Thank you so much, Chris. 
And it's truly a great honor to have the opportunity to come to this stage twice; I'm extremely grateful. 
I have been blown away by this conference, and I want to thank all of you for the many nice comments about what I had to say the other night. 
And I say that sincerely, partly because (Mock sob) I need that. 
(Laughter) Put yourselves in my position. 
(Laughter) I flew on Air Force Two for eight years. 
(Laughter) Now I have to take off my shoes or boots to get on an airplane! 
(Laughter) (Applause) I'll tell you one quick story to illustrate what that's been like for me. 
(Laughter) It's a true story -- every bit of this is true. 
Soon after Tipper and I left the -- (Mock sob) White House -- (Laughter) we were driving from our home in Nashville to a little farm we have 50 miles east of Nashville. 
Driving ourselves. 
(Laughter) I know it sounds like a little thing to you, but -- (Laughter) I looked in the rear-view mirror and all of a sudden it just hit me. 
There was no motorcade back there. 
(Laughter) You've heard of phantom limb pain? 
(Laughter) This was a rented Ford Taurus. 
(Laughter) It was dinnertime, and we started looking for a place to eat. 
We were on I-40. 
We got off the exit, we found a Shoney's restaurant. 
Low-cost family restaurant chain, for those of you who don't know it. 
We went in and sat down at the booth, and the waitress came over, made a big commotion over Tipper. 
(Laughter) She took our order, and then went to the couple in the booth next to us, and she lowered her voice so much, I had to really strain to hear what she was saying. 
And she said "Yes, that's former Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper." 
And the man said, "He's come down a long way, hasn't he?" 
(Laughter) (Applause) There's been kind of a series of epiphanies. 
(Laughter) The very next day, continuing the totally true story, I got on a G-V to fly to Africa to make a speech in Nigeria, in the city of Lagos, on the topic of energy. 
And I began the speech by telling them the story of what had just happened the day before in Nashville. 
And I told it pretty much the same way I've just shared it with you: Tipper and I were driving ourselves, Shoney's, low-cost family restaurant chain, what the man said -- they laughed. 
I gave my speech, then went back out to the airport to fly back home. 
I fell asleep on the plane until, during the middle of the night, we landed on the Azores Islands for refueling. 
I woke up, they opened the door, I went out to get some fresh air, and I looked, and there was a man running across the runway. 
And he was waving a piece of paper, and he was yelling, "Call Washington! Call Washington!" 
And I thought to myself, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the Atlantic, what in the world could be wrong in Washington? 
Then I remembered it could be a bunch of things. 
(Laughter) But what it turned out to be, was that my staff was extremely upset because one of the wire services in Nigeria had already written a story about my speech, and it had already been printed in cities all across the United States of America. 
It was printed in Monterey, I checked. 
(Laughter) And the story began, "Former Vice President Al Gore announced in Nigeria yesterday," quote: 'My wife Tipper and I have opened a low-cost family restaurant'" -- (Laughter) "'named Shoney's, and we are running it ourselves.'" (Laughter) Before I could get back to U.S. soil, David Letterman and Jay Leno had already started in on -- one of them had me in a big white chef's hat, Tipper was saying, "One more burger with fries!" 
(Laughter) Three days later, I got a nice, long, handwritten letter from my friend and partner and colleague Bill Clinton, saying, "Congratulations on the new restaurant, Al!" 
(Laughter) We like to celebrate each other's successes in life. 
(Laughter) I was going to talk about information ecology. 
But I was thinking that, since I plan to make a lifelong habit of coming back to TED, that maybe I could talk about that another time. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: It's a deal! 
(Applause) Al Gore: I want to focus on what many of you have said you would like me to elaborate on: What can you do about the climate crisis? 
I want to start with a couple of -- I'm going to show some new images, and I'm going to recapitulate just four or five. 
Now, the slide show. 
I update the slide show every time I give it. 
I add new images, because I learn more about it every time I give it. 
It's like beach-combing, you know? 
Every time the tide comes in and out, you find some more shells. 
Just in the last two days, we got the new temperature records in January. 
This is just for the United States of America. 
Historical average for Januarys is 31 degrees; last month was 39.5 degrees. 
Now, I know that you wanted some more bad news about the environment -- I'm kidding. 
But these are the recapitulation slides, and then I'm going to go into new material about what you can do. 
But I wanted to elaborate on a couple of these. 
First of all, this is where we're projected to go with the U.S. contribution to global warming, under business as usual. 
Efficiency in end-use electricity and end-use of all energy is the low-hanging fruit. 
Efficiency and conservation -- it's not a cost; it's a profit. 
The sign is wrong. 
It's not negative; it's positive. 
But they are also very effective in deflecting our path. 
Cars and trucks -- I talked about that in the slideshow, but I want you to put it in perspective. 
It's an easy, visible target of concern -- and it should be -- but there is more global warming pollution that comes from buildings than from cars and trucks. 
Cars and trucks are very significant, and we have the lowest standards in the world. 
And so we should address that. But it's part of the puzzle. 
Other transportation efficiency is as important as cars and trucks. 
Renewables at the current levels of technological efficiency can make this much difference. 
And with what Vinod, and John Doerr and others, many of you here -- there are a lot of people directly involved in this -- this wedge is going to grow much more rapidly than the current projection shows it. 
Carbon Capture and Sequestration -- that's what CCS stands for -- is likely to become the killer app that will enable us to continue to use fossil fuels in a way that is safe. 
Not quite there yet. 
OK. Now, what can you do? 
Reduce emissions in your home. 
Most of these expenditures are also profitable. 
Insulation, better design. 
I mentioned automobiles -- buy a hybrid. 
Figure out some of the other options that are much better. 
It's important. 
Be a green consumer. 
You have choices with everything you buy, between things that have a harsh effect, or a much less harsh effect on the global climate crisis. 
Consider this: Make a decision to live a carbon-neutral life. 
Those of you who are good at branding, I'd love to get your advice and help on how to say this in a way that connects with the most people. 
It is easier than you think. 
It really is. 
A lot of us in here have made that decision, and it is really pretty easy. 
It means reduce your carbon dioxide emissions with the full range of choices that you make, and then purchase or acquire offsets for the remainder that you have not completely reduced. 
There is a carbon calculator. 
Participant Productions convened -- with my active involvement -- the leading software writers in the world, on this arcane science of carbon calculation, to construct a consumer-friendly carbon calculator. 
You can very precisely calculate what your CO2 emissions are, and then you will be given options to reduce. 
And by the time the movie comes out in May, this will be updated to 2.0, and we will have click-through purchases of offsets. 
Next, consider making your business carbon-neutral. 
Again, some of us have done that, and it's not as hard as you think. 
Integrate climate solutions into all of your innovations, whether you are from the technology, or entertainment, or design and architecture community. 
Invest sustainably. 
Listen, if you have invested money with managers who you compensate on the basis of their annual performance, don't ever again complain about quarterly report CEO management. 
Over time, people do what you pay them to do. 
And if they judge how much they're going to get paid on your capital that they've invested, based on the short-term returns, you're going to get short-term decisions. 
A lot more to be said about that. 
Become a catalyst of change. 
The movie is a movie version of the slideshow I gave two nights ago, except it's a lot more entertaining. 
Many of you here have the opportunity to ensure that a lot of people see it. 
Consider sending somebody to Nashville. 
Pick well. 
And I am personally going to train people to give this slideshow -- re-purposed, with some of the personal stories obviously replaced with a generic approach, and it's not just the slides, it's what they mean. 
And it's how they link together. 
And so I'm going to be conducting a course this summer for a group of people that are nominated by different folks to come and then give it en masse, in communities all across the country, and we're going to update the slideshow for all of them every single week, to keep it right on the cutting edge. 
Working with Larry Lessig, it will be, somewhere in that process, posted with tools and limited-use copyrights, so that young people can remix it and do it in their own way. 
(Applause) Where did anybody get the idea that you ought to stay arm's length from politics? 
We need Republicans as well. 
This used to be a bipartisan issue, and I know that in this group it really is. 
Make our democracy work the way it's supposed to work. 
Support the idea of capping carbon dioxide emissions -- global warming pollution -- and trading it. 
Here's why: as long as the United States is out of the world system, it's not a closed system. 
Once it becomes a closed system, with U.S. participation, then everybody who's on a board of directors -- how many people here serve on the board of directors of a corporation? 
Once it's a closed system, you will have legal liability if you do not urge your CEO to get the maximum income from reducing and trading the carbon emissions that can be avoided. 
Help with the mass persuasion campaign that will start this spring. 
We have to change the minds of the American people. 
Because presently, the politicians do not have permission to do what needs to be done. 
And in our modern country, the role of logic and reason no longer includes mediating between wealth and power the way it once did. 
It's now repetition of short, hot-button, 30-second, 28-second television ads. 
We have to buy a lot of those ads. 
Let's re-brand global warming, as many of you have suggested. 
I like "climate crisis" instead of "climate collapse," but again, those of you who are good at branding, I need your help on this. 
Somebody said the test we're facing now, a scientist told me, is whether the combination of an opposable thumb and a neocortex is a viable combination. 
(Laughter) That's really true. 
Again, the Republicans here -- this shouldn't be partisan. 
You have more influence than some of us who are Democrats do. 
This is an opportunity. 
Not just this, but connected to the ideas that are here, to bring more coherence to them. 
We are one. 
Thank you very much, I appreciate it. 
(Applause) 

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

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

So I'm going to talk about work; specifically, why people can't seem to get work done at work, which is a problem we all kind of have. 
But let's sort of start at the beginning. 
So, we have companies and non-profits and charities and all these groups that have employees or volunteers of some sort. 
And they expect these people who work for them to do great work -- I would hope, at least. 
At least good work, hopefully, at least it's good work -- hopefully great work. 
And so what they typically do is they decide that all these people need to come together in one place to do that work. 
So a company, or a charity, or an organization of any kind, unless you're working in Africa, if you're really lucky to do that -- most people have to go to an office every day. 
And so these companies, they build offices. 
They go out and they buy a building, or they rent a building, or they lease some space, and they fill this space with stuff. 
They fill it with tables, or desks, chairs, computer equipment, software, Internet access, maybe a fridge, maybe a few other things, and they expect their employees, or their volunteers, to come to that location every day to do great work. 
It seems like it's perfectly reasonable to ask that. 
However, if you actually talk to people and even question yourself, and you ask yourself, where do you really want to go when you really need to get something done? 
You'll find out that people don't say what businesses think they would say. 
If you ask people the question: Where do you need to go when you need to get something done? 
Typically, you get three different kinds of answers. 
One is kind of a place or a location or a room. 
Another one is a moving object, and a third is a time. 
So here are some examples. 
I've been asking people this question for about 10 years: "Where do you go when you really need to get something done?" 
I'll hear things like, the porch, the deck, the kitchen. 
I'll hear things like an extra room in the house, the basement, the coffee shop, the library. 
And then you'll hear things like the train, a plane, a car -- so, the commute. 
And then you'll hear people say, "Well, it doesn't really matter where I am, as long as it's early in the morning or late at night or on the weekends." 
You almost never hear someone say, "The office." 
But businesses are spending all this money on this place called the office, and they're making people go to it all the time, yet people don't do work in the office. 
What is that about? 
(Laughter) Why is that? Why is that happening? 
And what you find out is, if you dig a little bit deeper, you find out that people -- this is what happens: People go to work, and they're basically trading in their work day for a series of "work moments" -- that's what happens at the office. 
You don't have a work day anymore. You have work moments. 
It's like the front door of the office is like a Cuisinart, and you walk in and your day is shredded to bits, because you have 15 minutes here, 30 minutes there, and something else happens, you're pulled off your work, then you have 20 minutes, then it's lunch, then you have something else to do ... 
Then you've got 15 minutes, and someone pulls you aside and asks you a question, and before you know it, it's 5 p.m., and you look back on the day, and you realize that you didn't get anything done. 
We've all been through this. 
We probably went through it yesterday or the day before, or the day before that. 
You look back on your day, and you're like, "I got nothing done today. 
I was at work. I sat at my desk. I used my expensive computer. 
I used the software they told me to use. 
I went to these meetings I was asked to go to. 
I did these conference calls. I did all this stuff. 
But I didn't actually do anything. 
I just did tasks. 
I didn't actually get meaningful work done." 
And what you find is that, especially with creative people -- designers, programmers, writers, engineers, thinkers -- that people really need long stretches of uninterrupted time to get something done. 
You cannot ask somebody to be creative in 15 minutes and really think about a problem. 
You might have a quick idea, but to be in deep thought about a problem and really consider a problem carefully, you need long stretches of uninterrupted time. 
And even though the work day is typically eight hours, how many people here have ever had eight hours to themselves at the office? 
How about seven hours? 
Six? Five? Four? 
When's the last time you had three hours to yourself at the office? 
Two hours? One, maybe? 
Very, very few people actually have long stretches of uninterrupted time at an office. 
And this is why people choose to do work at home, or they might go to the office, but they might go to the office really early in the day, or late at night when no one's around, or they stick around after everyone's left, or go in on the weekends, or they get work done on the plane, in the car or in the train, because there are no distractions. 
Now there are different kinds of distractions, but not the really bad distractions, which I'll talk about in a minute. 
And this whole phenomenon of having short bursts of time to get things done reminds me of another thing that doesn't work when you're interrupted, and that is sleep. 
I think that sleep and work are very closely related -- not because you can work while you're sleeping and sleep while you're working. 
That's not really what I mean. 
I'm talking specifically about the fact that sleep and work are phase-based, or stage-based, events. 
Sleep is about sleep phases, or stages -- some people call them different things. 
There are five of them, and in order to get to the really deep ones, the meaningful ones, you have to go through the early ones. 
If you're interrupted while you're going through the early ones -- if someone bumps you in bed, or there's a sound, or whatever happens -- you don't just pick up where you left off. 
If you're interrupted and woken up, you have to start again. 
So you have to go back a few phases and start again. 
And what ends up happening -- you might have days like this where you wake up at eight or seven in the morning, or whenever you get up, and you're like, "I didn't sleep very well. 
I did the sleep thing -- I went to bed, I laid down, but I didn't really sleep." 
People say you go "to" sleep, but you don't go to sleep, you go towards sleep; it takes a while. 
You've got to go through phases and stuff, and if you're interrupted, you don't sleep well. 
So does anyone here expect someone to sleep well if they're interrupted all night? 
I don't think anyone would say yes. 
Why do we expect people to work well if they're being interrupted all day at the office? 
How can we possibly expect people to do their job if they go to the office and are interrupted? 
That doesn't really seem like it makes a lot of sense, to me. 
So what are the interruptions that happen at the office but not at other places? 
Because in other places, you can have interruptions like the TV, or you could go for a walk, or there's a fridge downstairs, or you've got your own couch, or whatever you want to do. 
If you talk to certain managers, they'll tell you that they don't want their employees to work at home because of these distractions. 
They'll sometimes also say, "If I can't see the person, how do I know they're working?" 
which is ridiculous, but that's one of the excuses that managers give. 
And I'm one of these managers. I understand. I know how this goes. 
We all have to improve on this sort of thing. 
But oftentimes they'll cite distractions: "I can't let someone work at home. 
They'll watch TV, or do this other thing." 
It turns out those aren't the things that are distracting, Because those are voluntary distractions. 
You decide when you want to be distracted by the TV, when you want to turn something on, or when you want to go downstairs or go for a walk. 
At the office, most of the interruptions and distractions that really cause people not to get work done are involuntary. 
So let's go through a couple of those. 
Now, managers and bosses will often have you think that the real distractions at work are things like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and other websites, and in fact, they'll go so far as to actually ban these sites at work. 
Some of you may work at places where you can't get to certain sites. 
I mean, is this China? What the hell is going on here? 
You can't go to a website at work, and that's the problem? 
That's why people aren't getting work done, because they're on Facebook and Twitter? 
That's kind of ridiculous. It's a total decoy. 
Today's Facebook and Twitter and YouTube, these things are just modern-day smoke breaks. 
No one cared about letting people take a smoke break for 15 minutes 10 years ago, so why does anyone care if someone goes to Facebook or Twitter or YouTube here and there? 
Those aren't the real problems in the office. 
The real problems are what I like to call the M&Ms, the Managers and the Meetings. 
Those are the real problems in the modern office today. 
And this is why things don't get done at work, it's because of the M&Ms. 
Now what's interesting is, if you listen to all the places that people talk about doing work, like at home, in the car, on a plane, late at night, or early in the morning, you don't find managers and meetings. 
You find a lot of other distractions, but not managers and meetings. 
So these are the things that you don't find elsewhere, but you do find at the office. 
And managers are basically people whose job it is to interrupt people. 
That's pretty much what managers are for. They're for interrupting people. 
They don't really do the work, so they make sure everyone else is doing work, which is an interruption. 
We have lots of managers in the world now, and a lot of people in the world, and a lot of interruptions by these managers. 
They have to check in: "Hey, how's it going? 
Show me what's up." This sort of thing. 
They keep interrupting you at the wrong time, while you're actually trying to do something they're paying you to do, they tend to interrupt you. 
That's kind of bad. 
But what's even worse is the thing that managers do most of all, which is call meetings. 
And meetings are just toxic, terrible, poisonous things during the day at work. 
(Laughter) We all know this to be true, and you would never see a spontaneous meeting called by employees. 
It doesn't work that way. 
The manager calls the meeting so the employees can all come together, and it's an incredibly disruptive thing to do to people -- to say, "Hey look, we're going to bring 10 people together right now and have a meeting. 
I don't care what you're doing, you've got to stop doing it, so you can have this meeting." 
I mean, what are the chances that all 10 people are ready to stop? 
What if they're thinking about something important, or doing important work? 
All of a sudden you tell them they have to stop doing that to do something else. 
So they go into a meeting room, they get together, and they talk about stuff that doesn't really matter, usually. 
Because meetings aren't work. 
Meetings are places to go to talk about things you're supposed to be doing later. 
But meetings also procreate. 
So one meeting tends to lead to another meeting, which leads to another meeting. 
There's often too many people in the meetings, and they're very, very expensive to the organization. 
Companies often think of a one-hour meeting as a one-hour meeting, but that's not true, unless there's only one person. 
If there are 10 people, it's a 10-hour meeting, not a one-hour meeting. 
It's 10 hours of productivity taken from the rest of the organization to have this one-hour meeting, which probably should have been handled by two or three people talking for a few minutes. 
But instead, there's a long scheduled meeting, because meetings are scheduled the way software works, which is in increments of 15 minutes, or 30 minutes, or an hour. 
You don't schedule an eight-hour meeting with Outlook; you can't. 
You can go 15 minutes or 30 minutes or 45 minutes or an hour. 
And so we tend to fill these times up when things should go really quickly. 
So meetings and managers are two major problems in businesses today, especially at offices. 
These things don't exist outside of the office. 
So I have some suggestions to remedy the situation. 
What can managers do -- enlightened managers, hopefully -- what can they do to make the office a better place for people to work, so it's not the last resort, but it's the first resort, so that people start to say, "When I really want to get stuff done, I go to the office." 
Because the offices are well-equipped; everything is there for them to do the work. 
But they don't want to go there right now, so how do we change that? 
I have three suggestions to share with you. 
We've all heard of the Casual Friday thing. 
But how about "No-talk Thursdays?" 
(Laughter) Pick one Thursday once a month, and cut it in half, just the afternoon -- I'll make it easy for you. 
So just the afternoon, one Thursday. 
First Thursday of the month, just the afternoon, nobody in the office can talk to each other. 
Just silence, that's it. 
And what you'll find is that a tremendous amount of work gets done when no one talks to each other. 
This is when people actually get stuff done, is when no one's bothering them or interrupting them. 
Giving someone four hours of uninterrupted time is the best gift you can give anybody at work. 
It's better than a computer, better than a new monitor, better than new software, or whatever people typically use. 
Giving them four hours of quiet time at the office is going to be incredibly valuable. 
If you try that, I think you'll agree, and hopefully you can do it more often. 
So maybe it's every other week, or every week, once a week, afternoons no one can talk to each other. 
That's something that you'll find will really, really work. 
Another thing you can try, is switching from active communication and collaboration, which is like face-to-face stuff -- tapping people on the shoulder, saying hi to them, having meetings, and replace that with more passive models of communication, using things like email and instant messaging, or collaboration products, things like that. 
Now some people might say email is really distracting, I.M. is really distracting, and these other things are really distracting, but they're distracting at a time of your own choice and your own choosing. 
You can quit the email app; you can't quit your boss. 
You can quit I.M.; you can't hide your manager. 
You can put these things away, and then you can be interrupted on your own schedule, at your own time, when you're available, when you're ready to go again. 
Because work, like sleep, happens in phases. 
So you'll be going up, doing some work, and then you'll come down from that work, and then maybe it's time to check that email or I.M. 
There are very, very few things that are that urgent, that need to happen, that need to be answered right this second. 
So if you're a manager, start encouraging people to use more things like I.M. and email and other things that someone can put away and then get back to you on their own schedule. 
And the last suggestion I have is that, if you do have a meeting coming up, if you have the power, just cancel it. 
Just cancel that next meeting. 
(Laughter) Today's Friday, usually people have meetings on Monday. 
Just don't have it. 
I don't mean move it; I mean just erase it from memory, it's gone. 
And you'll find out that everything will be just fine. 
All these discussions and decisions you thought you had to make at this one time at 9 a.m. on Monday, just forget about them, and things will be fine. 
You'll find out all these things you thought you had to do, you don't actually have to do. 
So those are just three quick suggestions I wanted to give you guys to think about. 
I hope that some of these ideas were at least provocative enough for managers and bosses and business owners and organizers and people who are in charge of other people, to think about laying off a little bit, and giving people more time to get work done. 
I think it'll all pay off in the end. 
So, thanks for listening. 
(Applause) 

Well, the subject of difficult negotiation reminds me of one of my favorite stories from the Middle East, of a man who left to his three sons, 17 camels. 
To the first son, he left half the camels; to the second son, he left a third of the camels; and to the youngest son, he left a ninth of the camels. 
The three sons got into a negotiation -- 17 doesn't divide by two. 
It doesn't divide by three. 
It doesn't divide by nine. 
Brotherly tempers started to get strained. 
Finally, in desperation, they went and they consulted a wise old woman. 
The wise old woman thought about their problem for a long time, and finally she came back and said, "Well, I don't know if I can help you, but at least, if you want, you can have my camel." 
So then, they had 18 camels. 
The second son took his third -- a third of 18 is six. 
The youngest son took his ninth -- a ninth of 18 is two. 
You get 17. 
They had one camel left over. 
They gave it back to the wise old woman. 
(Laughter) Now, if you think about that story for a moment, I think it resembles a lot of the difficult negotiations we get involved in. 
They start off like 17 camels, no way to resolve it. 
Somehow, what we need to do is step back from those situations, like that wise old woman, look at the situation through fresh eyes and come up with an 18th camel. 
Finding that 18th camel in the world's conflicts has been my life passion. 
I basically see humanity a bit like those three brothers. 
We're all one family. 
We know that scientifically, thanks to the communications revolution, all the tribes on the planet -- all 15,000 tribes -- are in touch with each other. 
And it's a big family reunion. 
And yet, like many family reunions, it's not all peace and light. 
There's a lot of conflict, and the question is: How do we deal with our differences? 
How do we deal with our deepest differences, given the human propensity for conflict and the human genius at devising weapons of enormous destruction? 
That's the question. 
As I've spent the last better part of three decades, almost four, traveling the world, trying to work, getting involved in conflicts ranging from Yugoslavia to the Middle East to Chechnya to Venezuela -- some of the most difficult conflicts on the face of the planet -- I've been asking myself that question. 
And I think I've found, in some ways, what is the secret to peace. 
It's actually surprisingly simple. 
It's not easy, but it's simple. 
It's not even new. 
It may be one of our most ancient human heritages. 
The secret to peace is us. 
It's us who act as a surrounding community around any conflict, who can play a constructive role. 
Let me give you just a story, an example. 
About 20 years ago, I was in South Africa, working with the parties in that conflict, and I had an extra month, so I spent some time living with several groups of San Bushmen. 
I was curious about them, about the way in which they resolve conflict. 
Because, after all, within living memory, they were hunters and gatherers, living pretty much like our ancestors lived for maybe 99 percent of the human story. 
And all the men have these poison arrows that they use for hunting -- absolutely fatal. 
So how do they deal with their differences? 
Well, what I learned is, whenever tempers rise in those communities, someone goes and hides the poison arrows out in the bush, and then everyone sits around in a circle like this, and they sit and they talk and they talk. 
It may take two days, three days, four days, but they don't rest until they find a resolution or better yet -- a reconciliation. 
And if tempers are still too high, then they send someone off to visit some relatives, as a cooling-off period. 
Well, that system is, I think, probably the system that kept us alive to this point, given our human tendencies. 
That system, I call "the third side." 
Because if you think about it, normally when we think of conflict, when we describe it, there's always two sides -- it's Arabs versus Israelis, labor versus management, husband versus wife, Republicans versus Democrats. 
But what we don't often see is that there's always a third side, and the third side of the conflict is us, it's the surrounding community, it's the friends, the allies, the family members, the neighbors. 
And we can play an incredibly constructive role. 
Perhaps the most fundamental way in which the third side can help is to remind the parties of what's really at stake. 
For the sake of the kids, for the sake of the family, for the sake of the community, for the sake of the future, let's stop fighting for a moment and start talking. 
Because, the thing is, when we're involved in conflict, it's very easy to lose perspective. 
It's very easy to react. 
Human beings -- we're reaction machines. 
And as the saying goes, when angry, you will make the best speech you will ever regret. 
(Laughter) And so the third side reminds us of that. 
The third side helps us go to the balcony, which is a metaphor for a place of perspective, where we can keep our eyes on the prize. 
Let me tell you a little story from my own negotiating experience. 
Some years ago, I was involved as a facilitator in some very tough talks between the leaders of Russia and the leaders of Chechnya. 
There was a war going on, as you know. 
And we met in the Hague, in the Peace Palace, in the same room where the Yugoslav war-crimes tribunal was taking place. 
And the talks got off to a rather rocky start when the vice president of Chechnya began by pointing at the Russians and said, "You should stay right here in your seats, because you're going to be on trial for war crimes." 
And then he turned to me and said, "You're an American. 
Look at what you Americans are doing in Puerto Rico." 
And my mind started racing, "Puerto Rico? What do I know about Puerto Rico?" 
I started reacting. 
(Laughter) But then, I tried to remember to go to the balcony. 
And then when he paused and everyone looked at me for a response, from a balcony perspective, I was able to thank him for his remarks and say, "I appreciate your criticism of my country and I take it as a sign that we're among friends and can speak candidly to one another." 
(Laughter) "And what we're here to do is not to talk about Puerto Rico or the past. 
We're here to see if we can figure out a way to stop the suffering and the bloodshed in Chechnya." 
The conversation got back on track. 
That's the role of the third side, to help the parties go to the balcony. 
Now let me take you, for a moment, to what's widely regarded as the world's most difficult conflict, or the most impossible conflict, the Middle East. 
Question is: where's the third side there? 
How could we possibly go to the balcony? 
Now, I don't pretend to have an answer to the Middle East conflict, but I think I've got a first step -- literally, a first step -- something that any one of us could do as third-siders. 
Let me just ask you one question first. 
How many of you in the last years have ever found yourself worrying about the Middle East and wondering what anyone could do? 
Just out of curiosity, how many of you? 
OK, so the great majority of us. 
And here, it's so far away. 
Why do we pay so much attention to this conflict? 
Is it the number of deaths? 
There are a hundred times more people who die in a conflict in Africa than in the Middle East. 
No, it's because of the story, because we feel personally involved in that story. 
Whether we're Christians, Muslims or Jews, religious or non-religious, we feel we have a personal stake in it. 
Stories matter; as an anthropologist, I know that. 
Stories are what we use to transmit knowledge. 
They give meaning to our lives. 
That's what we tell here at TED, we tell stories. 
Stories are the key. 
And so my question is -- yes, let's try and resolve the politics there in the Middle East, but let's also take a look at the story. 
Let's try to get at the root of what it's all about. 
Let's see if we can apply the third side to it. 
What would that mean? What is the story there? 
Now, as anthropologists, we know that every culture has an origin story. 
What's the origin story of the Middle East? 
In a phrase, it's: Four thousand years ago, a man and his family walked across the Middle East, and the world has never been the same since. 
That man, of course, was Abraham. 
And what he stood for was unity, the unity of the family; he's the father of us all. 
But it's not just what he stood for, it's what his message was. 
His basic message was unity too, the interconnectedness of it all, the unity of it all. 
And his basic value was respect, was kindness toward strangers. 
That's what he's known for, his hospitality. 
So in that sense, he's the symbolic third side of the Middle East. 
He's the one who reminds us that we're all part of a greater whole. 
Now, think about that for a moment. 
Today, we face the scourge of terrorism. 
What is terrorism? 
Terrorism is basically taking an innocent stranger and treating them as an enemy whom you kill in order to create fear. 
What's the opposite of terrorism? 
It's taking an innocent stranger and treating them as a friend whom you welcome into your home, in order to sow and create understanding or respect, or love. 
So what if, then, you took the story of Abraham, which is a third-side story, what if that could be -- because Abraham stands for hospitality -- what if that could be an antidote to terrorism? 
What if that could be a vaccine against religious intolerance? 
How would you bring that story to life? 
Now, it's not enough just to tell a story. 
That's powerful, but people need to experience the story. 
They need to be able to live the story. 
And that was my thinking of how would you do that. 
And that's what comes to the first step here. 
Because the simple way to do that is: you go for a walk. 
You go for a walk in the footsteps of Abraham. 
You retrace the footsteps of Abraham. 
Because walking has a real power. 
You know, as an anthropologist, walking is what made us human. 
It's funny -- when you walk, you walk side-by-side, in the same common direction. 
Now if I were to come to you face-to-face and come this close to you, you would feel threatened. 
But if I walk shoulder-to-shoulder, even touching shoulders, it's no problem. 
Who fights while they walk? 
That's why in negotiations, often, when things get tough, people go for walks in the woods. 
So the idea came to me of, what about inspiring a path, a route -- think the Silk Route, think the Appalachian Trail -- that followed in the footsteps of Abraham? 
People said, "That's crazy. You can't. 
You can't retrace the footsteps of Abraham -- it's too insecure, you've got to cross all these borders, it goes across 10 different countries in the Middle East, because it unites them all." 
And so we studied the idea at Harvard. 
And then a few years ago, a group of us, about 25 of us from 10 different countries, decided to see if we could retrace the footsteps of Abraham, going from his initial birthplace in the city of Urfa in Southern Turkey, Northern Mesopotamia. 
And we then took a bus and took some walks and went to Harran, where, in the Bible, he sets off on his journey. 
Then we crossed the border into Syria, went to Aleppo, which, turns out, is named after Abraham. 
We went to Damascus, which has a long history associated with Abraham. 
We then came to Northern Jordan, to Jerusalem -- which is all about Abraham -- to Bethlehem, and finally, to the place where he's buried, in Hebron. 
So effectively, we went from womb to tomb. 
We showed it could be done. 
Let me ask you a question. 
How many of you have had the experience of being in a strange neighborhood or strange land, and a total stranger, perfect stranger, comes up to you and shows you some kindness -- maybe invites you into their home, gives you a drink, gives you a coffee, gives you a meal? 
How many of you have ever had that experience? 
That's the essence of the Abraham Path. 
That's what you discover as you go into these villages in the Middle East where you expect hostility, and you get the most amazing hospitality, all associated with Abraham: "In the name of Father Ibrahim, let me offer you some food." 
So what we discovered is that Abraham is not just a figure out of a book for those people; he's alive, he's a living presence. 
And to make a long story short, in the last couple of years now, thousands of people have begun to walk parts of the path of Abraham in the Middle East, enjoying the hospitality of the people there. 
They've begun to walk in Israel and Palestine, in Jordan, in Turkey, in Syria. 
It's an amazing experience. 
Men, women, young people, old people -- more women than men, actually, interestingly. 
For those who can't walk, who are unable to get there right now, people started to organize walks in cities, in their own communities. 
In Cincinnati, for instance, they organized a walk from a church to a mosque to a synagogue and all had an Abrahamic meal together. 
It was Abraham Path Day. 
In São Paulo, Brazil, it's become an annual event for thousands of people to run in a virtual Abraham Path Run, uniting the different communities. 
The media love it; they really adore it. 
They lavish attention on it because it's visual and it spreads the idea, this idea of Abrahamic hospitality, of kindness towards strangers. 
And just a couple weeks ago, there was an NPR story on it. 
Last month, there was a piece in the Manchester Guardian about it, two whole pages. 
And they quoted a villager who said, "This walk connects us to the world." 
He said, "It was like a light that went on in our lives -- it brought us hope." 
And so that's what it's about. 
But it's not just about psychology; it's about economics. 
Because as people walk, they spend money. 
And this woman right here, Um Ahmad, is a woman who lives on the path in Northern Jordan. 
She's desperately poor. 
She's partially blind, her husband can't work, she's got seven kids. 
But what she can do is cook. 
And so she's begun to cook for some groups of walkers who come through the village and have a meal in her home. 
They sit on the floor -- she doesn't even have a tablecloth. 
She makes the most delicious food, that's fresh from the herbs in the surrounding countryside. 
And so more and more walkers have come, and lately she's begun to earn an income to support her family. 
And so she told our team there, she said, "You have made me visible in a village where people were once ashamed to look at me." 
That's the potential of the Abraham Path. 
There are literally hundreds of those kinds of communities across the Middle East, across the path. 
The potential is basically to change the game. 
And to change the game, you have to change the frame, the way we see things -- to change the frame from hostility to hospitality, from terrorism to tourism. 
And in that sense, the Abraham Path is a game-changer. 
I have a little acorn here that I picked up while I was walking on the path earlier this year. 
Now, the acorn is associated with the oak tree, of course -- grows into an oak tree, which is associated with Abraham. 
The path right now is like an acorn; it's still in its early phase. 
What would the oak tree look like? 
When I think back to my childhood, a good part of which I spent, after being born here in Chicago, I spent in Europe. 
If you had been in the ruins of, say, London in 1945, or Berlin, and you had said, "Sixty years from now, this is going to be the most peaceful, prosperous part of the planet," people would have thought you were certifiably insane. 
But they did it, thanks to a common identity, Europe, and a common economy. 
So my question is, if it can be done in Europe, why not in the Middle East? 
Why not, thanks to a common identity, which is the story of Abraham, and thanks to a common economy that would be based, in good part, on tourism? 
So let me conclude, then, by saying that in the last 35 years, as I've worked in some of the most dangerous, difficult and intractable conflicts around the planet, I have yet to see one conflict that I felt could not be transformed. 
It's not easy, of course. 
But it's possible. 
It was done in South Africa. 
It was done in Northern Ireland. 
It could be done anywhere. 
It simply depends on us. 
It depends on us taking the third side. 
So let me invite you to consider taking the third side, even as a very small step. 
We're about to take a break in a moment. 
Just go up to someone who's from a different culture, a different country, a different ethnicity -- some difference -- and engage them in a conversation. 
That's a third-side act. 
That's walking Abraham's Path. 
After a TED Talk, why not a TED Walk? 
(Laughter) So let me just leave you with three things. 
One is, the secret to peace is the third side. 
The third side is us. 
Each of us, with a single step, can take the world, can bring the world a step closer to peace. 
There's an old African proverb that goes: "When spiderwebs unite, they can halt even the lion." 
If we're able to unite our third-side webs of peace, we can even halt the lion of war. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

I work on helping computers communicate about the world around us. 
There are a lot of ways to do this, and I like to focus on helping computers to talk about what they see and understand. 
Given a scene like this, a modern computer-vision algorithm can tell you that there's a woman and there's a dog. 
It can tell you that the woman is smiling. 
It might even be able to tell you that the dog is incredibly cute. 
I work on this problem thinking about how humans understand and process the world. 
The thoughts, memories and stories that a scene like this might evoke for humans. 
All the interconnections of related situations. 
Maybe you've seen a dog like this one before, or you've spent time running on a beach like this one, and that further evokes thoughts and memories of a past vacation, past times to the beach, times spent running around with other dogs. 
One of my guiding principles is that by helping computers to understand what it's like to have these experiences, to understand what we share and believe and feel, then we're in a great position to start evolving computer technology in a way that's complementary with our own experiences. 
So, digging more deeply into this, a few years ago I began working on helping computers to generate human-like stories from sequences of images. 
So, one day, I was working with my computer to ask it what it thought about a trip to Australia. 
It took a look at the pictures, and it saw a koala. 
It didn't know what the koala was, but it said it thought it was an interesting-looking creature. 
Then I shared with it a sequence of images about a house burning down. 
It took a look at the images and it said, "This is an amazing view! This is spectacular!" 
It sent chills down my spine. 
It saw a horrible, life-changing and life-destroying event and thought it was something positive. 
I realized that it recognized the contrast, the reds, the yellows, and thought it was something worth remarking on positively. 
And part of why it was doing this was because most of the images I had given it were positive images. 
That's because people tend to share positive images when they talk about their experiences. 
When was the last time you saw a selfie at a funeral? 
I realized that, as I worked on improving AI task by task, dataset by dataset, that I was creating massive gaps, holes and blind spots in what it could understand. 
And while doing so, I was encoding all kinds of biases. 
Biases that reflect a limited viewpoint, limited to a single dataset -- biases that can reflect human biases found in the data, such as prejudice and stereotyping. 
I thought back to the evolution of the technology that brought me to where I was that day -- how the first color images were calibrated against a white woman's skin, meaning that color photography was biased against black faces. 
And that same bias, that same blind spot continued well into the '90s. 
And the same blind spot continues even today in how well we can recognize different people's faces in facial recognition technology. 
I though about the state of the art in research today, where we tend to limit our thinking to one dataset and one problem. 
And that in doing so, we were creating more blind spots and biases that the AI could further amplify. 
I realized then that we had to think deeply about how the technology we work on today looks in five years, in 10 years. 
Humans evolve slowly, with time to correct for issues in the interaction of humans and their environment. 
In contrast, artificial intelligence is evolving at an incredibly fast rate. 
And that means that it really matters that we think about this carefully right now -- that we reflect on our own blind spots, our own biases, and think about how that's informing the technology we're creating and discuss what the technology of today will mean for tomorrow. 
CEOs and scientists have weighed in on what they think the artificial intelligence technology of the future will be. 
Stephen Hawking warns that "Artificial intelligence could end mankind." 
Elon Musk warns that it's an existential risk and one of the greatest risks that we face as a civilization. 
Bill Gates has made the point, "I don't understand why people aren't more concerned." 
But these views -- they're part of the story. 
The math, the models, the basic building blocks of artificial intelligence are something that we call access and all work with. 
We have open-source tools for machine learning and intelligence that we can contribute to. 
And beyond that, we can share our experience. 
We can share our experiences with technology and how it concerns us and how it excites us. 
We can discuss what we love. 
We can communicate with foresight about the aspects of technology that could be more beneficial or could be more problematic over time. 
If we all focus on opening up the discussion on AI with foresight towards the future, this will help create a general conversation and awareness about what AI is now, what it can become and all the things that we need to do in order to enable that outcome that best suits us. 
We already see and know this in the technology that we use today. 
We use smart phones and digital assistants and Roombas. 
Are they evil? 
Maybe sometimes. 
Are they beneficial? 
Yes, they're that, too. 
And they're not all the same. 
And there you already see a light shining on what the future holds. 
The future continues on from what we build and create right now. 
We set into motion that domino effect that carves out AI's evolutionary path. 
In our time right now, we shape the AI of tomorrow. 
Technology that immerses us in augmented realities bringing to life past worlds. 
Technology that helps people to share their experiences when they have difficulty communicating. 
Technology built on understanding the streaming visual worlds used as technology for self-driving cars. 
Technology built on understanding images and generating language, evolving into technology that helps people who are visually impaired be better able to access the visual world. 
And we also see how technology can lead to problems. 
We have technology today that analyzes physical characteristics we're born with -- such as the color of our skin or the look of our face -- in order to determine whether or not we might be criminals or terrorists. 
We have technology that crunches through our data, even data relating to our gender or our race, in order to determine whether or not we might get a loan. 
All that we see now is a snapshot in the evolution of artificial intelligence. 
Because where we are right now, is within a moment of that evolution. 
That means that what we do now will affect what happens down the line and in the future. 
If we want AI to evolve in a way that helps humans, then we need to define the goals and strategies that enable that path now. 
What I'd like to see is something that fits well with humans, with our culture and with the environment. 
Technology that aids and assists those of us with neurological conditions or other disabilities in order to make life equally challenging for everyone. 
Technology that works regardless of your demographics or the color of your skin. 
And so today, what I focus on is the technology for tomorrow and for 10 years from now. 
AI can turn out in many different ways. 
But in this case, it isn't a self-driving car without any destination. 
This is the car that we are driving. 
We choose when to speed up and when to slow down. 
We choose if we need to make a turn. 
We choose what the AI of the future will be. 
There's a vast playing field of all the things that artificial intelligence can become. 
It will become many things. 
And it's up to us now, in order to figure out what we need to put in place to make sure the outcomes of artificial intelligence are the ones that will be better for all of us. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

On a warm August morning in Harare, Farai, a 24-year-old mother of two, walks towards a park bench. 
She looks miserable and dejected. 
Now, on the park bench sits an 82-year-old woman, better known to the community as Grandmother Jack. 
Farai hands Grandmother Jack an envelope from the clinic nurse. 
Grandmother Jack invites Farai to sit down as she opens the envelope and reads. 
There's silence for three minutes or so as she reads. 
And after a long pause, Grandmother Jack takes a deep breath, looks at Farai and says, "I'm here for you. 
Would you like to share your story with me?" 
Farai begins, her eyes swelling with tears. 
She says, "Grandmother Jack, I'm HIV-positive. 
I've been living with HIV for the past four years. 
My husband left me a year ago. 
I have two kids under the age of five. 
I'm unemployed. 
I can hardly take care of my children." 
Tears are now flowing down her face. 
And in response, Grandmother Jack moves closer, puts her hand on Farai, and says, "Farai, it's OK to cry. 
You've been through a lot. 
Would you like to share more with me?" 
And Farai continues. 
"In the last three weeks, I have had recurrent thoughts of killing myself, taking my two children with me. 
I can't take it anymore. 
The clinic nurse sent me to see you." 
There's an exchange between the two, which lasts about 30 minutes. 
And finally, Grandmother Jack says, "Farai, it seems to me that you have all the symptoms of kufungisisa." 
The word "kufungisisa" opens up a floodgate of tears. 
So, kufungisisa is the local equivalent of depression in my country. 
It literally means "thinking too much." 
The World Health Organization estimates that more than 300 million people globally, today, suffer from depression, or what in my country we call kufungisisa. 
And the World Health Organization also tells us that every 40 seconds, someone somewhere in the world commits suicide because they are unhappy, largely due to depression or kufungisisa. 
And most of these deaths are occurring in low- and middle-income countries. 
In fact, the World Health Organization goes as far as to say that when you look at the age group between 15 to 29, a leading cause of death now is actually suicide. 
But there are wider events that lead to depression and in some cases, suicide, such as abuse, conflict, violence, isolation, loneliness -- the list is endless. 
But one thing that we do know is that depression can be treated and suicides averted. 
But the problem is we just don't have enough psychiatrists or psychologists in the world to do the job. 
In most low- and middle-income countries, for instance, the ratio of psychiatrists to the population is something like one for every one and a half million people, which literally means that 90 percent of the people needing mental health services will not get it. 
In my country, there are 12 psychiatrists, and I'm one of them, for a population of approximately 14 million. 
Now, let me just put that into context. 
One evening while I was at home, I get a call from the ER, or the emergency room, from a city which is some 200 kilometers away from where I live. 
And the ER doctor says, "One of your patients, someone you treated four months ago, has just taken an overdose, and they are in the ER department. 
Hemodynamically, they seem to be OK, but they will need neuropsychiatric evaluation." 
Now, I obviously can't get into my car in the middle of the night and drive 200 kilometers. 
So as best as we could, over the phone with the ER doctor, we come up with an assessment. 
We ensure that suicidal observations are in place. 
We ensure that we start reviewing the antidepressants that this patient has been taking, and we finally conclude that as soon as Erica -- that was her name, 26-year-old -- as soon as Erica is ready to be released from the ER, she should come directly to me with her mother, and I will evaluate and establish what can be done. 
And we assumed that that would take about a week. 
A week passes. 
Three weeks pass. 
No Erica. 
And one day I get a call from Erica's mother, and she says, "Erica committed suicide three days ago. 
She hanged herself from the mango tree in the family garden." 
Now, almost like a knee-jerk reaction, I couldn't help but ask, "But why didn't you come to Harare, where I live? 
We had agreed that as soon as you're released from the ER, you will come to me." 
Her response was brief. 
"We didn't have the 15 dollars bus fare to come to Harare." 
Now, suicide is not an unusual event in the world of mental health. 
But there was something about Erica's death that struck me at the core of my very being. 
That statement from Erica's mother: "We didn't have 15 dollars bus fare to come to you," made me realize that it just wasn't going to work, me expecting people to come to me. 
And I got into this state of soul-searching, trying to really discover my role as a psychiatrist in Africa. 
And after considerable consultation and soul-searching, talking to colleagues, friends and family, it suddenly dawned on me that actually, one the most reliable resources we have in Africa are grandmothers. 
Yes, grandmothers. 
And I thought, grandmothers are in every community. 
There are hundreds of them. 
And -- (Laughter) And they don't leave their communities in search of greener pastures. 
(Laughter) See, the only time they leave is when they go to a greener pasture called heaven. 
(Laughter) So I thought, how about training grandmothers in evidence-based talk therapy, which they can deliver on a bench? 
Empower them with the skills to listen, to show empathy, all of that rooted in cognitive behavioral therapy; empower them with the skills to provide behavior activation, activity scheduling; and support them using digital technology. 
You know, mobile phone technology. 
Pretty much everyone in Africa has a mobile phone today. 
So in 2006, I started my first group of grandmothers. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) Today, there are hundreds of grandmothers who are working in more than 70 communities. 
And in the last year alone, more than 30,000 people received treatment on the Friendship Bench from a grandmother in a community in Zimbabwe. 
(Applause) And recently, we published this work that is done by these grandmothers in the Journal of the American Medical Association. 
And -- (Applause) And our results show that six months after receiving treatment from a grandmother, people were still symptom-free: no depression, suicidal ideation completely reduced. 
In fact, our results -- this was a clinical trial -- in fact, this clinical trial showed that grandmothers were more effective at treating depression than doctors and -- (Laughter) (Applause) And so, we're now working towards expanding this program. 
There are more than 600 million people currently aged above 65 in the world. 
And by the year 2050, there will be 1.5 billion people aged 65 and above. 
Imagine if we could create a global network of grandmothers in every major city in the world, who are trained in evidence-based talk therapy, supported through digital platforms, networked. 
And they will make a difference in communities. 
They will reduce the treatment gap for mental, neurological and substance-use disorders. 
Finally, this is a file photograph of Grandmother Jack. 
So, Farai had six sessions on the bench with Grandmother Jack. 
Today, Farai is employed. 
She has her two children at school. 
And as for Grandmother Jack, one morning in February, we expected her to see her 257th client on the bench. 
She didn't show up. 
She had gone to a greener pasture called heaven. 
But I believe that Grandmother Jack, from up there, she's cheering on all the other grandmothers -- the increasing number of grandmothers who are making a difference in the lives of thousands of people. 
And I'm sure she's in awe when she realizes that something that she helped to pioneer is now spreading to other countries, like Malawi, the island of Zanzibar and coming closer to home here in the Unites States in the city of New York. 
May her soul rest in peace. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) (Cheering) (Applause) 

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

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

You may have heard about the Koran's idea of paradise being 72 virgins, and I promise I will come back to those virgins. 
But in fact, here in the Northwest, we're living very close to the real Koranic idea of paradise, defined 36 times as "gardens watered by running streams." 
Since I live on a houseboat on the running stream of Lake Union, this makes perfect sense to me. 
But the thing is, how come it's news to most people? 
I know many well-intentioned non-Muslims who've begun reading the Koran, but given up, disconcerted by its "otherness." 
The historian Thomas Carlyle considered Muhammad one of the world's greatest heroes, yet even he called the Koran "as toilsome reading as I ever undertook; a wearisome, confused jumble." 
(Laughter) Part of the problem, I think, is that we imagine that the Koran can be read as we usually read a book -- as though we can curl up with it on a rainy afternoon with a bowl of popcorn within reach, as though God -- and the Koran is entirely in the voice of God speaking to Muhammad -- were just another author on the best-seller list. 
Yet, the fact that so few people do actually read the Koran is precisely why it's so easy to quote -- that is, to misquote. 
(Laughter) Phrases and snippets taken out of context in what I call the "highlighter version," which is the one favored by both Muslim fundamentalists and anti-Muslim Islamophobes. 
So this past spring, as I was gearing up to begin writing a biography of Muhammad, I realized I needed to read the Koran properly -- as properly as I could, that is. 
My Arabic is reduced by now to wielding a dictionary, so I took four well-known translations and decided to read them side by side, verse by verse, along with a transliteration and the original seventh-century Arabic. 
Now, I did have an advantage. 
My last book was about the story behind the Shi'a-Sunni split, and for that, I'd worked closely with the earliest Islamic histories, so I knew the events to which the Koran constantly refers, its frame of reference. 
I knew enough, that is, to know that I'd be a tourist in the Koran -- an informed one, an experienced one, even, but still an outsider, an agnostic Jew reading someone else's holy book. 
(Laughter) So I read slowly. 
(Laughter) I'd set aside three weeks for this project, and that, I think, is what is meant by "hubris" -- (Laughter) because it turned out to be three months. 
(Laughter) I did resist the temptation to skip to the back, where the shorter and more clearly mystical chapters are. 
But every time I thought I was beginning to get a handle on the Koran -- that feeling of "I get it now" -- it would slip away overnight, and I'd come back in the morning, wondering if I wasn't lost in a strange land. 
And yet, the terrain was very familiar. 
The Koran declares that it comes to renew the message of the Torah and the Gospels. 
So one-third of it reprises the stories of Biblical figures like Abraham, Moses, Joseph, Mary, Jesus. 
God himself was utterly familiar from his earlier manifestation as Yahweh, jealously insisting on no other gods. 
The presence of camels, mountains, desert wells and springs took me back to the year I spent wandering the Sinai Desert. 
And then there was the language, the rhythmic cadence of it, reminding me of evenings spent listening to Bedouin elders recite hours-long narrative poems entirely from memory. 
And I began to grasp why it's said that the Koran is really the Koran only in Arabic. 
Take the Fatihah, the seven-verse opening chapter that is the Lord's Prayer and the Shema Yisrael of Islam combined. 
It's just 29 words in Arabic, but anywhere from 65 to 72 in translation. 
And yet the more you add, the more seems to go missing. 
The Arabic has an incantatory, almost hypnotic quality that begs to be heard rather than read, felt more than analyzed. 
It wants to be chanted out loud, to sound its music in the ear and on the tongue. 
So the Koran in English is a kind of shadow of itself, or as Arthur Arberry called his version, "an interpretation." 
But all is not lost in translation. 
As the Koran promises, patience is rewarded, and there are many surprises -- a degree of environmental awareness, for instance, and of humans as mere stewards of God's creation, unmatched in the Bible. 
And where the Bible is addressed exclusively to men, using the second- and third-person masculine, the Koran includes women -- talking, for instance, of believing men and believing women, honorable men and honorable women. 
Or take the infamous verse about killing the unbelievers. 
Yes, it does say that, but in a very specific context: the anticipated conquest of the sanctuary city of Mecca, where fighting was usually forbidden. 
And the permission comes hedged about with qualifiers. 
Not "You must kill unbelievers in Mecca," but you can, you are allowed to, but only after a grace period is over, and only if there's no other pact in place, and only if they try to stop you getting to the Kaaba, and only if they attack you first. 
And even then -- God is merciful; forgiveness is supreme -- and so, essentially, better if you don't. 
(Laughter) This was perhaps the biggest surprise -- how flexible the Koran is, at least in minds that are not fundamentally inflexible. 
"Some of these verses are definite in meaning," it says, "and others are ambiguous." 
The perverse at heart will seek out the ambiguities, trying to create discord by pinning down meanings of their own. 
Only God knows the true meaning. 
The phrase "God is subtle" appears again and again, and indeed, the whole of the Koran is far more subtle than most of us have been led to believe. 
As in, for instance, that little matter of virgins and paradise. 
Old-fashioned orientalism comes into play here. 
The word used four times is "houris," rendered as dark-eyed maidens with swelling breasts, or as fair, high-bosomed virgins. 
Yet all there is in the original Arabic is that one word: houris. 
Not a swelling breast or high bosom in sight. 
(Laughter) Now this may be a way of saying "pure beings," like in angels, or it may be like the Greek "kouros" or "kore," an eternal youth. 
But the truth is, nobody really knows. 
And that's the point. 
Because the Koran is quite clear when it says that you'll be "a new creation in paradise," and that you will be "recreated in a form unknown to you," which seems to me a far more appealing prospect than a virgin. 
(Laughter) And that number 72 never appears. 
There are no 72 virgins in the Koran. 
That idea only came into being 300 years later, and most Islamic scholars see it as the equivalent of people with wings sitting on clouds and strumming harps. 
Paradise is quite the opposite. 
It's not virginity; it's fecundity; it's plenty. 
It's gardens watered by running streams. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

I want you to take a look at this baby. 
What you're drawn to are her eyes and the skin you love to touch. 
But today I'm going to talk to you about something you can't see. 
What's going on up in that little brain of hers. 
The modern tools of neuroscience are demonstrating to us that what's going on up there is nothing short of rocket science. 
And what we're learning is going to shed some light on what the romantic writers and poets described as the "celestial openness" of the child's mind. 
What we see here is a mother in India, and she's speaking Koro, which is a newly discovered language. 
And she's talking to her baby. 
What this mother -- and the 800 people who speak Koro in the world -- understands is that, to preserve this language, they need to speak it to the babies. 
And therein lies a critical puzzle. 
Why is it that you can't preserve a language by speaking to you and I, to the adults? 
Well, it's got to do with your brain. 
What we see here is that language has a critical period for learning. 
The way to read this slide is to look at your age on the horizontal axis. 
(Laughter) And you'll see on the vertical your skill at acquiring a second language. 
The babies and children are geniuses until they turn seven, and then there's a systematic decline. 
After puberty, we fall off the map. 
No scientists dispute this curve, but laboratories all over the world are trying to figure out why it works this way. 
Work in my lab is focused on the first critical period in development, and that is the period in which babies try to master which sounds are used in their language. 
We think, by studying how the sounds are learned, we'll have a model for the rest of language, and perhaps for critical periods that may exist in childhood for social, emotional and cognitive development. 
So we've been studying the babies using a technique that we're using all over the world and the sounds of all languages. 
The baby sits on a parent's lap, and we train them to turn their heads when a sound changes -- like from "ah" to "ee." 
If they do so at the appropriate time, the black box lights up and a panda bear pounds a drum. 
A six-monther adores the task. 
What have we learned? 
Well, babies all over the world are what I like to describe as "citizens of the world." 
They can discriminate all the sounds of all languages, no matter what country we're testing and what language we're using, and that's remarkable because you and I can't do that. 
We're culture-bound listeners. 
We can discriminate the sounds of our own language, but not those of foreign languages. 
So the question arises: When do those citizens of the world turn into the language-bound listeners that we are? 
And the answer: before their first birthdays. 
What you see here is performance on that head-turn task for babies tested in Tokyo and the United States, here in Seattle, as they listened to "ra" and "la" -- sounds important to English, but not to Japanese. 
So at six to eight months, the babies are totally equivalent. 
Two months later, something incredible occurs. 
The babies in the United States are getting a lot better, babies in Japan are getting a lot worse, but both of those groups of babies are preparing for exactly the language that they are going to learn. 
So the question is: What's happening during this critical two-month period? 
This is the critical period for sound development, but what's going on up there? 
So there are two things going on. 
The first is that the babies are listening intently to us, and they're taking statistics as they listen to us talk -- they're taking statistics. 
So listen to two mothers speaking motherese -- the universal language we use when we talk to kids -- first in English and then in Japanese. 
(Video) Ah, I love your big blue eyes -- so pretty and nice. 
(Japanese) Patricia Kuhl: During the production of speech, when babies listen, what they're doing is taking statistics on the language that they hear. 
And those distributions grow. 
And what we've learned is that babies are sensitive to the statistics, and the statistics of Japanese and English are very, very different. 
English has a lot of Rs and Ls. 
The distribution shows. 
And the distribution of Japanese is totally different, where we see a group of intermediate sounds, which is known as the Japanese "R." 
So babies absorb the statistics of the language and it changes their brains; it changes them from the citizens of the world to the culture-bound listeners that we are. 
But we as adults are no longer absorbing those statistics. 
We are governed by the representations in memory that were formed early in development. 
So what we're seeing here is changing our models of what the critical period is about. 
We're arguing from a mathematical standpoint that the learning of language material may slow down when our distributions stabilize. 
It's raising lots of questions about bilingual people. 
Bilinguals must keep two sets of statistics in mind at once and flip between them, one after the other, depending on who they're speaking to. 
So we asked ourselves, can the babies take statistics on a brand new language? 
And we tested this by exposing American babies who'd never heard a second language to Mandarin for the first time during the critical period. 
We knew that, when monolinguals were tested in Taipei and Seattle on the Mandarin sounds, they showed the same pattern. 
Six to eight months, they're totally equivalent. 
Two months later, something incredible happens. 
But the Taiwanese babies are getting better, not the American babies. 
What we did was expose American babies, during this period, to Mandarin. 
It was like having Mandarin relatives come and visit for a month and move into your house and talk to the babies for 12 sessions. 
Here's what it looked like in the laboratory. 
(Mandarin) PK: So what have we done to their little brains? 
(Laughter) We had to run a control group to make sure that coming into the laboratory didn't improve your Mandarin skills. 
So a group of babies came in and listened to English. 
And we can see from the graph that exposure to English didn't improve their Mandarin. 
But look at what happened to the babies exposed to Mandarin for 12 sessions. 
They were as good as the babies in Taiwan who'd been listening for 10 and a half months. 
What it demonstrated is that babies take statistics on a new language. 
Whatever you put in front of them, they'll take statistics on. 
But we wondered what role the human being played in this learning exercise. 
So we ran another group of babies in which the kids got the same dosage, the same 12 sessions, but over a television set. 
And another group of babies who had just audio exposure and looked at a teddy bear on the screen. 
What did we do to their brains? 
What you see here is the audio result -- no learning whatsoever -- and the video result -- no learning whatsoever. 
It takes a human being for babies to take their statistics. 
The social brain is controlling when the babies are taking their statistics. 
We want to get inside the brain and see this thing happening as babies are in front of televisions, as opposed to in front of human beings. 
Thankfully, we have a new machine, magnetoencephalography, that allows us to do this. 
It looks like a hair dryer from Mars. 
But it's completely safe, completely noninvasive and silent. 
We're looking at millimeter accuracy with regard to spatial and millisecond accuracy using 306 SQUIDs -- these are superconducting quantum interference devices -- to pick up the magnetic fields that change as we do our thinking. 
We're the first in the world to record babies in an MEG machine while they are learning. 
So this is little Emma. 
She's a six-monther. 
And she's listening to various languages in the earphones that are in her ears. 
You can see, she can move around. 
We're tracking her head with little pellets in a cap, so she's free to move completely unconstrained. 
It's a technical tour de force. 
What are we seeing? 
We're seeing the baby brain. 
As the baby hears a word in her language, the auditory areas light up, and then subsequently areas surrounding it that we think are related to coherence, getting the brain coordinated with its different areas, and causality, one brain area causing another to activate. 
We are embarking on a grand and golden age of knowledge about child's brain development. 
We're going to be able to see a child's brain as they experience an emotion, as they learn to speak and read, as they solve a math problem, as they have an idea. 
And we're going to be able to invent brain-based interventions for children who have difficulty learning. 
Just as the poets and writers described, we're going to be able to see, I think, that wondrous openness, utter and complete openness, of the mind of a child. 
In investigating the child's brain, we're going to uncover deep truths about what it means to be human, and in the process, we may be able to help keep our own minds open to learning for our entire lives. 
(Applause) 

