that has https, SSL encrypted services, services like Gmail. +Now we all, or a big part of us, use Gmail or one of their competitors, but these services are especially popular in totalitarian states like Iran, where dissidents use foreign services like Gmail because they know they are more trustworthy than the local services and they are encrypted over SSL connections, so the local government can't snoop on their discussions. +Except they can if they hack into a foreign C.A. +and issue rogue certificates. +And this is exactly what happened with the case of DigiNotar. +What about Arab Spring and things that have been happening, for example, in Egypt? +Well in Egypt, the rioters looted the headquarters of the Egyptian secret police in April 2011, and when they were looting the building they found lots of papers. +Among those papers, was this binder entitled "FINFISHER." +And within that binder were notes from a company based in Germany which had sold the Egyptian government a set of tools for intercepting -- and in very large scale -- all the communication of the citizens of the country. +They had sold this tool for 280,000 Euros to the Egyptian government. +The company headquarters are right here. +So Western governments are providing totalitarian governments with tools to do this against their own citizens. +But Western governments are doing it to themselves as well. +For example, in Germany, just a couple of weeks ago the so-called State Trojan was found, which was a trojan used by German government officials to investigate their own citizens. +If you are a suspect in a criminal case, well it's pretty obvious, your phone will be tapped. +But today, it goes beyond that. +They will tap your Internet connection. +They will even use tools like State Trojan to infect your computer with a trojan, which enables them to watch all your communication, to listen to your online discussions, to collect your passwords. +Now when we think deeper about things like these, the obvious response from people should be that, "Okay, that sounds bad, but that doesn't really affect me because I'm a legal citizen. +Why should I worry? +Because I have nothing to hide." +And this is an argument, which doesn't make sense. +Privacy is implied. +Privacy is not up for discussion. +This is not a question between privacy against security. +It's a question of freedom against control. +And while we might trust our governments right now, right here in 2011, any right we give away will be given away for good. +And do we trust, do we blindly trust, any future government, a government we might have 50 years from now? +And these are the questions that we have to worry about for the next 50 years. + +This may sound strange, but I'm a big fan of the concrete block. +The first concrete blocks were manufactured in 1868 with a very simple idea: modules made of cement of a fixed measurement that fit together. +Very quickly concrete blocks became the most-used construction unit in the world. +They enabled us to to build things that were larger than us, buildings, bridges, one brick at a time. +Essentially concrete blocks had become the building block of our time. +Almost a hundred years later in 1947, LEGO came up with this. +It was called the Automatic Binding Brick. +And in a few short years, LEGO bricks took place in every household. +It's estimated that over 400 billion bricks have been produced -- or 75 bricks for every person on the planet. +You don't have to be an engineer to make beautiful houses, beautiful bridges, beautiful buildings. +LEGO made it accessible. +LEGO has essentially taken the concrete block, the building block of the world, and made it into the building block of our imagination. +Meanwhile the exact same year, at Bell Labs the next revolution was about to be announced, the next building block. +The transistor was a small plastic unit that would take us from a world of static bricks piled on top of each other to a world where everything was interactive. +Like the concrete block, the transistor allows you to build much larger, more complex circuits, one brick at a time. +But there's a main difference: The transistor was only for experts. +I personally don't accept this, that the building block of our time is reserved for experts, so I decided to change that. +Eight years ago when I was at the Media Lab, I started exploring this idea of how to put the power of engineers in the hands of artists and designers. +A few years ago I started developing littleBits. +Let me show you how they work. +LittleBits are electronic modules with each one specific function. +They're pre-engineered to be light, sound, motors and sensors. +And the best part about it is they snap together with magnets. +So you can't put them the wrong way. +The bricks are color-coded. +Green is output, blue is power, pink is input and orange is wire. +So all you need to do is snap a blue to a green and very quickly you can start making larger circuits. +You put a blue to a green, you can make light. +You can put a knob in between and now you've made a little dimmer. +Switch out the knob for a pulse module, which is here, and now you've made a little blinker. +Add this buzzer for some extra punch and you've created a noise machine. +I'm going to stop that. +So beyond simple play, littleBits are actually pretty powerful. +Instead of having to program, to wire, to solder, littleBits allow you to program using very simple intuitive gestures. +So to make this blink faster or slower, you would just turn this knob and basically make it pulse faster or slower. +The idea behind littleBits is that it's a growing library. +We want to make every single interaction in the world into a ready-to-use brick. +Lights, sounds, solar panels, motors -- everything should be accessible. +We've been giving littleBits to kids and seeing them play with them. +And it's been an incredible experience. +The nicest thing is how they start to understand the electronics around them from everyday that they don't learn at schools. +For example, how a nightlight works, or why an elevator door stays open, or how an iPod responds to touch. +We've also been taking littleBits to design schools. +So for example, we've had designers with no experience with electronics whatsoever start to play with littleBits as a material. +Here you see, with felt and paper water bottles, we have Geordie making ... +A few weeks ago we took littleBits to RISD and gave them to some designers with no experience in engineering whatsoever -- just cardboard, wood and paper -- and told them "Make something." +Here's an example of a project they made, a motion-activated confetti canon ball. +But wait, this is actually my favorite project. +It's a lobster made of playdough that's afraid of the dark. +To these non-engineers, littleBits became another material, electronics became just another material. +And we want to make this material accessible to everyone. +So littleBits is open-source. +You can go on the website, download all the design files, make them yourself. +We want to encourage a world of creators, of inventors, of contributors, because this world that we live in, this interactive world, is ours. +So go ahead and start inventing. +Thank you. + +When I was 11, I remember waking up one morning to the sound of joy in my house. +My father was listening to BBC News on his small, gray radio. +There was a big smile on his face which was unusual then, because the news mostly depressed him. +"The Taliban are gone!" my father shouted. +I didn't know what it meant, but I could see that my father was very, very happy. +"You can go to a real school now," he said. +A morning that I will never forget. +A real school. +You see, I was six when the Taliban took over Afghanistan and made it illegal for girls to go to school. +So for the next five years, I dressed as a boy to escort my older sister, who was no longer allowed to be outside alone, to a secret school. +It was the only way we both could be educated. +Each day, we took a different route so that no one would suspect where we were going. +We would cover our books in grocery bags so it would seem we were just out shopping. +The school was in a house, more than 100 of us packed in one small living room. +It was cozy in winter but extremely hot in summer. +We all knew we were risking our lives -- the teacher, the students and our parents. +From time to time, the school would suddenly be canceled for a week because Taliban were suspicious. +We always wondered what they knew about us. +Were we being followed? +Do they know where we live? +We were scared, but still, school was where we wanted to be. +I was very lucky to grow up in a family where education was prized and daughters were treasured. +My grandfather was an extraordinary man for his time. +A total maverick from a remote province of Afghanistan, he insisted that his daughter, my mom, go to school, and for that he was disowned by his father. +But my educated mother became a teacher. +There she is. +She retired two years ago, only to turn our house into a school for girls and women in our neighborhood. +And my father -- that's him -- he was the first ever in his family to receive an education. +There was no question that his children would receive an education, including his daughters, despite the Taliban, despite the risks. +To him, there was greater risk in not educating his children. +During Taliban years, I remember there were times I would get so frustrated by our life and always being scared and not seeing a future. +I would want to quit, but my father, he would say, "Listen, my daughter, you can lose everything you own in your life. +Your money can be stolen. You can be forced to leave your home during a war. +But the one thing that will always remain with you is what is here, and if we have to sell our blood to pay your school fees, we will. +So do you still not want to continue?" +Today I am 22. +I was raised in a country that has been destroyed by decades of war. +Fewer than six percent of women my age have made it beyond high school, and had my family not been so committed to my education, I would be one of them. +Instead, I stand here a proud graduate of Middlebury College. +When I returned to Afghanistan, my grandfather, the one exiled from his home for daring to educate his daughters, was among the first to congratulate me. +He not only brags about my college degree, but also that I was the first woman, and that I am the first woman to drive him through the streets of Kabul. +My family believes in me. +I dream big, but my family dreams even bigger for me. +That's why I am a global ambassador for 10x10, a global campaign to educate women. +That's why I cofounded SOLA, the first and perhaps only boarding school for girls in Afghanistan, a country where it's still risky for girls to go to school. +The exciting thing is that I see students at my school with ambition grabbing at opportunity. +And I see their parents and their fathers who, like my own, advocate for them, despite and even in the face of daunting opposition. +Like Ahmed. That's not his real name, and I cannot show you his face, but Ahmed is the father of one of my students. +Less than a month ago, he and his daughter were on their way from SOLA to their village, and they literally missed being killed by a roadside bomb by minutes. +As he arrived home, the phone rang, a voice warning him that if he sent his daughter back to school, they would try again. +"Kill me now, if you wish," he said, "but I will not ruin my daughter's future because of your old and backward ideas." +What I've come to realize about Afghanistan, and this is something that is often dismissed in the West, that behind most of us who succeed is a father who recognizes the value in his daughter and who sees that her success is his success. +It's not to say that our mothers aren't key in our success. +In fact, they're often the initial and convincing negotiators of a bright future for their daughters, but in the context of a society like in Afghanistan, we must have the support of men. +Under the Taliban, girls who went to school numbered in the hundreds -- remember, it was illegal. +But today, more than three million girls are in school in Afghanistan. +Afghanistan looks so different from here in America. +I find that Americans see the fragility in changes. +I fear that these changes will not last much beyond the U.S. troops' withdrawal. +But when I am back in Afghanistan, when I see the students in my school and their parents who advocate for them, who encourage them, I see a promising future and lasting change. +To me, Afghanistan is a country of hope and boundless possibilities, and every single day the girls of SOLA remind me of that. +Like me, they are dreaming big. +Thank you. + +Everything I do, and everything I do professionally -- my life -- has been shaped by seven years of work as a young man in Africa. +From 1971 to 1977 -- I look young, but I'm not — -- I worked in Zambia, Kenya, Ivory Coast, Algeria, Somalia, in projects of technical cooperation with African countries. +I worked for an Italian NGO, and every single project that we set up in Africa failed. +And I was distraught. +I thought, age 21, that we Italians were good people and we were doing good work in Africa. +Instead, everything we touched we killed. +Our first project, the one that has inspired my first book, "Ripples from the Zambezi," was a project where we Italians decided to teach Zambian people how to grow food. +So we arrived there with Italian seeds in southern Zambia in this absolutely magnificent valley going down to the Zambezi River, and we taught the local people how to grow Italian tomatoes and zucchini and ... +And of course the local people had absolutely no interest in doing that, so we paid them to come and work, and sometimes they would show up. +And we were amazed that the local people, in such a fertile valley, would not have any agriculture. +But instead of asking them how come they were not growing anything, we simply said, "Thank God we're here." +"Just in the nick of time to save the Zambian people from starvation." +And of course, everything in Africa grew beautifully. +We had these magnificent tomatoes. In Italy, a tomato would grow to this size. In Zambia, to this size. +And we could not believe, and we were telling the Zambians, "Look how easy agriculture is." +When the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red, overnight, some 200 hippos came out from the river and they ate everything. +And we said to the Zambians, "My God, the hippos!" +And the Zambians said, "Yes, that's why we have no agriculture here." +"Why didn't you tell us?" "You never asked." +I thought it was only us Italians blundering around Africa, but then I saw what the Americans were doing, what the English were doing, what the French were doing, and after seeing what they were doing, I became quite proud of our project in Zambia. +Because, you see, at least we fed the hippos. +You should see the rubbish — -- You should see the rubbish that we have bestowed on unsuspecting African people. +You want to read the book, read "Dead Aid," by Dambisa Moyo, Zambian woman economist. +The book was published in 2009. +We Western donor countries have given the African continent two trillion American dollars in the last 50 years. +I'm not going to tell you the damage that that money has done. +Just go and read her book. +Read it from an African woman, the damage that we have done. +We Western people are imperialist, colonialist missionaries, and there are only two ways we deal with people: We either patronize them, or we are paternalistic. +The two words come from the Latin root "pater," which means "father." +But they mean two different things. +Paternalistic, I treat anybody from a different culture as if they were my children. "I love you so much." +Patronizing, I treat everybody from another culture as if they were my servants. +That's why the white people in Africa are called "bwana," boss. +I was given a slap in the face reading a book, "Small is Beautiful," written by Schumacher, who said, above all in economic development, if people do not wish to be helped, leave them alone. +This should be the first principle of aid. +The first principle of aid is respect. +This morning, the gentleman who opened this conference lay a stick on the floor, and said, "Can we -- can you imagine a city that is not neocolonial?" +I decided when I was 27 years old to only respond to people, and I invented a system called Enterprise Facilitation, where you never initiate anything, you never motivate anybody, but you become a servant of the local passion, the servant of local people who have a dream to become a better person. +So what you do -- you shut up. +You never arrive in a community with any ideas, and you sit with the local people. +We don't work from offices. +We meet at the cafe. We meet at the pub. +We have zero infrastructure. +And what we do, we become friends, and we find out what that person wants to do. +The most important thing is passion. +You can give somebody an idea. +If that person doesn't want to do it, what are you going to do? +The passion that the person has for her own growth is the most important thing. +The passion that that man has for his own personal growth is the most important thing. +And then we help them to go and find the knowledge, because nobody in the world can succeed alone. +The person with the idea may not have the knowledge, but the knowledge is available. +So years and years ago, I had this idea: Why don't we, for once, instead of arriving in the community to tell people what to do, why don't, for once, listen to them? But not in community meetings. +Let me tell you a secret. +There is a problem with community meetings. +Entrepreneurs never come, and they never tell you, in a public meeting, what they want to do with their own money, what opportunity they have identified. +So planning has this blind spot. +The smartest people in your community you don't even know, because they don't come to your public meetings. +What we do, we work one-on-one, and to work one-on-one, you have to create a social infrastructure that doesn't exist. +You have to create a new profession. +The profession is the family doctor of enterprise, the family doctor of business, who sits with you in your house, at your kitchen table, at the cafe, and helps you find the resources to transform your passion into a way to make a living. +I started this as a tryout in Esperance, in Western Australia. +I was a doing a Ph.D. at the time, trying to go away from this patronizing bullshit that we arrive and tell you what to do. +And so what I did in Esperance that first year was to just walk the streets, and in three days I had my first client, and I helped this first guy who was smoking fish from a garage, was a Maori guy, and I helped him to sell to the restaurant in Perth, to get organized, and then the fishermen came to me to say, "You the guy who helped Maori? Can you help us?" +And I helped these five fishermen to work together and get this beautiful tuna not to the cannery in Albany for 60 cents a kilo, but we found a way to take the fish for sushi to Japan for 15 dollars a kilo, and the farmers came to talk to me, said, "Hey, you helped them. Can you help us?" +In a year, I had 27 projects going on, and the government came to see me to say, "How can you do that? +How can you do — ?" And I said, "I do something very, very, very difficult. +I shut up, and listen to them." +So — — So the government says, "Do it again." +We've done it in 300 communities around the world. +We have helped to start 40,000 businesses. +There is a new generation of entrepreneurs who are dying of solitude. +Peter Drucker, one of the greatest management consultants in history, died age 96, a few years ago. +Peter Drucker was a professor of philosophy before becoming involved in business, and this is what Peter Drucker says: "Planning is actually incompatible with an entrepreneurial society and economy." +Planning is the kiss of death of entrepreneurship. +So now you're rebuilding Christchurch without knowing what the smartest people in Christchurch want to do with their own money and their own energy. +You have to learn how to get these people to come and talk to you. +You have to offer them confidentiality, privacy, you have to be fantastic at helping them, and then they will come, and they will come in droves. +In a community of 10,000 people, we get 200 clients. +Can you imagine a community of 400,000 people, the intelligence and the passion? +Which presentation have you applauded the most this morning? +Local, passionate people. That's who you have applauded. +So what I'm saying is that entrepreneurship is where it's at. +We are at the end of the first industrial revolution -- nonrenewable fossil fuels, manufacturing -- and all of a sudden, we have systems which are not sustainable. +The internal combustion engine is not sustainable. +Freon way of maintaining things is not sustainable. +What we have to look at is at how we feed, cure, educate, transport, communicate for seven billion people in a sustainable way. +The technologies do not exist to do that. +Who is going to invent the technology for the green revolution? Universities? Forget about it! +Government? Forget about it! +It will be entrepreneurs, and they're doing it now. +There's a lovely story that I read in a futurist magazine many, many years ago. +There was a group of experts who were invited to discuss the future of the city of New York in 1860. +And in 1860, this group of people came together, and they all speculated about what would happen to the city of New York in 100 years, and the conclusion was unanimous: The city of New York would not exist in 100 years. +Why? Because they looked at the curve and said, if the population keeps growing at this rate, to move the population of New York around, they would have needed six million horses, and the manure created by six million horses would be impossible to deal with. +They were already drowning in manure. +So 1860, they are seeing this dirty technology that is going to choke the life out of New York. +So what happens? In 40 years' time, in the year 1900, in the United States of America, there were 1,001 car manufacturing companies -- 1,001. +The idea of finding a different technology had absolutely taken over, and there were tiny, tiny little factories in backwaters. +Dearborn, Michigan. Henry Ford. +However, there is a secret to work with entrepreneurs. +First, you have to offer them confidentiality. +Otherwise they don't come and talk to you. +Then you have to offer them absolute, dedicated, passionate service to them. +And then you have to tell them the truth about entrepreneurship. +The smallest company, the biggest company, has to be capable of doing three things beautifully: The product that you want to sell has to be fantastic, you have to have fantastic marketing, and you have to have tremendous financial management. +Guess what? +We have never met a single human being in the world who can make it, sell it and look after the money. +It doesn't exist. +This person has never been born. +We've done the research, and we have looked at the 100 iconic companies of the world -- Carnegie, Westinghouse, Edison, Ford, all the new companies, Google, Yahoo. +There's only one thing that all the successful companies in the world have in common, only one: None were started by one person. +Now we teach entrepreneurship to 16-year-olds in Northumberland, and we start the class by giving them the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiography, and the task of the 16-year-olds is to underline, in the first two pages of Richard Branson's autobiography how many times Richard uses the word "I" and how many times he uses the word "we." +Never the word "I," and the word "we" 32 times. +He wasn't alone when he started. +Nobody started a company alone. No one. +So we can create the community where we have facilitators who come from a small business background sitting in cafes, in bars, and your dedicated buddies who will do to you, what somebody did for this gentleman who talks about this epic, somebody who will say to you, "What do you need? +What can you do? Can you make it? +Okay, can you sell it? Can you look after the money?" +"Oh, no, I cannot do this." "Would you like me to find you somebody?" +We activate communities. +We have groups of volunteers supporting the Enterprise Facilitator to help you to find resources and people and we have discovered that the miracle of the intelligence of local people is such that you can change the culture and the economy of this community just by capturing the passion, the energy and imagination of your own people. +Thank you. + +Five years ago, I experienced a bit of what it must have been like to be Alice in Wonderland. +Penn State asked me, a communications teacher, to teach a communications class for engineering students. +And I was scared. +Really scared. Scared of these students with their big brains and their big books and their big, unfamiliar words. +But as these conversations unfolded, I experienced what Alice must have when she went down that rabbit hole and saw that door to a whole new world. +That's just how I felt as I had those conversations with the students. I was amazed at the ideas that they had, and I wanted others to experience this wonderland as well. +And I believe the key to opening that door is great communication. +We desperately need great communication from our scientists and engineers in order to change the world. +Our scientists and engineers are the ones that are tackling our grandest challenges, from energy to environment to health care, among others, and if we don't know about it and understand it, then the work isn't done, and I believe it's our responsibility as non-scientists to have these interactions. +But these great conversations can't occur if our scientists and engineers don't invite us in to see their wonderland. +So scientists and engineers, please, talk nerdy to us. +I want to share a few keys on how you can do that to make sure that we can see that your science is sexy and that your engineering is engaging. +First question to answer for us: so what? +Tell us why your science is relevant to us. +Don't just tell me that you study trabeculae, but tell me that you study trabeculae, which is the mesh-like structure of our bones because it's important to understanding and treating osteoporosis. +And when you're describing your science, beware of jargon. +Jargon is a barrier to our understanding of your ideas. +Sure, you can say "spatial and temporal," but why not just say "space and time," which is so much more accessible to us? +And making your ideas accessible is not the same as dumbing it down. +Instead, as Einstein said, make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. +You can clearly communicate your science without compromising the ideas. +A few things to consider are having examples, stories and analogies. Those are ways to engage and excite us about your content. +And when presenting your work, drop the bullet points. +Have you ever wondered why they're called bullet points? +What do bullets do? Bullets kill, and they will kill your presentation. +A slide like this is not only boring, but it relies too much on the language area of our brain, and causes us to become overwhelmed. +Instead, this example slide by Genevieve Brown is much more effective. It's showing that the special structure of trabeculae are so strong that they actually inspired the unique design of the Eiffel Tower. +And the trick here is to use a single, readable sentence that the audience can key into if they get a bit lost, and then provide visuals which appeal to our other senses and create a deeper sense of understanding of what's being described. +So I think these are just a few keys that can help the rest of us to open that door and see the wonderland that is science and engineering. +And because the engineers that I've worked with have taught me to become really in touch with my inner nerd, I want to summarize with an equation. +Take your science, subtract your bullet points and your jargon, divide by relevance, meaning share what's relevant to the audience, and multiply it by the passion that you have for this incredible work that you're doing, and that is going to equal incredible interactions that are full of understanding. +And so, scientists and engineers, when you've solved this equation, by all means, talk nerdy to me. +Thank you. + +Hi. This is my mobile phone. +A mobile phone can change your life, and gives you individual freedom. +With a mobile phone, you can shoot a crime against humanity in Syria. +With a mobile phone, you can tweet a message and start a protest in Egypt. +And with a mobile phone, you can record a song, load it up to SoundCloud and become famous. +All this is possible with your mobile phone. +I'm a child of 1984, and I live in the city of Berlin. +Let's go back to that time, to this city. +Here you can see how hundreds of thousands of people stood up and protested for change. +This is autumn 1989, and imagine that all those people standing up and protesting for change had a mobile phone in their pocket. +Who in the room has a mobile phone with you? +Hold it up. +Hold your phones up, hold your phones up! +Hold it up. An Android, a Blackberry, wow. +That's a lot. Almost everybody today has a mobile phone. +But today I will talk about me and my mobile phone, and how it changed my life. +And I will talk about this. +These are 35,830 lines of information. +Raw data. +And why are these informations there? +Because in the summer of 2006, the E.U. Commission tabled a directive. +This directive [is] called Data Retention Directive. +This directive says that each phone company in Europe, each Internet service company all over Europe, has to store a wide range of information about the users. +Who calls whom? Who sends whom an email? +Who sends whom a text message? +And if you use your mobile phone, where you are. +All this information is stored for at least six months, up to two years by your phone company or your Internet service provider. +And all over Europe, people stood up and said, "We don't want this." +They said, we don't want this data retention. +We want self-determination in the digital age, and we don't want that phone companies and Internet companies have to store all this information about us. +They were lawyers, journalists, priests, they all said: "We don't want this." +And here you can see, like 10 thousands of people went out on the streets of Berlin and said, "Freedom, not fear." +And some even said, this would be Stasi 2.0. +Stasi was the secret police in East Germany. +And I also ask myself, does it really work? +Can they really store all this information about us? +Every time I use my mobile phone? +So I asked my phone company, Deutsche Telekom, which was at that time the largest phone company in Germany, and I asked them, please, send me all the information you have stored about me. +And I asked them once, and I asked them again, and I got no real answer. It was only blah blah answers. +But then I said, I want to have this information, because this is my life you are protocoling. +So I decided to start a lawsuit against them, because I wanted to have this information. +But Deutsche Telekom said, no, we will not give you this information. +So at the end, I had a settlement with them. +I'll put down the lawsuit and they will send me all the information I ask for. +Because in the mean time, the German Constitutional Court ruled that the implementation of this E.U. directive into German law was unconstitutional. +So I got this ugly brown envelope with a C.D. inside. +And on the C.D., this was on. +Thirty-five thousand eight hundred thirty lines of information. +At first I saw it, and I said, okay, it's a huge file. Okay. +But then after a while I realized, this is my life. +This is six months of my life, into this file. +So I was a little bit skeptical, what should I do with it? +Because you can see where I am, where I sleep at night, what I am doing. +But then I said, I want to go out with this information. +I want to make them public. +Because I want to show the people what does data retention mean. +So together with Zeit Online and Open Data City, I did this. +This is a visualization of six months of my life. +You can zoom in and zoom out, you can wind back and fast forward. +You can see every step I take. +And you can even see how I go from Frankfurt by train to Cologne, and how often I call in between. +All this is possible with this information. +That's a little bit scary. +But it is not only about me. +It's about all of us. +First, it's only like, I call my wife and she calls me, and we talk to each other a couple of times. +And then there are some friends calling me, and they call each other. +And after a while you are calling you, and you are calling you, and you have this great communication network. +But you can see how your people are communicating with each other, what times they call each other, when they go to bed. +You can see all of this. +You can see the hubs, like who are the leaders in the group. +If you have access to this information, you can see what your society is doing. +If you have access to this information, you can control your society. +This is a blueprint for countries like China and Iran. +This is a blueprint how to survey your society, because you know who talks to whom, who sends whom an email, all this is possible if you have access to this information. +And this information is stored for at least six months in Europe, up to two years. +Like I said at the beginning, imagine that all those people on the streets of Berlin in autumn of 1989 had a mobile phone in their pocket. +And the Stasi would have known who took part at this protest, and if the Stasi would have known who are the leaders behind it, this may never have happened. +The fall of the Berlin Wall would maybe not [have been] there. +And in the aftermath, also not the fall of the Iron Curtain. +Because today, state agencies and companies want to store as much information as they can get about us, online and offline. +They want to have the possibility to track our lives, and they want to store them for all time. +But self-determination and living in the digital age is no contradiction. +But you have to fight for your self-determination today. +You have to fight for it every day. +So, when you go home, tell your friends that privacy is a value of the 21st century, and it's not outdated. +When you go home, tell your representative only because companies and state agencies have the possibility to store certain information, they don't have to do it. +And if you don't believe me, ask your phone company what information they store about you. +So, in the future, every time you use your mobile phone, let it be a reminder to you that you have to fight for self-determination in the digital age. +Thank you. + +I live in South Central. +This is South Central: liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots. +So the city planners, they get together and they figure they're going to change the name South Central to make it represent something else, so they change it to South Los Angeles, like this is going to fix what's really going wrong in the city. +This is South Los Angeles. +Liquor stores, fast food, vacant lots. +Just like 26.5 million other Americans, I live in a food desert, South Central Los Angeles, home of the drive-thru and the drive-by. +Funny thing is, the drive-thrus are killing more people than the drive-bys. +People are dying from curable diseases in South Central Los Angeles. +For instance, the obesity rate in my neighborhood is five times higher than, say, Beverly Hills, which is probably eight, 10 miles away. +I got tired of seeing this happening. +And I was wondering, how would you feel if you had no access to healthy food, if every time you walk out your door you see the ill effects that the present food system has on your neighborhood? +I see wheelchairs bought and sold like used cars. +I see dialysis centers popping up like Starbucks. +And I figured, this has to stop. +So I figured that the problem is the solution. +Food is the problem and food is the solution. +Plus I got tired of driving 45 minutes round trip to get an apple that wasn't impregnated with pesticides. +So what I did, I planted a food forest in front of my house. +It was on a strip of land that we call a parkway. +It's 150 feet by 10 feet. +Thing is, it's owned by the city. +But you have to maintain it. +So I'm like, "Cool. I can do whatever the hell I want, since it's my responsibility and I gotta maintain it." +And this is how I decided to maintain it. +So me and my group, L.A. Green Grounds, we got together and we started planting my food forest, fruit trees, you know, the whole nine, vegetables. +What we do, we're a pay-it-forward kind of group, where it's composed of gardeners from all walks of life, from all over the city, and it's completely volunteer, and everything we do is free. +And the garden, it was beautiful. +And then somebody complained. +The city came down on me, and basically gave me a citation saying that I had to remove my garden, which this citation was turning into a warrant. +And I'm like, "Come on, really? +A warrant for planting food on a piece of land that you could care less about?" +And I was like, "Cool. Bring it." +Because this time it wasn't coming up. +So L.A. Times got ahold of it. Steve Lopez did a story on it and talked to the councilman, and one of the Green Grounds members, they put up a petition on Change.org, and with 900 signatures, we were a success. +We had a victory on our hands. +My councilman even called in and said how they endorse and love what we're doing. +I mean, come on, why wouldn't they? +L.A. leads the United States in vacant lots that the city actually owns. +They own 26 square miles of vacant lots. +That's 20 Central Parks. +That's enough space to plant 725 million tomato plants. +Why in the hell would they not okay this? +Growing one plant will give you 1,000, 10,000 seeds. +When one dollar's worth of green beans will give you 75 dollars' worth of produce. +It's my gospel, when I'm telling people, grow your own food. +Growing your own food is like printing your own money. +See, I have a legacy in South Central. +I grew up there. I raised my sons there. +And I refuse to be a part of this manufactured reality that was manufactured for me by some other people, and I'm manufacturing my own reality. +See, I'm an artist. +Gardening is my graffiti. I grow my art. +Just like a graffiti artist, where they beautify walls, me, I beautiful lawns, parkways. +I use the garden, the soil, like it's a piece of cloth, and the plants and the trees, that's my embellishment for that cloth. +You'd be surprised what the soil could do if you let it be your canvas. +You just couldn't imagine how amazing a sunflower is and how it affects people. +So what happened? +I have witnessed my garden become a tool for the education, a tool for the transformation of my neighborhood. +To change the community, you have to change the composition of the soil. +We are the soil. +You'd be surprised how kids are affected by this. +Gardening is the most therapeutic and defiant act you can do, especially in the inner city. +Plus you get strawberries. +I remember this time, there was this mother and a daughter came, it was, like, 10:30 at night, and they were in my yard, and I came out and they looked so ashamed. +So I'm like, man, it made me feel bad that they were there, and I told them, you know, you don't have to do this like this. +This is on the street for a reason. +It made me feel ashamed to see people that were this close to me that were hungry, and this only reinforced why I do this, and people asked me, "Fin, aren't you afraid people are going to steal your food?" +And I'm like, "Hell no, I ain't afraid they're gonna steal it. +That's why it's on the street. +That's the whole idea. +I want them to take it, but at the same time, I want them to take back their health." +There's another time when I put a garden in this homeless shelter in downtown Los Angeles. +These are the