I was around 10 when one day, I discovered a box of my father's old things. 
In it, under a bunch of his college textbooks, was a pair of black corduroy bell-bottom pants. 
These pants were awful -- musty and moth-eaten. 
And of course, I fell in love with them. 
I'd never seen anything like them. 
Until that day, all I'd ever known and worn was my school uniform, which, in fact, I was pretty grateful for, because from quite a young age, I'd realized I was somewhat different. 
I'd never been one of the boys my age; terrible at sports, possibly the unmanliest little boy ever. 
(Laughter) I was bullied quite a bit. 
And so, I figured that to survive I would be invisible, and the uniform helped me to seem no different from any other child. 
(Laughter) Well, almost. 
This became my daily prayer: "God, please make me just like everybody else." 
I think this went straight to God's voicemail, though. 
(Laughter) And eventually, it became pretty clear that I was not growing up to be the son that my father always wanted. 
Sorry, Dad. 
No, I was not going to magically change. 
And over time, I grew less and less sure that I actually wanted to. 
Therefore, the day those black corduroy bell-bottom pants came into my life, something happened. 
I didn't see pants; I saw opportunity. 
The very next day, I had to wear them to school, come what may. 
And once I pulled on those god-awful pants and belted them tight, almost instantly, I developed what can only be called a swagger. 
(Laughter) All the way to school, and then all the way back because I was sent home at once -- (Laughter) I transformed into a little brown rock star. 
(Laughter) I finally didn't care anymore that I could not conform. 
That day, I was suddenly celebrating it. 
That day, instead of being invisible, I chose to be looked at, just by wearing something different. 
That day, I discovered the power of what we wear. 
That day, I discovered the power of fashion, and I've been in love with it ever since. 
Fashion can communicate our differences to the world for us. 
And with this simple act of truth, I realized that these differences -- they stopped being our shame. 
They became our expressions, expressions of our very unique identities. 
And we should express ourselves, wear what we want. 
What's the worst that could happen? 
The fashion police are going to get you for being so last season? 
(Laughter) Yeah. 
Well, unless the fashion police meant something entirely different. 
Nobel Prize laureate Malala survived Taliban extremists in October 2012. 
However, in October 2017, she faced a different enemy, when online trolls viciously attacked the photograph that showed the 20-year-old wearing jeans that day. 
The comments, the hatred she received, ranged from "How long before the scarf comes off?" 
to, and I quote, "That's the reason the bullet directly targeted her head a long time ago." 
Now, when most of us decide to wear a pair of jeans someplace like New York, London, Milan, Paris, we possibly don't stop to think that it's a privilege; something that somewhere else can have consequences, something that can one day be taken away from us. 
My grandmother was a woman who took extraordinary pleasure in dressing up. 
Her fashion was colorful. 
And the color she loved to wear so much was possibly the only thing that was truly about her, the one thing she had agency over, because like most other women of her generation in India, she'd never been allowed to exist beyond what was dictated by custom and tradition. 
She'd been married at 17, and after 65 years of marriage, when my grandfather died suddenly one day, her loss was unbearable. 
But that day, she was going to lose something else as well, the one joy she had: to wear color. 
In India, according to custom, when a Hindu woman becomes a widow, all she's allowed to wear is white from the day of the death of her husband. 
No one made my grandmother wear white. 
However, every woman she'd known who had outlived her husband, including her mother, had done it. 
This oppression was so internalized, so deep-rooted, that she herself refused a choice. 
She passed away this year, and until the day she died, she continued to wear only white. 
I have a photograph with her from earlier, happier times. 
In it, you can't really see what she's wearing -- the photo is in black and white. 
However, from the way she's smiling in it, you just know she's wearing color. 
This is also what fashion can do. 
It has the power to fill us with joy, the joy of freedom to choose for ourselves how we want to look, how we want to live -- a freedom worth fighting for. 
And fighting for freedom, protest, comes in many forms. 
Widows in India like my grandmother, thousands of them, live in a city called Vrindavan. 
And so, it's been a sea of white for centuries. 
However, only as recently as 2013, the widows of Vrindavan have started to celebrate Holi, the Indian festival of color, which they are prohibited from participating in. 
On this one day in March, these women take the traditional colored powder of the festival and color each other. 
With every handful of the powder they throw into the air, their white saris slowly start to suffuse with color. 
And they don't stop until they're completely covered in every hue of the rainbow that's forbidden to them. 
The color washes off the next day, however, for that moment in time, it's their beautiful disruption. 
This disruption, any kind of dissonance, can be the first gauntlet we throw down in a battle against oppression. 
And fashion -- it can create visual disruption for us -- on us, literally. 
Lessons of defiance have always been taught by fashion's great revolutionaries: its designers. 
Jean Paul Gaultier taught us that women can be kings. 
Thom Browne -- he taught us that men can wear heels. 
And Alexander McQueen, in his spring 1999 show, had two giant robotic arms in the middle of his runway. 
And as the model, Shalom Harlow began to spin in between them, these two giant arms -- furtively at first and then furiously, began to spray color onto her. 
McQueen, thus, before he took his own life, taught us that this body of ours is a canvas, a canvas we get to paint however we want. 
Somebody who loved this world of fashion was Karar Nushi. 
He was a student and actor from Iraq. 
He loved his vibrant, eclectic clothes. 
However, he soon started receiving death threats for how he looked. 
He remained unfazed. 
He remained fabulous, until July 2017, when Karar was discovered dead on a busy street in Baghdad. 
He'd been kidnapped. 
He'd been tortured. 
And eyewitnesses say that his body showed multiple wounds. 
Stab wounds. 
Two thousand miles away in Peshawar, Pakistani transgender activist Alisha was shot multiple times in May 2016. 
She was taken to the hospital, but because she dressed in women's clothing, she was refused access to either the men's or the women's wards. 
What we choose to wear can sometimes be literally life and death. 
And even in death, we sometimes don't get to choose. 
Alisha died that day and then was buried as a man. 
What kind of world is this? 
Well, it's one in which it's natural to be afraid, to be frightened of this surveillance, this violence against our bodies and what we wear on them. 
However, the greater fear is that once we surrender, blend in and begin to disappear one after the other, the more normal this false conformity will look, the less shocking this oppression will feel. 
For the children we are raising, the injustice of today could become the ordinary of tomorrow. 
They'll get used to this, and they, too, might begin to see anything different as dirty, something to be hated, something to be extinguished, like lights to be put out, one by one, until darkness becomes a way of life. 
However, if I today, then you tomorrow, maybe even more of us someday, if we embrace our right to look like ourselves, then in the world that's been violently whitewashed, we will become the pinpricks of color pushing through, much like those widows of Vrindavan. 
How then, with so many of us, will the crosshairs of a gun be able to pick out Karar, Malala, Alisha? 
Can they kill us all? 
The time is now to stand up, to stand out. 
Where sameness is safeness, with something as simple as what we wear, we can draw every eye to ourselves to say that there are differences in this world, and there always will be. 
Get used to it. 
And this we can say without a single word. 
Fashion can give us a language for dissent. 
It can give us courage. 
Fashion can let us literally wear our courage on our sleeves. 
So wear it. 
Wear it like armor. 
Wear it because it matters. 
And wear it because you matter. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There's a question I've been puzzling over and writing about for pretty much all of my adult life. 
Why do some large-scale crises jolt us awake and inspire us to change and evolve while others might jolt us a bit, but then it's back to sleep? 
Now, the kind of shocks I'm talking about are big -- a cataclysmic market crash, rising fascism, an industrial accident that poisons on a massive scale. 
Now, events like this can act like a collective alarm bell. 
Suddenly, we see a threat, we get organized. 
We discover strength and resolve that was previously unimaginable. 
It's as if we're no longer walking, but leaping. 
Except, our collective alarm seems to be busted. 
Faced with a crisis, we often fall apart, regress and that becomes a window for antidemocratic forces to push societies backwards, to become more unequal and more unstable. 
Ten years ago, I wrote about this backwards process and I called it the "Shock Doctrine." 
So what determines which road we navigate through crisis? 
Whether we grow up fast and find those strengths or whether we get knocked back. 
And I'd say this is a pressing question these days. 
Because things are pretty shocking out there. 
Record-breaking storms, drowning cities, record-breaking fires threatening to devour them, thousands of migrants disappearing beneath the waves. 
And openly supremacist movements rising, in many of our countries there are torches in the streets. 
And now there's no shortage of people who are sounding the alarm. 
But as a society, I don't think we can honestly say that we're responding with anything like the urgency that these overlapping crises demand from us. 
And yet, we know from history that it is possible for crisis to catalyze a kind of evolutionary leap. 
And one of the most striking examples of this progressive power of crisis is the Great Crash of 1929. 
There was the shock of the sudden market collapse followed by all of the aftershocks, the millions who lost everything thrown onto breadlines. 
And this was taken by many as a message that the system itself was broken. 
And many people listened and they leapt into action. 
In the United States and elsewhere, governments began to weave a safety net so that the next time there was a crash there would be programs like social security to catch people. 
There were huge job-creating public investments in housing, electrification and transit. 
And there was a wave of aggressive regulation to reign in the banks. 
Now, these reforms were far from perfect. 
In the US, African American workers, immigrants and women were largely excluded. 
But the Depression period, along with the transformation of allied nations and economies during the World War II effort, show us that it is possible for complex societies to rapidly transform themselves in the face of a collective threat. 
Now, when we tell this story of the 1929 Crash, that's usually the formula that it follows -- that there was a shock and it induced a wake-up call and that produced a leap to a safer place. 
Now, if that's really what it took, then why isn't it working anymore? 
Why do today's non-stop shocks -- why don't they spur us into action? 
Why don't they produce leaps? 
Especially when it comes to climate change. 
So I want to talk to you today about what I think is a much more complete recipe for deep transformation catalyzed by shocking events. 
And I'm going to focus on two key ingredients that usually get left out of the history books. 
One has to do with imagination, the other with organization. 
Because it's in the interplay between the two where revolutionary power lies. 
So let's start with imagination. 
The victories of the New Deal didn't happen just because suddenly everybody understood the brutalities of laissez-faire. 
This was a time, let's remember, of tremendous ideological ferment, when many different ideas about how to organize societies did battle with one another in the public square. 
A time when humanity dared to dream big about different kinds of futures, many of them organized along radically egalitarian lines. 
Now, not all of these ideas were good but this was an era of explosive imagining. 
This meant that the movements demanding change knew what they were against -- crushing poverty, widening inequality -- but just as important, they knew what they were for. 
They had their "no" and they had their "yes," too. 
They also had very different models of political organization than we do today. 
For decades, social and labor movements had been building up their membership bases, linking their causes together and increasing their strength. 
Which meant that by the time the Crash happened, there was already a movement that was large and broad enough to, for instance, stage strikes that didn't just shut down factories, but shut down entire cities. 
The big policy wins of the New Deal were actually offered as compromises. 
Because the alternative seemed to be revolution. 
So, let's adjust that equation from earlier. 
A shocking event plus utopian imagination plus movement muscle, that's how we get a real leap. 
So how does our present moment measure up? 
We are living, once again, at a time of extraordinary political engagements. 
Politics is a mass obsession. 
Progressive movements are growing and resisting with tremendous courage. 
And yet, we know from history that "no" is not enough. 
Now, there are some "yeses" out there that are emerging. 
And they're actually getting a lot bolder quickly. 
Where climate activists used to talk about changing light bulbs, now we're pushing for 100 percent of our energy to come from the sun, wind and waves, and to do it fast. 
Movements catalyzed by police violence against black bodies are calling for an end to militarized police, mass incarceration and even for reparations for slavery. 
Students are not just opposing tuition increases, but from Chile to Canada to the UK, they are calling for free tuition and debt cancellation. 
And yet, this still doesn't add up to the kind of holistic and universalist vision of a different world than our predecessors had. 
So why is that? 
Well, very often we think about political change in defined compartments these days. 
Environment in one box, inequality in another, racial and gender justice in a couple of other boxes, education over here, health over there. 
And within each compartment, there are thousands upon thousands of different groups and NGOs, each competing with one another for credit, name recognition and of course, resources. 
In other words, we act a lot like corporate brands. 
Now, this is often referred to as the problem of silos. 
Now, silos are understandable. 
They carve up our complex world into manageable chunks. 
They help us feel less overwhelmed. 
But in the process, they also train our brains to tune out when somebody else's issue comes up and when somebody else's issue needs our help and support. 
And they also keep us from seeing glaring connections between our issues. 
So for instance, the people fighting poverty and inequality rarely talk about climate change. 
Even though we see time and again that it's the poorest of people who are the most vulnerable to extreme weather. 
The climate change people rarely talk about war and occupation. 
Even though we know that the thirst for fossil fuels has been a major driver of conflict. 
The environmental movement has gotten better at pointing out that the nations that are getting hit hardest by climate change are populated overwhelmingly by black and brown people. 
But when black lives are treated as disposable in prisons, in schools and on the streets, these connections are too rarely made. 
The walls between our silos also means that our solutions, when they emerge, are also disconnected from each other. 
So progressives now have this long list of demands that I was mentioning earlier, those "yeses." 
But what we're still missing is that coherent picture of the world we're fighting for. 
What it looks like, what it feels like, and most of all, what its core values are. 
And that really matters. 
Because when large-scale crises hit us and we are confronted with the need to leap somewhere safer, there isn't any agreement on what that place is. 
And leaping without a destination looks a lot like jumping up and down. 
(Laughter) Fortunately, there are all kinds of conversations and experiments going on to try to overcome these divisions that are holding us back. 
And I want to finish by talking about one of them. 
A couple of years ago, a group of us in Canada decided that we were hitting the limits of what we could accomplish in our various silos. 
So we locked ourselves in a room for two days, and we tried to figure out what bound us together. 
In that room were people who rarely get face to face. 
There were indigenous elders with hipsters working on transit. 
There was the head of Greenpeace with a union leader representing oil workers and loggers. 
There were faith leaders and feminist icons and many more. 
And we gave ourselves a pretty ambitious assignment: agreeing on a short statement describing the world after we win. 
The world after we've already made the transition to a clean economy and a much fairer society. 
In other words, instead of trying to scare people about what will happen if we don't act, we decided to try to inspire them with what could happen if we did act. 
Sensible people are always telling us that change needs to come in small increments. 
That politics is the art of the possible and that we can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. 
Well, we rejected all of that. 
We wrote a manifesto, and we called it "The Leap." 
I have to tell you that agreeing on our common "yes" across such diversity of experiences and against a backdrop of a lot of painful history was not easy work. 
But it was also pretty thrilling. 
Because as soon as we gave ourselves permission to dream, those threads connecting much of our work became self-evident. 
We realized, for instance, that the bottomless quest for profits that is forcing so many people to work more than 50 hours a week, without security, and that is fueling this epidemic of despair is the same quest for bottomless profits and endless growth that is at the heart of our ecological crisis and is destabilizing our planet. 
It also became clear what we need to do. 
We need to create a culture of care-taking. 
In which no one and nowhere is thrown away. 
In which the inherent value of all people and every ecosystem is foundational. 
So we came up with this people's platform, and don't worry, I'm not going to read the whole thing to you out loud -- if you're interested, you can read it at theleap.org. 
But I will give you a taste of what we came up with. 
So we call for that 100 percent renewable economy in a hurry, but we went further. 
Calls for new kinds of trade deals, a robust debate on a guaranteed annual income, full rights for immigrant workers, getting corporate money out of politics, free universal day care, electoral reform and more. 
What we discovered is that a great many of us are looking for permission to act less like brands and more like movements. 
Because movements don't care about credit. 
They want good ideas to spread far and wide. 
What I love about The Leap is that it rejects the idea that there is this hierarchy of crisis, and it doesn't ask anyone to prioritize one struggle over another or wait their turn. 
And though it was birthed in Canada, we've discovered that it travels well. 
Since we launched, The Leap has been picked up around the world with similar platforms, being written from Nunavut to Australia, to Norway to the UK and the US, where it's gaining a lot of traction in cities like Los Angeles, where it's being localized. 
And also in rural communities that are traditionally very conservative, but where politics is failing the vast majority of people. 
Here's what I've learned from studying shocks and disasters for two decades. 
Crises test us. 
We either fall apart or we grow up fast. 
Finding new reserves of strength and capacity that we never knew we had. 
The shocking events that fill us with dread today can transform us, and they can transform the world for the better. 
But first we need to picture the world that we're fighting for. 
And we have to dream it up together. 
Right now, every alarm in our house is going off simultaneously. 
It's time to listen. 
It's time to leap. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

My students often ask me, "What is sociology?" 
And I tell them it's the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they don't see. 
And they say, "So, how can I be a sociologist? 
How can I understand those invisible forces?" 
And I say, "Empathy. 
Start with empathy. 
It all begins with empathy. 
Take yourself out of your shoes, put yourself into the shoes of another person." 
Here, I'll give you an example. 
So I imagine my life if, a hundred years ago, China had been the most powerful nation in the world and they came to the United States in search of coal. 
And they found it, and, in fact, they found lots of it right here. 
And pretty soon, they began shipping that coal, ton by ton, railcar by railcar, boatload by boatload, back to China and elsewhere around the world. 
And they got fabulously wealthy in doing so. 
And they built beautiful cities all powered on that coal. 
And back here in the United States, we saw economic despair, deprivation. 
This is what I saw. 
I saw people struggling to get by, not knowing what was what and what was next. 
And I asked myself the question: How is it possible that we could be so poor here in the United States, because coal is such a wealthy resource; it's so much money? 
And I realize: because the Chinese ingratiated themselves with a small ruling class here in the United States, who stole all of that money and all of that wealth for themselves. 
And the rest of us, the vast majority of us, struggle to get by. 
And the Chinese gave this small ruling elite loads of military weapons and sophisticated technology in order to ensure that people like me would not speak out against this relationship. 
Does this sound familiar? 
And they did things like train Americans to help protect the coal. 
And everywhere, there were symbols of the Chinese -- everywhere, a constant reminder. 
And back in China, what do they say in China? 
Nothing! They don't talk about us. They don't talk about the coal. 
If you ask them, they'll say, "Well, you know, we need the coal. 
I mean, come on, I'm not going to turn down my thermostat. 
You can't expect that." 
And so, I get angry, and I get pissed, as do lots of average people. 
And we fight back, and it gets really ugly. 
And the Chinese respond in a very ugly way. 
And before we know it, they send in the tanks and they send in the troops. 
And lots of people are dying. 
And it's a very, very difficult situation. 
Can you imagine what you would feel if you were in my shoes? 
Can you imagine walking out of this building and seeing a tank sitting out there, or a truck full of soldiers? 
Just imagine what you would feel, because you know why they're here; you know what they're doing here. 
If you can, that's empathy. That's empathy. 
You've left your shoes, and you've stood in mine. 
And you've got to feel that. 
OK, so that's the warm-up. 
Now we're going to have the real radical experiment. 
So, for the remainder of my talk, what I want you to do is put yourselves in the shoes of an ordinary Arab Muslim living in the Middle East -- in particular, in Iraq. 
And so to help you, perhaps you're a member of this middle-class family in Baghdad. 
What you want is the best for your kids. 
You want your kids to have a better life. 
And you watch the news, you pay attention. 
You read the newspaper, you go down to the coffee shop with your friends, you read the newspapers from around the world. 
Sometimes you even watch satellite, CNN, from the United States. 
You have a sense of what the Americans are thinking. 
But really, you just want a better life for yourself. 
That's what you want. 
You're Arab Muslim living in Iraq. 
You want a better life for yourself. 
So here, let me help you. 
Let me help you with some things that you might be thinking. 
Number one: this incursion into your land these past 20 years and before -- the reason anyone is interested in your land, and particularly the United States, is oil. 
It's all about oil; you know that, everybody knows that. 
People back in the United States know it's about oil. 
It's because somebody else has a design for your resource. 
It's your resource -- it's not somebody else's. 
It's your land; it's your resource. 
Somebody else has a design for it. 
And you know why they have a design? 
You know why they have their eyes set on it? 
Because they have an entire economic system that's dependent on that oil -- foreign oil, oil from other parts of the world that they don't own. 
And what else do you think about these people? 
The Americans, they're rich. 
Come on, they live in big houses, they have big cars. 
They all have blond hair, blue eyes. They're happy. 
You think that. It's not true, of course, but that's the media impression. 
And that's what you get. 
And they have big cities, and the cities are all dependent on oil. 
And back home, what do you see? 
Poverty, despair, struggle. 
I mean -- this is Iraq. 
This is what you see. 
You see people struggling to get by. 
It's not easy; you see a lot of poverty. 
These people have designs for your resource, and this is what you see? 
Something else you see that you talk about -- Americans don't talk about this, but you do -- there's this thing, this militarization of the world, and it's centered right in the United States. 
And the United States is responsible for almost one half of the world's military spending. 
Four percent of the world's population! 
It's part of your life. 
And you talk about it with your friends. 
You read about it. 
And back when Saddam Hussein was in power, the Americans didn't care about his crimes. 
When he was gassing the Kurds and gassing Iran, they didn't care about it. 
When oil was at stake, somehow, suddenly, things mattered. 
And what you see, something else: the United States, the hub of democracy around the world -- they don't seem to really be supporting democratic countries all around the world. 
There are a lot of countries, oil-producing countries, that aren't very democratic, but supported by the United States. 
That's odd. 
Oh -- these incursions, these two wars, the 10 years of sanctions, the eight years of occupation, the insurgency that's been unleashed on your people, the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths? 
All because of oil. 
You can't help but think that. 
You talk about it. 
It's in the forefront of your mind, always. 
You say, "How is that possible?" 
And this man, he's everyman -- your grandfather, your uncle, your father, your son, your neighbor, your professor, your student. 
Once a life of happiness and joy and suddenly, pain and sorrow. 
Everyone in your country has been touched by the violence, the bloodshed, the pain, the horror -- everybody. 
Not a single person in your country has not been touched. 
But there's something else. 
There's something else about these people, these Americans who are there. 
There's something else about them that you see that they don't see themselves. 
They're Christians. 
They worship the Christian God, they have crosses, they carry Bibles. 
Their Bibles have a little insignia that says "US Army" on them. 
And their leaders, their leaders: before they send their sons and daughters off to war in your country -- and you know the reason -- before they send them off, they go to a Christian church, and they pray to their Christian God, and they ask for protection and guidance from that god. 
Why? 
Well, obviously, when people die in the war, they are Muslims, they are Iraqis -- they're not Americans. 
You don't want Americans to die -- "Protect Our Troops." 
And you feel something about that -- of course you do. 
And they do wonderful things. 
You read about it, you hear about it. 
They're there to build schools and help people. 
That's what they want to do. 
They do wonderful things, but they also do the bad things, and you can't tell the difference. 
Here's a guy who says that your god is a false god. 
Your god's an idol; his god is the true god. 
The solution to the problem in the Middle East, according to him, is to convert you all to Christianity -- just get rid of your religion. 
And you know that. Americans don't read about this guy. 
You pass it around. You pass his words around. 
He was one of the leading commanders in the second invasion of Iraq. 
And you're thinking, "My God, if this guy is saying that, then all the soldiers must be saying that." 
And this word here -- George Bush called this war a crusade. 
Man, the Americans, they're just like, "Ah, crusade. 
Whatever. I don't know what that means." 
You know what it means -- it's a holy war against Muslims. 
Look, invade, subdue them, take their resources. 
If they won't submit, kill them. 
That's what this is about. 
This is frightening. 
And this man, Terry Jones: I mean here's a guy who wants to burn Qurans, right? 
And the Americans: "Ah, he's a knucklehead. 
He's a former hotel manager; he's got three dozen members of his church ..." 
They laugh him off. 
You don't laugh him off, because in the context of everything else, all the pieces fit. 
Of course this is how Americans think. 
So people all over the Middle East, not just in your country, are protesting. 
"He wants to burn Qurans, our holy book. 
These Christians -- who are these Christians? 
They're so evil, they're so mean -- this is what they're about?" 
This is what you're thinking as an Arab Muslim, as an Iraqi. 
And then your cousin says, "Hey coz, check out this website. 
You've got to see this -- Bible Boot Camp. 
These Christians are nuts! 
They're training their little kids to be soldiers for Jesus. 
They take little kids and run them through these things till they teach them how to say, 'Sir! Yes, sir!' and things like 'grenade toss' and 'weapons care and maintenance.' And go to the website -- it says 'US Army' right on it. 
I mean, these Christians, they're nuts. 
How can they do this to their little kids?" 
And you're reading this website. 
And of course, Christians in the United States, or anybody, says, "This is some little church in the middle of nowhere." 
You don't know that. 
It's all over the Web: "Bible Boot Camp." 
And look at this. 
They even teach their kids -- they train them in the same way the US Marines train. 
Isn't that interesting. 
And it scares you, and it frightens you. 
So these guys, you see them. 
You see, I, Sam Richards -- I know who these guys are. 
They're my students, my friends; I know what they're thinking. 
You don't know. 
When you see them, they're something else. 
They're something else. 
We don't see it that way in the United States, but you see it that way. 
So here. 
Of course, you've got it wrong. 
You're generalizing. It's wrong. 
You don't understand the Americans. 
It's not a Christian invasion. 
We're not just there for oil; we're there for lots of reasons. 
You have it wrong. You've missed it. 
And of course, most of you don't support the insurgency; you don't support killing Americans; you don't support the terrorists. 
Of course you don't. Very few people do. 
But -- some of you do. 
And this is a perspective. 
OK. So now, here's what we're going to do. 
Step outside of your shoes that you're in right now, and step back into your normal shoes. 
So everyone's back in the room. OK? 
Now here comes the radical experiment. 
So we're all back home. 
This photo: this woman -- man, I feel her. 
I feel her. 
She's my sister, my wife, my cousin, my neighbor. 
She's anybody to me. 
These guys standing there, everybody in the photo -- I feel this photo, man. 
So here's what I want you to do. 
Let's go back to my first example, of the Chinese. 
I want you to go there. 
It's all about coal, and the Chinese are here in the United States. 
What I want you to do is picture her as a Chinese woman receiving a Chinese flag because her loved one has died in America in the coal uprising. 
And the soldiers are Chinese, and everybody else is Chinese. 
As an American, how do you feel about this picture? 
What do you think about that scene? 
OK, try this. Bring it back. 
This is the scene here. 
It's an American, American soldiers, American woman who lost her loved one in the Middle East, in Iraq or Afghanistan. 
Now, put yourself in the shoes, go back to the shoes of an Arab Muslim living in Iraq. 
What are you feeling and thinking about this photo, about this woman? 
OK, now follow me on this, because I'm taking a big risk here. 
And so I'm going to invite you to take a risk with me. 
These gentlemen here, they're insurgents. 
They were caught by the American soldiers, trying to kill Americans. 
And maybe they succeeded. Maybe they succeeded. 
Put yourself in the shoes of the Americans who caught them. 
Can you feel the rage? 
Can you feel that you just want to take these guys and wring their necks? 
Can you go there? 
It shouldn't be that difficult. 
You just -- oh, man. 
Now, put yourself in their shoes. 
Are they brutal killers or patriotic defenders? 
Can you feel their anger, their fear, their rage at what has happened in their country? 
Can you imagine that maybe one of them, in the morning, bent down to their child and hugged their child and said, "Dear, I'll be back later. 
I'm going out to defend your freedom, your lives. 
I'm going out to look out for us, the future of our country." 
Can you imagine saying that? 
Can you go there? 
What do you think they're feeling? 
You see, that's empathy. 
[understand] Now, you might ask, "OK, Sam, so why do you do this sort of thing? 
Why would you use this example of all examples?" 
You're allowed to hate these people. 
You're allowed to just hate them with every fiber of your being. 
And if I can get you to step into their shoes and walk an inch -- one tiny inch -- then imagine the kind of sociological analysis that you can do in all other aspects of your life. 
You can walk a mile when it comes to understanding why that person's driving 40 miles per hour in the passing lane; or your teenage son; or your neighbor who annoys you by cutting his lawn on Sunday mornings. 
Whatever it is, you can go so far. 
And this is what I tell my students: step outside of your tiny, little world. 
Step inside of the tiny, little world of somebody else. 
And then do it again and do it again and do it again. 
And suddenly, all these tiny, little worlds, they come together in this complex web. 
And they build a big, complex world. 
And suddenly, without realizing it, you're seeing the world differently. 
Everything has changed. 
Everything in your life has changed. 
And that's, of course, what this is about. 
Attend to other lives, other visions. 
Listen to other people, enlighten ourselves. 
I'm not saying that I support the terrorists in Iraq. 
But as a sociologist, what I am saying is: I understand. 
And now perhaps -- perhaps -- you do, too. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So it's 1995, I'm in college, and a friend and I go on a road trip from Providence, Rhode Island to Portland, Oregon. 
And you know, we're young and unemployed, so we do the whole thing on back roads through state parks and national forests -- basically the longest route we can possibly take. 
And somewhere in the middle of South Dakota, I turn to my friend and I ask her a question that's been bothering me for 2,000 miles. 
"What's up with the Chinese character I keep seeing by the side of the road?" 
My friend looks at me totally blankly. 
There's actually a gentleman in the front row who's doing a perfect imitation of her look. 
(Laughter) And I'm like, "You know, all the signs we keep seeing with the Chinese character on them." 
She just stares at me for a few moments, and then she cracks up, because she figures out what I'm talking about. 
And what I'm talking about is this. 
(Laughter) Right, the famous Chinese character for picnic area. 
(Laughter) I've spent the last five years of my life thinking about situations exactly like this -- why we sometimes misunderstand the signs around us, and how we behave when that happens, and what all of this can tell us about human nature. 
In other words, as you heard Chris say, I've spent the last five years thinking about being wrong. 
This might strike you as a strange career move, but it actually has one great advantage: no job competition. 
(Laughter) In fact, most of us do everything we can to avoid thinking about being wrong, or at least to avoid thinking about the possibility that we ourselves are wrong. 
We get it in the abstract. 
We all know everybody in this room makes mistakes. 
The human species, in general, is fallible -- okay fine. 
But when it comes down to me, right now, to all the beliefs I hold, here in the present tense, suddenly all of this abstract appreciation of fallibility goes out the window -- and I can't actually think of anything I'm wrong about. 
And the thing is, the present tense is where we live. 
We go to meetings in the present tense; we go on family vacations in the present tense; we go to the polls and vote in the present tense. 
So effectively, we all kind of wind up traveling through life, trapped in this little bubble of feeling very right about everything. 
I think this is a problem. 
I think it's a problem for each of us as individuals, in our personal and professional lives, and I think it's a problem for all of us collectively as a culture. 
So what I want to do today is, first of all, talk about why we get stuck inside this feeling of being right. 
And second, why it's such a problem. 
And finally, I want to convince you that it is possible to step outside of that feeling and that if you can do so, it is the single greatest moral, intellectual and creative leap you can make. 
So why do we get stuck in this feeling of being right? 
One reason, actually, has to do with a feeling of being wrong. 
So let me ask you guys something -- or actually, let me ask you guys something, because you're right here: How does it feel -- emotionally -- how does it feel to be wrong? 
Dreadful. Thumbs down. 
Embarrassing. Okay, wonderful, great. 
Dreadful, thumbs down, embarrassing -- thank you, these are great answers, but they're answers to a different question. 
You guys are answering the question: How does it feel to realize you're wrong? 
(Laughter) Realizing you're wrong can feel like all of that and a lot of other things, right? 
I mean it can be devastating, it can be revelatory, it can actually be quite funny, like my stupid Chinese character mistake. 
But just being wrong doesn't feel like anything. 
I'll give you an analogy. 
Do you remember that Loony Tunes cartoon where there's this pathetic coyote who's always chasing and never catching a roadrunner? 
In pretty much every episode of this cartoon, there's a moment where the coyote is chasing the roadrunner and the roadrunner runs off a cliff, which is fine -- he's a bird, he can fly. 
But the thing is, the coyote runs off the cliff right after him. 
And what's funny -- at least if you're six years old -- is that the coyote's totally fine too. 
He just keeps running -- right up until the moment that he looks down and realizes that he's in mid-air. 
That's when he falls. 
When we're wrong about something -- not when we realize it, but before that -- we're like that coyote after he's gone off the cliff and before he looks down. 
You know, we're already wrong, we're already in trouble, but we feel like we're on solid ground. 
So I should actually correct something I said a moment ago. 
It does feel like something to be wrong; it feels like being right. 
(Laughter) So this is one reason, a structural reason, why we get stuck inside this feeling of rightness. 
I call this error blindness. 
Most of the time, we don't have any kind of internal cue to let us know that we're wrong about something, until it's too late. 
But there's a second reason that we get stuck inside this feeling as well -- and this one is cultural. 
Think back for a moment to elementary school. 
You're sitting there in class, and your teacher is handing back quiz papers, and one of them looks like this. 
This is not mine, by the way. 
(Laughter) So there you are in grade school, and you know exactly what to think about the kid who got this paper. 
It's the dumb kid, the troublemaker, the one who never does his homework. 
So by the time you are nine years old, you've already learned, first of all, that people who get stuff wrong are lazy, irresponsible dimwits -- and second of all, that the way to succeed in life is to never make any mistakes. 
We learn these really bad lessons really well. 
And a lot of us -- and I suspect, especially a lot of us in this room -- deal with them by just becoming perfect little A students, perfectionists, over-achievers. 
Right, Mr. CFO, astrophysicist, ultra-marathoner? 
(Laughter) You're all CFO, astrophysicists, ultra-marathoners, it turns out. 
Okay, so fine. 
Except that then we freak out at the possibility that we've gotten something wrong. 
Because according to this, getting something wrong means there's something wrong with us. 
So we just insist that we're right, because it makes us feel smart and responsible and virtuous and safe. 
So let me tell you a story. 
A couple of years ago, a woman comes into Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center for a surgery. 
Beth Israel's in Boston. 
It's the teaching hospital for Harvard -- one of the best hospitals in the country. 
So this woman comes in and she's taken into the operating room. 
She's anesthetized, the surgeon does his thing -- stitches her back up, sends her out to the recovery room. 
Everything seems to have gone fine. 
And she wakes up, and she looks down at herself, and she says, "Why is the wrong side of my body in bandages?" 
Well the wrong side of her body is in bandages because the surgeon has performed a major operation on her left leg instead of her right one. 
When the vice president for health care quality at Beth Israel spoke about this incident, he said something very interesting. 
He said, "For whatever reason, the surgeon simply felt that he was on the correct side of the patient." 
(Laughter) The point of this story is that trusting too much in the feeling of being on the correct side of anything can be very dangerous. 
This internal sense of rightness that we all experience so often is not a reliable guide to what is actually going on in the external world. 
And when we act like it is, and we stop entertaining the possibility that we could be wrong, well that's when we end up doing things like dumping 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, or torpedoing the global economy. 
So this is a huge practical problem. 
But it's also a huge social problem. 
Think for a moment about what it means to feel right. 
It means that you think that your beliefs just perfectly reflect reality. 
And when you feel that way, you've got a problem to solve, which is, how are you going to explain all of those people who disagree with you? 
It turns out, most of us explain those people the same way, by resorting to a series of unfortunate assumptions. 
The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is we just assume they're ignorant. 
They don't have access to the same information that we do, and when we generously share that information with them, they're going to see the light and come on over to our team. 
When that doesn't work, when it turns out those people have all the same facts that we do and they still disagree with us, then we move on to a second assumption, which is that they're idiots. 
(Laughter) They have all the right pieces of the puzzle, and they are too moronic to put them together correctly. 
And when that doesn't work, when it turns out that people who disagree with us have all the same facts we do and are actually pretty smart, then we move on to a third assumption: they know the truth, and they are deliberately distorting it for their own malevolent purposes. 
So this is a catastrophe. 
This attachment to our own rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to and causes us to treat each other terribly. 
But to me, what's most baffling and most tragic about this is that it misses the whole point of being human. 
It's like we want to imagine that our minds are just these perfectly translucent windows and we just gaze out of them and describe the world as it unfolds. 
And we want everybody else to gaze out of the same window and see the exact same thing. 
That is not true, and if it were, life would be incredibly boring. 
The miracle of your mind isn't that you can see the world as it is. 
It's that you can see the world as it isn't. 
We can remember the past, and we can think about the future, and we can imagine what it's like to be some other person in some other place. 
And we all do this a little differently, which is why we can all look up at the same night sky and see this and also this and also this. 
And yeah, it is also why we get things wrong. 
1,200 years before Descartes said his famous thing about "I think therefore I am," this guy, St. Augustine, sat down and wrote "Fallor ergo sum" -- "I err therefore I am." 
Augustine understood that our capacity to screw up, it's not some kind of embarrassing defect in the human system, something we can eradicate or overcome. 
It's totally fundamental to who we are. 
Because, unlike God, we don't really know what's going on out there. 
And unlike all of the other animals, we are obsessed with trying to figure it out. 
To me, this obsession is the source and root of all of our productivity and creativity. 
Last year, for various reasons, I found myself listening to a lot of episodes of the Public Radio show This American Life. 
And so I'm listening and I'm listening, and at some point, I start feeling like all the stories are about being wrong. 
And my first thought was, "I've lost it. 
I've become the crazy wrongness lady. 
I just imagined it everywhere," which has happened. 
But a couple of months later, I actually had a chance to interview Ira Glass, who's the host of the show. 
And I mentioned this to him, and he was like, "No actually, that's true. 
In fact," he says, "as a staff, we joke that every single episode of our show has the same crypto-theme. 
And the crypto-theme is: 'I thought this one thing was going to happen and something else happened instead.' And the thing is," says Ira Glass, "we need this. 
We need these moments of surprise and reversal and wrongness to make these stories work." 
And for the rest of us, audience members, as listeners, as readers, we eat this stuff up. 
We love things like plot twists and red herrings and surprise endings. 
When it comes to our stories, we love being wrong. 
But, you know, our stories are like this because our lives are like this. 
We think this one thing is going to happen and something else happens instead. 
George Bush thought he was going to invade Iraq, find a bunch of weapons of mass destruction, liberate the people and bring democracy to the Middle East. 
And something else happened instead. 
And Hosni Mubarak thought he was going to be the dictator of Egypt for the rest of his life, until he got too old or too sick and could pass the reigns of power onto his son. 
And something else happened instead. 
And maybe you thought you were going to grow up and marry your high school sweetheart and move back to your hometown and raise a bunch of kids together. 
And something else happened instead. 
And I have to tell you that I thought I was writing an incredibly nerdy book about a subject everybody hates for an audience that would never materialize. 
And something else happened instead. 
(Laughter) I mean, this is life. 
For good and for ill, we generate these incredible stories about the world around us, and then the world turns around and astonishes us. 
No offense, but this entire conference is an unbelievable monument to our capacity to get stuff wrong. 
We just spent an entire week talking about innovations and advancements and improvements, but you know why we need all of those innovations and advancements and improvements? 
Because half the stuff that's the most mind-boggling and world-altering -- TED 1998 -- eh. 
(Laughter) Didn't really work out that way, did it? 
(Laughter) Where's my jet pack, Chris? 
(Laughter) (Applause) So here we are again. 
And that's how it goes. 
We come up with another idea. 
We tell another story. 
We hold another conference. 
The theme of this one, as you guys have now heard seven million times, is the rediscovery of wonder. 
And to me, if you really want to rediscover wonder, you need to step outside of that tiny, terrified space of rightness and look around at each other and look out at the vastness and complexity and mystery of the universe and be able to say, "Wow, I don't know. 
Maybe I'm wrong." 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you guys. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

I decided when I was asked to do this that what I really wanted to talk about was my friend, Richard Feynman. 
I was one of the fortunate few that really did get to know him and enjoyed his presence. 
And I'm going to tell you about the Richard Feynman that I knew. 
I'm sure there are people here who could tell you about the Richard Feynman they knew, and it would probably be a different Richard Feynman. 
He was a man of many, many parts. 
He was, of course, foremost, a very, very, very great scientist. 
He was an actor. You saw him act. 
I also had the good fortune to be in those lectures, up in the balcony. 
They were fantastic. 
He was a philosopher. 
He was a drum player. 
He was a teacher par excellence. 
Richard Feynman was also a showman, an enormous showman. 
He was full of macho, a kind of macho one-upmanship. 
He loved intellectual battle. 
He had a gargantuan ego. 
But the man had, somehow, a lot of room at the bottom. 
And what I mean by that is a lot of room, in my case -- I can't speak for anybody else, but in my case -- a lot of room for another big ego. 
Well, not as big as his, but fairly big. 
I always felt good with Dick Feynman. 
It was always fun to be with him. 
He always made me feel smart. 
How can somebody like that make you feel smart? 
He made me feel smart. He made me feel he was smart. 
He made me feel we were both smart, and the two of us could solve any problem whatever. 
And in fact, we did sometimes do physics together. 
We never published a paper together, but we did have a lot of fun. 
He loved to win, win these little macho games we would sometimes play. 
And he didn't only play them with me, but with all sorts of people. 
He would almost always win. 
But when he didn't win, when he lost, he would laugh and seem to have just as much fun as if he had won. 
I remember once he told me a story about a joke the students played on him. 
I think it was for his birthday -- they took him for lunch to a sandwich place in Pasadena. 
It may still exist; I don't know. 
Celebrity sandwiches was their thing. 
You could get a Marilyn Monroe sandwich. 
You could get a Humphrey Bogart sandwich. 
The students went there in advance, and arranged that they'd all order Feynman sandwiches. 
One after another, they came in and ordered Feynman sandwiches. 
Feynman loved this story. 
He told me this story, and he was really happy and laughing. 
When he finished the story, I said to him, "Dick, I wonder what would be the difference between a Feynman sandwich and a Susskind sandwich." 
And without skipping a beat at all, he said, "Well, they'd be about the same. 
The only difference is a Susskind sandwich would have a lot more ham." 
"Ham" as in bad actor. 
(Laughter) Well, I happened to have been very quick that day, and I said, "Yeah, but a lot less baloney." 
(Laughter) (Applause) The truth of the matter is that a Feynman sandwich had a load of ham, but absolutely no baloney. 
What Feynman hated worse than anything else was intellectual pretense -- phoniness, false sophistication, jargon. 
I remember sometime during the mid-'80s, Dick and I and Sidney Coleman would meet a couple of times up in San Francisco -- at some very rich guy's house -- up in San Francisco for dinner. 
And the last time the rich guy invited us, he also invited a couple of philosophers. 
These guys were philosophers of mind. 
Their specialty was the philosophy of consciousness. 
And they were full of all kinds of jargon. 
I'm trying to remember the words -- "monism," "dualism," categories all over the place. 
I didn't know what those meant, neither did Dick or Sydney, for that matter. 
And what did we talk about? 
Well, what do you talk about when you talk about minds? 
There's one obvious thing to talk about: Can a machine become a mind? 
Can you build a machine that thinks like a human being that is conscious? 
We sat around and talked about this -- we of course never resolved it. 
But the trouble with the philosophers is that they were philosophizing when they should have been science-ophizing. 
It's a scientific question, after all. 
And this was a very, very dangerous thing to do around Dick Feynman. 
(Laughter) Feynman let them have it -- both barrels, right between the eyes. 
It was brutal; it was funny -- ooh, it was funny. 
But it was really brutal. 
He really popped their balloon. 
But the amazing thing was -- Feynman had to leave a little early; he wasn't feeling too well, so he left a little bit early. 
And Sidney and I were left there with the two philosophers. 
And the amazing thing is these guys were flying. 
They were so happy. 
They had met the great man; they had been instructed by the great man; they had an enormous amount of fun having their faces shoved in the mud ... 
And it was something special. 
I realized there was something just extraordinary about Feynman, even when he did what he did. 
Dick -- he was my friend; I did call him Dick -- Dick and I had a little bit of a rapport. 
I think it may have been a special rapport that he and I had. 
We liked each other; we liked the same kind of things. 
I also like the intellectual macho games. 
Sometimes I would win, mostly he would win, but we both enjoyed them. 
And Dick became convinced at some point that he and I had some kind of similarity of personality. 
I don't think he was right. 
I think the only point of similarity between us is we both like to talk about ourselves. 
But he was convinced of this. 
And the man was incredibly curious. 
And he wanted to understand what it was and why it was that there was this funny connection. 
And one day, we were walking. 
We were in France, in Les Houches. 
We were up in the mountains, 1976. 
And Feynman said to me, "Leonardo ..." 
The reason he called me "Leonardo" is because we were in Europe, and he was practicing his French. 
(Laughter) And he said, "Leonardo, were you closer to your mother or your father when you were a kid?" 
I said, "Well, my real hero was my father. 
He was a working man, had a fifth-grade education. 
He was a master mechanic, and he taught me how to use tools. 
He taught me all sorts of things about mechanical things. 
He even taught me the Pythagorean theorem. 
He didn't call it the hypotenuse, he called it the shortcut distance." 
And Feynman's eyes just opened up. 
He went off like a lightbulb. 
And he said that he had had basically exactly the same relationship with his father. 
In fact, he had been convinced at one time that to be a good physicist, it was very important to have had that kind of relationship with your father. 
I apologize for the sexist conversation here, but this is the way it really happened. 
He said he had been absolutely convinced that this was necessary, a necessary part of the growing up of a young physicist. 
Being Dick, he, of course, wanted to check this. 
He wanted to go out and do an experiment. 
(Laughter) Well, he did. 
He went out and did an experiment. 
He asked all his friends that he thought were good physicists, "Was it your mom or your pop that influenced you?" 
They were all men, and to a man, every single one of them said, "My mother." 
(Laughter) There went that theory, down the trash can of history. 
(Laughter) But he was very excited that he had finally met somebody who had the same experience with his father as he had with his father. 
And for some time, he was convinced this was the reason we got along so well. 
I don't know. Maybe. Who knows? 
But let me tell you a little bit about Feynman the physicist. 
Feynman's style -- no, "style" is not the right word. 
"Style" makes you think of the bow tie he might have worn, or the suit he was wearing. 
It's something much deeper than that, but I can't think of another word for it. 
Feynman's scientific style was always to look for the simplest, most elementary solution to a problem that was possible. 
If it wasn't possible, you had to use something fancier. 
No doubt, part of this was his great joy and pleasure in showing people that he could think more simply than they could. 
But he also deeply believed, he truly believed, that if you couldn't explain something simply, you didn't understand it. 
In the 1950s, people were trying to figure out how superfluid helium worked. 
There was a theory. 
It was a complicated theory; I'll tell you what it was soon enough. 
It was a terribly complicated theory, full of very difficult integrals and formulas and mathematics and so forth. 
And it sort of worked, but it didn't work very well. 
The only way it worked is when the helium atoms were very, very far apart. 
And unfortunately, the helium atoms in liquid helium are right on top of each other. 
Feynman decided, as a sort of amateur helium physicist, that he would try to figure it out. 
He had an idea, a very clear idea. 
He would try to figure out what the quantum wave function of this huge number of atoms looked like. 
He would try to visualize it, guided by a small number of simple principles. 
The small number of simple principles were very, very simple. 
The first one was that when helium atoms touch each other, they repel. 
The implication of that is that the wave function has to go to zero, it has to vanish when the helium atoms touch each other. 
The other fact is that in the ground state -- the lowest energy state of a quantum system -- the wave function is always very smooth; it has the minimum number of wiggles. 
So he sat down -- and I imagine he had nothing more than a simple piece of paper and a pencil -- and he tried to write down, and did write down, the simplest function that he could think of, which had the boundary conditions that the wave function vanish when things touch and is smooth in between. 
He wrote down a simple thing -- so simple, in fact, that I suspect a really smart high-school student who didn't even have calculus could understand what he wrote down. 
The thing was, that simple thing that he wrote down explained everything that was known at the time about liquid helium, and then some. 
I've always wondered whether the professionals -- the real professional helium physicists -- were just a little bit embarrassed by this. 
They had their super-powerful technique, and they couldn't do as well. 
Incidentally, I'll tell you what that super-powerful technique was. 
It was the technique of Feynman diagrams. 
(Laughter) He did it again in 1968. 
In 1968, in my own university -- I wasn't there at the time -- they were exploring the structure of the proton. 
The proton is obviously made of a whole bunch of little particles; this was more or less known. 
And the way to analyze it was, of course, Feynman diagrams. 
That's what Feynman diagrams were constructed for -- to understand particles. 
The experiments that were going on were very simple: you simply take the proton, and you hit it really sharply with an electron. 
This was the thing the Feynman diagrams were for. 
The only problem was that Feynman diagrams are complicated. 
They're difficult integrals. 
If you could do all of them, you would have a very precise theory, but you couldn't -- they were just too complicated. 
People were trying to do them. 
One loop, two loops -- maybe you could do a three-loop diagram, but beyond that, you couldn't do anything. 
Just think of the proton as an assemblage, a swarm, of little particles." 
He called them "partons." 
He said, "Just think of it as a swarm of partons moving real fast." 
Because they're moving real fast, relativity says the internal motions go very slow. 
The electron hits it suddenly -- it's like taking a very sudden snapshot of the proton. 
What do you see? 
They don't move, and because they don't move during the course of the experiment, you don't have to worry about how they're moving. 
You don't have to worry about the forces between them. 
You just get to think of it as a population of frozen partons." 
This was the key to analyzing these experiments. 
Extremely effective. 
Somebody said the word "revolution" is a bad word. 
I suppose it is, so I won't say "revolution," but it certainly evolved very, very deeply our understanding of the proton, and of particles beyond that. 
Well, I had some more that I was going to tell you about my connection with Feynman, what he was like, but I see I have exactly half a minute. 
So I think I'll just finish up by saying: I actually don't think Feynman would have liked this event. 
I think he would have said, "I don't need this." 
But ... 
How should we really honor Feynman? 
I think the answer is we should honor Feynman by getting as much baloney out of our own sandwiches as we can. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Zimmerman: We'd like to take you on a fantastic journey to visit the creatures we call the Elders. 
We call them the Elders because a half a billion years ago they tripled the amount of oxygen in the air, which led to an explosion of life, which led to all of us. 
We call them the Elders, but you probably know them as plankton. 
(Laughter) Now, Simone is a physicist, and I'm an inventor. 
A couple of years ago, I was giving a talk about an invention I made -- it was a 3D microscope. 
And Simone was in the audience. 
He realized that my microscope could solve a big problem he was having. 
Which was, how to measure the movement of plankton in 3D fast enough so he could mathematically model their sensing and behavior. 
And I frankly needed an application for my microscope, so ... 
(Laughter) It was like peanut butter meets chocolate. 
(Laughter) So we started working together, studying these amazing creatures. 
And then we were alarmed to discover something. 
And that's why we're here today. 
And I just want to do something with you. 
Now, please, just hold your breath for a second. 
Yes, literally hold your breath. 
This is the world without plankton. 
You see, plankton generate two-thirds of our oxygen using the sun. 
OK, now you can breathe, because they're still here. 
For now. 
Simone Bianco: As many of you know, since 1950, the average surface temperature of the earth has increased by one degree Centigrade due to all the carbon dioxide we are pumping into the air. 
Now, while this temperature increase may not seem like a big deal to us, it is to plankton. 
Indirect measurements have shown that the global phytoplankton population may have decreased by as much as 40 percent between 1950 and 2010 because of climate change. 
And you see, this is a problem also because it's starving the fish that eat them. 
And about a billion people around the world depend on fish as their primary source of protein from animals. 
So you see, this isn't just about breathing. 
No plankton means no fish. 
And that is a lot of food we will need to replace. 
There's something else that is interesting. 
The bodies of plankton's ancestors actually make up a for lot of the carbon we burn today. 
Which is kind of ironic, if you ask me. 
Because the plankton that are here today clean that carbon out of the air. 
But you see, they don't really hold a grudge. 
(Laughter) The problem is they cannot keep up with the tremendous amount of carbon we are dumping into the air. 
So what does all of this mean? 
Well, it means that our big carbon footprint is crushing the very creatures that sustain us. 
And yes, like Tom said, killing almost half of the creatures that allow us to breathe is a really big deal. 
So you're probably asking yourself: Why aren't we doing something about it? 
Our theory is that plankton are tiny, and it's really, really hard to care about something you cannot see. 
You see, there's a quote I really like in "The Little Prince" that goes, "What is essential is invisible to the eye." 
We really believe that if more people could come face to ... cilia with plankton, there is a greater chance we could all rally together and save these creatures that are so important to life on our planet. 
TZ: Exactly, Simone. 
So to do this, we're going to bring you scuba diving with plankton. 
But I just need to shrink you by a factor of 1000, to a scale where the diameter of a human hair is as big as my hand. 
And I happen to have invented a machine to do just that. 
SB: Anyone here remember "Fantastic Voyage" or "Innerspace?" 
Yeah, yeah. 
Martin Short is one of my all-time favorite actors. 
And now this -- this is just like that. 
When I was a boy, I saw "Fantastic Voyage," and I really loved how I could travel through the bloodstream and see biology work on a cellular level. 
I've always been inspired by science fiction. 
As an inventor, I try and turn fantasy into reality. 
And I once invented this glove which let me travel and help people like you explore the virtual world. 
So now I've invented this machine to let us explore the microscopic world. 
It's not virtual, it's real. 
Just really, really tiny. 
It's based on the microscope that got Simone's attention. 
So, here's how it works. 
I have an image sensor like the kind in your cell phone, behind the lens. 
And then I have a little tray of plankton water like you might find from a river or my fish tank, which I never change the water on. 
(Laughter) Because I love plankton. 
(Laughter) And underneath I have a light, an LED, which is going to cast shadows of the plankton on the image sensor. 
And now this silver thing is an XY plotter, so I can move the image sensor to follow the plankton as they swim. 
Now comes the fantasy part. 
(Laughter) I put a tilt sensor on this helmet so I can control the microscope with my head. 
And now let's look at the video from this image sensor. 
This is in that little tray, and with my head, I can move the microscope. 
So now we're ready to go scuba diving with plankton. 
My head will be the navigator, and Simone will be our tour guide. 
SB: Yes. 
(Laughter) So welcome all to the wonderful world of life in a drop of water. 
Actually, as you can see, with this instrument, we are not at all limited to a single drop. 
Alright, let's find something. 
The little creatures you see in the center of your screen, they are called rotifer. 
They are the garbage collectors of our waters. 
They break down organic matter and allow it to be reclaimed by the environment. 
Now, you know, nature is an amazing recycler. 
Structures are continuously built, they are decomposed and recycled, and all of that is powered by solar energy. 
Think about what will happen if, you know, our garbage collectors didn't come anymore, if they disappeared. 
Something else? Let's look for something else. 
Oh, look at that. 
You see the big ice-cream-cone-shaped things? 
Those are called Stentor, those are amazing creatures. 
You know, they are big, but they are a single cell. 
You remember the rotifer we just met? 
That's about half a millimeter, it's about 1,000 cells -- it's typically 15 for the brain, 15 for the stomach and you know, about the same for reproduction, which is kind of the right mix, if you ask me. 
(Laughter) But ... right? 
TZ: I agree. 
SB: But a Stentor is only a single cell. 
And it's able to sense and react to its environment. 
You see, it will swim forward when it's happy; it will swim backward when it's trying to get away from something like, you know, a toxic chemical. 
With our friends in the Center for Cellular Construction and the help of the National Science Foundation, we are using Stentor to sense the presence of contamination in food and water, which I think is really cool. 
Alright, last one. 
So the dots that you see there that are, let's say, behind everything, they're algae. 
They are the creatures that provide the majority of oxygen in the air. 
They convert solar light and carbon dioxide into the oxygen that is filling your lungs right now. 
So you see, we all got algae breath. 
TZ: (Exhales) SB: Yay! (Laughter) You know, there's something interesting. 
About a billion years ago, ancient plants got their photosynthesis capability by incorporating tiny, tiny plankton into their cells. 
That's exactly like us putting solar panels on top of our roofs. 
So you see, the microscopic world is even more amazing than science fiction. 
TZ: Oh, indeed. 
So now you've seen how vital plankton are to our lives and how much we need them. 
If we kill the plankton, we will die of asphyxiation or starvation, take your pick. 
Oh, yes, I know it's sad, yes. 
(Laughter) In the game of plankton, you win or you die. 
(Laughter) Now, what amazes me is, we have known about global warming for over a century. 
Ever since the Swedish scientist, Arrhenius, calculated the effect of burning fossil fuel on the earth's temperature. 
We've known about this for a long time, but it's not too late if we act now. 
Yes, yes, I know, I know, our world is based on fossil fuels, but we can adjust our society to run on renewable energy from the Sun to create a more sustainable and secure future. 
That's good for the little creatures here, the plankton, and that good for us -- here's why. 
The three greatest concerns of people all around the globe typically are jobs, violence and health. 
A job means food and shelter. 
Look at these creatures, they're swimming around, they're looking for a place to eat and reproduce. 
If a single cell is programmed to do that, it's no surprise that 30 trillion cells have the same agenda. 
Violence. 
Dependence on fossil fuels makes a country vulnerable. 
Which leads to conflicts all around the oil resources. 
Solar energy, on the other hand, is distributed around the whole globe, and no one can blockade the sun. 
(Laughter) And then, finally, health. 
Fossil fuels are like a global cigarette. 
And in my opinion, coal is like an unfiltered type. 
Now, just like smoking, the best time to quit is when? 
Audience: Now. 
TZ: Now! Not when you get lung cancer. 
Now I know if you look around, some people may abandon facts and reason. 
Only until suffering -- (Laughter) Yes, they will abandon facts and reason. 
But suffering will eventually and inevitably force change. 
But let's instead use our neocortex, our new brain, to save the Elders, some of the oldest creatures on the earth. 
And let's apply science to harness the energy that has fueled the Elders for millions of years -- the sun. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I love the Internet. 
It's true. 
Think about everything it has brought us. 
Think about all the services we use, all the connectivity, all the entertainment, all the business, all the commerce. 
And it's happening during our lifetimes. 
I'm pretty sure that one day we'll be writing history books hundreds of years from now. This time our generation will be remembered as the generation that got online, the generation that built something really and truly global. 
But yes, it's also true that the Internet has problems, very serious problems, problems with security and problems with privacy. 
I've spent my career fighting these problems. 
So let me show you something. 
This here is Brain. 
This is a floppy disk -- five and a quarter-inch floppy disk infected by Brain.A. 
It's the first virus we ever found for PC computers. 
And we actually know where Brain came from. 
We know because it says so inside the code. 
Let's take a look. 
All right. 
That's the boot sector of an infected floppy, and if we take a closer look inside, we'll see that right there, it says, "Welcome to the dungeon." 
And then it continues, saying, 1986, Basit and Amjad. 
And Basit and Amjad are first names, Pakistani first names. 
In fact, there's a phone number and an address in Pakistan. 
(Laughter) Now, 1986. 
Now it's 2011. 
That's 25 years ago. 
The PC virus problem is 25 years old now. 
So half a year ago, I decided to go to Pakistan myself. 
So let's see, here's a couple of photos I took while I was in Pakistan. 
This is from the city of Lahore, which is around 300 kilometers south from Abbottabad, where Bin Laden was caught. 
Here's a typical street view. 
And here's the street or road leading to this building, which is 730 Nizam block at Allama Iqbal Town. 
And I knocked on the door. 
(Laughter) You want to guess who opened the door? 
Basit and Amjad; they are still there. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So here standing up is Basit. 
Sitting down is his brother Amjad. 
These are the guys who wrote the first PC virus. 
Now of course, we had a very interesting discussion. 
I asked them why. 
I asked them how they feel about what they started. 
And I got some sort of satisfaction from learning that both Basit and Amjad had had their computers infected dozens of times by completely unrelated other viruses over these years. 
So there is some sort of justice in the world after all. 
Now, the viruses that we used to see in the 1980s and 1990s obviously are not a problem any more. 
So let me just show you a couple of examples of what they used to look like. 
What I'm running here is a system that enables me to run age-old programs on a modern computer. 
So let me just mount some drives. Go over there. 
What we have here is a list of old viruses. 
So let me just run some viruses on my computer. 
For example, let's go with the Centipede virus first. 
And you can see at the top of the screen, there's a centipede scrolling across your computer when you get infected by this one. 
You know that you're infected because it actually shows up. 
Here's another one. This is the virus called Crash, invented in Russia in 1992. 
Let me show you one which actually makes some sound. 
(Siren noise) And the last example, guess what the Walker virus does? 
Yes, there's a guy walking across your screen once you get infected. 
So it used to be fairly easy to know that you're infected by a virus, when the viruses were written by hobbyists and teenagers. 
Today, they are no longer being written by hobbyists and teenagers. 
Today, viruses are a global problem. 
What we have here in the background is an example of our systems that we run in our labs, where we track virus infections worldwide. 
So we can actually see in real time that we've just blocked viruses in Sweden and Taiwan and Russia and elsewhere. 
In fact, if I just connect back to our lab systems through the Web, we can see in real time just some kind of idea of how many viruses, how many new examples of malware we find every single day. 
Here's the latest virus we've found, in a file called Server.exe. 
And we found it right over here three seconds ago -- the previous one, six seconds ago. 
And if we just scroll around, it's just massive. 
We find tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands. 
And that's the last 20 minutes of malware every single day. 
So where are all these coming from then? 
Well today, it's the organized criminal gangs writing these viruses because they make money with their viruses. 
It's gangs like -- let's go to GangstaBucks.com. 
This is a website operating in Moscow where these guys are buying infected computers. 
So if you are a virus writer and you're capable of infecting Windows computers, but you don't know what to do with them, you can sell those infected computers -- somebody else's computers -- to these guys. 
And they'll actually pay you money for those computers. 
So how do these guys then monetize those infected computers? 
Well there's multiple different ways, such as banking trojans, which will steal money from your online banking accounts when you do online banking, or keyloggers. 
Keyloggers silently sit on your computer, hidden from view, and they record everything you type. 
So you're sitting on your computer and you're doing Google searches. 
Every single Google search you type is saved and sent to the criminals. 
Every single email you write is saved and sent to the criminals. 
Same thing with every single password and so on. 
But the thing that they're actually looking for most are sessions where you go online and do online purchases in any online store. 
Because when you do purchases in online stores, you will be typing in your name, the delivery address, your credit card number and the credit card security codes. 
And here's an example of a file we found from a server a couple of weeks ago. 
That's the credit card number, that's the expiration date, that's the security code, and that's the name of the owner of the card. 
Once you gain access to other people's credit card information, you can just go online and buy whatever you want with this information. 
And that, obviously, is a problem. 
We now have a whole underground marketplace and business ecosystem built around online crime. 
One example of how these guys actually are capable of monetizing their operations: we go and have a look at the pages of INTERPOL and search for wanted persons. 
We find guys like Bjorn Sundin, originally from Sweden, and his partner in crime, also listed on the INTERPOL wanted pages, Mr. Shaileshkumar Jain, a U.S. citizen. 
These guys were running an operation called I.M.U., a cybercrime operation through which they netted millions. 
They are both right now on the run. 
Nobody knows where they are. 
U.S. officials, just a couple of weeks ago, froze a Swiss bank account belonging to Mr. Jain, and that bank account had 14.9 million U.S. dollars on it. 
So the amount of money online crime generates is significant. 
And that means that the online criminals can actually afford to invest into their attacks. 
We know that online criminals are hiring programmers, hiring testing people, testing their code, having back-end systems with SQL databases. 
And they can afford to watch how we work -- like how security people work -- and try to work their way around any security precautions we can build. 
They also use the global nature of Internet to their advantage. 
I mean, the Internet is international. 
That's why we call it the Internet. 
And if you just go and take a look at what's happening in the online world, here's a video built by Clarified Networks, which illustrates how one single malware family is able to move around the world. 
This operation, believed to be originally from Estonia, moves around from one country to another as soon as the website is tried to shut down. 
So you just can't shut these guys down. 
They will switch from one country to another, from one jurisdiction to another -- moving around the world, using the fact that we don't have the capability to globally police operations like this. 
So the Internet is as if someone would have given free plane tickets to all the online criminals of the world. 
Now, criminals who weren't capable of reaching us before can reach us. 
So how do you actually go around finding online criminals? 
How do you actually track them down? 
Let me give you an example. 
What we have here is one exploit file. 
Here, I'm looking at the Hex dump of an image file, which contains an exploit. 
And that basically means, if you're trying to view this image file on your Windows computer, it actually takes over your computer and runs code. 
Now, if you'll take a look at this image file -- well there's the image header, and there the actual code of the attack starts. 
And that code has been encrypted, so let's decrypt it. 
It has been encrypted with XOR function 97. 
You just have to believe me, it is, it is. 
And we can go here and actually start decrypting it. 
Well the yellow part of the code is now decrypted. 
And I know, it doesn't really look much different from the original. 
But just keep staring at it. 
You'll actually see that down here you can see a Web address: unionseek.com/d/ioo.exe And when you view this image on your computer it actually is going to download and run that program. 
And that's a backdoor which will take over your computer. 
But even more interestingly, if we continue decrypting, we'll find this mysterious string, which says O600KO78RUS. 
That code is there underneath the encryption as some sort of a signature. 
It's not used for anything. 
And I was looking at that, trying to figure out what it means. 
So obviously I Googled for it. 
I got zero hits; wasn't there. 
So I spoke with the guys at the lab. 
And we have a couple of Russian guys in our labs, and one of them mentioned, well, it ends in RUS like Russia. 
And 78 is the city code for the city of St. Petersburg. 
For example, you can find it from some phone numbers and car license plates and stuff like that. 
So I went looking for contacts in St. Petersburg, and through a long road, we eventually found this one particular website. 
Here's this Russian guy who's been operating online for a number of years who runs his own website, and he runs a blog under the popular Live Journal. 
And on this blog, he blogs about his life, about his life in St. Petersburg -- he's in his early 20s -- about his cat, about his girlfriend. 
And he drives a very nice car. 
In fact, this guy drives a Mercedes-Benz S600 V12 with a six-liter engine with more than 400 horsepower. 
Now that's a nice car for a 20-something year-old kid in St. Petersburg. 
How do I know about this car? 
Because he blogged about the car. 
He actually had a car accident. 
In downtown St. Petersburg, he actually crashed his car into another car. 
And he put blogged images about the car accident -- that's his Mercedes -- right here is the Lada Samara he crashed into. 
And you can actually see that the license plate of the Samara ends in 78RUS. 
And if you actually take a look at the scene picture, you can see that the plate of the Mercedes is O600KO78RUS. 
Now I'm not a lawyer, but if I would be, this is where I would say, "I rest my case." 
(Laughter) So what happens when online criminals are caught? 
Well in most cases it never gets this far. 
The vast majority of the online crime cases, we don't even know which continent the attacks are coming from. 
And even if we are able to find online criminals, quite often there is no outcome. 
The local police don't act, or if they do, there's not enough evidence, or for some reason we can't take them down. 
I wish it would be easier; unfortunately it isn't. 
But things are also changing at a very rapid pace. 
You've all heard about things like Stuxnet. 
So if you look at what Stuxnet did is that it infected these. 
That's a Siemens S7-400 PLC, programmable logic [controller]. 
And this is what runs our infrastructure. 
This is what runs everything around us. 
PLC's, these small boxes which have no display, no keyboard, which are programmed, are put in place, and they do their job. 
For example, the elevators in this building most likely are controlled by one of these. 
And when Stuxnet infects one of these, that's a massive revolution on the kinds of risks we have to worry about. 
Because everything around us is being run by these. 
I mean, we have critical infrastructure. 
You go to any factory, any power plant, any chemical plant, any food processing plant, you look around -- everything is being run by computers. 
Everything is being run by computers. 
Everything is reliant on these computers working. 
We have become very reliant on Internet, on basic things like electricity, obviously, on computers working. 
And this really is something which creates completely new problems for us. 
We must have some way of continuing to work even if computers fail. 
(Laughter) (Applause) So preparedness means that we can do stuff even when the things we take for granted aren't there. 
It's actually very basic stuff -- thinking about continuity, thinking about backups, thinking about the things that actually matter. 
Now I told you -- (Laughter) I love the Internet. I do. 
Think about all the services we have online. 
Think about if they are taken away from you, if one day you don't actually have them for some reason or another. 
I see beauty in the future of the Internet, but I'm worried that we might not see that. 
I'm worried that we are running into problems because of online crime. 
Online crime is the one thing that might take these things away from us. 
(Laughter) I've spent my life defending the Net, and I do feel that if we don't fight online crime, we are running a risk of losing it all. 
We have to do this globally, and we have to do it right now. 
What we need is more global, international law enforcement work to find online criminal gangs -- these organized gangs that are making millions out of their attacks. 
That's much more important than running anti-viruses or running firewalls. 
What actually matters is actually finding the people behind these attacks, and even more importantly, we have to find the people who are about to become part of this online world of crime, but haven't yet done it. 
We have to find the people with the skills, but without the opportunities and give them the opportunities to use their skills for good. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 13, 2014 started as a routine Friday in Redemption Hospital in Monrovia, the capital of Liberia. 
Redemption is the largest free public health hospital in the city. 
We are called upon to serve hundreds of thousands of people. 
In the best of times it puts strain on our resources. 
Monthly supplies run out within weeks, and patients without beds would be seated in chairs. 
That summer, we had a nurse who had been sick for a while. 
Sick enough to be admitted in our hospital. 
But our treatment didn't seem to be helping her; her symptoms were getting worse: diarrhea, severe abdominal pain, fever and weakness. 
On that particular Friday, she developed severe respiratory distress, and her eyes were menacingly red. 
One of my fellow doctors, a general surgeon, became suspicious of her condition. 
He said her symptoms were suggestive of Ebola. 
We kept a close watch on her, we tried to help her. 
We were treating her for malaria, typhoid and gastroenteritis. 
We didn't know it, but by then it was too late. 
The next morning I walked in to check on my patient. 
I could tell by the look in her eyes that she was filled with fear. 
I gave her reassurance, but shortly after ... 
she died of Ebola. 
For me, her death was very personal. 
But this was just the beginning. 
A virtual biological bomb had exploded. 
But the word spread faster than the virus, and panic spread across the hospital. 
All the patients ran away. 
Then, all the nurses and doctors ran away. 
This was the beginning of our medical tsunami -- the devastating Ebola virus that left an indelible scar in our country's history. 
I was not trained for this. 
I had just graduated from medical school two years before. 
At this time, my total knowledge about Ebola came from a one-page article I had read in medical school. 
I perceived the disease as so dangerous, this one page in essence had convinced me to run out of the hospital, too, the moment I heard of a case of Ebola. 
But when it finally happened, I stayed on and decided to help. 
And so did several other brave health care professionals. 
But we would pay a heavy price. 
Many persons and health professionals had become high-risk contacts. 
This actually meant 21 days counting to potentially disease or death. 
Our health systems were fragile, our health workers lacked skills and training. 
So in the weeks and months that followed, health workers were disproportionately affected by the Ebola virus disease. 
More than 400 nurses, doctors and other health professionals became infected. 
Unfortunately, my friend, the general surgeon who correctly identified the symptoms in that first case became one of the casualties. 
On July 27, the president of Liberia imposed quarantine on the worst-affected areas. 
She closed all the schools and universities and shut down many public events. 
Four days later, the United States Peace Corps pulled out of Liberia, out of Sierra Leone and Guinea due to Ebola. 
In August, six weeks after the nurse died, hundreds of people were dying of the disease each week. 
People were dying in the streets. 
Over the months that followed, West Africa would lose thousands of people to Ebola virus disease. 
In August, I joined a team to set up the Ebola treatment unit at JFK hospital in Monrovia. 
I was charged with running the second Ebola treatment unit in the city. 
Our unit provided hope for thousands of patients, families and communities. 
I not only provided care, I came face to face with Ebola. 
Living every day as a high-risk Ebola virus disease contact during the worst of the outbreak was one of my worst experiences. 
I started counting 21 days every day. 
I lived every moment anticipating the onset of symptoms of the disease. 
I measured my body temperature several times. 
I showered with chlorinated water, more concentrated than actually recommended. 
I chlorinated my phones, my pants, my hands, my car. 
My clothes became bleached. 
Those days you were alone, people were so afraid of touching anybody. 
Everyone was counted as a potential contact. 
Touching would make them sick. 
I was stigmatized. 
But if that was what it was for me, who was symptom-free, imagine what it was for someone who actually had symptoms, someone who had Ebola. 
We learned that to treat Ebola successfully, we had to suspend some of the normal rules of society. 
Our president declared a state of emergency in August and suspended certain rights. 
And the national police even supported our work during the Ebola response. 
In February 2015, gang members came in for isolation in our Ebola isolation unit. 
They were also know as the VIP Boys of Monrovia, terrifying small-time drug addicts whose presence could instill a tremendous amount of fear, although they could not legally carry guns. 
They underwent quarantine for 21 days in our unit and were not arrested. 
We told the police, "If you arrest them here, they will stop coming, they won't get treated. 
And the Ebola virus will continue to spread." 
The police agreed, and we were able to treat the VIP Boys, and they did not have to worry about being arrested while in the unit. 
Over the course of the outbreak, West Africa had almost 29,000 cases. 
More than 11,000 people died. 
And that included 12 of my fine colleagues at John F. Kennedy hospital in Monrovia. 
In June 2016, exactly 23 months after my first Ebola patient died, Liberia declared its Ebola outbreak ended. 
We thought that once the outbreak ended, so did the problems. 
We hoped that life would go back to normal. 
Today, there are more than 17,000 survivors in West Africa. 
People who actually had Ebola virus disease, lived through it and survived. 
We counted survival rate as a success: the end of suffering for the patient and fulfilling joy for families. 
Every discharge from the unit was a moment of jubilation. 
At least so we thought. 
The best description of the moment of discharge and a rare glimpse into the moment that defines our life post-Ebola was vividly expressed in the words of my best friend and fellow doctor, Philip Ireland, in an interview with "The Times." 
He said at the time of his release, "There were a lot of people there from JFK hospital: my family, my elder brother, my wife was there. 
A lot of other doctors were there, too, and members of the media were there. 
And I felt like Nelson Mandela, it felt like the 'Long Walk to Freedom,' and I walked and raised my hands to the heaven, thanking God for saving my life." 
And Philip said, "Then I saw something else. 
There were a lot of crying people, people happy to see me. 
But when I got close to anybody, they backed away." 
For many Ebola survivors, society still seems to be backing away, even as they struggle to lead a normal life. 
For these survivors, life can be compared to another health emergency. 
They may suffer debilitating joint and body pain. 
The suffering gradually decays over time for most. 
However, many continue to bear intermittent pain. 
Some survivors are blind, others have neurological disabilities. 
Some survivors experience stigmatization every day, in many ways. 
A lot of children are orphans. 
Some survivors experience post-traumatic stress disorder. 
And some survivors lack opportunity for education. 
Even families can be split apart by fear of Ebola, too. 
There's no definitive cure for transmitting Ebola virus through sex. 
However, there are successful interventions for prevention. 
We have worked hard on semen testing, behavioral counseling, safe sex promotion and research. 
For the past year, there have been no cases of sexual transmission. 
But some male survivors have lost their spouses out of fear they will be infected with Ebola. 
That's how families are torn apart. 
Another tremendous challenge for Ebola survivors is obtaining adequate health care. 
In theory, Liberia's public health services are free of charge. 
In practice, our health system lacks the funding and capacity to expand care to all at the point of need. 
Many survivors have waited many months to undergo surgery to heal their blinding cataracts. 
Few had to relive the traumatic experience, when their blood was retested for Ebola at the point of admission. 
Some survivors experienced delayed or deferred admission due to limited bed capacity. 
No bed available for one more patient. 
This is neither national policy nor officially condoned, but many people are still afraid of the sporadic resurgence of Ebola virus. 
The results can be tragic. 
I have seen Beatrice, an Ebola survivor, several times now. 
She's 26 years old. 
Many of her family members became infected, she luckily survived. 
But since that day in 2014 she was discharged to cheering health workers, her life has never been the same. 
She became blind as the result of Ebola. 
In 2014, the baby of a dear friend of mine was only two months old, when both parents and child were admitted in an Ebola treatment unit in Monrovia. 
Luckily, they survived. 
My friend's baby is almost three years old now, but cannot stand, cannot walk, cannot speak. 
He has failure to thrive. 
There are many more hidden experiences and many stories are yet untold. 
The survivors of Ebola deserve our attention and support. 
The only way we can defeat this pandemic is when we ensure that we win this final battle. 
Our best opportunity is to ensure that every survivor receives adequate care at the point of need without any form of stigma and at no cost to them personally. 
How can a society consider itself healed when a person's entire identity is defined by the fact that they recovered from Ebola? 
Should a previous disease that a person no longer has become the sum total of their identity, the identifier in their passport that deters you from traveling to seek medical care abroad? 
Simply the ID that denies you health care. 
Or prevents you from having a relationship with your spouse. 
Or denies you of family, of friend or home. 
Or prevents you from carrying on your normal job, so you can put food on the table or have a roof over your family's head. 
What is the meaning of the right to life when our life is clouded by stigma and barriers that fuel that stigma? 
Until we have much better answers to those questions in West Africa, our work is not over yet. 
Liberians are a resilient people. 
And we know how to rise to a challenge, even a devastating one. 
My best memories of the outbreak center on those many people who survived the disease, but I cannot forget the hard-working nurses, doctors, volunteers and staff who risked their own safety in service of humanity. 
And some even losing their lives in the process. 
During the worst of the contagion, one thing kept us making those perilous daily journeys into the Ebola wards. 
We had a passion to save lives. 
Was I afraid during the Ebola outbreak? 
Of course I was. 
But for me, the opportunity to protect our global health security and keep communities safe at home and abroad was an honor. 
So as the dangers became greater, our humanity became stronger. 
We faced our fears. 
The global health community working together defeated Ebola, and that ... 
that is how I know that we can defeat its aftermath in our hearts, in our minds and in our communities. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

The history of civilization, in some ways, is a history of maps: How have we come to understand the world around us? 
One of the most famous maps works because it really isn't a map at all. 
[Small thing. Big idea.] [Michael Bierut on the London Tube Map] The London Underground came together in 1908, when eight different independent railways merged to create a single system. 
They needed a map to represent that system so people would know where to ride. 
The map they made is complicated. 
You can see rivers, bodies of water, trees and parks -- the stations were all crammed together at the center of the map, and out in the periphery, there were some that couldn't even fit on the map. 
So the map was geographically accurate, but maybe not so useful. 
Enter Harry Beck. 
Harry Beck was a 29-year-old engineering draftsman who had been working on and off for the London Underground. 
And he had a key insight, and that was that people riding underground in trains don't really care what's happening aboveground. 
They just want to get from station to station -- "Where do I get on? Where do I get off?" 
It's the system that's important, not the geography. 
He's taken this complicated mess of spaghetti, and he's simplified it. 
The lines only go in three directions: they're horizontal, they're vertical, or they're 45 degrees. 
Likewise, he spaced the stations equally, he's made every station color correspond to the color of the line, and he's fixed it all so that it's not really a map anymore. 
What it is is a diagram, just like circuitry, except the circuitry here isn't wires conducting electrons, it's tubes containing trains conducting people from place to place. 
In 1933, the Underground decided, at last, to give Harry Beck's map a try. 
The Underground did a test run of a thousand of these maps, pocket-size. 
They were gone in one hour. 
They realized they were onto something, they printed 750,000 more, and this is the map that you see today. 
Beck's design really became the template for the way we think of metro maps today. 
Tokyo, Paris, Berlin, São Paulo, Sydney, Washington, D.C. -- all of them convert complex geography into crisp geometry. 
All of them use different colors to distinguish between lines, all of them use simple symbols to distinguish between types of stations. 
They all are part of a universal language, seemingly. 
I bet Harry Beck wouldn't have known what a user interface was, but that's really what he designed and he really took that challenge and broke it down to three principles that I think can be applied in nearly any design problem. 
First one is focus. 
Focus on who you're doing this for. 
The second principle is simplicity. 
What's the shortest way to deliver that need? 
Finally, the last thing is: Thinking in a cross-disciplinary way. 
Who would've thought that an electrical engineer would be the person to hold the key to unlock what was then one of the most complicated systems in the world -- all started by one guy with a pencil and an idea. 

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

The sound is a really big part, I think, of the experience of using a pencil, and it has this really audible scratchiness. 
(Scratching) [Small thing. Big idea.] [Caroline Weaver on the Pencil] The pencil is a very simple object. 
It's made of wood with some layers of paint an eraser and a core, which is made out of graphite, clay and water. 
Yeah, it took hundreds of people over centuries to come to this design. 
And it's that long history of collaboration that, to me, makes it a very perfect object. 
The story of the pencil starts with graphite. 
People started finding really useful applications for this new substance. 
They cut it into small sticks and wrapped it in string or sheepskin or paper and sold it on the streets of London to be used for writing or for drawing or, a lot of times, by farmers and shepherds, who used it to mark their animals. 
Over in France, Nicolas-Jacques Conté figured out a method of grinding the graphite, mixing it with powdered clay and water to make a paste. 
From there, this paste was filled into a mold and fired in a kiln, and the result was a really strong graphite core that wasn't breakable, that was smooth, usable -- it was so much better than anything else that existed at the time, and to this day, that's the method that's still used in making pencils. 
Meanwhile, over in America, in Concord, Massachusetts, it was Henry David Thoreau who came up with the grading scale for different hardnesses of pencil. 
It was graded one through four, number two being the ideal hardness for general use. 
The softer the pencil, the more graphite it had in it, and the darker and smoother the line will be. 
The firmer the pencil, the more clay it had in it and the lighter and finer it will be. 
Originally, when pencils were handmade, they were made round. 
There was no easy way to make them, and it was the Americans who really mechanized the craft. 
A lot of people credit Joseph Dixon for being one of the first people to start developing actual machines to do things like cut wood slats, cut grooves into the wood, apply glue to them ... 
And they figured out it was easier and less wasteful to do a hexagonal pencil, and so that became the standard. 
Since the early days of pencils, people have loved that they can be erased. 
Originally, it was bread crumbs that were used to scratch away pencil marks and later, rubber and pumice. 
The attached eraser happened in 1858, when American stationer Hymen Lipman patented the first pencil with an attached eraser, which really changed the pencil game. 
The world's first yellow pencil was the KOH-I-NOOR 1500. 
KOH-I-NOOR did this crazy thing where they painted this pencil with 14 coats of yellow paint and dipped the end in 14-carat gold. 
There is a pencil for everyone, and every pencil has a story. 
The Blackwing 602 is famous for being used by a lot of writers, especially John Steinbeck and Vladimir Nabokov. 
And then, you have the Dixon pencil company. 
They're responsible for the Dixon Ticonderoga. 
It's an icon, it's what people think of when they think of a pencil and what they think of when they think of school. 
And the pencil's really a thing that, I think, the average user has never thought twice about, how it's made or why it's made the way it is, because it's just always been that way. 
In my opinion, there's nothing that can be done to make the pencil better than it is. 
It's perfect. 

How many people are bored at their desk for how many hours every day and how many days a week and how many weeks a year for how many years in their life? 
[Small thing. Big idea.] [Daniel Engber on the Progress Bar] The progress bar is just an indicator on a computer that something's happening inside the device. 
The classic one that's been used for years is a horizontal bar. 
I mean, this goes back to pre-computer versions of this on ledgers, where people would fill in a horizontal bar from left to right to show how much of a task they had completed at a factory. 
This is just the same thing on a screen. 
Something happened in the 70s that is sometimes referred to as "the software crisis," where suddenly, computers were getting more complicated more quickly than anyone had been prepared for, from a design perspective. 
People were using percent-done indicators in different ways. 
So you might have a graphical countdown clock, or they would have a line of asterisks that would fill out from left to right on a screen. 
But no one had done a systematic survey of these things and tried to figure out: How do they actually affect the user's experience of sitting at the computer? 
This graduate student named Brad Myers, in 1985, decided he would study this. 
He found that it didn't really matter if the percent-done indicator was giving you the accurate percent done. 
What mattered was that it was there at all. 
Just seeing it there made people feel better, and that was the most surprising thing. 
He has all these ideas about what this thing could do. 
Maybe it could make people relax effectively. 
Maybe it would allow people to turn away from their machine and do something else of exactly the right duration. 
They would look and say, "Oh, the progress bar is half done. 
That took five minutes. 
So now I have five minutes to send this fax," or whatever people were doing in 1985. 
Both of those things are wrong. 
Like, when you see that progress bar, it sort of locks your attention in a tractor beam, and it turns the experience of waiting into this exciting narrative that you're seeing unfold in front of you: that somehow, this time you've spent waiting in frustration for the computer to do something, has been reconceptualized as: "Progress! Oh! Great stuff is happening!" 
[Progress...] But once you start thinking about the progress bar as something that's more about dulling the pain of waiting, well, then you can start fiddling around with the psychology. 
So if you have a progress bar that just moves at a constant rate -- let's say, that's really what's happening in the computer -- that will feel to people like it's slowing down. 
We get bored. 
Well, now you can start trying to enhance it and make it appear to move more quickly than it really is, make it move faster at the beginning, like a burst of speed. 
That's exciting, people feel like, "Oh! Something's really happening!" 
Then you can move back into a more naturalistic growth of the progress bar as you go along. 
You're assuming that people are focusing on the passage of time -- they're trying to watch grass grow, they're trying to watch a pot of water, waiting for it to boil, and you're just trying to make that less boring, less painful and less frustrating than it was before. 
So the progress bar at least gives you the vision of a beginning and an end, and you're working towards a goal. 
I think in some ways, it mitigates the fear of death. 
Too much? 

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

There are no bad buttons, there are only bad people. 
How does that sound? OK? 
[Small thing.] [Big idea.] [Isaac Mizrahi on the Button] No one knows who invented the button. 
It might have shown up as early as 2000 BCE. 
It was decorative when it first started, just something pretty sewn onto your clothes. 
Then about 3,000 years later, someone finally invented the buttonhole, and buttons were suddenly useful. 
The button and the buttonhole is such a great invention. 
Not only does it slip through the buttonhole, but then it kind of falls into place, and so you're completely secure, like it's never going to open. 
The design of a button hasn't changed much since the Middle Ages. 
It's one of the most enduring designs in history. 
For me, the best buttons are usually round. 
There's either a dome button with a little shank, or there's just this sort of round thing with either a rim or not a rim, either two holes or four holes. 
Almost more important than the button is the buttonhole. 
And the way you figure that out is: the diameter of the button plus the width of the button, plus a little bit of ease. 
Before buttons, clothes were bigger -- they were more kind of amorphous, and people, like, wriggled into them or just kind of wrapped themselves in things. 
But then fashion moved closer to the body as we discovered uses for the button. 
At one time, it was the one way to make clothes fit against the body. 
I think the reason buttons have endured for so long, historically, is because they actually work to keep our clothes shut. 
Zippers break; Velcro makes a lot of noise, and it wears out after a while. 
If a button falls off, you just literally sew that thing on. 
A button is kind of there for the long run. 
It's not just the most elemental design ever, it's also such a crazy fashion statement. 
When I was a kid, my mom knit me this beautiful sweater. 
I didn't like it. 
And then I found these buttons, and the minute the buttons were on the sweater, I loved it. 
If you don't have good taste and you can't pick out a button, then let someone else do it, you know? 
I mean that. 

I think stairs may be one of the most emotionally malleable physical elements that an architect has to work with. 
[Small thing. Big idea.] [David Rockwell on the Stairs] At its most basic, a stair is a way to get from point A to point B at different elevations. 
Stairs have a common language. 
Treads, which is the thing that you walk on. 
Riser, which is the vertical element that separates the two treads. 
A lot of stairs have nosings that create a kind of edge. 
And then, the connected piece is a stringer. 
Those pieces, in different forms, make up all stairs. 
I assume stairs came to be from the first time someone said, "I want to get to this higher rock from the lower rock." 
People climbed using whatever was available: stepped logs, ladders and natural pathways that were worn over time. 
Some of the earliest staircases, like the pyramids in Chichén Itzá or the roads to Mount Tai in China, were a means of getting to a higher elevation, which people sought for worship or for protection. 
As engineering has evolved, so has what's practical. 
Stairs can be made from all kinds of material. 
There are linear stairs, there are spiraled stairs. 
Stairs can be indoors, they can be outdoors. 
They clearly help us in an emergency. 
But they're also a form of art in and of themselves. 
As we move across a stairway, the form dictates our pacing, our feeling, our safety and our relationship and engagement with the space around us. 
So for a second, think about stepping down a gradual, monumental staircase like the one in front of the New York Public Library. 
From those steps, you have a view of the street and all the people around you, and your walk is slow and steady because the tread is so wide. 
That's a totally different experience than going down the narrow staircase to, say, an old pub, where you spill into the room. 
There, you encounter tall risers, so you move more quickly. 
Stairs add enormous drama. 
Think about how stairs signaled a grand entrance and were the star of that moment. 
Stairs can even be heroic. 
The staircase that remained standing after September 11th and the attack on the World Trade Center was dubbed the "Survivors' Staircase," because it played such a central role in leading hundreds of people to safety. 
But small stairs can have a huge impact, too. 
The stoop is a place that invites neighbors to gather, blast music, and watch the city in motion. 
It's fascinating to me that you see people wanting to hang out on the stairs. 
I think they fill a deeply human need we have to inhabit a space more than just on the ground plane. 
And so if you're able to sit halfway up there, you're in a kind of magical place. 

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

What is going on in this baby's mind? 
If you'd asked people this 30 years ago, most people, including psychologists, would have said that this baby was irrational, illogical, egocentric -- that he couldn't take the perspective of another person or understand cause and effect. 
In the last 20 years, developmental science has completely overturned that picture. 
So in some ways, we think that this baby's thinking is like the thinking of the most brilliant scientists. 
Let me give you just one example of this. 
One thing that this baby could be thinking about, that could be going on in his mind, is trying to figure out what's going on in the mind of that other baby. 
After all, one of the things that's hardest for all of us to do is to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling. 
And maybe the hardest thing of all is to figure out that what other people think and feel isn't actually exactly like what we think and feel. 
Anyone who's followed politics can testify to how hard that is for some people to get. 
We wanted to know if babies and young children could understand this really profound thing about other people. 
Now the question is: How could we ask them? 
Babies, after all, can't talk, and if you ask a three year-old to tell you what he thinks, what you'll get is a beautiful stream of consciousness monologue about ponies and birthdays and things like that. 
So how do we actually ask them the question? 
Well it turns out that the secret was broccoli. 
What we did -- Betty Rapacholi, who was one of my students, and I -- was actually to give the babies two bowls of food: one bowl of raw broccoli and one bowl of delicious goldfish crackers. 
Now all of the babies, even in Berkley, like the crackers and don't like the raw broccoli. 
(Laughter) But then what Betty did was to take a little taste of food from each bowl. 
And she would act as if she liked it or she didn't. 
So half the time, she acted as if she liked the crackers and didn't like the broccoli -- just like a baby and any other sane person. 
But half the time, what she would do is take a little bit of the broccoli and go, "Mmmmm, broccoli. 
I tasted the broccoli. Mmmmm." 
And then she would take a little bit of the crackers, and she'd go, "Eww, yuck, crackers. 
I tasted the crackers. Eww, yuck." 
So she'd act as if what she wanted was just the opposite of what the babies wanted. 
We did this with 15 and 18 month-old babies. 
And then she would simply put her hand out and say, "Can you give me some?" 
So the question is: What would the baby give her, what they liked or what she liked? 
And the remarkable thing was that 18 month-old babies, just barely walking and talking, would give her the crackers if she liked the crackers, but they would give her the broccoli if she liked the broccoli. 
On the other hand, 15 month-olds would stare at her for a long time if she acted as if she liked the broccoli, like they couldn't figure this out. 
But then after they stared for a long time, they would just give her the crackers, what they thought everybody must like. 
So there are two really remarkable things about this. 
The first one is that these little 18 month-old babies have already discovered this really profound fact about human nature, that we don't always want the same thing. 
And what's more, they felt that they should actually do things to help other people get what they wanted. 
Even more remarkably though, the fact that 15 month-olds didn't do this suggests that these 18 month-olds had learned this deep, profound fact about human nature in the three months from when they were 15 months old. 
So children both know more and learn more than we ever would have thought. 
And this is just one of hundreds and hundreds of studies over the last 20 years that's actually demonstrated it. 
The question you might ask though is: Why do children learn so much? 
And how is it possible for them to learn so much in such a short time? 
I mean, after all, if you look at babies superficially, they seem pretty useless. 
And actually in many ways, they're worse than useless, because we have to put so much time and energy into just keeping them alive. 
But if we turn to evolution for an answer to this puzzle of why we spend so much time taking care of useless babies, it turns out that there's actually an answer. 
If we look across many, many different species of animals, not just us primates, but also including other mammals, birds, even marsupials like kangaroos and wombats, it turns out that there's a relationship between how long a childhood a species has and how big their brains are compared to their bodies and how smart and flexible they are. 
And sort of the posterbirds for this idea are the birds up there. 
On one side is a New Caledonian crow. 
And crows and other corvidae, ravens, rooks and so forth, are incredibly smart birds. 
They're as smart as chimpanzees in some respects. 
And this is a bird on the cover of science who's learned how to use a tool to get food. 
On the other hand, we have our friend the domestic chicken. 
And chickens and ducks and geese and turkeys are basically as dumb as dumps. 
So they're very, very good at pecking for grain, and they're not much good at doing anything else. 
Well it turns out that the babies, the New Caledonian crow babies, are fledglings. 
They depend on their moms to drop worms in their little open mouths for as long as two years, which is a really long time in the life of a bird. 
Whereas the chickens are actually mature within a couple of months. 
So childhood is the reason why the crows end up on the cover of Science and the chickens end up in the soup pot. 
There's something about that long childhood that seems to be connected to knowledge and learning. 
Well what kind of explanation could we have for this? 
Well some animals, like the chicken, seem to be beautifully suited to doing just one thing very well. 
So they seem to be beautifully suited to pecking grain in one environment. 
Other creatures, like the crows, aren't very good at doing anything in particular, but they're extremely good at learning about laws of different environments. 
And of course, we human beings are way out on the end of the distribution like the crows. 
We have bigger brains relative to our bodies by far than any other animal. 
We're smarter, we're more flexible, we can learn more, we survive in more different environments, we migrated to cover the world and even go to outer space. 
And our babies and children are dependent on us for much longer than the babies of any other species. 
My son is 23. 
(Laughter) And at least until they're 23, we're still popping those worms into those little open mouths. 
All right, why would we see this correlation? 
Well an idea is that that strategy, that learning strategy, is an extremely powerful, great strategy for getting on in the world, but it has one big disadvantage. 
And that one big disadvantage is that, until you actually do all that learning, you're going to be helpless. 
So you don't want to have the mastodon charging at you and be saying to yourself, "A slingshot or maybe a spear might work. Which would actually be better?" 
You want to know all that before the mastodons actually show up. 
And the way the evolutions seems to have solved that problem is with a kind of division of labor. 
So the idea is that we have this early period when we're completely protected. 
We don't have to do anything. All we have to do is learn. 
And then as adults, we can take all those things that we learned when we were babies and children and actually put them to work to do things out there in the world. 
So one way of thinking about it is that babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species. 
So they're the protected blue sky guys who just have to go out and learn and have good ideas, and we're production and marketing. 
We have to take all those ideas that we learned when we were children and actually put them to use. 
Another way of thinking about it is instead of thinking of babies and children as being like defective grownups, we should think about them as being a different developmental stage of the same species -- kind of like caterpillars and butterflies -- except that they're actually the brilliant butterflies who are flitting around the garden and exploring, and we're the caterpillars who are inching along our narrow, grownup, adult path. 
If this is true, if these babies are designed to learn -- and this evolutionary story would say children are for learning, that's what they're for -- we might expect that they would have really powerful learning mechanisms. 
And in fact, the baby's brain seems to be the most powerful learning computer on the planet. 
But real computers are actually getting to be a lot better. 
And there's been a revolution in our understanding of machine learning recently. 
And it all depends on the ideas of this guy, the Reverend Thomas Bayes, who was a statistician and mathematician in the 18th century. 
And essentially what Bayes did was to provide a mathematical way using probability theory to characterize, describe, the way that scientists find out about the world. 
So what scientists do is they have a hypothesis that they think might be likely to start with. 
They go out and test it against the evidence. 
The evidence makes them change that hypothesis. 
Then they test that new hypothesis and so on and so forth. 
And what Bayes showed was a mathematical way that you could do that. 
And that mathematics is at the core of the best machine learning programs that we have now. 
And some 10 years ago, I suggested that babies might be doing the same thing. 
So if you want to know what's going on underneath those beautiful brown eyes, I think it actually looks something like this. 
This is Reverend Bayes's notebook. 
So I think those babies are actually making complicated calculations with conditional probabilities that they're revising to figure out how the world works. 
All right, now that might seem like an even taller order to actually demonstrate. 
Because after all, if you ask even grownups about statistics, they look extremely stupid. 
How could it be that children are doing statistics? 
So to test this we used a machine that we have called the Blicket Detector. 
This is a box that lights up and plays music when you put some things on it and not others. 
And using this very simple machine, my lab and others have done dozens of studies showing just how good babies are at learning about the world. 
Let me mention just one that we did with Tumar Kushner, my student. 
If I showed you this detector, you would be likely to think to begin with that the way to make the detector go would be to put a block on top of the detector. 
But actually, this detector works in a bit of a strange way. 
Because if you wave a block over the top of the detector, something you wouldn't ever think of to begin with, the detector will actually activate two out of three times. 
Whereas, if you do the likely thing, put the block on the detector, it will only activate two out of six times. 
So the unlikely hypothesis actually has stronger evidence. 
It looks as if the waving is a more effective strategy than the other strategy. 
So we did just this; we gave four year-olds this pattern of evidence, and we just asked them to make it go. 
And sure enough, the four year-olds used the evidence to wave the object on top of the detector. 
Now there are two things that are really interesting about this. 
The first one is, again, remember, these are four year-olds. 
They're just learning how to count. 
But unconsciously, they're doing these quite complicated calculations that will give them a conditional probability measure. 
And the other interesting thing is that they're using that evidence to get to an idea, get to a hypothesis about the world, that seems very unlikely to begin with. 
And in studies we've just been doing in my lab, similar studies, we've show that four year-olds are actually better at finding out an unlikely hypothesis than adults are when we give them exactly the same task. 
So in these circumstances, the children are using statistics to find out about the world, but after all, scientists also do experiments, and we wanted to see if children are doing experiments. 
When children do experiments we call it "getting into everything" or else "playing." 
And there's been a bunch of interesting studies recently that have shown this playing around is really a kind of experimental research program. 
Here's one from Cristine Legare's lab. 
What Cristine did was use our Blicket Detectors. 
And what she did was show children that yellow ones made it go and red ones didn't, and then she showed them an anomaly. 
And what you'll see is that this little boy will go through five hypotheses in the space of two minutes. 
(Video) Boy: How about this? 
Same as the other side. 
Alison Gopnik: Okay, so his first hypothesis has just been falsified. 
(Laughter) Boy: This one lighted up, and this one nothing. 
AG: Okay, he's got his experimental notebook out. 
Boy: What's making this light up. 
(Laughter) I don't know. 
AG: Every scientist will recognize that expression of despair. 
(Laughter) Boy: Oh, it's because this needs to be like this, and this needs to be like this. 
AG: Okay, hypothesis two. 
Boy: That's why. 
Oh. 
(Laughter) AG: Now this is his next idea. 
He told the experimenter to do this, to try putting it out onto the other location. 
Not working either. 
Boy: Oh, because the light goes only to here, not here. 
Oh, the bottom of this box has electricity in here, but this doesn't have electricity. 
AG: Okay, that's a fourth hypothesis. 
Boy: It's lighting up. 
So when you put four. 
So you put four on this one to make it light up and two on this one to make it light up. 
AG: Okay,there's his fifth hypothesis. 
Now that is a particularly -- that is a particularly adorable and articulate little boy, but what Cristine discovered is this is actually quite typical. 
If you look at the way children play, when you ask them to explain something, what they really do is do a series of experiments. 
This is actually pretty typical of four year-olds. 
Well, what's it like to be this kind of creature? 
What's it like to be one of these brilliant butterflies who can test five hypotheses in two minutes? 
Well, if you go back to those psychologists and philosophers, a lot of them have said that babies and young children were barely conscious if they were conscious at all. 
And I think just the opposite is true. 
I think babies and children are actually more conscious than we are as adults. 
Now here's what we know about how adult consciousness works. 
And adults' attention and consciousness look kind of like a spotlight. 
So what happens for adults is we decide that something's relevant or important, we should pay attention to it. 
Our consciousness of that thing that we're attending to becomes extremely bright and vivid, and everything else sort of goes dark. 
And we even know something about the way the brain does this. 
So what happens when we pay attention is that the prefrontal cortex, the sort of executive part of our brains, sends a signal that makes a little part of our brain much more flexible, more plastic, better at learning, and shuts down activity in all the rest of our brains. 
So we have a very focused, purpose-driven kind of attention. 
If we look at babies and young children, we see something very different. 
I think babies and young children seem to have more of a lantern of consciousness than a spotlight of consciousness. 
So babies and young children are very bad at narrowing down to just one thing. 
But they're very good at taking in lots of information from lots of different sources at once. 
And if you actually look in their brains, you see that they're flooded with these neurotransmitters that are really good at inducing learning and plasticity, and the inhibitory parts haven't come on yet. 
So when we say that babies and young children are bad at paying attention, what we really mean is that they're bad at not paying attention. 
So they're bad at getting rid of all the interesting things that could tell them something and just looking at the thing that's important. 
That's the kind of attention, the kind of consciousness, that we might expect from those butterflies who are designed to learn. 
Well if we want to think about a way of getting a taste of that kind of baby consciousness as adults, I think the best thing is think about cases where we're put in a new situation that we've never been in before -- when we fall in love with someone new, or when we're in a new city for the first time. 
And what happens then is not that our consciousness contracts, it expands, so that those three days in Paris seem to be more full of consciousness and experience than all the months of being a walking, talking, faculty meeting-attending zombie back home. 
And by the way, that coffee, that wonderful coffee you've been drinking downstairs, actually mimics the effect of those baby neurotransmitters. 
So what's it like to be a baby? 
It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double-espressos. 
(Laughter) That's a fantastic way to be, but it does tend to leave you waking up crying at three o'clock in the morning. 
(Laughter) Now it's good to be a grownup. 
I don't want to say too much about how wonderful babies are. 
It's good to be a grownup. 
We can do things like tie our shoelaces and cross the street by ourselves. 
And it makes sense that we put a lot of effort into making babies think like adults do. 
But if what we want is to be like those butterflies, to have open-mindedness, open learning, imagination, creativity, innovation, maybe at least some of the time we should be getting the adults to start thinking more like children. 
(Applause) 

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

Recently, we've seen the effects of cyber attacks on the business world. 
Data breaches at companies like JP Morgan, Yahoo, Home Depot and Target have caused losses of hundreds of millions and in some cases, billions of dollars. 
It wouldn't take many large attacks to ravage the world economy. 
And the public sector has not been immune, either. 
In 2012 to 2014, there was a significant data breach at the US Office of Personnel Management. 
Security clearance and fingerprint data was compromised, affecting 22 million employees. 
And you may have heard of the attempt by state-sponsored hackers to use stolen data to influence election outcomes in a number of countries. 
Two recent examples are the compromise of a large amount of data from the Bundestag, the national Parliament of Germany, and the theft of emails from the US Democratic National Committee. 
The cyber threat is now affecting our democratic processes. 
And it's likely to get worse. 
As computer technology is becoming more powerful, the systems we use to protect our data are becoming more vulnerable. 
Adding to the concern is a new type of computing technology, called quantum computing, which leverages microscopic properties of nature to deliver unimaginable increases in computational power. 
It's so powerful that it will crack many of the encryption systems that we use today. 
So is the situation hopeless? 
Should we start packing our digital survival gear and prepare for an upcoming data apocalypse? 
I would say, not yet. 
Quantum computing is still in the labs, and it will take a few years until it's put to practical applications. 
More important, there have been major breakthroughs in the field of encryption. 
For me, this is a particularly exciting time in the history of secure communications. 
About 15 years ago, when I learned of our new-found ability to create quantum effects that don't exist in nature, I was excited. 
The idea of applying the fundamental laws of physics to make encryption stronger really intrigued me. 
Today, a select groups of companies and labs around the world, including mine, are maturing this technology for practical applications. 
That's right. 
We are now preparing to fight quantum with quantum. 
So how does this all work? 
Well, first, let's take a quick tour of the world of encryption. 
For that, you'll need a briefcase, some important documents that you want to send your friend, James Bond, and a lock to keep it all safe. 
Because the documents are top secret, we're going to use an advanced briefcase. 
It has a special combination lock which, when closed, converts all the text in the documents to random numbers. 
So you put your documents inside, close the lock -- at which point in time the documents get converted to random numbers -- and you send the briefcase to James. 
While it's on its way, you call him to give him the code. 
When he gets the briefcase, he enters the code, the documents get unscrambled, and voilà, you've just sent an encoded message to James Bond. 
(Laughter) A fun example, but it does illustrate three things important for encryption. 
The code -- we call this an encryption key. 
You can think of it as a password. 
The call to James to give him the code for the combination lock. 
We call this key exchange. 
This is how you ensure you get the encryption key securely to the right place. 
And the lock, which encodes and decodes the document. 
We call this an encryption algorithm. 
Using the key, it encodes the text in the documents to random numbers. 
A good algorithm will encode in such a way that without the key it's very difficult to unscramble. 
What makes encryption so important is that if someone were to capture the briefcase and cut it open without the encryption key and the encryption algorithm, they wouldn't be able to read the documents. 
They would look like nothing more than a bunch of random numbers. 
Most security systems rely on a secure method for key exchange to communicate the encryption key to the right place. 
However, rapid increases in computational power are putting at risk a number of the key exchange methods we have today. 
Consider one of the very widely used systems today -- RSA. 
When it was invented, in 1977, it was estimated that it would take 40 quadrillion years to break a 426-bit RSA key. 
In 1994, just 17 years later, the code was broken. 
As computers have become more and more powerful, we've had to use larger and larger codes. 
Today we routinely use 2048 or 4096 bits. 
As you can see, code makers and breakers are engaged in an ongoing battle to outwit each other. 
And when quantum computers arrive in the next 10 to 15 years, they will even more rapidly crack the complex mathematics that underlies many of our encryption systems today. 
Indeed, the quantum computer is likely to turn our present security castle into a mere house of cards. 
We have to find a way to defend our castle. 
There's been a growing body of research in recent years looking at using quantum effects to make encryption stronger. 
And there have been some exciting breakthroughs. 
Remember those three things important for encryption -- high-quality keys, secure key exchange and a strong algorithm? 
Well, advances in science and engineering are putting two of those three elements at risk. 
First of all, those keys. 
Random numbers are the foundational building blocks of encryption keys. 
But today, they're not truly random. 
Currently, we construct encryption keys from sequences of random numbers generated from software, so-called pseudo-random numbers. 
Numbers generated by a program or a mathematical recipe will have some, perhaps subtle, pattern to them. 
The less random the numbers are, or in scientific terms, the less entropy they contain, the easier they are to predict. 
Recently, several casinos have been victims of a creative attack. 
The output of slot machines was recorded over a period of time and then analyzed. 
This allowed the cyber criminals to reverse engineer the pseudo-random number generator behind the spinning wheels. 
And allowed them, with high accuracy, to predict the spins of the wheels, enabling them to make big financial gains. 
Similar risks apply to encryption keys. 
So having a true random number generator is essential for secure encryption. 
For years, researchers have been looking at building true random number generators. 
But most designs to date are either not random enough, fast enough or aren't easily repeatable. 
But the quantum world is truly random. 
So it makes sense to take advantage of this intrinsic randomness. 
Devices that can measure quantum effects can produce an endless stream of random numbers at high speed. 
Foiling all those would-be casino criminals. 
A select group of universities and companies around the world are focused on building true random number generators. 
At my company, our quantum random number generator started life on a two meter by one meter optic table. 
We were then able to reduce it to a server-size box. 
Today, it's miniaturized into a PCI card that plugs into a standard computer. 
This is the world's fastest true random number generator. 
It measures quantum effects to produce a billion random numbers per second. 
And it's in use today to improve security at cloud providers, banks and government agencies around the world. 
(Applause) But even with a true random number generator, we've still got the second big cyber threat: the problem of secure key exchange. 
Current key exchange techniques will not stand up to a quantum computer. 
The quantum solution to this problem is called quantum key distribution or QKD, which leverages a fundamental, counterintuitive characteristic of quantum mechanics. 
The very act of looking at a quantum particle changes it. 
Let me give you an example of how this works. 
Consider again exchanging the code for the lock with James Bond. 
Except this time, instead of a call to give James the code, we're going to use quantum effects on a laser to carry the code and send it over standard optic fiber to James. 
We assume that Dr. No is trying to hack the exchange. 
Luckily, Dr. No's attempt to intercept the quantum keys while in transit will leave fingerprints that James and you can detect. 
This allows those intercepted keys to be discarded. 
The keys which are then retained can be used to provide very strong data protection. 
And because the security is based on the fundamental laws of physics, a quantum computer, or indeed any future supercomputer will not be able to break it. 
My team and I are collaborating with leading universities and the defense sector to mature this exciting technology into the next generation of security products. 
The internet of things is heralding a hyperconnected era with 25 to 30 billion connected devices forecast by 2020. 
For the correct functioning of our society in an IoT world, trust in the systems that support these connected devices is vital. 
We're betting that quantum technologies will be essential in providing this trust, enabling us to fully benefit from the amazing innovations that are going to so enrich our lives. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Hi. Today, I'm going to take you through glimpses of about eight of my projects, done in collaboration with Danish artist Soren Pors. 
We call ourselves Pors and Rao, and we live and work in India. 
I'd like to begin with my very first object, which I call "The Uncle Phone." 
And it was inspired by my uncle's peculiar habit of constantly asking me to do things for him, almost like I were an extension of his body -- to turn on the lights or to bring him a glass of water, a pack of cigarettes. 
And as I grew up, it became worse and worse, And I started to think of it as a form of control. 
But of course, I could never say anything, because the uncle is a respected figure in the Indian family. 
And the situation that irked me and mystified me the most was his use of a landline telephone. 
He would hold on to the receiver and expect me to dial a number for him. 
And so as a response and as a gift to my uncle, I made him "The Uncle Phone." 
It's so long that it requires two people to use it. 
It's exactly the way my uncle uses a phone that's designed for one person. 
But the problem is that, when I left home and went to college, I started missing his commands. 
And so I made him a golden typewriter through which he could dispense his commands to nephews and nieces around the world as an email. 
So what he had to do was take a piece of paper, roll it into the carriage, type his email or command and pull the paper out. 
This device would automatically send the intended person the letter as an email. 
So here you can see, we embedded a lot of electronics that understands all of the mechanical actions and converts it to digital. 
So my uncle is only dealing with a mechanical interface. 
And of course, the object had to be very grand and have a sense of ritualism, the way my uncle likes it. 
The next work is a sound-sensitive installation that we affectionately call "The Pygmies." 
And we wanted to work with a notion of being surrounded by a tribe of very shy, sensitive and sweet creatures. 
So how it works is we have these panels, which we have on the wall, and behind them, we have these little creatures which hide. 
And as soon as it's silent, they sort of creep out. 
And if it's even more silent, they stretch their necks out. 
And at the slightest sound, they hide back again. 
So we had these panels on three walls of a room. 
And we had over 500 of these little pygmies hiding behind them. 
So this is how it works. 
This is a video prototype. 
So when it's quiet, it's sort of coming out from behind the panels. 
And they hear like humans do, or real creatures do. 
So they get immune to sounds that scare them after awhile. 
And they don't react to background sounds. 
You'll hear a train in moment that they don't react to. 
(Noise) But they react to foreground sounds. You'll hear that in a second. 
(Whistling) So we worked very hard to make them as lifelike as possible. 
So each pygmy has its own behavior, psyche, mood swings, personalities and so on. 
So this is a very early prototype. 
Of course, it got much better after that. 
And we made them react to people, but we found that people were being quite playful and childlike with them. 
This is a video installation called "The Missing Person." 
And we were quite intrigued with playing with the notion of invisibility. 
How would it be possible to experience a sense of invisibility? 
So we worked with a company that specializes in camera surveillance, and we asked them to develop a piece of software with us, using a camera that could look at people in the room, track them and replace one person with the background, rendering them invisible. 
So I'm just going to show you a very early prototype. 
On the right side you can see my colleague Soren, who's actually in the space. 
And on the left side, you'll see the processed video where the camera has made him invisible. 
Soren enters the room. Pop! He goes invisible. 
And you can see that the camera is tracking him and erasing. 
It's a very early video, so we haven't yet dealt with the overlap and all of that, but that got refined pretty soon, later. 
So how we used it was in a room where we had a camera looking into the space, and we had one monitor, one on each wall. 
And as people walked into the room, they would see themselves in the monitor, except with one difference: one person was constantly invisible wherever they moved in the room. 
So this is a work called "The Sun Shadow." 
And it was almost like a sheet of paper, like a cutout of a childlike drawing of an oil spill or a sun. 
And from the front, this object appeared to be very strong and robust, and from the side, it almost seemed very weak. 
So people would walking into the room and they'd almost ignore it, thinking it was some crap laying around. 
But as soon as they passed by, it would start to climb up the wall in jerky fashion. 
And it would get exhausted, and it would collapse every time. 
(Laughter) So this work is a caricature of an upside-down man. 
His head is so heavy, full of heavy thoughts, that it's sort of fallen into his hat, and his body's grown out of him almost like a plant. 
Well what he does is he moves around in a very drunken fashion on his head in a very unpredictable and extremely slow movement. 
And it's kind of constrained by that circle. 
Because if that circle weren't there, and the floor was very even, it would start to wander about in the space. 
And there's no wires. 
So I'll just show you an instance -- so when people enter the room, it activates this object. 
And it very slowly, over a few minutes, sort of painfully goes up, and then it gains momentum and it looks like it's almost about to fall. 
And this is an important moment, because we wanted to instill in the viewer an instinct to almost go and help, or save the subject. 
But it doesn't really need it, because it, again, sort of manages to pull itself up. 
So this work was a real technical challenge for us, and we worked very hard, like most of our works, over years to get the mechanics right and the equilibrium and the dynamics. 
And it was very important for us to establish the exact moment that it would fall, because if we made it in a way that it would topple over, then it would damage itself, and if it didn't fall enough, it wouldn't instill that fatalism, or that sense of wanting to go and help it. 
So I'm going to show you a very quick video where we are doing a test scenario -- it's much faster. 
That's my colleague. He's let it go. 
Now he's getting nervous, so he's going to go catch it. 
But he doesn't need to, because it manages to lift itself up on its own. 
So this is a work that we were very intrigued with, working with the aesthetic of fur embedded with thousands of tiny different sizes of fiber optics, which twinkle like the night sky. 
And it's at the scale of the night sky. 
So we wrapped this around a blob-like form, which is in the shape of a teddy bear, which was hanging from the ceiling. 
And the idea was to sort of contrast something very cold and distant and abstract like the universe into the familiar form of a teddy bear, which is very comforting and intimate. 
And the idea was that at some point you would stop looking at the form of a teddy bear and you would almost perceive it to be a hole in the space, and as if you were looking out into the twinkling night sky. 
So this is the last work, and a work in progress, and it's called "Space Filler." 
Well imagine a small cube that's about this big standing in front of you in the middle of the room, and as you approached it, it tried to intimidate you by growing into a cube that's twice its height and [eight] times its volume. 
And so this object is constantly expanding and contracting to create a dynamic with people moving around it -- almost like it were trying to conceal a secret within its seams or something. 
So we work with a lot of technology, but we don't really love technology, because it gives us a lot of pain in our work over years and years. 
But we use it because we're interested in the way that it can help us to express the emotions and behavioral patterns in these creatures that we create. 
And once a creature pops into our minds, it's almost like the process of creation is to discover the way this creature really wants to exist and what form it wants to take and what way it wants to move. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

[A provocation from Danny Hillis:] [It's time to start talking about engineering our climate] What if there was a way to build a thermostat that allowed you to turn down the temperature of the earth anytime you wanted? 
Now, you would think if somebody had a plausible idea about how to do that, everybody would be very excited about it, and there would be lots of research on how to do it. 
But in fact, a lot of people do understand how to do that. 
But there's not much support for research in this area. 
And I think part of it is because there are some real misunderstandings about it. 
So I'm not going to try to convince you today that this is a good idea. 
But I am going to try to get your curiosity going about it and clear up some of the misunderstandings. 
So, the basic idea of solar geoengineering is that we can cool things down just by reflecting a little bit more sunlight back into space. 
And ideas about how to do this have been around literally for decades. 
Clouds are a great way to do that, these low-lying clouds. 
Everybody knows it's cooler under a cloud. 
I like this cloud because it has exactly the same water content as the transparent air around it. 
And it just shows that even a little bit of a change in the flow of the air can cause a cloud to form. 
We make artificial clouds all the time. 
These are contrails, which are artificial water clouds that are made by the passing of a jet engine. 
And so, we're already changing the clouds on earth. 
By accident. 
Or, if you like to believe it, by supersecret government conspiracy. 
(Laughter) But we are already doing this quite a lot. 
This is a NASA picture of shipping lanes. 
Passing ships actually cause clouds to form, and this is a big enough effect that it actually helps reduce global warming already by about a degree. 
So we already are doing solar engineering. 
There's lots of ideas about how to do this. 
People have looked at everything, from building giant parasols out into space to fizzing bubble waters in the ocean. 
And some of these are actually very plausible ideas. 
One that was published recently by David Keith at Harvard is to take chalk and put dust up into the stratosphere, where it reflects off sunlight. 
And that's a really neat idea, because chalk is one of the most common minerals on earth, and it's very safe -- it's so safe, we put it into baby food. 
And basically, if you throw chalk up into the stratosphere, it comes down in a couple of years all by itself, dissolved in rainwater. 
Now, before you start worrying about all this chalk in your rainwater, let me explain to you how little of it it actually takes. 
And that turns out to be very easy to calculate. 
This is a back-of-the-envelope calculation I made. 
(Laughter) (Applause) I assure you, people have done much more careful calculations, and it comes out with the same answer, which is that you have to put chalk up at the rate of about 10 teragrams a year to undo the effects of the CO2 that we've already done -- just in terms of temperature, not all the effects, but the temperature. 
So what does that look like? 
I can't visualize 10 teragrams per year. 
So I asked the Cambridge Fire Department and Taylor Milsal to lend me a hand. 
This is a hose pumping water at 10 teragrams a year. 
And that is how much you would have to pump into the stratosphere to cool the earth back down to pre-industrial levels. 
And it's amazingly little; it's like one hose for the entire earth. 
Now of course, you wouldn't really use a hose, you'd fly it up in airplanes or something like that. 
But it's so little, it would be like putting a handful of chalk into every Olympic swimming pool full of rain. 
It's almost nothing. 
So why don't people like this idea? 
Why isn't it taken more seriously? 
And there are some very good reasons for that. 
A lot of people really don't think we should be talking about this at all. 
And, in fact, I have some very good friends in the audience who I respect a lot, who really don't think I should be talking about this. 
And the reason is that they're concerned that if people imagine there's some easy way out, that we won't give up our addiction to fossil fuels. 
And I do worry about that. 
I think it's actually a serious problem. 
But there's also, I think, a deeper problem, which is: nobody likes the idea of messing with the entire earth -- I certainly don't. 
I love this planet, I really do. 
And I don't want to mess with it. 
But we're already changing our atmosphere, we're already messing with it. 
And so I think it makes sense for us to look for ways to mitigate that impact. 
And we need to do research to do that. 
We need to understand the science behind that. 
I've noticed that there's a theme that's kind of developed at TED, which is kind of, "fear versus hope," or "creativity versus caution." 
And of course, we need both of those. 
So there aren't any silver bullets. 
This is certainly not a silver bullet. 
But we need science to tell us what our options are; that informs both our creativity and our caution. 
So I am an optimist about our future selves, but I'm not an optimist because I think our problems are small. 
I'm an optimist because I think our capacity to deal with our problems is much greater than we imagine. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) This talk sparked a lot of controversy at TED2017, and we encourage you to look at discussions online to see other points of view. 