guys, they helped me unload the truck. +It was cool, and they just shared the stories about how this affected them and how they used to plant with their mother and their grandmother, and it was just cool to see how this changed them, if it was only for that one moment. +So Green Grounds has gone on to plant maybe 20 gardens. +We've had, like, 50 people come to our dig-ins and participate, and it's all volunteers. +If kids grow kale, kids eat kale. +If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes. +But when none of this is presented to them, if they're not shown how food affects the mind and the body, they blindly eat whatever the hell you put in front of them. +I see young people and they want to work, but they're in this thing where they're caught up -- I see kids of color and they're just on this track that's designed for them, that leads them to nowhere. +So with gardening, I see an opportunity where we can train these kids to take over their communities, to have a sustainable life. +And when we do this, who knows? +We might produce the next George Washington Carver. +but if we don't change the composition of the soil, we will never do this. +Now this is one of my plans. This is what I want to do. +I want to plant a whole block of gardens where people can share in the food in the same block. +I want to take shipping containers and turn them into healthy cafes. +Now don't get me wrong. +I'm not talking about no free shit, because free is not sustainable. +The funny thing about sustainability, you have to sustain it. +What I'm talking about is putting people to work, and getting kids off the street, and letting them know the joy, the pride and the honor in growing your own food, opening farmer's markets. +So what I want to do here, we gotta make this sexy. +So I want us all to become ecolutionary renegades, gangstas, gangsta gardeners. +We gotta flip the script on what a gangsta is. +If you ain't a gardener, you ain't gangsta. +Get gangsta with your shovel, okay? +And let that be your weapon of choice. +So basically, if you want to meet with me, you know, if you want to meet, don't call me if you want to sit around in cushy chairs and have meetings where you talk about doing some shit -- where you talk about doing some shit. +If you want to meet with me, come to the garden with your shovel so we can plant some shit. +Peace. Thank you. +Thank you. + +One of my favorite words in the whole of the Oxford English Dictionary is "snollygoster." +Just because it sounds so good. +And what snollygoster means is "a dishonest politician." +Although there was a 19th-century newspaper editor who defined it rather better when he said, "A snollygoster is a fellow who seeks office regardless of party, platform or principle, and who, when he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnancy." +Now I have no idea what "talknophical" is. +Something to do with words, I assume. +But it's very important that words are at the center of politics, and all politicians know they have to try and control language. +It wasn't until, for example, 1771 that the British Parliament allowed newspapers to report the exact words that were said in the debating chamber. +And this was actually all down to the bravery of a guy with the extraordinary name of Brass Crosby, who took on Parliament. +And he was thrown into the Tower of London and imprisoned, but he was brave enough, he was brave enough to take them on, and in the end he had such popular support in London that he won. +And it was only a few years later that we have the first recorded use of the phrase "as bold as brass." +Most people think that's down to the metal. +It's not. It's down to a campaigner for the freedom of the press. +But to really show you how words and politics interact, I want to take you back to the United States of America, just after they'd achieved independence. +And they had to face the question of what to call George Washington, their leader. +They didn't know. +What do you call the leader of a republican country? +And this was debated in Congress for ages and ages. +And there were all sorts of suggestions on the table, which might have made it. +I mean, some people wanted him to be called Chief Magistrate Washington, and other people, His Highness George Washington, and other people, Protector of the Liberties of the People of the United States of America Washington. +Not that catchy. +Some people just wanted to call him King. +They thought it was tried and tested. +And they weren't even being monarchical there, they had the idea that you could be elected King for a fixed term. +And, you know, it could have worked. +And everybody got insanely bored, actually, because this debate went on for three weeks. +I read a diary of this poor senator, who just keeps coming back, "Still on this subject." +And the reason for the delay and the boredom was that the House of Representatives were against the Senate. +The House of Representatives didn't want Washington to get drunk on power. +They didn't want to call him King in case that gave him ideas, or his successor ideas. +So they wanted to give him the humblest, meagerest, most pathetic title that they could think of. +And that title was "President." +President. They didn't invent the title. I mean, it existed before, but it just meant somebody who presides over a meeting. +It was like the foreman of the jury. +And it didn't have much more grandeur than the term "foreman" or "overseer." +There were occasional presidents of little colonial councils and bits of government, but it was really a nothing title. +And that's why the Senate objected to it. +They said, that's ridiculous, you can't call him President. +This guy has to go and sign treaties and meet foreign dignitaries. +And who's going to take him seriously if he's got a silly little title like President of the United States of America? +And after three weeks of debate, in the end the Senate did not cave in. +Instead, they agreed to use the title "President" for now, but they also wanted it absolutely set down that they didn't agree with it from a decent respect for the opinions and practice of civilized nations, whether under republican or monarchical forms of government, whose custom it is to annex, through the office of the Chief Magistrate, titles of respectability -- not bloody President -- and that in the intercourse with foreign nations, the majesty of the people of the United States may not be hazarded by an appearance of singularity, i.e., we don't want to look like bloody weirdos. +Now you can learn three interesting things from this. +First of all -- and this is my favorite -- is that so far as I've ever been able to find out, the Senate has never formally endorsed the title of President. +Barack Obama, President Obama, is there on borrowed time, just waiting for the Senate to spring into action. +Second thing you can learn is that when a government says that this is a temporary measure -- -- you can still be waiting 223 years later. +But the third thing you can learn, and this is the really important one, this is the point I want to leave you on, is that the title, President of the United States of America, doesn't sound that humble at all these days, does it? +Something to do with the slightly over 5,000 nuclear warheads he has at his disposal and the largest economy in the world and a fleet of drones and all that sort of stuff. +Reality and history have endowed that title with grandeur. +And so the Senate won in the end. +They got their title of respectability. +And also, the Senate's other worry, the appearance of singularity -- well, it was a singularity back then. +But now, do you know how many nations have a president? +A hundred and forty-seven. +All because they want to sound like the guy who's got the 5,000 nuclear warheads, etc. +And so, in the end, the Senate won and the House of Representatives lost, because nobody's going to feel that humble when they're told that they are now the President of the United States of America. +And that's the important lesson I think you can take away, and the one I want to leave you with. +Politicians try to pick words and use words to shape reality and control reality, but in fact, reality changes words far more than words can ever change reality. +Thank you very much. + +So I arrived by truck with about 50 rebels to the battle for Jalalabad as a 19-year-old vegetarian surfer from Jacksonville, Florida. +I traded my Converse black low-tops for a pair of brown leather sandals and launched a rocket towards government tanks that I couldn't even see. +And this was my first time in Afghanistan. +Long before that I had grown up with the war, but alongside weekend sleepovers and Saturday soccer games and fistfights with racist children of the Confederacy and religio-nationalist demonstrations chanting, "Down with communism and long live Afghanistan," and burning effigies of Brezhnev before I even knew what it meant. +But this is the geography of self. +And so I stand here today, Afghan by blood, redneck by the grace of God, an atheist and a radically politicized artist who's been living, working and creating in Afghanistan for the last nine years. +Now there are a lot of wonderful things that you could make art about in Afghanistan, but personally I don't want to paint rainbows; I want to make art that disturbs identity and challenges authority and exposes hypocrisy and reinterprets reality and even uses kind of an imaginative ethnography to try and understand the world that we live in. +I want to spend a day in the life of a jihadi gangster who wears his jihad against the communists like popstar bling and uses armed religious intimidation and political corruption to make himself rich. +And where else can the jihadi gangster go, but run for parliament and do a public installation campaign with the slogan: "Vote for me! I've done jihad, and I'm rich." +And try and use this campaign to expose these mafiosos who are masquerading as national heroes. +I want to look into corruption in Afghanistan through a work called "Payback" and impersonate a police officer, set up a fake checkpoint on the street of Kabul and stop cars, but instead of asking them for a bribe, offering them money and apologizing on behalf of the Kabul Police Department -- and hoping that they'll accept this 100 Afghanis on our behalf. +I want to look at how, in my opinion, the conflict in Afghanistan has become conflict chic. +The war and the expatriate life that comes with it have created this environment of style and fashion that can only be described through creating a fashion line for soldiers and suicide bombers where I take local Afghan fox fur and add it to a flack jacket or make multiple interior pockets on fashionable neo-traditional vests. +And I'd like to look at how taking a simple Kabul wheelbarrow and putting it on the wall amidst Kipling's call of 1899 to generate dialogue about how I see contemporary development initiatives being rooted in yesterday's colonial rhetoric about a "white man's burden" to save the brown man from himself and maybe even civilize him a bit. +But doing these things, they can get you in jail, they can be misunderstood, misinterpreted. +But I do them because I have to, because the geography of self mandates it. +That is my burden. What's yours? +Thank you. + +Hi. My name is Cameron Russell, and for the last little while I've been a model. +Actually, for 10 years. +And I feel like there's an uncomfortable tension in the room right now because I should not have worn this dress. +So luckily I brought an outfit change. +This is the first outfit change on the TED stage, so you guys are pretty lucky to witness it, I think. +If some of the women were really horrified when I came out, you don't have to tell me now, but I'll find out later on Twitter. +I'd also note that I'm quite privileged to be able to transform what you think of me in a very brief 10 seconds. +Not everybody gets to do that. +These heels are very uncomfortable, so good thing I wasn't going to wear them. +The worst part is putting this sweater over my head, because that's when you'll all laugh at me, so don't do anything while it's over my head. +All right. +So why did I do that? +That was awkward. +Well, hopefully not as awkward as that picture. +Image is powerful, but also image is superficial. +I just totally transformed what you thought of me in six seconds. +And in this picture, I had actually never had a boyfriend in real life. +I was totally uncomfortable, and the photographer was telling me to arch my back and put my hand in that guy's hair. +And of course, barring surgery, or the fake tan that I got two days ago for work, there's very little that we can do to transform how we look, and how we look, though it is superficial and immutable, has a huge impact on our lives. +So today, for me, being fearless means being honest. +And I am on this stage because I am a model. +I am on this stage because I am a pretty, white woman, and in my industry we call that a sexy girl. +And I'm going to answer the questions that people always ask me, but with an honest twist. +So the first question is, how do you become a model? +And I always just say, "Oh, I was scouted," but that means nothing. +The real way that I became a model is I won a genetic lottery, and I am the recipient of a legacy, and maybe you're wondering what is a legacy. +Well, for the past few centuries we have defined beauty not just as health and youth and symmetry that we're biologically programmed to admire, but also as tall, slender figures, and femininity and white skin. +And this is a legacy that was built for me, and it's a legacy that I've been cashing out on. +And I know there are people in the audience who are skeptical at this point, and maybe there are some fashionistas who are, like, "Wait. Naomi. Tyra. Joan Smalls. Liu Wen." +And first, I commend you on your model knowledge. Very impressive. +But unfortunately I have to inform you that in 2007, a very inspired NYU Ph.D. student counted all the models on the runway, every single one that was hired, and of the 677 models that were hired, only 27, or less than four percent, were non-white. +The next question people always ask me is, "Can I be a model when I grow up?" +And the first answer is, "I don't know, they don't put me in charge of that." +But the second answer, and what I really want to say to these little girls is, "Why? +You know? You can be anything. +You could be the President of the United States, or the inventor of the next Internet, or a ninja cardio-thoracic surgeon poet, which would be awesome, because you'd be the first one." +If, after this amazing list, they still are like, "No, no, Cameron, I want to be a model," well then I say, "Be my boss." +Because I'm not in charge of anything, and you could be the editor in chief of American Vogue or the CEO of H&M, or the next Steven Meisel. +Saying that you want to be a model when you grow up is akin to saying that you want to win the Powerball when you grow up. +It's out of your control, and it's awesome, and it's not a career path. +I will demonstrate for you now 10 years of accumulated model knowledge, because unlike cardio-thoracic surgeons, it can just be distilled right into -- right now. +So if the photographer is right there and the light is right there, like a nice HMI, and the client says, "Cameron, we want a walking shot," well then this leg goes first, nice and long, this arm goes back, this arm goes forward, the head is at three quarters, and you just go back and forth, just do that, and then you look back at your imaginary friends, 300, 400, 500 times. +It will look something like this. +Hopefully less awkward than that one in the middle. +That was, I don't know what happened there. +Unfortunately after you've gone to school, and you have a résumé and you've done a few jobs, you can't say anything anymore, so if you say you want to be the President of the United States, but your résumé reads, "Underwear Model: 10 years," people give you a funny look. +The next question people always ask me is, "Do they retouch all the photos?" +And yeah, they pretty much retouch all the photos, but that is only a small component of what's happening. +This picture is the very first picture that I ever took, and it's also the very first time that I had worn a bikini, and I didn't even have my period yet. +I know we're getting personal, but I was a young girl. +This is what I looked like with my grandma just a few months earlier. +Here's me on the same day as this shoot. +My friend got to come with me. +Here's me at a slumber party a few days before I shot French Vogue. +Here's me on the soccer team and in V Magazine. +And here's me today. +And I hope what you're seeing is that these pictures are not pictures of me. +They are constructions, and they are constructions by a group of professionals, by hairstylists and makeup artists and photographers and stylists and all of their assistants and pre-production and post-production, and they build this. That's not me. +Okay, so the next question people always ask me is, "Do you get free stuff?" +I do have too many 8-inch heels which I never get to wear, except for earlier, but the free stuff that I get is the free stuff that I get in real life, and that's what we don't like to talk about. +I grew up in Cambridge, and one time I went into a store and I forgot my money and they gave me the dress for free. +When I was a teenager, I was driving with my friend who was an awful driver and she ran a red and of course, we got pulled over, and all it took was a "Sorry, officer," and we were on our way. +And I got these free things because of how I look, not who I am, and there are people paying a cost for how they look and not who they are. +I live in New York, and last year, of the 140,000 teenagers that were stopped and frisked, 86 percent of them were black and Latino, and most of them were young men. +And there are only 177,000 young black and Latino men in New York, so for them, it's not a question of, "Will I get stopped?" +but "How many times will I get stopped? When will I get stopped?" +When I was researching this talk, I found out that of the 13-year-old girls in the United States, 53 percent don't like their bodies, and that number goes to 78 percent by the time that they're 17. +So the last question people ask me is, "What is it like to be a model?" +And I think the answer that they're looking for is, "If you are a little bit skinnier and you have shinier hair, you will be so happy and fabulous." +And when we're backstage, we give an answer that maybe makes it seem like that. +We say, "It's really amazing to travel, and it's amazing to get to work with creative, inspired, passionate people." +And those things are true, but they're only one half of the story, because the thing that we never say on camera, that I have never said on camera, is, "I am insecure." +And I'm insecure because I have to think about what I look like every day. +And if you ever are wondering, "If I have thinner thighs and shinier hair, will I be happier?" +you just need to meet a group of models, because they have the thinnest thighs and the shiniest hair and the coolest clothes, and they're the most physically insecure women probably on the planet. +So when I was writing this talk, I found it very difficult to strike an honest balance, because on the one hand, I felt very uncomfortable to come out here and say, "Look I've received all these benefits from a deck stacked in my favor," and it also felt really uncomfortable to follow that up with, "and it doesn't always make me happy." +But mostly it was difficult to unpack a legacy of gender and racial oppression when I am one of the biggest beneficiaries. +But I'm also happy and honored to be up here and I think that it's great that I got to come before 10 or 20 or 30 years had passed and I'd had more agency in my career, because maybe then I wouldn't tell the story of how I got my first job, or maybe I wouldn't tell the story of how I paid for college, which seems so important right now. +If there's a takeaway to this talk, I hope it's that we all feel more comfortable acknowledging the power of image in our perceived successes and our perceived failures. +Thank you. + +I have never, ever forgotten the words of my grandmother who died in her exile: "Son, resist Gaddafi. Fight him. +But don't you ever turn into a Gaddafi-like revolutionary." +Almost two years have passed since the Libyan Revolution broke out, inspired by the waves of mass mobilization in both the Tunisian and the Egyptian revolutions. +I joined forces with many other Libyans inside and outside Libya to call for a day of rage and to initiate a revolution against the tyrannical regime of Gaddafi. +And there it was, a great revolution. +Young Libyan women and men were at the forefront calling for the fall of the regime, raising slogans of freedom, dignity, social justice. +They have shown an exemplary bravery in confronting the brutal dictatorship of Gaddafi. +They have shown a great sense of solidarity from the far east to the far west to the south. +Eventually, after a period of six months of brutal war and a toll rate of almost 50,000 dead, we managed to liberate our country and to topple the tyrant. +However, Gaddafi left behind a heavy burden, a legacy of tyranny, corruption and seeds of diversions. +For four decades Gaddafi's tyrannical regime destroyed the infrastructure as well as the culture and the moral fabric of Libyan society. +Aware of the devastation and the challenges, I was keen among many other women to rebuild the Libyan civil society, calling for an inclusive and just transition to democracy and national reconciliation. +Almost 200 organizations were established in Benghazi during and immediately after the fall of Gaddafi -- almost 300 in Tripoli. +After a period of 33 years in exile, I went back to Libya, and with unique enthusiasm, I started organizing workshops on capacity building, on human development of leadership skills. +With an amazing group of women, I co-founded the Libyan Women's Platform for Peace, a movement of women, leaders, from different walks of life, to lobby for the sociopolitical empowerment of women and to lobby for our right for equal participation in building democracy and peace. +I met a very difficult environment in the pre-elections, an environment which was increasingly polarized, an environment which was shaped by the selfish politics of dominance and exclusion. +I led an initiative by the Libyan Women's Platform for Peace to lobby for a more inclusive electoral law, a law that would give every citizen, no matter what your background, the right to vote and run, and most importantly to stipulate on political parties the alternation of male and female candidates vertically and horizontally in their lists, creating the zipper list. +Eventually, our initiative was adopted and successful. +Women won 17.5 percent of the National Congress in the first elections ever in 52 years. +However, bit by bit, the euphoria of the elections, and of the revolution as a whole, was fading out -- for every day we were waking up to the news of violence. +One day we wake up to the news of the desecration of ancient mosques and Sufi tombs. +On another day we wake up to the news of the murder of the American ambassador and the attack on the consulate. +On another day we wake up to the news of the assassination of army officers. +And every day, every day we wake up with the rule of the militias and their continuous violations of human rights of prisoners and their disrespect of the rule of law. +Our society, shaped by a revolutionary mindset, became more polarized and has driven away from the ideals and the principles -- freedom, dignity, social justice -- that we first held. +Intolerance, exclusion and revenge became the icons of the [aftermath] of the revolution. +I am here today not at all to inspire you with our success story of the zipper list and the elections. +I'm rather here today to confess that we as a nation took the wrong choice, made the wrong decision. +We did not prioritize right. +For elections did not bring peace and stability and security in Libya. +Did the zipper list and the alternation between female and male candidates bring peace and national reconciliation? +No, it didn't. +What is it, then? +Why does our society continue to be polarized and dominated with selfish politics of dominance and exclusion, by both men and women? +Maybe what was missing was not the women only, but the feminine values of compassion, mercy and inclusion. +Our society needs national dialogue and consensus-building more than it needed the elections, which only reinforced polarization and division. +Our society needs the qualitative representation of the feminine more than it needs the numerical, quantitative representation of the feminine. +We need to stop acting as agents of rage and calling for days of rage. +We need to start acting as agents of compassion and mercy. +We need to develop a feminine discourse that not only honors but also implements mercy instead of revenge, collaboration instead of competition, inclusion instead of exclusion. +These are the ideals that a war-torn Libya needs desperately in order to achieve peace. +For peace has an alchemy, and this alchemy is about the intertwining, the alternation between the feminine and masculine perspectives. +That's the real zipper. +And we need to establish that existentially before we do so sociopolitically. +According to a Quranic verse "Salam" -- peace -- "is the word of the all-merciful God, raheem." +In turn, the word "raheem," which is known in all Abrahamic traditions, has the same root in Arabic as the word "rahem" -- womb -- symbolizing the maternal feminine encompassing all humanity from which the male and the female, from which all tribes, all peoples, have emanated from. +And so just as the womb entirely envelopes the embryo, which grows within it, the divine matrix of compassion nourishes the entire existence. +Thus we are told that "My mercy encompasses all things." +Thus we are told that "My mercy takes precedence over my anger." +May we all be granted a grace of mercy. +Thank you. + +When I was little, I thought my country was the best on the planet, and I grew up singing a song called "Nothing To Envy." +And I was very proud. +In school, we spent a lot of time studying the history of Kim Il-Sung, but we never learned much about the outside world, except that America, South Korea, Japan are the enemies. +Although I often wondered about the outside world, I thought I would spend my entire life in North Korea, until everything suddenly changed. +When I was seven years old, I saw my first public execution, but I thought my life in North Korea was normal. +My family was not poor, and myself, I had never experienced hunger. +But one day, in 1995, my mom brought home a letter from a coworker's sister. +It read, "When you read this, all five family members will not exist in this world, because we haven't eaten for the past two weeks. +We are lying on the floor together, and our bodies are so weak we are ready to die." +I was so shocked. +This was the first time I heard that people in my country were suffering. +Soon after, when I was walking past a train station, I saw something terrible that I can't erase from my memory. +A lifeless woman was lying on the ground, while an emaciated child in her arms just stared helplessly at his mother's face. +But nobody helped them, because they were so focused on taking care of themselves and their families. +A huge famine hit North Korea in the mid-1990s. +Ultimately, more than a million North Koreans died during the famine, and many only survived by eating grass, bugs and tree bark. +Power outages also became more and more frequent, so everything around me was completely dark at night except for the sea of lights in China, just across the river from my home. +I always wondered why they had lights but we didn't. +This is a satellite picture showing North Korea at night compared to neighbors. +This is the Amrok River, which serves as a part of the border between North Korea and China. +As you can see, the river can be very narrow at certain points, allowing North Koreans to secretly cross. +But many die. +Sometimes, I saw dead bodies floating down the river. +I can't reveal many details [about] how I left North Korea, but I only can say that during the ugly years of the famine I was sent to China to live with distant relatives. +But I only thought that I would be separated from my family for a short time. +I could have never imagined that it would take 14 years to live together. +In China, it was hard living as a young girl without my family. +I had no idea what life was going to be like as a North Korean refugee, but I soon learned it's not only extremely difficult, it's also very dangerous, since North Korean refugees are considered in China as illegal migrants. +So I was living in constant fear that my identity could be revealed, and I would be repatriated to a horrible fate back in North Korea. +One day, my worst nightmare came true, when I was caught by the Chinese police and brought to the police station for interrogation. +Someone had accused me of being North Korean, so they tested my Chinese language abilities and asked me tons of questions. +I was so scared, I thought my heart was going to explode. +If anything seemed unnatural, I could be imprisoned and repatriated. +I thought my life was over, but I managed to control all the emotions inside me and answer the questions. +After they finished questioning me, one official said to another, "This was a false report. +She's not North Korean." +And they let me go. It was a miracle. +Some North Koreans in China seek asylum in foreign embassies, but many can be caught by the Chinese police and repatriated. +These girls were so lucky. +Even though they were caught, they were eventually released after heavy international pressure. +These North Koreans were not so lucky. +Every year, countless North Koreans are caught in China and repatriated to North Korea, where they can be tortured, imprisoned or publicly executed. +Even though I was really fortunate to get out, many other North Koreans have not been so lucky. +It's tragic that North Koreans have to hide their identities and struggle so hard just to survive. +Even after learning a new language and getting a job, their whole world can be turned upside down in an instant. +That's why, after 10 years of hiding my identity, I decided to risk going to South Korea, and I started a new life yet again. +Settling down in South Korea was a lot more challenging than I had expected. +English was so important in South Korea, so I had to start learning my third language. +Also, I realized there was a wide gap between North and South. +We are all Korean, but inside, we have become very different due to 67 years of division. +I even went through an identity crisis. +Am I South Korean or North Korean? +Where am I from? Who am I? +Suddenly, there was no country I could proudly call my own. +Even though adjusting to life in South Korea was not easy, I made a plan. +I started studying for the university entrance exam. +Just as I was starting to get used to my new life, I received a shocking phone call. +The North Korean authorities intercepted some money that I sent to my family, and, as a punishment, my family was going to be forcibly removed to a desolate location in the countryside. +They had to get out quickly, so I started planning how to help them escape. +North Koreans have to travel incredible distances on the path to freedom. +It's almost impossible to cross the border between North Korea and South Korea, so, ironically, I took a flight back to China and I headed toward the North Korean border. +Since my family couldn't speak Chinese, I had to guide them, somehow, through more than 2,000 miles in China and then into Southeast Asia. +The journey by bus took one week, and we were almost caught several times. +One time, our bus was stopped and boarded by a Chinese police officer. +He took everyone's I.D. cards, and he started asking them questions. +Since my family couldn't understand Chinese, I thought my family was going to be arrested. +As the Chinese officer approached my family, I impulsively stood up, and I told him that these are deaf and dumb people that I was chaperoning. +He looked at me suspiciously, but luckily he believed me. +We made it all the way to the border of Laos, but I had to spend almost all my money to bribe the border guards in Laos. +But even after we got past the border, my family was arrested and jailed for illegal border crossing. +After I paid the fine and bribe, my family was released in one month, but soon after, my family was arrested and jailed again in the capital of Laos. +This was one of the lowest points in my life. +I did everything to get my family to freedom, and we came so close, but my family was thrown in jail just a short distance from the South Korean embassy. +I went back and forth between the immigration office and the police station, desperately trying to get my family out, but I didn't have enough money to pay a bribe or fine anymore. +I lost all hope. +At that moment, I heard one man's voice ask me, "What's wrong?" +I was so surprised that a total stranger cared enough to ask. +In my broken English, and with a dictionary, I explained the situation, and without hesitating, the man went to the ATM and he paid the rest of the money for my family and two other North Koreans to get out of jail. +I thanked him with all my heart, and I asked him, "Why are you helping me?" +"I'm not helping you," he said. +"I'm helping the North Korean people." +I realized that this was a symbolic moment in my life. +The kind stranger symbolized new hope for me and the North Korean people when we needed it most, and he showed me the kindness of strangers and the support of the international community are truly the rays of hope we North Korean people need. +Eventually, after our long journey, my family and I were reunited in South Korea, but getting to freedom is only half the battle. +Many North Koreans are separated from their families, and when they arrive in a new country, they start with little or no money. +So we can benefit from the international community for education, English language training, job training, and more. +We can also act as a bridge between the people inside North Korea and the outside world, because many of us stay in contact with family members still inside, and we send information and money that is helping to change North Korea from inside. +I've been so lucky, received so much help and inspiration in my life, so I want to help give aspiring North Koreans a chance to prosper with international support. +I'm confident that you will see more and more North Koreans succeeding all over the world, including the TED stage. +Thank you. + +Today I have just one request. +Please don't tell me I'm normal. +Now I'd like to introduce you to my brothers. +Remi is 22, tall and very handsome. +He's speechless, but he communicates joy in a way that some of the best orators cannot. +Remi knows what love is. +He shares it unconditionally and he shares it regardless. +He's not greedy. He doesn't see skin color. +He doesn't care about religious differences, and get this: He has never told a lie. +When he sings songs from our childhood, attempting words that not even I could remember, he reminds me of one thing: how little we know about the mind, and how wonderful the unknown must be. +Samuel is 16. He's tall. He's very handsome. +He has the most impeccable memory. +He has a selective one, though. +He doesn't remember if he stole my chocolate bar, but he remembers the year of release for every song on my iPod, conversations we had when he was four, weeing on my arm on the first ever episode of Teletubbies, and Lady Gaga's birthday. +Don't they sound incredible? +But most people don't agree. +And in fact, because their minds don't fit into society's version of normal, they're often bypassed and misunderstood. +But what lifted my heart and strengthened my soul was that even though this was the case, although they were not seen as ordinary, this could only mean one thing: that they were extraordinary -- autistic and extraordinary. +Now, for you who may be less familiar with the term "autism," it's a complex brain disorder that affects social communication, learning and sometimes physical skills. +It manifests in each individual differently, hence why Remi is so different from Sam. +And across the world, every 20 minutes, one new person is diagnosed with autism, and although it's one of the fastest-growing developmental disorders in the world, there is no known cause or cure. +And I cannot remember the first moment I encountered autism, but I cannot recall a day without it. +I was just three years old when my brother came along, and I was so excited that I had a new being in my life. +And after a few months went by, I realized that he was different. +He screamed a lot. +He didn't want to play like the other babies did, and in fact, he didn't seem very interested in me whatsoever. +Remi lived and reigned in his own world, with his own rules, and he found pleasure in the smallest things, like lining up cars around the room and staring at the washing machine and eating anything that came in between. +And as he grew older, he grew more different, and the differences became more obvious. +Yet beyond the tantrums and the frustration and the never-ending hyperactivity was something really unique: a pure and innocent nature, a boy who saw the world without prejudice, a human who had never lied. +Extraordinary. +Now, I cannot deny that there have been some challenging moments in my family, moments where I've wished that they were just like me. +But I cast my mind back to the things that they've taught me about individuality and communication and love, and I realize that these are things that I wouldn't want to change with normality. +Normality overlooks the beauty that differences give us, and the fact that we are different doesn't mean that one of us is wrong. +It just means that there's a different kind of right. +And if I could communicate just one thing to Remi and to Sam and to you, it would be that you don't have to be normal. +You can be extraordinary. +Because autistic or not, the differences that we have -- We've got a gift! Everyone's got a gift inside of us, and in all honesty, the pursuit of normality is the ultimate sacrifice of potential. +The chance for greatness, for progress and for change dies the moment we try to be like someone else. +Please -- don't tell me I'm normal. +Thank you. + +Doc Edgerton inspired us with awe and curiosity with this photo of a bullet piercing through an apple, and exposure just a millionth of a second. +But now, 50 years later, we can go a million times faster and see the world not at a million, or a billion, but one trillion frames per second. +I present you a new type of photography, femto-photography, a new imaging technique so fast that it can create slow motion videos of light in motion. +And with that, we can create cameras that can look around corners, beyond line of sight or see inside our body without an X-ray, and really challenge what we mean by a camera. +Now if I take a laser pointer and turn it on and off in one trillionth of a second -- which is several femtoseconds -- I'll create a packet of photons barely a millimeter wide, and that packet of photons, that bullet, will travel at the speed of light, and, again, a million times faster than an ordinary bullet. +Now, if you take that bullet and take this packet of photons and fire into this bottle, how will those photons shatter into this bottle? +How does light look in slow motion? +Now, the whole event +Now, remember, the whole event is effectively taking place in less than a nanosecond — that's how much time it takes for light to travel — but I'm slowing down in this video by a factor of 10 billion so you can see the light in motion. +But, Coca-Cola did not sponsor this research. +Now, there's a lot going on in this movie, so let me break this down and show you what's going on. +So, the pulse enters the bottle, our bullet, with