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

Namaste. 
I'm from India. 
The home of ancient mathematics. 
But me, I just hated math. 
(Laughter) Until it saved my life. 
I grew up in Akola, a small town 700 miles away from the capital city. 
In my community, we never had a culture of girls attending school beyond the age of 10 or 12 years. 
In fact, some women would tell me, "Why do you need education? 
Just learn the household work so that you can take care of your family." 
But I never wanted to abide myself by the "normal" rules for girls. 
And I would think to myself, instead of just learning the household work, why not learn how to make money so that I can actually take care of my family? 
(Laughter) I knew if I had to do something different, I would have to stay in school. 
But that was hard. 
As it was socially not accepted, everybody was against it. 
But I was a stubborn young girl. 
I did everything I could to continue studying, even if that meant stitching school uniforms or making festival greeting cards. 
I did all that. 
Well, I had excellent grades in all subjects. 
All except one. 
You guessed it: math. 
All these calculations, formulas, multiplication; I just couldn't get them right. 
After I finished college, I realized I had no future in Akola, so I decided to do something almost nobody in my town had ever done before: to leave my home town, by myself, a single woman. 
Nobody wanted me to do that. 
I remember when I walked up to my mom and told her, "Mama, I'm leaving." 
She looked at me and said, "Uma, I know how difficult it is for you and even for me, and I cannot even support you openly, but I want you to have this." 
And she hands me a gold bangle. 
That was the only jewelry left with her. 
She said, "I don't have much but this is for you to buy the bus ticket." 
You can see the bus ticket here. 
It's been ten years. I still have this. 
As a promise that I won't let my mom sacrifice anything more for me. 
So, on 22nd of July, 2007, I arrived in Pune, a city of four million people. 
I had never been out of my village before so being in the city for the first time, I was mesmerized and excited. 
And scared as well. 
I didn't even know if I could trust the taxi driver while taking the taxi for the first time in an unknown city. 
Life in the city was extremely hard at first. 
I was away from my family, didn't have any friends. 
I had brought very little money with me; around three and a half dollars. 
So I used to eat every second day - every other day - so that I can save as much as I can. 
Yes, good things take time, but they do happen. 
And finally, it happened to me. 
I was given an opportunity to work in a primary school, as a teacher. 
Wow, I was so happy. 
Until I got to know the subject they gave me to teach. 
(Laughter) Yes, it was math. 
(Laughter) And I'm like, "Oh God, how will I teach something I hate so much?" 
(Laughter) But I had no choice so I started teaching math. 
You know, the basics like multiplication tables. 
I remember I struggled every night to figure out lessons for my students. 
I was hating it. 
And I was afraid if I didn't do well, I might not make it. 
But the more I worked on it, trying to make it interesting, trying to make it fun, the more I realized the pattern in these numbers. 
As if these multiplication tables were sending me a message, I sensed as if these numbers were talking to me. 
And that's when I figured out the magic these odd and even numbers have; the poetry, the symmetry they have. 
Let me show you what I mean: Let's look at table of three for example. 
Feels like we are back in school? 
(Laughter) Three, we all know it's an odd number. 
And if I multiply three with another odd number, it gives me a result which is definitely an odd number. 
Like this one here: Three times three gives us nine. 
An odd number. 
And then I noticed something very interesting about it. 
If I multiply an odd number with an even number, it ultimately becomes an even number, like this one here. 
Three times four gives us 12. 
An even number. 
So, odd multiplied with odd, the result has to definitely be an odd number. 
But odd multiplied with something even, no matter how many times you do it, it will definitely give us an even number. 
And I'm like, this is quite me. 
With all the odds I was up against, if I multiply my odd situation, with my odd behavior ... 
(Laughter) (Applause) So what happens? 
I get myself into another odd situation. 
(Laughter) But the magic is, if I multiply my odd situations with my even behavior, with my positive behavior, it gets me to better results, to even results. 
And if one doesn't stop when the situations are odd like this, if one keeps pushing himself, keeps multiplying his blessings, keeps multiplying his skills, even though the beginning is, the end will never be odd. 
Wow, so once I got to know this, I was like, if something odd can teach me such a valuable lesson of life, I'm sure there is something interesting about the even numbers as well. 
(Laughter) So, let's look at table of two, for example. 
What I notice here is every time, right from the beginning to the end, all multiplication results are even, without any odds. 
And how is it possible? 
That's possible because the number itself which is getting multiplied, is an even number. 
This tells me if I am even to myself, as an individual, nothing odd will come my way. 
(Laughter) Now this of course doesn't mean I don't come across any odd or bad situations. 
I certainly do. 
But facing them with even attitude makes the whole difference. 
That's how, even though I have to struggle hard for my basic rights, instead of being upset and angry, I am happy and even to myself, because the struggle made me stronger, made me who I am today. 
Now I have these learnings, these secrets from all different multiplication tables. 
One of my favorites is table of 11. 
And I think most of us liked, when we were in school, because that is the easiest one to multiply. 
What I love about this is the perfect symmetry in it. 
The one and one, the two and two. 
Isn't that beautiful? 
And easy, of course. 
For me, the question was: How can I have my life this similarly easy and beautiful? 
For me these two symmetrical numbers reflect the outside me and the inside me. 
I can live in harmony, I can live in peace only when my outside matches my inner being. 
Isn't this all we're looking for? 
We can be anybody; maybe two, maybe three. 
Whoever we are, unless or until our inside personality matches our outside personality, our outside personality matches our inside personality, we cannot live in peace, we cannot live in harmony. 
Now, because math became my art, became my reminder, my guide of what I needed to do, and what my goal was, I started loving math. 
Because of this, I was not only able to keep my job, but also make it interesting for others. 
Now ten years down the line, I have a wonderful job in a great company. 
I am able to move my entire family to Pune to live with me. 
Now nobody says I shouldn't have done this. 
Rather everyone appreciates for what I stood for. 
As kids, we all are asked to solve math problems. 
But in reality, math solved many of my problems. 
Thank you for having me. Dhanyavaad (Thank you). 
(Applause) (Cheers) 

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

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. 
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. 
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. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) You know, I never thought that I'd end up working at Microsoft. 
It's very gratifying to have this kind of reception here. 
(Laughter) I guess you can see this is lots of different types of cameras: it's everything from cell-phone cameras to professional SLRs, quite a large number of them, stitched together in this environment. 
If I can find some of the sort of weird ones -- So many of them are occluded by faces, and so on. 
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. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) 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. 

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

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

When I was in the fifth grade, I bought an issue of "DC Comics Presents #57" off of a spinner rack at my local bookstore, and that comic book changed my life. 
The combination of words and pictures did something inside my head that had never been done before, and I immediately fell in love with the medium of comics. 
I became a voracious comic book reader, but I never brought them to school. 
Instinctively, I knew that comic books didn't belong in the classroom. 
My parents definitely were not fans, and I was certain that my teachers wouldn't be either. 
After all, they never used them to teach, comic books and graphic novels were never allowed during silent sustained reading, and they were never sold at our annual book fair. 
Even so, I kept reading comics, and I even started making them. 
Eventually I became a published cartoonist, writing and drawing comic books for a living. 
I also became a high school teacher. 
This is where I taught: Bishop O'Dowd High School in Oakland, California. 
I taught a little bit of math and a little bit of art, but mostly computer science, and I was there for 17 years. 
When I was a brand new teacher, I tried bringing comic books into my classroom. 
I remember telling my students on the first day of every class that I was also a cartoonist. 
It wasn't so much that I was planning to teach them with comics, it was more that I was hoping comics would make them think that I was cool. 
(Laughter) I was wrong. 
This was the '90s, so comic books didn't have the cultural cachet that they do today. 
My students didn't think I was cool. They thought I was kind of a dork. 
And even worse, when stuff got hard in my class, they would use comic books as a way of distracting me. 
They would raise their hands and ask me questions like, "Mr. Yang, who do you think would win in a fight, Superman or the Hulk?" 
(Laughter) I very quickly realized I had to keep my teaching and my cartooning separate. 
It seemed like my instincts in fifth grade were correct. 
Comic books didn't belong in the classroom. 
But again, I was wrong. 
A few years into my teaching career, I learned firsthand the educational potential of comics. 
One semester, I was asked to sub for this Algebra 2 class. 
I was asked to long-term sub it, and I said yes, but there was a problem. 
At the time, I was also the school's educational technologist, which meant every couple of weeks I had to miss one or two periods of this Algebra 2 class because I was in another classroom helping another teacher with a computer-related activity. 
For these Algebra 2 students, that was terrible. 
I mean, having a long-term sub is bad enough, but having a sub for your sub? That's the worst. 
In an effort to provide some sort of consistency for my students, I began videotaping myself giving lectures. 
I'd then give these videos to my sub to play for my students. 
I tried to make these videos as engaging as possible. 
I even included these little special effects. 
For instance, after I finished a problem on the board, I'd clap my hands, and the board would magically erase. 
(Laughter) I thought it was pretty awesome. 
I was pretty certain that my students would love it, but I was wrong. 
(Laughter) These video lectures were a disaster. 
I had students coming up to me and saying things like, "Mr. Yang, we thought you were boring in person, but on video, you are just unbearable." 
(Laughter) So as a desperate second attempt, I began drawing these lectures as comics. 
I'd do these very quickly with very little planning. 
I'd just take a sharpie, draw one panel after the other, figuring out what I wanted to say as I went. 
These comics lectures would come out to anywhere between four and six pages long, I'd xerox these, give them to my sub to hand to my students. 
And much to my surprise, these comics lectures were a hit. 
My students would ask me to make these for them even when I could be there in person. 
It was like they liked cartoon me more than actual me. 
(Laughter) This surprised me, because my students are part of a generation that was raised on screens, so I thought for sure they would like learning from a screen better than learning from a page. 
But when I talked to my students about why they liked these comics lectures so much, I began to understand the educational potential of comics. 
First, unlike their math textbooks, these comics lectures taught visually. 
Our students grow up in a visual culture, so they're used to taking in information that way. 
But unlike other visual narratives, like film or television or animation or video, comics are what I call permanent. 
In a comic, past, present and future all sit side by side on the same page. 
This means that the rate of information flow is firmly in the hands of the reader. 
When my students didn't understand something in my comics lecture, they could just reread that passage as quickly or as slowly as they needed. 
It was like I was giving them a remote control over the information. 
The same was not true of my video lectures, and it wasn't even true of my in-person lectures. 
When I speak, I deliver the information as quickly or slowly as I want. 
So for certain students and certain kinds of information, these two aspects of the comics medium, its visual nature and its permanence, make it an incredibly powerful educational tool. 
When I was teaching this Algebra 2 class, I was also working on my master's in education at Cal State East Bay. 
And I was so intrigued by this experience that I had with these comics lectures that I decided to focus my final master's project on comics. 
I wanted to figure out why American educators have historically been so reluctant to use comic books in their classrooms. 
Here's what I discovered. 
Comic books first became a mass medium in the 1940s, with millions of copies selling every month, and educators back then took notice. 
A lot of innovative teachers began bringing comics into their classrooms to experiment. 
In 1944, the "Journal of Educational Sociology" even devoted an entire issue to this topic. 
Things seemed to be progressing. 
Teachers were starting to figure things out. 
But then along comes this guy. 
This is child psychologist Dr. Fredric Wertham, and in 1954, he wrote a book called "Seduction of the Innocent," where he argues that comic books cause juvenile delinquency. 
(Laughter) He was wrong. 
Now, Dr. Wertham was actually a pretty decent guy. 
He spent most of his career working with juvenile delinquents, and in his work he noticed that most of his clients read comic books. 
What Dr. Wertham failed to realize was in the 1940s and '50s, almost every kid in America read comic books. 
Dr. Wertham does a pretty dubious job of proving his case, but his book does inspire the Senate of the United States to hold a series of hearings to see if in fact comic books caused juvenile delinquency. 
These hearings lasted for almost two months. 
They ended inconclusively, but not before doing tremendous damage to the reputation of comic books in the eyes of the American public. 
After this, respectable American educators all backed away, and they stayed away for decades. 
It wasn't until the 1970s that a few brave souls started making their way back in. 
And it really wasn't until pretty recently, maybe the last decade or so, that comics have seen more widespread acceptance among American educators. 
Comic books and graphic novels are now finally making their way back into American classrooms and this is even happening at Bishop O'Dowd, where I used to teach. 
Mr. Smith, one of my former colleagues, uses Scott McCloud's "Understanding Comics" in his literature and film class, because that book gives his students the language with which to discuss the relationship between words and images. 
Mr. Burns assigns a comics essay to his students every year. 
By asking his students to process a prose novel using images, Mr. Burns asks them to think deeply not just about the story but also about how that story is told. 
And Ms. Murrock uses my own "American Born Chinese" with her English 1 students. 
For her, graphic novels are a great way of fulfilling a Common Core Standard. 
The Standard states that students ought to be able to analyze how visual elements contribute to the meaning, tone and beauty of a text. 
Over in the library, Ms. Counts has built a pretty impressive graphic novel collection for Bishop O'Dowd. 
Now, Ms. Counts and all of her librarian colleagues have really been at the forefront of comics advocacy, really since the early '80s, when a school library journal article stated that the mere presence of graphic novels in the library increased usage by about 80 percent and increased the circulation of noncomics material by about 30 percent. 
Inspired by this renewed interest from American educators, American cartoonists are now producing more explicitly educational content for the K-12 market than ever before. 
A lot of this is directed at language arts, but more and more comics and graphic novels are starting to tackle math and science topics. 
STEM comics graphics novels really are like this uncharted territory, ready to be explored. 
America is finally waking up to the fact that comic books do not cause juvenile delinquency. 
(Laughter) That they really do belong in every educator's toolkit. 
There's no good reason to keep comic books and graphic novels out of K-12 education. 
They teach visually, they give our students that remote control. 
The educational potential is there just waiting to be tapped by creative people like you. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

It was June 2014. 
I was 30 years old, and I received a call from my doctor's office to say my test results were in. 
So I walked up to see her in my lunch break, and my doctor said she was very sorry to tell me that I had breast cancer. 
I didn't want to believe her and at first, I didn't. 
You see, I'm a lawyer and I needed some evidence. 
So I'm very embarrassed to tell you all that I stood up and I walked around to where she was sitting so that I could look over her shoulder and verify what was written on the page in front of her. 
(Laughter) Malignant carcinoma. 
But still not wanting to believe it, I said, "Now, malignant carcinoma, you're sure that means cancer?" 
(Laughter) She told me she was sure. 
Back at work, I handed over the urgent things that needed to be done while I was having more tests to see if my cancer had spread. 
But at that moment, work wasn't my priority. 
I was thinking about how I was going to tell my family and friends that I had cancer. 
How I was going to answer their questions about how bad it was and whether I was going to be OK, when I didn't know that myself. 
I was wondering if my partner and I would ever have an opportunity to start a family. 
And I was figuring out how I was going to tell my mother, who had herself had breast cancer when she was pregnant with me. 
She would know how I was feeling and have an idea of what lay ahead for me. 
But I also didn't want her to have to relive her cancer experience. 
What I didn't appreciate at the time was that work was about to play a huge role in my treatment and recovery. 
That it would be my coworkers and my job that would make me feel valuable and human at times when I would have otherwise felt like a statistic. 
That it would be my job that would give me routine and stability when I was dealing with so many difficult personal decisions and so much uncertainty. 
Like, what sort of breast reconstruction I was going to have. 
And at a time like that, you would think that I would turn to my family and friends for support. 
And yes, of course I did that. 
But it would ultimately be my colleagues who would play a huge role in my day-to-day life. 
And they would be the ones to make me laugh. 
You see, we were a pretty close team, and we shared a couple of really good in-jokes, like this time they overheard someone ask me how I got my hair so shiny and perfect -- without knowing that it was, of course, a wig, and you know, it was a very good wig and it did make getting ready in the mornings very easy. 
(Laughter) But in little moments like this, I appreciated what their support meant, and I wondered what I would have done without that network. 
I've spoken with so many people, women in particular, who haven't had the chance to have that network because they haven't been given the opportunity to work through treatment. 
And there are several reasons for this. 
But I think it mostly comes down to overly paternalistic employers. 
These employers want you to go away and focus on yourself. 
And come back when you're better. 
And they use those kinds of phrases. 
And while these responses are well-meaning, knowing the benefits it brought me, it makes me incredibly frustrated when people are told that they couldn’t or shouldn't work, when it's something that they want to do and physically can do. 
So I started to look into what an employer is required to do when someone presents with a cancer diagnosis. 
I discovered that under Australian law, cancer is considered a disability. 
So if you are unable to perform your usual work duties, your employer is obligated by the Disability Discrimination Act to make reasonable adjustments to your working arrangements, so that you can continue to work. 
What would reasonable adjustments look like for me? 
I knew the obvious impacts my diagnosis was going to have on work. 
Medical appointments would be scheduled during business hours, and I knew that I would need time off to recover from surgical procedures. 
Again, being a typical lawyer, I had done my due diligence on what to expect from treatment. 
Admittedly, a lot of that was through Doctor Google, perhaps not my best move and I wouldn't recommend that. 
(Laughter) But while I was ready for all the physical side effects, what really scared me was this thing called chemo brain. 
Chemo brain presents itself through memory loss, an inability to concentrate and an inability to solve problems. 
And if this happened to me, I wondered how I was going to do my job as a lawyer. 
Would I be forced to leave work? 
And how could I possibly have a discussion with my manager about reasonable adjustments to my working arrangements when I didn't know how I was going to be impacted? 
I was fortunate to have a supportive manager who was happy to see how things went as we went along, rather than requiring a concrete plan up front. 
I was lucky that while he may not have even known about this concept of reasonable adjustments, to him, it was just common sense. 
But I've learned that it's not common sense to everyone. 
Everyone going through treatment will learn how it impacts them and what their limitations are. 
And they'll learn to adjust for that. 
So for me, there were the tips and tricks that I learned about the treatment itself, like, before you go to chemo, you need to make sure you're really well hydrated and that you're warm, because it helps the nurses to find your veins. 
And make sure that you don't eat any of your favorite food, either before or after chemo, because you're going to be throwing that up and you won't ever want to look at it again. 
(Laughter) I learned that one the hard way. 
And then there were the tricks for managing my workflow. 
I scheduled chemo for first thing on a Monday morning. 
I knew that from the time I left the cancer care unit, I had about four hours before this fog screen would come down and I would start to be sick. 
So I would use that time to clean my inbox and make any urgent calls. 
The worst of the sickness would be gone within about 48 hours. 
And then I would log back into work from home. 
This treatment continued and I knew what to expect. 
I was able to set reasonable expectations with my business partners about what I could do and the time frames that I could do it in. 
But I still remember the hesitation in their voices when it came to asking for things. 
And asking me to do things by a certain time. 
And trust me, these were people that were not afraid of setting a good deadline. 
(Laughter) I got the impression they didn't want to put any extra pressure on me while I was going through treatment. 
And while I appreciated the sentiment, I actually needed the deadlines. 
To me, that was something within my control and something that could stay in my control when there were so many things that couldn't. 
And as I was working from home, I was thinking about how employers should be applying this concept of reasonable adjustments in our current age, where one in two Australian men and women will be diagnosed with cancer by the age of 85. 
So, as we continue to work longer and longer into older age, the chances of having a serious illness while we're in the workforce are increasing. 
And with technology enabling us to work anywhere, any time, reasonable adjustments are no longer contingent upon whether or not you can continue to physically make it into the physical office. 
Reasonable adjustments are also not about just offering a longer break or a comfier chair to sit in, although those things might be good, too. 
At the very least, we need to be applying the flexibility policies and strategies we've developed for other scenarios, like for people with family responsibilities. 
But how can we ensure that people are even having a conversation about what reasonable adjustments might look like for them if a manager's first response is to say, "Oh no, don't come back to work until you're better." 
And a light went on for me. 
It must be compulsory for managers to have to have these conversations with their employees. 
And lessons from people like me, that have really benefited from working through treatment, need to be more widely shared. 
And I thought about what could be done to guide these conversations, and then an amazing colleague of mine, Camilla Gunn, developed a "Working with Cancer" toolkit. 
The toolkit provides a framework for those diagnosed, their managers, their carers and their coworkers to have conversations about cancer and the work support available. 
Camilla and I have now been to other organizations to talk about the toolkit and how it can help to guide through what, quite frankly, are otherwise some pretty awkward conversations. 
And I'm pleased to say that the uptake of the toolkit is increasing. 
So what should be a manager's first response when somebody says that they're sick and they don't know how it's going to impact their work? 
It must be this: "To the extent that you are able, and want to, we would love to work out an arrangement for you to continue to work through treatment." 
We need to start positively engaging people with serious illness to keep them in the workforce, rather than paternalistically pushing them away. 
I've told you my story because I want you to know the benefits that working through treatment brought me. 
And I also want to change your perceptions if you think that somebody going through treatment is just bored, frail and vomiting a lot. 
And yes, these things were true some of the time, if not a lot of the time, but I was also determined to push myself at work as much as I had always done. 
And I was able to do that because my employer gave me the choice. 
Most importantly, I'm telling you because while it's a seemingly obvious choice to give someone, it's not one that is always offered or encouraged. 
And it must be. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I remember the first time that I saw people injecting drugs. 
I had just arrived in Vancouver to lead a research project in HIV prevention in the infamous Downtown East Side. 
It was in the lobby of the Portland Hotel, a supportive housing project that gave rooms to the most marginalized people in the city, the so-called "difficult to house." 
I'll never forget the young woman standing on the stairs repeatedly jabbing herself with a needle, and screaming, "I can't find a vein," as blood splattered on the wall. 
In response to the desperate state of affairs, the drug use, the poverty, the violence, the soaring rates of HIV, Vancouver declared a public health emergency in 1997. 
This opened the door to expanding harm reduction services, distributing more needles, increasing access to methadone, and, finally, opening a supervised injection site. 
Things that make injecting drugs less hazardous. 
But today, 20 years later, harm reduction is still viewed as some sort of radical concept. 
In some places, it's still illegal to carry a clean needle. 
Drug users are far more likely to be arrested than to be offered methadone therapy. 
Recent proposals for supervised injection sites in cities like Seattle, Baltimore and New York have been met with stiff opposition: opposition that goes against everything we know about addiction. 
Why is that? 
Why are we still stuck on the idea that the only option is to stop using -- that any drug use will not be tolerated? 
Why do we ignore countless personal stories and overwhelming scientific evidence that harm reduction works? 
Critics say that harm reduction doesn't stop people from using illegal drugs. 
Well, actually, that is the whole point. 
After every criminal and societal sanction that we can come up with, people still use drugs, and far too many die. 
Critics also say that we are giving up on people by not focusing our attention on treatment and recovery. 
In fact, it is just the opposite. 
We are not giving up on people. 
We know that if recovery is ever going to happen we must keep people alive. 
Offering someone a clean needle or a safe place to inject is the first step to treatment and recovery. 
Critics also claim that harm reduction gives the wrong message to our children about drug users. 
The last time I looked, these drug users are our children. 
The message of harm reduction is that while drugs can hurt you, we still must reach out to people who are addicted. 
A needle exchange is not an advertisement for drug use. 
Neither is a methadone clinic or a supervised injection site. 
What you see there are people sick and hurting, hardly an endorsement for drug use. 
Let's take supervised injection sites, for example. 
Probably the most misunderstood health intervention ever. 
All we are saying is that allowing people to inject in a clean, dry space with fresh needles, surrounded by people who care is a lot better than injecting in a dingy alley, sharing contaminated needles and hiding out from police. 
It's better for everybody. 
The first supervised injection site in Vancouver was at 327 Carol Street, a narrow room with a concrete floor, a few chairs and a box of clean needles. 
The police would often lock it down, but somehow it always mysteriously reopened, often with the aid of a crowbar. 
I would go down there some evenings to provide medical care for people who were injecting drugs. 
I was always struck with the commitment and compassion of the people who operated and used the site. 
No judgment, no hassles, no fear, lots of profound conversation. 
I learned that despite unimaginable trauma, physical pain and mental illness, that everyone there thought that things would get better. 
Most were convinced that, someday, they'd stop using drugs altogether. 
That room was the forerunner to North America's first government-sanctioned supervised injection site, called INSITE. 
It opened in September of 2003 as a three-year research project. 
The conservative government was intent on closing it down at the end of the study. 
After eight years, the battle to close INSITE went all the way up to Canada's Supreme Court. 
It pitted the government of Canada against two people with a long history of drug use who knew the benefits of INSITE firsthand: Dean Wilson and Shelley Tomic. 
The court ruled in favor of keeping INSITE open by nine to zero. 
The justices were scathing in their response to the government's case. 
And I quote: "The effect of denying the services of INSITE to the population that it serves and the correlative increase in the risk of death and disease to injection drug users is grossly disproportionate to any benefit that Canada might derive from presenting a uniform stance on the possession of narcotics." 
This was a hopeful moment for harm reduction. 
Yet, despite this strong message from the Supreme Court, it was, until very recently, impossible to open up any new sites in Canada. 
There was one interesting thing that happened in December of 2016, when due to the overdose crisis, the government of British Columbia allowed the opening of overdose prevention sites. 
Essentially ignoring the federal approval process, community groups opened up about 22 of these de facto illegal supervised injection sites across the province. 
Virtually overnight, thousands of people could use drugs under supervision. 
Hundreds of overdoses were reversed by Naloxone, and nobody died. 
In fact, this is what's happened at INSITE over the last 14 years: 75,000 different individuals have injected illegal drugs more than three and a half million times, and not one person has died. 
Nobody has ever died at INSITE. 
So there you have it. 
We have scientific evidence and successes from needle exchanges methadone and supervised injection sites. 
These are common-sense, compassionate approaches to drug use that improve health, bring connection and greatly reduce suffering and death. 
So why haven't harm reduction programs taken off? 
Why do we still think that drug use is law enforcement issue? 
Our disdain for drugs and drug users goes very deep. 
We are bombarded with images and media stories about the horrible impacts of drugs. 
We have stigmatized entire communities. 
We applaud military-inspired operations that bring down drug dealers. 
And we appear unfazed by building more jails to incarcerate people whose only crime is using drugs. 
Virtually millions of people are caught up in a hopeless cycle of incarceration, violence and poverty that has been created by our drug laws and not the drugs themselves. 
How do I explain to people that drug users deserve care and support and the freedom to live their lives when all we see are images of guns and handcuffs and jail cells? 
Let's be clear: criminalization is just a way to institutionalize stigma. 
Making drugs illegal does nothing to stop people from using them. 
Our paralysis to see things differently is also based on an entirely false narrative about drug use. 
We have been led to believe that drug users are irresponsible people who just want to get high, and then through their own personal failings spiral down into a life of crime and poverty, losing their jobs, their families and, ultimately, their lives. 
In reality, most drug users have a story, whether it's childhood trauma, sexual abuse, mental illness or a personal tragedy. 
The drugs are used to numb the pain. 
We must understand that as we approach people with so much trauma. 
At its core, our drug policies are really a social justice issue. 
While the media may focus on overdose deaths like Prince and Michael Jackson, the majority of the suffering happens to people who are living on the margins, the poor and the dispossessed. 
They don't vote; they are often alone. 
They are society's disposable people. 
Even within health care, drug use is highly stigmatized. 
People using drugs avoid the health care system. 
They know that once engaged in clinical care or admitted to hospital, they will be treated poorly. 
And their supply line, be it heroin, cocaine or crystal meth will be interrupted. 
On top of that, they will be asked a barrage of questions that only serve to expose their losses and shame. 
"What drugs do you use?" 
"How long have you been living on the street?" 
"Where are your children?" 
"When were you last in jail?" 
Essentially: "Why the hell don't you stop using drugs?" 
In fact, our entire medical approach to drug use is upside down. 
For some reason, we have decided that abstinence is the best way to treat this. 
If you're lucky enough, you may get into a detox program. 
If you live in a community with Suboxone or methadone, you may get on a substitution program. 
Hardly ever would we offer people what they desperately need to survive: a safe prescription for opioids. 
Starting with abstinence is like asking a new diabetic to quit sugar or a severe asthmatic to start running marathons or a depressed person to just be happy. 
For any other medical condition, we would never start with the most extreme option. 
What makes us think that strategy would work for something as complex as addiction? 
While unintentional overdoses are not new, the scale of the current crisis is unprecedented. 
The Center for Disease Control estimated that 64,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in 2016, far exceeding car crashes or homicides. 
Drug-related mortality is now the leading cause of death among men and women between 20 and 50 years old in North America Think about that. 
How did we get to this point, and why now? 
There is a kind of perfect storm around opioids. 
Drugs like Oxycontin, Percocet and Dilaudid have been liberally distributed for decades for all kinds of pain. 
It is estimated that two million Americans are daily opioid users, and over 60 million people received at least one prescription for opioids last year. 
This massive dump of prescription drugs into communities has provided a steady source for people wanting to self-medicate. 
In response to this prescription epidemic, people have been cut off, and this has greatly reduced the street supply The unintended but predictable consequence is an overdose epidemic. 
Many people who were reliant on a steady supply of prescription drugs turned to heroin. 
And now the illegal drug market has tragically switched to synthetic drugs, mainly fentanyl. 
These new drugs are cheap, potent and extremely hard to dose. 
People are literally being poisoned. 
Can you imagine if this was any other kind of poisoning epidemic? 
What if thousands of people started dying from poisoned meat or baby formula or coffee? 
We would be treating this as a true emergency. 
We would immediately be supplying safer alternatives. 
There would be changes in legislation, and we would be supporting the victims and their families. 
But for the drug overdose epidemic, we have done none of that. 
We continue to demonize the drugs and the people who use them and blindly pour even more resources into law enforcement. 
So where should we go from here? 
First, we should fully embrace, fund and scale up harm reduction programs across North America. 
I know that in places like Vancouver, harm reduction has been a lifeline to care and treatment. 
I know that the number of overdose deaths would be far higher without harm reduction. 
And I personally know hundreds of people who are alive today because of harm reduction. 
But harm reduction is just the start. 
If we truly want to make an impact on this drug crisis, we need to have a serious conversation about prohibition and criminal punishment. 
We need to recognize that drug use is first and foremost a public health issue and turn to comprehensive social and health solutions. 
We already have a model for how this can work. 
In 2001, Portugal was having its own drug crisis. 
Lots of people using drugs, high crime rates and an overdose epidemic. 
They defied global conventions and decriminalized all drug possession. 
Money that was spent on drug enforcement was redirected to health and rehabilitation programs. 
The results are in. 
Overall drug use is down dramatically. 
Overdoses are uncommon. 
Many more people are in treatment. 
And people have been given their lives back. 
We have come so far down the road of prohibition, punishment and prejudice that we have become indifferent to the suffering that we have inflicted on the most vulnerable people in our society. 
This year even more people will get caught up in the illegal drug trade. 
Thousands of children will learn that their mother or father has been sent to jail for using drugs. 
And far too many parents will be notified that their son or daughter has died of a drug overdose. 
It doesn't have to be this way. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

I'm going to start here. 
This is a hand-lettered sign that appeared in a mom and pop bakery in my old neighborhood in Brooklyn a few years ago. 
The store owned one of those machines that can print on plates of sugar. 
And kids could bring in drawings and have the store print a sugar plate for the top of their birthday cake. 
But unfortunately, one of the things kids liked to draw was cartoon characters. 
They liked to draw the Little Mermaid, they'd like to draw a smurf, they'd like to draw Micky Mouse. 
But it turns out to be illegal to print a child's drawing of Micky Mouse onto a plate of sugar. 
And it's a copyright violation. 
And policing copyright violations for children's birthday cakes was such a hassle that the College Bakery said, "You know what, we're getting out of that business. 
If you're an amateur, you don't have access to our machine anymore. 
If you want a printed sugar birthday cake, you have to use one of our prefab images -- only for professionals." 
So there's two bills in Congress right now. 
One is called SOPA, the other is called PIPA. 
SOPA stands for the Stop Online Piracy Act. 
It's from the Senate. 
PIPA is short for PROTECTIP, which is itself short for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property -- because the congressional aides who name these things have a lot of time on their hands. 
And what SOPA and PIPA want to do is they want to do this. 
They want to raise the cost of copyright compliance to the point where people simply get out of the business of offering it as a capability to amateurs. 
Now the way they propose to do this is to identify sites that are substantially infringing on copyright -- although how those sites are identified is never fully specified in the bills -- and then they want to remove them from the domain name system. 
They want to take them out of the domain name system. 
Now the domain name system is the thing that turns human-readable names, like Google.com, into the kinds of addresses machines expect -- 74.125.226.212. 
Now the problem with this model of censorship, of identifying a site and then trying to remove it from the domain name system, is that it won't work. 
And you'd think that would be a pretty big problem for a law, but Congress seems not to have let that bother them too much. 
Now the reason it won't work is that you can still type 74.125.226.212 into the browser or you can make it a clickable link and you'll still go to Google. 
So the policing layer around the problem becomes the real threat of the act. 
Now to understand how Congress came to write a bill that won't accomplish its stated goals, but will produce a lot of pernicious side effects, you have to understand a little bit about the back story. 
And the back story is this: SOPA and PIPA, as legislation, were drafted largely by media companies that were founded in the 20th century. 
The 20th century was a great time to be a media company, because the thing you really had on your side was scarcity. 
If you were making a TV show, it didn't have to be better than all other TV shows ever made; it only had to be better than the two other shows that were on at the same time -- which is a very low threshold of competitive difficulty. 
Which meant that if you fielded average content, you got a third of the U.S. public for free -- tens of millions of users for simply doing something that wasn't too terrible. 
This is like having a license to print money and a barrel of free ink. 
But technology moved on, as technology is wont to do. 
And slowly, slowly, at the end of the 20th century, that scarcity started to get eroded -- and I don't mean by digital technology; I mean by analog technology. 
Cassette tapes, video cassette recorders, even the humble Xerox machine created new opportunities for us to behave in ways that astonished the media business. 
Because it turned out we're not really couch potatoes. 
We don't really like to only consume. 
We do like to consume, but every time one of these new tools came along, it turned out we also like to produce and we like to share. 
And this freaked the media businesses out -- it freaked them out every time. 
Jack Valenti, who was the head lobbyist for the Motion Picture Association of America, once likened the ferocious video cassette recorder to Jack the Ripper and poor, helpless Hollywood to a woman at home alone. 
That was the level of rhetoric. 
And so the media industries begged, insisted, demanded that Congress do something. 
And Congress did something. 
By the early 90s, Congress passed the law that changed everything. 
And that law was called the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. 
What the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 said was, look, if people are taping stuff off the radio and then making mixtapes for their friends, that is not a crime. That's okay. 
Taping and remixing and sharing with your friends is okay. 
If you make lots and lots of high quality copies and you sell them, that's not okay. 
But this taping business, fine, let it go. 
And they thought that they clarified the issue, because they'd set out a clear distinction between legal and illegal copying. 
But that wasn't what the media businesses wanted. 
They had wanted Congress to outlaw copying full-stop. 
So when the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 was passed, the media businesses gave up on the idea of legal versus illegal distinctions for copying because it was clear that if Congress was acting in their framework, they might actually increase the rights of citizens to participate in our own media environment. 
So they went for plan B. 
It took them a while to formulate plan B. 
Plan B appeared in its first full-blown form in 1998 -- something called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. 
It was a complicated piece of legislation, a lot of moving parts. 
But the main thrust of the DMCA was that it was legal to sell you uncopyable digital material -- except that there's no such things as uncopyable digital material. 
It would be, as Ed Felton once famously said, "Like handing out water that wasn't wet." 
Bits are copyable. That's what computers do. 
That is a side effect of their ordinary operation. 
So in order to fake the ability to sell uncopyable bits, the DMCA also made it legal to force you to use systems that broke the copying function of your devices. 
Every DVD player and game player and television and computer you brought home -- no matter what you thought you were getting when you bought it -- could be broken by the content industries, if they wanted to set that as a condition of selling you the content. 
And to make sure you didn't realize, or didn't enact their capabilities as general purpose computing devices, they also made it illegal for you to try to reset the copyability of that content. 
The DMCA marks the moment when the media industries gave up on the legal system of distinguishing between legal and illegal copying and simply tried to prevent copying through technical means. 
Now the DMCA had, and is continuing to have, a lot of complicated effects, but in this one domain, limiting sharing, it has mostly not worked. 
And the main reason it hasn't worked is the Internet has turned out to be far more popular and far more powerful than anyone imagined. 
The mixtape, the fanzine, that was nothing compared to what we're seeing now with the Internet. 
We are in a world where most American citizens over the age of 12 share things with each other online. 
We share written things, we share images, we share audio, we share video. 
Some of the stuff we share is stuff we've made. 
Some of the stuff we share is stuff we've found. 
Some of the stuff we share is stuff we've made out of what we've found, and all of it horrifies those industries. 
So PIPA and SOPA are round two. 
But where the DMCA was surgical -- we want to go down into your computer, we want to go down into your television set, down into your game machine, and prevent it from doing what they said it would do at the store -- PIPA and SOPA are nuclear and they're saying, we want to go anywhere in the world and censor content. 
Now the mechanism, as I said, for doing this, is you need to take out anybody pointing to those IP addresses. 
You need to take them out of search engines, you need to take them out of online directories, you need to take them out of user lists. 
And because the biggest producers of content on the Internet are not Google and Yahoo, they're us, we're the people getting policed. 
Because in the end, the real threat to the enactment of PIPA and SOPA is our ability to share things with one another. 
So what PIPA and SOPA risk doing is taking a centuries-old legal concept, innocent until proven guilty, and reversing it -- guilty until proven innocent. 
You can't share until you show us that you're not sharing something we don't like. 
Suddenly, the burden of proof for legal versus illegal falls affirmatively on us and on the services that might be offering us any new capabilities. 
And if it costs even a dime to police a user, that will crush a service with a hundred million users. 
So this is the Internet they have in mind. 
Imagine this sign everywhere -- except imagine it doesn't say College Bakery, imagine it says YouTube and Facebook and Twitter. 
Imagine it says TED, because the comments can't be policed at any acceptable cost. 
The real effects of SOPA and PIPA are going to be different than the proposed effects. 
The threat, in fact, is this inversion of the burden of proof, where we suddenly are all treated like thieves at every moment we're given the freedom to create, to produce or to share. 
And the people who provide those capabilities to us -- the YouTubes, the Facebooks, the Twitters and TEDs -- are in the business of having to police us, or being on the hook for contributory infringement. 
There's two things you can do to help stop this -- a simple thing and a complicated thing, an easy thing and a hard thing. 
The simple thing, the easy thing, is this: if you're an American citizen, call your representative, call your senator. 
When you look at the people who co-signed on the SOPA bill, people who've co-signed on PIPA, what you see is that they have cumulatively received millions and millions of dollars from the traditional media industries. 
You don't have millions and millions of dollars, but you can call your representatives, and you can remind them that you vote, and you can ask not to be treated like a thief, and you can suggest that you would prefer that the Internet not be broken. 
And if you're not an American citizen, you can contact American citizens that you know and encourage them to do the same. 
Because this seems like a national issue, but it is not. 
These industries will not be content with breaking our Internet. 
If they break it, they will break it for everybody. 
That's the easy thing. 
That's the simple thing. 
The hard thing is this: get ready, because more is coming. 
SOPA is simply a reversion of COICA, which was purposed last year, which did not pass. 
And all of this goes back to the failure of the DMCA to disallow sharing as a technical means. 
And the DMCA goes back to the Audio Home Recording Act, which horrified those industries. 
Because the whole business of actually suggesting that someone is breaking the law and then gathering evidence and proving that, that turns out to be really inconvenient. 
"We'd prefer not to do that," says the content industries. 
And what they want is not to have to do that. 
They don't want legal distinctions between legal and illegal sharing. 
They just want the sharing to go away. 
PIPA and SOPA are not oddities, they're not anomalies, they're not events. 
They're the next turn of this particular screw, which has been going on 20 years now. 
And if we defeat these, as I hope we do, more is coming. 
Because until we convince Congress that the way to deal with copyright violation is the way copyright violation was dealt with with Napster, with YouTube, which is to have a trial with all the presentation of evidence and the hashing out of facts and the assessment of remedies that goes on in democratic societies. 
That's the way to handle this. 
In the meantime, the hard thing to do is to be ready. 
Because that's the real message of PIPA and SOPA. 
Time Warner has called and they want us all back on the couch, just consuming -- not producing, not sharing -- and we should say, "No." 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I want to talk about one of the big questions, perhaps the biggest question: How should we live together? 
How should a group of people, who perhaps live in a city or in the continent or even the whole globe, share and manage common resources? 
How should we make the rules that govern us? 
This has always been an important question. 
And today, I think it's even more important than ever if we want to address rising inequality, climate change, the refugee crisis, just to name a few major issues. 
It's also a very old question. 
Humans have been asking themselves this question ever since we lived in organized societies. 
Like this guy, Plato. 
He thought we needed benevolent guardians who could make decisions for the greater good of everyone. 
Kings and queens thought they could be those guardians, but during various revolutions, they tended to lose their heads. 
And this guy, you probably know. 
Here in Hungary, you lived for many years under one attempt to implement his answer of how to live together. 
His answer was brutal, cruel and inhumane. 
But a different answer, a different kind of answer, which went more or less into hibernation for 2,000 years, has had profound recent success. 
That answer is, of course, democracy. 
If we take a quick look at the modern history of democracy, it goes something like this. 
Along here, we're going to put the last 200 years. 
Up here, we're going to put the number of democracies. 
And the graph does this, the important point of which, is this extraordinary increase over time, which is why the 20th century has been called the century of democracy's triumph, and why, as Francis Fukuyama said in 1989, some believe that we have reached the end of history, that the question of how to live together has been answered, and that answer is liberal democracy. 
Let's explore that assertion, though. 
I want to find out what you think. 
So I'm going to ask you two questions, and I want you to put your hands up if you agree. 
The first question is: Who thinks living in a democracy is a good thing? 
Who likes democracy? 
If you can think of a better system, keep your hands down. 
Don't worry about those who didn't raise their hands, I'm sure they mean very well. 
The second question is: Who thinks our democracies are functioning well? 
Come on, there must be one politician in the audience somewhere. 
(Laughter) No. 
But my point is, if liberal democracy is the end of history, then there's a massive paradox or contradiction here. 
Why is that? 
Well, the first question is about the ideal of democracy, and all these qualities are very appealing. 
But in practice, it's not working. 
And that's the second question. 
Our politics is broken, our politicians aren't trusted, and the political system is distorted by powerful vested interests. 
I think there's two ways to resolve this paradox. 
One is to give up on democracy; it doesn't work. 
Let's elect a populist demagogue who will ignore democratic norms, trample on liberal freedoms and just get things done. 
The other option, I think, is to fix this broken system, to bring the practice closer to the ideal and put the diverse voices of society in our parliaments and get them to make considered, evidence-based laws for the long-term good of everyone. 
Which brings me to my epiphany, my moment of enlightenment. 
And I want you to get critical. 
I want you to ask yourselves, "Why wouldn't this work?" 
And then come and talk to me afterwards about it. 
Its technical name is "sortition." 
But its common name is "random selection." 
And the idea is actually very simple: we randomly select people and put them in parliament. 
(Laughter) Let's think about that for a few more minutes, shall we? 
Imagine we chose you and you and you and you and you down there and a bunch of other random people, and we put you in our parliament for the next couple of years. 
Of course, we could stratify the selection to make sure that it matched the socioeconomic and demographic profile of the country and was a truly representative sample of people. 
Fifty percent of them would be women. 
Many of them would be young, some would be old, a few would be rich, but most of them would be ordinary people like you and me. 
This would be a microcosm of society. 
And this microcosm would simulate how we would all think, if we had the time, the information and a good process to come to the moral crux of political decisions. 
And although you may not be in that group, someone of your age, someone of your gender, someone from your location and someone with your background would be in that room. 
The decisions made by these people would build on the wisdom of crowds. 
They would become more than the sum of their parts. 
They would become critical thinkers with access to experts, who would be on tap but not on top. 
And they could prove that diversity can trump ability when confronting the wide array of societal questions and problems. 
It would not be government by public opinion poll. 
It would not be government by referendum. 
These informed, deliberating people would move beyond public opinion to the making of public judgments. 
However, there would be one major side effect: if we replaced elections with sortition and made our parliament truly representative of society, it would mean the end of politicians. 
And I'm sure we'd all be pretty sad to see that. 
(Laughter) Very interestingly, random selection was a key part of how democracy was done in ancient Athens. 
This machine, this device, is called a kleroteria. 
It's an ancient Athenian random-selection device. 
The ancient Athenians randomly selected citizens to fill the vast majority of their political posts. 
They knew that elections were aristocratic devices. 
They knew that career politicians were a thing to be avoided. 
And I think we know these things as well. 
But more interesting than the ancient use of random selection is its modern resurgence. 
The rediscovery of the legitimacy of random selection in politics has become so common lately, that there's simply too many examples to talk about. 
Of course, I'm very aware that it's going to be difficult to institute this in our parliaments. 
Try this -- say to your friend, "I think we should populate our parliament with randomly selected people." 
"Are you joking? 
What if my neighbor gets chosen? 
The fool can't even separate his recycling." 
But the perhaps surprising but overwhelming and compelling evidence from all these modern examples is that it does work. 
If you give people responsibility, they act responsibly. 
Don't get me wrong -- it's not a panacea. 
The question is not: Would this be perfect? 
Of course not. 
People are fallibly human, and distorting influences will continue to exist. 
The question is: Would it be better? 
And the answer to that question, to me at least, is obviously yes. 
Which gets us back to our original question: How should we live together? 
And now we have an answer: with a parliament that uses sortition. 
But how would we get from here to there? 
How could we fix our broken system and remake democracy for the 21st century? 
Well, there are several things that we can do, and that are, in fact, happening right now. 
We can experiment with sortition. 
We can introduce it to schools and workplaces and other institutions, like Democracy In Practice is doing in Bolivia. 
We can hold policy juries and citizens' assemblies, like the newDemocracy Foundation is doing in Australia, like the Jefferson Center is doing in the US and like the Irish government is doing right now. 
We could build a social movement demanding change, which is what the Sortition Foundation is doing in the UK. 
And at some point, we should institute it. 
Perhaps the first step would be a second chamber in our parliament, full of randomly selected people -- a citizens' senate, if you will. 
There's a campaign for a citizens' senate in France and another campaign in Scotland, and it could, of course, be done right here in Hungary. 
That would be kind of like a Trojan horse right into the heart of government. 
And then, when it becomes impossible to patch over the cracks in the current system, we must step up and replace elections with sortition. 
I have hope. 
Here in Hungary, systems have been created, and systems have been torn down and replaced in the past. 
Change can and does happen. 
It's just a matter of when and how. 
Thank you. (Hungarian) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The digital divide is a mother that's 45 years old and can't get a job, because she doesn't know how to use a computer. 
It is an immigrant that doesn't know that he can call his family for free. 
It is a child who can't resolve his homework, because he doesn't have access to information. 
The digital divide is a new illiteracy. 
"Digital divide" is also defined as: the gap between individuals and communities that have access to information technologies and those that don't. 
Why does this happen? It happens because of 3 things. 
The first is that people can't get access to these technologies because they can't afford them. 
The second is because they don't know how to use them. 
The third is because they don't know the benefits derived from technology. 
So let's consider some very basic statistics. 
The population of the world is nearly seven billion people. 
Out of these, approximately two billion are digitally included. 
This is approximately 30% of the entire world population, which means that the remaining 70% of the world -- close to five billion people -- do not have access to a computer or the internet. 
Let's think about that number for a second. 
Five billion people; that's four times the population of India, that have never touched a computer, have never accessed the internet. 
So this is a digital abyss that we're talking about, this is not a digital divide. 
Here we can see a map by Chris Harrison that shows the internet connections around the world. 
What we can see is that most of the internet connections are centered on North America and Europe, while the rest of the world is engulfed in the dark shadow of digital divide. 
Next, we can see connections, city-to-city, around the world, and we can see that most of the information generated is being generated between North America and Europe, while the rest of the world is not broadcasting their ideas or information. 
So what does this mean? 
We are living in a world that seems to be having a digital revolution, a revolution that everyone here thinks that we're part of, but the 70% of the world that is digitally excluded is not part of this. 
What does this mean? 
Well, the people that will be digitally excluded won't be able to compete in the labor markets of the future, they won't be connected, they'll be less informed, they'll be less inspired and they'll be less responsible. 
Internet should not be a luxury, it should be a right, because it is a basic social necessity of the 21st century. 
We can't operate without it. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
It allows us to connect to the world. 
It empowers us. 
It gives us social participation. It is a tool for change. 
And so, how are we going to bridge this digital divide? 
Well, there are many models that try and bridge the digital divide, that try and include the population at large. 
But the question is: Are they really working? 
I'm sure everybody here knows One Laptop per Child, where one computer is given to one child. 
The problem with this is, do we really want children to take computers to their homes, homes that have adverse conditions? 
And we also must understand that by giving a child a computer, we're also transferring costs, very high costs, such as internet connection, electricity, maintenance, software, updates. 
So we must create different models, models that help the families rather than add a burden on them. 
Also, let's not forget about the carbon footprint. 
Imagine five billion laptops. 
What would the world look like then? 
Imagine the hazardous residue that would be generated from that. 
Imagine the trash. 
So if we give one computer to one person, and we multiply that times five billion, even if that laptop is a hundred dollars, then we would have 483 trillion dollars. 
Now let's consider we're only counting the youth, ages 10 to 24. 
That's approximately 30% of the digitally excluded population. 
Then that would be 145 trillion dollars. 
What nation has this amount of money? 
This is not a sustainable model. 
So with this in mind, we created a different model. 
We created the RIA, in Spanish, or in English, Learning and Innovation Network, which is a network of community centers that bring education through the use of technology. 
We wanted to increase the number of users per computer in such a way that we could dilute the cost of infrastructure, the cost per user, and that we could bring education and technology to everybody within these communities. 
Let's look at a basic comparison. 
The RIA has 1,650 computers. 
If we had used the One Laptop per Child model of a 1 to 1 ratio, then we would have benefited 1,650 users. 
What we did instead is set up centers that have longer hours of operation than schools, that also include all of the population -- our youngest user is 3 years old, the oldest is 86 -- and with this, in less than two years, we were able to reach 140,000 users, out of which -- (Applause) Thank you. 
out of which, 34,000 have already graduated from our courses. 
Another thing with One Laptop per Child is that it doesn't guarantee the educational use of a computer. 
Technology is nothing without that content. 
We need to use it as a means, not as an end. 
How did we accomplish such a high impact? 
Well, you can't just go into a community and pretend to change it, you need to look at a lot of factors. 
So what we do is a thing we call "urban acupuncture." 
We first start by looking at the basic geography of a site. 
So take, for example, Ecatepec. 
This is one of the most densely populated municipalities in Mexico. 
It has a very low income level. 
So we look at the basic geography, we look at roads, streets, the flux of pedestrians and vehicles. 
Then we look at income, we look at education. 
Then we set up a center there in the place that's going to heal the body, a little needle to change the city body. 
And there we go. 
And so, there are four basic elements that we need to consider when we're using education through technology. 
The first one is we need to create spaces. 
We need to create a space that is welcoming to the community, a space that is according to the needs of the children and of the elders and of every possible person that lives within that community. 
So we create these spaces that are all made with recycled materials. 
We use modular architecture to lower the ecological impact. 
And second, connection. 
By connection, I mean not only a connection to the internet, that's too easy. 
We need to create a connection that's an interconnection of humans. 
The internet is a very complex organism that is fueled of the ideas, the thoughts and the emotions of human beings. 
We need to create networks that aid in exchanging information. 
Third, content. 
Education is nothing without content. 
And you can't pretend to have a relationship of only a computer with a child. 
So we create a route, a very basic learning route, where we teach people how to use a computer, how to use the internet, how to use office software, and in 72 hours, we create digital citizens. 
You can't pretend that people are just going to touch a computer and become digitally included, you need to have a process. 
And after this, then they can take on a longer educational route. 
And then fourth, training. 
We need to train not only the users, but we need to train the people that will facilitate learning for these people. 
When you're talking about the digital divide, people have stigmas, people have fears; people don't understand how it can complement their lives. 
So what we do is train facilitators so that they can help in breaking that digital barrier. 
So, we have four elements: we have a space that's created, we have a connection, we have content and we have training. 
We have created a digital learning community. 
But there is one more element, which is the benefits that technology can create, because it is not printed, static content. 
It is dynamic; it is modifiable. 
So we have we do is, we provide content, then we do training, then we analyze the user patterns so that we can improve content. 
So it creates a virtuous circle. 
It allows us to deliver education according to different types of intelligence and according to different user needs. 
With this in mind, we have to think that technology is something that can modify according to human processes. 
I want to share a story. 
In 2006, I went to live here. 
This is one of the poorest communities in all of Mexico. 
I went to film a documentary on the people that live off trash, entirely of trash -- their houses are built with trash, they eat trash, they dress in trash. 
And after two months of living with them, of seeing the children and the way they work, I understood that the only thing that can change and that can break the poverty cycle is education. 
And we can use technology to bring education to these communities. 
Here is another shot. 
The main message is that technology is not going to save the world; we are, and we can use technology to help us. 
I'm sure everybody here has experienced it; what moves technology is human energy. 
So let's use this energy to make the world a better place. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Imagine waking up to a stranger -- sometimes multiple strangers -- questioning your right to existence for something that you wrote online, waking up to an angry message, scared and worried for your safety. 
Welcome to the world of cyberharassment. 
The kind of harassment that women face in Pakistan is very serious and leads to sometimes deadly outcomes. 
This kind of harassment keeps women from accessing the internet -- essentially, knowledge. 
It's a form of oppression. 
Pakistan is the sixth most populous country in the world, with 140 million people having access to mobile technologies, and 15 percent internet penetration. 
And this number doesn't seem to go down with the rise of new technologies. 
Pakistan is also the birthplace of the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner, Malala Yousafzai. 
But that's just one aspect of Pakistan. 
Another aspect is where the twisted concept of honor is linked to women and their bodies; where men are allowed to disrespect women and even kill them sometimes in the name of so-called "family honor"; where women are left to die right outside their houses for speaking to a man on a mobile phone, in the name of "family honor." 
Let me say this very clearly: it's not honor; it's a cold-blooded murder. 
I come from a very small village in Punjab, Pakistan, where women are not allowed to pursue their higher education. 
The elders of my extended family didn't allow their women to pursue their higher education or their professional careers. 
However, unlike the other male guardians of my family, my father was one who really supported my ambitions. 
To get my law degree, of course, it was really difficult, and [there were] frowns of disapproval. 
But in the end, I knew it's either me or them, and I chose myself. 
(Applause) My family's traditions and expectations for a woman wouldn't allow me to own a mobile phone until I was married. 
And even when I was married, this tool became a tool for my own surveillance. 
When I resisted this idea of being surveilled by my ex-husband, he really didn't approve of this and threw me out of his house, along with my six-month-old son, Abdullah. 
And that was the time when I first asked myself, "Why? 
Why are women not allowed to enjoy the same equal rights enshrined in our Constitution? 
While the law states that a woman has the same equal access to the information, why is it always men -- brothers, fathers and husbands -- who are granting these rights to us, effectively making the law irrelevant?" 
So I decided to take a step, instead of keep questioning these patriarchal structures and societal norms. 
And I founded the Digital Rights Foundation in 2012 to address all the issues and women's experiences in online spaces and cyberharassment. 
From lobbying for free and safe internet to convincing young women that access to the safe internet is their fundamental, basic, human right, I'm trying to play my part in igniting the spark to address the questions that have bothered me all these years. 
With a hope in my heart, and to offer a solution to this menace, I started Pakistan's and the region's first cyberharassment help line in December 2016 -- (Applause) to extend my support to the women who do not know who to turn to when they face serious threats online. 
I think of the women who do not have the necessary support to deal with the mental trauma when they feel unsafe in online spaces, and they go about their daily activities, thinking that there is a rape threat in their in-box. 
Safe access to the internet is an access to knowledge, and knowledge is freedom. 
When I fight for women's digital rights, I'm fighting for equality. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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. 
(Laughter) 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. 
(Applause) 

A whip-like straw. 
Powerful, crushing blades. 
A pointed, piercing tube. 
There are nearly a million known insect species in the world, but most have one of just five common types of mouthparts. 
And that’s extremely useful to scientists because when they encounter an unfamiliar insect in the wild, they can learn a lot about it just by examining how it eats. 
Scientific classification, or taxonomy, is used to organize all living things into seven levels: kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species. 
The features of an insect’s mouthparts can help identify which order it belongs to, while also providing clues about how it evolved and what it feeds on. 
The chewing mouthpart is the most common. 
It’s also the most primitive— all other mouthparts are thought to have started out looking like this one before evolving into something different. 
It features a pair of jaws called mandibles with toothed inner edges that cut up and crush solid foods, like leaves or other insects. 
You can find this mouthpart on ants from the Hymenoptera order, grasshoppers and crickets of the Orthoptera order, dragonflies of the Odonata order, and beetles of the Coleoptera order. 
The piercing-sucking mouthpart consists of a long, tube-like structure called a beak. 
This beak can pierce plant or animal tissue to suck up liquids like sap or blood. 
It can also secrete saliva with digestive enzymes that liquefy food for easier sucking. 
Insects in the Hemiptera order have piercing-sucking mouthparts and include bed bugs, cicadas, aphids, and leafhoppers. 
The siphoning mouthpart, a friendlier version of the piercing and sucking beak, also consists of a long, tube-like structure called a proboscis that works like a straw to suck up nectar from flowers. 
Insects of the Lepidoptera order— butterflies and moths— keep their proboscises rolled up tightly beneath their heads when they’re not feeding and unfurl them when they come across some sweet nectar. 
With the sponging mouthpart, there’s yet another tube, this time ending in two spongy lobes that contain many finer tubes called pseudotracheae. 
The pseudotracheae secrete enzyme-filled saliva and soak up fluids and dissolved foods by capillary action. 
House flies, fruit flies, and the other non-biting members of the Diptera order are the only insects that use this technique. 
But, there’s a catch. 
Biting flies within Diptera, like mosquitoes, horse flies, and deer flies, have a piercing-sucking mouthpart instead of the sponging mouthpart. 
And finally, the chewing-lapping mouthpart is a combination of mandibles and a proboscis with a tongue-like structure at its tip for lapping up nectar. 
On this type of mouthpart, the mandibles themselves are not actually used for eating. 
For bees and wasps, members of the Hymenoptera order, they serve instead as tools for pollen-collecting and wax-molding. 
Of course, in nature, there are always exceptions to the rules. 
The juvenile stages of some insects, for example, have completely different kinds of mouths than their adult versions, like caterpillars, which use chewing mouthparts to devour leaves before metamorphosing into butterflies and moths with siphoning mouthparts. 
Still, mouthpart identification can, for the most part, help scientists—and you —categorize insects. 
So why not break out a magnifying lens and learn a little more about who’s nibbling your vegetable garden, biting your arm, or just flying by your ear. 