a packet of photons that start traveling through and that start scattering inside. +Some of the light leaks, goes on the table, and you start seeing these ripples of waves. +Many of the photons eventually reach the cap and then they explode in various directions. +As you can see, there's a bubble of air, and it's bouncing around inside. +Meanwhile, the ripples are traveling on the table, and because of the reflections at the top, you see at the back of the bottle, after several frames, the reflections are focused. +Now, if you take an ordinary bullet and let it go the same distance and slow down the video again by a factor of 10 billion, do you know how long you'll have to sit here to watch that movie? +A day, a week? Actually, a whole year. +It'll be a very boring movie — — of a slow, ordinary bullet in motion. +And what about some still-life photography? +You can watch the ripples again washing over the table, the tomato and the wall in the back. +It's like throwing a stone in a pond of water. +I thought, this is how nature paints a photo, one femto frame at a time, but of course our eye sees an integral composite. +But if you look at this tomato one more time, you will notice, as the light washes over the tomato, it continues to glow. It doesn't become dark. +Why is that? Because the tomato is actually ripe, and the light is bouncing around inside the tomato, and it comes out after several trillionths of a second. +So, in the future, when this femto-camera is in your camera phone, you might be able to go to a supermarket and check if the fruit is ripe without actually touching it. +So how did my team at MIT create this camera? +Now, as photographers, you know, if you take a short exposure photo, you get very little light, but we're going to go a billion times faster than your shortest exposure, so you're going to get hardly any light. +So, what we do is we send that bullet, those packet of photons, millions of times, and record again and again with very clever synchronization, and from the gigabytes of data, we computationally weave together to create those femto-videos I showed you. +And we can take all that raw data and treat it in very interesting ways. +So, Superman can fly. +Some other heroes can become invisible, but what about a new power for a future superhero: to see around corners? +The idea is that we could shine some light on the door. +It's going to bounce, go inside the room, some of that is going to reflect back on the door, and then back to the camera, and we could exploit these multiple bounces of light. +And it's not science fiction. We have actually built it. +On the left, you see our femto-camera. +There's a mannequin hidden behind a wall, and we're going to bounce light off the door. +So after our paper was published in Nature Communications, it was highlighted by Nature.com, and they created this animation. +We're going to fire those bullets of light, and they're going to hit this wall, and because the packet of the photons, they will scatter in all the directions, and some of them will reach our hidden mannequin, which in turn will again scatter that light, and again in turn the door will reflect some of that scattered light, and a tiny fraction of the photons will actually come back to the camera, but most interestingly, they will all arrive at a slightly different time slot. +And because we have a camera that can run so fast, our femto-camera, it has some unique abilities. +It has very good time resolution, and it can look at the world at the speed of light. +And this way, we know the distances, of course to the door, but also to the hidden objects, but we don't know which point corresponds to which distance. +By shining one laser, we can record one raw photo, which, you look on the screen, doesn't really make any sense, but then we will take a lot of such pictures, dozens of such pictures, put them together, and try to analyze the multiple bounces of light, and from that, can we see the hidden object? +Can we see it in full 3D? +So this is our reconstruction. +Now we have some ways to go before we take this outside the lab on the road, but in the future, we could create cars that avoid collisions with what's around the bend, or we can look for survivors in hazardous conditions by looking at light reflected through open windows, or we can build endoscopes that can see deep inside the body around occluders, and also for cardioscopes. +But of course, because of tissue and blood, this is quite challenging, so this is really a call for scientists to start thinking about femto-photography as really a new imaging modality to solve the next generation of health imaging problems. +Now, like Doc Edgerton, a scientist himself, science became art, an art of ultra-fast photography, and I realized that all the gigabytes of data that we're collecting every time is not just for scientific imaging, but we can also do a new form of computational photography with time-lapse and color-coding, and we look at those ripples. Remember, the time between each of those ripples is only a few trillionths of a second. +But there's also something funny going on here. +When you look at the ripples under the cap, the ripples are moving away from us. +The ripples should be moving towards us. +What's going on here? +It turns out, because we're recording nearly at the speed of light, we have strange effects, and Einstein would have loved to see this picture. +The order at which events take place in the world appear in the camera with sometimes reversed order, so by applying the corresponding space and time warp, we can correct for this distortion. +So whether it's for photography around corners, or creating the next generation of health imaging, or creating new visualizations, since our invention, we have open-sourced all the data and details on our website, and our hope is that the DIY, the creative and the research community will show us that we should stop obsessing about the megapixels in cameras — — and start focusing on the next dimension in imaging. +It's about time. Thank you. + +There are a lot of ways the people around us can help improve our lives. +We don't bump into every neighbor, so a lot of wisdom never gets passed on, though we do share the same public spaces. +So over the past few years, I've tried ways to share more with my neighbors in public space, using simple tools like stickers, stencils and chalk. +And these projects came from questions I had, like, how much are my neighbors paying for their apartments? +How can we lend and borrow more things without knocking on each other's doors at a bad time? +How can we share more of our memories of our abandoned buildings, and gain a better understanding of our landscape? +And how can we share more of our hopes for our vacant storefronts, so our communities can reflect our needs and dreams today? +Now, I live in New Orleans, and I am in love with New Orleans. +My soul is always soothed by the giant live oak trees, shading lovers, drunks and dreamers for hundreds of years, and I trust a city that always makes way for music. +I feel like every time someone sneezes, New Orleans has a parade. +The city has some of the most beautiful architecture in the world, but it also has one of the highest amounts of abandoned properties in America. +I live near this house, and I thought about how I could make it a nicer space for my neighborhood, and I also thought about something that changed my life forever. +In 2009, I lost someone I loved very much. +Her name was Joan, and she was a mother to me, and her death was sudden and unexpected. +And I thought about death a lot, and this made me feel deep gratitude for the time I've had, and brought clarity to the things that are meaningful to my life now. +But I struggle to maintain this perspective in my daily life. +I feel like it's easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, and forget what really matters to you. +So with help from old and new friends, I turned the side of this abandoned house into a giant chalkboard and stenciled it with a fill-in-the-blank sentence: "Before I die, I want to ... " So anyone walking by can pick up a piece of chalk, reflect on their lives, and share their personal aspirations in public space. +I didn't know what to expect from this experiment, but by the next day, the wall was entirely filled out, and it kept growing. +And I'd like to share a few things that people wrote on this wall. +"Before I die, I want to be tried for piracy." +"Before I die, I want to straddle the International Date Line." +"Before I die, I want to sing for millions." +"Before I die, I want to plant a tree." +"Before I die, I want to live off the grid." +"Before I die, I want to hold her one more time." +"Before I die, I want to be someone's cavalry." +"Before I die, I want to be completely myself." +So this neglected space became a constructive one, and people's hopes and dreams made me laugh out loud, tear up, and they consoled me during my own tough times. +It's about knowing you're not alone. +It's about understanding our neighbors in new and enlightening ways. +It's about making space for reflection and contemplation, and remembering what really matters most to us as we grow and change. +I made this last year, and started receiving hundreds of messages from passionate people who wanted to make a wall with their community, so my civic center colleagues and I made a tool kit, and now walls have been made in countries around the world, including Kazakhstan, South Africa, Australia, Argentina and beyond. +Together, we've shown how powerful our public spaces can be if we're given the opportunity to have a voice and share more with one another. +Two of the most valuable things we have are time and our relationships with other people. +In our age of increasing distractions, it's more important than ever to find ways to maintain perspective and remember that life is brief and tender. +Death is something that we're often discouraged to talk about or even think about, but I've realized that preparing for death is one of the most empowering things you can do. +Thinking about death clarifies your life. +Our shared spaces can better reflect what matters to us as individuals and as a community, and with more ways to share our hopes, fears and stories, the people around us can not only help us make better places, they can help us lead better lives. +Thank you. +Thank you. + +So, well, I do applied math, and this is a peculiar problem for anyone who does applied math, is that we are like management consultants. +No one knows what the hell we do. +So I am going to give you some -- attempt today to try and explain to you what I do. +So, dancing is one of the most human of activities. +We delight at ballet virtuosos and tap dancers you will see later on. +Now, ballet requires an extraordinary level of expertise and a high level of skill, and probably a level of initial suitability that may well have a genetic component to it. +Now, sadly, neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease gradually destroy this extraordinary ability, as it is doing to my friend Jan Stripling, who was a virtuoso ballet dancer in his time. +So great progress and treatment has been made over the years. +However, there are 6.3 million people worldwide who have the disease, and they have to live with incurable weakness, tremor, rigidity and the other symptoms that go along with the disease, so what we need are objective tools to detect the disease before it's too late. +We need to be able to measure progression objectively, and ultimately, the only way we're going to know when we actually have a cure is when we have an objective measure that can answer that for sure. +But frustratingly, with Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders, there are no biomarkers, so there's no simple blood test that you can do, and the best that we have is like this 20-minute neurologist test. +You have to go to the clinic to do it. It's very, very costly, and that means that, outside the clinical trials, it's just never done. It's never done. +But what if patients could do this test at home? +Now, that would actually save on a difficult trip to the clinic, and what if patients could do that test themselves, right? +No expensive staff time required. +Takes about $300, by the way, in the neurologist's clinic to do it. +So what I want to propose to you as an unconventional way in which we can try to achieve this, because, you see, in one sense, at least, we are all virtuosos like my friend Jan Stripling. +So here we have a video of the vibrating vocal folds. +Now, this is healthy and this is somebody making speech sounds, and we can think of ourselves as vocal ballet dancers, because we have to coordinate all of these vocal organs when we make sounds, and we all actually have the genes for it. FoxP2, for example. +And like ballet, it takes an extraordinary level of training. +I mean, just think how long it takes a child to learn to speak. +From the sound, we can actually track the vocal fold position as it vibrates, and just as the limbs are affected in Parkinson's, so too are the vocal organs. +So on the bottom trace, you can see an example of irregular vocal fold tremor. +We see all the same symptoms. +We see vocal tremor, weakness and rigidity. +The speech actually becomes quieter and more breathy after a while, and that's one of the example symptoms of it. +So these vocal effects can actually be quite subtle, in some cases, but with any digital microphone, and using precision voice analysis software in combination with the latest in machine learning, which is very advanced by now, we can now quantify exactly where somebody lies on a continuum between health and disease using voice signals alone. +So these voice-based tests, how do they stack up against expert clinical tests? We'll, they're both non-invasive. +The neurologist's test is non-invasive. They both use existing infrastructure. +You don't have to design a whole new set of hospitals to do it. +And they're both accurate. Okay, but in addition, voice-based tests are non-expert. +That means they can be self-administered. +They're high-speed, take about 30 seconds at most. +They're ultra-low cost, and we all know what happens. +When something becomes ultra-low cost, it becomes massively scalable. +So here are some amazing goals that I think we can deal with now. +We can reduce logistical difficulties with patients. +No need to go to the clinic for a routine checkup. +We can do high-frequency monitoring to get objective data. +We can perform low-cost mass recruitment for clinical trials, and we can make population-scale screening feasible for the first time. +We have the opportunity to start to search for the early biomarkers of the disease before it's too late. +So, taking the first steps towards this today, we're launching the Parkinson's Voice Initiative. +With Aculab and PatientsLikeMe, we're aiming to record a very large number of voices worldwide to collect enough data to start to tackle these four goals. +We have local numbers accessible to three quarters of a billion people on the planet. +Anyone healthy or with Parkinson's can call in, cheaply, and leave recordings, a few cents each, and I'm really happy to announce that we've already hit six percent of our target just in eight hours. +Thank you. +So Max, by taking all these samples of, let's say, 10,000 people, you'll be able to tell who's healthy and who's not? +What are you going to get out of those samples? +Yeah. Yeah. So what will happen is that, during the call you have to indicate whether or not you have the disease or not, you see. Right. +You see, some people may not do it. They may not get through it. +But we'll get a very large sample of data that is collected from all different circumstances, and it's getting it in different circumstances that matter because then we are looking at ironing out the confounding factors, and looking for the actual markers of the disease. +So you're 86 percent accurate right now? +It's much better than that. +Actually, my student Thanasis, I have to plug him, because he's done some fantastic work, and now he has proved that it works over the mobile telephone network as well, which enables this project, and we're getting 99 percent accuracy. +Ninety-nine. Well, that's an improvement. +So what that means is that people will be able to — People will be able to call in from their mobile phones and do this test, and people with Parkinson's could call in, record their voice, and then their doctor can check up on their progress, see where they're doing in this course of the disease. +Absolutely. +Thanks so much. Max Little, everybody. +Thanks, Tom. + +This is where I live. I live in Kenya, at the south parts of the Nairobi National Park. +Those are my dad's cows at the back, and behind the cows, that's the Nairobi National Park. +Nairobi National Park is not fenced in the south widely, which means wild animals like zebras migrate out of the park freely. +So predators like lions follow them, and this is what they do. +They kill our livestock. +This is one of the cows which was killed at night, and I just woke up in the morning and I found it dead, and I felt so bad, because it was the only bull we had. +My community, the Maasai, we believe that we came from heaven with all our animals and all the land for herding them, and that's why we value them so much. +So I grew up hating lions so much. +The morans are the warriors who protect our community and the livestock, and they're also upset about this problem. +So they kill the lions. +It's one of the six lions which were killed in Nairobi. +And I think this is why the Nairobi National Park lions are few. +So a boy, from six to nine years old, in my community is responsible for his dad's cows, and that's the same thing which happened to me. +So I had to find a way of solving this problem. +And the first idea I got was to use fire, because I thought lions were scared of fire. +But I came to realize that that didn't really help, because it was even helping the lions to see through the cowshed. +So I didn't give up. I continued. +And a second idea I got was to use a scarecrow. +I was trying to trick the lions [into thinking] that I was standing near the cowshed. +But lions are very clever. +They will come the first day and they see the scarecrow, and they go back, but the second day, they'll come and they say, this thing is not moving here, it's always here. +So he jumps in and kills the animals. +So one night, I was walking around the cowshed with a torch, and that day, the lions didn't come. +And I discovered that lions are afraid of a moving light. +So I had an idea. +Since I was a small boy, I used to work in my room for the whole day, and I even took apart my mom's new radio, and that day she almost killed me, but I learned a lot about electronics. +So I got an old car battery, an indicator box. It's a small device found in a motorcycle, and it helps motorists when they want to turn right or left. It blinks. +And I got a switch where I can switch on the lights, on and off. +And that's a small torch from a broken flashlight. +So I set up everything. +As you can see, the solar panel charges the battery, and the battery supplies the power to the small indicator box. I call it a transformer. +And the indicator box makes the lights flash. +As you can see, the bulbs face outside, because that's where the lions come from. +And that's how it looks to lions when they come at night. +The lights flash and trick the lions into thinking I was walking around the cowshed, but I was sleeping in my bed. +Thanks. +So I set it up in my home two years ago, and since then, we have never experienced any problem with lions. +And my neighboring homes heard about this idea. +One of them was this grandmother. +She had a lot of her animals being killed by lions, and she asked me if I could put the lights for her. +And I said, "Yes." +So I put the lights. You can see at the back, those are the lion lights. +Since now, I've set up seven homes around my community, and they're really working. +And my idea is also being used now all over Kenya for scaring other predators like hyenas, leopards, and it's also being used to scare elephants away from people's farms. +Because of this invention, I was lucky to get a scholarship in one of the best schools in Kenya, Brookhouse International School, and I'm really excited about this. +My new school now is coming in and helping by fundraising and creating an awareness. +I even took my friends back to my community, and we're installing the lights to the homes which don't have [any], and I'm teaching them how to put them. +So one year ago, I was just a boy in the savanna grassland herding my father's cows, and I used to see planes flying over, and I told myself that one day, I'll be there inside. +And here I am today. +I got a chance to come by plane for my first time for TED. +So my big dream is to become an aircraft engineer and pilot when I grow up. +I used to hate lions, but now because my invention is saving my father's cows and the lions, we are able to stay with the lions without any conflict. +Ashê olên. It means in my language, thank you very much. +You have no idea how exciting it is to hear a story like yours. +So you got this scholarship. Yep. +You're working on other electrical inventions. +What's the next one on your list? +My next invention is, I want to make an electric fence. Electric fence? +But I know electric fences are already invented, but I want to make mine. +You already tried it once, right, and you -- I tried it before, but I stopped because it gave me a shock. +In the trenches. Richard Turere, you are something else. +We're going to cheer you on every step of the way, my friend. +Thank you so much. Thank you. + +Photography has been my passion ever since I was old enough to pick up a camera, but today I want to share with you the 15 most treasured photos of mine, and I didn't take any of them. +There were no art directors, no stylists, no chance for reshoots, not even any regard for lighting. +In fact, most of them were taken by random tourists. +My story begins when I was in New York City for a speaking engagement, and my wife took this picture of me holding my daughter on her first birthday. We're on the corner of 57th and 5th. +We happened to be back in New York exactly a year later, so we decided to take the same picture. +Well you can see where this is going. +Approaching my daughter's third birthday, my wife said, "Hey, why don't you take Sabina back to New York and make it a father-daughter trip, and continue the ritual?" +This is when we started asking passing tourists to take the picture. +You know, it's remarkable how universal the gesture is of handing your camera to a total stranger. +No one's ever refused, and luckily no one's ever run off with our camera. +Back then, we had no idea how much this trip would change our lives. +It's really become sacred to us. +This one was taken just weeks after 9/11, and I found myself trying to explain what had happened that day in ways a five-year-old could understand. +So these photos are far more than proxies for a single moment, or even a specific trip. +They're also ways for us to freeze time for one week in October and reflect on our times and how we change from year to year, and not just physically, but in every way. +Because while we take the same photo, our perspectives change, and she reaches new milestones, and I get to see life through her eyes, and how she interacts with and sees everything. +This very focused time we get to spend together is something we cherish and anticipate the entire year. +Recently, on one trip, we were walking, and she stops dead in her tracks, and she points to a red awning of the doll store that she loved when she was little on our earlier trips. +And she describes to me the feeling she felt as a five-year-old standing in that exact spot. +She said she remembers her heart bursting out of her chest when she saw that place for the very first time nine years earlier. +And now what she's looking at in New York are colleges, because she's determined to go to school in New York. +And it hit me: One of the most important things we all make are memories. +So I want to share the idea of taking an active role in consciously creating memories. +I don't know about you, but aside from these 15 shots, I'm not in many of the family photos. +I'm always the one taking the picture. +So I want to encourage everyone today to get in the shot, and don't hesitate to go up to someone and ask, "Will you take our picture?" +Thank you. + +When I was in my 20s, I saw my very first psychotherapy client. +I was a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at Berkeley. +She was a 26-year-old woman named Alex. +Now Alex walked into her first session wearing jeans and a big slouchy top, and she dropped onto the couch in my office and kicked off her flats and told me she was there to talk about guy problems. +Now when I heard this, I was so relieved. +My classmate got an arsonist for her first client. +And I got a twentysomething who wanted to talk about boys. +This I thought I could handle. +But I didn't handle it. +With the funny stories that Alex would bring to session, it was easy for me just to nod my head while we kicked the can down the road. +"Thirty's the new 20," Alex would say, and as far as I could tell, she was right. +Work happened later, marriage happened later, kids happened later, even death happened later. +Twentysomethings like Alex and I had nothing but time. +But before long, my supervisor pushed me to push Alex about her love life. +I pushed back. +I said, "Sure, she's dating down, she's sleeping with a knucklehead, but it's not like she's going to marry the guy." +And then my supervisor said, "Not yet, but she might marry the next one. +Besides, the best time to work on Alex's marriage is before she has one." +That's what psychologists call an "Aha!" moment. +That was the moment I realized, 30 is not the new 20. +Yes, people settle down later than they used to, but that didn't make Alex's 20s a developmental downtime. +That made Alex's 20s a developmental sweet spot, and we were sitting there blowing it. +That was when I realized that this sort of benign neglect was a real problem, and it had real consequences, not just for Alex and her love life but for the careers and the families and the futures of twentysomethings everywhere. +There are 50 million twentysomethings in the United States right now. +We're talking about 15 percent of the population, or 100 percent if you consider that no one's getting through adulthood without going through their 20s first. +Raise your hand if you're in your 20s. +I really want to see some twentysomethings here. +Oh, yay! Y'all's awesome. +If you work with twentysomethings, you love a twentysomething, you're losing sleep over twentysomethings, I want to see — Okay. Awesome, twentysomethings really matter. +So I specialize in twentysomethings because I believe that every single one of those 50 million twentysomethings deserves to know what psychologists, sociologists, neurologists and fertility specialists already know: that claiming your 20s is one of the simplest, yet most transformative, things you can do for work, for love, for your happiness, maybe even for the world. +This is not my opinion. These are the facts. +We know that 80 percent of life's most defining moments take place by age 35. +That means that eight out of 10 of the decisions and experiences and "Aha!" moments that make your life what it is will have happened by your mid-30s. +People who are over 40, don't panic. +This crowd is going to be fine, I think. +We know that the first 10 years of a career has an exponential impact on how much money you're going to earn. +We know that more than half of Americans are married or are living with or dating their future partner by 30. +We know that the brain caps off its second and last growth spurt in your 20s as it rewires itself for adulthood, which means that whatever it is you want to change about yourself, now is the time to change it. +We know that personality changes more during your 20s than at any other time in life, and we know that female fertility peaks at age 28, and things get tricky after age 35. +So your 20s are the time to educate yourself about your body and your options. +So when we think about child development, we all know that the first five years are a critical period for language and attachment in the brain. +It's a time when your ordinary, day-to-day life has an inordinate impact on who you will become. +But what we hear less about is that there's such a thing as adult development, and our 20s are that critical period of adult development. +But this isn't what twentysomethings are hearing. +Newspapers talk about the changing timetable of adulthood. +Researchers call the 20s an extended adolescence. +Journalists coin silly nicknames for twentysomethings like "twixters" and "kidults." +It's true. +As a culture, we have trivialized what is actually the defining decade of adulthood. +Leonard Bernstein said that to achieve great things, you need a plan and not quite enough time. +Isn't that true? +So what do you think happens when you pat a twentysomething on the head and you say, "You have 10 extra years to start your life"? +Nothing happens. +You have robbed that person of his urgency and ambition, and absolutely nothing happens. +And then every day, smart, interesting twentysomethings like you or like your sons and daughters come into my office and say things like this: "I know my boyfriend's no good for me, but this relationship doesn't count. I'm just killing time." +Or they say, "Everybody says as long as I get started on a career by the time I'm 30, I'll be fine." +But then it starts to sound like this: "My 20s are almost over, and I have nothing to show for myself. +I had a better résumé the day after I graduated from college." +And then it starts to sound like this: "Dating in my 20s was like musical chairs. +Everybody was running around and having fun, but then sometime around 30 it was like the music turned off and everybody started sitting down. +I didn't want to be the only one left standing up, so sometimes I think I married my husband because he was the closest chair to me at 30." +Where are the twentysomethings here? +Do not do that. +Okay, now that sounds a little flip, but make no mistake, the stakes are very high. +When a lot has been pushed to your 30s, there is enormous thirtysomething pressure to jump-start a career, pick a city, partner up, and have two or three kids in a much shorter period of time. +Many of these things are incompatible, and as research is just starting to show, simply harder and more stressful to do all at once in our 30s. +The post-millennial midlife crisis isn't buying a red sports car. +It's realizing you can't have that career you now want. +It's realizing you can't have that child you now want, or you can't give your child a sibling. +Too many thirtysomethings and fortysomethings look at themselves, and at me, sitting across the room, and say about their 20s, "What was I doing? What was I thinking?" +I want to change what twentysomethings are doing and thinking. +Here's a story about how that can go. +It's a story about a woman named Emma. +At 25, Emma came to my office because she was, in her words, having an identity crisis. +She said she thought she might like to work in art or entertainment, but she hadn't decided yet, so she'd spent the last few years waiting tables instead. +Because it was cheaper, she lived with a boyfriend who displayed his temper more than his ambition. +And as hard as her 20s were, her early life had been even harder. +She often cried in our sessions, but then would collect herself by saying, "You can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends." +Well one day, Emma comes in and she hangs her head in her lap, and she sobbed for most of the hour. +She'd just bought a new address book, and she'd spent the morning filling in her many contacts, but then she'd been left staring at that empty blank that comes after the words "In case of emergency, please call ... ." +She was nearly hysterical when she looked at me and said, "Who's going to be there for me if I get in a car wreck? +Who's going to take care of me if I have cancer?" +Now in that moment, it took everything I had not to say, "I will." +But what Emma needed wasn't some therapist who really, really cared. +Emma needed a better life, and I knew this was her chance. +I had learned too much since I first worked with Alex to just sit there while Emma's defining decade went parading by. +So over the next weeks and months, I told Emma three things that every twentysomething, male or female, deserves to hear. +First, I told Emma to forget about having an identity crisis and get some identity capital. +By get identity capital, I mean do something that adds value to who you are. +Do something that's an investment in who you might want to be next. +I didn't know the future of Emma's career, and no one knows the future of work, but I do know this: Identity capital begets identity capital. +So now is the time for that cross-country job, that internship, that startup you want to try. +I'm not discounting twentysomething exploration here, but I am discounting exploration that's not supposed to count, which, by the way, is not exploration. +That's procrastination. +I told Emma to explore work and make it count. +Second, I told Emma that the urban tribe is overrated. +Best friends are great for giving rides to the airport, but twentysomethings who huddle together with like-minded peers limit who they know, what they know, how they think, how they speak, and where they work. +That new piece of capital, that new person to date almost always comes from outside the inner circle. +New things come from what are called our weak ties, our friends of friends of friends. +So yes, half of twentysomethings are un- or under-employed. +But half aren't, and weak ties are how you get yourself into that group. +Half of new jobs are never posted, so reaching out to your neighbor's boss is how you get that un-posted job. +It's not cheating. It's the science of how information spreads. +Last but not least, Emma believed that you can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends. +Now this was true for her growing up, but as a twentysomething, soon Emma would pick her family when she partnered with someone and created a family of her own. +I told Emma the time to start picking your family is now. +Now you may be thinking that 30 is actually a better time to settle down than 20, or even 25, and I agree with you. +But grabbing whoever you're living with or sleeping with when everyone on Facebook starts walking down the aisle is not progress. +The best time to work on your marriage is before you have one, and that means being as intentional with love as you are with work. +Picking your family is about consciously choosing who and what you want rather than just making it work or killing time with whoever happens to be choosing you. +So what happened to Emma? +Well, we went through that address book, and she found an old roommate's cousin who worked at an art museum in another state. +That weak tie helped her get a job there. +That job offer gave her the reason to leave that live-in boyfriend. +Now, five years later, she's a special events planner for museums. +She's married to a man she mindfully chose. +She loves her new career, she loves her new family, and she sent me a card that said, "Now the emergency contact blanks don't seem big enough." +Now Emma's story made that sound easy, but that's what I love about working with twentysomethings. +They are so easy to help. +Twentysomethings are like airplanes just leaving LAX, bound for somewhere west. +Right after takeoff, a slight change in course is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji. +Likewise, at 21 or 25 or even 29, one good conversation, one good break, one good TED Talk, can have an enormous effect across years and even generations to come. +So here's an idea worth spreading to every twentysomething you know. +It's as simple as what I learned to say to Alex. +It's what I now have the privilege of saying to twentysomethings like Emma every single day: Thirty is not the new 20, so claim your adulthood, get some identity capital, use your weak ties, pick your family. +Don't be defined by what you didn't know or didn't do. +You're deciding your life right now. +Thank you. + +Throughout the history of computers we've been striving to shorten the gap between us and digital information, the gap between our physical world and the world in the screen where our imagination can go wild. +And this gap has become shorter, shorter, and even shorter, and now this gap is shortened down to less than a millimeter, the thickness of a touch-screen glass, and the power of computing has become accessible to everyone. +But I wondered, what if there could be no boundary at all? +I started to imagine what this would look like. +First, I created this tool which penetrates into the digital space, so when you press it hard on the screen, it transfers its physical body into pixels. +Designers can materialize their ideas directly in 3D, and surgeons can practice on virtual organs underneath the screen. +So with this tool, this boundary has been broken. +But our two hands still remain outside the screen. +How can you reach inside and interact with the digital information using the full dexterity of our hands? +At Microsoft Applied Sciences, along with my mentor Cati Boulanger, I redesigned the computer and turned a little space above the keyboard into a digital workspace. +By combining a transparent display and depth cameras for sensing your fingers and face, now you can lift up your hands from the keyboard and reach inside this 3D space and grab pixels with your bare hands. +Because windows and files have a position in the real space, selecting them is as easy as grabbing a book off your shelf. +Then you can flip through this book while highlighting the lines, words on the virtual touch pad below each floating window. +Architects can stretch or rotate the models with their two hands directly. +So in these examples, we are reaching into the digital world. +But how about reversing its role and having the digital information reach us instead? +I'm sure many of us have had the experience of buying and returning items online. +But now you don't have to worry about it. +What I got here is an online augmented fitting room. +This is a view that you get from head-mounted or see-through display when the system understands the geometry of your body. +Taking this idea further, I started to think, instead of just seeing these pixels in our space, how can we make it physical so that we can touch and feel it? +What would such a future look like? +At MIT Media Lab, along with my advisor Hiroshi Ishii and my collaborator Rehmi Post, we created this one physical pixel. +Well, in this case, this spherical magnet acts like a 3D pixel in our space, which means that both computers and people can move this object to anywhere within this little 3D space. +What we did was essentially canceling gravity and controlling the movement by combining magnetic levitation and mechanical actuation and sensing technologies. +And by digitally programming the object, we are liberating the object from constraints of time and space, which means that now, human motions can be recorded and played back and left permanently in the physical world. +So choreography can be taught physically over distance and Michael Jordan's famous shooting can be replicated over and over as a physical reality. +Students can use this as a tool to learn about the complex concepts such as planetary motion, physics, and unlike computer screens or textbooks, this is a real, tangible experience that you can touch and feel, and it's very powerful. +And what's more exciting than just turning what's currently in the computer physical is to start imagining how programming the world will alter even our daily physical activities. +As you can see, the digital information will not just show us something but it will start directly acting upon us as a part of our physical surroundings without disconnecting ourselves from our world. +Today, we started by talking about the boundary, but if we remove this boundary, the only boundary left is our imagination. +Thank you. + +So I was trained to become a gymnast for two years in Hunan, China in the 1970s. +When I was in the first grade, the government wanted to transfer me to a school for athletes, all expenses paid. +But my tiger mother said, "No." +My parents wanted me to become an engineer like them. +After surviving the Cultural Revolution, they firmly believed there's only one sure way to happiness: a safe and well-paid job. +It is not important if I like the job or not. +But my dream was to become a Chinese opera singer. +That is me playing my imaginary piano. +An opera singer must start training young to learn acrobatics, so I tried everything I could to go to opera school. +I even wrote to the school principal and the host of a radio show. +But no adults liked the idea. +No adults believed I was serious. +Only my friends supported me, but they were kids, just as powerless as I was. +So at age 15, I knew I was too old to be trained. +My dream would never come true. +I was afraid that for the rest of my life some second-class happiness would be the best I could hope for. +But that's so unfair. +So I was determined to find another calling. +Nobody around to teach me? Fine. +I turned to books. +I satisfied my hunger for parental advice from this book by a family of writers and musicians.