Hello everyone. 
I'm Sam, and I just turned 17. 
A few years ago, before my freshman year in High School, I wanted to play snare drum in the Foxboro High School Marching Band, and it was a dream that I just had to accomplish. 
But each snare drum and harness weighed about 40 pounds each, and I have a disease called Progeria. 
So just to give you an idea, I weigh only about 50 pounds. 
So, logistically, I really couldn't carry a regular sized snare drum, and because of this the band director assigned me to play pit percussion during the halftime show. 
Now pit percussion was fun. 
It involved some really cool auxiliary percussion instruments, like the bongos, timpani, and timbales, and cowbell. 
So it was fun, but it involved no marching, and I was just so devastated. 
However, nothing was going to stop me from playing snare drum with the marching band in the halftime show. 
So my family and I worked with an engineer to design a snare drum harness that would be lighter, and easier for me to carry. 
So after continuous work, we made a snare drum apparatus that weighs only about 6 pounds. 
(Applause) I just want to give you some more information about Progeria. 
It affects only about 350 kids today, worldwide. 
So it's pretty rare, and the effects of Progeria include: tight skin, lack of weight gain, stunted growth, and heart disease. 
Last year my Mom and her team of scientists published the first successful Progeria Treatment Study, and because of this I was interviewed on NPR, and John Hamilton asked me the question: "What is the most important thing that people should know about you?" 
And my answer was simply that I have a very happy life. 
(Applause) So even though there are many obstacles in my life, with a lot of them being created by Progeria, I don't want people to feel bad for me. 
I don't think about these obstacles all the time, and I'm able to overcome most of them anyway. 
So I’m here today, to share with you my philosophy for a happy life. 
So, for me, there are 3 aspects to this philosophy. 
So this is a quote from the famous Ferris Bueller. 
The first aspect to my philosophy is that I’m okay with what I ultimately can’t do because there is so much I can do. 
Now people sometimes ask me questions like, "Isn’t it hard living with Progeria?" or "What daily challenges of Progeria do you face?" 
And I’d like to say that, even though I have Progeria, most of my time is spent thinking about things that have nothing to do with Progeria at all. 
Now this doesn’t mean that I ignore the negative aspects of these obstacles. 
When I can’t do something like run a long distance, or go on an intense roller coaster, I know what I’m missing out on. 
But instead, I choose to focus on the activities that I can do through things that I’m passionate about, like scouting, or music, or comic books, or any of my favorite Boston sports teams. 
Yeah, so -- (Laughter) However, sometimes I need to find a different way to do something by making adjustments, and I want to put those things in the "can do" category. 
Kind of like you saw with the drum earlier. 
So here’s a clip with me playing Spider-Man with the Foxboro High School Marching Band at halftime a couple of years ago. 
(Video) ♫ Spider-Man theme song ♫ (Applause) Thank you. 
All right, all right, so -- That was pretty cool, and so I was able to accomplish my dream of playing snare drum with the marching band, as I believe I can do for all of my dreams. 
So hopefully, you can accomplish your dreams as well, with this outlook. 
The next aspect to my philosophy is that I surround myself with people I want to be with, people of high quality. 
I’m extremely lucky to have an amazing family, who have always supported me throughout my entire life. 
And I’m also really fortunate to have a really close group of friends at school. 
Now we’re kind of goofy, a lot of us are band geeks, but we really enjoy each other’s company, and we help each other out when we need to. 
We see each other for who we are on the inside. 
So this is us goofing off a little bit. 
So we’re juniors in High School now, and we can now mentor younger band members, as a single collective unit. 
What I love about being in a group like the band, is that the music that we make together, is true, is genuine, and it supersedes Progeria. 
So I don’t have to worry about that when I’m feeling so good about making music. 
But even having made a documentary, going on TV a couple of times, I feel like I’m at my highest point when I’m with the people that surround me every day. 
They provide the real positive influences in my life, as I hope I can provide a positive influence in theirs as well. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
So the bottom line here, is that I hope you appreciate and love your family, love your friends, for you guys, love you Bro’s and acknowledge your mentors, and your community, because they are a very real aspect of everyday life, they can make a truly significant, positive impact. 
The third aspect to the philosophy is, Keep moving forward. 
Here’s a quote by a man you may know, named Walt Disney, and it’s one of my favorite quotes. 
I always try to have something to look forward to. 
Something to strive for to make my life richer. 
It doesn’t have to be big. 
It could be anything from looking forward to the next comic book to come out, or going on a large family vacation, or hanging out with my friends, to going to the next High School football game. 
However, all of these things keep me focused, and know that there’s a bright future ahead, and may get me through some difficult times that I may be having. 
Now this mentality includes staying in a forward thinking state of mind. 
I try hard not to waste energy feeling badly for myself, because when I do, I get stuck in a paradox, where there’s no room for any happiness or any other emotion. 
Now, it’s not that I ignore when I’m feeling badly, I kind of accept it, I let it in, so that I can acknowledge it, and do what I need to do to move past it. 
When I was younger, I wanted to be an engineer. 
I wanted to be an inventor, who would catapult the world into a better future. 
Maybe this came from my love of Legos, and the freedom of expression that I felt when I was building with them. 
And this was also derived from my family and my mentors, who always make me feel whole, and good about myself. 
Now today my ambitions have changed a little bit, I’d like to go into the field of Biology, maybe cell biology, or genetics, or biochemistry, or really anything. 
This is a friend of mine, who I look up to, Francis Collins, the director of the NIH, and this is us at TEDMED last year, chatting away. 
I feel that no matter what I choose to become, I believe that I can change the world. 
And as I’m striving to change the world, I will be happy. 
About four years ago, HBO began to film a documentary about my family and me called “Life According to Sam”. 
That was a pretty great experience, but it was also four years ago. 
And like anyone, my views on many things have changed, and hopefully matured, like my potential career choice. 
However, some things have stayed the same throughout that time. 
Like my mentality, and philosophy towards life. 
So I would like to show you a clip of my younger self from the film, that I feel embodies that philosophy. 
(Video) I know more about it genetically. 
So it’s less of an embodiment now. 
It used to be like this thing that prevents me from doing all this stuff, that causes other kids to die, that causes everybody to be stressed, and now it’s a protein that is abnormal, that weakens the structure of cells. 
So, and it takes a burden off of me because now I don’t have to think about Progeria as an entity. 
Okay, pretty good, huh? 
(Applause) Thank you. 
So, as you can see I’ve been thinking this way for many years. 
But I’d never really had to apply all of these aspects of my philosophy to the test at one time, until last January. 
I was pretty sick, I had a chest cold, and I was in the hospital for a few days, and I was secluded from all of the aspects of my life that I felt made me, me, that kind of gave me my identity. 
But knowing that I was going to get better, and looking forward to a time that I would feel good again, helped me to keep moving forward. 
And sometimes I had to be brave, and it wasn’t always easy. 
Sometimes I faltered, I had bad days, but I realized that being brave isn’t supposed to be easy. 
And for me, I feel it’s the key way to keep moving forward. 
So, all in all, I don’t waste energy feeling bad for myself. 
I surround myself with people that I want to be with, and I keep moving forward. 
So with this philosophy, I hope that all of you, regardless of your obstacles, can have a very happy life as well. 
Oh, wait, hang on a second, one more piece of advice –- (Laughter) Never miss a party if you can help it. 
My school’s homecoming dance is tomorrow night, and I will be there. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

Good morning. 
I'm here today to talk about autonomous flying beach balls. 
(Laughter) No, agile aerial robots like this one. 
I'd like to tell you a little bit about the challenges in building these, and some of the terrific opportunities for applying this technology. 
So these robots are related to unmanned aerial vehicles. 
However, the vehicles you see here are big. 
They weigh thousands of pounds, are not by any means agile. 
They're not even autonomous. 
In fact, many of these vehicles are operated by flight crews that can include multiple pilots, operators of sensors, and mission coordinators. 
What we're interested in is developing robots like this -- and here are two other pictures -- of robots that you can buy off the shelf. 
So these are helicopters with four rotors, and they're roughly a meter or so in scale, and weigh several pounds. 
And so we retrofit these with sensors and processors, and these robots can fly indoors. 
Without GPS. 
The robot I'm holding in my hand is this one, and it's been created by two students, Alex and Daniel. 
So this weighs a little more than a tenth of a pound. 
It consumes about 15 watts of power. 
And as you can see, it's about eight inches in diameter. 
So let me give you just a very quick tutorial on how these robots work. 
So it has four rotors. 
If you spin these rotors at the same speed, the robot hovers. 
If you increase the speed of each of these rotors, then the robot flies up, it accelerates up. 
Of course, if the robot were tilted, inclined to the horizontal, then it would accelerate in this direction. 
So to get it to tilt, there's one of two ways of doing it. 
So in this picture, you see that rotor four is spinning faster and rotor two is spinning slower. 
And when that happens, there's a moment that causes this robot to roll. 
And the other way around, if you increase the speed of rotor three and decrease the speed of rotor one, then the robot pitches forward. 
And then finally, if you spin opposite pairs of rotors faster than the other pair, then the robot yaws about the vertical axis. 
So an on-board processor essentially looks at what motions need to be executed and combines these motions, and figures out what commands to send to the motors -- 600 times a second. 
That's basically how this thing operates. 
So one of the advantages of this design is when you scale things down, the robot naturally becomes agile. 
So here, R is the characteristic length of the robot. 
It's actually half the diameter. 
And there are lots of physical parameters that change as you reduce R. 
The one that's most important is the inertia, or the resistance to motion. 
So it turns out the inertia, which governs angular motion, scales as a fifth power of R. 
So the smaller you make R, the more dramatically the inertia reduces. 
So as a result, the angular acceleration, denoted by the Greek letter alpha here, goes as 1 over R. 
It's inversely proportional to R. 
The smaller you make it, the more quickly you can turn. 
So this should be clear in these videos. 
On the bottom right, you see a robot performing a 360-degree flip in less than half a second. 
Multiple flips, a little more time. 
So here the processes on board are getting feedback from accelerometers and gyros on board, and calculating, like I said before, commands at 600 times a second, to stabilize this robot. 
So on the left, you see Daniel throwing this robot up into the air, and it shows you how robust the control is. 
No matter how you throw it, the robot recovers and comes back to him. 
So why build robots like this? 
Well, robots like this have many applications. 
You can send them inside buildings like this, as first responders to look for intruders, maybe look for biochemical leaks, gaseous leaks. 
You can also use them for applications like construction. 
So here are robots carrying beams, columns and assembling cube-like structures. 
I'll tell you a little bit more about this. 
The robots can be used for transporting cargo. 
So one of the problems with these small robots is their payload-carrying capacity. 
So you might want to have multiple robots carry payloads. 
This is a picture of a recent experiment we did -- actually not so recent anymore -- in Sendai, shortly after the earthquake. 
So robots like this could be sent into collapsed buildings, to assess the damage after natural disasters, or sent into reactor buildings, to map radiation levels. 
So one fundamental problem that the robots have to solve if they are to be autonomous, is essentially figuring out how to get from point A to point B. 
So this gets a little challenging, because the dynamics of this robot are quite complicated. 
In fact, they live in a 12-dimensional space. 
So we use a little trick. 
We take this curved 12-dimensional space, and transform it into a flat, four-dimensional space. 
And that four-dimensional space consists of X, Y, Z, and then the yaw angle. 
And so what the robot does, is it plans what we call a minimum-snap trajectory. 
So to remind you of physics: You have position, derivative, velocity; then acceleration; and then comes jerk, and then comes snap. 
So this robot minimizes snap. 
So what that effectively does, is produce a smooth and graceful motion. 
And it does that avoiding obstacles. 
So these minimum-snap trajectories in this flat space are then transformed back into this complicated 12-dimensional space, which the robot must do for control and then execution. 
So let me show you some examples of what these minimum-snap trajectories look like. 
And in the first video, you'll see the robot going from point A to point B, through an intermediate point. 
(Whirring noise) So the robot is obviously capable of executing any curve trajectory. 
So these are circular trajectories, where the robot pulls about two G's. 
Here you have overhead motion capture cameras on the top that tell the robot where it is 100 times a second. 
It also tells the robot where these obstacles are. 
And the obstacles can be moving. 
And here, you'll see Daniel throw this hoop into the air, while the robot is calculating the position of the hoop, and trying to figure out how to best go through the hoop. 
So as an academic, we're always trained to be able to jump through hoops to raise funding for our labs, and we get our robots to do that. 
(Applause) So another thing the robot can do is it remembers pieces of trajectory that it learns or is pre-programmed. 
So here, you see the robot combining a motion that builds up momentum, and then changes its orientation and then recovers. 
So it has to do this because this gap in the window is only slightly larger than the width of the robot. 
So just like a diver stands on a springboard and then jumps off it to gain momentum, and then does this pirouette, this two and a half somersault through and then gracefully recovers, this robot is basically doing that. 
So it knows how to combine little bits and pieces of trajectories to do these fairly difficult tasks. 
So I want change gears. 
So one of the disadvantages of these small robots is its size. 
And I told you earlier that we may want to employ lots and lots of robots to overcome the limitations of size. 
So one difficulty is: How do you coordinate lots of these robots? 
And so here, we looked to nature. 
So I want to show you a clip of Aphaenogaster desert ants, in Professor Stephen Pratt's lab, carrying an object. 
So this is actually a piece of fig. 
Actually you take any object coated with fig juice, and the ants will carry it back to the nest. 
So these ants don't have any central coordinator. 
They sense their neighbors. 
There's no explicit communication. 
But because they sense the neighbors and because they sense the object, they have implicit coordination across the group. 
So this is the kind of coordination we want our robots to have. 
So when we have a robot which is surrounded by neighbors -- and let's look at robot I and robot J -- what we want the robots to do, is to monitor the separation between them, as they fly in formation. 
And then you want to make sure that this separation is within acceptable levels. 
So again, the robots monitor this error and calculate the control commands 100 times a second, which then translates into motor commands, 600 times a second. 
So this also has to be done in a decentralized way. 
Again, if you have lots and lots of robots, it's impossible to coordinate all this information centrally fast enough in order for the robots to accomplish the task. 
Plus, the robots have to base their actions only on local information -- what they sense from their neighbors. 
And then finally, we insist that the robots be agnostic to who their neighbors are. 
So this is what we call anonymity. 
So what I want to show you next is a video of 20 of these little robots, flying in formation. 
They're monitoring their neighbors' positions. 
They're maintaining formation. 
The formations can change. 
They can be planar formations, they can be three-dimensional formations. 
As you can see here, they collapse from a three-dimensional formation into planar formation. 
And to fly through obstacles, they can adapt the formations on the fly. 
So again, these robots come really close together. 
As you can see in this figure-eight flight, they come within inches of each other. 
And despite the aerodynamic interactions with these propeller blades, they're able to maintain stable flight. 
(Applause) So once you know how to fly in formation, you can actually pick up objects cooperatively. 
So this just shows that we can double, triple, quadruple the robots' strength, by just getting them to team with neighbors, as you can see here. 
One of the disadvantages of doing that is, as you scale things up -- so if you have lots of robots carrying the same thing, you're essentially increasing the inertia, and therefore you pay a price; they're not as agile. 
But you do gain in terms of payload-carrying capacity. 
Another application I want to show you -- again, this is in our lab. 
This is work done by Quentin Lindsey, who's a graduate student. 
So his algorithm essentially tells these robots how to autonomously build cubic structures from truss-like elements. 
So his algorithm tells the robot what part to pick up, when, and where to place it. 
So in this video you see -- and it's sped up 10, 14 times -- you see three different structures being built by these robots. 
And again, everything is autonomous, and all Quentin has to do is to give them a blueprint of the design that he wants to build. 
So all these experiments you've seen thus far, all these demonstrations, have been done with the help of motion-capture systems. 
So what happens when you leave your lab, and you go outside into the real world? 
And what if there's no GPS? 
So this robot is actually equipped with a camera, and a laser rangefinder, laser scanner. 
And it uses these sensors to build a map of the environment. 
What that map consists of are features -- like doorways, windows, people, furniture -- and it then figures out where its position is, with respect to the features. 
The coordinate system is defined based on the robot, where it is and what it's looking at. 
And it navigates with respect to those features. 
So I want to show you a clip of algorithms developed by Frank Shen and Professor Nathan Michael, that shows this robot entering a building for the very first time, and creating this map on the fly. 
So the robot then figures out what the features are, it builds the map, it figures out where it is with respect to the features, and then estimates its position 100 times a second, allowing us to use the control algorithms that I described to you earlier. 
So this robot is actually being commanded remotely by Frank, but the robot can also figure out where to go on its own. 
So suppose I were to send this into a building, and I had no idea what this building looked like. 
I can ask this robot to go in, create a map, and then come back and tell me what the building looks like. 
So here, the robot is not only solving the problem of how to go from point A to point B in this map, but it's figuring out what the best point B is at every time. 
So essentially it knows where to go to look for places that have the least information, and that's how it populates this map. 
So I want to leave you with one last application. 
And there are many applications of this technology. 
I'm a professor, and we're passionate about education. 
Robots like this can really change the way we do K-12 education. 
But we're in Southern California, close to Los Angeles, so I have to conclude with something focused on entertainment. 
I want to conclude with a music video. 
I want to introduce the creators, Alex and Daniel, who created this video. 
(Applause) So before I play this video, I want to tell you that they created it in the last three days, after getting a call from Chris. 
And the robots that play in the video are completely autonomous. 
You will see nine robots play six different instruments. 
And of course, it's made exclusively for TED 2012. 
Let's watch. 
(Sound of air escaping from valve) (Music) (Whirring sound) (Music) (Applause) (Cheers) 

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

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. 
(Laughter) We'll just -- we can just skip -- I'll just skip through the video instead ... 
(Laughter) No. 
(Laughter) (Laughter) (Music) This is not ... 
(Laughter) Okay. 
(Laughter) Solar technology is ... 
Oh, that's all my time? 
Okay. Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

Hi, my name is Frank, and I collect secrets. 
It all started with a crazy idea in November of 2004. 
I printed up 3,000 self-addressed postcards, just like this. 
They were blank on one side, and on the other side I listed some simple instructions. 
I asked people to anonymously share an artful secret they'd never told anyone before. 
And I handed out these postcards randomly on the streets of Washington, D.C., not knowing what to expect. 
But soon the idea began spreading virally. 
People began to buy their own postcards and make their own postcards. 
I started receiving secrets in my home mailbox, not just with postmarks from Washington, D.C., but from Texas, California, Vancouver, New Zealand, Iraq. 
Soon my crazy idea didn't seem so crazy. 
PostSecret.com is the most visited advertisement-free blog in the world. 
And this is my postcard collection today. 
You can see my wife struggling to stack a brick of postcards on a pyramid of over a half-million secrets. 
What I'd like to do now is share with you a very special handful of secrets from that collection, starting with this one. 
"I found these stamps as a child, and I have been waiting all my life to have someone to send them to. 
I never did have someone." 
Secrets can take many forms. 
They can be shocking or silly or soulful. 
They can connect us to our deepest humanity or with people we'll never meet. 
(Laughter) Maybe one of you sent this one in. 
I don't know. 
This one does a great job of demonstrating the creativity that people have when they make and mail me a postcard. 
This one obviously was made out of half a Starbucks cup with a stamp and my home address written on the other side. 
"Dear Birthmother, I have great parents. 
I've found love. I'm happy." 
Secrets can remind us of the countless human dramas, of frailty and heroism, playing out silently in the lives of people all around us even now. 
"Everyone who knew me before 9/11 believes I'm dead." 
"I used to work with a bunch of uptight religious people, so sometimes I didn't wear panties, and just had a big smile and chuckled to myself." 
(Laughter) This next one takes a little explanation before I share it with you. 
I love to speak on college campuses and share secrets and the stories with students. 
And sometimes afterwards I'll stick around and sign books and take photos with students. 
And this next postcard was made out of one of those photos. 
And I should also mention that, just like today, at that PostSecret event, I was using a wireless microphone. 
"Your mic wasn't off during sound check. 
We all heard you pee." 
(Laughter) This was really embarrassing when it happened, until I realized it could have been worse. 
Right. You know what I'm saying. 
(Laughter) "Inside this envelope is the ripped up remains of a suicide note I didn't use. 
I feel like the happiest person on Earth (now.)" "One of these men is the father of my son. 
He pays me a lot to keep it a secret." 
(Laughter) "That Saturday when you wondered where I was, well, I was getting your ring. 
It's in my pocket right now." 
I had this postcard posted on the PostSecret blog two years ago on Valentine's Day. 
It was the very bottom, the last secret in the long column. 
And it hadn't been up for more than a couple hours before I received this exuberant email from the guy who mailed me this postcard. 
And he said, "Frank, I've got to share with you this story that just played out in my life." 
He said, "My knees are still shaking." 
He said, "For three years, my girlfriend and I, we've made it this Sunday morning ritual to visit the PostSecret blog together and read the secrets out loud. 
I read some to her, she reads some to me." 
He says, "It's really brought us closer together through the years. 
And so when I discovered that you had posted my surprise proposal to my girlfriend at the very bottom, I was beside myself. 
And I tried to act calm, not to give anything away. 
And just like every Sunday, we started reading the secrets out loud to each other." 
He said, "But this time it seemed like it was taking her forever to get through each one." 
But she finally did. 
She got to that bottom secret, his proposal to her. 
And he said, "She read it once and then she read it again." 
And she turned to him and said, "Is that our cat?" 
(Laughter) And when she saw him, he was down on one knee, he had the ring out. 
He popped the question, she said yes. It was a very happy ending. 
So I emailed him back and I said, "Please share with me an image, something, that I can share with the whole PostSecret community and let everyone know your fairy tale ending." 
And he emailed me this picture. 
(Laughter) "I found your camera at Lollapalooza this summer. 
I finally got the pictures developed and I'd love to give them to you." 
This picture never got returned back to the people who lost it, but this secret has impacted many lives, starting with a student up in Canada named Matty. 
Matty was inspired by that secret to start his own website, a website called IFoundYourCamera. 
Matty invites people to mail him digital cameras that they've found, memory sticks that have been lost with orphan photos. 
And Matty takes the pictures off these cameras and posts them on his website every week. 
And people come to visit to see if they can identify a picture they've lost or help somebody else get the photos back to them that they might be desperately searching for. 
This one's my favorite. 
(Laughter) Matty has found this ingenious way to leverage the kindness of strangers. 
And it might seem like a simple idea, and it is, but the impact it can have on people's lives can be huge. 
Matty shared with me an emotional email he received from the mother in that picture. 
"That's me, my husband and son. 
The other pictures are of my very ill grandmother. 
Thank you for making your site. 
These pictures mean more to me than you know. 
My son's birth is on this camera. 
He turns four tomorrow." 
Every picture that you see there and thousands of others have been returned back to the person who lost it -- sometimes crossing oceans, sometimes going through language barriers. 
This is the last postcard I have to share with you today. 
"When people I love leave voicemails on my phone I always save them in case they die tomorrow and I have no other way of hearing their voice ever again." 
When I posted this secret, dozens of people sent voicemail messages from their phones, sometimes ones they'd been keeping for years, messages from family or friends who had died. 
They said that by preserving those voices and sharing them, it helped them keep the spirit of their loved ones alive. 
One young girl posted the last message she ever heard from her grandmother. 
Secrets can take many forms. 
They can be shocking or silly or soulful. 
They can connect us with our deepest humanity or with people we'll never meet again. 
Voicemail recording: First saved voice message. 
Grandma: ♫ It's somebody's birthday today ♫ ♫ Somebody's birthday today ♫ ♫ The candles are lighted ♫ ♫ on somebody's cake ♫ ♫ And we're all invited ♫ ♫ for somebody's sake ♫ You're 21 years old today. 
Have a real happy birthday, and I love you. 
I'll say bye for now. 
FW: Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) June Cohen: Frank, that was beautiful, so touching. 
Have you ever sent yourself a postcard? 
Have you ever sent in a secret to PostSecret? 
FW: I have one of my own secrets in every book. 
I think in some ways, the reason I started the project, even though I didn't know it at the time, was because I was struggling with my own secrets. 
And it was through crowd-sourcing, it was through the kindness that strangers were showing me, that I could uncover parts of my past that were haunting me. 
JC: And has anyone ever discovered which secret was yours in the book? 
Has anyone in your life been able to tell? 
FW: Sometimes I share that information, yeah. 
(Laughter) (Applause) 

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

I bet all of you are familiar with this view of the ocean, but the thing is, most of the ocean looks nothing like this. 
Below the sunlit surface waters, there's an otherworldly realm known as the twilight zone. 
At 200 to 1,000 meters below the surface, sunlight is barely a glimmer. 
Tiny particles swirl down through the darkness while flashes of bioluminescence give us a clue that these waters teem with life: microbes, plankton, fish. 
Everything that lives here has amazing adaptations for the challenges of such an extreme environment. 
These animals help support top predators such as whales, tuna, swordfish and sharks. 
There could be 10 times more fish biomass here than previously thought. 
In fact, maybe more than all the rest of the ocean combined. 
There are countless undiscovered species in deep waters, and life in the twilight zone is intertwined with earth's climate. 
Yet the twilight zone is virtually unexplored. 
There are so many things we still don't know about it. 
I think we can change that. 
I was drawn to oceanography by just this kind of challenge. 
To me it represents the perfect intersection of science, technology and the unknown, the spark for so many breakthrough discoveries about life on our planet. 
As a college student, I went on an expedition across the Atlantic with a team of scientists using a high-powered laser to measure microscopic algae. 
The wild thing that happened on that trip is that we discovered what everyone who looked before had completely missed: photosynthetic cells smaller than anyone thought possible. 
We now know those tiny cells are the most abundant photosynthetic organisms on earth. 
This amazing discovery happened because we used new technology to see life in the ocean in a new way. 
I am convinced that the discoveries awaiting us in the twilight zone will be just as breathtaking. 
We know so little about the twilight zone because it's difficult to study. 
It's exceedingly large, spanning from the Arctic to the Southern Ocean and around the globe. 
It's different from place to place. 
It changes quickly as the water and animals move. 
And it's deep and dark and cold, and the pressures there are enormous. 
What we do know is fascinating. 
You may be imagining huge monsters lurking in the deep sea, but most of the animals are very small, like this lantern fish. 
And this fierce-looking fish is called a bristlemouth. 
Believe it or not, these are the most abundant vertebrates on earth and many are so small that a dozen could fit in this one tube. 
It gets even more interesting, because small size does not stop them from being powerful through sheer number. 
Deep, penetrating sonar shows us that the animals form dense layers. 
You can see what I mean by the red and yellow colors around 400 meters in these data. 
So much sound bounces off this layer, it's been mistaken for the ocean bottom. 
But if we look, it can't be, because the layer is deep during the day, it rises up at night and the pattern repeats day after day. 
This is actually the largest animal migration on earth. 
It happens around the globe every day, sweeping through the world's oceans in a massive living wave as twilight zone inhabitants travel hundreds of meters to surface waters to feed at night and return to the relative safety of deeper, darker waters during the day. 
These animals and their movements help connect the surface and deep ocean in important ways. 
The animals feed near the surface, they bring carbon in their food into the deep waters, where some of that carbon can stay behind and remain isolated from the atmosphere for hundreds or even thousands of years. 
In this way, the migration may help keep carbon dioxide out of our atmosphere and limit the effects of global warming on our climate. 
But we still have many questions. 
We don't know which species are migrating, what they're finding to eat, who is trying to eat them or how much carbon they are able to transport. 
So I'm a scientist who studies life in the ocean. 
For me, curiosity about these things is a powerful driver, but there's more to the motivation here. 
We need to answer these questions and answer them quickly, because the twilight zone is under threat. 
Factory ships in the open ocean have been vacuuming up hundreds of thousands of tons of small, shrimp-like animals called krill. 
The animals are ground into fish meal to support increasing demands for aquaculture and for nutraceuticals such as krill oil. 
Industry is on the brink of deepening fisheries such as these into the mid-water in what could start a kind of twilight zone gold rush operating outside the reach of national fishing regulations. 
This could have irreversible global-scale impacts on marine life and food webs. 
We need to get out ahead of fishing impacts and work to understand this critical part of the ocean. 
At Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, I'm really fortunate to be surrounded by colleagues who share this passion. 
Together, we are ready to launch a large-scale exploration of the twilight zone. 
We have a plan to begin right away with expeditions in the North Atlantic, where we'll tackle the big challenges of observing and studying the twilight zone's remarkable diversity. 
This kind of multiscale, multidimensional exploration means we need to integrate new technologies. 
Let me show you a recent example that has changed our thinking. 
Satellite tracking devices on animals such as sharks are now showing us that many top predators regularly dive deep into the twilight zone to feed. 
And when we map their swimming patterns and compare them to satellite data, we find that their feeding hot spots are linked to ocean currents and other features. 
We used to think these animals found all of their food in surface waters. 
We now believe they depend on the twilight zone. 
But we still need to figure out how they find the best areas to feed, what they're eating there and how much their diets depend on twilight zone species. 
We will also need new technologies to explore the links with climate. 
Remember these particles? 
Some of them are produced by gelatinous animals called salps. 
Salps are like superefficient vacuum cleaners, slurping up plankton and producing fast-sinking pellets of poop -- try saying that 10 times fast -- pellets of poop that carry carbon deep into the ocean. 
We sometimes find salps in enormous swarms. 
We need to know where and when and why and whether this kind of carbon sink has a big impact on earth's climate. 
To meet these challenges, we will need to push the limits of technology. 
We will deploy cameras and samplers on smart robots to patrol the depths and help us track the secret lives of animals like salps. 
We will use advanced sonar to figure out how many fish and other animals are down there. 
We will sequence DNA from the environment in a kind of forensic analysis to figure out which species are there and what they are eating. 
With so much that's still unknown about the twilight zone, there's an almost unlimited opportunity for new discovery. 
Just look at these beautiful, fascinating creatures. 
We barely know them. 
And imagine how many more are just down there waiting for our new technologies to see them. 
The excitement level about this could not be higher on our team of ocean scientists, engineers and communicators. 
There is also a deep sense of urgency. 
We can't turn back the clock on decades of overfishing in countless regions of the ocean that once seemed inexhaustible. 
How amazing would it be to take a different path this time? 
The twilight zone is truly a global commons. 
We need to first know and understand it before we can be responsible stewards and hope to fish it sustainably. 
This is not just a journey for scientists, it is for all of us, because the decisions we collectively make over the next decade will affect what the ocean looks like for centuries to come. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Chris Anderson: So two months ago, something crazy happened. 
Can you talk us through this, because this caught so many people's attention? 
Gwynne Shotwell: I'll stay quiet for the beginning, and then I'll start talking. 
(Video) Voices: Five, four, three, two, one. 
(Cheering) Woman: Liftoff. Go Falcon Heavy. 
GS: So this was such an important moment for SpaceX. 
With the Falcon 9 and now the Falcon Heavy, we can launch into orbit any payload that has previously been conceived or is conceived right now. 
We've got a couple of launches of Falcon Heavy later this year, so this had to go right. 
It was the first time we flew it, and the star of the show, of course, brother and sister side boosters landing. 
I was excited. 
(Laughter) Thanking my team. 
By the way, there's maybe a thousand people standing around me right there. 
And Starman. 
Starman did not steal the show, though -- the boosters did. 
CA: (Laughter) CA: There had to be some payload -- why not put a Tesla into space? 
GS: Exactly. It was perfect. 
CA: Gwynne, let's wind the clock back. 
I mean, how did you end up an engineer and President of SpaceX? 
Were you supernerdy as a girl? 
GS: I don't think I was nerdy, but I was definitely doing the things that the girls weren't doing. 
I asked my mom, who was an artist, when I was in third grade, how a car worked, so she had no idea so she gave me a book, and I read it, and sure enough, my first job out of my mechanical engineering degree was with Chrysler Motors in the automotive industry. 
But I actually got into engineering not because of that book but because my mom took me to a Society of Women Engineers event, and I fell in love with the mechanical engineer that spoke. 
She was doing really critical work, and I loved her suit. 
(Laughter) And that's what a 15-year-old girl connects with. 
And I used to shy away from telling that story, but if that's what caused me to be an engineer -- hey, I think we should talk about that. 
CA: Sixteen years ago, you became employee number seven at SpaceX, and then over the next years, you somehow built a multi-billion-dollar relationship with NASA, despite the fact that SpaceX's first three launches blew up. 
I mean, how on earth did you do that? 
GS: So actually, selling rockets is all about relationships and making a connection with these customers. 
When you don't have a rocket to sell, what's really important is selling your team, selling the business savvy of your CEO -- that's not really hard to sell these days -- and basically, making sure that any technical issue that they have or any concern, you can address right away. 
So I think it was helpful for me to be an engineer. 
I think it was helpful to my role of running sales for Elon. 
CA: And currently, a big focus of the company is, I guess, kind of a race with Boeing to be the first to provide the service to NASA of actually putting humans into orbit. 
Safety considerations obviously come to the fore, here. 
How are you sleeping? 
GS: I actually sleep really well. I'm a good sleeper, that's my best thing. 
But I think the days leading up to our flying crew will probably be a little sleepless. 
But really, fundamentally, safety comes in the design of the system that you're going to fly people on, and so we've been working for years, actually, almost a decade, on this technology. 
We're taking the Dragon cargo spaceship and we're upgrading it to be able to carry crew. 
And as I said, we've been engineering in these safety systems for quite some time. 
CA: So isn't it that there's one system that actually allows instant escape if there's a problem. 
GS: That's right. It's called the launch escape system. 
CA: I think we have that. Let's show that. 
GS: We've got a video of a test that we ran in 2015. 
So this simulated having a really bad day on the pad. 
Basically, you want the capsule to get out of Dodge. 
You want it to get away from the rocket that had a bad day right below it. 
This is if there was an issue on the pad. 
We also will be doing another demonstration later this year on if we have an issue with the rocket during flight. 
CA: And those rockets have another potential function as well, eventually. 
GS: Yeah, so the launch escape system for Dragon is pretty unique. 
It's an integrated launch escape system. 
It's basically a pusher, so the propellant system and the thrusters are integrated into the capsule, and so if it detects a rocket problem, it pushes the capsule away. 
Capsule safety systems in the past have been like tractor pullers, and the reason we didn't want to do that is that puller needs to come off before you can safely reenter that capsule, so we wanted to eliminate, in design, that possibility of failure. 
CA: I mean, SpaceX has made the regular reusability of rockets seem almost routine, which means you've done something that no national space program, for example, has been able to achieve. 
How was that possible? 
GS: I think there's a couple of things -- there's a million things, actually -- that have allowed SpaceX to be successful. 
The first is that we're kind of standing on the shoulders of giants. Right? 
We got to look at the rocket industry and the developments to date, and we got to pick the best ideas, leverage them. 
We also didn't have technology that we had to include in our vehicle systems. 
So we didn't have to design around legacy components that maybe weren't the most reliable or were particularly expensive, so we really were able to let physics drive the design of these systems. 
CA: I mean, there are other programs started from scratch. 
That last phrase you said there, you let physics drive the design, what's an example of that? 
GS: There's hundreds of examples, actually, of that, but basically, we got to construct the vehicle design from, really, a clean sheet of paper, and we got to make decisions that we wanted to make. 
The tank architecture -- it's a common dome design. 
Basically it's like two beer cans stacked together, one full of liquid oxygen, one full of RP, and that basically saved weight. 
It allowed us to basically take more payload for the same design. 
One of the other elements of the vehicle that we're flying right now is we do use densified liquid oxygen and densified RP, so it's ultracold, and it allows you to pack more propellent into the vehicle. 
It is done elsewhere, probably not to the degree that we do it, but it adds a lot of margin to the vehicle, which obviously adds reliability. 
CA: Gwynne, you became President of SpaceX 10 years ago, I think. 
What's it been like to work so closely with Elon Musk? 
GS: So I love working for Elon. 
I've been doing it for 16 years this year, actually. 
I don't think I'm dumb enough to do something for 16 years that I don't like doing. 
He's funny and fundamentally without him saying anything he drives you to do your best work. 
He doesn't have to say a word. 
You just want to do great work. 
CA: You might be the person best placed to answer this question, which has puzzled me, which is to shed light on this strange unit of time called "Elon time." 
For example, last year, I asked Elon, you know, when Tesla would auto-drive across America, and he said by last December, which is definitely true, if you take Elon time into account. 
So what's the conversion ratio between Elon time and real time? 
(Laughter) GS: You put me in a unique position, Chris. 
Thanks for that. 
There's no question that Elon is very aggressive on his timelines, but frankly, that drives us to do things better and faster. 
I think all the time and all the money in the world does not yield the best solution, and so putting that pressure on the team to move quickly is really important. 
CA: It feels like you play kind of a key intermediary role here. 
I mean, he sets these crazy goals that have their impact, but, in other circumstances, might blow up a team or set impossible expectations. 
It feels like you've found a way of saying, "Yes, Elon," and then making it happen in a way that is acceptable both to him and to your company, to your employees. 
GS: There is two really important realizations for that. 
First of all, when Elon says something, you have to pause and not immediately blurt out, "Well, that's impossible," or, "There's no way we're going to do that. I don't know how." 
So you zip it, and you think about it, and you find ways to get that done. 
And the other thing I realized, and it made my job satisfaction substantially harder. 
So I always felt like my job was to take these ideas and kind of turn them into company goals, make them achievable, and kind of roll the company over from this steep slope, get it comfortable. 
And I noticed every time I felt like we were there, we were rolling over, people were getting comfortable, Elon would throw something out there, and all of a sudden, we're not comfortable and we're climbing that steep slope again. 
But then once I realized that that's his job, and my job is to get the company close to comfortable so he can push again and put us back on that slope, then I started liking my job a lot more, instead of always being frustrated. 
CA: So if I estimated that the conversation ratio for Elon time to your time is about 2x, am I a long way out there? 
GS: That's not terrible, and you said it, I didn't. 
(Laughter) CA: You know, looking ahead, one huge initiative SpaceX is believed to be, rumored to be working on, is a massive network of literally thousands of low earth orbit satellites to provide high-bandwidth, low-cost internet connection to every square foot of planet earth. 
Is there anything you can tell us about this? 
GS: We actually don't chat very much about this particular project, not because we're hiding anything, but this is probably one of the most challenging if not the most challenging project we've undertaken. 
No one has been successful deploying a huge constellation for internet broadband, or basically for satellite internet, and I don't think physics is the difficulty here. 
I think we can come up with the right technology solution, but we need to make a business out of it, and it'll cost the company about 10 billion dollars or more to deploy this system. 
And so we're marching steadily along but we're certainly not claiming victory yet. 
CA: I mean, the impact of that, obviously, if that happened to the world, of connectivity everywhere, would be pretty radical, and perhaps mainly for good -- I mean, it changes a lot if suddenly everyone can connect cheaply. 
GS: Yeah, there's no question it'll change the world. 
CA: How much of a worry is it, and how much of a drag on the planning is it, are concerns just about space junk? 
People worry a lot about this. 
This would a huge increase in the total number of satellites in orbit. 
Is that a concern? 
GS: So space debris is a concern, there's no question -- not because it's so likely to happen, but the consequences of it happening are pretty devastating. 
You could basically spew a bunch of particles in orbit that could take out that orbit from being useful for decades or longer. 
So as a matter of fact, we are required to bring down our second stage after every mission so it doesn't end up being a rocket carcass orbiting earth. 
So you really need to be a good steward of that. 
CA: So despite the remarkable success there of that Falcon Heavy rocket, you're actually not focusing on that as your future development plan. 
You're doubling down to a much bigger rocket called the BFR, which stands for ... 
GS: It's the Big Falcon Rocket. CA: The Big Falcon Rocket, that's right. 
(Laughter) What's the business logic of doing this when you invested all that in that incredible technology, and now you're just going to something much bigger. Why? 
GS: Actually, we've learned some lessons over the duration where we've been developing these launch systems. 
What we want to do is not introduce a new product before we've been able to convince the customers that this is the product that they should move to, so we're working on the Big Falcon Rocket now, but we're going to continue flying Falcon 9s and Falcon Heavies until there is absolute widespread acceptance of BFR. 
But we are working on it right now, we're just not going to cancel Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy and just put in place BFR. 
CA: The logic is that BFR is what you need to take humanity to Mars? 
GS: That's correct. 
CA: But somehow, you've also found other business ideas for this. 
GS: Yes. BFR can take the satellites that we're currently taking to orbit to many orbits. 
It allows for even a new class of satellites to be delivered to orbit. 
Basically, the width, the diameter of the fairing is eight meters, so you can think about what giant telescopes you can put in that fairing, in that cargo bay, and see really incredible things and discover incredible things in space. 
But then there are some residual capabilities that we have out of BFR as well. 
CA: A residual capability? GS: It's a residual capability. 
CA: Is that what you call this? Talk about what the heck this is. 
Oh wait a sec -- GS: That's Falcon Heavy. 
That's worth pointing out, by the way. 
What a beautiful rocket, and that hangar could just fit the Statue of Liberty in it, so you get a sense of size of that Falcon Heavy Rocket. 
CA: And the fact that there are 27 engines there. 
That's part of the design principle that you, rather than just inventing ever bigger rockets, you team them up. 
GS: It's exactly this residual capability. 
We developed the Merlin engine for the Falcon 1 launch vehicle. 
We could have tossed that engine and built an entirely new engine for the Falcon 9. 
It would have been called something different, because Falcon 9 is nine Merlin engines, but instead of spending a billion dollars on a brand new engine, we put nine of them together on the back end of Falcon 9. 
Residual capability: glue three Falcon 9s together and you have the largest operational rocket flying. 
And so it was expensive to do, but it was a much more efficient path than starting from scratch. 
CA: And the BFR is the equivalent of how much bigger than that, in terms of its power? 
GS: BFR is about, I believe, two and half times the size of this. 
CA: Right, and so that allows you -- I mean, I still don't really believe this video that we're about to play here. 
What on earth is this? 
GS: So it currently is on earth, but this is basically space travel for earthlings. 
I can't wait for this residual capability. 
Basically, what we're going to do is we're going to fly BFR like an aircraft and do point-to-point travel on earth, so you can take off from New York City or Vancouver and fly halfway across the globe. 
You'll be on the BFR for roughly half an hour or 40 minutes, and the longest part -- yeah, it's so awesome. 
(Applause) The longest part of that flight is actually the boat out and back. 
(Laughter) CA: I mean. Gwynne, come on, this is awesome, but it's crazy, right? 
This is never going to actually happen. 
GS: Oh no, it's definitely going to happen. 
This is definitely going to happen. 
CA: How? 
(Applause) So first of all, countries are going to accept this incoming missile -- (Laughter) GS: Chris, so can you imagine us trying to convince a federal range, Air Force bases to take the incomers? 
Because we're doing it now, regularly, right? 
We're bringing the first stages back, and we're landing them on federal property on an Air Force base. 
So I think doing it, I don't know, 10 kilometers out from a city, maybe it's only five kilometers out from a city. 
CA: So how many passengers can possibly afford the fortune of flying by space? 
GS: So the first BFR is going to have roughly a hundred passengers. 
And let's talk a little bit about the business. 
Everyone thinks rockets are really expensive, and to a large degree they are, and how could we possibly compete with airline tickets here? 
But if you think about it, if I can do this trip in half an hour to an hour, I can do dozens of these a day, right? 
And yet, a long-haul aircraft can only make one of those flights a day. 
So even if my rocket was slightly more expensive and the fuel is a little bit more expensive, I can run 10x at least what they're running in a day, and really make the revenue that I need to out of that system. 
CA: So you really believe this is going to be deployed at some point in our amazing future. When? 
GS: Within a decade, for sure. 
CA: And this is Gwynne time or Elon time? 
GS: That's Gwynne time. I'm sure Elon will want us to go faster. 
(Laughter) CA: OK, that's certainly amazing. 
(Laughter) GS: I'm personally invested in this one, because I travel a lot and I do not love to travel, and I would love to get to see my customers in Riyadh, leave in the morning and be back in time to make dinner. 
CA: So we're going to test this out. 
So within 10 years, an economy price ticket, or, like, a couple thousand dollars per person to fly New York to Shanghai. 
GS: Yeah, I think it'll be between economy and business, but you do it in an hour. 
CA: Yeah, well, OK, that is definitely something. 
(Laughter) And meanwhile, the other use of BFR is being developed to go a little bit further than Shanghai. 
Talk about this. 
You guys have actually developed quite a detailed, sort of, picture of how humans might fly to Mars, and what that would look like. 
GS: Yeah. So we've got a video, this is a cropped video from others we've shown, and then there's a couple of new bits to it. 
But basically, you're going to lift off from a pad, you've got a booster as well as the BFS, the Big Falcon Spaceship. 
It's going to take off. 
The booster is going to drop the spaceship off in orbit, low earth orbit, and then return just like we're returning boosters right now. 
So it sounds incredible, but we're working on the pieces, and you can see us achieve these pieces. 
So booster comes back. 
The new thing here is that we're going to actually land on the pad that we launched from. 
Currently, we land on a separate pad, or we land out on a boat. 
Fast, quick connect. 
You take a cargo ship full of fuel, or a fuel depot, put it on that booster, get that in orbit, do a docking maneuver, refuel the spaceship, and head on to your destination, and this one is Mars. 
CA: So, like, a hundred people go to Mars at one time, taking, what, six months? Two months? 
GS: It ends up depending on how big the rocket is. 
I think this first version, and we'll continue to make even bigger BFRs, I think it's a three-month trip. 
Right now, the average is six to eight, but we're going to try to do it faster. 
CA: When do you believe SpaceX will land the first human on Mars? 
GS: It's a very similar time frame from the point-to-point. 
It's the same capability. 
It will be within a decade -- not this decade. 
CA: In real time, again, within a decade. 
Well, that would also be amazing. 
(Laughter) Why, though? Seriously, why? 
I mean, you've got a company where this is the official stated mission. 
Has everyone actually bought into that mission, given that, I mean, there's a lot of people around who think, come on, you've got so much talent, so much technology capability. 
There are so many things on earth that need urgent attention. 
Why would you have this escape trip off to another planet? 
(Applause) GS: So I am glad you asked that, but I think we need to expand our minds a little bit. 
There are plenty of things to do on earth, but there are lots of companies working on that. 
I think we're working on one of the most important things we possibly can, and that's to find another place for humans to live and survive and thrive. 
If something happened on earth, you need humans living somewhere else. 
(Applause) It's the fundamental risk reduction for the human species. 
And this does not subvert making our planet here better and doing a better job taking care of it, but I think you need multiple paths to survival, and this is one of them. 
And let's not talk about the downer piece, like, you go to Mars to make sure all earthlings don't die. 
That's terrible, actually, that's a terrible reason to go do it. 
Fundamentally, it's another place to explore, and that's what makes humans different from animals, it's our sense of exploration and sense of wonderment and learning something new. 
And then I also have to say, this is the first step in us moving to other solar systems and potentially other galaxies, and I think this is the only time I ever out-vision Elon, because I want to meet other people in other solar systems. 
Mars is fine, but it is a fixer-upper planet. 
There's work to do there to make it habitable. 
(Laughter) I want to find people, or whatever they call themselves, in another solar system. 
CA: That is a big vision. 
Gwynne Shotwell, thank you. 
You have one of the most amazing jobs on the planet. 
GS: Thank you very much. Thanks, Chris. 

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

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

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

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

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

I'm going to start on a slightly somber note. 
Two thousand and seven, five years ago, my wife gets diagnosed with breast cancer. 
Stage IIB. 
Now, looking back, the most harrowing part of that experience was not just the hospital visits -- these were very painful for my wife, understandably so. 
It was not even the initial shock of knowing that she had breast cancer at just 39 years old, absolutely no history of cancer in her family. 
The most horrifying and agonizing part of the whole experience was we were making decisions after decisions after decisions that were being thrust upon us. 
Should it be a mastectomy? Should it be a lumpectomy? 
Should it be a more aggressive form of treatment, given that it was stage IIB? 
With all the side effects? 
Or should it be a less aggressive form of treatment? 
And these were being thrust upon us by the doctors. 
Now you could ask this question, why were the doctors doing this? 
A simplistic answer would be, the doctors are doing this because they want to protect themselves legally. 
I think that is too simplistic. 
These are well-meaning doctors, some of them have gone on to become very good friends. 
They probably were simply following the wisdom that has come down through the ages, this adage that when you're making decisions, especially decisions of importance, it's best to be in charge, it's best to be in control, it's best to be in the driver's seat. 
And we were certainly in the driver's seat, making all these decisions. 
And let me tell you -- if some of you have been there, it was a most agonizing and harrowing experience. 
Which got me thinking. 
I said, is there any validity to this whole adage that when you're making decisions, it's best to take the driver's seat, be in charge, be in control? 
Or are there contexts where we're far better off taking the passenger's seat and have someone else drive? 
For example, a trusted financial advisor, could be a trusted doctor, etc. 
And since I study human decision making, I said, I'm going to run some studies to find some answers. 
And I'm going to share one of these studies with you today. 
So, imagine that all of you are participants in the study. 
I want to tell you that what you're going to do in the study is, you're going to drink a cup of tea. 
If you're wondering why, I'll tell you why in a few seconds from now. 
You are going to solve a series of puzzles, and I'm going to show you examples of these puzzles momentarily. 
And the more puzzles you solve, the greater the chances that you'll win some prizes. 
Now, why do you have to consume the tea? 
Why? Because it makes a lot of sense: In order to solve these puzzles effectively, if you think about it, your mind needs to be in two states simultaneously, right? 
It needs to be alert, for which caffeine is very good. 
Simultaneously, it needs to be calm -- not agitated, calm -- for which chamomile is very good. 
Now comes the between-subjects design, the AB design, the AB testing. 
So what I'm going to do is randomly assign you to one of two groups. 
So imagine that there is an imaginary line out here, so everyone here will be group A, everyone out here will be group B. 
Now, for you folks, what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you these two teas, and I'll go ahead and ask you to choose your tea. 
You can decide, what is your mental state: OK, I choose the caffeinated tea, I choose the chamomile tea. 
So you're going to be in charge, you're going to be in control, you're going to be in the driver's seat. 
You folks, I'm going to show you these two teas, but you don't have a choice. 
I'm going to give you one of these two teas, and keep in mind, I'm going to pick one of these two teas at random for you. 
And you know that. 
So if you think about it, this is an extreme-case scenario, because in the real world, whenever you are taking passenger's seat, very often the driver is going to be someone you trust, an expert, etc. 
Now, you're all going to consume the tea. 
So imagine that you're taking the tea now, we'll wait for you to finish the tea. 
We'll give another five minutes for the ingredient to have its effects. 
Now you're going to have 30 minutes to solve 15 puzzles. 
Here's an example of the puzzle you're going to solve. 
Anyone in the audience want to take a stab? 
Audience member: Pulpit! Baba Shiv: Whoa! OK. 
That's cool. 
Yeah, so what we'd do if we had you who gave the answer as a participant, we would have calibrated the difficulty level of the puzzles to your expertise. 
Because we want these puzzles to be difficult. 
These are tricky puzzles, because your first instinct is to say "tulip." 
Right? 
So these have been calibrated to your level of expertise, because we want this to be difficult, and I'll tell you why, momentarily. 
Now, here's another example. 
Anyone? This is much more difficult. 
Audience member: Embark. BS: Yeah. Wow! OK. 
So, yeah, so this is, again, difficult. 
You'll say "kamber," then you'll go, "maker," and all that, and then you can unstick yourself. 
Now, the question we're asking here is, in terms of the outcome -- and it comes in the number of puzzles solved -- will you in the driver's seat end up solving more puzzles because you are in control, you could decide which tea you would choose, or would you be better off, in terms of the number of puzzles solved? 
And, systemically, what we will show, across a series of studies, is that you, the passengers, even though the tea was picked for you at random, will end up solving more puzzles than you, the drivers. 
We also observe another thing, and that is, you folks not only are solving fewer puzzles, you're also putting less juice into the task -- less effort, you're less persistent, and so on. 
How do we know that? 
Well, we have two objective measures. 
One is, what is the time, on average, you're taking in attempting to solve these puzzles? 
You will spend less time compared to you. 
Second, you have 30 minutes to solve these; are you taking the entire 30 minutes or are you giving up before the 30 minutes elapse? 
You will be more likely to give up before the 30 minutes elapse, compared to you. 
So you're putting in less juice, and therefore, the outcome: fewer puzzles solved. 
That brings us now to: why does this happen? 
And under what situations -- when -- would we see this pattern of results where the passenger is going to show better, more favorable outcomes, compared to the driver? 
It all has to do with when you face what I call the INCA. 
It's an acronym that stands for the nature of the feedback you're getting after you made the decision. 
So if you think about it, in this particular puzzle task -- it could happen in investing in the stock market, very volatile out there, it could be the medical situation -- the feedback here is immediate. 
You know the feedback, whether you're solving the puzzles or not. 
Right? Second, it is negative. 
Remember, the deck was stacked against you, in terms of the difficulty level of these puzzles. 
And this can happen in the medical domain. 
For example, very early on in the treatment, things are negative, the feedback, before things become positive. 
Right? It can happen in the stock market. 
Volatile stock market, getting negative feedback, it is also immediate. 
And the feedback in all these cases is concrete, it's unambiguous; you know if you've solved the puzzles or not. 
Now, the added one, apart from this immediacy, negative, this concreteness -- now you have a sense of agency. 
You were responsible for your decision. 
So what do you do? 
You focus on the foregone option. 
You say, you know what? 
(Laughter) That casts your decision in doubt, reduces the confidence you have in the decision, the confidence you have in the performance, the performance in terms of solving the puzzles. 
And therefore less juice into the task, fewer puzzles solved and less favorable outcomes compared to you folks. 
And this can happen in the medical domain, if you think about it, right? 
A patient in the driver's seat, for example. 
Less juice, which means keeping herself or himself less physically fit, physically active to hasten the recovery process, which is what is often advocated. 
And therefore, there are times when you're facing the INCA, when the feedback is going to be immediate, negative, concrete and you have the sense of agency, where you're far better off taking the passenger's seat and have someone else drive. 
Now, I started off on a somber note. 
I want to finish up on a more upbeat note. 
It has now been five years, slightly more than five years, and the good news, thank God, is that the cancer is still in remission. 
So it all ends well. 
But one thing I didn't mention was that very early on into her treatment, my wife and I decided that we would take the passenger's seat. 
And that made so much of a difference in terms of the peace of mind that came with that; we could focus on her recovery. 
We let the doctors make all the decisions and take the driver's seat. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hi. 
I've received hate online. 
A lot of it. 
And it comes with the territory of my work. 
I'm a digital creator, I make things specifically for the internet. 
Like, a few years ago, I made a video series called "Every Single Word" where I edited down popular films to only the words spoken by people of color, as a way to empirically and accessibly talk about the issue of representation in Hollywood. 
Then, later, as transphobic bathroom bill started gaining media attention around the United States, I hosted and produced an interview series called "Sitting in Bathrooms with Trans People" where I did exactly that. 
(Laughter) And then -- Sure, I'll take applause. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
And then, are you familiar with those unboxing videos on YouTube where YouTubers open up the latest electronic gadgets? 
Great, so I satirized those in a weekly series, where instead I unboxed intangible ideologies like police brutality, masculinity and the mistreatment of Native Americans. 
(Laughter) My work -- Thanks. 
One person applauding, God bless. 
(Laughter) Mom, hi. 
(Laughter) So, my work became popular. 
Very popular. 
I got millions of views, a ton of great press and a slew of new followers. 
But the flip side of success on the internet is internet hate. 
I was called everything. 
From "beta" to "snowflake" and, of course, the ever-popular "cuck." 
Don't worry, I will break these terms down for you. 
(Laughter) So, "beta," for those of you unfamiliar, is shorthand online lingo for "beta male." 
But let's be real, I wear pearl earrings and my fashion aesthetic is rich-white-woman-running-errands, so I'm not angling to be an alpha. 
(Applause) Doesn't totally work. 
(Laughter) Now, "snowflake" is a put-down for people who are sensitive and believe themselves to be unique, and I'm a millennial and an only child, so, duh! 
(Laughter) But my favorite, favorite, favorite is "cuck." 
It's a slur, short for "cuckold," for men who have been cheated on by their wives. 
But friends, I am so gay, that if I had a wife, I would encourage her to cheat on me. 
(Laughter) Thank you. 
Let's take a look at some of this negativity in action. 
Sometimes it's direct. 
Like Marcos, who wrote, "You're everything I hate in a human being." 
Thank you, Marcos. 
Others are more concise. 
Like Donovan, who wrote, "gaywad fagggggg." 
Now, I do need to point out, Donovan is not wrong, OK? 
In fact, he's right on both counts, so credit where credit is due. 
Thank you, Donovan. 
Others write to me with questions, like Brian, who asked, "Were you born a bitch or did you just learn to be one over time?" 
But my favorite thing about this is that once Brian was done typing, his finger must have slipped because then he sent me the thumbs-up emoji. 
(Laughter) So, babe, thumbs up to you, too. 
(Laughter) It's fun to talk about these messages now. 
Right? 
And it's cathartic to laugh at them. 
But I can tell you that it really does not feel good to receive them. 
At first, I would screenshot their comments and make fun of their typos, but this soon felt elitist and ultimately unhelpful. 
So over time, I developed an unexpected coping mechanism. 
Because most of these messages I received were through social media, I could often click on the profile picture of the person who sent them and learn everything about them. 
I could see pictures they were tagged in, posts they'd written, memes they'd shared, and somehow, seeing that it was a human on the other side of the screen made me feel a little better. 
Not to justify what they wrote, right? 
But just to provide context. 
Still, that didn't feel like enough. 
So, I called some of them -- only the ones I felt safe talking to -- with a simple opening question: "Why did you write that?" 
The first person I spoke to was Josh. 
He had written to tell me that I was a moron, I was a reason this country was dividing itself, and he added at the end that being gay was a sin. 
I was so nervous for our first conversation. 
This wasn't a comments section. 
So I couldn't use tools like muting or blocking. 
Of course, I guess, I could have hung up on him. 
But I didn't want to. 
Because I liked talking to him. 
Because I liked him. 
Here's a clip of one of our conversations. 
(Audio) Dylan Marron: Josh, you said you're about to graduate high school, right? 
Josh: Mmm-hmm. 
DM: How is high school for you? 
Josh: Am I allowed to use the H-E-double-hockey-stick word? 
DM: Oh, yeah. You're allowed to. 
Josh: It was hell. 
DM: Really? 
Josh: And it's still hell right now, even though it's only two weeks left. 
I'm a little bit bigger -- I don't like to use the word "fat," but I am a little bit bigger than a lot of my classmates and they seem to judge me before they even got to know me. 
DM: That's awful. 
I mean, I also just want to let you know, Josh, I was bullied in high school, too. 
So did our common ground of being bullied in high school erase what he wrote me? 
No. 
And did our single phone conversation radically heal a politically divided country and cure systemic injustice? 
No, absolutely not, right? 
But did our conversation humanize us to each other more than profile pictures and posts ever could? 
Absolutely. 
I didn't stop there. 
Because some of the hate I received was from "my side." 
So when Matthew, a queer liberal artist like me publicly wrote that I represented some of the worst aspects of liberalism, I wanted to ask him this. 
DM: You tagged me in this post. 
Did you want me to see it? 
Matthew (Laughing): I honestly didn't think that you would. 
DM: Have you ever been publicly dragged? 
Matthew: I have been. 
And I just said, "No, I don't care." 
DM: And did you not care? 
Matthew: But it was hard. 
DM: Did you not care? 
Matthew: Oh, I cared, yes. 
DM: At the end of these conversations, there's often a moment of reflection. 
A reconsideration. 
And that's exactly what happened at the end of my call with a guy named Doug who had written that I was a talentless propaganda hack. 
(Audio) Did the conversation we just had -- does it, like, make you feel differently about how you write online? 
Doug: Yeah! You know, when I said this to you, when I said you were a "talentless hack," I had never conversed with you in my life, really. 
I didn't really know anything really about you. 
And I think that a lot of times, that's what the comment sections really are, it's really a way to get your anger at the world out on random profiles of strangers, pretty much. 
DM (Laughing): Yeah, right. 
Doug: But it definitely has made me rethink the way that I interact with people online. 
DM: So I've collected these conversations and many others for my podcast "Conversations with People Who Hate Me." 
(Laughter) Before I started this project, I thought that the real way to bring about change was to shut down opposing viewpoints through epically worded video essays and comments and posts, but I soon learned those were only cheered on by the people who already agreed with me. 
Sometimes -- bless you. 
Sometimes, the most subversive thing you could do -- yeah, clap for him. 
(Laughter) Sometimes, the most subversive thing you could do was to actually speak with the people you disagreed with, and not simply at them. 
Now in every one of my calls, I always ask my guests to tell me about themselves. 
And it's their answer to this question that allows me to empathize with them. 
And empathy, it turns out, is a key ingredient in getting these conversations off the ground, but it can feel very vulnerable to be empathizing with someone you profoundly disagree with. 
So I established a helpful mantra for myself. 
Empathy is not endorsement. 
Empathizing with someone you profoundly disagree with does not suddenly compromise your own deeply held beliefs and endorse theirs. 
Empathizing with someone who, for example, believes that being gay is a sin doesn't mean that I'm suddenly going to drop everything, pack my bags and grab my one-way ticket to hell, right? 
It just means that I'm acknowledging the humanity of someone who was raised to think very differently from me. 
I also want to be super clear about something. 
This is not a prescription for activism. 
I understand that some people don't feel safe talking to their detractors and others feel so marginalized that they justifiably don't feel that they have any empathy to give. 
I totally get that. 
This is just what I feel well-suited to do. 
You know, I've reached out to a lot of people for this podcast. 
And some have politely declined, others have read my message and ignored it, some have blocked me automatically when I sent the invitation and one guy actually agreed to do it and then, five minutes into the call, hung up on me. 
I'm also aware that this talk will appear on the internet. 
And with the internet comes comment sections, and with comment sections inevitably comes hate. 
So as you are watching this talk, you can feel free to call me whatever you'd like. 
You can call me a "gaywad," a "snowflake," a "cuck," a "beta," or "everything wrong with liberalism." 
But just know that if you do, I may ask you to talk. 
And if you refuse or block me automatically or agree and hang up on me, then maybe, babe, the snowflake is you. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) (Cheering) (Applause) 