["Correspondence in the Family of Fou Lei"] I found my role model of an independent woman when Confucian tradition requires obedience.["Jane Eyre"] And I learned to be efficient from this book.["Cheaper by the Dozen"] And I was inspired to study abroad after reading these. +["Complete Works of Sanmao" ] ["Lessons From History" by Nan Huaijin] I came to the U.S. in 1995, so which books did I read here first? +Books banned in China, of course. +"The Good Earth" is about Chinese peasant life. +That's just not convenient for propaganda. Got it. +The Bible is interesting, but strange. +That's a topic for a different day. +But the fifth commandment gave me an epiphany: "You shall honor your father and mother." +"Honor," I said. "That's so different, and better, than obey." +So it becomes my tool to climb out of this Confucian guilt trap and to restart my relationship with my parents. +Encountering a new culture also started my habit of comparative reading. +It offers many insights. +For example, I found this map out of place at first because this is what Chinese students grew up with. +It had never occurred to me, China doesn't have to be at the center of the world. +A map actually carries somebody's view. +Comparative reading actually is nothing new. +It's a standard practice in the academic world. +There are even research fields such as comparative religion and comparative literature. +Compare and contrast gives scholars a more complete understanding of a topic. +So I thought, well, if comparative reading works for research, why not do it in daily life too? +So I started reading books in pairs. +So they can be about people -- ["Benjamin Franklin" by Walter Isaacson]["John Adams" by David McCullough] -- who are involved in the same event, or friends with shared experiences. +["Personal History" by Katharine Graham]["The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life," by Alice Schroeder] I also compare the same stories in different genres -- [Holy Bible: King James Version]["Lamb" by Chrisopher Moore] -- or similar stories from different cultures, as Joseph Campbell did in his wonderful book.["The Power of Myth" by Joseph Campbell] For example, both the Christ and the Buddha went through three temptations. +For the Christ, the temptations are economic, political and spiritual. +For the Buddha, they are all psychological: lust, fear and social duty -- interesting. +So if you know a foreign language, it's also fun to read your favorite books in two languages. +["The Way of Chuang Tzu" Thomas Merton]["Tao: The Watercourse Way" Alan Watts] Instead of lost in translation, I found there is much to gain. +For example, it's through translation that I realized "happiness" in Chinese literally means "fast joy." Huh! +"Bride" in Chinese literally means "new mother." Uh-oh. +Books have given me a magic portal to connect with people of the past and the present. +I know I shall never feel lonely or powerless again. +Having a dream shattered really is nothing compared to what many others have suffered. +I have come to believe that coming true is not the only purpose of a dream. +Its most important purpose is to get us in touch with where dreams come from, where passion comes from, where happiness comes from. +Even a shattered dream can do that for you. +So because of books, I'm here today, happy, living again with a purpose and a clarity, most of the time. +So may books be always with you. +Thank you. +Thank you. +Thank you. + +So when I was eight years old, a new girl came to join the class, and she was so impressive, as the new girl always seems to be. +She had vast quantities of very shiny hair and a cute little pencil case, super strong on state capitals, just a great speller. +And I just curdled with jealousy that year, until I hatched my devious plan. +So one day I stayed a little late after school, a little too late, and I lurked in the girls' bathroom. +When the coast was clear, I emerged, crept into the classroom, and took from my teacher's desk the grade book. +And then I did it. +I fiddled with my rival's grades, just a little, just demoted some of those A's. +All of those A's. +And I got ready to return the book to the drawer, when hang on, some of my other classmates had appallingly good grades too. +So, in a frenzy, I corrected everybody's marks, not imaginatively. +I gave everybody a row of D's and I gave myself a row of A's, just because I was there, you know, might as well. +And I am still baffled by my behavior. +I don't understand where the idea came from. +I don't understand why I felt so great doing it. +I felt great. +I don't understand why I was never caught. +I mean, it should have been so blatantly obvious. +I was never caught. +But most of all, I am baffled by, why did it bother me so much that this little girl, this tiny little girl, was so good at spelling? +Jealousy baffles me. +It's so mysterious, and it's so pervasive. +We know babies suffer from jealousy. +We know primates do. Bluebirds are actually very prone. +We know that jealousy is the number one cause of spousal murder in the United States. +And yet, I have never read a study that can parse to me its loneliness or its longevity or its grim thrill. +For that, we have to go to fiction, because the novel is the lab that has studied jealousy in every possible configuration. +In fact, I don't know if it's an exaggeration to say that if we didn't have jealousy, would we even have literature? +Well no faithless Helen, no "Odyssey." +No jealous king, no "Arabian Nights." +No Shakespeare. +There goes high school reading lists, because we're losing "Sound and the Fury," we're losing "Gatsby," "Sun Also Rises," we're losing "Madame Bovary," "Anna K." +No jealousy, no Proust. And now, I mean, I know it's fashionable to say that Proust has the answers to everything, but in the case of jealousy, he kind of does. +This year is the centennial of his masterpiece, "In Search of Lost Time," and it's the most exhaustive study of sexual jealousy and just regular competitiveness, my brand, that we can hope to have. +And we think about Proust, we think about the sentimental bits, right? +We think about a little boy trying to get to sleep. +We think about a madeleine moistened in lavender tea. +We forget how harsh his vision was. +We forget how pitiless he is. +I mean, these are books that Virginia Woolf said were tough as cat gut. +I don't know what cat gut is, but let's assume it's formidable. +Let's look at why they go so well together, the novel and jealousy, jealousy and Proust. +Is it something as obvious as that jealousy, which boils down into person, desire, impediment, is such a solid narrative foundation? +I don't know. I think it cuts very close to the bone, because let's think about what happens when we feel jealous. +When we feel jealous, we tell ourselves a story. +We tell ourselves a story about other people's lives, and these stories make us feel terrible because they're designed to make us feel terrible. +As the teller of the tale and the audience, we know just what details to include, to dig that knife in. Right? +Jealousy makes us all amateur novelists, and this is something Proust understood. +In the first volume, Swann's Way, the series of books, Swann, one of the main characters, is thinking very fondly of his mistress and how great she is in bed, and suddenly, in the course of a few sentences, and these are Proustian sentences, so they're long as rivers, but in the course of a few sentences, he suddenly recoils and he realizes, "Hang on, everything I love about this woman, somebody else would love about this woman. +Everything that she does that gives me pleasure could be giving somebody else pleasure, maybe right about now." +And this is the story he starts to tell himself, and from then on, Proust writes that every fresh charm Swann detects in his mistress, he adds to his "collection of instruments in his private torture chamber." +Now Swann and Proust, we have to admit, were notoriously jealous. +You know, Proust's boyfriends would have to leave the country if they wanted to break up with him. +But you don't have to be that jealous to concede that it's hard work. Right? +Jealousy is exhausting. +It's a hungry emotion. It must be fed. +And what does jealousy like? +Jealousy likes information. +Jealousy likes details. +Jealousy likes the vast quantities of shiny hair, the cute little pencil case. +Jealousy likes photos. +That's why Instagram is such a hit. +Proust actually links the language of scholarship and jealousy. +When Swann is in his jealous throes, and suddenly he's listening at doorways and bribing his mistress' servants, he defends these behaviors. +He says, "You know, look, I know you think this is repugnant, but it is no different from interpreting an ancient text or looking at a monument." +He says, "They are scientific investigations with real intellectual value." +Proust is trying to show us that jealousy feels intolerable and makes us look absurd, but it is, at its crux, a quest for knowledge, a quest for truth, painful truth, and actually, where Proust is concerned, the more painful the truth, the better. +Grief, humiliation, loss: These were the avenues to wisdom for Proust. +He says, "A woman whom we need, who makes us suffer, elicits from us a gamut of feelings far more profound and vital than a man of genius who interests us." +Is he telling us to just go and find cruel women? +No. I think he's trying to say that jealousy reveals us to ourselves. +And does any other emotion crack us open in this particular way? +Does any other emotion reveal to us our aggression and our hideous ambition and our entitlement? +Does any other emotion teach us to look with such peculiar intensity? +Freud would write about this later. +One day, Freud was visited by this very anxious young man who was consumed with the thought of his wife cheating on him. +And Freud says, it's something strange about this guy, because he's not looking at what his wife is doing. +Because she's blameless; everybody knows it. +The poor creature is just under suspicion for no cause. +But he's looking for things that his wife is doing without noticing, unintentional behaviors. +Is she smiling too brightly here, or did she accidentally brush up against a man there? +[Freud] says that the man is becoming the custodian of his wife's unconscious. +The novel is very good on this point. +The novel is very good at describing how jealousy trains us to look with intensity but not accuracy. +In fact, the more intensely jealous we are, the more we become residents of fantasy. +And this is why, I think, jealousy doesn't just provoke us to do violent things or illegal things. +Jealousy prompts us to behave in ways that are wildly inventive. +Now I'm thinking of myself at eight, I concede, but I'm also thinking of this story I heard on the news. +A 52-year-old Michigan woman was caught creating a fake Facebook account from which she sent vile, hideous messages to herself for a year. +For a year. A year. +And she was trying to frame her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend, and I have to confess when I heard this, I just reacted with admiration. +Because, I mean, let's be real. +What immense, if misplaced, creativity. Right? +This is something from a novel. +This is something from a Patricia Highsmith novel. +Now Highsmith is a particular favorite of mine. +She is the very brilliant and bizarre woman of American letters. +She's the author of "Strangers on a Train" and "The Talented Mr. Ripley," books that are all about how jealousy, it muddles our minds, and once we're in the sphere, in that realm of jealousy, the membrane between what is and what could be can be pierced in an instant. +Take Tom Ripley, her most famous character. +Now, Tom Ripley goes from wanting you or wanting what you have to being you and having what you once had, and you're under the floorboards, he's answering to your name, he's wearing your rings, emptying your bank account. +That's one way to go. +But what do we do? We can't go the Tom Ripley route. +I can't give the world D's, as much as I would really like to, some days. +And it's a pity, because we live in envious times. +We live in jealous times. +I mean, we're all good citizens of social media, aren't we, where the currency is envy? +Does the novel show us a way out? I'm not sure. +So let's do what characters always do when they're not sure, when they are in possession of a mystery. +Let's go to 221B Baker Street and ask for Sherlock Holmes. +When people think of Holmes, they think of his nemesis being Professor Moriarty, right, this criminal mastermind. +But I've always preferred [Inspector] Lestrade, who is the rat-faced head of Scotland Yard who needs Holmes desperately, needs Holmes' genius, but resents him. +Oh, it's so familiar to me. +So Lestrade needs his help, resents him, and sort of seethes with bitterness over the course of the mysteries. +But as they work together, something starts to change, and finally in "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons," once Holmes comes in, dazzles everybody with his solution, Lestrade turns to Holmes and he says, "We're not jealous of you, Mr. Holmes. +We're proud of you." +And he says that there's not a man at Scotland Yard who wouldn't want to shake Sherlock Holmes' hand. +It's one of the few times we see Holmes moved in the mysteries, and I find it very moving, this little scene, but it's also mysterious, right? +It seems to treat jealousy as a problem of geometry, not emotion. +You know, one minute Holmes is on the other side from Lestrade. +The next minute they're on the same side. +Suddenly, Lestrade is letting himself admire this mind that he's resented. +Could it be so simple though? +What if jealousy really is a matter of geometry, just a matter of where we allow ourselves to stand in relation to another? +Well, maybe then we wouldn't have to resent somebody's excellence. +We could align ourselves with it. +But I like contingency plans. +So while we wait for that to happen, let us remember that we have fiction for consolation. +Fiction alone demystifies jealousy. +Fiction alone domesticates it, invites it to the table. +And look who it gathers: sweet Lestrade, terrifying Tom Ripley, crazy Swann, Marcel Proust himself. +We are in excellent company. +Thank you. + +I was about 10 years old on a camping trip with my dad in the Adirondack Mountains, a wilderness area in the northern part of New York State. +It was a beautiful day. +The forest was sparkling. +The sun made the leaves glow like stained glass, and if it weren't for the path we were following, we could almost pretend we were the first human beings to ever walk that land. +We got to our campsite. +It was a lean-to on a bluff looking over a crystal, beautiful lake, when I discovered a horror. +Behind the lean-to was a dump, maybe 40 feet square with rotting apple cores and balled-up aluminum foil, and a dead sneaker. +And I was astonished, I was very angry, and I was deeply confused. +The campers who were too lazy to take out what they had brought in, who did they think would clean up after them? +That question stayed with me, and it simplified a little. +Who cleans up after us? +However you configure or wherever you place the us, who cleans up after us in Istanbul? +Who cleans up after us in Rio or in Paris or in London? +Here in New York, the Department of Sanitation cleans up after us, to the tune of 11,000 tons of garbage and 2,000 tons of recyclables every day. +I wanted to get to know them as individuals. +I wanted to understand who takes the job. +What's it like to wear the uniform and bear that burden? +So I started a research project with them. +I rode in the trucks and walked the routes and interviewed people in offices and facilities all over the city, and I learned a lot, but I was still an outsider. +I needed to go deeper. +So I took the job as a sanitation worker. +I didn't just ride in the trucks now. I drove the trucks. +And I operated the mechanical brooms and I plowed the snow. +It was a remarkable privilege and an amazing education. +Everyone asks about the smell. +It's there, but it's not as prevalent as you think, and on days when it is really bad, you get used to it rather quickly. +The weight takes a long time to get used to. +I knew people who were several years on the job whose bodies were still adjusting to the burden of bearing on your body tons of trash every week. +Then there's the danger. +According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, sanitation work is one of the 10 most dangerous occupations in the country, and I learned why. +You're in and out of traffic all day, and it's zooming around you. +It just wants to get past you, so it's often the motorist is not paying attention. +That's really bad for the worker. +And then the garbage itself is full of hazards that often fly back out of the truck and do terrible harm. +I also learned about the relentlessness of trash. +When you step off the curb and you see a city from behind a truck, you come to understand that trash is like a force of nature unto itself. +It never stops coming. +It's also like a form of respiration or circulation. +It must always be in motion. +And then there's the stigma. +You put on the uniform, and you become invisible until someone is upset with you for whatever reason like you've blocked traffic with your truck, or you're taking a break too close to their home, or you're drinking coffee in their diner, and they will come and scorn you, and tell you that they don't want you anywhere near them. +I find the stigma especially ironic, because I strongly believe that sanitation workers are the most important labor force on the streets of the city, for three reasons. +They are the first guardians of public health. +If they're not taking away trash efficiently and effectively every day, it starts to spill out of its containments, and the dangers inherent to it threaten us in very real ways. +Diseases we've had in check for decades and centuries burst forth again and start to harm us. +The economy needs them. +If we can't throw out the old stuff, we have no room for the new stuff, so then the engines of the economy start to sputter when consumption is compromised. +I'm not advocating capitalism, I'm just pointing out their relationship. +And then there's what I call our average, necessary quotidian velocity. +By that I simply mean how fast we're used to moving in the contemporary day and age. +We usually don't care for, repair, clean, carry around our coffee cup, our shopping bag, our bottle of water. +We use them, we throw them out, we forget about them, because we know there's a workforce on the other side that's going to take it all away. +So I want to suggest today a couple of ways to think about sanitation that will perhaps help ameliorate the stigma and bring them into this conversation of how to craft a city that is sustainable and humane. +Their work, I think, is kind of liturgical. +They're on the streets every day, rhythmically. +They wear a uniform in many cities. +You know when to expect them. +And their work lets us do our work. +They are almost a form of reassurance. +The flow that they maintain keeps us safe from ourselves, from our own dross, our cast-offs, and that flow must be maintained always no matter what. +On the day after September 11 in 2001, I heard the growl of a sanitation truck on the street, and I grabbed my infant son and I ran downstairs and there was a man doing his paper recycling route like he did every Wednesday. +And I tried to thank him for doing his work on that day of all days, but I started to cry. +And he looked at me, and he just nodded, and he said, "We're going to be okay. +We're going to be okay." +It was a little while later that I started my research with sanitation, and I met that man again. +His name is Paulie, and we worked together many times, and we became good friends. +I want to believe that Paulie was right. +We are going to be okay. +But in our effort to reconfigure how we as a species exist on this planet, we must include and take account of all the costs, including the very real human cost of the labor. +And we also would be well informed to reach out to the people who do that work and get their expertise on how do we think about, how do we create systems around sustainability that perhaps take us from curbside recycling, which is a remarkable success across 40 years, across the United States and countries around the world, and lift us up to a broader horizon where we're looking at other forms of waste that could be lessened from manufacturing and industrial sources. +Municipal waste, what we think of when we talk about garbage, accounts for three percent of the nation's waste stream. +It's a remarkable statistic. +So in the flow of your days, in the flow of your lives, next time you see someone whose job is to clean up after you, take a moment to acknowledge them. +Take a moment to say thank you. + +Hello, TEDWomen, what's up. +Not good enough. +Hello, TEDWomen, what is up? +My name is Maysoon Zayid, and I am not drunk, but the doctor who delivered me was. +He cut my mom six different times in six different directions, suffocating poor little me in the process. +As a result, I have cerebral palsy, which means I shake all the time. +Look. +It's exhausting. I'm like Shakira, Shakira meets Muhammad Ali. +C.P. is not genetic. +It's not a birth defect. You can't catch it. +No one put a curse on my mother's uterus, and I didn't get it because my parents are first cousins, which they are. +It only happens from accidents, like what happened to me on my birth day. +Now, I must warn you, I'm not inspirational, and I don't want anyone in this room to feel bad for me, because at some point in your life, you have dreamt of being disabled. +Come on a journey with me. +It's Christmas Eve, you're at the mall, you're driving around in circles looking for parking, and what do you see? +Sixteen empty handicapped spaces. +And you're like, "God, can't I just be a little disabled?" +Also, I gotta tell you, I got 99 problems, and palsy is just one. +If there was an Oppression Olympics, I would win the gold medal. +I'm Palestinian, Muslim, I'm female, I'm disabled, and I live in New Jersey. +If you don't feel better about yourself, maybe you should. +Cliffside Park, New Jersey is my hometown. +I have always loved the fact that my hood and my affliction share the same initials. +I also love the fact that if I wanted to walk from my house to New York City, I could. +A lot of people with C.P. don't walk, but my parents didn't believe in "can't." +My father's mantra was, "You can do it, yes you can can." +So, if my three older sisters were mopping, I was mopping. +If my three older sisters went to public school, my parents would sue the school system and guarantee that I went too, and if we didn't all get A's, we all got my mother's slipper. +My father taught me how to walk when I was five years old by placing my heels on his feet and just walking. +Another tactic that he used is he would dangle a dollar bill in front of me and have me chase it. +My inner stripper was very strong, and by -- Yeah. No, by the first day of kindergarten, I was walking like a champ who had been punched one too many times. +Growing up, there were only six Arabs in my town, and they were all my family. +Now there are 20 Arabs in town, and they are still all my family. +I don't think anyone even noticed we weren't Italian. +This was before 9/11 and before politicians thought it was appropriate to use "I hate Moslems" as a campaign slogan. +The people that I grew up with had no problem with my faith. +They did, however, seem very concerned that I would starve to death during Ramadan. +I would explain to them that I have enough fat to live off of for three whole months, so fasting from sunrise to sunset is a piece of cake. +I have tap-danced on Broadway. +Yeah, on Broadway. It's crazy. +My parents couldn't afford physical therapy, so they sent me to dancing school. +I learned how to dance in heels, which means I can walk in heels. +And I'm from Jersey, and we are really concerned with being chic, so if my friends wore heels, so did I. +And when my friends went and spent their summer vacations on the Jersey Shore, I did not. +I spent my summers in a war zone, because my parents were afraid that if we didn't go back to Palestine every single summer, we'd grow up to be Madonna. +Summer vacations often consisted of my father trying to heal me, so I drank deer's milk, I had hot cups on my back, I was dunked in the Dead Sea, and I remember the water burning my eyes and thinking, "It's working! It's working!" +But one miracle cure we did find was yoga. +I have to tell you, it's very boring, but before I did yoga, I was a stand-up comedian who can't stand up. +And now I can stand on my head. +My parents reinforced this notion that I could do anything, that no dream was impossible, and my dream was to be on the daytime soap opera "General Hospital." +I went to college during affirmative action and got a sweet scholarship to ASU, Arizona State University, because I fit every single quota. +I was like the pet lemur of the theater department. +Everybody loved me. +I did all the less-than-intelligent kids' homework, I got A's in all of my classes, A's in all of their classes. +Every time I did a scene from "The Glass Menagerie," my professors would weep. +But I never got cast. +Finally, my senior year, ASU decided to do a show called "They Dance Real Slow in Jackson." +It's a play about a girl with C.P. +I was a girl with C.P. +So I start shouting from the rooftops, "I'm finally going to get a part! +I have cerebral palsy! +Free at last! Free at last! +Thank God almighty, I'm free at last!" +I didn't get the part. +Sherry Brown got the part. +I went racing to the head of the theater department crying hysterically, like someone shot my cat, to ask her why, and she said it was because they didn't think I could do the stunts. +I said, "Excuse me, if I can't do the stunts, neither can the character." +This was a part that I was literally born to play and they gave it, they gave it to a non-palsy actress. +College was imitating life. +Hollywood has a sordid history of casting able-bodied actors to play disabled onscreen. +Upon graduating, I moved back home, and my first acting gig was as an extra on a daytime soap opera. +My dream was coming true. +And I knew that I would be promoted from "diner diner" to "wacky best friend" in no time. +But instead, I remained a glorified piece of furniture that you could only recognize from the back of my head, and it became clear to me that casting directors didn't hire fluffy, ethnic, disabled actors. +They only hired perfect people. +But there were exceptions to the rule. +I grew up watching Whoopi Goldberg, Roseanne Barr, Ellen, and all of these women had one thing in common: they were comedians. +So I became a comic. +My first gig was driving famous comics from New York City to shows in New Jersey, and I'll never forget the face of the first comic I ever drove when he realized that he was speeding down the New Jersey Turnpike with a chick with C.P. driving him. +I've performed in clubs all over America, and I've also performed in Arabic in the Middle East, uncensored and uncovered. +Some people say I'm the first stand-up comic in the Arab world. +I never like to claim first, but I do know that they never heard that nasty little rumor that women aren't funny, and they find us hysterical. +In 2003, my brother from another mother and father Dean Obeidallah and I started the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival, now in its 10th year. +Our goal was to change the negative image of Arab-Americans in media, while also reminding casting directors that South Asian and Arab are not synonymous. +Mainstreaming Arabs was much, much easier than conquering the challenge against the stigma against disability. +My big break came in 2010. +I was invited to be a guest on the cable news show "Countdown With Keith Olbermann." +I walked in looking like I was going to the prom, and they shuffle me into a studio and seat me on a spinning, rolling chair. +So I looked at the stage manager and I'm like, "Excuse me, can I have another chair?" +And she looked at me and she went, "Five, four, three, two ..." +And we were live, right? +So I had to grip onto the anchor's desk so that I wouldn't roll off the screen during the segment, and when the interview was over, I was livid. +I had finally gotten my chance and I blew it, and I knew I would never get invited back. +But not only did Mr. Olbermann invite me back, he made me a full-time contributor, and he taped down my chair. +One fun fact I learned while on the air with Keith Olbermann was that humans on the Internet are scumbags. +People say children are cruel, but I was never made fun of as a child or an adult. +Suddenly, my disability on the world wide web is fair game. +I would look at clips online and see comments like, "Yo, why's she tweakin?" +"Yo, is she retarded?" +And my favorite, "Poor Gumby-mouth terrorist. +What does she suffer from? +We should really pray for her." +One commenter even suggested that I add my disability to my credits: screenwriter, comedian, palsy. +Disability is as visual as race. +If a wheelchair user can't play Beyoncé, then Beyoncé can't play a wheelchair user. +The disabled are the largest — Yeah, clap for that, man. C'mon. +People with disabilities are the largest minority in the world, and we are the most underrepresented in entertainment. +The doctors said that I wouldn't walk, but I am here in front of you. +However, if I grew up with social media, I don't think I would be. +I hope that together we can create more positive images of disability in the media and in everyday life. +Perhaps if there were more positive images, it would foster less hate on the Internet. +Or maybe not. +Maybe it still takes a village to teach our children well. +My crooked journey has taken me to some very spectacular places. +I got to walk the red carpet flanked by soap diva Susan Lucci and the iconic Lorraine Arbus. +I got to act in a movie with Adam Sandler and work with my idol, the amazing Dave Matthews. +I toured the world as a headliner on Arabs Gone Wild. +I was a delegate representing the great state of New Jersey at the 2008 DNC. +And I founded Maysoon's Kids, a charity that hopes to give Palestinian refugee children a sliver of the chance my parents gave me. +But the one moment that stands out the most was when I got -- before this moment -- — but the one moment that stands out the most was when I got to perform for the man who floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee, has Parkinson's and shakes just like me, Muhammad Ali. +It was the only time that my father ever saw me perform live, and I dedicate this talk to his memory. +My name is Maysoon Zayid, and if I can can, you can can. + +So, we used to solve big problems. +On July 21st, 1969, Buzz Aldrin climbed out of Apollo 11's lunar module and descended onto the Sea of Tranquility. +Armstrong and Aldrin were alone, but their presence on the moon's gray surface was the culmination of a convulsive, collective effort. +The Apollo program was the greatest peacetime mobilization in the history of the United States. +To get to the moon, NASA spent around 180 billion dollars in today's money, or four percent of the federal budget. +Apollo employed around 400,000 people and demanded the collaboration of 20,000 companies, universities and government agencies. +People died, including the crew of Apollo 1. +But before the Apollo program ended, 24 men flew to the moon. +Twelve walked on its surface, of whom Aldrin, following the death of Armstrong last year, is now the most senior. +So why did they go? +They didn't bring much back: 841 pounds of old rocks, and something all 24 later emphasized -- a new sense of the smallness and the fragility of our common home. +Why did they go? The cynical answer is they went because President Kennedy wanted to show the Soviets that his nation had the better rockets. +But Kennedy's own words at Rice University in 1962 provide a better clue. +To contemporaries, Apollo wasn't only a victory of West over East in the Cold War. +At the time, the strongest emotion was of wonder at the transcendent powers of technology. +They went because it was a big thing to do. +Landing on the moon occurred in the context of a long series of technological triumphs. +The first half of the 20th century produced the assembly line and the airplane, penicillin and a vaccine for tuberculosis. +In the middle years of the century, polio was eradicated and smallpox eliminated. +Technology itself seemed to possess what Alvin Toffler in 1970 called "accelerative thrust." +For most of human history, we could go no faster than a horse or a boat with a sail, but in 1969, the crew of Apollo 10 flew at 25,000 miles an hour. +Since 1970, no human beings have been back to the moon. +No one has traveled faster than the crew of Apollo 10, and blithe optimism about technology's powers has evaporated as big problems we had imagined technology would solve, such as going to Mars, creating clean energy, curing cancer, or feeding the world have come to seem intractably hard. +I remember watching the liftoff of Apollo 17. +I was five years old, and my mother told me not to stare at the fiery exhaust of a Saturn V rocket. +I vaguely knew this was to be the last of the moon missions, but I was absolutely certain there would be Mars colonies in my lifetime. +So "Something happened to our capacity to solve big problems with technology" has become a commonplace. +You hear it all the time. +We've heard it over the last two days here at TED. +It feels as if technologists have diverted us and enriched themselves with trivial toys, with things like iPhones and apps and social media, or algorithms that speed automated trading. +There's nothing wrong with most of these things. +They've expanded and enriched our lives. +But they don't solve humanity's big problems. +What happened? +So there is a parochial explanation in Silicon Valley, which admits that it has been funding less ambitious companies than it did in the years when it financed Intel, Microsoft, Apple and Genentech. +Silicon Valley says the markets are to blame, in particular the incentives that venture capitalists offer to entrepreneurs. +Silicon Valley says that venture investing shifted away from funding transformational ideas and towards funding incremental problems or even fake problems. +But I don't think that explanation is good enough. +It mostly explains what's wrong with Silicon Valley. +Even when venture capitalists were at their most risk-happy, they preferred small investments, tiny investments that offered an exit within 10 years. +V.C.s have always struggled to invest profitably in technologies such as energy whose capital requirements are huge and whose development is long and lengthy, and V.C.s have never, never funded the development of technologies meant to solve big problems that possess no immediate commercial value. +No, the reasons we can't solve big problems are more complicated and more profound. +Sometimes we choose not to solve big problems. +We could go to Mars if we want. +NASA even has the outline of a plan. +But going to Mars would follow a political decision with popular appeal, and that will never happen. +We won't go to Mars, because everyone thinks there are more important things to do here on Earth. +Sometimes, we can't solve big problems because our political systems fail. +Today, less than two percent of the world's energy consumption derives from advanced, renewable sources such as solar, wind and biofuels, less than two percent, and the reason is purely economic. +Coal and natural gas are cheaper than solar and wind, and petroleum is cheaper than biofuels. +We want alternative energy sources that can compete on price. None exist. +Now, technologists, business leaders and economists all basically agree on what national policies and international treaties would spur the development of alternative energy: mostly, a significant increase in energy research and development, and some kind of price on carbon. +But there's no hope in the present political climate that we will see U.S. energy policy or international treaties that reflect that consensus. +Sometimes, big problems that had seemed technological turn out not to be so. +Famines were long understood to be caused by failures in food supply. +But 30 years of research have taught us that famines are political crises that catastrophically affect food distribution. +Technology can improve things like crop yields or systems for storing and transporting food, but there will be famines so long as there are bad governments. +Finally, big problems sometimes elude solution because we don't really understand the problem. +President Nixon declared war on cancer in 1971, but we soon discovered there are many kinds of cancer, most of them fiendishly resistant to therapy, and it is only in the last 10 years that effective, viable therapies have come to seem real. +Hard problems are hard. +It's not true that we can't solve big problems through technology. +We can, we must, but these four elements must all be present: Political leaders and the public must care to solve a problem; institutions must support its solution; It must really be a technological problem; and we must understand it. +The Apollo mission, which has become a kind of metaphor for technology's capacity to solve big problems, met these criteria. +But it is an irreproducible model for the future. +It is not 1961. +There is no galvanizing contest like the Cold War, no politician like John Kennedy who can heroize the difficult and the dangerous, and no popular science fictional mythology such as exploring the solar system. +Most of all, going to the moon turned out to be easy. +It was just three days away. +And arguably it wasn't even solving much of a problem. +We are left alone with our day, and the solutions of the future will be harder won. +God knows, we don't lack for the challenges. +Thank you very much. + +I'd like to invite you to close your eyes. +Imagine yourself standing outside the front door of your home. +I'd like you to notice the color of the door, the material that it's made out of. +Now visualize a pack of overweight nudists on bicycles. +They are competing in a naked bicycle race, and they are headed straight for your front door. +I need you to actually see this. +They are pedaling really hard, they're sweaty, they're bouncing around a lot. +And they crash straight into the front door of your home. +Bicycles fly everywhere, wheels roll past you, spokes end up in awkward places. +Step over the threshold of your door into your foyer, your hallway, whatever's on the other side, and appreciate the quality of the light. +The light is shining down on Cookie Monster. +Cookie Monster is waving at you from his perch on top of a tan horse. +It's a talking horse. +You can practically feel his blue fur tickling your nose. +You can smell the oatmeal raisin cookie that he's about to shovel into his mouth. +Walk past him. Walk past him into your living room. +In your living room, in full imaginative broadband, picture Britney Spears. +She is scantily clad, she's dancing on your coffee table, and she's singing "Hit Me Baby One More Time." +And then follow me into your kitchen. +In your kitchen, the floor has been paved over with a yellow brick road and out of your oven are coming towards you Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Lion from "The Wizard of Oz," hand-in-hand skipping straight towards you. +Okay. Open your eyes. +I want to tell you about a very bizarre contest that is held every spring in New York City. +It's called the United States Memory Championship. +And I had gone to cover this contest a few years back as a science journalist expecting, I guess, that this was going to be like the Superbowl of savants. +This was a bunch of guys and a few ladies, widely varying in both age and hygienic upkeep. +They were memorizing hundreds of random numbers, looking at them just once. +They were memorizing the names of dozens and dozens and dozens of strangers. +They were memorizing entire poems in just a few minutes. +They were competing to see who could memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards the fastest. +I was like, this is unbelievable. +These people must be freaks of nature. +And I started talking to a few of the competitors. +This is a guy called Ed Cook who had come over from England where he had one of the best trained memories. +And I said to him, "Ed, when did you realize that you were a savant?" +And Ed was like, "I'm not a savant. +In fact, I have just an average memory. +Everybody who competes in this contest will tell you that they have just an average memory. +We've all trained ourselves to perform these utterly miraculous feats of memory using a set of ancient techniques, techniques invented 2,500 years ago in Greece, the same techniques that Cicero had used to memorize his speeches, that medieval scholars had used to memorize entire books." +And I was like, "Whoa. How come I never heard of this before?" +And we were standing outside the competition hall, and Ed, who is a wonderful, brilliant, but somewhat eccentric English guy, says to me, "Josh, you're an American journalist. +Do you know Britney Spears?" +I'm like, "What? No. Why?" +"Because I really want to teach Britney Spears how to memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards on U.S. national television. +It will prove to the world that anybody can do this." +I was like, "Well I'm not Britney Spears, but maybe you could teach me. +I mean, you've got to start somewhere, right?" +And that was the beginning of a very strange journey for me. +I ended up spending the better part of the next year not only training my memory, but also investigating it, trying to understand how it works, why it sometimes doesn't work and what its potential might be. +I met a host of really interesting people. +This is a guy called E.P. +He's an amnesic who had, very possibly, the very worst memory in the world. +His memory was so bad that he didn't even remember he had a memory problem, which is amazing. +And he was this incredibly tragic figure, but he was a window into the extent to which our memories make us who we are. +The other end of the spectrum: I met this guy. +This is Kim Peek. +He was the basis for Dustin Hoffman's character in the movie "Rain Man." +We spent an afternoon together in the Salt Lake City Public Library memorizing phone books, which was scintillating. +And I went back and I read a whole host of memory treatises, treatises written 2,000-plus years ago in Latin in Antiquity and then later in the Middle Ages. +And I learned a whole bunch of really interesting stuff. +One of the really interesting things that I learned is that once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today. +Once upon a time, people invested in their memories, in laboriously furnishing their minds. +Over the last few millenia we've invented a series of technologies -- from the alphabet to the scroll to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone -- that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity. +These technologies have made our modern world possible, but they've also changed us. +They've changed us culturally, and I would argue that they've changed us cognitively. +Having little need to remember anymore, it sometimes seems like we've forgotten how. +One of the last places on Earth where you still find people passionate about this idea of a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory is at this totally singular memory contest. +It's actually not that singular, there are contests held all over the world. +And I was fascinated, I wanted to know how do these guys do it. +A few years back a group of researchers at University College London brought a bunch of memory champions into the lab. +They wanted to know: Do these guys have brains that are somehow structurally, anatomically different from the rest of ours? +The answer was no. +Are they smarter than the rest of us? +They gave them a bunch of cognitive tests, and the answer was not really. +There was however one really interesting and telling difference between the brains of the memory champions and the control subjects that they were comparing them to. +When they put these guys in an fMRI machine, scanned their brains while they were memorizing numbers and people's faces and pictures of snowflakes, they found that the memory champions were lighting up different parts of the brain than everyone else. +Of note, they were using, or they seemed to be using, a part of the brain that's involved in spatial memory and navigation. +Why? And is there something the rest of us can learn from this? +The sport of competitive memorizing is driven by a kind of arms race where every year somebody comes up with a new way to remember more stuff more quickly, and then the rest of the field has to play catchup. +This is my friend Ben Pridmore, three-time world memory champion. +On his desk in front of him are 36 shuffled packs of playing cards that he is about to try to memorize in one hour, using a technique that he invented and he alone has mastered. +He used a similar technique to memorize the precise order of 4,140 random binary digits in half an hour. +Yeah. +And while there are a whole host of ways of remembering stuff in these competitions, everything, all of the techniques that are being used, ultimately come down to a concept that psychologists refer to as elaborative encoding. +And it's well illustrated by a nifty paradox known as the Baker/baker paradox, which goes like this: If I tell two people to remember the same word, if I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy named Baker." +That's his name. +And I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy who is a baker." +And I come back to you at some point later on, and I say, "Do you remember that word that I told you a while back? +Do you remember what it was?" +The person who was told his name is Baker is less likely to remember the same word than the person was told his job is that he is a baker. +Same word, different amount of remembering; that's weird. +What's going on here? +Well the name Baker doesn't actually mean anything to you. +It is entirely untethered from all of the other memories floating around in your skull. +But the common noun baker, we know bakers. +Bakers wear funny white hats. +Bakers have flour on their hands. +Bakers smell good when they come home from work. +Maybe we even know a baker. +And when we first hear that word, we start putting these associational hooks into it that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date. +The entire art of what is going on in these memory contests and the entire art of remembering stuff better in everyday life is figuring out ways to transform capital B Bakers into lower-case B bakers -- to take information that is lacking in context, in significance, in meaning and transform it in some way so that it becomes meaningful in the light of all the other things that you have in your mind. +One of the more elaborate techniques for doing this dates back 2,500 years to Ancient Greece. +It came to be known as the memory palace. +The story behind its creation goes like this: There was a poet called Simonides who was attending a banquet. +He was actually the hired entertainment, because back then if you wanted to throw a really slamming party, you didn't hire a D.J., you hired a poet. +And he stands up, delivers his poem from memory, walks out the door, and at the moment he does, the banquet hall collapses, kills everybody inside. +It doesn't just kill everybody, it mangles the bodies beyond all recognition. +Nobody can say who was inside, nobody can say where they were sitting. +The bodies can't be properly buried. +It's one tragedy compounding another. +Simonides, standing outside, the sole survivor amid the wreckage, closes his eyes and has this realization, which is that in his mind's eye, he can see where each of the guests at the banquet had been sitting. +And he takes the relatives by the hand and guides them each to their loved ones amid the wreckage. +What Simonides figured out at that moment is something that I think we all kind of intuitively know, which is that, as bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories. +If I asked you to recount the first 10 words of the story that I just told you about Simonides, chances are you would have a tough time with it. +But I would wager that if I asked you to recall who is sitting on top of a talking tan horse in your foyer right now, you would be able to see that. +The idea behind the memory palace is to create this imagined edifice in your mind's eye and populate it with images of the things that you want to remember -- the crazier, weirder, more bizarre, funnier, raunchier, stinkier the image is, the more unforgettable it's likely to be. +This is advice that goes back 2,000-plus years to the earliest Latin memory treatises. +So how does this work? +Let's say that you've been invited to TED center stage to give a speech and you want to do it from memory, and you want to do it the way that Cicero would have done it if he had been invited to TEDxRome 2,000 years ago. +What you might do is picture yourself at the front door of your house. +And you'd come up with some sort of an absolutely crazy, ridiculous, unforgettable image to remind you that the first thing you want to talk about is this totally bizarre contest. +And then you'd go inside your house, and you would see an image of Cookie Monster on top of Mister Ed. +And that would remind you that you would want to then introduce your friend Ed Cook. +And then you'd see an image of Britney Spears to remind you of this funny anecdote you want to tell. +And you go into your kitchen, and the fourth topic you were going to talk about was this strange journey that you went on for a year, and you have some friends to help you remember that. +This is how Roman orators memorized their speeches -- not word-for-word, which is just going to screw you up, but topic-for-topic. +In fact, the phrase "topic sentence," that comes from the Greek word "topos," which means "place." +That's a vestige of when people used to think about oratory and rhetoric in these sorts of spatial terms. +The phrase "in the first place," that's like in the first place of your memory palace. +I thought this was just fascinating, and I got really into it. +And I went to a few more of these memory contests. +And I had this notion that I might write something longer about this subculture of competitive memorizers. +But there was a problem. +The problem was that a memory contest is a pathologically boring event. +Truly, it is like a bunch of people sitting around taking the SATs. +I mean, the most dramatic it gets is when somebody starts massaging their temples. +And I'm a journalist, I need something to write about. +I know that there's this incredible stuff happening in these people's minds, but I don't have access to it. +And I realized, if I was going to tell this story, I needed to walk in their shoes a little bit. +And so I started trying to spend 15 or 20 minutes every morning before I sat down with my New York Times just trying to remember something. +Maybe it was a poem. +Maybe it was names from an old yearbook that I bought at a flea market. +And I found that this was shockingly fun. +I never would have expected that. +It was fun because this is actually not about training your memory. +What you're doing is you're trying to get better and better and better at creating, at dreaming up, these utterly ludicrous, raunchy, hilarious and hopefully unforgettable images in your mind's eye. +And I got pretty into it. +This is me wearing my standard competitive memorizer's training kit. +It's a pair of earmuffs and a set of safety goggles that have been masked over except for two small pinholes, because distraction is the competitive memorizer's greatest enemy. +I ended up coming back to that same contest that I had covered a year earlier. +And I had this notion that I might enter it, sort of as an experiment in participatory journalism. +It'd make, I thought, maybe a nice epilogue to all my research. +Problem was the experiment went haywire. +I won the contest, which really wasn't supposed to happen. +Now it is nice to be able to memorize speeches and phone numbers and shopping lists, but it's actually kind of beside the point. +These are just tricks. +They are tricks that work because they're based on some pretty basic principles about how our brains work. +And you don't have to be building memory palaces or memorizing packs of playing cards to benefit from a little bit of insight about how your mind works. +We often talk about people with great memories as though it were some sort of an innate gift, but that is not the case. +Great memories are learned. +At the most basic level, we remember when we pay attention. +We remember when we are deeply engaged. +We remember when we are able to take a piece of information and experience and figure out why it is meaningful to us, why it is significant, why it's colorful, when we're able to transform it in some way that it makes sense in the light of all of the other things floating around in our minds, when we're able to transform Bakers into bakers. +The memory palace, these memory techniques, they're just shortcuts. +In fact, they're not even really shortcuts. +They work because they make you work. +They force a kind of depth of processing, a kind of mindfulness, that most of us don't normally walk around exercising. +But there actually are no shortcuts. +This is how stuff is made memorable. +And I think if there's one thing that I want to leave you with, it's what E.P., the amnesic who couldn't even remember that he had a memory problem, left me with, which is the notion that our lives are the sum of our memories. +How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not paying attention to the human being across from us who is talking with us, by being so lazy that we're not willing to process deeply? +I learned firsthand that there are incredible memory capacities latent in all of us. +But if you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember. +Thank you. + +When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. +I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools. +And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests. +I gave out homework assignments. +When the work came back, I calculated grades. +What struck me was that I.Q. was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. +Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric I.Q. scores. +Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well. +And that got me thinking. +The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math, sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram. +But these concepts are not impossible, and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough. +After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective. +In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is I.Q., but what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily? +So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist. +I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my question was, who is successful here and why? +My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy. +We tried to predict which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out. +We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition. +We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students? +We partnered with private companies, asking, which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs? +And who's going to earn the most money? +In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. +And it wasn't social intelligence. +It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't I.Q. +It was grit. +Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. +Grit is having stamina. +Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. +Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint. +A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools. +I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate. +Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure, things like family income, standardized achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school. +So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters. It's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out. +To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. +Every day, parents and teachers ask me, "How do I build grit in kids? +What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? +How do I keep them motivated for the long run?" +The honest answer is, I don't know. +What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty. +Our data show very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments. +In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent. +So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called "growth mindset." +This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. +Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition. +So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit. +But we need more. +And that's where I'm going to end my remarks, because that's where we are. +That's the work that stands before us. +We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them. +We need to measure whether we've been successful, and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned. +In other words, we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier. +Thank you. + +My work focuses on the connection of both thinking about our community life being part of the environment where architecture grows from the natural local conditions and traditions. +Today I brought two recent projects as an example of this. +Both projects are in emerging countries, one in Ethiopia and another one in Tunisia. +And also they have in common that the different analyses from different perspectives becomes an essential part of the final piece of architecture. +The first example started with an invitation to design a multistory shopping mall in Ethiopia's capital city Addis Ababa. +And this is the type of building we were shown as an example, to my team and myself, of what we had to design. +At first, the first thing I thought was, I want to run away. +After seeing a few of these buildings -- there are many in the city -- we realized that they have three very big points. +First, these buildings, they are almost empty because they have very large shops where people cannot afford to buy things. +Second, they need tons of energy to perform because of the skin treatment with glass that creates heat in the inside, and then you need a lot of cooling. +In a city where this shouldn't happen because they have really mild weather that ranges from 20 to 25 degrees the whole year. +And third is that their image has nothing to do with Africa and with Ethiopia. +It is a pity in a place that has such rich culture and traditions. +Also during our first visit to Ethiopia, I was really captivated by the old merkato that is this open-air structure where thousands of people, they go and buy things every day from small vendors. +And also it has this idea of the public space that uses the outdoors to create activity. +So I thought, this is what I really want to design, not a shopping mall. +But the question was how we could do a multistory, contemporary building with these principles. +The next challenge was when we looked at the site, that is, in a really growing area of the city, where most of these buildings that you see in the image, they were not there. +And it's also between two parallel streets that don't have any connection for hundreds of meters. +So the first thing we did was to create a connection between these two streets, putting all the entrances of the building. +And this extends with an inclined atrium that creates an open-air space in the building that self-protects itself with its own shape from the sun and the rain. +And around this void we placed this idea of the market with small shops, that change in each floor because of the shape of the void. +I also thought, how to close the building? +And I really wanted to find a solution that would respond to the local climate conditions. +And I started thinking about the textile like a shell made of concrete with perforations that would let the air in, and also the light, but in a filtered way. +And then the inspiration came from these beautiful buttons of the Ethiopian women's dresses. +That they have fractal geometry properties and this helped me to shape the whole facade. +And we are building that with these small prefabricated pieces that are the windows that let the air and the light in a controlled way inside the building. +And this is complemented by these small colored glasses that use the light from the inside of the building to light up the building at night. +With these ideas it was not easy first to convince the developers because they were like, "This is not a shopping mall. We didn't ask for that." +But then we all realized that this idea of the market happened to be a lot more profitable than the idea of the shopping mall because basically they had more shops to sell. +And also that the idea of the facade was much, much cheaper, not only because of the material compared with the glass, but also because we didn't need to have air conditioning anymore. +So we created some budget savings that we used to implement the project. +And the first implementation was to think about how we could make the building self-sufficient in terms of energy in a city that has electricity cuts almost every day. +So we created a huge asset by placing photovoltaics there on the roof. +And then under those panels we thought about the roof like a new public space with gathering areas and bars that would create this urban oasis. +And these porches on the roof, all together they collect the water to reuse for sanitation on the inside. +Hopefully by the beginning of next year, because we are already on the fifth floor of the construction. +The second example is a master plan of 2,000 apartments and facilities in the city of Tunis. +And for doing such a big project, the biggest project I've ever designed, I really needed to understand the city of Tunis, but also its surroundings and the tradition and culture. +During that analysis I paid special attention to the medina that is this 1,000-year-old structure that used to be closed by a wall, opened by twelve different gates, connected by almost straight lines. +When I went to the site, the first design operation we did was to extend the existing streets, creating 12 initial blocks similar in size and characteristics to the ones we have in Barcelona and other cities in Europe with these courtyards. +On top of that, we selected some strategic points reminded of this idea of the gates and connecting them by straight lines, and this modified this initial pattern. +And the last operation was to think about the cell, the small cell of the project, like the apartment, as an essential part of the master plan. +And for that I thought, what would be the best orientation in the Mediterranean climate for an apartment? +And it's north-south, because it creates a thermal difference between both sides of the house and then a natural ventilation. +So we overlap a pattern that makes sure that most of the apartments are perfectly oriented in that direction. +And this is the result that is almost like a combination of the European block and the Arab city. +It has these blocks with courtyards, and then on the ground floor you have all these connections for the pedestrians. +And also it responds to the local regulations that establish a higher density on the upper levels and a lower density on the ground floor. +And it also reinforces this idea of the gates. +The volume has this connecting shape that shades itself with three different types of apartments and also lets the light go on the ground floor in a very dense neighborhood And in the courtyards there are the different facilities, such as a gym and a kindergarten and close by, a series of commercial [spaces] that bring activity to the ground floor. +The roof, which is my favorite space of the project is almost like giving back to the community the space taken by the construction. +And it's where all the neighbors, they can go up and socialize, and do activities such as having a two-kilometer run in the morning, jumping from one building to another. +These two examples, they have a common approach in the design process. +And also, they are in emerging countries where you can see the cities literally growing. +In these cities, the impact of architecture in people's lives of today and tomorrow changes the local communities and economies at the same speed as the buildings grow. +For this reason, I see even more importance to look at architecture finding simple but affordable solutions that enhance the relationship between the community and the environment and that aim to connect nature and people. +Thank you very much. + +So I'm going to talk about trust, and I'm going to start by reminding you of the standard views that people have about trust. +I think these are so commonplace, they've become clichés of our society. +And I think there are three. +One's a claim: there has been a great decline in trust, very widely believed. +The second is an aim: we should have more trust. +And the third is a task: we should rebuild trust. +I think that the claim, the aim and the task are all misconceived. +So what I'm going to try to tell you today is a different story about a claim, an aim and a task which I think give one quite a lot better purchase on the matter. +First the claim: Why do people think trust has declined? +And if I really think about it on the basis of my own evidence, I don't know the answer. +I'm inclined to think it may have declined in some activities or some institutions and it might have grown in others. +I don't have an overview. +But, of course, I can look at the opinion polls, and the opinion polls are supposedly the source of a belief that trust has declined. +When you actually look at opinion polls across time, there's not much evidence for that. +That's to say, the people who were mistrusted 20 years ago, principally journalists and politicians, are still mistrusted. +And the people who were highly trusted 20 years ago are still rather highly trusted: judges, nurses. +The rest of us are in between, and by the way, the average person in the street is almost exactly midway. +But is that good evidence? +What opinion polls record is, of course, opinions. +What else can they record? +So they're looking at the generic attitudes that people report when you ask them certain questions. +Do you trust politicians? Do you trust teachers? +Now if somebody said to you, "Do you trust greengrocers? +Do you trust fishmongers? +Do you trust elementary school teachers?" +you would probably begin by saying, "To do what?" +And that would be a perfectly sensible response. +And you might say, when you understood the answer to that, "Well, I trust some of them, but not others." +That's a perfectly rational thing. +In short, in our real lives, we seek to place trust in a differentiated way. +We don't make an assumption that the level of trust that we will have in every instance of a certain type of official or office-holder or type of person is going to be uniform. +I might, for example, say that I certainly trust a certain elementary school teacher I know to teach the reception class to read, but in no way to drive the school minibus. +I might, after all, know that she wasn't a good driver. +I might trust my most loquacious friend to keep a conversation going but not -- but perhaps not to keep a secret. +Simple. +So if we've got those evidence in our ordinary lives of the way that trust is differentiated, why do we sort of drop all that intelligence when we think about trust more abstractly? +I think the polls are very bad guides to the level of trust that actually exists, because they try to obliterate the good judgment that goes into placing trust. +Secondly, what about the aim? +The aim is to have more trust. +Well frankly, I think that's a stupid aim. +It's not what I would aim at. +I would aim to have more trust in the trustworthy but not in the untrustworthy. +In fact, I aim positively to try not to trust the untrustworthy. +And I think, of those people who, for example, placed their savings with the very aptly named Mr. Madoff, who then made off with them, and I think of them, and I think, well, yes, too much trust. +More trust is not an intelligent aim in this life. +Intelligently placed and intelligently refused trust is the proper aim. +Well once one says that, one says, yeah, okay, that means that what matters in the first place is not trust but trustworthiness. +It's judging how trustworthy people are in particular respects. +And I think that judgment requires us to look at three things. +Are they competent? Are they honest? Are they reliable? +And if we find that a person is competent in the relevant matters, and reliable and honest, we'll have a pretty good reason to trust them, because they'll be trustworthy. +But if, on the other hand, they're unreliable, we might not. +I have friends who are competent and honest, but I would not trust them to post a letter, because they're forgetful. +I have friends who are very confident they can do certain things, but I realize that they overestimate their own competence. +And I'm very glad to say, I don't think I have many friends who are competent and reliable but extremely dishonest. +If so, I haven't yet spotted it. +But that's what we're looking for: trustworthiness before trust. +Trust is the response. +Trustworthiness is what we have to judge. And, of course, it's difficult. +Across the last few decades, we've tried to construct systems of accountability for all sorts of institutions and professionals and officials and so on that will make it easier for us to judge their trustworthiness. +A lot of these systems have the converse effect. +They don't work as they're supposed to. +I remember I was talking with a midwife who said, "Well, you see, the problem is it takes longer to do the paperwork than to deliver the baby." +And all over our public life, our institutional life, we find that problem, that the system of accountability that is meant to secure trustworthiness and evidence of trustworthiness is actually doing the opposite. +It is distracting people who have to do difficult tasks, like midwives, from doing them by requiring them to tick the boxes, as we say. +You can all give your own examples there. +So so much for the aim. +The aim, I think, is more trustworthiness, and that is going to be different if we are trying to be trustworthy and communicate our trustworthiness to other people, and if we are trying to judge whether other people or office-holders or politicians are trustworthy. +It's not easy. It is judgment, and simple reaction, attitudes, don't do adequately here. +Now thirdly, the task. +Calling the task rebuilding trust, I think, also gets things backwards. +It suggests that you and I should rebuild trust. +Well, we can do that for ourselves. +We can rebuild a bit of trustworthiness. +We can do it two people together trying to improve trust. +But trust, in the end, is distinctive because it's given by other people. +You can't rebuild what other people give you. +You have to give them the basis for giving you their trust. +So you have to, I think, be trustworthy. +And that, of course, is because you can't fool all of the people all of the time, usually. +But you also have to provide usable evidence that you are trustworthy. +How to do it? +Well every day, all over the place, it's being done by ordinary people, by officials, by institutions, quite effectively. +Let me give you a simple commercial example. +The shop where I buy my socks says I may take them back, and they don't ask any questions. +They take them back and give me the money or give me the pair of socks of the color I wanted. +That's super. I trust them because they have made themselves vulnerable to me. +I think there's a big lesson in that. +If you make yourself vulnerable to the other party, then that is very good evidence that you are trustworthy and you have confidence in what you are saying. +So in the end, I think what we are aiming for is not very difficult to discern. +It is relationships in which people are trustworthy and can judge when and how the other person is trustworthy. +So the moral of all this is, we need to think much less about trust, let alone about attitudes of trust detected or mis-detected by opinion polls, much more about being trustworthy, and how you give people adequate, useful and simple evidence that you're trustworthy. +Thanks. + +You know, my favorite part of being a dad is the movies I get to watch. +I love sharing my favorite movies with my kids, and when my daughter was four, we got to watch "The Wizard of Oz" together. +It totally dominated her imagination for months. +Her favorite character was Glinda, of course. +It gave her a great excuse to wear a sparkly dress and carry a wand. +But you watch that movie enough times, and you start to realize how unusual it is. +Now we live today, and are raising our children, in a kind of children's-fantasy-spectacular-industrial complex. +But "The Wizard of Oz" stood alone. +It did not start that trend. +Forty years later was when the trend really caught on, with, interestingly, another movie that featured a metal guy and a furry guy rescuing a girl by dressing up as the enemy's guards. +Do you know what I'm talking about? +Yeah. +Now, there's a big difference between these two movies, a couple of really big differences between "The Wizard of Oz" and all the movies we watch today. +One is there's very little violence in "The Wizard of Oz." +The monkeys are rather aggressive, as are the apple trees. +But I think if "The Wizard of Oz" were made today, the wizard would say, "Dorothy, you are the savior of Oz that the prophecy foretold. +Use your magic slippers to defeat the computer-generated armies of the Wicked Witch." +But that's not how it happens. +Another thing that's really unique about "The Wizard of Oz" to me is that all of the most heroic and wise and even villainous characters are female. +Now I started to notice this when I actually showed "Star Wars" to my daughter, which was years later, and the situation was different. +At that point I also had a son. +He was only three at the time. +He was not invited to the screening. He was too young for that. +But he was the second child, and the level of supervision had plummeted. +So he wandered in, and it imprinted on him like a mommy duck does to its duckling, and I don't think he understands what's going on, but he is sure soaking in it. +And I wonder what he's soaking in. +Is he picking up on the themes of courage and perseverance and loyalty? +Is he picking up on the fact that Luke joins an army to overthrow the government? +Is he picking up on the fact that there are only boys in the universe except for Aunt Beru, and of course this princess, who's really cool, but who kind of waits around through most of the movie so that she can award the hero with a medal and a wink to thank him for saving the universe, which he does by the magic that he was born with? +Compare this to 1939 with "The Wizard of Oz." +How does Dorothy win her movie? +By making friends with everybody and being a leader. +That's kind of the world I'd rather raise my kids in -- Oz, right? -- and not the world of dudes fighting, which is where we kind of have to be. +Why is there so much Force -- capital F, Force -- in the movies we have for our kids, and so little yellow brick road? +There is a lot of great writing about the impact that the boy-violent movie has on girls, and you should do that reading. It's very good. +I haven't read as much on how boys are picking up on this vibe. +I know from my own experience that Princess Leia did not provide the adequate context that I could have used in navigating the adult world that is co-ed. +I think there was a first-kiss moment when I really expected the credits to start rolling because that's the end of the movie, right? +I finished my quest, I got the girl. +Why are you still standing there? +I don't know what I'm supposed to do. +The movies are very, very focused on defeating the villain and getting your reward, and there's not a lot of room for other relationships and other journeys. +It's almost as though if you're a boy, you are a dopey animal, and if you are a girl, you should bring your warrior costume. +There are plenty of exceptions, and I will defend the Disney princesses in front of any you. +But they do send a message to boys, that they are not, the boys are not really the target audience. +They are doing a phenomenal job of teaching girls how to defend against the patriarchy, but they are not necessarily showing boys how they're supposed to defend against the patriarchy. +There's no models for them. +And we also have some terrific women who are writing new stories for our kids, and as three-dimensional and delightful as Hermione and Katniss are, these are still war movies. +And, of course, the most successful studio of all time continues to crank out classic after classic, every single one of them about the journey of a boy, or a man, or two men who are friends, or a man and his son, or two men who are raising a little girl. +Until, as many of you are thinking, this year, when they finally came out with "Brave." +I recommend it to all of you. It's on demand now. +Do you remember what the critics said when "Brave" came out? +"Aw, I can't believe Pixar made a princess movie." +It's very good. Don't let that stop you. +Now, almost none of these movies pass the Bechdel Test. +I don't know if you've heard of this. +It has not yet caught on and caught fire, but maybe today we will start a movement. +Alison Bechdel is a comic book artist, and back in the mid-'80s, she recorded this conversation she'd had with a friend about assessing the movies that they saw. +And it's very simple. There's just three questions you should ask: Is there more than one character in the movie that is female who has lines? +So try to meet that bar. +And do these women talk to each other at any point in the movie? +And is their conversation about something other than the guy that they both like? +Right? Thank you. +Thank you very much. +Two women who exist and talk to each other about stuff. +It does happen. I've seen it, and yet I very rarely see it in the movies that we know