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

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

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

There are a lot of ways the people around us can help improve our lives. 
We don't bump into every neighbor, so a lot of wisdom never gets passed on, though we do share the same public spaces. 
So over the past few years, I've tried ways to share more with my neighbors in public space, using simple tools like stickers, stencils and chalk. 
And these projects came from questions I had, like: How much are my neighbors paying for their apartments? 
(Laughter) How can we lend and borrow more things, without knocking on each other's doors at a bad time? 
How can we share more memories of our abandoned buildings, and gain a better understanding of our landscape? 
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. 
(Laughter) 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 life, 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." 
(Laughter) "Before I die, I want to straddle the International Dateline." 
"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. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello, Doha. Hello! 
Salaam alaikum. 
I love coming to Doha. It's such an international place. 
It feels like the United Nations here. 
You land at the airport, and you're welcomed by an Indian lady who takes you to Al Maha Services, where you meet a Filipino lady who hands you off to a South African lady who then takes you to a Korean who takes you to a Pakistani guy with the luggage who takes you to the car with a Sri Lankan. 
You go to the hotel and you check in. There's a Lebanese. 
Yeah? And then a Swedish guy showed me my room. 
I said, "Where are the Qataris?" 
(Laughter) (Applause) They said, "No, no, it's too hot. They come out later. They're smart." 
"They know." 
(Laughter) And of course, it's growing so fast, sometimes there's growing pains. 
You know, like sometimes you run into people that you think know the city well, but they don't know it that well. 
My Indian cab driver showed up at the W, and I asked him to take me to the Sheraton, and he said, "No problem, sir." 
And then we sat there for two minutes. 
I said, "What's wrong?" He said, "One problem, sir." 
(Laughter) I said, "What?" He goes, "Where is it?" 
(Laughter) I go, "You're the driver, you should know." 
He goes, "No, I just arrived, sir." 
I go, "You just arrived at the W?" "No, I just arrived in Doha, sir." 
(Laughter) "I was on my way home from the airport, I got a job. I'm working already." 
(Laughter) He goes, "Sir, why don't you drive?" 
(Laughter) "I don't know where we're going." 
"Neither do I. It will be an adventure, sir." 
(Laughter) The Middle East has been an adventure the past couple of years. 
It is going crazy with the Arab Spring and revolution and all this. 
Are there any Lebanese here tonight, by applause? 
(Cheering) Lebanese, yeah. 
The Middle East is going crazy. 
You know the Middle East is going crazy when Lebanon is the most peaceful place in the region. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Who would have thought? 
(Laughter) Oh my gosh. 
No, there's serious issues in the region. 
Some people don't want to talk about them. I'm here to talk about them tonight. 
Ladies and gentlemen of the Middle East, here's a serious issue. 
When we see each other, when we say hello, how many kisses are we going to do? 
(Laughter) Every country is different and it's confusing, okay? 
In Lebanon, they do three. 
In Egypt, they do two. 
I was in Lebanon, I got used to three. 
I went to Egypt. I went to say hello to this one Egyptian guy, I went, one, two. I went for three -- He wasn't into it. 
(Laughter) I told him, I said, "No, no, I was just in Lebanon." 
He goes, "I don't care where you were. You just stay where you are, please." 
(Laughter) (Applause) I went to Saudi Arabia. 
In Saudi Arabia, they go one, two, and then they stay on the same side: three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 -- (Laughter) Next time you see a Saudi, look closely. 
They're just a little bit tilted. 
(Laughter) "Abdul, are you okay?" 
"I was saying hello for half an hour. I'll be all right." 
(Laughter) Qataris, you guys do the nose to nose. 
Why is that? Are you too tired to go all the way around? 
(Laughter) "Habibi, it's so hot. Just come here for a second. Say hello. 
Hello, Habibi. Just don't move. Just stay there, please. 
I need to rest." 
(Laughter) Iranians, sometimes we do two, sometimes we do three. 
A friend of mine explained to me, before the '79 revolution, it was two. 
(Laughter) After the revolution, three. 
So with Iranians, you can tell whose side the person is on based on the number of kisses they give you. 
Yeah, if you go one, two, three -- "I can't believe you support this regime!" 
(Laughter) "With your three kisses." 
(Laughter) But no, guys, really, it is exciting to be here, and like I said, you guys are doing a lot culturally, you know, and it's amazing, and it helps change the image of the Middle East in the West. 
A lot of Americans don't know a lot about us, about the Middle East. 
I'm Iranian and American. I'm there. I know, I've traveled here. 
There's so much, we laugh, right? 
People don't know we laugh. 
When I did the Axis of Evil comedy tour, it came out on Comedy Central, I went online to see what people were saying. 
I ended up on a conservative website. 
One guy wrote another guy. He said, "I never knew these people laughed." 
Think about it. You never see us laughing in American film or television, right? 
Maybe like an evil laugh: "Wuhahaha." 
(Laughter) "I will kill you in the name of Allah, wuhahahahaha." 
(Laughter) But never like, "Ha ha ha ha la." 
(Laughter) We like to laugh. We like to celebrate life. 
And I wish more Americans would travel here. 
I always encourage my friends: "Travel, see the Middle East, there's so much to see, so many good people." 
And it's vice versa, and it helps stop problems of misunderstanding and stereotypes from happening. 
For example, I don't know if you heard about this, a little while ago in the US, there was a Muslim family walking down the aisle of an airplane, talking about the safest place to sit on the plane. 
Some passengers overheard them, somehow misconstrued that as terrorist talk, got them kicked off the plane. 
It was a family, a mother, father, child, talking about the seating. 
As a Middle Eastern male, I know there's certain things I'm not supposed to say on an airplane in the US, right? 
I'm not supposed to be walking down the aisle, and be like, "Hi, Jack." That's not cool. 
(Laughter) Even if I'm there with my friend named Jack, I say, "Greetings, Jack. Salutations, Jack." 
Never "Hi, Jack." 
(Laughter) But now, apparently we can't even talk about the safest place to sit on an airplane. 
So my advice to all my Middle Eastern friends and Muslim friends and anyone who looks Middle Eastern or Muslim, so to, you know, Indians, and Latinos, everyone, if you're brown -- (Laughter) Here's my advice to my brown friends. 
(Laughter) The next time you're on an airplane in the US, just speak your mother tongue. 
That way no one knows what you're saying. Life goes on. 
(Laughter) Granted, some mother tongues might sound a little threatening to the average American. 
If you're walking down the aisle speaking Arabic, you might freak them out -- (Imitating Arabic) They might say, "What's he talking about?" 
The key, to my Arab brothers and sisters, is to throw in random good words to put people at ease as you're walking down the aisle. 
Just as you're walking down -- (Imitating Arabic) Strawberry! 
(Laughter) (Imitating Arabic) Rainbow! 
(Laughter) (Imitating Arabic) Tutti Frutti! 
(Laughter) "I think he's going to hijack the plane with some ice cream." 
Thank you very much. Have a good night. 
Thank you, TED. 
(Cheers) (Applause) 

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

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

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. 
(Applause) 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. 
(Applause) 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. 
(Applause) 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. 
(Applause) 

(Mechanical noises) (Music) (Applause) 

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

I'd like you to ask yourself, what do you feel when you hear the words "organic chemistry?" 
What comes to mind? 
There is a course offered at nearly every university, and it's called Organic Chemistry, and it is a grueling, heavy introduction to the subject, a flood of content that overwhelms students, and you have to ace it if you want to become a doctor or a dentist or a veterinarian. 
And that is why so many students perceive this science like this ... 
as an obstacle in their path, and they fear it and they hate it and they call it a weed-out course. 
What a cruel thing for a subject to do to young people, weed them out. 
And this perception spread beyond college campuses long ago. 
There is a universal anxiety about these two words. 
I happen to love this science, and I think this position in which we have placed it is inexcusable. 
It's not good for science, and it's not good for society, and I don't think it has to be this way. 
And I don't mean that this class should be easier. It shouldn't. 
But your perception of these two words should not be defined by the experiences of premed students who frankly are going through a very anxious time of their lives. 
So I'm here today because I believe that a basic knowledge of organic chemistry is valuable, and I think that it can be made accessible to everybody, and I'd like to prove that to you today. 
Would you let me try? 
Audience: Yeah! 
Jakob Magolan: All right, let's go for it. 
(Laughter) Here I have one of these overpriced EpiPens. 
Inside it is a drug called epinephrine. 
Epinephrine can restart the beat of my heart, or it could stop a life-threatening allergic reaction. 
An injection of this right here will do it. 
It would be like turning the ignition switch in my body's fight-or-flight machinery. 
My heart rate, my blood pressure would go up so blood could rush to my muscles. 
My pupils would dilate. I would feel a wave of strength. 
Epinephrine has been the difference between life and death for many people. 
This is like a little miracle that you can hold in your fingers. 
Here is the chemical structure of epinephrine. 
This is what organic chemistry looks like. 
It looks like lines and letters ... 
No meaning to most people. 
I'd like to show you what I see when I look at that picture. 
I see a physical object that has depth and rotating parts, and it's moving. 
We call this a compound or a molecule, and it is 26 atoms that are stitched together by atomic bonds. 
The unique arrangement of these atoms gives epinephrine its identity, but nobody has ever actually seen one of these, because they're very small, so we're going to call this an artistic impression, and I want to explain to you how small this is. 
In here, I have less than half a milligram of it dissolved in water. 
It's the mass of a grain of sand. 
The number of epinephrine molecules in here is one quintillion. 
That's 18 zeroes. 
That number is hard to visualize. 
Seven billion of us on this planet? 
Maybe 400 billion stars in our galaxy? 
You're not even close. 
If you wanted to get into the right ballpark, you'd have to imagine every grain of sand on every beach, under all the oceans and lakes, and then shrink them all so they fit in here. 
Epinephrine is so small we will never see it, not through any microscope ever, but we know what it looks like, because it shows itself through some sophisticated machines with fancy names like "nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometers." 
So visible or not, we know this molecule very well. 
We know it is made of four different types of atoms, hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. 
These are the colors we typically use for them. 
Everything in our universe is made of little spheres that we call atoms. 
There's about a hundred of these basic ingredients, and they're all made from three smaller particles: protons, neutrons, electrons. 
We arrange these atoms into this familiar table. 
We give them each a name and a number. 
But life as we know it doesn't need all of these, just a smaller subset, just these. 
And there are four atoms in particular that stand apart from the rest as the main building blocks of life, and they are the same ones that are found in epinephrine: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. 
Now what I tell you next is the most important part. 
When these atoms connect to form molecules, they follow a set of rules. 
Hydrogen makes one bond, oxygen always makes two, nitrogen makes three and carbon makes four. 
That's it. 
HONC -- one, two, three, four. 
If you can count to four, and you can misspell the word "honk," you're going to remember this for the rest of your lives. 
(Laughter) Now here I have four bowls with these ingredients. 
We can use these to build molecules. 
Let's start with epinephrine. 
Now, these bonds between atoms, they're made of electrons. 
Atoms use electrons like arms to reach out and hold their neighbors. 
Two electrons in each bond, like a handshake, and like a handshake, they are not permanent. 
They can let go of one atom and grab another. 
That's what we call a chemical reaction, when atoms exchange partners and make new molecules. 
The backbone of epinephrine is made mostly of carbon atoms, and that's common. 
Carbon is life's favorite structural building material, because it makes a good number of handshakes with just the right grip strength. 
That's why we define organic chemistry as the study of carbon molecules. 
Now, if we build the smallest molecules we can think of that follow our rules, they highlight our rules, and they have familiar names: water, ammonia and methane, H20 and NH3 and CH4. 
The words "hydrogen," "oxygen" and "nitrogen" -- we use the same words to name these three molecules that have two atoms each. 
They still follow the rules, because they have one, two and three bonds between them. 
That's why oxygen gets called O2. 
I can show you combustion. 
Here's carbon dioxide, CO2. 
Above it, let's place water and oxygen, and beside it, some flammable fuels. 
These fuels are made of just hydrogen and carbon. 
That's why we call them hydrocarbons. We're very creative. 
(Laughter) So when these crash into molecules of oxygen, as they do in your engine or in your barbecues, they release energy and they reassemble, and every carbon atom ends up at the center of a CO2 molecule, holding on to two oxygens, and all the hydrogens end up as parts of waters, and everybody follows the rules. 
They are not optional, and they're not optional for bigger molecules either, like these three. 
This is our favorite vitamin sitting next to our favorite drug, (Laughter) and morphine is one of the most important stories in medical history. 
It marks medicine's first real triumph over physical pain, and every molecule has a story, and they are all published. 
They're written by scientists, and they're read by other scientists, so we have handy representations to do this quickly on paper, and I need to teach you how to do that. 
So we lay epinephrine flat on a page, and then we replace all the spheres with simple letters, and then the bonds that lie in the plane of the page, they just become regular lines, and the bonds that point forwards and backwards, they become little triangles, either solid or dashed to indicate depth. 
We don't actually draw these carbons. 
We save time by just hiding them. 
They're represented by corners between the bonds, and we also hide every hydrogen that's bonded to a carbon. 
We know they're there whenever a carbon is showing us any fewer than four bonds. 
The last thing that's done is the bonds between OH and NH. 
We just get rid of those to make it cleaner, and that's all there is to it. 
This is the professional way to draw molecules. 
This is what you see on Wikipedia pages. 
It takes a little bit of practice, but I think everyone here could do it, but for today, this is epinephrine. 
This is also called adrenaline. They're one and the same. 
It's made by your adrenal glands. 
You have this molecule swimming through your body right now. 
It's a natural molecule. 
This EpiPen would just give you a quick quintillion more of them. 
(Laughter) We can extract epinephrine from the adrenal glands of sheep or cattle, but that's not where this stuff comes from. 
We make this epinephrine in a factory by stitching together smaller molecules that come mostly from petroleum. 
And this is 100 percent synthetic. 
And that word, "synthetic," makes some of us uncomfortable. 
It's not like the word "natural," which makes us feel safe. 
But these two molecules, they cannot be distinguished. 
We're not talking about two cars that are coming off an assembly line here. 
A car can have a scratch on it, and you can't scratch an atom. 
These two are identical in a surreal, almost mathematical sense. 
At this atomic scale, math practically touches reality. 
And a molecule of epinephrine ... 
it has no memory of its origin. 
It just is what it is, and once you have it, the words "natural" and "synthetic," they don't matter, and nature synthesizes this molecule just like we do, except nature is much better at this than we are. 
Before there was life on earth, all the molecules were small, simple: carbon dioxide, water, nitrogen, just simple things. 
The emergence of life changed that. 
Life brought biosynthetic factories that are powered by sunlight, and inside these factories, small molecules crash into each other and become large ones: carbohydrates, proteins, nucleic acids, multitudes of spectacular creations. 
Nature is the original organic chemist, and her construction also fills our sky with the oxygen gas we breathe, this high-energy oxygen. 
All of these molecules are infused with the energy of the sun. 
They store it like batteries. 
So nature is made of chemicals. 
Maybe you guys can help me to reclaim this word, "chemical," because it has been stolen from us. 
It doesn't mean toxic, and it doesn't mean harmful, and it doesn't mean man-made or unnatural. 
It just means "stuff," OK? 
(Laughter) You can't have chemical-free lump charcoal. 
That is ridiculous. 
(Laughter) And I'd like to do one more word. 
The word "natural" doesn't mean "safe," and you all know that. 
Plenty of nature's chemicals are quite toxic, and others are delicious, and some are both ... 
(Laughter) toxic and delicious. 
The only way to tell whether something is harmful is to test it, and I don't mean you guys. 
Professional toxicologists: we have these people. 
They're well-trained, and you should trust them like I do. 
So nature's molecules are everywhere, including the ones that have decomposed into these black mixtures that we call petroleum. 
We refine these molecules. 
There's nothing unnatural about them. 
We purify them. 
Now, our dependence on them for energy -- that means that every one of those carbons gets converted into a molecule of CO2. 
That's a greenhouse gas that is messing up our climate. 
Maybe knowing this chemistry will make that reality easier to accept for some people, I don't know, but these molecules are not just fossil fuels. 
They're also the cheapest available raw materials for doing something that we call synthesis. 
We're using them like pieces of LEGO. 
We have learned how to connect them or break them apart with great control. 
I have done a lot of this myself, and I still think it's amazing it's even possible. 
What we do is kind of like assembling LEGO by dumping boxes of it into washing machines, but it works. 
We can make molecules that are exact copies of nature, like epinephrine, or we can make creations of our own from scratch, like these two. 
One of these eases the symptoms of multiple sclerosis; the other one cures a type of blood cancer that we call T-cell lymphoma. 
A molecule with the right size and shape, it's like a key in a lock, and when it fits, it interferes with the chemistry of a disease. 
That's how drugs work. 
Natural or synthetic, they're all just molecules that happen to fit snugly somewhere important. 
But nature is much better at making them than we are, so hers look more impressive than ours, like this one. 
This is called vancomycin. 
She gave this majestic beast two chlorine atoms to wear like a pair of earrings. 
We found vancomycin in a puddle of mud in a jungle in Borneo in 1953. 
It's made by a bacteria. 
We can't synthesize this cost-efficiently in a lab. 
It's too complicated for us, but we can harvest it from its natural source, and we do, because this is one of our most powerful antibiotics. 
And new molecules are reported in our literature every day. 
We make them or we find them in every corner of this planet. 
And that's where drugs come from, and that's why your doctors have amazing powers ... 
(Laughter) to cure deadly infections and everything else. 
Being a physician today is like being a knight in shining armor. 
They fight battles with courage and composure, but also with good equipment. 
So let's not forget the role of the blacksmith in this picture, because without the blacksmith, things would look a little different ... 
(Laughter) But this science is bigger than medicine. 
It is oils and solvents and flavors, fabrics, all plastics, the cushions that you're sitting on right now -- they're all manufactured, and they're mostly carbon, so that makes all of it organic chemistry. 
This is a rich science. 
I left out a lot today: phosphorus and sulfur and the other atoms, and why they all bond the way they do, and symmetry and non-bonding electrons, and atoms that are charged, and reactions and their mechanisms, and it goes on and on and on, and synthesis takes a long time to learn. 
But I didn't come here to teach you guys organic chemistry -- I just wanted to show it to you, and I had a lot of help with that today from a young man named Weston Durland, and you've already seen him. 
He's an undergraduate student in chemistry, and he also happens to be pretty good with computer graphics. 
(Laughter) So Weston designed all the moving molecules that you saw today. 
He and I wanted to demonstrate through the use of graphics like these to help someone talk about this intricate science. 
But our main goal was just to show you that organic chemistry is not something to be afraid of. 
It is, at its core, a window through which the beauty of the natural world looks richer. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Robbie Mizzone: Thank you. 
Tommy Mizzone: Thank you very much. 
Like he said, we're three brothers from New Jersey -- you know, the bluegrass capital of the world. 
(Laughter) We discovered bluegrass a few years ago, and we fell in love with it. 
This next song is an original we wrote called "Time Lapse," and it will probably live up to its name. 
(Tuning) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) TM: Thank you very much. 
RM: I'm just going to take a second to introduce the band. 
On guitar is my 15-year-old brother Tommy. 
(Applause) On banjo is 10-year-old Jonny. 
(Applause) He's also our brother. 
And I'm Robbie, and I'm 14, and I play the fiddle. 
(Applause) As you can see, we decided to make it hard on ourselves, and we chose to play three songs in three different keys. 
(Tuning) Yeah. I'm also going to explain, a lot of people want to know where we got the name "Sleepy Man Banjo Boys" from. 
So, it started when Jonny was little, and he first started the banjo, he would play on his back with his eyes closed, and we'd say it looked like he was sleeping. 
So you can probably piece the rest together. 
TM: We can't really figure out the reason. 
(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) TM: Thank you very much. 
(Cheering) RM: Thank you. 

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

There are three words that explain why I am here. 
They are "Amy Krouse Rosenthal." 
At the end of Amy's life, hyped up on morphine and home in hospice, the "New York Times" published an article she wrote for the "Modern Love" column on March 3, 2017. 
It was read worldwide by over five million people. 
The piece was unbearably sad, ironically funny and brutally honest. 
While it was certainly about our life together, the focus of the piece was me. 
It was called, "You May Want to Marry My Husband." 
It was a creative play on a personal ad for me. 
Amy quite literally left an empty space for me to fill with another love story. 
Amy was my wife for half my life. 
She was my partner in raising three wonderful, now grown children, and really, she was my girl, you know? 
We had so much in common. 
We loved the same art, the same documentaries, the same music. 
Music was a huge part of our life together. 
And we shared the same values. 
We were in love, and our love grew stronger up until her last day. 
Amy was a prolific author. 
In addition to two groundbreaking memoirs, she published over 30 children's books. 
Posthumously, the book she wrote with our daughter Paris, called "Dear Girl," reached the number one position on the "New York Times" bestseller list. 
She was a self-described tiny filmmaker. 
She was 5'1" and her films were not that long. 
(Laughter) Her films exemplified her natural ability to gather people together. 
She was also a terrific public speaker, talking with children and adults of all ages all over the world. 
Now, my story of grief is only unique in the sense of it being rather public. 
However, the grieving process itself was not my story alone. 
Amy gave me permission to move forward, and I'm so grateful for that. 
Now, just a little over a year into my new life, I've learned a few things. 
I'm here to share with you part of the process of moving forward through and with grief. 
But before I do that, I think it would be important to talk a little bit about the end of life, because it forms how I have been emotionally since then. 
Death is such a taboo subject, right? 
Amy ate her last meal on January 9, 2017. 
She somehow lived an additional two months without solid food. 
Her doctors told us we could do hospice at home or in the hospital. 
They did not tell us that Amy would shrink to half her body weight, that she would never lay with her husband again, and that walking upstairs to our bedroom would soon feel like running a marathon. 
Home hospice does have an aura of being a beautiful environment to die in. 
How great that you don't have the sounds of machines beeping and going on and off all the time, no disruptions for mandatory drug administration, home with your family to die. 
We did our best to make those weeks as meaningful as we could. 
We talked often about death. 
Everybody knows it's going to happen to them, like, for sure, but being able to talk openly about it was liberating. 
We talked about subjects like parenting. 
I asked Amy how I could be the best parent possible to our children in her absence. 
In those conversations, she gave me confidence by stressing what a great relationship I had with each one of them, and that I can do it. 
I know there will be many times where I wish she and I can make decisions together. 
We were always so in sync. 
May I be so audacious as to suggest that you have these conversations now, when healthy. 
Please don't wait. 
As part of our hospice experience, we organized groups of visitors. 
How brave of Amy to receive them, even as she began her physical decline. 
We had a Krouse night, her parents and three siblings. 
Friends and family were next. 
Each told beautiful stories of Amy and of us. 
Amy made an immense impact on her loyal friends. 
But home hospice is not so beautiful for the surviving family members. 
I want to get a little personal here and tell you that to this date, I have memories of those final weeks that haunt me. 
I remember walking backwards to the bathroom, assisting Amy with each step. 
I felt so strong. 
I'm not such a big guy, but my arms looked and felt so healthy compared to Amy's frail body. 
And that body failed in our house. 
On March 13 of last year, my wife died of ovarian cancer in our bed. 
I carried her lifeless body down our stairs, through our dining room and our living room to a waiting gurney to have her body cremated. 
I will never get that image out of my head. 
If you know someone who has been through the hospice experience, acknowledge that. 
Just say you heard this guy Jason talk about how tough it must be to have those memories and that you're there if they ever want to talk about it. 
They may not want to talk, but it's nice to connect with someone living each day with those lasting images. 
I know this sounds unbelievable, but I've never been asked that question. 
Amy's essay caused me to experience grief in a public way. 
Many of the readers who reached out to me wrote beautiful words of reflection. 
The scope of Amy's impact was deeper and richer than even us and her family knew. 
Some of the responses I received helped me with the intense grieving process because of their humor, like this email I received from a woman reader who read the article, declaring, "I will marry you when you are ready -- (Laughter) "provided you permanently stop drinking. 
No other conditions. 
I promise to outlive you. 
Thank you very much." 
Now, I do like a good tequila, but that really is not my issue. 
Yet how could I say no to that proposal? 
(Laughter) I laughed through the tears when I read this note from a family friend: "I remember Shabbat dinners at your home and Amy teaching me how to make cornbread croutons. 
Only Amy could find creativity in croutons." 
(Laughter) On July 27, just a few months after Amy's death, my dad died of complications related to a decades-long battle with Parkinson's disease. 
I had to wonder: How much can the human condition handle? 
What makes us capable of dealing with this intense loss and yet carry on? 
Was this a test? 
Why my family and my amazing children? 
Looking for answers, I regret to say, is a lifelong mission, but the key to my being able to persevere is Amy's expressed and very public edict that I must go on. 
Throughout this year, I have done just that. 
I have attempted to step out and seek the joy and the beauty that I know this life is capable of providing. 
But here's the reality: those family gatherings, attending weddings and events honoring Amy, as loving as they are, have all been very difficult to endure. 
People say I'm amazing. 
"How do you handle yourself that way during those times?" 
They say, "You do it with such grace." 
Well, guess what? 
I really am sad a lot of the time. 
I often feel like I'm kind of a mess, and I know these feelings apply to other surviving spouses, children, parents and other family members. 
In Japanese Zen, there is a term "Shoji," which translates as "birth death." 
There is no separation between life and death other than a thin line that connects the two. 
Birth, or the joyous, wonderful, vital parts of life, and death, those things we want to get rid of, are said to be faced equally. 
In this new life that I find myself in, I am doing my best to embrace this concept as I move forward with grieving. 
In the early months following Amy's death, though, I was sure that the feeling of despair would be ever-present, that it would be all-consuming. 
Soon I was fortunate to receive some promising advice. 
Many members of the losing-a-spouse club reached out to me. 
One friend in particular who had also lost her life partner kept repeating, "Jason, you will find joy." 
I didn't even know what she was talking about. 
How was that possible? 
But because Amy gave me very public permission to also find happiness, I now have experienced joy from time to time. 
There it was, dancing the night away at an LCD Soundsystem concert, traveling with my brother and best friend or with a college buddy on a boys' trip to meet a group of great guys I never met before. 
From observing that my deck had sun beating down on it on a cold day, stepping out in it, laying there, the warmth consuming my body. 
The joy comes from my three stunning children. 
There was my son Justin, texting me a picture of himself with an older gentleman with a massive, strong forearm and the caption, "I just met Popeye," with a huge grin on his face. 
(Laughter) There was his brother Miles, walking to the train for his first day of work after graduating college, who stopped and looked back at me and asked, "What am I forgetting?" 
I assured him right away, "You are 100 percent ready. You got this." 
And my daughter Paris, walking together through Battersea Park in London, the leaves piled high, the sun glistening in the early morning on our way to yoga. 
I would add that beauty is also there to discover, and I mean beauty of the wabi-sabi variety but beauty nonetheless. 
On the one hand, when I see something in this category, I want to say, "Amy, did you see that? Did you hear that? 
It's too beautiful for you not to share with me." 
On the other hand, I now experience these moments in an entirely new way. 
There was the beauty I found in music, like the moment in the newest Manchester Orchestra album, when the song "The Alien" seamlessly transitions into "The Sunshine," or the haunting beauty of Luke Sital-Singh's "Killing Me," whose chorus reads, "And it's killing me that you're not here with me. 
I'm living happily, but I'm feeling guilty." 
There is beauty in the simple moments that life has to offer, a way of seeing that world that was so much a part of Amy's DNA, like on my morning commute, looking at the sun reflecting off of Lake Michigan, or stopping and truly seeing how the light shines at different times of the day in the house we built together; even after a Chicago storm, noticing the fresh buildup of snow throughout the neighborhood; or peeking into my daughter's room as she's practicing the bass guitar. 
Listen, I want to make it clear that I'm a very fortunate person. 
I have the most amazing family that loves and supports me. 
I have the resources for personal growth during my time of grief. 
But whether it's a divorce, losing a job you worked so hard at or having a family member die suddenly or of a slow-moving and painful death, I would like to offer you what I was given: a blank of sheet of paper. 
What will you do with your intentional empty space, with your fresh start? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

What do we know about the future? 
Difficult question, simple answer: nothing. 
We cannot predict the future. 
We only can create a vision of the future, how it might be, a vision which reveals disruptive ideas, which is inspiring, and this is the most important reason which breaks the chains of common thinking. 
There are a lot of people who created their own vision about the future, for instance, this vision here from the early 20th century. 
It says here that this is the ocean plane of the future. 
It takes only one and a half days to cross the Atlantic Ocean. 
Today, we know that this future vision didn't come true. 
So this is our largest airplane which we have, the Airbus A380, and it's quite huge, so a lot of people fit in there and it's technically completely different than the vision I've shown to you. 
I'm working in a team with Airbus, and we have created our vision about a more sustainable future of aviation. 
So sustainability is quite important for us, which should incorporate social but as well as environmental and economic values. 
So we have created a very disruptive structure which mimics the design of bone, or a skeleton, which occurs in nature. 
So that's why it looks maybe a little bit weird, especially to the people who deal with structures in general. 
But at least it's just a kind of artwork to explore our ideas about a different future. 
What are the main customers of the future? 
So, we have the old, we have the young, we have the uprising power of women, and there's one mega-trend which affects all of us. 
These are the future anthropometrics. 
So our children are getting larger, but at the same time we are growing into different directions. 
So what we need is space inside the aircraft, inside a very dense area. 
These people have different needs. 
So we see a clear need of active health promotion, especially in the case of the old people. 
We want to be treated as individuals. 
We like to be productive throughout the entire travel chain, and what we are doing in the future is we want to use the latest man-machine interface, and we want to integrate this and show this in one product. 
So we combined these needs with technology's themes. 
So for instance, we are asking ourselves, how can we create more light? 
How can we bring more natural light into the airplane? 
So this airplane has no windows anymore, for example. 
What about the data and communication software which we need in the future? 
My belief is that the airplane of the future will get its own consciousness. 
It will be more like a living organism than just a collection of very complex technology. 
This will be very different in the future. 
It will communicate directly with the passenger in its environment. 
And then we are talking also about materials, synthetic biology, for example. 
And my belief is that we will get more and more new materials which we can put into structure later on, because structure is one of the key issues in aircraft design. 
So let's compare the old world with the new world. 
I just want to show you here what we are doing today. 
So this is a bracket of an A380 crew rest compartment. 
It takes a lot of weight, and it follows the classical design rules. 
This here is an equal bracket for the same purpose. 
It follows the design of bone. 
The design process is completely different. 
At the one hand, we have 1.2 kilos, and at the other hand 0.6 kilos. 
So this technology, 3D printing, and new design rules really help us to reduce the weight, which is the biggest issue in aircraft design, because it's directly linked to greenhouse gas emissions. 
Push this idea a little bit forward. 
So how does nature build its components and structures? 
So nature is very clever. It puts all the information into these small building blocks, which we call DNA. 
And nature builds large skeletons out of it. 
So we see a bottom-up approach here, because all the information, as I said, are inside the DNA. 
And this is combined with a top-down approach, because what we are doing in our daily life is we train our muscles, we train our skeleton, and it's getting stronger. 
And the same approach can be applied to technology as well. 
So our building block is carbon nanotubes, for example, to create a large, rivet-less skeleton at the end of the day. 
How this looks in particular, you can show it here. 
So imagine you have carbon nanotubes growing inside a 3D printer, and they are embedded inside a matrix of plastic, and follow the forces which occur in your component. 
And you've got trillions of them. 
So you really align them to wood, and you take this wood and make morphological optimization, so you make structures, sub-structures, which allows you to transmit electrical energy or data. 
And now we take this material, combine this with a top-down approach, and build bigger and bigger components. 
So how might the airplane of the future look? 
So we have very different seats which adapt to the shape of the future passenger, with the different anthropometrics. 
We have social areas inside the aircraft which might turn into a place where you can play virtual golf. 
And finally, this bionic structure, which is covered by a transparent biopolymer membrane, will really change radically how we look at aircrafts in the future. 
So as Jason Silva said, if we can imagine it, why not make it so? 
See you in the future. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Good morning! 
Are you awake? 
They took my name tag, but I wanted to ask you, did anyone here write their name on the tag in Arabic? 
Anyone! No one? All right, no problem. 
Once upon a time, not long ago, I was sitting in a restaurant with my friend, ordering food. 
So I looked at the waiter and said, "Do you have a menu (Arabic)?" 
He looked at me strangely, thinking that he misheard. 
He said, "Sorry? (English)." 
I said, "The menu (Arabic), please." 
He replied, "Don't you know what they call it?" 
"I do." 
He said, "No! It's called "menu" (English), or "menu" (French)." 
"Come, come, take care of this one!" said the waiter. 
He was disgusted when talking to me, as if he was saying to himself, "If this was the last girl on Earth, I wouldn't look at her!" 
What's the meaning of saying "menu" in Arabic? 
Two words made a Lebanese young man judge a girl as being backward and ignorant. 
How could she speak that way? 
At that moment, I started thinking. 
It definitely hurts! 
I'm denied the right to speak my own language in my own country? 
Where could this happen? 
How did we get here? 
Well, while we are here, there are many people like me, who would reach a stage in their lives, where they involuntarily give up everything that has happened to them in the past, just so they can say that they're modern and civilized. 
Should I forget all my culture, thoughts, intellect and all my memories? 
Childhood stories might be the best memories we have of the war! 
Should I forget everything I learned in Arabic, just to conform? 
To be one of them? 
Where's the logic in that? 
Despite all that, I tried to understand him. 
I didn't want to judge him with the same cruelty that he judged me. 
The Arabic language doesn't satisfy today's needs. 
It's not a language for science, research, a language we're used to in universities, a language we use in the workplace, a language we rely on if we were to perform an advanced research project, and it definitely isn't a language we use at the airport. 
Where can I use it, then? We could all ask this question! 
This is one reality. 
But we have another more important reality that we ought to think about. 
Arabic is the mother tongue. 
Research says that mastery of other languages demands mastery of the mother tongue. 
Mastery of the mother tongue is a prerequisite for creative expression in other languages. 
How? 
Gibran Khalil Gibran, when he first started writing, he used Arabic. 
All his ideas, imagination and philosophy were inspired by this little boy in the village where he grew up, smelling a specific smell, hearing a specific voice, and thinking a specific thought. 
Even when he wrote in English, when you read his writings in English, you smell the same smell, sense the same feeling. 
You can imagine that that's him writing in English, the same boy who came from the mountain. From a village on Mount Lebanon. 
So, this is an example no one can argue with. 
Second, it's often said that if you want to kill a nation, the only way to kill a nation, is to kill its language. 
This is a reality that developed societies are aware of. 
The Germans, French, Japanese and Chinese, all these nations are aware of this. 
That's why they legislate to protect their language. 
They make it sacred. 
That's why they use it in production, they pay a lot of money to develop it. 
Do we know better than them? 
All right, we aren't from the developed world, this advanced thinking hasn't reached us yet, and we would like to catch up with the civilized world. 
Countries that were once like us, but decided to strive for development, do research, and catch up with those countries, such as Turkey, Malaysia and others, they carried their language with them as they were climbing the ladder, protected it like a diamond. 
They kept it close to them. 
Because if you get any product from Turkey or elsewhere and it's not labeled in Turkish, then it isn't a local product. 
You wouldn't believe it's a local product. 
They'd go back to being consumers, clueless consumers, like we are most of the time. 
If I say, "Freedom, sovereignty, independence (Arabic)," what does this remind you of? 
Regardless of the who, how and why. 
Language isn't just for conversing, just words coming out of our mouths. 
Language represents specific stages in our lives, and terminology that is linked to our emotions. 
So when we say, "Freedom, sovereignty, independence," each one of you draws a specific image in their own mind, there are specific feelings of a specific day in a specific historical period. 
Language isn't one, two or three words or letters put together. 
It's an idea inside that relates to how we think, and how we see each other and how others see us. 
What is our intellect? 
How do you say whether this guy understands or not? 
So, if I say, "Freedom, sovereignty, independence (English)," or if your son came up to you and said, "Dad, have you lived through the period of the freedom (English) slogan?" 
How would you feel? 
If you don't see a problem, then I'd better leave, and stop talking in vain. 
The idea is that these expressions remind us of a specific thing. 
I have a francophone friend who's married to a French man. 
I asked her once how things were going. 
She said, "Everything is fine, but once, I spent a whole night asking and trying to translate the meaning of the word 'toqborni' for him." 
(Laughter) (Applause) The poor woman had mistakenly told him "toqborni," and then spent the whole night trying to explain it to him. 
He was puzzled by the thought: "How could anyone be this cruel? 
Does she want to commit suicide? 
'Bury me?' (English)" This is one of the few examples. 
It made us feel that she's unable to tell that word to her husband, since he won't understand, and he's right not to; his way of thinking is different. 
She said to me, "He listens to Fairuz with me, and one night, I tried to translate for him so he can feel what I feel when I listen to Fairuz." 
The poor woman tried to translate this for him: "From them I extended my hands and stole you --" (Laughter) And here's the pickle: "And because you belong to them, I returned my hands and left you." 
(Laughter) Translate that for me. 
(Applause) So, what have we done to protect the Arabic language? 
We turned this into a concern of the civil society, and we launched a campaign to preserve the Arabic language. 
Even though many people told me, "Why do you bother? 
Forget about this headache and go have fun." 
No problem! 
The campaign to preserve Arabic launched a slogan that says, "I talk to you from the East, but you reply from the West." 
We didn't say, "No! We do not accept this or that." 
We didn't adopt this style because that way, we wouldn't be understood. 
And when someone talks to me that way, I hate the Arabic language. 
We say-- (Applause) We want to change our reality, and be convinced in a way that reflects our dreams, aspirations and day-to-day life. 
In a way that dresses like us and thinks like we do. 
So, "I talk to you from the East, but you reply from the West" has hit the spot. 
Something very easy, yet creative and persuasive. 
After that, we launched another campaign with scenes of letters on the ground. 
You've seen an example of it outside, a scene of a letter surrounded by black and yellow tape with "Don't kill your language!" written on it. 
Why? Seriously, don't kill your language. 
We really shouldn't kill our language. 
If we were to kill the language, we'd have to find an identity. 
We'd have to find an existence. 
We'd go back to the beginning. 
This is beyond just missing our chance of being modern and civilized. 
After that we released photos of guys and girls wearing the Arabic letter. 
Photos of "cool" guys and girls. 
We are very cool! 
And to whoever might say, "Ha! You used an English word!" 
I say, "No! I adopt the word 'cool.'" Let them object however they want, but give me a word that's nicer and matches the reality better. 
I will keep on saying "Internet" I wouldn't say: "I'm going to the world wide web" (Laughs) Because it doesn't fit! We shouldn't kid ourselves. 
But to reach this point, we all have to be convinced that we shouldn't allow anyone who is bigger or thinks they have any authority over us when it comes to language, to control us or make us think and feel what they want. 
Creativity is the idea. 
So, if we can't reach space or build a rocket and so on, we can be creative. 
At this moment, every one of you is a creative project. 
Creativity in your mother tongue is the path. 
Let's start from this moment. 
Let's write a novel or produce a short film. 
A single novel could make us global again. 
It could bring the Arabic language back to being number one. 
So, it's not true that there's no solution; there is a solution! 
But we have to know that, and be convinced that a solution exists, that we have a duty to be part of that solution. 
In conclusion, what can you do today? 
Now, tweets, who's tweeting? 
Please, I beg of you, even though my time has finished, either Arabic, English, French or Chinese. 
But don't write Arabic with Latin characters mixed with numbers! 
(Applause) It's a disaster! That's not a language. 
You'd be entering a virtual world with a virtual language. 
It's not easy to come back from such a place and rise. 
That's the first thing we can do. 
We're not here today to convince each other. 
Now I will tell you a secret. 
A baby first identifies its father through language. 
When my daughter is born, I'll tell her, "This is your father, honey (Arabic)." 
I wouldn't say, "This is your dad, honey (English)." 
And in the supermarket, I promise my daughter Noor, that if she says to me, "Thanks (Arabic)," I won't say, "Dis, 'Merci, Maman,'" and hope no one has heard her. 
(Applause) Let's get rid of this cultural cringe. 
(Applause) 

If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys? 
(Laughter) Well, because we're not monkeys, we're fish. 
(Laughter) Now, knowing you're a fish and not a monkey is actually really important to understanding where we came from. 
I teach one of the largest evolutionary biology classes in the US, and when my students finally understand why I call them fish all the time, then I know I'm getting my job done. 
But I always have to start my classes by dispelling some hardwired myths, because without really knowing it, many of us were taught evolution wrong. 
For instance, we're taught to say "the theory of evolution." 
There are actually many theories, and just like the process itself, the ones that best fit the data are the ones that survive to this day. 
The one we know best is Darwinian natural selection. 
That's the process by which organisms that best fit an environment survive and get to reproduce, while those that are less fit slowly die off. 
And that's it. 
Evolution is as simple as that, and it's a fact. 
You can prove it just as easily. 
You just need to look at your bellybutton that you share with other placental mammals, or your backbone that you share with other vertebrates, or your DNA that you share with all other life on earth. 
Those traits didn't pop up in humans. 
They were passed down from different ancestors to all their descendants, not just us. 
But that's not really how we learn biology early on, is it? 
We learn plants and bacteria are primitive things, and fish give rise to amphibians followed by reptiles and mammals, and then you get you, this perfectly evolved creature at the end of the line. 
But life doesn't evolve in a line, and it doesn't end with us. 
But we're always shown evolution portrayed something like this, a monkey and a chimpanzee, some extinct humans, all on a forward and steady march to becoming us. 
But they don't become us any more than we would become them. 
We're also not the goal of evolution. 
But why does it matter? 
Why do we need to understand evolution the right way? 
Well, misunderstanding evolution has led to many problems, but you can't ask that age-old question, "Where are we from?" 
without understanding evolution the right way. 
Misunderstanding it has led to many convoluted and corrupted views of how we should treat other life on earth, and how we should treat each other in terms of race and gender. 
So let's go back four billion years. 
This is the single-celled organism we all came from. 
At first, it gave rise to other single-celled life, but these are still evolving to this day, and some would say the Archaea and Bacteria that make up most of this group is the most successful on the planet. 
They are certainly going to be here well after us. 
About three billion years ago, multicellularity evolved. 
This includes your fungi and your plants and your animals. 
The first animals to develop a backbone were fishes. 
So technically, all vertebrates are fishes, so technically, you and I are fish. 
So don't say I didn't warn you. 
One fish lineage came onto land and gave rise to, among other things, the mammals and reptiles. 
Some reptiles become birds, some mammals become primates, some primates become monkeys with tails, and others become the great apes, including a variety of human species. 
So you see, we didn't evolve from monkeys, but we do share a common ancestor with them. 
All the while, life around us kept evolving: more bacteria, more fungi, lots of fish, fish, fish. 
If you couldn't tell -- yes, they're my favorite group. 
(Laughter) As life evolves, it also goes extinct. 
Most species just last for a few million years. 
So you see, most life on earth that we see around us today are about the same age as our species. 
So it's hubris, it's self-centered to think, "Oh, plants and bacteria are primitive, and we've been here for an evolutionary minute, so we're somehow special." 
Think of life as being this book, an unfinished book for sure. 
We're just seeing the last few pages of each chapter. 
If you look out on the eight million species that we share this planet with, think of them all being four billion years of evolution. 
They're all the product of that. 
Think of us all as young leaves on this ancient and gigantic tree of life, all of us connected by invisible branches not just to each other, but to our extinct relatives and our evolutionary ancestors. 
As a biologist, I'm still trying to learn, with others, how everyone's related to each other, who is related to whom. 
Perhaps it's better still to think of us as a little fish out of water. 
Yes, one that learned to walk and talk, but one that still has a lot of learning to do about who we are and where we came from. 
(Applause) 

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

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

Good afternoon. 
I'd like to talk to you about laughter and the importance of laughter as a skill. 
And to do so, I'm going to start by discussing some American foreign policy because that's always - (Laughter) absolutely hilarious. 
(Laughter) Back in 1995, towards the end of the war in the former Yugoslavia, they'd been a very ill-tempered speech given by Boris Yeltsin at the UN about the involvement of the Russian Federation in NATO, and then he had a meeting with Bill Clinton, in which some of these same issues were coming up, and it was considered to be, likely to be a bit of a row. 
So, what actually happened when these two men came out? 
They gave a press conference about their summit. 
And can we learn anything about laughter if we watch this? 
(Video) Host: Good afternoon. Bill Clinton: Mr. President. 
(On stage) Sophie Scott: Watch Bill Clinton. 
(Video) Boris Yeltsin: (In Russian) Ladies and gentlemen, SS: Yeltsin - (Video) BY: (In Russian) dear journalists, SS: ... doesn't sound very happy. 
(Video) BY: (In Russian) First of all, I have to say that I was coming to this meeting at the invitation of the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, not with the same optimism as I am feeling right now. 
Interpreter: I want to say, first of all, that when I came here to the United States for this visit at the invitation of the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, I did not, at that time, have the degree of optimism with which I now am departing. 
BY: And this is all because of you - SS: (Laughter) (Video) BY: because even in all today's newspapers, based on my yesterday's statement at the United Nations, you predicted that our meeting today would be a failure. 
Interpreter: And this is all due to you, because coming from my statement yesterday in the United Nations, and if you looked at the press reports, one could see that what you were writing was that today's meeting with President Bill Clinton was going to be a disaster. 
(Laughter) SS: A big laugh. 
(Video) BY: And now, for the first time, I'm telling you that you have failed. 
Interpreter: But now, for the first time, I can tell you that you're a disaster. 
(Laughter) SS: Enormous laugh. 
(Laughter) Helpless with the laughter. 
(Laughter) (Video) BC: Be sure you get the right attribution there. 
(Laughter) SS: Boris Yeltsin now starts laughing. 
(Laughter) (Laughter) No one's able to get anything done for a while now. 
That tends to happen with laughter. 
(Laughter) (Laughter) These guys. 
(Laughter) So what is laughter? 
Clearly, that was quite an enjoyable thing in a rather surprising setting. 
Laughter, actually, is a very interesting behaviour. 
We tend to associate it with comedy and humour, but laughter is primarily a social behaviour. 
You're 30 times more likely to laugh with somebody else than if you're on your own. 
And frequently, this means your laughter happens when you're in conversation, because that tends to be what happens when you're with other people. 
And very often, that laughter is simply contagious laughter. 
You laugh just because other people are laughing. 
You just catch a laugh. 
You're much more likely to catch a laugh from someone you know than someone you don't know, and in conversations. 
We're still currently not laughing at jokes and humour with punchlines necessarily. 
We're laughing to show agreement. 
We're laughing to show understanding. 
We're laughing to show that we agree and we see where somebody's coming from. 
We share that experience. 
We laugh much more with people we know and people we feel comfortable around. 
We laugh - we don't laugh rather if we're feeling exposed or we're feeling awkward. 
When we're comfortable, when we can relax, when we're with people familiar to us, people we like, people with whom we share affection, we laugh even more. 
When we're children, we learn to laugh, and we learn to laugh primarily in play. 
And play is a very important behaviour, and we frequently use laughter to indicate that we are playing. 
The same behaviour could simply be pure aggression (Laughter) where not for the marking of it as play. 
And this is done with laughter primarily. 
We will use laughter, not just to show that we're part of the same group of somebody - we like them, we understand them, we agree with them. 
We will also use laughter to sort of show we understand that they may be trying to make us laugh; we pick up on their intentions. 
And we'll also use laughter to try and control situations. 
We'll use laughter to try and make ourselves feel better. 
And it only works if everybody joins in. 
If one person's going, "Hahahahaha," and no one else is laughing, that tends not to make anybody feel better at all. 
(Laughter) If everybody joins in, laughter is actually an effective way of improving the positive mood of a group of people. 
And people can use laughter because of this link, with sort of de-escalation from stress. 
People will use laughter to show that they're OK. 
"I'm angry that you've poured yellow paint all over me. 
I'm delighted. This is exactly how I hoped my day would go." 
(Laughter) Charles Darwin, very interestingly, got a lot of stuff right about the sort of how we started to look at emotions in the study of psychology over the next 150 years after his writing. 
He wrote about things like anger and disgust and fear, but he also wrote a lot about laughter, and we largely ignored that. 
There's actually very, very little scientific research into laughter. 
But Charles Darwin thought that laughter was really important, and he thought that at its heart, it was an expression of joy; it's a joyful emotion. 
And it's joy in play, it's joy in company, it's joy in the company of those we love. 
I think it's really important to think about that when we think about laughter. 
We also think about how that could go wrong. 
Because we learn to laugh. 
Babies will laugh when they're tickled or somebody plays peek-a-boo with them. 
But it's a behaviour we can encourage. 
We learn what laughter means. 
We learn to understand laughter. 
And we can see that going wrong. 
So this is a study that I did with my colleague Essi Viding at UCL last year, where we were studying teenage boys who are at risk of psychopathy. 
They have conduct disorders, and they have high inputs called callous-unemotional traits. 
So they're not behaving well, and they don't care if they hurt people. 
And what we find, when they listen to laughter compared to control teenage boys, who are normally developing, is that behaviourally, they don't find laughter contagious. 
They don't join in when somebody else laughs, and they don't want to join in when somebody else laughs. 
If we look at their brain where normally, when people hear laughter, you can see this priming response, you can see people getting ready to join in, they show a significantly reduced effect. 
Now, we don't know, in this context, if we're seeing this because those boys have always had a problem learning to laugh because of these conduct disorders and these callous-unemotional traits that they have, has that affected how they engage with laughter, or have they never had the opportunity to learn to laugh? 
Had they not been laughed with? 
Have they not been played with? 
Of course, we need a lot more research to look into this. 
There's an even more extreme condition called "gelotophobia," where people not only don't want to join in when they hear laughter, they are actively frightened and respond aggressively to laughter. 
They're the kind of person who's walking down the streets, hears laughter, think they're being laughed at and they punch that person. 
And you never find gelotophobia outside of the most profound psychological disturbances. 
So in fact, we can see laughter and the reaction to laughter spanning a huge different quality and properties of human experience, and kind of lives that we can live. 
It can be an incredibly positive social tool, or it can be something that you fear depending on your experiences. 
So, thinking about that, can we go back to that bit of film and think about why on earth Bill Clinton was laughing. 
Well, from the start, he's watching Boris Yeltsin like a hawk. 
All his attention is on him. 
And he looks like - actually, he's waiting for a reason to laugh. 
And then he gets his reason, because Boris Yeltsin says his name, Bill Clinton, and he laughs then. 
It's pure laugh of recognition: "Yes, ha ha ha, my name is Bill Clinton." 
(Laughter) Don't knock it, if it gets a laugh, it gets a laugh. 
So that's his reason. He's got going. 
And then Boris Yeltsin says the line about that you thought it would be a disaster but you're the disaster. 
Actually, that's a mistranslation; he used the word "failure," and it's mistranslated by the Russian-American interpreter. 
People have said that Bill Clinton is laughing at this mistranslation. 
I don't know if that's giving, but possibly he is. 
Most people probably didn't pick up on that. 
It's likely that he's now just using that as a reason both to escalate the laughter and also to reframe what is quite an insulting comment by Boris Yeltsin as a joke. 
He's de-escalating the situation and he's re-presenting it to us as: This guy is hilarious. 
(Laughter) It completely changes our perception and importantly Boris Yeltsin's perception of what's going on. 
Boris Yeltsin, "So yeah, I am killing it here." 
(Laughter) "This is very funny." 
(Laughter) And he carries on; he now gets a smile out of Yeltsin who cracks, and then he gets his laugh. 
Boris Yeltsin starts to laugh, and he is laughing primarily here through pure contagion. 
For a while, they're both incapacitated by the laughter, and that happens with laughter; it will stop you doing anything else for a short amount of time. 
And then they go back. OK, they're doing OK. 
So why - why was Bill Clinton laughing? 
Well, we've got the recognition, and then we've got the the kind of comment, the joke of reframing, and that's actually really important. 
He is de-escalating and reframes the whole thing. 
The atmosphere was tense, and he turns that into a positive situation. 
So he's de-escalating the stress, and he's just reframing everything as "This is great fun we're having, and this is just hilarious. 
This guy's so funny." 
He's also showing that he is quite comfortable in that situation. 
We don't laugh when we feel exposed or awkward. 
So Clinton's showing he's confident: "This is fine. You guys might have been worried about this. 
I know we're golden. This guy's hilarious." 
And that really matters to us. 
We learn, when we are very, very young, to use our parents laughter as a way of working out whether a situation is serious or not. 
Children of 12 months old will use their parents laughter, or their absence of laughter, to work out if an unfamiliar situation is something they should worry about. 
We continue doing that, so it matters that Bill Clinton is doing this. 
And he's also showing that he's affiliated with Yeltsin. 
He's showing that he feels affection towards him. 
And Yeltsin does the same thing. 
We don't catch laughs off people we don't like. 
We don't catch laughs off people we don't know. 
So actually, they're marking their bond there. 
And the final point that I think is really intriguing is Bill Clinton, at no stage, makes it look like he's laughing at Boris Yeltsin. 
He goes to great pains to include him. 
He's not going, "This guy is an idiot. Let's laugh at him." 
It would mean something very, very different if he did. 
In fact, I think generally, in American foreign policy, anybody's foreign policy, don't laugh in the face of a premier state from another country. 
It's probably eight-o'clock day-one of a rule. 
He includes him in that laughter. 
And this is a really important factor about laughter. 
Because laughter is about making and maintaining social bonds, people are very cautious about working out where they are in relation to that. 
And this does mean you can't just take a difficult situation and throw a squirt of laughter at it; you've got to make sure people feel included in that laughter. 
They're not feeling excluded or offended by that laughter. 
And this leads us back to perhaps a more important aspect of laughter. 
It's an important social skill that we learn to do. 
We learn about the social use of laughter throughout our entire early adult life, and it's probably one of the more important social skills that we acquire. 
And we should probably take this a lot more seriously. 
We should think about the things that can affect our laughter. 
We can think about the things that we could do to encourage our understanding of our laughter. 
And perhaps the takeaway message is take laughter seriously. 
Think about your laughter. 
Don't undervalue or trivialise your laughter. 
It matters. It matters a lot. 
It can sound like friendship. It can sometimes sound a lot like love. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

Over the course of our lifetimes, our bodies undergo a series of extraordinary metamorphoses: we grow, experience puberty, and many of us reproduce. 
Behind the scenes, the endocrine system works constantly to orchestrate these changes. 
Alongside growth and sexual maturity, this system regulates everything from your sleep to the rhythm of your beating heart, exerting its influence over each and every one of your cells. 
The endocrine system relies on interactions between three features to do its job: glands, hormones, and trillions of cell receptors. 
Firstly, there are several hormone-producing glands: three in your brain, and seven in the rest of your body. 
Each is surrounded by a network of blood vessels, from which they extract ingredients to manufacture dozens of hormones. 
Those hormones are then pumped out in tiny amounts, usually into the bloodstream. 
From there, each hormone needs to locate a set of target cells in order to bring about a specific change. 
To find its targets, it’s helped along by receptors, which are special proteins inside or on the cell’s surface. 
Those receptors recognise specific hormones as they waft by, and bind to them. 
When this happens, that hormone-receptor combination triggers a range of effects that either increase or decrease specific processes inside the cell to change the way that cell behaves. 
By exposing millions of cells at a time to hormones in carefully-regulated quantities, the endocrine system drives large-scale changes across the body. 
Take, for instance, the thyroid and the two hormones it produces, triiodothyronine and thyroxine. 
These hormones travel to most of the body’s cells, where they influence how quickly those cells use energy and how rapidly they work. 
In turn, that regulates everything from breathing rate to heartbeat, body temperature, and digestion. 
Hormones also have some of their most visible—and familiar—effects during puberty. 
In men, puberty begins when the testes start secreting testosterone. 
That triggers the gradual development of the sexual organs, makes facial hair sprout, and causes the voice to deepen and height to increase. 
In women, estrogen secreted from the ovaries signals the start of adulthood. 
It helps the body develop, makes the hips widen, and thickens the womb’s lining, preparing the body for menstruation or pregnancy. 
An enduring misconception around the endocrine system is that there are exclusively male and female hormones. 
In fact, men and women have estrogen and testosterone, just in different amounts. 
Both hormones play a role in pregnancy, as well, alongside more than 10 other hormones that ensure the growth of the fetus, enable birth, and help the mother feed her child. 
Such periods of hormonal change are also associated with fluctuations in mood. 
That’s because hormones can influence the production of certain chemicals in the brain, like serotonin. 
When chemical levels shift, they may cause changes in mood, as well. 
But that’s not to say that hormones have unlimited power over us. 
They’re frequently viewed as the main drivers of our behavior, making us slaves to their effects, especially during puberty. 
But research shows that our behavior is collectively shaped by a variety of influences, including the brain and its neurotransmitters, our hormones, and various social factors. 
The primary function of the endocrine system is to regulate our bodily processes, not control us. 
Sometimes disease, stress, and even diet can disrupt that regulatory function, however, altering the quantity of hormones that glands secrete or changing the way that cells respond. 
Diabetes is one of the most common hormonal disorders, occurring when the pancreas secretes too little insulin, a hormone that manages blood sugar levels. 
And hypo- and hyperthyroidism occur when the thyroid gland makes too little or too much thyroid hormone. 
When there’s too little thyroid hormone, that results in a slowed heart rate, fatigue, and depression, and when there’s too much thyroid hormone, weight loss, sleeplessness, and irritability. 
But most of the time, the endocrine system manages to keep our bodies in a state of balance. 
And through its constant regulation, it drives the changes that ultimately help us become who we are. 