and love. +In fact, this week I went to see a very high-quality movie, "Argo." +Right? Oscar buzz, doing great at the box office, a consensus idea of what a quality Hollywood film is. +It pretty much flunks the Bechdel test. +And I don't think it should, because a lot of the movie, I don't know if you've seen it, but a lot of the movie takes place in this embassy where men and women are hiding out during the hostage crisis. +We've got quite a few scenes of the men having deep, angst-ridden conversations in this hideout, and the great moment for one of the actresses is to peek through the door and say, "Are you coming to bed, honey?" +That's Hollywood for you. +So let's look at the numbers. +2011, of the 100 most popular movies, how many of them do you think actually have female protagonists? +Eleven. It's not bad. +It's not as many percent as the number of women we've just elected to Congress, so that's good. +But there is a number that is greater than this that's going to bring this room down. +Last year, The New York Times published a study that the government had done. +Here's what it said. +One out of five women in America say that they have been sexually assaulted some time in their life. +Now, I don't think that's the fault of popular entertainment. +I don't think kids' movies have anything to do with that. +I don't even think that music videos or pornography are really directly related to that, but something is going wrong, and when I hear that statistic, one of the things I think of is that's a lot of sexual assailants. +Who are these guys? What are they learning? +What are they failing to learn? +Are they absorbing the story that a male hero's job is to defeat the villain with violence and then collect the reward, which is a woman who has no friends and doesn't speak? +Are we soaking up that story? +You know, as a parent with the privilege of raising a daughter like all of you who are doing the same thing, we find this world and this statistic very alarming and we want to prepare them. +We have tools at our disposal like "girl power," and we hope that that will help, but I gotta wonder, is girl power going to protect them if, at the same time, actively or passively, we are training our sons to maintain their boy power? +I mean, I think the Netflix queue is one way that we can do something very important, and I'm talking mainly to the dads here. +I think we have got to show our sons a new definition of manhood. +The definition of manhood is already turning upside down. +You've read about how the new economy is changing the roles of caregiver and wage earner. +They're throwing it up in the air. +So our sons are going to have to find some way of adapting to this, some new relationship with each other, and I think we really have to show them, and model for them, how a real man is someone who trusts his sisters and respects them, and wants to be on their team, and stands up against the real bad guys, who are the men who want to abuse the women. +And I think our job in the Netflix queue is to look out for those movies that pass the Bechdel Test, if we can find them, and to seek out the heroines who are there, who show real courage, who bring people together, and to nudge our sons to identify with those heroines and to say, "I want to be on their team," because they're going to be on their team. +When I asked my daughter who her favorite character was in "Star Wars," do you know what she said? +Obi-Wan. +Obi-Wan Kenobi and Glinda. +What do these two have in common? +Maybe it's not just the sparkly dress. +I think these people are experts. +I think these are the two people in the movie who know more than anybody else, and they love sharing their knowledge with other people to help them reach their potential. +Now, they are leaders. +I like that kind of quest for my daughter, and I like that kind of quest for my son. +I want more quests like that. +I want fewer quests where my son is told, "Go out and fight it alone," and more quests where he sees that it's his job to join a team, maybe a team led by women, to help other people become better and be better people, like the Wizard of Oz. +Thank you. + +I would like to talk to you about a story about a small town kid. +I don't know his name, but I do know his story. +He lives in a small village in southern Somalia. +His village is near Mogadishu. +Drought drives the small village into poverty and to the brink of starvation. +With nothing left for him there, he leaves for the big city, in this case, Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia. +When he arrives, there are no opportunities, no jobs, no way forward. +He ends up living in a tent city on the outskirts of Mogadishu. +Maybe a year passes, nothing. +One day, he's approached by a gentleman who offers to take him to lunch, then to dinner, to breakfast. +He meets this dynamic group of people, and they give him a break. +He's given a bit of money to buy himself some new clothes, money to send back home to his family. +He is introduced to this young woman. +He eventually gets married. +He starts this new life. +He has a purpose in life. +One beautiful day in Mogadishu, under an azure blue sky, a car bomb goes off. +That small town kid with the big city dreams was the suicide bomber, and that dynamic group of people were al Shabaab, a terrorist organization linked to al Qaeda. +So how does the story of a small town kid just trying to make it big in the city end up with him blowing himself up? +He was waiting. +He was waiting for an opportunity, waiting to begin his future, waiting for a way forward, and this was the first thing that came along. +This was the first thing that pulled him out of what we call waithood. +And his story repeats itself in urban centers around the world. +It is the story of the disenfranchised, unemployed urban youth who sparks riots in Johannesburg, sparks riots in London, who reaches out for something other than waithood. +For young people, the promise of the city, the big city dream is that of opportunity, of jobs, of wealth, but young people are not sharing in the prosperity of their cities. +Often it's youth who suffer from the highest unemployment rates. +By 2030, three out of five people living in cities will be under the age of 18. +If we do not include young people in the growth of our cities, if we do not provide them opportunities, the story of waithood, the gateway to terrorism, to violence, to gangs, will be the story of cities 2.0. +And in my city of birth, Mogadishu, 70 percent of young people suffer from unemployment. +70 percent don't work, don't go to school. +They pretty much do nothing. +I went back to Mogadishu last month, and I went to visit Madina Hospital, the hospital I was born in. +I remember standing in front of that bullet-ridden hospital thinking, what if I had never left? +What if I had been forced into that same state of waithood? +Would I have become a terrorist? +I'm not really sure about the answer. +My reason for being in Mogadishu that month was actually to host a youth leadership and entrepreneurship summit. +I brought together about 90 young Somali leaders. +We sat down and brainstormed on solutions to the biggest challenges facing their city. +One of the young men in the room was Aden. +He went to university in Mogadishu, graduated. +There were no jobs, no opportunities. +I remember him telling me, because he was a college graduate, unemployed, frustrated, that he was the perfect target for al Shabaab and other terrorist organizations, to be recruited. +They sought people like him out. +But his story takes a different route. +In Mogadishu, the biggest barrier to getting from point A to point B are the roads. +Twenty-three years of civil war have completely destroyed the road system, and a motorbike can be the easiest way to get around. +Aden saw an opportunity and seized it. +He started a motorbike company. +He began renting out motorbikes to local residents who couldn't normally afford them. +He bought 10 bikes, with the help of family and friends, and his dream is to eventually expand to several hundred within the next three years. +How is this story different? +What makes his story different? +I believe it is his ability to identify and seize a new opportunity. +It's entrepreneurship, and I believe entrepreneurship can be the most powerful tool against waithood. +It empowers young people to be the creators of the very economic opportunities they are so desperately seeking. +And you can train young people to be entrepreneurs. +I want to talk to you about a young man who attended one of my meetings, Mohamed Mohamoud, a florist. +He was helping me train some of the young people at the summit in entrepreneurship and how to be innovative and how to create a culture of entrepreneurship. +He's actually the first florist Mogadishu has seen in over 22 years, and until recently, until Mohamed came along, if you wanted flowers at your wedding, you used plastic bouquets shipped from abroad. +If you asked someone, "When was the last time you saw fresh flowers?" for many who grew up under civil war, the answer would be, "Never." +So Mohamed saw an opportunity. +He started a landscaping and design floral company. +He created a farm right outside of Mogadishu, and started growing tulips and lilies, which he said could survive the harsh Mogadishu climate. +And he began delivering flowers to weddings, creating gardens at homes and businesses around the city, and he's now working on creating Mogadishu's first public park in 22 years. +There's no public park in Mogadishu. +He wants to create a space where families, young people, can come together, and, as he says, smell the proverbial roses. +And he doesn't grow roses because they use too much water, by the way. +So the first step is to inspire young people, and in that room, Mohamed's presence had a really profound impact on the youth in that room. +They had never really thought about starting up a business. +They've thought about working for an NGO, working for the government, but his story, his innovation, really had a strong impact on them. +He forced them to look at their city as a place of opportunity. +He empowered them to believe that they could be entrepreneurs, that they could be change makers. +By the end of the day, they were coming up with innovative solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing their city. +They came up with entrepreneurial solutions to local problems. +So inspiring young people and creating a culture of entrepreneurship is a really great step, but young people need capital to make their ideas a reality. +They need expertise and mentorship to guide them in developing and launching their businesses. +Connect young people with the resources they need, provide them the support they need to go from ideation to creation, and you will create catalysts for urban growth. +For me, entrepreneurship is more than just starting up a business. +It's about creating a social impact. +Mohamed is not simply selling flowers. +I believe he is selling hope. +His Peace Park, and that's what he calls it, when it's created, will actually transform the way people see their city. +Aden hired street kids to help rent out and maintain those bikes for him. +He gave them the opportunity to escape the paralysis of waithood. +These young entrepreneurs are having a tremendous impact in their cities. +So my suggestion is, turn youth into entrepreneurs, incubate and nurture their inherent innovation, and you will have more stories of flowers and Peace Parks than of car bombs and waithood. +Thank you. + +When I was a child growing up in Maine, one of my favorite things to do was to look for sand dollars on the seashores of Maine, because my parents told me it would bring me luck. +But you know, these shells, they're hard to find. +They're covered in sand. They're difficult to see. +However, overtime, I got used to looking for them. +I started seeing shapes and patterns that helped me to collect them. +This grew into a passion for finding things, a love for the past and archaeology. +And eventually when I started studying Egyptology, I realized that seeing with my naked eyes alone wasn't enough. +Because all of the sudden in Egypt my beach had grown from a tiny beach in Maine to one eight hundred miles long next to the Nile, and my sand dollars had grown to the size of cities. +This is really what brought me to using satellite imagery. +For trying to map the past, I knew that I had to see differently. +So I want to show you an example of how we see differently using the infrared. +This is a site located in the eastern Egyptian delta called Bendix. +And the site visibly appears brown, but when we use the infrared and we process it, all of the sudden, using false color, the site appears as bright pink. +What you are seeing are the actual chemical changes to the landscape caused by the building materials and activities of the ancient Egyptians. +What I want to share with you today is how we've used satellite data to find an ancient Egyptian city, called Itjtawy, missing for thousands of years. +Itjtawy was ancient Egypt's capital for over four hundred years, at a period of time called the Middle Kingdom about four thousand years ago. +The site is located in the Faiyum of Egypt and site is really important because in the Middle Kingdom there was this great renaissance for ancient Egyptian art, architecture and religion. +Egyptologists have always known the site of Itjtawy was located somewhere near the pyramids of the two kings who built it, indicated within the red circles here, but somewhere within this massive flood plane. +This area is huge -- it's four miles by three miles in size. +The Nile used to flow right next to the city of Itjtawy, and as it shifted and changed and moved over time to the east, it covered over the city. +So, how do you find a buried city in a vast landscape? +Finding it randomly would be the equivalent of locating a needle in a haystack, blindfolded wearing baseball mitts. +So what we did is we used NASA topography data to map out the landscape, very subtle changes. +We started to be able to see where the Nile used to flow. +But you can see in more detail -- and even more interesting -- this very slight raised area seen within the circle up here, which we thought could possibly be the location of the city of Itjtawy. +So we collaborated with the Egyptian scientists to do coring work, which you see here. +When I say coring, it's like ice coring, but instead of layers of climate change you're looking for layers of human occupation. +And five meters down, underneath a thick layer of mud, we found a dense layer of pottery. +What this shows is that at this possible location of Itjtawy, five meters down, we have of layer of occupation for several hundred years dating to the Middle Kingdom, dating to the exact period of time we think Itjtawy is. +We also found work stone -- carnelian, quartz and agate that shows that there was a jewelers workshop here. +These might not look like much, but when you think about the most common stones used in jewelry from the Middle Kingdom, these are the stones that were used. +So, we have a dense layer of occupation dating to the Middle Kingdom at this site. +We also have evidence of an elite jewelers workshop, showing that whatever was there was a very important city. +No Itjtawy was here yet, but we're going to be returning to the site in the near future to map it out. +And even more importantly, we have funding to train young Egyptians in the use of satellite technology so they can be the ones making great discoveries as well. +So I wanted to end with my favorite quote from the Middle Kingdom -- it was probably written at the city of Itjtawy four thousand years ago. +"Sharing knowledge is the greatest of all callings. +There's nothing like it in the land." +So as it turns out, TED was not founded in 1984 AD. +Making ideas actually started in 1984 BC at a not-lost-for-long city, found from above. +It certainly puts finding seashells by the seashore in perspective. +Thank you very much. +Thank you. + +Growing up in Taiwan as the daughter of a calligrapher, one of my most treasured memories was my mother showing me the beauty, the shape and the form of Chinese characters. +Ever since then, I was fascinated by this incredible language. +But to an outsider, it seems to be as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China. +Over the past few years, I've been wondering if I can break down this wall, so anyone who wants to understand and appreciate the beauty of this sophisticated language could do so. +I started thinking about how a new, fast method of learning Chinese might be useful. +Since the age of five, I started to learn how to draw every single stroke for each character in the correct sequence. +I learned new characters every day during the course of the next 15 years. +Since we only have five minutes, it's better that we have a fast and simpler way. +A Chinese scholar would understand 20,000 characters. +You only need 1,000 to understand the basic literacy. +The top 200 will allow you to comprehend 40 percent of basic literature -- enough to read road signs, restaurant menus, to understand the basic idea of the web pages or the newspapers. +Today I'm going to start with eight to show you how the method works. +You are ready? +Open your mouth as wide as possible until it's square. +You get a mouth. +This is a person going for a walk. +Person. +If the shape of the fire is a person with two arms on both sides, as if she was yelling frantically, "Help! I'm on fire!" -- This symbol actually is originally from the shape of the flame, but I like to think that way. Whichever works for you. +This is a tree. +Tree. +This is a mountain. +The sun. +The moon. +The symbol of the door looks like a pair of saloon doors in the wild west. +I call these eight characters radicals. +They are the building blocks for you to create lots more characters. +A person. +If someone walks behind, that is "to follow." +As the old saying goes, two is company, three is a crowd. +If a person stretched their arms wide, this person is saying, "It was this big." +The person inside the mouth, the person is trapped. +He's a prisoner, just like Jonah inside the whale. +One tree is a tree. Two trees together, we have the woods. +Three trees together, we create the forest. +Put a plank underneath the tree, we have the foundation. +Put a mouth on the top of the tree, that's "idiot." +Easy to remember, since a talking tree is pretty idiotic. +Remember fire? +Two fires together, I get really hot. +Three fires together, that's a lot of flames. +Set the fire underneath the two trees, it's burning. +For us, the sun is the source of prosperity. +Two suns together, prosperous. +Three together, that's sparkles. +Put the sun and the moon shining together, it's brightness. +It also means tomorrow, after a day and a night. +The sun is coming up above the horizon. Sunrise. +A door. Put a plank inside the door, it's a door bolt. +Put a mouth inside the door, asking questions. +Knock knock. Is anyone home? +This person is sneaking out of a door, escaping, evading. +On the left, we have a woman. +Two women together, they have an argument. +Three women together, be careful, it's adultery. +So we have gone through almost 30 characters. +By using this method, the first eight radicals will allow you to build 32. +The next group of eight characters will build an extra 32. +So with very little effort, you will be able to learn a couple hundred characters, which is the same as a Chinese eight-year-old. +So after we know the characters, we start building phrases. +For example, the mountain and the fire together, we have fire mountain. It's a volcano. +We know Japan is the land of the rising sun. +This is a sun placed with the origin, because Japan lies to the east of China. +So a sun, origin together, we build Japan. +A person behind Japan, what do we get? +A Japanese person. +The character on the left is two mountains stacked on top of each other. +In ancient China, that means in exile, because Chinese emperors, they put their political enemies in exile beyond mountains. +Nowadays, exile has turned into getting out. +A mouth which tells you where to get out is an exit. +This is a slide to remind me that I should stop talking and get off of the stage. Thank you. + +Today I'm going to speak to you about the last 30 years of architectural history. +That's a lot to pack into 18 minutes. +It's a complex topic, so we're just going to dive right in at a complex place: New Jersey. +Because 30 years ago, I'm from Jersey, and I was six, and I lived there in my parents' house in a town called Livingston, and this was my childhood bedroom. +Around the corner from my bedroom was the bathroom that I used to share with my sister. +And in between my bedroom and the bathroom was a balcony that overlooked the family room. +And that's where everyone would hang out and watch TV, so that every time that I walked from my bedroom to the bathroom, everyone would see me, and every time I took a shower and would come back in a towel, everyone would see me. +And I looked like this. +I was awkward, insecure, and I hated it. +I hated that walk, I hated that balcony, I hated that room, and I hated that house. +And that's architecture. +That feeling, those emotions that I felt, that's the power of architecture, because architecture is not about math and it's not about zoning, it's about those visceral, emotional connections that we feel to the places that we occupy. +And it's no surprise that we feel that way, because according to the EPA, Americans spend 90 percent of their time indoors. +That's 90 percent of our time surrounded by architecture. +That's huge. +That means that architecture is shaping us in ways that we didn't even realize. +That makes us a little bit gullible and very, very predictable. +It means that when I show you a building like this, I know what you think: You think "power" and "stability" and "democracy." +And I know you think that because it's based on a building that was build 2,500 years ago by the Greeks. +This is a trick. +This is a trigger that architects use to get you to create an emotional connection to the forms that we build our buildings out of. +It's a predictable emotional connection, and we've been using this trick for a long, long time. +We used it [200] years ago to build banks. +We used it in the 19th century to build art museums. +And in the 20th century in America, we used it to build houses. +And look at these solid, stable little soldiers facing the ocean and keeping away the elements. +This is really, really useful, because building things is terrifying. +It's expensive, it takes a long time, and it's very complicated. +And the people that build things -- developers and governments -- they're naturally afraid of innovation, and they'd rather just use those forms that they know you'll respond to. +That's how we end up with buildings like this. +This is a nice building. +But it doesn't have much to do with what a library actually does today. +That same year, in 2004, on the other side of the country, another library was completed, and it looks like this. +It's in Seattle. +This library is about how we consume media in a digital age. +It's about a new kind of public amenity for the city, a place to gather and read and share. +So how is it possible that in the same year, in the same country, two buildings, both called libraries, look so completely different? +And the answer is that architecture works on the principle of a pendulum. +On the one side is innovation, and architects are constantly pushing, pushing for new technologies, new typologies, new solutions for the way that we live today. +We wear all black, we get very depressed, you think we're adorable, we're dead inside because we've got no choice. +We have to go to the other side and reengage those symbols that we know you love. +So we do that, and you're happy, we feel like sellouts, so we start experimenting again and we push the pendulum back and back and forth and back and forth we've gone for the last 300 years, and certainly for the last 30 years. +Okay, 30 years ago we were coming out of the '70s. +Architects had been busy experimenting with something called brutalism. +It's about concrete. +Small windows, dehumanizing scale. +This is really tough stuff. +So as we get closer to the '80s, we start to reengage those symbols. +We push the pendulum back into the other direction. +We take these forms that we know you love and we update them. +We add neon and we add pastels and we use new materials. +And you love it. +And we can't give you enough of it. +We take Chippendale armoires and we turned those into skyscrapers, and skyscrapers can be medieval castles made out of glass. +Forms got big, forms got bold and colorful. +Dwarves became columns. +It was crazy. +But it's the '80s, it's cool. +This is the thing about postmodernism. +This is the thing about symbols. +They're easy, they're cheap, because instead of making places, we're making memories of places. +Because I know, and I know all of you know, this isn't Tuscany. +This is Ohio. +In the late '80s and early '90s, we start experimenting with something called deconstructivism. +We throw out historical symbols, we rely on new, computer-aided design techniques, and we come up with new compositions, forms crashing into forms. +This is academic and heady stuff, it's super unpopular, we totally alienate you. +Ordinarily, the pendulum would just swing back into the other direction. +And then, something amazing happened. +In 1997, this building opened. +This is the Guggenheim Bilbao, by Frank Gehry. +And this building fundamentally changes the world's relationship to architecture. +Paul Goldberger said that Bilbao was one of those rare moments when critics, academics, and the general public were completely united around a building. +The New York Times called this building a miracle. +Tourism in Bilbao increased 2,500 percent after this building was completed. +He is our very first starchitect. +Now, how is it possible that these forms -- they're wild and radical -- how is it possible that they become so ubiquitous throughout the world? +And it happened because media so successfully galvanized around them that they quickly taught us that these forms mean culture and tourism. +We created an emotional reaction to these forms. +So did every mayor in the world. +So every mayor knew that if they had these forms, they had culture and tourism. +This phenomenon at the turn of the new millennium happened to a few other starchitects. +Because think about how you consume architecture. +A thousand years ago, you would have had to have walked to the village next door to see a building. +Transportation speeds up: You can take a boat, you can take a plane, you can be a tourist. +Technology speeds up: You can see it in a newspaper, on TV, until finally, we are all architectural photographers, and the building has become disembodied from the site. +Architecture is everywhere now, and that means that the speed of communication has finally caught up to the speed of architecture. +Because architecture actually moves quite quickly. +It doesn't take long to think about a building. +It takes a long time to build a building, three or four years, and in the interim, an architect will design two or eight or a hundred other buildings before they know if that building that they designed four years ago was a success or not. +That's because there's never been a good feedback loop in architecture. +That's how we end up with buildings like this. +It's never going to happen again, I think, because we are living on the verge of the greatest revolution in architecture since the invention of concrete, of steel, or of the elevator, and it's a media revolution. +So my theory is that when you apply media to this pendulum, it starts swinging faster and faster, until it's at both extremes nearly simultaneously, and that effectively blurs the difference between innovation and symbol, between us, the architects, and you, the public. +Now we can make nearly instantaneous, emotionally charged symbols out of something that's brand new. +Let me show you how this plays out in a project that my firm recently completed. +We were hired to replace this building, which burned down. +This is the center of a town called the Pines in Fire Island in New York State. +It's a vacation community. +We proposed a building that was audacious, that was different than any of the forms that the community was used to, and we were scared and our client was scared and the community was scared, so we created a series of photorealistic renderings that we put onto Facebook and we put onto Instagram, and we let people start to do what they do: share it, comment, like it, hate it. +But that meant that two years before the building was complete, it was already a part of the community, so that when the renderings looked exactly like the finished product, there were no surprises. +This building was already a part of this community, and then that first summer, when people started arriving and sharing the building on social media, the building ceased to be just an edifice and it became media, because these, these are not just pictures of a building, they're your pictures of a building. +That means we don't need the Greeks anymore to tell us what to think about architecture. +We can tell each other what we think about architecture, because digital media hasn't just changed the relationship between all of us, it's changed the relationship between us and buildings. +Think for a second about those librarians back in Livingston. +If that building was going to be built today, the first thing they would do is go online and search "new libraries." +They would be bombarded by examples of experimentation, of innovation, of pushing at the envelope of what a library can be. +That's ammunition. +That's ammunition that they can take with them to the mayor of Livingston, to the people of Livingston, and say, there's no one answer to what a library is today. +Let's be a part of this. +This abundance of experimentation gives them the freedom to run their own experiment. +Everything is different now. +Architects are no longer these mysterious creatures that use big words and complicated drawings, and you aren't the hapless public, the consumer that won't accept anything that they haven't seen anymore. +Architects can hear you, and you're not intimidated by architecture. +This is the end of architectural history, and it means that the buildings of tomorrow are going to look a lot different than the buildings of today. +It means that a public space in the ancient city of Seville can be unique and tailored to the way that a modern city works. +It means that a stadium in Brooklyn can be a stadium in Brooklyn, not some red-brick historical pastiche of what we think a stadium ought to be. +It means that robots are going to build our buildings, because we're finally ready for the forms that they're going to produce. +And it means that buildings will twist to the whims of nature instead of the other way around. +It means that a parking garage in Miami Beach, Florida, can also be a place for sports and for yoga and you can even get married there late at night. +It means that no building is too small for innovation, like this little reindeer pavilion that's as muscly and sinewy as the animals it's designed to observe. +And it means that a building doesn't have to be beautiful to be lovable, like this ugly little building in Spain, where the architects dug a hole, packed it with hay, and then poured concrete around it, and when the concrete dried, they invited someone to come and clean that hay out so that all that's left when it's done is this hideous little room that's filled with the imprints and scratches of how that place was made, and that becomes the most sublime place to watch a Spanish sunset. +Because it doesn't matter if a cow builds our buildings or a robot builds our buildings. +It doesn't matter how we build, it matters what we build. +Architects already know how to make buildings that are greener and smarter and friendlier. +We've just been waiting for all of you to want them. +And finally, we're not on opposite sides anymore. +Find an architect, hire an architect, work with us to design better buildings, better cities, and a better world, because the stakes are high. +Buildings don't just reflect our society, they shape our society down to the smallest spaces: the local libraries, the homes where we raise our children, and the walk that they take from the bedroom to the bathroom. +Thank you. + +This is my niece, Stella. +She's just turned one and started to walk. +And she's walking in that really cool way that one-year-olds do, a kind of teetering, my-body's-moving- too-fast-for-my-legs kind of way. +It is absolutely gorgeous. +And one of her favorite things to do at the moment is to stare at herself in the mirror. +She absolutely loves her reflection. +She giggles and squeals, and gives herself these big, wet kisses. +When is it suddenly not okay to love the way that we look? +Because apparently we don't. +Ten thousand people every month google, "Am I ugly?" +This is Faye. Faye is 13 and she lives in Denver. +And like any teenager, she just wants to be liked and to fit in. +And she's slightly dreading it, and she's a bit confused because despite her mom telling her all the time that she's beautiful, every day at school, someone tells her that she's ugly. +Because of the difference between what her mom tells her and what her friends at school, or her peers at school are telling her, she doesn't know who to believe. +Some of them are so nasty, they don't bear thinking about. +This is an average, healthy-looking teenage girl receiving this feedback at one of the most emotionally vulnerable times in her life. +Well, today's teenagers are rarely alone. +They're under pressure to be online and available at all times, talking, messaging, liking, commenting, sharing, posting — it never ends. +Never before have we been so connected, so continuously, so instantaneously, so young. +And as one mom told me, it's like there's a party in their bedroom every night. +There's simply no privacy. +And the social pressures that go along with that are relentless. +This always-on environment is training our kids to value themselves based on the number of likes they get and the types of comments that they receive. +There's no separation between online and offline life. +What's real or what isn't is really hard to tell the difference between. +And where are they looking to for inspiration? +Well, you can see the kinds of images that are covering the newsfeeds of girls today. +Size zero models still dominate our catwalks. +Airbrushing is now routine. +And trends like #thinspiration, #thighgap, #bikinibridge and #proana. +For those who don't know, #proana means pro-anorexia. +These trends are teamed with the stereotyping and flagrant objectification of women in today's popular culture. +It is not hard to see what girls are benchmarking themselves against. +But boys are not immune to this either. +Aspiring to the chiseled jaw lines and ripped six packs of superhero-like sports stars and playboy music artists. +But, what's the problem with all of this? +Well, surely we want our kids to grow up as healthy, well balanced individuals. +But in an image-obsessed culture, we are training our kids to spend more time and mental effort on their appearance at the expense of all of the other aspects of their identities. +So, things like their relationships, the development of their physical abilities, and their studies and so on begin to suffer. +Six out of 10 girls are now choosing not to do something because they don't think they look good enough. +These are not trivial activities. +These are fundamental activities to their development as humans and as contributors to society and to the workforce. +Thirty-one percent, nearly one in three teenagers, are withdrawing from classroom debate. They're failing to engage in classroom debate because they don't want to draw attention to the way that they look. +One in five are not showing up to class at all on days when they don't feel good about it. +And when it comes to exams, if you don't think you look good enough, specifically if you don't think you are thin enough, you will score a lower grade point average than your peers who are not concerned with this. +And this is consistent across Finland, the U.S. +and China, and is true regardless of how much you actually weigh. +So to be super clear, we're talking about the way you think you look, not how you actually look. +Low body confidence is undermining academic achievement. +But it's also damaging health. +Teenagers with low body confidence do less physical activity, eat less fruits and vegetables, partake in more unhealthy weight control practices that can lead to eating disorders. +And we don't grow out of it. +Women who think they're overweight — again, regardless of whether they are or are not — have higher rates of absenteeism. +Seventeen percent of women would not show up to a job interview on a day when they weren't feeling confident about the way that they look. +Have a think about what this is doing to our economy. +If we could overcome this, what that opportunity looks like. +Unlocking this potential is in the interest of every single one of us. +But how do we do that? +Well, talking, on its own, only gets you so far. +It's not enough by itself. +If you actually want to make a difference, you have to do something. +And we've learned there are three key ways: The first is we have to educate for body confidence. +We have to help our teenagers develop strategies to overcome image-related pressures and build their self-esteem. +Now, the good news is that there are many programs out there available to do this. +The bad news is that most of them don't work. +I was shocked to learn that many well-meaning programs are inadvertently actually making the situation worse. +So we need to make damn sure that the programs that our kids are receiving are not only having a positive impact, but having a lasting impact as well. +And the research shows that the best programs address six key areas: The first is the influence of family, friends and relationships. +The second is media and celebrity culture, then how to handle teasing and bullying, the way we compete and compare with one another based on looks, talking about appearance — some people call this "body talk" or "fat talk" — and finally, the foundations of respecting and looking after yourself. +Challenging the status quo of how women are seen and talked about in our own circles. +It is not okay that we judge the contribution of our politicians by their haircuts or the size of their breasts, or to infer that the determination or the success of an Olympian is down to her not being a looker. +We need to start judging people by what they do, not what they look like. +We can all start by taking responsibility for the types of pictures and comments that we post on our own social networks. +We can compliment people based on their effort and their actions and not on their appearance. +And let me ask you, when was the last time that you kissed a mirror? +Ultimately, we need to work together as communities, as governments and as businesses to really change this culture of ours so that our kids grow up valuing their whole selves, valuing individuality, diversity, inclusion. +We need to put the people that are making a real difference on our pedestals, making a difference in the real world. +Giving them the airtime, because only then will we create a different world. +A world where our kids are free to become the best versions of themselves, where the way they think they look never holds them back from being who they are or achieving what they want in life. +Think about what this might mean for someone in your life. +Your friend? It could just be the woman a couple of seats away from you today. +What would it mean for her if she were freed from that voice of her inner critic, nagging her to have longer legs, thinner thighs, smaller stomach, shorter feet? +What could it mean for her if we overcame this and unlocked her potential in that way? +Right now, our culture's obsession with image is holding us all back. +But let's show our kids the truth. +Let's show them that the way you look is just one part of your identity and that the truth is we love them for who they are and what they do and how they make us feel. +Let's build self-esteem into our school curriculums. +Let's each and every one of us change the way we talk and compare ourselves to other people. +And let's work together as communities, from grassroots to governments, so that the happy little one-year-olds of today become the confident changemakers of tomorrow. +Let's do this. + +On November 5th, 1990, a man named El-Sayyid Nosair walked into a hotel in Manhattan and assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane, the leader of the Jewish Defense League. +Nosair was initially found not guilty of the murder, but while serving time on lesser charges, he and other men began planning attacks on a dozen New York City landmarks, including tunnels, synagogues and the United Nations headquarters. +Thankfully, those plans were foiled by an FBI informant. +Sadly, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was not. +I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1983 to him, an Egyptian engineer, and a loving American mother and grade school teacher, who together tried their best to create a happy childhood for me. +It wasn't until I was seven years old that our family dynamic started to change. +My father exposed me to a side of Islam that few people, including the majority of Muslims, get to see. +However, in every religion, in every population, you'll find a small percentage of people who hold so fervently to their beliefs that they feel they must use any means necessary to make others live as they do. +We arrived at Calverton Shooting Range, which unbeknownst to our group was being watched by the FBI. +That day, the last bullet I shot hit the small orange light that sat on top of the target and to everyone's surprise, especially mine, the entire target burst into flames. +They all seemed to get a really big laugh out of that comment, but it wasn't until a few years later that I fully understood what they thought was so funny. +They thought they saw in me the same destruction my father was capable of. +Those men would eventually be convicted of placing a van filled with 1,500 pounds of explosives into the sub-level parking lot of the World Trade Center's North Tower, causing an explosion that killed six people and injured over 1,000 others. +These were the men I looked up to. +These were the men I called ammu, which means uncle. +By the time I turned 19, I had already moved 20 times in my life, and that instability during my childhood didn't really provide an opportunity to make many friends. +Each time I would begin to feel comfortable around someone, it was time to pack up and move to the next town. +Being the perpetual new face in class, I was frequently the target of bullies. +So for the most part, I spent my time at home reading books and watching TV or playing video games. +For those reasons, my social skills were lacking, to say the least, and growing up in a bigoted household, I wasn't prepared for the real world. +I'd been raised to judge people based on arbitrary measurements, like a person's race or religion. +So what opened my eyes? +One of my first experiences that challenged this way of thinking was during the 2000 presidential elections. +Through a college prep program, I was able to take part in the National Youth Convention in Philadelphia. +My particular group's focus was on youth violence, and having been the victim of bullying for most of my life, this was a subject in which I felt particularly passionate. +The members of our group came from many different walks of life. +One day toward the end of the convention, I found out that one of the kids I had befriended was Jewish. +Now, it had taken several days for this detail to come to light, and I realized that there was no natural animosity between the two of us. +There, I was exposed to people from all sorts of faiths and cultures, and that experience proved to be fundamental to the development of my character. +Because of that feeling, I was able to contrast the stereotypes I'd been taught as a child with real life experience and interaction. +I don't know what it's like to be gay, but I'm well acquainted with being judged for something that's beyond my control. +Then there was "The Daily Show." +Inspiration can often come from an unexpected place, and the fact that a Jewish comedian had done more to positively influence my worldview than my own extremist father is not lost on me. +One day, I had a conversation with my mother about how my worldview was starting to change, and she said something to me that I will hold dear to my heart for as long as I live. +She looked at me with the weary eyes of someone who had experienced enough dogmatism to last a lifetime, and said, "I'm tired of hating people." +In that instant, I realized how much negative energy it takes to hold that hatred inside of you. +Zak Ebrahim is not my real name. +I changed it when my family decided to end our connection with my father and start a new life. +So why would I out myself and potentially put myself in danger? +Well, that's simple. +Instead, I choose to use my experience to fight back against terrorism, against the bigotry. +I do it for the victims of terrorism and their loved ones, for the terrible pain and loss that terrorism has forced upon their lives. +For the victims of terrorism, I will speak out against these senseless acts and condemn my father's actions. +And with that simple fact, I stand here as proof that violence isn't inherent in one's religion or race, and the son does not have to follow the ways of his father. +I am not my father. + +Right now you have a movie playing inside your head. +It's an amazing multi-track movie. +It has 3D vision and surround sound for what you're seeing and hearing right now, but that's just the start of it. +Your movie has smell and taste and touch. +It has a sense of your body, pain, hunger, orgasms. +It has emotions, anger and happiness. +It has memories, like scenes from your childhood playing before you. +And it has this constant voiceover narrative in your stream of conscious thinking. +At the heart of this movie is you experiencing all this directly. +This movie is your stream of consciousness, the subject of experience of the mind and the world. +Consciousness is one of the fundamental facts of human existence. +Each of us is conscious. +We all have our own inner movie, you and you and you. +There's nothing we know about more directly. +At least, I know about my consciousness directly. +I can't be certain that you guys are conscious. +Consciousness also is what makes life worth living. +If we weren't conscious, nothing in our lives would have meaning or value. +But at the same time, it's the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe. +Why aren't we just robots who process all this input, produce all that output, without experiencing the inner movie at all? +Right now, nobody knows the answers to those questions. +I'm going to suggest that to integrate consciousness into science, some radical ideas may be needed. +Some people say a science of consciousness is impossible. +Science, by its nature, is objective. +Consciousness, by its nature, is subjective. +So there can never be a science of consciousness. +For much of the 20th century, that view held sway. +Psychologists studied behavior objectively, neuroscientists studied the brain objectively, and nobody even mentioned consciousness. +Even 30 years ago, when TED got started, there was very little scientific work on consciousness. +Now, about 20 years ago, all that began to change. +Neuroscientists like Francis Crick and physicists like Roger Penrose said now is the time for science to attack consciousness. +And since then, there's been a real explosion, a flowering of scientific work on consciousness. +And this work has been wonderful. It's been great. +But it also has some fundamental limitations so far. +We saw some of this kind of work from Nancy Kanwisher and the wonderful work she presented just a few minutes ago. +Now we understand much better, for example, the kinds of brain areas that go along with the conscious experience of seeing faces or of feeling pain or of feeling happy. +But this is still a science of correlations. +It's not a science of explanations. +We know that these brain areas go along with certain kinds of conscious experience, but we don't know why they do. +I like to put this by saying that this kind of work from neuroscience is answering some of the questions we want answered about consciousness, the questions about what certain brain areas do and what they correlate with. +But in a certain sense, those are the easy problems. +No knock on the neuroscientists. +There are no truly easy problems with consciousness. +But it doesn't address the real mystery at the core of this subject: why is it that all that physical processing in a brain should be accompanied by consciousness at all? +Why is there this inner subjective movie? +Right now, we don't really have a bead on that. +And you might say, let's just give neuroscience a few years. +It'll turn out to be another emergent phenomenon like traffic jams, like hurricanes, like life, and we'll figure it out. +The classical cases of emergence are all cases of emergent behavior, how a traffic jam behaves, how a hurricane functions, how a living organism reproduces and adapts and metabolizes, all questions about objective functioning. +You could apply that to the human brain in explaining some of the behaviors and the functions of the human brain as emergent phenomena: how we walk, how we talk, how we play chess, all these questions about behavior. +But when it comes to consciousness, questions about behavior are among the easy problems. +When it comes to the hard problem, that's the question of why is it that all this behavior is accompanied by subjective experience? +And here, the standard paradigm of emergence, even the standard paradigms of neuroscience, don't really, so far, have that much to say. +Now, I'm a scientific materialist at heart. +I want a scientific theory of consciousness that works, and for a long time, I banged my head against the wall looking for a theory of consciousness in purely physical terms that would work. +But I eventually came to the conclusion that that just didn't work for systematic reasons. +So I think we're at a kind of impasse here. +We've got this wonderful, great chain of explanation, we're used to it, where physics explains chemistry, chemistry explains biology, biology explains parts of psychology. +But consciousness doesn't seem to fit into this picture. +On the one hand, it's a datum that we're conscious. +On the other hand, we don't know how to accommodate it into our scientific view of the world. +So I think consciousness right now is a kind of anomaly, one that we need to integrate into our view of the world, but we don't yet see how. +Faced with an anomaly like this, radical ideas may be needed, and I think that we may need one or two ideas that initially seem crazy before we can come to grips with consciousness scientifically. +Now, there are a few candidates for what those crazy ideas might be. +My friend Dan Dennett, who's here today, has one. +His crazy idea is that there is no hard problem of consciousness. +The whole idea of the inner subjective movie involves a kind of illusion or confusion. +Actually, all we've got to do is explain the objective functions, the behaviors of the brain, and then we've explained everything that needs to be explained. +Well I say, more power to him. +That's the kind of radical idea that we need to explore if you want to have a purely reductionist brain-based theory of consciousness. +At the same time, for me and for many other people, that view is a bit too close to simply denying the datum of consciousness to be satisfactory. +So I go in a different direction. +In the time remaining, I want to explore two crazy ideas that I think may have some promise. +The first crazy idea is that consciousness is fundamental. +Physicists sometimes take some aspects of the universe as fundamental building blocks: space and time and mass. +They postulate fundamental laws governing them, like the laws of gravity or of quantum mechanics. +These fundamental properties and laws aren't explained in terms of anything more basic. +Rather, they're taken as primitive, and you build up the world from there. +Now sometimes, the list of fundamentals expands. +In the 19th century, Maxwell figured out that you can't explain electromagnetic phenomena in terms of the existing fundamentals — space, time, mass, Newton's laws — so he postulated fundamental laws of electromagnetism and postulated electric charge as a fundamental element that those laws govern. +I think that's the situation we're in with consciousness. +If you can't explain consciousness in terms of the existing fundamentals — space, time, mass, charge — then as a matter of logic, you need to expand the list. +The natural thing to do is to postulate consciousness itself as something fundamental, a fundamental building block of nature. +This doesn't mean you suddenly can't do science with it. +This opens up the way for you to do science with it. +What we then need is to study the fundamental laws governing consciousness, the laws that connect consciousness to other fundamentals: space, time, mass, physical processes. +Physicists sometimes say that we want fundamental laws so simple that we could write them on the front of a t-shirt. +Well I think something like that is the situation we're in with consciousness. +We want to find fundamental laws so simple we could write them on the front of a t-shirt. +We don't know what those laws are yet, but that's what we're after. +The second crazy idea is that consciousness might be universal. +Every system might have some degree of consciousness. +This view is sometimes called panpsychism: pan for all, psych for mind, every system is conscious, not just humans, dogs, mice, flies, but even Rob Knight's microbes, elementary particles. +Even a photon has some degree of consciousness. +The idea is not that photons are intelligent or thinking. +It's not that a photon is wracked with angst because it's thinking, "Aww, I'm always buzzing around near the speed of light. +I never get to slow down and smell the roses." +No, not like that. +But the thought is maybe photons might have some element of raw, subjective feeling, some primitive precursor to consciousness. +This may sound a bit kooky to you. +I mean, why would anyone think such a crazy thing? +Some motivation comes from the first crazy idea, that consciousness is fundamental. +If it's fundamental, like space and time and mass, it's natural to suppose that it might be universal too, the way they are. +It's also worth noting that although the idea seems counterintuitive to us, it's much less counterintuitive to people from different cultures, where the human mind is seen as much more continuous with nature. +A deeper motivation comes from the idea that perhaps the most simple and powerful way to find fundamental laws connecting consciousness to physical processing is to link consciousness to information. +Wherever there's information processing, there's consciousness. +Complex information processing, like in a human, complex consciousness. +Simple information processing, simple consciousness. +A really exciting thing is in recent years a neuroscientist, Giulio Tononi, has taken this kind of theory and developed it rigorously with a mathematical theory. +He has a mathematical measure of information integration which he calls phi, measuring the amount of information integrated in a system. +And he supposes that phi goes along with consciousness. +So in a human brain, incredibly large amount of information integration, high degree of phi, a whole lot of consciousness. +In a mouse, medium degree of information integration, still pretty significant, pretty serious amount of consciousness. +But as you go down to worms, microbes, particles, the amount of phi falls off. +The amount of information integration falls off, but it's still non-zero. +On Tononi's theory, there's still going to be a non-zero degree of consciousness. +In effect, he's proposing a fundamental law of consciousness: high phi, high consciousness. +Now, I don't know if this theory is right, but it's actually perhaps the leading theory right now in the science of consciousness, and it's been used to integrate a whole range of scientific data, and it does have a nice property that it is in fact simple enough you can write it on the front of a t-shirt. +Another final motivation is that panpsychism might help us to integrate consciousness into the physical world. +Physicists and philosophers have often observed that physics is curiously abstract. +It describes the structure of reality using a bunch of equations, but it doesn't tell us about the reality that underlies it. +As Stephen Hawking puts it, what puts the fire into the equations? +Well, on the panpsychist view, you can leave the equations of physics as they are, but you can take them to be describing the flux of consciousness. +That's what physics really is ultimately doing, describing the flux of consciousness. +On this view, it's consciousness that puts the fire into the equations. +On that view, consciousness doesn't dangle outside the physical world as some kind of extra. +It's there right at its heart. +This view, I think, the panpsychist view, has the potential to transfigure our relationship to nature, and it may have some pretty serious social and ethical consequences. +Some of these may be counterintuitive. +I used to think I shouldn't eat anything which is conscious, so therefore I should be vegetarian. +Now, if you're a panpsychist and you take that view, you're going to go very hungry. +So I think when you think about it, this tends to transfigure your views, whereas what matters for ethical purposes and moral considerations, not so much the fact of consciousness, but the degree and the complexity of consciousness. +It's also natural to ask about consciousness in other systems, like computers. +What about the artificially intelligent system in the movie "Her," Samantha? +Is she conscious? +Well, if you take the informational, panpsychist view, she certainly has complicated information processing and integration, so the answer is very likely yes, she is conscious. +If that's right, it raises pretty serious ethical issues about both the ethics of developing intelligent computer systems and the ethics of turning them off. +Finally, you might ask about the consciousness of whole groups, the planet. +Does Canada have its own consciousness? +Or at a more local level, does an integrated group like the audience at a TED conference, are we right now having a collective TED consciousness, an inner movie for this collective TED group which is distinct from the inner movies of each of our parts? +I don't know the answer to that question, but I think it's at least one worth taking seriously. +Okay, so this panpsychist vision, it is a radical one, and I don't know that it's correct. +I'm actually more confident about the first crazy idea, that consciousness is fundamental, than about the second one, that it's universal. +I mean, the view raises any number of questions, has any number of challenges, like how do those little bits of consciousness add up to the kind of complex consciousness we know and love. +If we can answer those questions, then I think we're going to be well on our way to a serious theory of consciousness. +If not, well, this is the hardest problem perhaps in science and philosophy. +We can't expect to solve it overnight. +But I do think we're going to figure it out eventually. +Understanding consciousness is a real key, I think, both to understanding the universe and to understanding ourselves. +It may just take the right crazy idea. +Thank you. + +I grew up in a very small country town in Victoria. +I had a very normal, low-key kind of upbringing. +I went to school, I hung out with my friends, I fought with my younger sisters. +It was all very normal. +And when I was 15, a member of my local community approached my parents and wanted to nominate me for a community achievement award. +And my parents said, "Hm, that's really nice, but there's kind of one glaring problem with that. +She hasn't actually achieved anything." And they were right, you know. +I went to school, I got good marks, I had a very low-key after school job in my mum's hairdressing salon, and I spent a lot of time watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek." +Yeah, I know. What a contradiction. +But they were right, you know. +Years later, I was on my second teaching round in a Melbourne high school, and I was about 20 minutes into a year 11 legal studies class when this boy put up his hand and said, "Hey miss, when are you going to start doing your speech?" +And I said, "What speech?" +You know, I'd been talking them about defamation law for a good 20 minutes. +And he said, "You know, like, your motivational speaking. +You know, when people in wheelchairs come to school, they usually say, like, inspirational stuff?" +"It's usually in the big hall." +And that's when it dawned on me: This kid had only ever experienced disabled people as objects of inspiration. +We are not, to this kid -- and it's not his fault, I mean, that's true for many of us. +For lots of us, disabled people are not our teachers or our doctors or our manicurists. +We're not real people. We are there to inspire. +And in fact, I am sitting on this stage looking like I do in this wheelchair, and you are probably kind of expecting me to inspire you. Right? Yeah. +Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you dramatically. +I am not here to inspire you. +I am here to tell you that we have been lied to about disability. +It's not a bad thing, and it doesn't make you exceptional. +And in the past few years, we've been able to propagate this lie even further via social media. +You may have seen images like this one: "The only disability in life is a bad attitude." +Or this one: "Your excuse is invalid." Indeed. +Or this one: "Before you quit, try!" +These are just a couple of examples, but there are a lot of these images out there. +You know, you might have seen the one, the little girl with no hands drawing a picture with a pencil held in her mouth. +You might have seen a child running on carbon fiber prosthetic legs. +And these images, there are lots of them out there, they are what we call inspiration porn. +And I use the term porn deliberately, because they objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people. +So in this case, we're objectifying disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. +The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, "Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. +I could be that person." +But what if you are that person? +I've lost count of the number of times that I've been approached by strangers wanting to tell me that they think I'm brave or inspirational, and this was long before my work had any kind of public profile. +They were just kind of congratulating me for managing to get up in the morning and remember my own name. And it is objectifying. +These images, those images objectify disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. +They are there so that you can look at them and think that things aren't so bad for you, to put your worries into perspective. +And life as a disabled person is actually somewhat difficult. +We do overcome some things. +But the things that we're overcoming are not the things that you think they are. +They are not things to do with our bodies. +I use the term "disabled people" quite deliberately, because I subscribe to what's called the social model of disability, which tells us that we are more disabled by the society that we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses. +So I have lived in this body a long time. +I'm quite fond of it. +It does the things that I need it to do, and I've learned to use it to the best of its capacity just as you have, and that's the thing about those kids in those pictures as well. +They're not doing anything out of the ordinary. +They are just using their bodies to the best of their capacity. +So is it really fair to objectify them in the way that we do, to share those images? +People, when they say, "You're an inspiration," they mean it as a compliment. +And I know why it happens. +It's because of the lie, it's because we've been sold this lie that disability makes you exceptional. +You know, I'm up here bagging out inspiration, and you're thinking, "Jeez, Stella, aren't you inspired sometimes by some things?" +And the thing is, I am. +I learn from other disabled people all the time. +I'm learning not that I am luckier than them, though. +I am learning that it's a genius idea to use a pair of barbecue tongs to pick up things that you dropped. I'm learning that nifty trick where you can charge your mobile phone battery from your chair battery. +Genius. +We are learning from each others' strength and endurance, not against our bodies and our diagnoses, but against a world that exceptionalizes and objectifies us. +I really think that this lie that we've been sold about disability is the greatest injustice. +It makes life hard for us. +And that quote, "The only disability in life is a bad attitude," the reason that that's bullshit is because it's just not true, because of the social model of disability. +No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. +It's just not going to happen. +I really want to live in a world where disability is not the exception, but the norm. +I want to live in a world where a 15-year-old girl sitting in her bedroom watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" isn't referred to as achieving anything because she's doing it sitting down. +I want to live in a world where we don't have such low expectations of disabled people that we are congratulated for getting out of bed and remembering our own names in the morning. +I want to live in a world where we value genuine achievement for disabled people, and I want to live in a world where a kid in year 11 in a Melbourne high school is not one bit surprised that his new teacher is a wheelchair user. +Disability doesn't make you exceptional, but questioning what you think you know about it does. +Thank you. + +What do augmented reality and professional football have to do with empathy? +And what is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow? +Now unfortunately, I'm only going to answer one of those questions today, so please, try and contain your disappointment. +When most people think about augmented reality, they think about "Minority Report" and Tom Cruise waving his hands in the air, but augmented reality is not science fiction. +Augmented reality is something that will happen in our lifetime, and it will happen because we have the tools to make it happen, and people need to be aware of that, because augmented reality will change our lives just as much as the Internet and the cell phone. +Now how do we get to augmented reality? +Step one is the step I'm wearing right now, Google Glass. +I'm sure many of you are familiar with Google Glass. +What you may not be familiar with is that Google Glass is a device that will allow you to see what I see. +It will allow you to experience what it is like to be a professional athlete on the field. +Right now, the only way you can be on the field is for me to try and describe it to you. +I have to use words. +I have to create a framework that you then fill in with your imagination. +With Google Glass, we can put that underneath a helmet, and we can get a sense of what it's like to be running down the field at 100 miles an hour, your blood pounding in your ears. +You can get a sense of what it's like to have a 250-pound man sprinting at you trying to decapitate you with every ounce of his being. +And I've been on the receiving end of that, and it doesn't feel very good. +So let's pull up some video. +Go. +Ugh, getting tackled sucks. +Hold on, let's get a little closer. +All right, ready? +Go! +Now, you may have noticed there are some people missing there: the rest of the team. +We have some video of that courtesy of the University of Washington. +Quarterback: Hey, Mice 54! Mice 54! +Blue 8! Blue 8! Go! +Oh! +Fans want that experience. +Fans want to be on that field. +They want to be their favorite players, and they've already talked to me on YouTube, they've talked to me on Twitter, saying, "Hey, can you get this on a quarterback? +Well, once we have that experience with GoPro and Google Glass, how do we make it more immersive? +How do we take that next step? +The Oculus Rift has been described as one of the most realistic virtual reality devices ever created, and that is not empty hype. +I'm going to show you why that is not empty hype with this video. +Oh! Oh! +No! No! No! I don't want to play anymore! No! +Oh my God! Aaaah! +So that is the experience of a man on a roller coaster in fear of his life. +What do you think his experience is going to be when he is going down the side of a mountain at over 70 miles an hour as an Olympic downhill skier? +I think adult diaper sales may surge. +But this is not yet augmented reality. +This is only virtual reality, V.R. +How do we get to augmented reality, A.R.? +We get to augmented reality when coaches and managers and owners look at this information streaming in that people want to see, and they say, "How do we use this to make our teams better? +How do we use this to win games?" +Because teams always use technology to win games. +They like winning. It makes them money. +So a brief history of technology in the NFL. +In 1965, the Baltimore Colts put a wristband on their quarterback to allow him to call plays quicker. +They ended up winning a Super Bowl that year. +Other teams followed suit. +More people watched the game because it was more exciting. +It was faster. +In 1994, the NFL put helmet radios into the helmets of the quarterbacks, and later the defense. +More people watched games because it was faster. +It was more entertaining. +In 2023, imagine you're a player walking back to the huddle, and you have your next play displayed right in front of your face on your clear plastic visor that you already wear right now. +No more having to worry about forgetting plays. +No more worrying about having to memorize your playbook. +You just go out and react. +And coaches really want this, because missed assignments lose you games, and coaches hate losing games. +Losing games gets you fired as a coach. +They don't want that. +But augmented reality is not just an enhanced playbook. +Augmented reality is also a way to take all that data and use it in real time to enhance how you play the game. +What would that be like? +Well, a very simple setup would be a camera on each corner of the stadium looking down, giving you a bird's-eye view of all the people down there. +You also have information from helmet sensors and accelerometers, technology that's being worked on right now. +You take all that information, and you stream it to your players. +The good teams stream it in a way that the players can use. +The bad ones have information overload. +That determines good teams from bad. +And now, your I.T. department is just as important as your scouting department, and data-mining is not for nerds anymore. +It's also for jocks. Who knew? +What would that look like on the field? +Well, imagine you're the quarterback. +You take the snap and you drop back. +You're scanning downfield for an open receiver. +All of a sudden, a bright flash on the left side of your visor lets you know, blind side linebacker is blitzing in. +Normally, you wouldn't be able to see him, but the augmented reality system lets you know. +You step up into the pocket. +Another flash alerts you to an open receiver. +You throw the ball, but you're hit right as you throw. +The ball comes off track. +You don't know where it's going to land. +However, on the receiver's visor, he sees a patch of grass light up, and he knows to readjust. +He goes, catches the ball, sprints in, touchdown. +Crowd goes wild, and the fans are with him every step of the way, watching from every perspective. +Now this is something that will create massive excitement in the game. +It will make tons of people watch, because people want this experience. +Fans want to be on the field. +They want to be their favorite player. +Augmented reality will be a part of sports, because it's too profitable not to. +But the question I ask you is, is that's all that we're content to use augmented reality for? +Are we going to use it solely for our panem, our circenses, our entertainment as normal? +Because I believe that we can use augmented reality for something more. +I believe we can use augmented reality as a way to foster more empathy within the human species itself, by literally showing someone what it looks like to walk a mile in another person's shoes. +We know what this technology is worth to sports leagues. +It's worth revenue, to the tune of billions of dollars a year. +What is this technology worth to a gay Ugandan or Russian trying to show the world what it's like living under persecution? +What is this technology worth to a Commander Hadfield or a Neil deGrasse Tyson trying to inspire a generation of children to think more about space and science instead of quarterly reports and Kardashians? +Ladies and gentlemen, augmented reality is coming. +The questions we ask, the choices we make, and the challenges we face are, as always, up to us. +Thank you. + +I recently retired from the California Highway Patrol after 23 years of service. +The majority of those 23 years was spent patrolling the southern end of Marin County, which includes the Golden Gate Bridge. +The bridge is an iconic structure, known worldwide for its beautiful views of San Francisco, the Pacific Ocean, and its inspiring architecture. +Unfortunately, it is also a magnet for suicide, being one of the most utilized sites in the world. +The Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937. +Joseph Strauss, chief engineer in charge of building the bridge, was quoted as saying, "The bridge is practically suicide-proof. +Suicide from the bridge is neither practical nor probable." +But since its opening, over 1,600 people have leapt to their death from that bridge. +Some believe that traveling between the two towers will lead you to another dimension -- this bridge has been romanticized as such — that the fall from that frees you from all your worries and grief, and the waters below will cleanse your soul. +But let me tell you what actually occurs when the bridge is used as a means of suicide. +That impact shatters bones, some of which then puncture vital organs. +Most die on impact. +Those that don't generally flail in the water helplessly, and then drown. +I don't think that those who contemplate this method of suicide realize how grisly a death that they will face. +This is the cord. +Except for around the two towers, there is 32 inches of steel paralleling the bridge. +This is where most folks stand before taking their lives. +I can tell you from experience that once the person is on that cord, and at their darkest time, it is very difficult to bring them back. +I took this photo last year as this young woman spoke to an officer contemplating her life. +I want to tell you very happily that we were successful that day in getting her back over the rail. +When I first began working on the bridge, we had no formal training. +You struggled to funnel your way through these calls. +This was not only a disservice to those contemplating suicide, but to the officers as well. +We've come a long, long way since then. +Now, veteran officers and psychologists train new officers. +This is Jason Garber. +I met Jason on July 22 of last year when I get received a call of a possible suicidal subject sitting on the cord near midspan. +I responded, and when I arrived, I observed Jason speaking to a Golden Gate Bridge officer. +Jason was just 32 years old and had flown out here from New Jersey. +After about an hour of speaking with Jason, he asked us if we knew the story of Pandora's box. +Recalling your Greek mythology, Zeus created Pandora, and sent her down to Earth with a box, and told her, "Never, ever open that box." +Well one day, curiosity got the better of Pandora, and she did open the box. +Out flew plagues, sorrows, and all sorts of evils against man. +The only good thing in the box was hope. +Jason then asked us, "What happens when you open the box and hope isn't there?" +He paused a few moments, leaned to his right, and was gone. +This kind, intelligent young man from New Jersey had just committed suicide. +I spoke with Jason's parents that evening, and I suppose that, when I was speaking with them, that I didn't sound as if I was doing very well, because that very next day, their family rabbi called to check on me. +Jason's parents had asked him to do so. +The collateral damage of suicide affects so many people. +I pose these questions to you: What would you do if your family member, friend or loved one was suicidal? +What would you say? +Would you know what to say? +In my experience, it's not just the talking that you do, but the listening. +Listen to understand. +Don't argue, blame, or tell the person you know how they feel, because you probably don't. +By just being there, you may just be the turning point that they need. +If you think someone is suicidal, don't be afraid to confront them and ask the question. +One way of asking them the question is like this: "Others in similar circumstances have thought about ending their life; have you had these thoughts?" +Confronting the person head-on may just save their life and be the turning point for them. +Some other signs to look for: hopelessness, believing that things are terrible and never going to get better; helplessness, believing that there is nothing that you can do about it; recent social withdrawal; and a loss of interest in life. +I came up with this talk just a couple of days ago, and I received an email from a lady that I'd like to read you her letter. +She lost her son on January 19 of this year, and she wrote this me this email just a couple of days ago, and it's with her permission and blessing that I read this to you. +"Hi, Kevin. I imagine you're at the TED Conference. +That must be quite the experience to be there. +I'm thinking I should go walk the bridge this weekend. +Just wanted to drop you a note. +Hope you get the word out to many people and they go home talking about it to their friends who tell their friends, etc. +I'm still pretty numb, but noticing more moments of really realizing Mike isn't coming home. +Mike was driving from Petaluma to San Francisco to watch the 49ers game with his father on January 19. +He never made it there. +I called Petaluma police and reported him missing that evening. +The next morning, two officers came to my home and reported that Mike's car was down at the bridge. +A witness had observed him jumping off the bridge at 1:58 p.m. the previous day. +Thanks so much for standing up for those who may be only temporarily too weak to stand for themselves. +Who hasn't been low before without suffering from a true mental illness? +It shouldn't be so easy to end it. +My prayers are with you for your fight. +The GGB, Golden Gate Bridge, is supposed to be a passage across our beautiful bay, not a graveyard. +Good luck this week. Vicky." +I can't imagine the courage it takes for her to go down to that bridge and walk the path that her son took that day, and also the courage just to carry on. +I'd like to introduce you to a man I refer to as hope and courage. +On March 11 of 2005, I responded to a radio call of a possible suicidal subject on the bridge sidewalk near the north tower. +I rode my motorcycle down the sidewalk and observed this man, Kevin