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

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

Did you know that one of the first fertility drugs was made from the pee of Catholic nuns, and that even the Pope got involved? 
So, this is totally true. 
Back in the 1950s, scientists knew that when women enter menopause, they start releasing high levels of fertility hormones in their urine. 
But there was this doctor named Bruno Lunenfeld, who wondered if he could actually isolate those hormones from the urine and use it to help women who are having trouble getting pregnant. 
Obviously, the problem with this was that in order to test this idea, he needed a lot of pee from older women. 
And that is not an easy thing to find. 
So he and his colleagues got special permission from the Pope to collect gallons and gallons of urine from hundreds of older Catholic nuns. 
And in doing so, he actually isolated hormones that are still used to help women get pregnant today, though now, they can be synthesized in a lab, and gallons of pee aren't necessary. 
So why am I standing up here, telling this wonderfully intellectual audience about nun pee? 
Well, I'm a science journalist and multimedia producer, who has always been fascinated by gross stuff. 
So fascinated, in fact, that I started a weekly YouTube series called "Gross Science," all about the slimy, smelly, creepy underbelly of nature, medicine and technology. 
Now, I think most of us would agree that there's something a little gross about pee. 
You know, it's something that we don't really like to talk about, and we keep the act of doing it very private. 
But when Lunenfeld peered into the world of pee, he discovered something deeply helpful to humanity. 
And after a year and a half of making my show, I can tell you that very often when we explore the gross side of life, we find insights that we never would have thought we'd find, and we even often reveal beauty that we didn't think was there. 
I think it's important for us to talk about gross things for a few reasons. 
So, first of all, talking about gross stuff is a great tool for education, and it's an excellent way to preserve curiosity. 
To explain what I mean, why don't I tell you a little bit about what I was like as a child? 
So, I was what you might call a gross kid. 
In fact, my love of science itself began when my parents bought me a slime chemistry set and was then only enhanced by doing gross experiments in my sixth-grade biology class. 
We did things like, we swabbed surfaces around our classroom and cultured the bacteria we'd collected, and we dissected owl pellets, which are these balls of material that are undigested that owls barf up, and it's really kind of gross and awesome and cool. 
Now, the fact that I was obsessed with gross stuff as a kid is not so revolutionary. 
You know, lots of kids are really into gross things, like playing in dirt or collecting beetles or eating their boogers. 
And why is that? 
I think really little kids are like little explorers. 
They just want to experience as much as they can and don't have any idea about the relative acceptability of touching a ladybug versus a stinkbug. 
They just want to understand how everything works and experience as much of life as they can. 
And that is pure curiosity. 
But then adults step in, and we tell kids not to pick their noses and not to touch the slugs or toads or whatever else they find in the backyard, because those things are gross. 
And we do that in part to keep kids safe, right? 
Like, maybe picking your nose spreads germs and maybe touching that toad will give you warts, even though I don't actually think that's true. 
You should feel free to touch as many toads as you want. 
So at a certain point, when kids get a little bit older, there's this way that engaging with gross stuff isn't just about curiosity, it's also about, sort of, finding out where the limits are, pushing the boundaries of what's OK. 
So, lots of kids of a certain age will have burping competitions or competitions to see who can make the grossest face. 
And they do that in part because it's a little bit transgressive, right? 
But there's another layer to why we define stuff as gross. 
As humans, we've sort of extended the concept of disgust to morality. 
So, the psychologist Paul Rozin would say that many of the things we categorize as gross are things that reminds us that we're just animals. 
These are things like bodily fluids and sex and physical abnormalities and death. 
And the idea that we're just animals can be really unsettling, because it can be this reminder of our own mortality. 
And that can leave many of us with this deep existential angst. 
Rozin would say that there's this way in which disgust and the avoidance of gross things becomes not just a way to protect our bodies, it becomes a way to protect our souls. 
I think at a certain point, kids really begin to internalize this link between disgusting things and immorality. 
And while I don't have any concrete data to back up this next idea, I think that for a lot of us, it happens around the time we hit puberty. 
And you know -- yeah, I know. 
So during puberty, our bodies are changing, and we're sweating more, and girls get their periods, and we're thinking about sex in this way that we never did before. 
And through the human capacity for abstraction, this shame can settle in. 
So we don't necessarily just think, "Oh, my goodness, something really gross is happening to my body!" 
We think, "Oh my God, maybe I'm gross. 
And maybe that means that there's something bad or wrong about me." 
The thing is, that if you de facto associate gross stuff with immorality, you lose a huge part of your curiosity, because there is so much out there in the world that is a little bit gross. 
Like, think about going for a walk in the woods. 
You could just pay attention to the birds and the trees and the flowers and that would be fine, but in my view, you'd be missing a bigger and more awesome picture of life on this planet. 
There are cycles of decay that are driving forest growth, and there are networks of fungus beneath your feet that are connecting literally all of the plants around you. 
That's really amazing. 
So I feel like we should be talking about gross stuff early and often with young people, so they feel like they're actually allowed to claim this bigger picture of life on our planet. 
The good news is that for many of us, the fascination with gross stuff doesn't exactly go away, we just kind of pretend like it's not there. 
But truthfully, we all spend sort of a big part of our lives just trying not to be gross. 
When you really think about it, we're sort of just like bags of fluids and some weird tissues surrounded by a thin layer of skin. 
And to a certain extent, multiple times a day, whether consciously or subconsciously, I need to remind myself not to fart publicly. 
(Laughter) You know, we're desperately trying to avoid being gross all the time, so I think many of us take this kind of voyeuristic delight in learning about gross things. 
This is certainly true of kids; the number of middle school teachers who show my videos in their science classes is a testament to that. 
But I think it's totally true of adults, too. 
You know, I think we all love hearing about gross stories, because it's a socially acceptable way to explore the gross side of ourselves. 
But there's this other reason that I think talking about gross stuff is so important. 
A while back, I made a video on tonsil stones -- sorry, everyone -- which are these balls of mucus and bacteria and food that get lodged in your tonsils and they smell really terrible, sometimes you cough them up and it's like -- it's awful. 
And many, many people have experienced this. 
But many of the people who have experienced this haven't really had a forum to talk about it. 
And today, this video that I made is my most popular video. 
It has millions of views. 
(Laughter) And the comment section for that video became sort of like a self-help section, where people could talk about their tonsil stone experiences and, like, tips and tricks for getting rid of them. 
And I think it became this great way for people to talk about something that they'd never felt comfortable taking about publicly. 
And that is wonderful when it's about something as goofy as tonsil stones, but it's a little sad when a video can have an effect like that when it's about something as common as periods. 
Last February, I released a video on menstruation, and to this day, I am still getting messages from people around the globe who are asking me about their periods. 
There are a lot of young people -- and some not-so-young people -- out there, who are worried that what's happening to their bodies is somehow not normal. 
And, of course, I always tell them that I am not a medical professional, and that, if possible, they should talk to a doctor. 
But the truth of the matter is that everyone should feel comfortable talking to a doctor about their own bodies. 
And that's why I think it's really important for us to start this dialogue about gross stuff from a pretty early age, so we can let our kids know that it's alright to have agency over your own body and over your own health. 
There's another reason that talking to your doctor about your health and gross stuff is really, really important. 
Doctors and the scientific community can only address issues when they know there's something to address. 
So one of the really interesting things I learned while making the video on periods, is that I was talking to this one scientist who told me there's actually still a lot we don't know about periods. 
There's a lot of basic research that still hasn't been done. 
In part, that's just because there weren't a lot of scientists in the field who were women, to ask questions about it. 
And it's also not a topic that women talk about publicly. 
So there's this gap in what we know, just because no one was there to ask a question. 
There's one final reason that I think talking about gross stuff is so important, and that's because you just never know what you're going to find when you peel back all those layers of disgustingness. 
So, take the California brown sea hare. 
This is a sea slug that squirts this lovely, bright purple ink at any creature that tries to eat it. 
But it also happens to be one of the kinkiest creatures in the animal kingdom. 
So these guys are hermaphrodites, which means they have both male and female genitalia. 
And when it's time to mate, up to 20 individuals will all get together in this kind of, like, conga line and they'll all mate together. 
(Laughter) A single sea hare will inseminate the partner in front of it and receive sperm from the one behind, which is sort of like an awesome time-saver, when you think about it. 
(Laughter) But if scientists had only seen this and they were like, "OK, we're just not going to touch that with a stick," they would have missed the bigger thing about sea hares that makes them really remarkable. 
It turns out that these sea hares have a small number of very large neurons, which makes them excellent to use in neuroscience research. 
And, in fact, the scientist Eric Kandel used them in his research to understand how memories are stored. 
And you know what? 
He won a Nobel Prize for his work. 
So go out there and pick up beetles and play in dirt and ask questions. 
And own your fascination with gross stuff and don't be ashamed of it, because you never know what you're going to find. 
And as I say at the end of all my videos, "Ew." 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

[This talk contains graphic images Viewer discretion is advised] I collect objects. 
I collect branding irons that were used to mark slaves as property. 
I collect shackles for adults and restraints for adults as well as children. 
I collect lynching postcards. 
Yes, they depict lynchings. 
They also depict the massive crowds that attended these lynchings, and they are postcards that were also used for correspondence. 
I collect proslavery books that portray black people as criminals or as animals without souls. 
I brought you something today. 
This is a ship's branding iron. 
It was used to mark slaves. 
Well, they actually were not slaves when they were marked. 
They were in Africa. 
But they were marked with an "S" to designate that they were going to be slaves when they were brought to the US and when they were brought to Europe. 
Another object or image that captured my imagination when I was younger was a Klan robe. 
Growing up in South Carolina, I would see Ku Klux Klan rallies occasionally, actually more than occasionally, and the memories of those events never really left my mind. 
And I didn't really do anything with that imagery until 25 years later. 
A few years ago, I started researching the Klan, the three distinct waves of the Klan, the second one in particular. 
The second wave of the Klan had more than five million active members, which was five percent of the population at the time, which was also the population of New York City at the time. 
The Klan robe factory in the Buckhead neighborhood of Georgia was so busy it became a 24-hour factory to keep up with orders. 
They kept 20,000 robes on hand at all time to keep up with the demand. 
As a collector of artifacts and as an artist, I really wanted a Klan robe to be part of my collection, because artifacts and objects tell stories, but I really couldn't find one that was really good quality. 
What is a black man to do in America when he can't find the quality Klan robe that he's looking for? 
(Laughter) So I had no other choice. 
I decided I was going to make the best quality Klan robes in America. 
These are not your traditional Klan robes you would see at any KKK rally. 
I used kente cloth, I used camouflage, spandex, burlap, silks, satins and different patterns. 
I make them for different age groups; I make them for young kids as well as toddlers. 
I even made one for an infant. 
After making so many robes, I realized that the policies the Klan had in place or wanted to have in place a hundred years ago are in place today. 
We have segregated schools, neighborhoods, workplaces, and it's not the people wearing hoods that are keeping these policies in place. 
My work is about the long-term impact of slavery. 
We're not just dealing with the residue of systemic racism. 
It's the basis of every single thing we do. 
Again we have intentionally segregated neighborhoods, workplaces and schools. 
We have voter suppression. 
We have disproportionate representation of minorities incarcerated. 
We have environmental racism. We have police brutality. 
I brought you a few things today. 
The stealth aspect of racism is part of its power. 
When you're discriminated against, you can't always prove you're being discriminated against. 
Racism has the power to hide, and when it hides, it's kept safe because it blends in. 
I created this robe to illustrate that. 
The basis of capitalism in America is slavery. 
Slaves were the capital in capitalism. 
The first Grand Wizard in 1868, Nathan Bedford Forrest, was a Confederate soldier and a millionaire slave trader. 
The wealth that was created from chattel slavery -- that's slaves as property -- would boggle the mind. 
Cotton sales alone in 1860 equalled 200 million dollars. 
That would equal five billion dollars today. 
A lot of that wealth can be seen today through generational wealth. 
Oh, I forgot the other crops as well. 
You have indigo, rice and tobacco. 
In 2015, I made one robe a week for the entire year. 
After making 75 robes, I had an epiphany. 
I have a realization that white supremacy is there, but the biggest force of white supremacy is not the KKK, it's the normalization of systemic racism. 
There was something else I realized. 
The robes had no more power over me at all. 
But if we as a people collectively look at these objects -- branding irons, shackles, robes -- and realize that they are part of our history, we can find a way to where they have no more power over us. 
If we look at systemic racism and acknowledge that it's sown into the very fabric of who we are as a country, then we can actually do something about the intentional segregation in our schools, neighborhoods and workplaces. 
But then and only then can we actually address and confront this legacy of slavery and dismantle this ugly legacy of slavery. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

Once every 12 months, the world's largest human migration happens in China. 
Over the 40-day travel period of Chinese New Year, three billion trips are taken, as families reunite and celebrate. 
Now, the most strenuous of these trips are taken by the country's 290 million migrant workers, for many of whom this is the one chance a year to go home and see parents and their left-behind children. 
But the travel options are very limited; plane tickets cost nearly half of their monthly salary. 
So most of them, they choose the train. 
Their average journey is 700 kilometers. 
The average travel time is 15 and a half hours. 
And the country's tracks now have to handle 390 million travelers every Spring Festival. 
Until recently, migrant workers would have to queue for long hours -- sometimes days -- just to buy tickets, often only to be fleeced by scalpers. 
And they still had to deal with near-stampede conditions when travel day finally arrived. 
But technology has started to ease this experience. 
Mobile and digital tickets now account for 70 percent of sales, greatly reducing the lines at train stations. 
Digital ID scanners have replaced manual checks, expediting the boarding process, and artificial intelligence is deployed across the network to optimize travel routes. 
New solutions have been invented. 
China's largest taxi-hailing platform, called Didi Chuxing, launched a new service called Hitch, which matches car owners who are driving home with passengers looking for long-distance routes. 
In just its third year, Hitch served 30 million trips in this past holiday season, the longest of which was further than 1,500 miles. 
That's about the distance from Miami to Boston. 
This enormous need of migrant workers has powered fast upgrade and innovation across the country's transport systems. 
Now, the Chinese internet has developed in both familiar and unfamiliar ways. 
Just like in Silicon Valley, some of the seismic shifts in technology and consumer behavior have been driven by academic research, have been driven by enterprise desires, with the whims of privilege and youth sprinkled in every once in a while. 
I am a product of the American tech industry, both as a consumer and a corporate leader. 
So I am well acquainted with this type of fuel. 
But about a year and a half ago, I moved from my home in New York City to Hong Kong to become the CEO of the South China Morning Post. 
And from this new vantage point, I've observed something that is far less familiar to me, propelling so much of China's innovation and many of its entrepreneurs. 
It is an overwhelming need economy that is serving an underprivileged populous, which has been separated for 30 years from China's economic boom. 
The stark gaps that exist between the rich and the poor, between urban and rural or the academic and the unschooled -- these gaps, they form a soil that's ready for some incredible empowerment. 
So when capital and investment become focused on the needs of people who are hanging to the bottom rungs of an economic ladder, that's when we start to see the internet truly become a job creator, an education enabler and in many other ways, a path forward. 
Of course, China is not the only place where this alternative fuel exists, nor the only place where it is possible. 
But because of the country's sheer scale and status as a rising superpower, the needs of its population have created an opportunity for truly compelling impact. 
When explaining the rapid growth of the Chinese tech industry, many observers will cite two reasons. 
The first is the 1.4 billion people that call China home. 
The second is the government's active participation -- or pervasive intervention, depending on how you view it. 
Now, the central authorities have spent heavily on network infrastructure over the years, creating an attractive environment for investment. 
At the same time, they've insisted on standards and regulation, which has led to fast consensus and therefore, fast adoption. 
The world's largest pool of tech talent exists because of the abundance of educational incentives. 
And local, domestic companies, in the past, have been protected from international competition by market controls. 
Of course, you cannot observe the Chinese internet without finding widespread censorship and very serious concerns about dystopian monitoring. 
As an example: China is in the process of rolling out a social credit rating that will cover its entire population, rewarding and restricting citizens, based on highly qualitative characteristics like honesty and integrity. 
At the same time, China is deploying facial recognition across many of its 170 million closed-circuit cameras. 
Artificial intelligence is being used to predict crime and terrorism in Xinjiang province, where the Muslim minority is already under constant surveillance. 
Yet, the internet has continued to grow, and it is so big -- much bigger than I think most of us realize. 
By the end of 2017, the Chinese internet population had reached 772 million users. 
That's larger than the populations of the United States, Russia, of Germany, of the United Kingdom, of France and Canada combined. 
Ninety-eight percent of them are active on mobile. 
Ninety-two percent of them use messaging apps. 
There are now 650 million digital news consumers, 580 million digital video consumers, and the country's largest e-commerce platform, Taobao, now boasts 580 million monthly active users. 
It's about 80 percent larger than Amazon. 
On-demand travel, between bikes and cars, now accounts for 10 billion trips a year in China. 
That's two-thirds of all trips taken around the world. 
So it's a very mixed bag. 
The internet exists in a restricted, arguably manipulated form within China, yet it is massive and has vastly improved the lives of its citizens. 
So even in its imperfection, the growth of the Chinese internet should not be dismissed, and it's worthy of our closer examination. 
Let me tell you two other stories today. 
Luo Zhaoliu is a 34-year-old engineer from Jiangxi province. 
Now, his home region used to be extremely important to the Communist party because this was the birthplace of the Red Army. 
But over the decades, because of its separation from the economic and manufacturing centers of the country, it has slid into irrelevance. 
Luo, like so many in his generation, left home at a young age to look for work in a major city. 
He ended up in Shenzhen, which is one of China's tech hubs. 
As the young migrate, these rural villages are left with only elderly, who are really struggling to elevate themselves above abject poverty. 
After nine years, Luo decided to return to Jiangxi in 2017, because he believed that the booming e-commerce marketplace in China could help him revive his village. 
Like many rural communities, Luo's home specialized in a very specific provincial craft -- making fermented bean curd, in this case. 
So he started a small factory and started selling his locally made goods online. 
There have been many years of consumption growth across China's major cities. 
But recently, technology has been driving an explosion in craft goods sales among China's middle and upper classes. 
WeChat and other e-commerce platforms allow rural producers to market and sell their goods far beyond their original distribution areas. 
Research companies actually track this impact by counting what is called "Taobao villages." 
This is any rural village where at least 10 percent of its households are selling goods online and making a certain amount of revenue. 
And the growth has been significant in the last few years. 
There were just 20 Taobao villages in 2013, 212 in 2014, 780 in 2015, 1,300 in 2016 and over 2,100 at the end of 2017. 
They now account for nearly half a million active online stores, 19 billion dollars in annual sales and 1.3 million new jobs created. 
In Luo's first year back home, he was able to employ 15 villagers. 
And he sold about 60,000 units of fermented bean curd. 
He expects to hire 30 more people in the next year, as his demand rapidly rises. 
There are 60 million left-behind children scattered across China's rural landscape. 
And they grow up with at least one parent far away from home, as a migrant worker. 
Alongside all the general hardships of rural life, they often have to travel vast and dangerous distances just to get to school. 
They account for 30 percent of the country's primary and high school students. 
Ten-year-old Chang Wenxuan is one of these students. 
He walks an hour each way every single day to school, across these deep ravines, in an isolated landscape. 
But when he arrives at the small farming village in Gansu province, he will find just two other students in this entire school. 
Now, Chang's school is one of 1,000 in Gansu alone that has less than five registered students. 
So with limited student interaction, with underqualified teachers and schoolhouses that are barely furnished and not insulated, rural students have long been disadvantaged, with almost no path to higher education. 
But Chang's future has been dramatically shifted with the installation of a “Sunshine Classroom.” He's now part of a digital classroom of 100 students across 28 different schools, taught by qualified and certified teachers live-streaming from hundreds of miles away. 
He has access to new subjects like music and art, to new friends and to experiences that extend far beyond his home. 
Recently, Chang even got to visit the Frederiksborg Castle museum in Denmark -- virtually, of course. 
Now, online education has existed for many years outside of China. 
But it has never reached truly transformative scale, likely because traditional education systems in other tech centers of the world are far more advanced and far more stable. 
But China's extreme terrain and size have created an enormous and immediate need for innovation. 
There's a tech start-up in Shenzhen that grew to 300,000 students in just one year. 
And by our best estimation at the Post, there are now 55 million rural students across China that are addressable and accessible by live-streaming classes. 
This market of need is larger than the entire US student population between kindergarten and grade 12. 
So I'm extremely encouraged to find out that private investment in ed-tech in China now exceeds one billion dollars a year, with another 30 billion dollars in public funding that is committed between now and 2020. 
As the Chinese internet continues to grow, even in its imperfection and restrictions and controls, the lives of its once-forgotten populations have been irrevocably elevated. 
There is a focus on populations of need, not of want, that has driven a lot of the curiosity, the creativity and the development that we see. 
And there's still more to come. 
In America, internet population, or penetration, has now reached 88 percent. 
In China, the internet has still only reached 56 percent of the populous. 
That means there are over 600 million people who are still offline and disconnected. 
That's nearly twice the US population. 
An enormous opportunity. 
Wherever this alternative fuel exists, be it in China or Africa, Southeast Asia or the American heartland, we should endeavor to follow it with capital and with effort, driving both economic and societal impact all over the world. 
Just imagine for a minute what more could be possible if the global needs of the underserved become the primary focus of our inventions. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'd like to introduce you to a tiny microorganism that you've probably never heard of: its name is Prochlorococcus, and it's really an amazing little being. 
For one thing, its ancestors changed the earth in ways that made it possible for us to evolve, and hidden in its genetic code is a blueprint that may inspire ways to reduce our dependency on fossil fuel. 
But the most amazing thing is that there are three billion billion billion of these tiny cells on the planet, and we didn't know they existed until 35 years ago. 
So to tell you their story, I need to first take you way back, four billion years ago, when the earth might have looked something like this. 
There was no life on the planet, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. 
So what happened to change that planet into the one we enjoy today, teeming with life, teeming with plants and animals? 
Well, in a word, photosynthesis. 
About two and a half billion years ago, some of these ancient ancestors of Prochlorococcus evolved so that they could use solar energy and absorb it and split water into its component parts of oxygen and hydrogen. 
And they used the chemical energy produced to draw CO2, carbon dioxide, out of the atmosphere and use it to build sugars and proteins and amino acids, all the things that life is made of. 
And as they evolved and grew more and more over millions and millions of years, that oxygen accumulated in the atmosphere. 
Until about 500 million years ago, there was enough in the atmosphere that larger organisms could evolve. 
There was an explosion of life-forms, and, ultimately, we appeared on the scene. 
While that was going on, some of those ancient photosynthesizers died and were compressed and buried, and became fossil fuel with sunlight buried in their carbon bonds. 
They're basically buried sunlight in the form of coal and oil. 
Today's photosynthesizers, their engines are descended from those ancient microbes, and they feed basically all of life on earth. 
Your heart is beating using the solar energy that some plant processed for you, and the stuff your body is made out of is made out of CO2 that some plant processed for you. 
Basically, we're all made out of sunlight and carbon dioxide. 
Fundamentally, we're just hot air. 
(Laughter) So as terrestrial beings, we're very familiar with the plants on land: the trees, the grasses, the pastures, the crops. 
But the oceans are filled with billions of tons of animals. 
Do you ever wonder what's feeding them? 
Well there's an invisible pasture of microscopic photosynthesizers called phytoplankton that fill the upper 200 meters of the ocean, and they feed the entire open ocean ecosystem. 
Some of the animals live among them and eat them, and others swim up to feed on them at night, while others sit in the deep and wait for them to die and settle down and then they chow down on them. 
So these tiny phytoplankton, collectively, weigh less than one percent of all the plants on land, but annually they photosynthesize as much as all of the plants on land, including the Amazon rainforest that we consider the lungs of the planet. 
Every year, they fix 50 billion tons of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide into their bodies that feeds the ocean ecosystem. 
How does this tiny amount of biomass produce as much as all the plants on land? 
Well, they don't have trunks and stems and flowers and fruits and all that to maintain. 
All they have to do is grow and divide and grow and divide. 
They're really lean little photosynthesis machines. 
They really crank. 
So there are thousands of different species of phytoplankton, come in all different shapes and sizes, all roughly less than the width of a human hair. 
Here, I'm showing you some of the more beautiful ones, the textbook versions. 
I call them the charismatic species of phytoplankton. 
And here is Prochlorococcus. 
I know, it just looks like a bunch of schmutz on a microscope slide. 
(Laughter) But they're in there, and I'm going to reveal them to you in a minute. 
But first I want to tell you how they were discovered. 
About 38 years ago, we were playing around with a technology in my lab called flow cytometry that was developed for biomedical research for studying cells like cancer cells, but it turns out we were using it for this off-label purpose which was to study phytoplankton, and it was beautifully suited to do that. 
And here's how it works: so you inject a sample in this tiny little capillary tube, and the cells go single file by a laser, and as they do, they scatter light according to their size and they emit light according to whatever pigments they might have, whether they're natural or whether you stain them. 
And the chlorophyl of phytoplankton, which is green, emits red light when you shine blue light on it. 
And so we used this instrument for several years to study our phytoplankton cultures, species like those charismatic ones that I showed you, just studying their basic cell biology. 
But all that time, we thought, well wouldn't it be really cool if we could take an instrument like this out on a ship and just squirt seawater through it and see what all those diversity of phytoplankton would look like. 
So I managed to get my hands on what we call a big rig in flow cytometry, a large, powerful laser with a money-back guarantee from the company that if it didn't work on a ship, they would take it back. 
And so a young scientist that I was working with at the time, Rob Olson, was able to take this thing apart, put it on a ship, put it back together and take it off to sea. 
And it worked like a charm. 
We didn't think it would, because we thought the ship's vibrations would get in the way of the focusing of the laser, but it really worked like a charm. 
And so we mapped the phytoplankton distributions across the ocean. 
For the first time, you could look at them one cell at a time in real time and see what was going on -- that was very exciting. 
But one day, Rob noticed some faint signals coming out of the instrument that we dismissed as electronic noise for probably a year before we realized that it wasn't really behaving like noise. 
It had some regular patterns to it. 
To make a long story short, it was tiny, tiny little cells, less than one-one hundredth the width of a human hair that contain chlorophyl. 
That was Prochlorococcus. 
So remember this slide that I showed you? 
If you shine blue light on that same sample, this is what you see: two tiny little red light-emitting cells. 
Those are Prochlorococcus. 
They are the smallest and most abundant photosynthetic cell on the planet. 
At first, we didn't know what they were, so we called the "little greens." 
It was a very affectionate name for them. 
Ultimately, we knew enough about them to give them the name Prochlorococcus, which means "primitive green berry." 
And it was about that time that I became so smitten by these little cells that I redirected my entire lab to study them and nothing else, and my loyalty to them has really paid off. 
They've given me a tremendous amount, including bringing me here. 
(Applause) So over the years, we and others, many others, have studied Prochlorococcus across the oceans and found that they're very abundant over wide, wide ranges in the open ocean ecosystem. 
They're particularly abundant in what are called the open ocean gyres. 
These are sometimes referred to as the deserts of the oceans, but they're not deserts at all. 
Their deep blue water is teeming with a hundred million Prochlorococcus cells per liter. 
If you crowd them together like we do in our cultures, you can see their beautiful green chlorophyl. 
One of those test tubes has a billion Prochlorococcus in it, and as I told you earlier, there are three billion billion billion of them on the planet. 
That's three octillion, if you care to convert. 
(Laughter) And collectively, they weigh more than the human population and they photosynthesize as much as all of the crops on land. 
So over the years, as we were studying them and found how abundant they were, we thought, hmm, this is really strange. 
How can a single species be so abundant across so many different habitats? 
And as we isolated more into culture, we learned that they are different ecotypes. 
There are some that are adapted to the high-light intensities in the surface water, and there are some that are adapted to the low light in the deep ocean. 
In fact, those cells that live in the bottom of the sunlit zone are the most efficient photosynthesizers of any known cell. 
And then we learned that there are some strains that grow optimally along the equator, where there are higher temperatures, and some that do better at the cooler temperatures as you go north and south. 
So as we studied these more and more and kept finding more and more diversity, we thought, oh my God, how diverse are these things? 
And about that time, it became possible to sequence their genomes and really look under the hood and look at their genetic makeup. 
And we've been able to sequence the genomes of cultures that we have, but also recently, using flow cytometry, we can isolate individual cells from the wild and sequence their individual genomes, and now we've sequenced hundreds of Prochlorococcus. 
And although each cell has roughly 2,000 genes -- that's one tenth the size of the human genome -- as you sequence more and more, you find that they only have a thousand of those in common and the other thousand for each individual strain is drawn from an enormous gene pool, and it reflects the particular environment that the cell might have thrived in, not just high or low light or high or low temperature, but whether there are nutrients that limit them like nitrogen, phosphorus or iron. 
It reflects the habitat that they come from. 
Think of it this way. 
If each cell is a smartphone and the apps are the genes, when you get your smartphone, it comes with these built-in apps. 
Those are the ones that you can't delete if you're an iPhone person. 
You press on them and they don't jiggle and they don't have x's. 
Even if you don't want them, you can't get rid of them. 
(Laughter) Those are like the core genes of Prochlorococcus. 
They're the essence of the phone. 
But you have a huge pool of apps to draw upon to make your phone custom-designed for your particular lifestyle and habitat. 
If you travel a lot, you'll have a lot of travel apps, if you're into financial things, you might have a lot of financial apps, or if you're like me, you probably have a lot of weather apps, hoping one of them will tell you what you want to hear. 
(Laughter) And I've learned the last couple days in Vancouver that you don't need a weather app -- you just need an umbrella. 
So -- (Laughter) (Applause) So just as your smartphone tells us something about how you live your life, your lifestyle, reading the genome of a Prochlorococcus cell tells us what the pressures are in its environment. 
It's like reading its diary, not only telling us how it got through its day or its week, but even its evolutionary history. 
As we studied -- I said we've sequenced hundreds of these cells, and we can now project what is the total genetic size -- gene pool -- of the Prochlorococcus federation, as we call it. 
And it turns out that projections are that the collective has 80,000 genes. 
That's four times the size of the human genome. 
And it's that diversity of gene pools that makes it possible for them to dominate these large regions of the oceans and maintain their stability year in and year out. 
So when I daydream about Prochlorococcus, which I probably do more than is healthy -- (Laughter) I imagine them floating out there, doing their job, maintaining the planet, feeding the animals. 
But also I inevitably end up thinking about what a masterpiece they are, finely tuned by millions of years of evolution. 
With 2,000 genes, they can do what all of our human ingenuity has not figured out how to do yet. 
They can take solar energy, CO2 and turn it into chemical energy in the form of organic carbon, locking that sunlight in those carbon bonds. 
If we could figure out exactly how they do this, it could inspire designs that could reduce our dependency on fossil fuels, which brings my story full circle. 
The fossil fuels that are buried that we're burning took millions of years for the earth to bury those, including those ancestors of Prochlorococcus, and we're burning that now in the blink of an eye on geological timescales. 
Carbon dioxide is increasing in the atmosphere. 
It's a greenhouse gas. 
The oceans are starting to warm. 
So the question is, what is that going to do for my Prochlorococcus? 
And I'm sure you're expecting me to say that my beloved microbes are doomed, but in fact they're not. 
Projections are that their populations will expand as the ocean warms to 30 percent larger by the year 2100. 
Does that make me happy? 
Well, it makes me happy for Prochlorococcus of course -- (Laughter) but not for the planet. 
There are winners and losers in this global experiment that we've undertaken, and it's projected that among the losers will be some of those larger phytoplankton, those charismatic ones which are expected to be reduced in numbers, and they're the ones that feed the zooplankton that feed the fish that we like to harvest. 
So Prochlorococcus has been my muse for the past 35 years, but there are legions of other microbes out there maintaining our planet for us. 
They're out there ready and waiting for us to find them so they can tell their stories, too. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

In many patriarchal societies and tribal societies, fathers are usually known by their sons, but I'm one of the few fathers who is known by his daughter, and I am proud of it. 
(Applause) Malala started her campaign for education and stood for her rights in 2007, and when her efforts were honored in 2011, and she was given the national youth peace prize, and she became a very famous, very popular young girl of her country. 
Before that, she was my daughter, but now I am her father. 
Ladies and gentlemen, if we glance to human history, the story of women is the story of injustice, inequality, violence and exploitation. 
You see, in patriarchal societies, right from the very beginning, when a girl is born, her birth is not celebrated. 
She is not welcomed, neither by father nor by mother. 
The neighborhood comes and commiserates with the mother, and nobody congratulates the father. 
And a mother is very uncomfortable for having a girl child. 
When she gives birth to the first girl child, first daughter, she is sad. 
When she gives birth to the second daughter, she is shocked, and in the expectation of a son, when she gives birth to a third daughter, she feels guilty like a criminal. 
Not only the mother suffers, but the daughter, the newly born daughter, when she grows old, she suffers too. 
At the age of five, while she should be going to school, she stays at home and her brothers are admitted in a school. 
Until the age of 12, somehow, she has a good life. 
She can have fun. 
She can play with her friends in the streets, and she can move around in the streets like a butterfly. 
But when she enters her teens, when she becomes 13 years old, she is forbidden to go out of her home without a male escort. 
She is 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. 
If she is married to a man she doesn't like or if she is married to an old man, she has to accept, because she does not want to be dubbed as disobedient. 
If she is married very early, she has to accept. 
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 it is the irony of the situation that this mother, she teaches the same lesson of obedience to her daughter and the same lesson of honor to her sons. 
And this vicious cycle goes on, goes on. 
Ladies and gentlemen, this plight of millions of women could be changed if we think differently, if women and men think differently, if men and women in the tribal and patriarchal societies in the developing countries, if they can break a few norms of family and society, if they can abolish the discriminatory laws of the systems in their states, which go against the basic human rights of the women. 
Dear brothers and sisters, when Malala was born, and for the first time, believe me, I don't like newborn children, to be honest, but when I went and I looked into her eyes, believe me, I got extremely honored. 
And long before she was born, I thought about her name, and I was fascinated with a heroic legendary freedom fighter in Afghanistan. 
Her name was Malalai of Maiwand, and I named my daughter after her. 
A few days after Malala was born, my daughter was born, my cousin came -- and it was a coincidence -- he came to my home and he brought a family tree, a family tree of the Yousafzai family, and when I looked at the family tree, it traced back to 300 years of our ancestors. 
But when I looked, all were men, and I picked my pen, drew a line from my name, and wrote, "Malala." 
And when she grow old, when she was four and a half years old, I admitted her in my school. 
You will be asking, then, why should I mention about the admission of a girl in a school? 
Yes, I must mention it. 
It may be taken for granted in Canada, in America, in many developed countries, but in poor countries, in patriarchal societies, in tribal societies, it's a big event for the life of girl. 
Enrollment in a school means recognition of her identity and her name. 
Admission in a school means that she has entered the world of dreams and aspirations where she can explore her potentials for her future life. 
I have five sisters, and none of them could go to school, and you will be astonished, two weeks before, when I was filling out the Canadian visa form, and I was filling out the family part of the form, I could not recall the surnames of some of my sisters. 
And the reason was that I have never, never seen the names of my sisters written on any document. 
That was the reason that I valued my daughter. 
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. 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) 

Tyler Edmonds, Bobby Johnson, Davontae Sanford, Marty Tankleff, Jeffrey Deskovic, Anthony Caravella and Travis Hayes. 
You probably don't recognize their faces. 
Together, they served 89 years for murders that they didn't commit; murders that they falsely confessed to committing when they were teenagers. 
I'm a forensic developmental psychologist, and I study these types of cases. 
As a researcher, a professor and a new parent, my goal is to conduct scientific research that helps us understand how kids function in a legal system that was designed for adults. 
In March of 2006, police interrogated Brendan Dassey, a 16-year-old high school student with an IQ around 70, putting him in the range of intellectual disability. 
So here's just a brief snippet of his four-hour interrogation. 
(Video) Police 1: Brendan, be honest. 
I told you before that's the only thing that's going to help you here. 
Police 2: If we don't get honesty here -- I'm your friend right now, but I've got to believe in you, and if I don't believe in you, I can't go to bat for you. 
OK? You're nodding. 
Tell us what happened. 
P1: Your mom said you'd be honest with us. 
P2: And she's behind you 100 percent no matter what happens here. 
P1: That's what she said, because she thinks you know more, too. 
P2: We're in your corner. 
P1: We already know what happened, now tell us exactly. Don't lie. 
Lindsay Malloy: They told Brendan that honesty would "set him free," but they were completely convinced of his guilt at that point. 
So by honesty, they meant a confession, and his confession would definitely not end up setting him free. 
They eventually got a confession from Brendan that didn't really make sense, didn't match much of the physical evidence of the crime and is widely believed to be false. 
Still, it was enough to convict Brendan and sentence him to life in prison for murder and sexual assault in 2007. 
There was no physical evidence against Brendan at all. 
It was nothing more than his own words that sent him to prison for nearly a decade, until a judge overturned his conviction just a few months ago. 
The Dassey case is unique because it made its way into a Netflix series, called "Making a Murderer," which I'm sure many of you saw, and if you haven't, you should definitely watch it. 
The Dassey case is also unique because it led to such intense public outrage. 
People were very angry about how Brendan was questioned, and many assumed that his interrogation had to have been illegal. 
It wasn't illegal. 
As someone who's a researcher in this area and is familiar with police interrogation training manuals, I wasn't really surprised by what I saw. 
The fact is, Dassey's interrogation itself is actually not all that unique, and to be honest with you, I've seen worse. 
So I understand the public outcry about injustice in Brendan Dassey's individual case. 
But let's not forget that approximately one million or so of his peers are arrested every year in the United States and may be subjected to similar interrogation techniques, techniques that we know increase the risk for false confession. 
And I know many people are going to struggle with that term, "false confession," and with believing that false confessions actually occur. 
And I get that. 
It's very shocking and counterintuitive: Why would someone confess and even give gruesome details about a horrifying crime like rape or murder if they hadn't actually done it? 
It makes no sense. 
And the fact is, we can never know precisely how often false confessions occur. 
But what we do know is that false confessions or admissions were present in approximately 25 percent of wrongful convictions of people later exonerated by DNA evidence. 
Turns out, they were innocent. 
These cases are crystal clear because we have the DNA. 
So they didn't do the crime, and yet one-quarter of them confessed to it anyway. 
And at this point, from countless research studies, we have a pretty good sense of why people falsely confess, and why some people, like Brendan Dassey, are at greater risk for doing so. 
We know that youth are especially vulnerable to providing false confessions. 
In one study of exonerations, for example, only eight percent of adults had falsely confessed, but 42 percent of juveniles had done so. 
Of course, if we're just looking at wrongful convictions and exonerations, we're only getting part of the story. 
Left out, for instance, are the many cases that are resolved by guilty pleas, not trials. 
From TV and news headlines, you may think that trials are the norm in our legal system, but the reality is that 97 percent of legal cases in the US are resolved by pleas, not trials. 
Ninety-seven percent. 
Also left out will be confessions to more minor types of crimes that don't typically involve DNA evidence and aren't usually reviewed or appealed following a conviction. 
So for this reason, many refer to the false confessions we actually do know about as the tip of a much larger iceberg. 
In our research, we found alarming rates of false confession among teenagers. 
We interviewed almost 200 incarcerated 14-to-17-year-olds, and 17 percent of them reported that they'd made at least one false confession to police. 
What's also shocking to most is that, in interrogations in the US, police are allowed to interrogate juveniles just like adults. 
So they can lie to them -- blatant lies like, "We have your fingerprints, we have your DNA; your friend is down the hall saying that this was all your idea." 
Lying to suspects is banned in the UK, for example, but legal here in the US, even with intellectually impaired teens like Brendan Dassey. 
In our research, most of the incarcerated teens that we interviewed reported experiencing high-pressure police interrogations without lawyers or parents present. 
More than 80 percent described having been threatened by the police, including with the possibility of being raped or killed in jail or being tried as an adult. 
These maximization strategies are designed to make suspects feel like denials are pointless and confession is the only option. 
So you may have heard of playing the role of "good cop/bad cop," right? 
Well, this is bad cop. 
Juveniles are more suggestible and susceptible to social influence, like the intense pressure accusations and suggestions coming from authority figures in interrogations. 
More than 70 percent of the teens in our study said that the police had tried to "befriend" them or indicate a desire to help them out during the interrogation. 
These are referred to as "minimization strategies," and they're designed to convey sympathy and understanding to the suspect, and they imply that a confession will result in more lenient treatment. 
So in the classic good-cop-bad-cop oversimplification of police interrogations, this is "good cop." 
(Video) P1: Honesty here, Brendan, is the thing that's going to help you, OK? 
No matter what you did, we can work through that, OK? 
We can't make any promises, but we'll stand behind you no matter what you did, OK? 
LM: "No matter what you did, we can work through that." 
Hints of leniency like you just saw with Brendan are especially powerful among adolescents, in part because they evaluate reward and risk differently than adults do. 
Confessing brings an immediate reward to the suspect, right? 
Now the stressful, unpleasant interrogation is over. 
So confessing may seem like the best option to most teens, who are less focused on that long-term risk of conviction and punishment down the road as a result of that confession. 
I think we can all agree that thoughtful, long-term planning is not a strength of most teenagers that we know. 
And by and large, the legal system seems to get that young victims and witnesses should be treated differently than adults. 
But when it comes to young suspects, it's like the kid gloves come off. 
And treating juveniles as though they're adults in interrogations is a problem, because literally hundreds of psychological and neuroscientific studies tell us that juveniles do not think like adults, they do not behave like adults, and they're not built like adults. 
Adolescent brains are different from adult brains -- even anatomically. 
So there are important changes happening in the structure and function of the brain during adolescence, especially in the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system, and these are areas that are crucial for things like self-control, decision-making, emotion processing and regulation and sensitivity to reward and risk, all of which can affect how you function in a stressful circumstance, like a police interrogation. 
We need to educate law enforcement, attorneys, judges and jurors on juveniles' developmental limitations and how they can play out in a high-stakes interrogation. 
In one national survey of police officers, 75 percent of them actually requested specialized training in how to talk to children and adolescents -- most of them had had none. 
We also need to consider having special protections in place for juveniles. 
In his 91-page decision to overturn Dassey's conviction earlier this year, the judge made a big deal about the fact that Dassey had no parent or other allied adult in the interrogation room with him. 
So here's a clip of Brendan talking to his mom after he confessed, when it was obviously far too late for him. 
(Video) Mom: What do you mean? 
Brendan: Like, if his story is, like, different, like I never did nothing or something. 
M: Did you? 
Huh? 
B: Not really. 
M: What do you mean, "Not really"? 
B: They got into my head. 
LM: So he sums it up pretty beautifully there: "They got into my head." 
We don't know if the outcome would have been different for Brendan if his mom had been in the interrogation room with him. 
But it's certainly possible. 
In our research, only seven percent of incarcerated teens, most of whom had had numerous encounters with police, had ever had a parent or attorney in the room with them when they were questioned as a suspect. 
Few had ever asked for a parent or attorney to be present. 
And you see this in lower-stake situations, too. 
We did a mock interrogation experiment in our lab here at FIU -- with parent permission for all minors, of course, and all the appropriate ethical approvals. 
We falsely accused teens and adults of cheating on a study task -- an academic dishonesty offense -- that we told them was as serious as cheating in a class. 
In reality, participants had witnessed a peer cheat, someone who was actually part of our research team and was allegedly on academic probation. 
And we gave everyone a tough choice: you can lose your extra credit for participating in the study or accuse your peer, who will probably be expelled because of his academic probation status. 
Of course, in reality, none of these consequences would have panned out, and we fully debriefed all of the participants afterward. 
But most teenagers -- 59 percent of them -- signed the confession statement, falsely taking responsibility for the cheating. 
Only three teens out of 74, or about four percent of them, asked to talk to a parent when we accused them of cheating, despite the fact that for most of them, their parent was literally sitting in the next room during the study. 
Of course, cheating is far from murder, and I know that. 
But it's interesting that so many teens, significantly more teens than adults, signed the confession saying that they cheated. 
They hadn't cheated, but they signed this form anyway saying that they had, rarely attempting to involve a parent in the situation. 
Other studies tell the same story. 
Over 90 percent of juveniles waive their Miranda rights and submit to police questioning without lawyers or parents present. 
In England and Wales, interrogations of juveniles must be conducted in the presence of an "appropriate adult," like a parent, guardian or social worker. 
And this isn't something youth have to ask for -- which is great, because research shows that they won't -- it's automatic. 
Now, having an appropriate adult safeguard for juveniles here in the US would not be a cure-all for improving police questioning of youth. 
Unfortunately, parents often lack the knowledge and legal sophistication to appropriately advise their children. 
You can just look at the case of the Central Park Five: five teenagers who falsely confessed to a brutal gang rape in 1989, with their parents by their sides. 
And it took over a decade to clear their names. 
So the appropriate adult really should be an attorney or perhaps a trained child advocate. 
Overturning Dassey's conviction, the judge pointed out that there's no federal law requiring that the police even inform a juvenile's parent that the juvenile is being questioned or honor that juvenile's request to have a parent in the room. 
So if you think about all of this together for a second: as a country, we've decided that juveniles cannot be trusted with things like voting, buying cigarettes, attending an R-rated movie or driving, but they can make the judgment call to waive their Miranda rights, rights that we know from research, most teens don't understand or appreciate. 
And parents in the room: depending on the state that you live in, your child can potentially waive these rights without your knowledge and without consulting any adult first. 
Now, no one -- and certainly not me -- wants to prevent police from doing the very important investigative work that they do every day. 
But we need to make sure that they have appropriate training for talking to youth. 
As a parent and as a researcher, I think we can do better. 
I think we can take steps to prevent another Brendan Dassey, while still getting the crucial information that we need from children and teens to solve crimes. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Alright, let me tell you about building synthetic cells and printing life. 
But first, let me tell you a quick story. 
On March 31, 2013, my team and I received an email from an international health organization, alerting us that two men died in China shortly after contracting the H7N9 bird flu. 
There were fears of a global pandemic as the virus started rapidly moving across China. 
Although methods existed to produce a flu vaccine and stop the disease from spreading, at best, it would not be available for at least six months. 
This is because a slow, antiquated flu vaccine manufacturing process developed over 70 years ago was the only option. 
The virus would need to be isolated from infected patients, packaged up and then sent to a facility where scientists would inject the virus into chicken eggs, and incubate those chicken eggs for several weeks in order to prepare the virus for the start of a multistep, multimonth flu vaccine manufacturing process. 
My team and I received this email because we had just invented a biological printer, which would allow for the flu vaccine instructions to be instantly downloaded from the internet and printed. 
Drastically speeding up the way in which flu vaccines are made, and potentially saving thousands of lives. 
The biological printer leverages our ability to read and write DNA and starts to bring into focus what we like to call biological teleportation. 
I am a biologist and an engineer who builds stuff out of DNA. 
Believe it or not, one of my favorite things to do is to take DNA apart and put it back together so that I can understand better how it works. 
I can edit and program DNA to do things, just like coders programing a computer. 
But my apps are different. 
They create life. 
Self-replicating living cells and things like vaccines and therapeutics that work in ways that were previously impossible. 
Here's National Medal of Science recipient Craig Venter and Nobel laureate Ham Smith. 
These two guys shared a similar vision. 
That vision was, because all of the functions and characteristics of all biological entities, including viruses and living cells, are written into the code of DNA, if one can read and write that code of DNA, then they can be reconstructed in a distant location. 
This is what we mean by biological teleportation. 
To prove out this vision, Craig and Ham set a goal of creating, for the first time, a synthetic cell, starting from DNA code in the computer. 
I mean, come on, as a scientist looking for a job, doing cutting-edge research, it doesn't get any better than this. 
(Laughter) OK, a genome is a complete set of DNA within an organism. 
Following the Human Genome Project in 2003, which was an international effort to identify the complete genetic blueprint of a human being, a genomics revolution happened. 
Scientists started mastering the techniques for reading DNA. 
In order to determine the order of the As, Cs, Ts and Gs within an organism. 
But my job was far different. 
I needed to master the techniques for writing DNA. 
Like an author of a book, this started out as writing short sentences, or sequences of DNA code, but this soon turned into writing paragraphs and then full-on novels of DNA code, to make important biological instructions for proteins and living cells. 
Living cells are nature's most efficient machines at making new products, accounting for the production of 25 percent of the total pharmaceutical market, which is billions of dollars. 
We knew that writing DNA would drive this bioeconomy even more, once cells could be programmed just like computers. 
We also knew that writing DNA would enable biological teleportation ... 
the printing of defined, biological material, starting from DNA code. 
As a step toward bringing these promises to fruition, our team set out to create, for the first time, a synthetic bacterial cell, starting from DNA code in the computer. 
Synthetic DNA is a commodity. 
You can order very short pieces of DNA from a number of companies, and they will start from these four bottles of chemicals that make up DNA, G, A, T and C, and they will build those very short pieces of DNA for you. 
Over the past 15 years or so, my teams have been developing the technology for stitching together those short pieces of DNA into complete bacterial genomes. 
The largest genome that we constructed contained over one million letters. 
Which is more than twice the size of your average novel, and we had to put every single one of those letters in the correct order, without a single typo. 
We were able to accomplish this by developing a procedure that I tried to call the "one-step isothermal in vitro recombination method." 
(Laughter) But, surprisingly, the science community didn't like this technically accurate name and decided to call it Gibson Assembly. 
Gibson Assembly is now the gold standard tool, used in laboratories around the world for building short and long pieces of DNA. 
(Applause) Once we chemically synthesized the complete bacterial genome, our next challenge was to find a way to convert it into a free-living, self-replicating cell. 
Our approach was to think of the genome as the operating system of the cell, with the cell containing the hardware necessary to boot up the genome. 
Through a lot of trial and error, we developed a procedure where we could reprogram cells and even convert one bacterial species into another, by replacing the genome of one cell with that of another. 
This genome transplantation technology then paved the way for the booting-up of genomes written by scientists and not by Mother Nature. 
In 2010, all of the technologies that we had been developing for reading and writing DNA all came together when we announced the creation of the first synthetic cell, which of course, we called Synthia. 
(Laughter) Ever since the first bacterial genome was sequenced, back in 1995, thousands more whole bacterial genomes have been sequenced and stored in computer databases. 
Our synthetic cell work was the proof of concept that we could reverse this process: pull a complete bacterial genome sequence out of the computer and convert that information into a free-living, self-replicating cell, with all of the expected characteristics of the species that we constructed. 
Now I can understand why there may be concerns about the safety of this level of genetic manipulation. 
While the technology has the potential for great societal benefit, it also has the potential for doing harm. 
With this in mind, even before carrying out the very first experiment, our team started to work with the public and the government to find solutions together to responsibly develop and regulate this new technology. 
One of the outcomes from those discussions was to screen every customer and every customer's DNA synthesis orders, to make sure that pathogens or toxins are not being made by bad guys, or accidentally by scientists. 
All suspicious orders are reported to the FBI and other relevant law-enforcement agencies. 
Synthetic cell technologies will power the next industrial revolution and transform industries and economies in ways that address global sustainability challenges. 
The possibilities are endless. 
I mean, you can think of clothes constructed form renewable biobased sources, cars running on biofuel from engineered microbes, plastics made from biodegradable polymers and customized therapies, printed at a patient's bedside. 
The massive efforts to create synthetic cells have made us world leaders at writing DNA. 
Throughout the process, we found ways to write DNA faster, more accurately and more reliably. 
Because of the robustness of these technologies, we found that we could readily automate the processes and move the laboratory workflows out of the scientist's hands and onto a machine. 
In 2013, we built the first DNA printer. 
We call it the BioXp. 
And it has been absolutely essential in writing DNA across a number of applications my team and researchers around the world are working on. 
It was shortly after we built the BioXp that we received that email about the H7N9 bird flu scare in China. 
A team of Chinese scientists had already isolated the virus, sequenced its DNA and uploaded the DNA sequence to the internet. 
At the request of the US government, we downloaded the DNA sequence and in less than 12 hours, we printed it on the BioXp. 
Our collaborators at Novartis then quickly started turning that synthetic DNA into a flu vaccine. 
Meanwhile, the CDC, using technology dating back to the 1940s, was still waiting for the virus to arrive from China so that they could begin their egg-based approach. 
For the first time, we had a flu vaccine developed ahead of time for a new and potentially dangerous strain, and the US government ordered a stockpile. 
(Applause) This was when I began to appreciate, more than ever, the power of biological teleportation. 
(Laughter) Naturally, with this in mind, we started to build a biological teleporter. 
We call it the DBC. 
That's short for digital-to-biological converter. 
Unlike the BioXp, which starts from pre-manufactured short pieces of DNA, the DBC starts from digitized DNA code and converts that DNA code into biological entities, such as DNA, RNA, proteins or even viruses. 
You can think of the BioXp as a DVD player, requiring a physical DVD to be inserted, whereas the DBC is Netflix. 
To build the DBC, my team of scientists worked with software and instrumentation engineers to collapse multiple laboratory workflows, all in a single box. 
This included software algorithms to predict what DNA to build, chemistry to link the G, A, T and C building blocks of DNA into short pieces, Gibson Assembly to stitch together those short pieces into much longer ones, and biology to convert the DNA into other biological entities, such as proteins. 
This is the prototype. 
Although it wasn't pretty, it was effective. 
It made therapeutic drugs and vaccines. 
And laboratory workflows that once took weeks or months could now be carried out in just one to two days. 
And that's all without any human intervention and simply activated by the receipt of an email which could be sent from anywhere in the world. 
We like to compare the DBC to fax machines. 
But whereas fax machines received images and documents, the DBC receives biological materials. 
Now, consider how fax machines have evolved. 
The prototype of the 1840s is unrecognizable, compared with the fax machines of today. 
In the 1980s, most people still didn't know what a fax machine was, and if they did, it was difficult for them to grasp the concept of instantly reproducing an image on the other side of the world. 
But nowadays, everything that a fax machine does is integrated on our smart phones, and of course, we take this rapid exchange of digital information for granted. 
Here's what our DBC looks like today. 
We imagine the DBC evolving in similar ways as fax machines have. 
We're working to reduce the size of the instrument, and we're working to make the underlying technology more reliable, cheaper, faster and more accurate. 
Accuracy is extremely important when synthesizing DNA, because a single change to a DNA letter could mean the difference between a medicine working or not or synthetic cell being alive or dead. 
The DBC will be useful for the distributed manufacturing of medicine starting from DNA. 
Every hospital in the world could use a DBC for printing personalized medicines for a patient at their bedside. 
I can even imagine a day when it's routine for people to have a DBC to connect to their home computer or smart phone as a means to download their prescriptions, such as insulin or antibody therapies. 
The DBC will also be valuable when placed in strategic areas around the world, for rapid response to disease outbreaks. 
For example, the CDC in Atlanta, Georgia could send flu vaccine instructions to a DBC on the other side of the world, where the flu vaccine is manufactured right on the front lines. 
That flu vaccine could even be specifically tailored to the flu strain that's circulating in that local area. 
Sending vaccines around in a digital file, rather than stockpiling those same vaccines and shipping them out, promises to save thousands of lives. 
Of course, the applications go as far as the imagination goes. 
It's not hard to imagine placing a DBC on another planet. 
Scientists on Earth could then send the digital instructions to that DBC to make new medicines or to make synthetic organisms that produce oxygen, food, fuel or building materials, as a means for making the planet more habitable for humans. 
(Applause) With digital information traveling at the speed of light, it would only take minutes to send those digital instructions from Earth to Mars, but it would take months to physically deliver those same samples on a spacecraft. 
But for now, I would be satisfied beaming new medicines across the globe, fully automated and on demand, saving lives from emerging infectious diseases and printing personalized cancer medicines for those who don't have time to wait. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The coldest materials in the world aren’t in Antarctica. 
They’re not at the top of Mount Everest or buried in a glacier. 
They’re in physics labs: clouds of gases held just fractions of a degree above absolute zero. 
That’s 395 million times colder than your refrigerator, 100 million times colder than liquid nitrogen, and 4 million times colder than outer space. 
Temperatures this low give scientists a window into the inner workings of matter, and allow engineers to build incredibly sensitive instruments that tell us more about everything from our exact position on the planet to what’s happening in the farthest reaches of the universe. 
How do we create such extreme temperatures? 
In short, by slowing down moving particles. 
When we’re talking about temperature, what we’re really talking about is motion. 
The atoms that make up solids, liquids, and gases are moving all the time. 
When atoms are moving more rapidly, we perceive that matter as hot. 
When they’re moving more slowly, we perceive it as cold. 
To make a hot object or gas cold in everyday life, we place it in a colder environment, like a refrigerator. 
Some of the atomic motion in the hot object is transferred to the surroundings, and it cools down. 
But there’s a limit to this: even outer space is too warm to create ultra-low temperatures. 
So instead, scientists figured out a way to slow the atoms down directly – with a laser beam. 
Under most circumstances, the energy in a laser beam heats things up. 
But used in a very precise way, the beam’s momentum can stall moving atoms, cooling them down. 
That’s what happens in a device called a magneto-optical trap. 
Atoms are injected into a vacuum chamber, and a magnetic field draws them towards the center. 
A laser beam aimed at the middle of the chamber is tuned to just the right frequency that an atom moving towards it will absorb a photon of the laser beam and slow down. 
The slow down effect comes from the transfer of momentum between the atom and the photon. 
A total of six beams, in a perpendicular arrangement, ensure that atoms traveling in all directions will be intercepted. 
At the center, where the beams intersect, the atoms move sluggishly, as if trapped in a thick liquid — an effect the researchers who invented it described as “optical molasses.” A magneto-optical trap like this can cool atoms down to just a few microkelvins — about -273 degrees Celsius. 
This technique was developed in the 1980s, and the scientists who'd contributed to it won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 for the discovery. 
Since then, laser cooling has been improved to reach even lower temperatures. 
But why would you want to cool atoms down that much? 
First of all, cold atoms can make very good detectors. 
With so little energy, they’re incredibly sensitive to fluctuations in the environment. 
So they’re used in devices that find underground oil and mineral deposits, and they also make highly accurate atomic clocks, like the ones used in global positioning satellites. 
Secondly, cold atoms hold enormous potential for probing the frontiers of physics. 
Their extreme sensitivity makes them candidates to be used to detect gravitational waves in future space-based detectors. 
They’re also useful for the study of atomic and subatomic phenomena, which requires measuring incredibly tiny fluctuations in the energy of atoms. 
Those are drowned out at normal temperatures, when atoms speed around at hundreds of meters per second. 
Laser cooling can slow atoms to just a few centimeters per second— enough for the motion caused by atomic quantum effects to become obvious. 
Ultracold atoms have already allowed scientists to study phenomena like Bose-Einstein condensation, in which atoms are cooled almost to absolute zero and become a rare new state of matter. 
So as researchers continue in their quest to understand the laws of physics and unravel the mysteries of the universe, they’ll do so with the help of the very coldest atoms in it. 