Berthia, standing on the sidewalk. +For the next hour and a half, I listened as Kevin spoke about his depression and hopelessness. +Kevin decided on his own that day to come back over that rail and give life another chance. +When Kevin came back over, I congratulated him. +"This is a new beginning, a new life." +But I asked him, "What was it that made you come back and give hope and life another chance?" +And you know what he told me? +He said, "You listened. +You let me speak, and you just listened." +Shortly after this incident, I received a letter from Kevin's mother, and I have that letter with me, and I'd like to read it to you. +"Dear Mr. Briggs, Nothing will erase the events of March 11, but you are one of the reasons Kevin is still with us. +I truly believe Kevin was crying out for help. +He has been diagnosed with a mental illness for which he has been properly medicated. +I adopted Kevin when he was only six months old, completely unaware of any hereditary traits, but, thank God, now we know. +Kevin is straight, as he says. +We truly thank God for you. +Sincerely indebted to you, Narvella Berthia." +And on the bottom she writes, "P.S. When I visited San Francisco General Hospital that evening, you were listed as the patient. +Boy, did I have to straighten that one out." +Today, Kevin is a loving father and contributing member of society. +He speaks openly about the events that day and his depression in the hopes that his story will inspire others. +Suicide is not just something I've encountered on the job. +It's personal. +My grandfather committed suicide by poisoning. +That act, although ending his own pain, robbed me from ever getting to know him. +This is what suicide does. +For most suicidal folks, or those contemplating suicide, they wouldn't think of hurting another person. +They just want their own pain to end. +Typically, this is accomplished in just three ways: sleep, drugs or alcohol, or death. +In my career, I've responded to and been involved in hundreds of mental illness and suicide calls around the bridge. +Of those incidents I've been directly involved with, I've only lost two, but that's two too many. +One was Jason. +The other was a man I spoke to for about an hour. +During that time, he shook my hand on three occasions. +On that final handshake, he looked at me, and he said, "Kevin, I'm sorry, but I have to go." +And he leapt. +I do want to tell you, though, the vast majority of folks that we do get to contact on that bridge do not commit suicide. +Additionally, that very few who have jumped off the bridge and lived and can talk about it, that one to two percent, most of those folks have said that the second that they let go of that rail, they knew that they had made a mistake and they wanted to live. +I tell people, the bridge not only connects Marin to San Francisco, but people together also. +That connection, or bridge that we make, is something that each and every one of us should strive to do. +Suicide is preventable. +There is help. There is hope. +Thank you very much. + +The world makes you something that you're not, but you know inside what you are, and that question burns in your heart: How will you become that? +I may be somewhat unique in this, but I am not alone, not alone at all. +So when I became a fashion model, I felt that I'd finally achieved the dream that I'd always wanted since I was a young child. +My outside self finally matched my inner truth, my inner self. +For complicated reasons which I'll get to later, when I look at this picture, at that time I felt like, Geena, you've done it, you've made it, you have arrived. +But this past October, I realized that I'm only just beginning. +All of us are put in boxes by our family, by our religion, by our society, our moment in history, even our own bodies. +Some people have the courage to break free, not to accept the limitations imposed by the color of their skin or by the beliefs of those that surround them. +Those people are always the threat to the status quo, to what is considered acceptable. +In my case, for the last nine years, some of my neighbors, some of my friends, colleagues, even my agent, did not know about my history. +I remember when I was five years old in the Philippines walking around our house, I would always wear this t-shirt on my head. +And my mom asked me, "How come you always wear that t-shirt on your head?" +I said, "Mom, this is my hair. I'm a girl." +I knew then how to self-identify. +Gender has always been considered a fact, immutable, but we now know it's actually more fluid, complex and mysterious. +Because of my success, I never had the courage to share my story, not because I thought what I am is wrong, but because of how the world treats those of us who wish to break free. +Every day, I am so grateful because I am a woman. +I have a mom and dad and family who accepted me for who I am. +Many are not so fortunate. +There's a long tradition in Asian culture that celebrates the fluid mystery of gender. +There is a Buddhist goddess of compassion. +There is a Hindu goddess, hijra goddess. +So when I was eight years old, I was at a fiesta in the Philippines celebrating these mysteries. +I was in front of the stage, and I remember, out comes this beautiful woman right in front of me, and I remember that moment something hit me: That is the kind of woman I would like to be. +So when I was 15 years old, still dressing as a boy, I met this woman named T.L. +She is a transgender beauty pageant manager. +That night she asked me, "How come you are not joining the beauty pageant?" +That moment changed my life. +All of a sudden, I was introduced to the world of beauty pageants. +Not a lot of people could say that your first job is a pageant queen for transgender women, but I'll take it. +So from 15 to 17 years old, I joined the most prestigious pageant to the pageant where it's at the back of the truck, literally, or sometimes it would be a pavement next to a rice field, and when it rains -- it rains a lot in the Philippines -- the organizers would have to move it inside someone's house. +I also experienced the goodness of strangers, especially when we would travel in remote provinces in the Philippines. +But most importantly, I met some of my best friends in that community. +In 2001, my mom, who had moved to San Francisco, called me and told me that my green card petition came through, that I could now move to the United States. +I resisted it. +I told my mom, "Mom, I'm having fun. +I'm here with my friends, I love traveling, being a beauty pageant queen." +But then two weeks later she called me, she said, "Did you know that if you move to the United States you could change your name and gender marker?" +That was all I needed to hear. +My mom also told me to put two E's in the spelling of my name. +She also came with me when I had my surgery in Thailand at 19 years old. +It's interesting, in some of the most rural cities in Thailand, they perform some of the most prestigious, safe and sophisticated surgery. +At that time in the United States, you needed to have surgery before you could change your name and gender marker. +So in 2001, I moved to San Francisco, and I remember looking at my California driver's license with the name Geena and gender marker F. +That was a powerful moment. +For some people, their I.D. is their license to drive or even to get a drink, but for me, that was my license to live, to feel dignified. +I felt that I could conquer my dream and move to New York and be a model. +Many are not so fortunate. +I think of this woman named Islan Nettles. +She's from New York, she's a young woman who was courageously living her truth, but hatred ended her life. +For most of my community, this is the reality in which we live. +Our suicide rate is nine times higher than that of the general population. +Every November 20, we have a global vigil for Transgender Day of Remembrance. +I'm here at this stage because it's a long history of people who fought and stood up for injustice. +This is Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. +Today, this very moment, is my real coming out. +I could no longer live my truth for and by myself. +I want to do my best to help others live their truth without shame and terror. +I am here, exposed, so that one day there will never be a need for a November 20 vigil. +My deepest truth allowed me to accept who I am. +Will you? +Thank you very much. +I'm wondering what you would say, especially to parents, but in a more broad way, to friends, to family, to anyone who finds themselves encountering a child or a person who is struggling with and uncomfortable with a gender that's being assigned them, what might you say to the family members of that person to help them become good and caring and kind family members to them? +Geena Rocero: Sure. Well, first, really, I'm so blessed. +And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, so — But it's just, gender identity is in the core of our being, right? +I mean, we're all assigned gender at birth, so what I'm trying to do is to have this conversation that sometimes that gender assignment doesn't match, and there should be a space that would allow people to self-identify, and that's a conversation that we should have with parents, with colleagues. +The transgender movement, it's at the very beginning, to compare to how the gay movement started. +There's still a lot of work that needs to be done. +There should be an understanding. +There should be a space of curiosity and asking questions, and I hope all of you guys will be my allies. +Thank you. That was so lovely. Thank you. + +In many patriarchal societies and tribal societies, fathers are usually known by their sons, but I'm one of the few fathers who is known by his daughter, and I am proud of it. +Before that, she was my daughter, but now I am her father. +Ladies and gentlemen, if we glance to human history, the story of women is the story of injustice, inequality, violence and exploitation. +She is not welcomed, neither by father nor by mother. +The neighborhood comes and commiserates with the mother, and nobody congratulates the father. +And a mother is very uncomfortable for having a girl child. +When she gives birth to the first girl child, first daughter, she is sad. +When she gives birth to the second daughter, she is shocked, and in the expectation of a son, when she gives birth to a third daughter, she feels guilty like a criminal. +Not only the mother suffers, but the daughter, the newly born daughter, when she grows old, she suffers too. +At the age of five, while she should be going to school, she stays at home and her brothers are admitted in a school. +Until the age of 12, somehow, she has a good life. +She can have fun. +She can play with her friends in the streets, and she can move around in the streets like a butterfly. +But when she enters her teens, when she becomes 13 years old, she is forbidden to go out of her home without a male escort. +She is confined under the four walls of her home. +She is no more a free individual. +She becomes the so-called honor of her father and of her brothers and of her family, and if she transgresses the code of that so-called honor, she could even be killed. +And it is also interesting that this so-called code of honor, it does not only affect the life of a girl, it also affects the life of the male members of the family. +I know a family of seven sisters and one brother, and that one brother, he has migrated to the Gulf countries, to earn a living for his seven sisters and parents, because he thinks that it will be humiliating if his seven sisters learn a skill and they go out of the home and earn some livelihood. +So this brother, he sacrifices the joys of his life and the happiness of his sisters at the altar of so-called honor. +And there is one more norm of the patriarchal societies that is called obedience. +A good girl is supposed to be very quiet, very humble and very submissive. +It is the criteria. +The role model good girl should be very quiet. +She is supposed to be silent and she is supposed to accept the decisions of her father and mother and the decisions of elders, even if she does not like them. +Otherwise, she will be called disobedient. +And what happens at the end? +In the words of a poetess, she is wedded, bedded, and then she gives birth to more sons and daughters. +And this vicious cycle goes on, goes on. +Ladies and gentlemen, this plight of millions of women could be changed if we think differently, if women and men think differently, if men and women in the tribal and patriarchal societies in the developing countries, if they can break a few norms of family and society, if they can abolish the discriminatory laws of the systems in their states, which go against the basic human rights of the women. +Dear brothers and sisters, when Malala was born, and for the first time, believe me, I don't like newborn children, to be honest, but when I went and I looked into her eyes, believe me, I got extremely honored. +And long before she was born, I thought about her name, and I was fascinated with a heroic legendary freedom fighter in Afghanistan. +Her name was Malalai of Maiwand, and I named my daughter after her. +A few days after Malala was born, my daughter was born, my cousin came -- and it was a coincidence -- he came to my home and he brought a family tree, a family tree of the Yousafzai family, and when I looked at the family tree, it traced back to 300 years of our ancestors. +But when I looked, all were men, and I picked my pen, drew a line from my name, and wrote, "Malala." +And when she grow old, when she was four and a half years old, I admitted her in my school. +You will be asking, then, why should I mention about the admission of a girl in a school? +Yes, I must mention it. +It may be taken for granted in Canada, in America, in many developed countries, but in poor countries, in patriarchal societies, in tribal societies, it's a big event for the life of girl. +Enrollment in a school means recognition of her identity and her name. +Admission in a school means that she has entered the world of dreams and aspirations where she can explore her potentials for her future life. +I have five sisters, and none of them could go to school, and you will be astonished, two weeks before, when I was filling out the Canadian visa form, and I was filling out the family part of the form, I could not recall the surnames of some of my sisters. +And the reason was that I have never, never seen the names of my sisters written on any document. +What my father could not give to my sisters and to his daughters, I thought I must change it. +I used to appreciate the intelligence and the brilliance of my daughter. +I encouraged her to sit with me when my friends used to come. +I encouraged her to go with me to different meetings. +And all these good values, I tried to inculcate in her personality. +And this was not only she, only Malala. +I imparted all these good values to my school, girl students and boy students as well. +I used education for emancipation. +I taught my girls, I taught my girl students, to unlearn the lesson of obedience. +I taught my boy students to unlearn the lesson of so-called pseudo-honor. +Dear brothers and sisters, we were striving for more rights for women, and we were struggling to have more, more and more space for the women in society. +But we came across a new phenomenon. +It was lethal to human rights and particularly to women's rights. +It was called Talibanization. +It means a complete negation of women's participation in all political, economical and social activities. +Hundreds of schools were lost. +Girls were prohibited from going to school. +Women were forced to wear veils and they were stopped from going to the markets. +Musicians were silenced, girls were flogged and singers were killed. +Millions were suffering, but few spoke, and it was the most scary thing when you have all around such people who kill and who flog, and you speak for your rights. +It's really the most scary thing. +At the age of 10, Malala stood, and she stood for the right of education. +She wrote a diary for the BBC blog, she volunteered herself for the New York Times documentaries, and she spoke from every platform she could. +And her voice was the most powerful voice. +It spread like a crescendo all around the world. +And that was the reason the Taliban could not tolerate her campaign, and on October 9 2012, she was shot in the head at point blank range. +It was a doomsday for my family and for me. +The world turned into a big black hole. +While my daughter was on the verge of life and death, I whispered into the ears of my wife, "Should I be blamed for what happened to my daughter and your daughter?" +And she abruptly told me, "Please don't blame yourself. +You stood for the right cause. +You put your life at stake for the cause of truth, for the cause of peace, and for the cause of education, and your daughter in inspired from you and she joined you. +You both were on the right path and God will protect her." +These few words meant a lot to me, and I didn't ask this question again. +When Malala was in the hospital, and she was going through the severe pains and she had had severe headaches because her facial nerve was cut down, I used to see a dark shadow spreading on the face of my wife. +But my daughter never complained. +She used to tell us, "I'm fine with my crooked smile and with my numbness in my face. +I'll be okay. Please don't worry." +She was a solace for us, and she consoled us. +Dear brothers and sisters, we learned from her how to be resilient in the most difficult times, and I'm glad to share with you that despite being an icon for the rights of children and women, she is like any 16-year old girl. +She cries when her homework is incomplete. +She quarrels with her brothers, and I am very happy for that. +People ask me, what special is in my mentorship which has made Malala so bold and so courageous and so vocal and poised? +I tell them, don't ask me what I did. +Ask me what I did not do. +I did not clip her wings, and that's all. +Thank you very much. + +I had brain surgery 18 years ago, and since that time, brain science has become a personal passion of mine. +I'm actually an engineer. +So that said, there's a stigma when you have brain surgery. +Are you still smart or not? +And if not, can you make yourself smart again? +Immediately after my surgery, I had to decide what amounts of each of over a dozen powerful chemicals to take each day, because if I just took nothing, I would die within hours. +There have been several close calls. +But luckily, I'm an experimentalist at heart, so I decided I would experiment to try to find more optimal dosages because there really isn't a clear road map on this that's detailed. +I began to try different mixtures, and I was blown away by how tiny changes in dosages dramatically changed my sense of self, my sense of who I was, my thinking, my behavior towards people. +One particularly dramatic case: for a couple months I actually tried dosages and chemicals typical of a man in his early 20s, and I was blown away by how my thoughts changed. +I was kind of extreme. +But to me, the surprise was, I wasn't trying to be arrogant. +I was actually trying, with a little bit of insecurity, to actually fix a problem in front of me, and it just didn't come out that way. +But that experience, I think, gave me a new appreciation for men and what they might walk through, and I've gotten along with men a lot better since then. +What I was trying to do with tuning these hormones and neurotransmitters and so forth was to try to get my intelligence back after my illness and surgery, my creative thought, my idea flow. +And I think mostly in images, and so for me that became a key metric -- how to get these mental images that I use as a way of rapid prototyping, if you will, my ideas, trying on different new ideas for size, playing out scenarios. +This kind of thinking isn't new. +Philiosophers like Hume and Descartes and Hobbes saw things similarly. +They thought that mental images and ideas were actually the same thing. +There are those today that dispute that, and lots of debates about how the mind works, but for me it's simple: Mental images, for most of us, are central in inventive and creative thinking. +So after several years, I tuned myself up and I have lots of great, really vivid mental images with a lot of sophistication and the analytical backbone behind them. +And so now I'm working on, how can I get these mental images in my mind out to my computer screen faster? +Can you imagine, if you will, a movie director being able to use her imagination alone to direct the world in front of her? +Or a musician to get the music out of his head? +There are incredible possibilities with this as a way for creative people to share at light speed. +So let me show you why I think we're pretty close to getting there by sharing with you two recent experiments from two top neuroscience groups. +Both used fMRI technology -- functional magnetic resonance imaging technology -- to image the brain, and here is a brain scan set from Giorgio Ganis and his colleagues at Harvard. +And the left-hand column shows a brain scan of a person looking at an image. +The middle column shows the brainscan of that same individual imagining, seeing that same image. +And the right column was created by subtracting the middle column from the left column, showing the difference to be nearly zero. +This was repeated on lots of different individuals with lots of different images, always with a similar result. +The difference between seeing an image and imagining seeing that same image is next to nothing. +Next let me share with you one other experiment, this from Jack Gallant's lab at Cal Berkeley. +In this experiment, individuals were shown hundreds of hours of YouTube videos while scans were made of their brains to create a large library of their brain reacting to video sequences. +Then a new movie was shown with new images, new people, new animals in it, and a new scan set was recorded. +The computer, using brain scan data alone, decoded that new brain scan to show what it thought the individual was actually seeing. +On the right-hand side, you see the computer's guess, and on the left-hand side, the presented clip. +This is the jaw-dropper. +We are so close to being able to do this. +We just need to up the resolution. +And now remember that when you see an image versus when you imagine that same image, it creates the same brain scan. +So this was done with the highest-resolution brain scan systems available today, and their resolution has increased really about a thousandfold in the last several years. +Next we need to increase the resolution another thousandfold to get a deeper glimpse. +How do we do that? +There's a lot of techniques in this approach. +One way is to crack open your skull and put in electrodes. +I'm not for that. +There's a lot of new imaging techniques being proposed, some even by me, but given the recent success of MRI, first we need to ask the question, is it the end of the road with this technology? +Conventional wisdom says the only way to get higher resolution is with bigger magnets, but at this point bigger magnets only offer incremental resolution improvements, not the thousandfold we need. +I'm putting forward an idea: instead of bigger magnets, let's make better magnets. +We can create much more complicated structures with slightly different arrangements, kind of like making Spirograph. +So why does that matter? +A lot of effort in MRI over the years has gone into making really big, really huge magnets, right? +But yet most of the recent advances in resolution have actually come from ingeniously clever encoding and decoding solutions in the F.M. radio frequency transmitters and receivers in the MRI systems. +Let's also, instead of a uniform magnetic field, put down structured magnetic patterns in addition to the F.M. radio frequencies. +So by combining the magnetics patterns with the patterns in the F.M. radio frequencies processing which can massively increase the information that we can extract in a single scan. +And using fMRI, we should be able to measure not just oxygenated blood flow, but the hormones and neurotransmitters I've talked about and maybe even the direct neural activity, which is the dream. +We're going to be able to dump our ideas directly to digital media. +Could you imagine if we could leapfrog language and communicate directly with human thought? +What would we be capable of then? +And how will we learn to deal with the truths of unfiltered human thought? +You think the Internet was big. +These are huge questions. +It might be irresistible as a tool to amplify our thinking and communication skills. +And indeed, this very same tool may prove to lead to the cure for Alzheimer's and similar diseases. +We have little option but to open this door. +It's hard to imagine it taking much longer. +We need to learn how to take this step together. +Thank you. + +I think we all have closets. +Your closet may be telling someone you love her for the first time, or telling someone that you're pregnant, or telling someone you have cancer, or any of the other hard conversations we have throughout our lives. +All a closet is is a hard conversation, and although our topics may vary tremendously, the experience of being in and coming out of the closet is universal. +It is scary, and we hate it, and it needs to be done. +Several years ago, I was working at the South Side Walnut Cafe, a local diner in town, and during my time there I would go through phases of militant lesbian intensity: not shaving my armpits, quoting Ani DiFranco lyrics as gospel. +And depending on the bagginess of my cargo shorts and how recently I had shaved my head, the question would often be sprung on me, usually by a little kid: "Um, are you a boy or are you a girl?" +And there would be an awkward silence at the table. +I'd clench my jaw a little tighter, hold my coffee pot with a little more vengeance. +The dad would awkwardly shuffle his newspaper and the mom would shoot a chilling stare at her kid. +But I would say nothing, and I would seethe inside. +So I promised myself, the next time, I would say something. +I would have that hard conversation. +So within a matter of weeks, it happens again. +"Are you a boy or are you a girl?" +I've got my Gloria Steinem quotes. +I've even got this little bit from "Vagina Monologues" I'm going to do. +So I take a deep breath and I look down and staring back at me is a four-year-old girl in a pink dress, not a challenge to a feminist duel, just a kid with a question: "Are you a boy or are you a girl?" +So I take another deep breath, squat down to next to her, and say, "Hey, I know it's kind of confusing. +My hair is short like a boy's, and I wear boy's clothes, but I'm a girl, and you know how sometimes you like to wear a pink dress, and sometimes you like to wear your comfy jammies? +Well, I'm more of a comfy jammies kind of girl." +And this kid looks me dead in the eye, without missing a beat, and says, "My favorite pajamas are purple with fish. +Can I get a pancake, please?" +How about that pancake?" +It was the easiest hard conversation I have ever had. +And why? Because Pancake Girl and I, we were both real with each other. +So like many of us, I've lived in a few closets in my life, and yeah, most often, my walls happened to be rainbow. +But inside, in the dark, you can't tell what color the walls are. +You just know what it feels like to live in a closet. +So really, my closet is no different than yours or yours or yours. +Sure, I'll give you 100 reasons why coming out of my closet was harder than coming out of yours, but here's the thing: Hard is not relative. +Hard is hard. +Who can tell me that explaining to someone you've just declared bankruptcy is harder than telling someone you just cheated on them? +Who can tell me that his coming out story is harder than telling your five-year-old you're getting a divorce? +There is no harder, there is just hard. +We need to stop ranking our hard against everyone else's hard to make us feel better or worse about our closets and just commiserate on the fact that we all have hard. +At some point in our lives, we all live in closets, and they may feel safe, or at least safer than what lies on the other side of that door. +But I am here to tell you, no matter what your walls are made of, a closet is no place for a person to live. +Me, I had a ponytail, a strapless dress, and high-heeled shoes. +I was not the militant lesbian ready to fight any four-year-old that walked into the cafe. +I was frozen by fear, curled up in the corner of my pitch-black closet clutching my gay grenade, and moving one muscle is the scariest thing I have ever done. +My family, my friends, complete strangers -- I had spent my entire life trying to not disappoint these people, and now I was turning the world upside down on purpose. +I was burning the pages of the script we had all followed for so long, but if you do not throw that grenade, it will kill you. +One of my most memorable grenade tosses was at my sister's wedding. +And after a little small talk, one of the women shouted out, "I love Nathan Lane!" +And the battle of gay relatability had begun. +"Ash, have you ever been to the Castro?" +"Well, yeah, actually, we have friends in San Francisco." +"Well, we've never been there but we've heard it's fabulous." +"Ash, do you know my hairdresser Antonio? +He's really good and he has never talked about a girlfriend." +"Ash, what's your favorite TV show? +Our favorite TV show? Favorite: Will & Grace. +And you know who we love? Jack. +Jack is our favorite." +And then one woman, stumped but wanting so desperately to show her support, to let me know she was on my side, she finally blurted out, "Well, sometimes my husband wears pink shirts." +I could go back to my girlfriend and my gay-loving table and mock their responses, chastise their unworldliness and their inability to jump through the politically correct gay hoops I had brought with me, or I could empathize with them and realize that that was maybe one of the hardest things they had ever done, that starting and having that conversation was them coming out of their closets. +Sure, it would have been easy to point out where they felt short. +It's a lot harder to meet them where they are and acknowledge the fact that they were trying. +And what else can you ask someone to do but try? +If you're going to be real with someone, you gotta be ready for real in return. +So hard conversations are still not my strong suit. +Ask anybody I have ever dated. +But I'm getting better, and I follow what I like to call the three Pancake Girl principles. +Now, please view this through gay-colored lenses, but know what it takes to come out of any closet is essentially the same. +Number one: Be authentic. +Take the armor off. Be yourself. +That kid in the cafe had no armor, but I was ready for battle. +If you want someone to be real with you, they need to know that you bleed too. +Number two: Be direct. Just say it. Rip the Band-Aid off. +If you know you are gay, just say it. +If you tell your parents you might be gay, they will hold out hope that this will change. +Do not give them that sense of false hope. +You are speaking your truth. +Never apologize for that. +And some folks may have gotten hurt along the way, so sure, apologize for what you've done, but never apologize for who you are. +And yeah, some folks may be disappointed, but that is on them, not on you. +Those are their expectations of who you are, not yours. +That is their story, not yours. +The only story that matters is the one that you want to write. +So the next time you find yourself in a pitch-black closet clutching your grenade, know we have all been there before. +And you may feel so very alone, but you are not. +And we know it's hard but we need you out here, no matter what your walls are made of, because I guarantee you there are others peering through the keyholes of their closets looking for the next brave soul to bust a door open, so be that person and show the world that we are bigger than our closets and that a closet is no place for a person to truly live. + +Intelligence -- what is it? +If we take a look back at the history of how intelligence has been viewed, one seminal example has been Edsger Dijkstra's famous quote that "the question of whether a machine can think is about as interesting as the question of whether a submarine can swim." +Now, Edsger Dijkstra, when he wrote this, intended it as a criticism of the early pioneers of computer science, like Alan Turing. +However, if you take a look back and think about what have been the most empowering innovations that enabled us to build artificial machines that swim and artificial machines that [fly], you find that it was only through understanding the underlying physical mechanisms of swimming and flight that we were able to build these machines. +And so, several years ago, I undertook a program to try to understand the fundamental physical mechanisms underlying intelligence. +Let's take a step back. +Let's first begin with a thought experiment. +Pretend that you're an alien race that doesn't know anything about Earth biology or Earth neuroscience or Earth intelligence, but you have amazing telescopes and you're able to watch the Earth, and you have amazingly long lives, so you're able to watch the Earth over millions, even billions of years. +And you observe a really strange effect. +You observe that, over the course of the millennia, Earth is continually bombarded with asteroids up until a point, and that at some point, corresponding roughly to our year, 2000 AD, asteroids that are on a collision course with the Earth that otherwise would have collided mysteriously get deflected or they detonate before they can hit the Earth. +Now of course, as earthlings, we know the reason would be that we're trying to save ourselves. +We're trying to prevent an impact. +But if you're an alien race who doesn't know any of this, doesn't have any concept of Earth intelligence, you'd be forced to put together a physical theory that explains how, up until a certain point in time, asteroids that would demolish the surface of a planet mysteriously stop doing that. +And so I claim that this is the same question as understanding the physical nature of intelligence. +So in this program that I undertook several years ago, I looked at a variety of different threads across science, across a variety of disciplines, that were pointing, I think, towards a single, underlying mechanism for intelligence. +And so, taking all of these different threads and putting them together, I asked, starting several years ago, is there an underlying mechanism for intelligence that we can factor out of all of these different threads? +Is there a single equation for intelligence? +And the answer, I believe, is yes. ["F = T ∇ Sτ"] What you're seeing is probably the closest equivalent to an E = mc² for intelligence that I've seen. +So what you're seeing here is a statement of correspondence that intelligence is a force, F, that acts so as to maximize future freedom of action. +It acts to maximize future freedom of action, or keep options open, with some strength T, with the diversity of possible accessible futures, S, up to some future time horizon, tau. +In short, intelligence doesn't like to get trapped. +Intelligence tries to maximize future freedom of action and keep options open. +And so, given this one equation, it's natural to ask, so what can you do with this? +How predictive is it? +Does it predict human-level intelligence? +Does it predict artificial intelligence? +So I'm going to show you now a video that will, I think, demonstrate some of the amazing applications of just this single equation. +But what if that tentative cosmological connection between entropy and intelligence hints at a deeper relationship? +What if intelligent behavior doesn't just correlate with the production of long-term entropy, but actually emerges directly from it? +To find out, we developed a software engine called Entropica, designed to maximize the production of long-term entropy of any system that it finds itself in. +Amazingly, Entropica was able to pass multiple animal intelligence tests, play human games, and even earn money trading stocks, all without being instructed to do so. +Here are some examples of Entropica in action. +Just like a human standing upright without falling over, here we see Entropica automatically balancing a pole using a cart. +This behavior is remarkable in part because we never gave Entropica a goal. +It simply decided on its own to balance the pole. +This balancing ability will have appliactions for humanoid robotics and human assistive technologies. +Just as some animals can use objects in their environments as tools to reach into narrow spaces, here we see that Entropica, again on its own initiative, was able to move a large disk representing an animal around so as to cause a small disk, representing a tool, to reach into a confined space holding a third disk and release the third disk from its initially fixed position. +This tool use ability will have applications for smart manufacturing and agriculture. +In addition, just as some other animals are able to cooperate by pulling opposite ends of a rope at the same time to release food, here we see that Entropica is able to accomplish a model version of that task. +This cooperative ability has interesting implications for economic planning and a variety of other fields. +Entropica is broadly applicable to a variety of domains. +For example, here we see it successfully playing a game of pong against itself, illustrating its potential for gaming. +Here we see Entropica orchestrating new connections on a social network where friends are constantly falling out of touch and successfully keeping the network well connected. +This same network orchestration ability also has applications in health care, energy, and intelligence. +Here we see Entropica directing the paths of a fleet of ships, successfully discovering and utilizing the Panama Canal to globally extend its reach from the Atlantic to the Pacific. +By the same token, Entropica is broadly applicable to problems in autonomous defense, logistics and transportation. +Finally, here we see Entropica spontaneously discovering and executing a buy-low, sell-high strategy on a simulated range traded stock, successfully growing assets under management exponentially. +This risk management ability will have broad applications in finance and insurance. +Alex Wissner-Gross: So what you've just seen is that a variety of signature human intelligent cognitive behaviors such as tool use and walking upright and social cooperation all follow from a single equation, which drives a system to maximize its future freedom of action. +Now, there's a profound irony here. +Going back to the beginning of the usage of the term robot, the play "RUR," there was always a concept that if we developed machine intelligence, there would be a cybernetic revolt. +The machines would rise up against us. +One major consequence of this work is that maybe all of these decades, we've had the whole concept of cybernetic revolt in reverse. +It's not that machines first become intelligent and then megalomaniacal and try to take over the world. +Another important consequence is goal seeking. +I'm often asked, how does the ability to seek goals follow from this sort of framework? +Finally, Richard Feynman, famous physicist, once wrote that if human civilization were destroyed and you could pass only a single concept on to our descendants to help them rebuild civilization, that concept should be that all matter around us is made out of tiny elements that attract each other when they're far apart but repel each other when they're close together. +My equivalent of that statement to pass on to descendants to help them build artificial intelligences or to help them understand human intelligence, is the following: Intelligence should be viewed as a physical process that tries to maximize future freedom of action and avoid constraints in its own future. +Thank you very much.