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

You know me. 
I am in your friendship circle hidden in plain sight. 
My clothes are still impeccable -- bought in the good years when I was still making money. 
To look at me you would not know that my electricity was cut off last week for nonpayment, or that I meet the eligibility requirements for food stamps. 
But if you paid attention, you would see that sadness in my eyes -- hear that hint of fear in my otherwise self-assured voice. 
These days I'm buying the $1.99 trial-size jug of Tide to make ends meet. 
I bet you didn't know laundry detergent came in that size. 
You invite me to the same expensive restaurants the two of us have always enjoyed, but I order mineral water now with a twist of lemon, not the 12-dollar glass of chardonnay. 
I am frugal in my menu choices. 
Meticulous, I count every penny in my head. 
I demur dividing the table bill evenly to cover desserts and designer coffees and second and third glasses of wine I did not consume. 
I am tired of trying to fake appearances. 
A friend told me that I'm broke not poor, and there is a difference. 
I live without cable, my gym membership and nail appointments. 
I've discovered I can do my own hair. 
There is no retirement savings, no nest egg. 
I exhausted that long ago. 
There is no expensive condo to draw equity and no husband to back me up. 
Months of slow pay and no pay have decimated my credit. 
Bill collectors call constantly, reading verbatim from a script before expressing polite sympathy for my plight and then demanding payment arrangements I can't possibly meet. 
Friends wonder privately how someone so well educated could be in economic free fall. 
I'm still as talented as ever and smart as a whip, but work is sketchy now, mostly on and off consulting gigs. 
At 55 I've learned how to fake cheeriness, but there are not many opportunities for work anymore. 
I don't remember exactly when it stopped, but I cannot deny now having entered the uncertain world of formerly and used to be. 
I'm not sure anymore where I belong. 
What I do know is that dozens of online job applications seem to just disappear into a black hole. 
I'm wondering what is to become of me. 
So far my health has held up, but my body aches -- or is it my spirit? 
Homeless women used to be invisible to me but I appraise them now with curious eyes, wondering if their stories started like mine. 
I wrote this piece a year ago. 
It's a composite of my story and other women I know. 
I wrote it because I was tired of pretending I was all right when I wasn't. 
I was tired of faking normal. 
I wasn't seeing myself in the popular press. 
Nobody I knew was traveling the world or buying a condo in Costa Rica. 
Very few of my friends had set aside the 15 to 20 percent experts tell us we need to maintain our standard of living in retirement. 
My friends, many in their 50s and 60s, were looking at a downward mobility, a work-for-life proposition, just a job loss, medical diagnosis or divorce away from insolvency. 
We may not have hit rock bottom, but many of us saw a sequence of events where rock bottom was possible for the first time. 
And the truth is, it really doesn't take much. 
The median household in the US only has enough savings to replace one month of income. 
Forty-seven percent of us cannot pull together 400 dollars to deal with an emergency. 
That's almost half of us. 
A major car repair and we're standing on the abyss. 
You wouldn't know it to look around you -- I'm not the only one in this situation. 
There are people in this room who are in the same predicament, and if it's not you, it is your parents or your sister or maybe your best friend. 
We get good at faking normal. 
Shame keeps us silent and siloed. 
When I first decided I was going to come out with my story, I did a website and a friend noticed that there were no photos of me -- it was all kind of cartoons like this. 
Even as I was coming out, I was still hiding. 
We live in a world where success is defined by income. 
When you say that you have money problems, you're announcing pretty much that you're a loser. 
When you're a graduate of Harvard Business School as I am, you're some kind of double loser. 
We boomers hear a lot about how we have underfunded our retirement; how it's all our fault. 
Why on earth would we draw down our 401(k) plan to cover the shortfall on our mother-in-law's nursing home care, or to pay for our kid's tuition, or just to survive? 
We're accused of being poor planners and deadbeats -- all that money we spent on lattes and bottled water. 
To shame and blame is so deliciously tempting. 
Many of us don't even wait for others to do it we're so busy doing it to ourselves. 
I say let's own our part: we all could have saved more. 
I know I could have saved more, and if you were to rifle through my life over the last 30 years, you would see more than one dumb thing I have done financially. 
I can't change that now and neither can you, but let's not mix up individual, isolated behavior with the systemic factors that have caused a 7.7-trillion-dollar retirement income gap. 
Millions of boomer-age Americans did not land here because of too many trips to Starbucks. 
We spent the last three decades dealing with flat and falling wages and disappearing pensions and through-the-roof cost on housing and health care and education. 
It used to not be like this. 
We all remember the three-legged retirement income stool which had the savings and pension and social security. 
Well, that stool has gone wobbly. 
Take savings -- what savings? 
For many families, there's just nothing left to save after the bills have been paid. 
The pension leg of the stool has also gone wobbly. 
We can remember when many people had pensions. 
Today only 13 percent of American workers are employed by companies that offer them. 
So what did we get instead? 
We got 401(k)-type plans and suddenly responsibility for retirement planning got shifted from our companies to us. 
We got the reigns but we also got the risk, and it turns out that millions of us just aren't that good at voluntarily investing over 40 years. 
Millions of us just aren't that good at managing market risk. 
And really the numbers tell the story. 
Half of all American households have no retirement savings at all. 
That would be zero. 
No 401(k), no IRA, not a dime. 
Among 55-to-64-year-olds who do have a retirement account, the median value of that account is 104,000 dollars. 
Now, 104,000 dollars does sound better than zero, but as an annuity, it generates about 300 dollars. 
I don't have to tell you that you can't live on that. 
With savings down, pensions becoming a relic of the past and 401(k) plans failing millions of Americans, many near-retirees are dependent on social security as their retirement plan. 
But here's the problem. 
Social security was never supposed to be the retirement plan. 
It's not nearly enough. 
At best it replaces something like 40 percent of your pre-retirement income. 
Things have changed a lot from when social security was introduced back in 1935. 
Then, a 21-year-old male had a 50 percent chance of living until he was 65. 
So he retired at 60, did a little fishing, kissed his grandkids, got his gold watch -- he'd be dead within five years of receiving benefits. 
That's not the pattern today. 
If you're in your late 50s and in good health, you're going to live easily another 20 or 25 years. 
That's a really long time to make ends meet if you are broke. 
So what's the play if you've landed here and you're 50 or 55 or 60? 
What's the play if you don't want to land here and you're 22 or 32? 
Here's what I've learned from my own experience. 
The cavalry's not coming. 
There is no big rescue, no prince charming, no big bailout in the works. 
To have a shot at something other than being old and poor in America, we're going to have to save ourselves and each other. 
I've had to come out of the shadows, stand here openly, and I'm inviting you to do so as well. 
I'm not going to tell you that it's not easy. 
I ventured though to tell my story because I thought it would make it a little easier for people to tell theirs. 
I think it's only through our strength in numbers that we can begin to change the national "la-la" conversation that we are having on this retirement crisis. 
With so many of us shell-shocked and adrift about what has happened to us, we're going to have to build up from the grassroots, forming what I think are resilience circles. 
These are small groups of people coming together to talk about what has happened to them, to share resources and information and to begin to figure out a way forward. 
I believe from this base that we can find our voices again and sound the alarm -- start pushing our institutions and policymakers to go hard on this retirement crisis with the urgency it deserves. 
In the meantime -- and there is an "in the meantime" -- we're going to have to adopt a live-low-to-the-ground mindset, drastically cutting back on our expenses. 
And I don't mean just living within our means. 
A lot of people are already doing that. 
What is called for now is to, in a much deeper way, ask ourselves what it really means to live a life that is not defined by things. 
I call it "smalling up." 
Smalling up is figuring out what you really need to feel contented and grounded. 
I have a friend who drives really beat-up, raggedy cars, but he will scrimp and save 15,000 dollars at one point to buy a flute because music is what really matters to him. 
He smalled up. 
I've had to also let go of magical thinking -- this idea that if I just was patient enough and tightened my belt that things would go back to normal. 
If I just sent in one more CV or applied to one more job online or attended one more networking event that surely I'd get the kind of job I was used to having. 
Surely things would return to normal. 
The truth is I'm not going back and neither are you. 
The normal that we knew is over. 
In this new place that we are, we're going to be asked to do things that we don't want to do. 
We're going to be asked to take assignments that we think are beneath our station and our talent and our skill. 
I have had to get off my throne. 
Last year, a good friend of mine asked me if I would help her with some organization work. 
I assumed she meant community organizing along the lines of what President Obama did in Chicago. 
She meant organizing somebody's closet. 
I said, "I'm not doing that." 
She said, "Get off your throne. Money is green." 
It's not easy being part of the advance team that is ushering in this new era of work and living. 
First is always hardest. 
First is before there are networks and pathways and role models ... 
before there are policies and ways to show us how to go forward. 
We're in the middle of a seismic shift, and we're going to have to find bridgework to get us through. 
Bridgework is what we do in the meantime; bridgework is what we do while we're trying to figure out what is next. 
Bridgework is also letting go of this notion that our worth and our value depend on our income and our titles and our jobs. 
Bridgework can look crazy or cool depending on how you were rolling when your personal financial crisis hit. 
I have friends with PhDs who are working at the Container Store or driving Uber or Lyft, and then I have other friends who are partnering with other boomers and doing really cool entrepreneurial ventures. 
Bridgework doesn't mean that we don't want to build on our past careers, that we don't want meaningful work. 
We do. 
Bridgework is what we do in the meantime while we're figuring out what is next. 
I've also learned to think strategy not failure when I'm sort of processing all these things that I don't want to do. 
And I say that that's an approach that I would invite you to consider as well. 
So if you need to move in with your brother to make ends meet, call him. 
If you need to take in a boarder to help you pay your mortgage or pay your rent, do it. 
If you need to get food stamps, get the darn food stamps. 
AARP says only a third of older adults who are eligible actually get them. 
Do what you need to do to go another round. 
Know that there are millions of us. 
Come out of the shadows. 
Cut back, small up; think strategy, not failure; get off your throne and find the bridgework to get your through the lean times. 
As a country, we have achieved longevity, investing billions of dollars in the diagnosis, treatment and management of disease. 
It's not enough to just live a long time. 
We want to live well. 
We haven't invested nearly as much in the physical infrastructure to ensure that that happens. 
We need now a new way of thinking about what it means to be old in America. 
And we need guidance and ideas about how to live a richly textured life on a much more modest income. 
So I am calling on change agents and social entrepreneurs, artists and elders and impact investors. 
I'm calling on developers and disrupters of the status quo. 
We need you to help us imagine how to invest in the services and products and infrastructure that will support our dignity, our independence and our well-being in these many, many decades that we're going to live. 
My journey has taken me from a place of fear and shame to one of humility and understanding. 
I'm ready now to link shields with others, to fight this fight, and I'm inviting you to join me. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

Election night 2008 was a night that tore me in half. 
It was the night that Barack Obama was elected. 
[One hundred and forty-three] years after the end of slavery, and [43] years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, an African-American was elected president. 
Many of us never thought that this was possible until the moment that it happened. 
And in many ways, it was the climax of the black civil rights movement in the United States. 
I was in California that night, which was ground zero at the time for another movement: the marriage equality movement. 
Gay marriage was on the ballot in the form of Proposition 8, and as the election returns started to come in, it became clear that the right for same sex couples to marry, which had recently been granted by the California courts, was going to be taken away. 
So on the same night that Barack Obama won his historic presidency, the lesbian and gay community suffered one of our most painful defeats. 
And then it got even worse. 
Pretty much immediately, African-Americans started to be blamed for the passage of Proposition 8. 
This was largely due to an incorrect poll that said that blacks had voted for the measure by something like 70 percent. 
This turned out not to be true, but this idea of pervasive black homophobia set in, and was grabbed on by the media. 
I couldn't tear myself away from the coverage. 
I listened to some gay commentator say that the African-American community was notoriously homophobic, and now that civil rights had been achieved for us, we wanted to take away other people's rights. 
There were even reports of racist epithets being thrown at some of the participants of the gay rights rallies that took place after the election. 
And on the other side, some African-Americans dismissed or ignored homophobia that was indeed real in our community. 
And others resented this comparison between gay rights and civil rights, and once again, the sinking feeling that two minority groups of which I'm both a part of were competing with each other instead of supporting each other overwhelmed and, frankly, pissed me off. 
Now, I'm a documentary filmmaker, so after going through my pissed off stage and yelling at the television and radio, my next instinct was to make a movie. 
And what guided me in making this film was, how was this happening? 
How was it that the gay rights movement was being pitted against the civil rights movement? 
And this wasn't just an abstract question. 
I'm a beneficiary of both movements, so this was actually personal. 
But then something else happened after that election in 2008. 
The march towards gay equality accelerated at a pace that surprised and shocked everyone, and is still reshaping our laws and our policies, our institutions and our entire country. 
And so it started to become increasingly clear to me that this pitting of the two movements against each other actually didn't make sense, and that they were in fact much, much more interconnected, and that, in fact, some of the way that the gay rights movement has been able to make such incredible gains so quickly is that it's used some of the same tactics and strategies that were first laid down by the civil rights movement. 
Let's just look at a few of these strategies. 
First off, it's really interesting to see, to actually visually see, how quick the gay rights movement has made its gains, if you look at a few of the major events on a timeline of both freedom movements. 
Now, there are tons of milestones in the civil rights movement, but the first one we're going to start with is the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. 
This was a protest campaign against Montgomery, Alabama's segregation on their public transit system, and it began when a woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person. 
The campaign lasted a year, and it galvanized the civil rights movement like nothing had before it. 
And I call this strategy the "I'm tired of your foot on my neck" strategy. 
So gays and lesbians have been in society since societies began, but up until the mid-20th century, homosexual acts were still illegal in most states. 
So just 14 years after the Montgomery bus boycott, a group of LGBT folks took that same strategy. 
It's known as Stonewall, in 1969, and it's where a group of LGBT patrons fought back against police beatings at a Greenwich Village bar that sparked three days of rioting. 
Incidentally, black and latino LGBT folks were at the forefront of this rebellion, and it's a really interesting example of the intersection of our struggles against racism, homophobia, gender identity and police brutality. 
After Stonewall happened, gay liberation groups sprang up all over the country, and the modern gay rights movement as we know it took off. 
So the next moment to look at on the timeline is the 1963 March on Washington. 
This was a seminal event in the civil rights movement and it's where African-Americans called for both civil and economic justice. 
And it's of course where Martin Luther King delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech, but what's actually less known is that this march was organized by a man named Bayard Rustin. 
Bayard was an out gay man, and he's considered one of the most brilliant strategists of the civil rights movement. 
He later in his life became a fierce advocate of LGBT rights as well, and his life is testament to the intersection of the struggles. 
The March on Washington is one of the high points of the movement, and it's where there was a fervent belief that African-Americans too could be a part of American democracy. 
I call this strategy the "We are visible and many in numbers" strategy. 
Some early gay activists were actually directly inspired by the march, and some had taken part. 
Gay pioneer Jack Nichols said, "We marched with Martin Luther King, seven of us from the Mattachine Society" -- which was an early gay rights organization — "and from that moment on, we had our own dream about a gay rights march of similar proportions." 
Several years later, a series of marches took place, each one gaining the momentum of the gay freedom struggle. 
The first one was in 1979, and the second one took place in 1987. 
The third one was held in 1993. 
Almost a million people showed up, and people were so energized and excited by what had taken place, they went back to their own communities and started their own political and social organizations, further increasing the visibility of the movement. 
The day of that march, October 11, was then declared National Coming Out Day, and is still celebrated all over the world. 
These marches set the groundwork for the historic changes that we see happening today in the United States. 
And lastly, the "Loving" strategy. 
The name speaks for itself. 
In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia, and invalidated all laws that prohibited interracial marriage. 
This is considered one of the Supreme Court's landmark civil rights cases. 
In 1996, President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA, and that made the federal government only have to recognize marriages between a man and a woman. 
In United States v. Windsor, a 79-year-old lesbian named Edith Windsor sued the federal government when she was forced to pay estate taxes on her deceased wife's property, something that heterosexual couples don't have to do. 
And as the case wound its way through the lower courts, the Loving case was repeatedly cited as precedent. 
When it got to the Supreme Court in 2013, the Supreme Court agreed, and DOMA was thrown out. 
It was incredible. 
But the gay marriage movement has been making gains for years now. 
To date, 17 states have passed laws allowing marriage equality. 
It's become the de facto battle for gay equality, and it seems like daily, laws prohibiting it are being challenged in the courts, even in places like Texas and Utah, which no one saw coming. 
So a lot has changed since that night in 2008 when I felt torn in half. 
I did go on to make that film. 
It's a documentary film, and it's called "The New Black," and it looks at how the African-American community is grappling with the gay rights issue in light of the gay marriage movement and this fight over the meaning of civil rights. 
And I wanted to capture some of this incredible change that was happening, and as luck or politics would have it, another marriage battle started gearing up, this time in Maryland, where African-Americans make up 30 percent of the electorate. 
So this tension between gay rights and civil rights started to bubble up once again, and I was lucky enough to capture how some people were making the connection between the movements this time. 
This is a clip of Karess Taylor-Hughes and Samantha Masters, two characters in the film, as they hit the streets of Baltimore and try to convince potential voters. 
(Video) Samantha Masters: That's what's up, man, this is a righteous man over here. 
Okay, are you registered to vote? 
Man: No. Karess Taylor-Hughes: Okay. How old are you? 
Man: 21. KTH: 21? You gotta get registered to vote. 
We got to get you registered to vote. 
Man: I ain't voting on no gay shit. 
SM: Okay, why? What's up? Man: I ain't with that. 
SM: That's not cool. 
Man: What made you be gay? SM: So what made you be straight? 
So what made you be straight? 
Man 2: You can't answer that question. (Laughter) KSM: I used to not have the same rights as you, but I know that because a black man like yourself stood up for a woman like me, I know that I've got the same opportunities. 
So you, as a black man, have the opportunity to stand up for somebody else. 
Whether you're gay or not, these are your brothers and sisters out here, and they need you to represent. 
Man 2: Who is you to tell somebody who they can't have sex with, who they can't be with? 
They ain't got that power. 
Nobody has that power to say, you can't marry that young lady. 
Who has that power? Nobody. 
SM: But you know what? 
Our state has put the power in your hands, and so what we need you to do is vote for, you gonna vote for 6. 
Man 2: I got you. 
SM: Vote for 6, okay? Man 2: I got you. 
KSM: All right, do y'all need community service hours? 
You do? All right, you can always volunteer with us to get community service hours. 
Y'all want to do that? 
(Laughter) (Applause) Yoruba Richen: Thank you. 
What's amazing to me about that clip that we just captured as we were filming is, it really shows how Karess understands the history of the civil rights movement, but she's not restricted by it. 
She doesn't just limit it to black people. 
She sees it as a blueprint for expanding rights to gays and lesbians. 
Maybe because she's younger, she's like 25, she's able to do this a little bit more easily, but the fact is that Maryland voters did pass that marriage equality amendment, and in fact it was the first time that marriage equality was directly voted on and passed by the voters. 
African-Americans supported it at a higher level than had ever been recorded. 
It was a complete turnaround from that night in 2008 when Proposition 8 was passed. 
It was, and feels, monumental. 
We in the LGBT community have gone from being a pathologized and reviled and criminalized group to being seen as part of the great human quest for dignity and equality. 
We've gone from having to hide our sexuality in order to maintain our jobs and our families to literally getting a place at the table with the president and a shout out at his second inauguration. 
I just want to read what he said at that inauguration: "We the people declare today that the most evident of truths, that all of us are created equal. 
It is the star that guides us still, just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall." 
Now we know that everything is not perfect, especially when you look at what's happening with the LGBT rights issue internationally, but it says something about how far we've come when our president puts the gay freedom struggle in the context of the other great freedom struggles of our time: the women's rights movement and the civil rights movement. 
His statement demonstrates not only the interconnectedness of those movements, but how each one borrowed and was inspired by the other. 
So just as Martin Luther King learned from and borrowed from Gandhi's tactics of civil disobedience and nonviolence, which became a bedrock of the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement saw what worked in the civil rights movement, and they used some of those same strategies and tactics to make gains at an even quicker pace. 
Maybe one more other reason for the relative quick progress of the gay rights movement. 
Whereas a lot of us continue to still live in racially segregated spaces, LGBT folks, we are everywhere. 
We are in urban communities and rural communities, communities of color, immigrant communities, churches and mosques and synagogues. 
We are your mothers and brothers and sisters and sons. 
And when someone that you love or a family member comes out, it may be easier to support their quest for equality. 
And in fact, the gay rights movement asks us to support justice and equality from a space of love. 
That may be the biggest, greatest gift that the movement has given us. 
It calls on us to access that which is most universal and most intimate: a love of our brother and our sister and our neighbor. 
I just want to end with a quote by one of our greatest freedom fighters who's no longer with us, Nelson Mandela of South Africa. 
Nelson Mandela led South Africa after the dark and brutal days of Apartheid, and out of the ashes of that legalized racial discrimination, he led South Africa to become the first country in the world to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation within its constitution. 
Mandela said, "For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others." 
So as these movements continue on, and as freedom struggles around the world continue on, let's remember that not only are they interconnected, but they must support and enhance each other for us to be truly victorious. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Architecture is amazing, for sure. 
It's amazing because it's art. 
But you know, it's a very funny kind of art. 
It's an art at the frontier between art and science. 
It's fed by ... 
by real life, every day. 
It's driven by force of necessity. 
Quite amazing, quite amazing. 
And the life of the architect is also amazing. 
You know, as an architect, at 10 o’clock in the morning, you need to be a poet, for sure. 
But at 11, you must become a humanist, otherwise you'd lose your direction. 
And at noon, you absolutely need to be a builder. 
You need to be able to make a building, because architecture, at the end, is the art of making buildings. 
Architecture is the art of making shelter for human beings. 
Period. 
And this is not easy at all. 
It's amazing. 
Look at this. 
Here we are in London, at the top of the Shard of Glass. 
This is a building we completed a few years ago. 
Those people are well-trained workers, and they are assembling the top piece of the tower. 
Well, they look like rock climbers. 
They are. 
I mean, they are defying the force of gravity, like building does, by the way. 
We got 30 of those people -- actually, on that site, we got more than 1,400 people, coming from 60 different nationalities. 
You know, this is a miracle. It's a miracle. 
To put together 1,400 people, coming from such different places, is a miracle. 
Sites are miracles. 
This is another one. 
Let's talk about construction. 
Adventure, it's adventure in real life, not adventure in spirit. 
This guy there is a deepwater diver. 
From rock climbers to deepwater divers. 
This is in Berlin. 
After the fall of the Wall in '89, we built this building, connecting East Berlin to West Berlin, in Potsdamer Platz. 
We got on that project almost 5,000 people. 
Almost 5,000 people. 
And this is another site in Japan, building the Kansai Airport. 
Again, all the rock climbers, Japanese ones. 
You know, making buildings together is the best way to create a sense of cooperation. 
The sense of pride -- pride is essential. 
But, you know, construction, of course, is one of the reasons why architecture is amazing. 
But there is another one, that is maybe even more amazing. 
Because architecture is the art of making shelter for communities, not just for individuals -- communities and society at large. 
And society is never the same. 
The world keeps changing. 
And changes are difficult to swallow by people. 
And architecture is a mirror of those changes. 
Architecture is the built expression of those changes. 
So, this is why it is so difficult, because those changes create adventure. 
They create adventure, and architecture is adventure. 
This is the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, a long time ago. 
That was back in time, '77. 
This was a spaceship landing in the middle of Paris. 
Together with my friend in adventure, Richard Rogers, we were, at the time, young bad boys. 
Young, bad boys. 
(Laughter) It was really only a few years after May '68. 
So it was a rebellion, pure rebellion. 
The idea was to make the proof that cultural buildings should not be intimidating. 
They should create a sense of curiosity. 
This is the way to create a cultural place. 
Curiosity is the beginning of a cultural attitude. 
And there's a piazza there, you can see that piazza. 
And a piazza is the beginning of urban life. 
A piazza is the place where people meet. 
And they mix experience. 
And they mix ages. 
And, you know, in some way, you create the essence of the city. 
And since then, we made, in the office, so many other places for people. 
Here, in Rome, is a concert hall. 
Another place for people. 
This building inside is actually designed by the sound, you can see. 
It's flirting with sound. 
And this is the Kansai Airport, in Japan. 
To make a building, sometimes you need to make an island, and we made the island. 
The building is more than one mile long. 
It looks like an immense glider, landing on the ground. 
And this is in San Francisco. 
Another place for people. 
This building is the California Academy of Sciences. 
And we planted on that roof -- thousands and thousands of plants that use the humidity of the air, instead of pumping water from the water table. 
The roof is a living roof, actually. 
And this building was made Platinum LEED. 
The LEED is the system to measure, of course, the sustainability of a building. 
So this was also a place for people that will stay a long time. 
And this is actually New York. 
This is the new Whitney, in the Meatpacking District in New York. 
Well, another flying vessel. 
Another place for people. 
Here we are in Athens, the Niarchos Foundation. 
It's a library, it's an open house, a concert hall and a big park. 
This building is also a Platinum LEED building. 
This building actually captures the sun's energy with that roof. 
But, you know, making a building a place for people is good. 
Making libraries, making concert halls, making universities, making museums is good, because you create a place that's open, accessible. 
You create a building for a better world, for sure. 
But there is something else that makes architecture amazing, even more. 
And this is the fact that architecture doesn't just answer to need and necessity, but also to desires -- yes, desires -- dreams, aspirations. 
This is what architecture does. 
Even the most modest hut on earth is not just a roof. 
It's more than a roof. 
It's telling a story; it's telling a story about the identity of the people living in that hut. 
Individuals. 
Architecture is the art of telling stories. 
Like this one. 
In London: the Shard of Glass. 
Well, this building is the tallest building in Western Europe. 
It goes up more than 300 meters in the air, to breathe fresh air. 
The facets of this building are inclined, and they reflect the sky of London, that is never the same. 
After rain, everything becomes bluish. 
In the sunny evening, everything is red. 
It's something that is difficult to explain. 
It's what we call the soul of a building. 
On this picture on the left, you have the Menil Collection, used a long time ago. 
It's a museum. 
On the right is the Harvard Art Museum. 
Both those two buildings flirt with light. 
Light is probably one of the most essential materials in architecture. 
And this is in Amsterdam. 
This building is flirting with water. 
And this is my office, on the sea. 
Well, this is flirting with work. 
Actually, we enjoy working there. 
And that cable car is the little cable car that goes up to there. 
That's "The New York Times" in New York. 
Well, this is playing with transparency. 
Again, the sense of light, the sense of transparency. 
On the left here, you have the Magic Lantern in Japan, in Ginza, in Tokyo. 
And in the center is a monastery in the forest. 
This monastery is playing with the silence and the forest. 
And a museum, a science museum. 
This is about levitation. 
And this is in the center of Paris, in the belly of the whale. 
This is the Pathé Foundation in Paris. 
All those buildings have something in common: it's that something is searching for desire, for dreams. 
And that's me. 
(Laughter) Well, it's me on my sailing boat. 
Flirting with breeze. 
Well, there's not a very good reason to show you this picture. 
(Laughter) I'm trying, I'm trying. 
You know, one thing is clear: I love sailing, for sure. 
I actually also love designing sailing boats. 
But I love sailing, because sailing is associated with slowness. 
And ... 
and silence. 
And the sense of suspension. 
And there is another thing that this picture says. 
It says that I'm Italian. 
(Laughter) Well, there is very little I can do about that. 
(Laughter) I'm Italian, and I love beauty. 
I love beauty. 
Well, let's go sailing, I want to take you sailing here, to this place, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. 
This is the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Center. 
It's for the Kanaky ethnic group. 
It's in Nouméa, New Caledonia. 
This place is for art. 
Art and nature. 
And those buildings actually flirt with the wind, with the trade winds. 
They have a sound, they have a voice, those buildings. 
I'm showing this because it's about beauty. 
It's about pure beauty. 
And let's talk about beauty for a moment. 
Beauty is like the bird of paradise: the very moment you try to catch it, it flies away. 
Your arm is too short. 
But beauty is not a frivolous idea. 
It's the opposite. 
In my native language, that is Italian, "beautiful" is "bello." 
In Spanish, "beauty" is "belleza." 
In Greek, "beautiful" is "kalos." 
When you add "agathos," that means "beautiful and good." 
In no one of those languages, "beautiful" just means "beautiful." 
It also means "good." 
Real beauty is when the invisible joins the visible, coming on surface. 
And this doesn't apply only to art or nature. 
This applies to science, human curiosity, solidarity -- that's the reason why you may say, "This is a beautiful person," "That's a beautiful mind." 
This, this is the beauty that can change people into better people, by switching a special light in their eyes. 
And making buildings for this beauty makes cities better places to live. 
And better cities make better citizens. 
Well, this beauty -- this universal beauty, I should say -- is one of the few things that can change the world. 
Believe me, this beauty will save the world. 
One person at a time, but it will do it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Come with me to Agbogbloshie, a neighborhood in the heart of Accra, named after a god that lives in the Odaw River. 
There's a slum, Old Fadama, built on land reclaimed from the Korle Lagoon, just before it opens into the Gulf of Guinea. 
There's a scrapyard here where people take apart all kinds of things, from mobile phones to computers, automobiles to even entire airplanes. 
Agbogbloshie's scrapyard is famous because it has become a symbol of the downside of technology: the problem of planned obsolescence. 
It's seen as a place where devices from around the world end their life, where your data comes to die. 
These are the images that the media loves to show, of young men and boys burning wires and cables to recover copper and aluminum, using Styrofoam and old tires as fuel, seriously hurting themselves and the environment. 
It's a super-toxic process, producing pollutants that enter the global ecosystem, build up in fatty tissue and threaten the top of the food chain. 
But this story is incomplete. 
There's a lot we can learn from Agbogbloshie, where scrap collected from city- and nationwide is brought. 
For so many of us, our devices are black boxes. 
We know what they do, but not how they work or what's inside. 
In Agbogbloshie, people make it their business to know exactly what's inside. 
Scrap dealers recover copper, aluminum, steel, glass, plastic and printed circuit boards. 
It's called "urban mining." 
It's now more efficient for us to mine materials from our waste. 
There is 10 times more gold, silver, platinum, palladium in one ton of our electronics than in one ton of ore mined from beneath the surface of the earth. 
In Agbogbloshie, weight is a form of currency. 
Devices are dissected to recover materials, parts and components with incredible attention to detail, down to the aluminum tips of electric plugs. 
But scrap dealers don't destroy components that are still functional. 
They supply them to repair workshops like this one in Agbogbloshie and the tens of thousands of technicians across the country that refurbish electrical and electronic equipment, and sell them as used products to consumers that may not be able to buy a new television or a new computer. 
Make no mistake about it, there are young hackers in Agbogbloshie -- and I mean that in the very best sense of that word -- that know not only how to take apart computers but how to put them back together, how to give them new life. 
Agbogbloshie reminds us that making is a cycle. 
It extends to remaking and unmaking in order to recover the materials that enable us to make something anew. 
We can learn from Agbogbloshie, where cobblers remake work boots, where women collect plastic from all over the city, sort it by type, shred it, wash it and ultimately sell it back as feedstock to factories to make new clothing, new plastic buckets and chairs. 
Steel is stockpiled separately, where the carcasses of cars and microwaves and washing machines become iron rods for new construction; where roofing sheets become cookstoves; where shafts from cars become chisels that are used to scrap more objects; where aluminum recovered from the radiators of fridges and air conditioners are melted down and use sand casting to make ornaments for the building industry, for pots which are sold just down the street in the Agbogbloshie market with a full array of locally made ovens, stoves and smokers, which are used every day to make the majority of palm nut soups, of tea and sugar breads, of grilled tilapia in the city. 
They're made in roadside workshops like this one by welders like Mohammed, who recover materials from the waste stream and use them to make all kinds of things, like dumbbells for working out out of old car parts. 
But here's what's really cool: the welding machines they use look like this, and they're made by specially coiling copper around electrical steel recovered from old transformer scrap. 
There's an entire industry just next to Agbogbloshie making locally fabricated welding machines that power local fabrication. 
What's really cool as well is that there's a transfer of skills and knowledge across generations, from masters to apprentices, but it's done through active learning, through heuristic learning, learning by doing and by making. 
And this stands in sharp contrast to the experience of many students in school, where lecturers lecture, and students write things down and memorize them. 
It's boring, but the real problem is this somehow preempts their latent or their inherent entrepreneurial power. 
They know books but not how to make stuff. 
Four years ago, my cofounder Yasmine Abbas and I asked: What would happen if we could couple the practical know-how of makers in the informal sector with the technical knowledge of students and young professionals in STEAM fields -- science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics -- to build a STEAM-powered innovation engine to drive what we call "Sankofa Innovation," which I'll explain. 
We took forays into the scrapyard to look for what could be repurposed, like DVD writers that could become laser etchers, or the power supplies of old servers for a start-up in Kumasi making 3D printers out of e-waste. 
The key was to bring together young people from different backgrounds that ordinarily never have anything to do with each other, to have a conversation about how they could collaborate and to test and develop new machines and tools that could allow them to shred and strip copper instead of burning it, to mold plastic bricks and tiles, to build new computers out of components recovered from dead electronics, to build a drone. 
And here you can see it flying for the first time in Agbogbloshie. 
(Applause) Yasmine and I have collaborated with over 1,500 young people, 750 from STEAM fields, and over 750 grassroots makers and scrap dealers from Agbogbloshie and beyond. 
They've joined hands together to develop a platform which they call Spacecraft, a hybrid physical and digital space for crafting, more of a process than a product, an open architecture for making, which involves three parts: a makerspace kiosk, which is prefab and modular; tool kits which can be customized based on what makers want to make; and a trading app. 
We built the app specifically with the needs of the scrap dealers in mind first, because we realized that it was not enough to arm them with information and upgraded technology if we wanted them to green their recycling processes; they needed incentives. 
Scrap dealers are always looking for new scrap and new buyers and what interests them is finding buyers who will pay more for clean copper than for burnt. 
We realized that in the entire ecosystem, everyone was searching for something. 
Makers are searching for materials, parts, components, tools, blueprints to make what it is they want to make. 
They're also finding a way to let customers and clientele find out that they can repair a blender or fix an iron or, as we learned yesterday, to make a french fry machine. 
On the flip side, you find that there are end users that are desperately looking for someone that can make them a french fry machine, and you have scrap dealers who are looking how they can collect this scrap, process it, and turn it back into an input for new making. 
We tried to untangle that knot of not knowing to allow people to find what they need to make what they want to make. 
We prototyped the makerspace kiosk in Agbogbloshie, conceived as the opposite of a school: a portal into experiential and experimental making that connects local and global and connects making with remaking and unmaking. 
We made a rule that everything had to be made from scratch using only materials made in Ghana or sourced from the scrapyard. 
The structures essentially are simple trusses which bolt together. 
It takes about two hours to assemble one module with semi-skilled labor, and by developing tooling and jigs and rigs, we were able to actually build these standardized parts within this ecosystem of artisanal welders with the precision of one millimeter -- of course, using made-in-Agbogbloshie welding machines, as well as for the tools, which can lock, the toolboxes, and stack to make workbenches, and again, customized based on what you want to make. 
We've tested the app in Agbogbloshie and are getting ready to open it up to other maker ecosystems. 
In six months, we'll have finished three years of testing the makerspace kiosk, which I have to admit, we've subjected to some pretty horrific abuse. 
But it's for a good cause, because based on the results of that testing, we've been able to redesign an upgraded version of this makerspace. 
If a fab lab is large, expensive, and fixed in place, think of this as the counterpoint: something low-cost, which can be locally manufactured, which can be expanded and kitted out incrementally as makers acquire resources. 
You can think of it as a toolshed, where makers can come and check out tools and take them via handcart to wherever they want in the city to make what it is they want to make. 
And moving into the next phase, we're planning to also add ceiling-mounted CNC bots, which allow makers to cocreate together with robots. 
Ultimately, this is a kit of parts, which can be assembled locally within the informal sector using standardized parts which can be upgraded collectively through an open-source process. 
In totality, this entire makerspace system tries to do five things: to enable emerging makers to gather the resources they need and the tools to make what they want to make; to learn by doing and from others; to produce more and better products; to be able to trade to generate steady income; and ultimately, to amplify not only their reputation as a maker, but their maker potential. 
Sankofa is one of the most powerful Adinkra symbols of the Akan peoples in Ghana and Cote d'Ivoire, and it can be represented as a bird reaching onto its back to collect an egg, a symbol of power. 
It translates literally from the Twi as "return and get it," and what this means is that if an individual or a community or a society wants to have a successful future, they have to draw on the past. 
To acquire and master existing ways of doing, access the knowledge of their ancestors. 
And this is very relevant if we want to think about an inclusive future for Africa today. 
We have to start from the ground up, mining what already works for methods and for models, and to think about how might we be able to connect, in a kind of "both-and," not "either-or" paradigm, the innovation capacity of this growing network of tech hubs and incubators across the continent and to rethink beyond national boundaries and political boundaries, to think about how we can network innovation in Africa with the spirit of Sankofa and the existing capacity of makers at the grassroots. 
If, in the future, someone tells you Agbogbloshie is the largest e-waste dump in the world, I hope you can correct them and explain to them that a dump is a place where you throw things away and leave them forever; a scrapyard is where you take things apart. 
Waste is something that no longer has any value, whereas scrap is something that you recover specifically to use it to remake something new. 
Making is a cycle, and African makerspaces are already pioneering and leading circular economy at the grassroots. 
Let's make more and better together. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Four years ago, here at TED, I announced Planet's Mission 1: to launch a fleet of satellites that would image the entire Earth, every day, and to democratize access to it. 
The problem we were trying to solve was simple. 
Satellite imagery you find online is old, typically years old, yet human activity was happening on days and weeks and months, and you can't fix what you can't see. 
We wanted to give people the tools to see that change and take action. 
The beautiful Blue Marble image, taken by the Apollo 17 astronauts in 1972 had helped humanity become aware that we're on a fragile planet. 
And we wanted to take it to the next level, to give people the tools to take action, to take care of it. 
Well, after many Apollo projects of our own, launching the largest fleet of satellites in human history, we have reached our target. 
Today, Planet images the entire Earth, every single day. 
Mission accomplished. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
It's taken 21 rocket launches -- this animation makes it look really simple -- it was not. 
And we now have over 200 satellites in orbit, downlinking their data to 31 ground stations we built around the planet. 
In total, we get 1.5 million 29-megapixel images of the Earth down each day. 
And on any one location of the Earth's surface, we now have on average more than 500 images. 
A deep stack of data, documenting immense change. 
And lots of people are using this imagery. 
Agricultural companies are using it to improve farmers' crop yields. 
Consumer-mapping companies are using it to improve the maps you find online. 
Governments are using it for border security or helping with disaster response after floods and fires and earthquakes. 
And lots of NGOs are using it. 
So, for tracking and stopping deforestation. 
Or helping to find the refugees fleeing Myanmar. 
Or to track all the activities in the ongoing crisis in Syria, holding all sides accountable. 
And today, I'm pleased to announce Planet stories. 
Anyone can go online to planet.com open an account and see all of our imagery online. 
It's a bit like Google Earth, except it's up-to-date imagery, and you can see back through time. 
You can compare any two days and see the dramatic changes that happen around our planet. 
Or you can create a time lapse through the 500 images that we have and see that change dramatically over time. 
And you can share these over social media. 
It's pretty cool. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
We initially created this tool for news journalists, who wanted to get unbiased information about world events. 
But now we've opened it up for anyone to use, for nonprofit or personal uses. 
And we hope it will give people the tools to find and see the changes on the planet and take action. 
OK, so humanity now has this database of information about the planet, changing over time. 
What's our next mission, what's Mission 2? 
In short, it's space plus AI. 
What we're doing with artificial intelligence is finding the objects in all the satellite images. 
The same AI tools that are used to find cats in videos online can also be used to find information on our pictures. 
So, imagine if you can say, this is a ship, this is a tree, this is a car, this is a road, this is a building, this is a truck. 
And if you could do that for all of the millions of images coming down per day, then you basically create a database of all the sizable objects on the planet, every day. 
And that database is searchable. 
So that's exactly what we're doing. 
Here's a prototype, working on our API. 
This is Beijing. 
So, imagine if we wanted to count the planes in the airport. 
We select the airport, and it finds the planes in today's image, and finds the planes in the whole stack of images before it, and then outputs this graph of all the planes in Beijing airport over time. 
Of course, you could do this for all the airports around the world. 
And let's look here in the port of Vancouver. 
So, we would do the same, but this time we would look for vessels. 
So, we zoom in on Vancouver, we select the area, and we search for ships. 
And it outputs where all the ships are. 
Now, imagine how useful this would be to people in coast guards who are trying to track and stop illegal fishing. 
See, legal fishing vessels transmit their locations using AIS beacons. 
But we frequently find ships that are not doing that. 
The pictures don't lie. 
And so, coast guards could use that and go and find those illegal fishing vessels. 
And soon we'll add not just ships and planes but all the other objects, and we can output data feeds of those locations of all these objects over time that can be integrated digitally from people's work flows. 
In time, we could get more sophisticated browsers that people pull in from different sources. 
But ultimately, I can imagine us abstracting out the imagery entirely and just having a queryable interface to the Earth. 
Imagine if we could just ask, "Hey, how many houses are there in Pakistan? 
Give me a plot of that versus time." 
"How many trees are there in the Amazon and can you tell me the locations of the trees that have been felled between this week and last week?" 
Wouldn't that be great? 
Well, that's what we're trying to go towards, and we call it "Queryable Earth." 
So, Planet's Mission 1 was to image the whole planet every day and make it accessible. 
Planet's Mission 2 is to index all the objects on the planet over time and make it queryable. 
Let me leave you with an analogy. 
Google indexed what's on the internet and made it searchable. 
Well, we're indexing what's on the Earth and making it searchable. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I'm here to tell you not just my story but stories of exceptional women from India whom I've met. 
They continue to inspire me, teach me, guide me in my journey of my life. 
These are incredible women. 
They never had an opportunity to go to school, they had no degrees, no travel, no exposure. 
Ordinary women who did extraordinary things with the greatest of their courage, wisdom and humility. 
These are my teachers. 
For the last three decades, I've been working, staying and living in India and working with women in rural India. 
I was born and brought up in Mumbai. 
When I was in college, I met Jayaprakash Narayan, famous Gandhian leader who inspired youth to work in rural India. 
I went into the villages to work in rural India. 
I was part of land rights movement, farmers' movement and women's movement. 
On the same line, I ended up in a very small village, fell in love with a young, handsome, dynamic young farmer-leader who was not very educated, but he could pull the crowd. 
And so in the passion of youth, I married him and left Mumbai, and went to a small village which did not have running water and no toilet. 
Honestly, my family and friends were horrified. 
(Laughter) I was staying with my family, with my three children in the village, and one day, a few years later one day, a woman called Kantabai came to me. 
Kantabai said, "I want to open a saving account. 
I want to save." 
I asked Kantabai: "You are doing business of blacksmith. 
Do you have enough money to save? 
You are staying on the street. 
Can you save?" 
Kantabai was insistent. 
She said, "I want to save because I want to buy a plastic sheet before the monsoons arrive. 
I want to save my family from rain." 
I went with Kantabai to the bank. 
Kantabai wanted to save 10 rupees a day -- less than 15 cents. 
Bank manager refused to open the account of Kantabai. 
He said Kantabai's amount is too small and it's not worth his time. 
Kantabai was not asking any loan from the bank. 
She was not asking any subsidy or grant from the government. 
What she was asking was to have a safe place to save her hard-earned money. 
And that was her right. 
And I went -- I said if banks are not opening the account of Kantabai, why not start the bank which will give an opportunity for women like Kantabai to save? 
And I applied for the banking license to Reserve Bank of India. 
(Applause) No, it was not an easy task. 
Our license was rejected -- (Laughter) on the grounds -- Reserve Bank said that we cannot issue a license to the bank whose promoting members who are nonliterate. 
I was terrified. 
I was crying. 
And by coming back home, I was continuously crying. 
I told Kantabai and other women that we couldn't get the license because our women are nonliterate. 
Our women said, "Stop crying. 
We will learn to read and write and apply again, so what?" 
(Applause) We started our literacy classes. 
Every day our women would come. 
They were so determined that after working the whole day, they would come to the class and learn to read and write. 
After five months, we applied again, but this time I didn't go alone. 
Fifteen women accompanied me to Reserve Bank of India. 
Our women told the officer of Reserve Bank, "You rejected the license because we cannot read and write. 
You rejected the license because we are nonliterate." 
But they said, "There were no schools when we were growing, so we are not responsible for our noneducation." 
And they said, "We cannot read and write, but we can count." 
(Laughter) (Applause) And they challenged the officer. 
"Then tell us to calculate the interest of any principal amount." 
(Laughter) "If we are unable to do it, don't give us license. 
Tell your officers to do it without a calculator and see who can calculate faster." 
(Applause) Needless to say, we got the banking license. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Today, more than 100,000 women are banking with us and we have more than 20 million dollars of capital. 
This is all women's savings, women capital, no outside investors asking for a business plan. 
No. 
It's our own rural women's savings. 
(Applause) I also want to say that yes, after we got the license, today Kantabai has her own house and is staying with her family in her own house for herself and her family. 
(Applause) When we started our banking operations, I could see that our women were not able to come to the bank because they used to lose the working day. 
I thought if women are not coming to the bank, bank will go to them, and we started doorstep banking. 
Recently, we starting digital banking. 
Digital banking required to remember a PIN number. 
Our women said, "We don't want a PIN number. 
That's not a good idea." 
And we tried to explain to them that maybe you should remember the PIN number; we will help you to remember the PIN number. 
They were firm. 
They said, "suggest something else," and they -- (Laughter) and they said, "What about thumb?" 
I thought that's a great idea. 
We'll link that digital banking with biometric, and now women use the digital financial transaction by using the thumb. 
And you know what they said? 
They said, "Anybody can steal my PIN number and take away my hard-earned money, but nobody can steal my thumb." 
(Applause) That reinforced the teaching which I have always learned from women: never provide poor solutions to poor people. 
They are smart. 
(Applause) A few months later, another woman came to the bank -- Kerabai. 
She mortgaged her gold and took the loan. 
I asked Kerabai, "Why are you mortgaging your precious jewelry and taking a loan?" 
Kerabai said, "Don't you realize that it's a terrible drought? 
There's no food or fodder for the animals. 
No water. 
I'm mortgaging gold to buy food and fodder for my animals." 
And then she asks me, "Can I mortgage gold and get water?" 
I had no answer. 
Kerabai challenged me: "You're working in the village with women and finance, but what if one day there's no water? 
If you leave this village, with whom are you going to do banking?" 
Kerabai had a valid question, so in this drought, we decided to start the cattle camp in the area. 
It's where farmers can bring their animals to one place and get fodder and water. 
It didn't rain. 
Cattle camp was extended for 18 months. 
Kerabai used to move around in the cattle camp and sing the songs of encouragement. 
Kerabai became very popular. 
It rained and cattle camp was ended, but after cattle camp ended, Kerabai came to our radio -- we have community radio which has more than 100,000 listeners. 
She said, "I want to have a regular show on the radio." 
Our radio manager said, "Kerabai, you cannot read and write. 
How will you write the script?" 
You know what she replied? 
"I cannot read and write, but I can sing. 
What's the big deal?" 
(Laughter) And today, Kerabai is doing a regular radio program, and not only that, she's become a famous radio jockey and she has been invited by all of the radios, even from Mumbai. 
She gets the invitation and she does the show. 
(Applause) Kerabai has become a local celebrity. 
One day I asked Kerabai, "How did you end up singing?" 
She said, "Shall I tell you the real fact? 
When I was pregnant with my first child, I was always hungry. 
I did not have enough food to eat. 
I did not have enough money to buy food, and so to forget my hunger, I started singing." 
So strong and wise, no? 
I always think that our women overcome so many obstacles -- cultural, social, financial -- and they find out their ways. 
I would like to share another story: Sunita Kamble. 
She has taken a course in a business school, and she has become a veterinary doctor. 
She's Dalit; she comes from an untouchable caste, but she does artificial insemination in goats. 
It is a very male-dominated profession and it is all the more difficult for Sunita because Sunita comes from an untouchable caste. 
But she worked very hard. 
She did successful goat deliveries in the region and she became a famous goat doctor. 
Recently, she got a national award. 
I went to Sunita's house to celebrate -- to congratulate her. 
When I entered the village, I saw a big cutout of Sunita. 
Sunita was smiling on that picture. 
I was really surprised to see an untouchable, coming from the village, having a big cutout at the entrance of the village. 
When I went to her house, I was even more amazed because upper caste leaders -- men -- were sitting in the house, in her house, and having chai and water, which is very rare in India. 
Upper caste leaders do not go to an untouchable's house and have chai or water. 
And they were requesting her to come and address the gathering of the village. 
Sunita broke centuries-old caste conditioning in India. 
(Applause) Let me come to what the younger generations do. 
As I'm standing here -- I'm so proud as I stand here, from Mhaswad to Vancouver. 
Back home, Sarita Bhise -- she's not even 16 years old. 
She's preparing herself -- she's a part of our sports program, Champions' program. 
She's preparing herself to represent India in field hockey. 
And you know where she's going? 
She's going to represent in 2020 Olympics, Tokyo. 
(Applause) Sarita comes from a very poor shepherd community. 
I am just -- I couldn't be more proud of her. 
There are millions of women like Sarita, Kerabai, Sunita, who can be around you also. 
They can be all over the world, but at first glance you may think that they do not have anything to say, they do not have anything to share. 
You would be so wrong. 
I am so lucky that I'm working with these women. 
They are sharing their stories with me, they are sharing their wisdom with me, and I'm just lucky to be with them. 
20 years before -- and I'm so proud -- we went to Reserve Bank of India and we set up the first rural women's bank. 
Today they are pushing me to go to National Stock Exchange to set up the first fund dedicated to micro rural women entrepreneurs. 
They are pushing me to set up the first small finance women's bank in the world. 
And as one of them said, "My courage is my capital." 
And I say here, their courage is my capital. 
And if you want, it can be yours also. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cancer. 
It's a devastating disease that takes an enormous emotional toll. 
Not only on the patient, but the patient's loved ones, as well. 
It is a battle that the human race has been fighting for centuries. 
And while we've made some advancements, we still haven't beaten it. 
Two out of five people in the US will develop cancer in their lifetime. 
Of those, 90 percent will succumb to the disease due to metastases. 
Metastasis is a spread of cancer from a primary site to a distal site, through the circulatory or the lymphatic system. 
For instance, a female patient with breast cancer doesn't succumb to the disease simply because she has a mass on her breast. 
She succumbs to the disease because it spreads to the lungs, liver, lymph nodes, brain, bone, where it becomes unresectable or untreatable. 
Metastasis is a complicated process. 
One that I've studied for several years now. 
And something that my team and I discovered recently was that cancer cells are able to communicate with each other and coordinate their movement, based on how closely packed they are in the tumor microenvironment. 
They communicate with each other through two signaling molecules called Interleukin-6 and Interleukin-8. 
Now, like anything else in nature, when things get a little too tight, the signal is enhanced, causing the cancer cells to move away faster from the primary site and spread to a new site. 
So, if we block this signal, using a drug cocktail that we developed, we can stop the communication between cancer cells and slow down the spread of cancer. 
Let me pause here for a second and take you back to when this all began for me in 2010, when I was just a sophomore in college. 
I had just started working in Dr Danny Wirtz's lab at Johns Hopkins University. 
And I'll be honest: I was a young, naive, Sri Lankan girl, (Laughter) who had no previous research experience. 
And I was tasked to look at how cancer cells move in a 3D collagen I matrix that recapsulated, in a dish, the conditions that cancer cells are exposed to in our bodies. 
This was new and exciting for me, because previous work had been done on 2D, flat, plastic dishes that really weren't representative of what the cancer cells are exposed to in our bodies. 
Because, let's face it, the cancer cells in our bodies aren't stuck onto plastic dishes. 
It was during this time that I attended a seminar conducted by Dr Bonnie Bassler from Princeton University, where she talked about how bacteria cells communicate with each other, based on their population density, and perform a specific action. 
It was at this moment that a light bulb went off in my head, and I thought, "Wow, I see this in my cancer cells every day, when it comes to their movement." 
The idea for my project was thus born. 
I hypothesized that cancer cells are able to communicate with each other and coordinate their movement, based on how closely packed they are in the tumor microenvironment. 
I became obsessed with pursuing this hypothesis. 
And fortunately, I work for someone who is open to running with my crazy ideas. 
So, I threw myself into this project. 
However, I couldn't do it by myself. 
I needed help. 
I definitely needed help. 
So we recruited undergraduate students, graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and professors from different institutions and multiple disciplines to come together and work on this idea that I conceived as a sophomore in college. 
After years of conducting experiments together and merging different ideas and perspectives, we discovered a new signaling pathway that controls how cancer cells communicate with each other and move, based on their cell density. 
Some of you might have heard this, because most of social media knows it as the Hasini effect. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And we weren't done yet. 
We then decided that we wanted to block this signaling pathway and see if we could slow down the spread of cancer. 
Which we did, in preclinical animal models. 
We came up with a drug cocktail consisting of tocilizumab, which is currently used to treat rheumatoid arthritis, and reparixin, which is currently in clinical trials against breast cancer. 
And interestingly, what we found was that this cocktail of drugs really had no effect on tumor growth, but directly targeted metastases. 
This was a significant finding, because currently, there aren't any FDA-approved therapeutics that directly target the spread of cancer. 
In fact, the spread of cancer, metastasis, is thought of as a byproduct of tumor growth. 
Where the idea is, if we can stop the tumor from growing, we can stop the tumor from spreading. 
However, most of us know that this is not true. 
We, on the other hand, came up with the drug cocktail that targets metastasis not by targeting tumor growth, but by targeting the complex mechanisms that govern it, through the targeting of the Hasini effect. 
(Laughter) This work was recently published in "Nature Communications," and my team and I received an overwhelming response from around the world. 
Nobody on my team could have predicted this sort of response. 
We seem to have struck a nerve. 
Looking back, I am extremely grateful for the positive response that I received, not only from academia, but also patients, and people around the world affected by this terrible disease. 
As I reflect on this success I've encountered with the Hasini effect, I keep coming back to the people that I was fortunate enough to work with. 
The undergraduate students who demonstrated superhuman powers through their hard work and dedication. 
The graduate students and the postdoctoral fellows, my fellow Avengers, who taught me new techniques and always made sure I stayed on track. 
The professors, my Yodas and my Obi-Wan Kenobis, who brought their expertise into making this work into what it is today. 
The support staff, the friends and family, people who lifted our spirits, and never let us give up on our ambitious endeavors. 
The best kind of sidekicks we could have asked for. 
It took a village to help me study metastasis. 
And believe me, without my village, I wouldn't be here. 
Today, our team has grown, and we are using the Hasini effect to develop combination therapies that will effectively target tumor growth and metastases. 
We are engineering new anticancer therapeutics, to limit toxicity and to reduce drug resistance. 
And we are developing groundbreaking systems that will help for the development of better human clinical trials. 
It blows my mind to think that all this, the incredible work that I'm pursuing -- and the fact that I'm standing here, talking to you today -- all came from this tiny idea that I had when I was sitting at the back of a seminar when I was just 20 years old. 
I recognize that right now, I am on this incredible journey that allows me to pursue work that I am extremely passionate about, and something that feeds my curiosity on a daily basis. 
But I have to say, my favorite part of all of this -- other than, of course, being here, talking to you, today -- is the fact that I get to work with a diverse group of people, who make my work stronger, better and just so much more fun. 
And because of this, I have to say that collaboration is my favorite superhuman power. 
And what I love about this power is that it's not unique to me. 
It's within all of us. 
My work shows that even cancer cells use collaboration to invade our bodies and spread their wrath. 
For us humans, it is a superpower that has produced incredible discoveries in the medical and scientific field. 
And it is the superpower that we can all turn to to inspire us to create something bigger than ourselves, that will help make the world a better place. 
Collaboration is the superpower that I turn to, to help me fight cancer. 
And I am confident that with the right collaborations, we will beat this terrible disease. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

So imagine that a plane is about to crash with 250 children and babies, and if you knew how to stop that, would you? 
Now imagine that 60 planes full of babies under five crash every single day. 
That's the number of kids that never make it to their fifth birthday. 
6.6 million children never make it to their fifth birthday. 
Most of these deaths are preventable, and that doesn't just make me sad, it makes me angry, and it makes me determined. 
Diarrhea and pneumonia are among the top two killers of children under five, and what we can do to prevent these diseases isn't some smart, new technological innovations. 
It's one of the world's oldest inventions: a bar of soap. 
Washing hands with soap, a habit we all take for granted, can reduce diarrhea by half, can reduce respiratory infections by one third. 
Handwashing with soap can have an impact on reducing flu, trachoma, SARS, and most recently in the case of cholera and Ebola outbreak, one of the key interventions is handwashing with soap. 
Handwashing with soap keeps kids in school. 
It stops babies from dying. 
Handwashing with soap is one of the most cost-effective ways of saving children's lives. 
It can save over 600,000 children every year. 
That's the equivalent of stopping 10 jumbo jets full of babies and children from crashing every single day. 
I think you'll agree with me that that's a pretty useful public health intervention. 
So now just take a minute. 
I think you need to get to know the person next to you. 
Why don't you just shake their hands. 
Please shake their hands. 
All right, get to know each other. 
They look really pretty. 
All right. 
So what if I told you that the person whose hands you just shook actually didn't wash their hands when they were coming out of the toilet? (Laughter) They don't look so pretty anymore, right? 
Pretty yucky, you would agree with me. 
Well, statistics are actually showing that four people out of five don't wash their hands when they come out of the toilet, globally. 
And the same way, we don't do it when we've got fancy toilets, running water, and soap available, it's the same thing in the countries where child mortality is really high. 
What is it? Is there no soap? 
Actually, soap is available. 
In 90 percent of households in India, 94 percent of households in Kenya, you will find soap. 
Even in countries where soap is the lowest, like Ethiopia, we are at 50 percent. 
So why is it? 
Why aren't people washing their hands? 
Why is it that Mayank, this young boy that I met in India, isn't washing his hands? 
Well, in Mayank's family, soap is used for bathing, soap is used for laundry, soap is used for washing dishes. 
His parents think sometimes it's a precious commodity, so they'll keep it in a cupboard. 
They'll keep it away from him so he doesn't waste it. 
On average, in Mayank's family, they will use soap for washing hands once a day at the very best, and sometimes even once a week for washing hands with soap. 
What's the result of that? 
Children pick up disease in the place that's supposed to love them and protect them the most, in their homes. 
Think about where you learned to wash your hands. 
Did you learn to wash your hands at home? 
Did you learn to wash your hands in school? 
I think behavioral scientists will tell you that it's very difficult to change the habits that you have had early in life. 
However, we all copy what everyone else does, and local cultural norms are something that shape how we change our behavior, and this is where the private sector comes in. 
Every second in Asia and Africa, 111 mothers will buy this bar to protect their family. 
Many women in India will tell you they learned all about hygiene, diseases, from this bar of soap from Lifebuoy brand. 
Iconic brands like this one have a responsibility to do good in the places where they sell their products. 
It's that belief, plus the scale of Unilever, that allows us to keep talking about handwashing with soap and hygiene to these mothers. 
Big businesses and brands can change and shift those social norms and make a difference for those habits that are so stubborn. 
Think about it: Marketeers spend all their time making us switch from one brand to the other. 
And actually, they know how to transform science and facts into compelling messages. 
Just for a minute, imagine when they put all their forces behind a message as powerful as handwashing with soap. 
The profit motive is transforming health outcomes in this world. 
But it's been happening for centuries: the Lifebuoy brand was launched in 1894 in Victorian England to actually combat cholera. 
Last week, I was in Ghana with the minister of health, because if you don't know, there's a cholera outbreak in Ghana at the moment. 
A hundred and eighteen years later, the solution is exactly the same: It's about ensuring that they have access to this bar of soap, and that they're using it, because that's the number one way to actually stop cholera from spreading. 
I think this drive for profit is extremely powerful, sometimes more powerful than the most committed charity or government. 
Government is doing what they can, especially in terms of the pandemics and epidemics such as cholera, or Ebola at the moment, but with competing priorities. 
The budget is not always there. 
And when you think about this, you think about what is required to make handwashing a daily habit, it requires sustained funding to refine this behavior. 
In short, those that fight for public health are actually dependent upon the soap companies to keep promoting handwashing with soap. 
We have friends like USAID, the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing with Soap, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Plan, WaterAid, that all believe for a win-win-win partnership. 
Win for the public sector, because we help them reach their targets. 
Win for the private sector, because we build new generations of future handwashers. 
And most importantly, win for the most vulnerable. 
On October 15, we will celebrate Global Handwashing Day. 
Schools, communities, our friends in the public sector and our friends in the private sector — yes, on that day even our competitors, we all join hands to celebrate the world's most important public health intervention. 
What's required, and again where the private sector can make a huge difference, is coming up with this big, creative thinking that drives advocacy. 
If you take our Help a Child Reach 5 campaign, we've created great films that bring the message of handwashing with soap to the everyday person in a way that can relate to them. 
We've had over 30 million views. 
Most of these discussions are still happening online. 
I urge you to take five minutes and look at those films. 
I come from Mali, one of the world's poorest countries. 
I grew up in a family where every dinner conversation was around social justice. 
I trained in Europe's premier school of public health. 
I think I'm probably one of the only women in my country with this high degree in health, and the only one with a doctorate in handwashing with soap. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Nine years ago, I decided, with a successful public health career in the making, that I could make the biggest impact coming, selling and promoting the world's best invention in public health: soap. 
We run today the world's largest handwashing program by any public health standards. 
We've reached over 183 million people in 16 countries. 
My team and I have the ambition to reach one billion by 2020. 
Over the last four years, business has grown double digits, whilst child mortality has reduced in all the places where soap use has increased. 
It may be uncomfortable for some to hear — business growth and lives saved somehow equated in the same sentence — but it is that business growth that allows us to keep doing more. 
Without it, and without talking about it, we cannot achieve the change that we need. 
Last week, my team and I spent time visiting mothers that have all experienced the same thing: the death of a newborn. 
I'm a mom. I can't imagine anything more powerful and more painful. 
This one is from Myanmar. 
She had the most beautiful smile, the smile, I think, that life gives you when you've had a second chance. 
Her son, Myo, is her second one. 
She had a daughter who passed away at three weeks, and we know that the majority of children that actually die die in the first month of their life, and we know that if we give a bar of soap to every skilled birth attendant, and that if soap is used before touching the babies, we can reduce and make a change in terms of those numbers. 
And that's what inspires me, inspires me to continue in this mission, to know that I can equip her with what's needed so that she can do the most beautiful job in the world: nurturing her newborn. 
And next time you think of a gift for a new mom and her family, don't look far: buy her soap. 
It's the most beautiful invention in public health. 
I hope you will join us and make handwashing part of your daily lives and our daily lives and help more children like Myo reach their fifth birthday. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

So I started working with refugees because I wanted to make a difference, and making a difference starts with telling their stories. 
So when I meet refugees, I always ask them questions. 
Who bombed your house? 
Who killed your son? 
Did the rest of your family make it out alive? 
How are you coping in your life in exile? 
But there's one question that always seems to me to be most revealing, and that is: What did you take? 
What was that most important thing that you had to take with you when the bombs were exploding in your town, and the armed gangs were approaching your house? 
A Syrian refugee boy I know told me that he didn't hesitate when his life was in imminent danger. 
He took his high school diploma, and later he told me why. 
He said, "I took my high school diploma because my life depended on it." 
And he would risk his life to get that diploma. 
On his way to school, he would dodge snipers. 
His classroom sometimes shook with the sound of bombs and shelling, and his mother told me, "Every day, I would say to him every morning, 'Honey, please don't go to school.'" And when he insisted, she said, "I would hug him as if it were for the last time." 
But he said to his mother, "We're all afraid, but our determination to graduate is stronger than our fear." 
But one day, the family got terrible news. 
Hany's aunt, his uncle and his cousin were murdered in their homes for refusing to leave their house. 
Their throats were slit. 
It was time to flee. 
They left that day, right away, in their car, Hany hidden in the back because they were facing checkpoints of menacing soldiers. 
And they would cross the border into Lebanon, where they would find peace. 
But they would begin a life of grueling hardship and monotony. 
They had no choice but to build a shack on the side of a muddy field, and this is Hany's brother Ashraf, who plays outside. 
And that day, they joined the biggest population of refugees in the world, in a country, Lebanon, that is tiny. 
It only has four million citizens, and there are one million Syrian refugees living there. 
There's not a town, a city or a village that is not host to Syrian refugees. 
This is generosity and humanity that is remarkable. 
Think about it this way, proportionately. 
It would be as if the entire population of Germany, 80 million people, would flee to the United States in just three years. 
Half of the entire population of Syria is now uprooted, most of them inside the country. 
Six and a half million people have fled for their lives. 
Over and well over three million people have crossed the borders and have found sanctuary in the neighboring countries, and only a small proportion, as you see, have moved on to Europe. 
What I find most worrying is that half of all Syrian refugees are children. 
I took this picture of this little girl. 
It was just two hours after she had arrived after a long trek from Syria into Jordan. 
And most troubling of all is that only 20 percent of Syrian refugee children are in school in Lebanon. 
And yet, Syrian refugee children, all refugee children tell us education is the most important thing in their lives. 
Why? Because it allows them to think of their future rather than the nightmare of their past. 
It allows them to think of hope rather than hatred. 
I'm reminded of a recent visit I took to a Syrian refugee camp in northern Iraq, and I met this girl, and I thought, "She's beautiful," and I went up to her and asked her, "Can I take your picture?" 
And she said yes, but she refused to smile. 
I think she couldn't, because I think she must realize that she represents a lost generation of Syrian refugee children, a generation isolated and frustrated. 
And yet, look at what they fled: utter destruction, buildings, industries, schools, roads, homes. 
Hany's home was also destroyed. 
This will need to be rebuilt by architects, by engineers, by electricians. 
Communities will need teachers and lawyers and politicians interested in reconciliation and not revenge. 
Shouldn't this be rebuilt by the people with the largest stake, the societies in exile, the refugees? 
Refugees have a lot of time to prepare for their return. 
You might imagine that being a refugee is just a temporary state. 
Well far from it. 
With wars going on and on, the average time a refugee will spend in exile is 17 years. 
Hany was into his second year in limbo when I went to visit him recently, and we conducted our entire conversation in English, which he confessed to me he learned from reading all of Dan Brown's novels and from listening to American rap. 
We also spent some nice moments of laughter and fun with his beloved brother Ashraf. 
But I'll never forget what he told me when we ended our conversation that day. 
He said to me, "If I am not a student, I am nothing." 
Hany is one of 50 million people uprooted in this world today. 
Never since World War II have so many people been forcibly displaced. 
So while we're making sweeping progress in human health, in technology, in education and design, we are doing dangerously little to help the victims and we are doing far too little to stop and prevent the wars that are driving them from their homes. 
And there are more and more victims. 
Every day, on average, by the end of this day, 32,000 people will be forcibly displaced from their homes — 32,000 people. 
They flee across borders like this one. 
We captured this on the Syrian border to Jordan, and this is a typical day. 
Or they flee on unseaworthy and overcrowded boats, risking their lives in this case just to reach safety in Europe. 
This Syrian young man survived one of these boats that capsized — most of the people drowned — and he told us, "Syrians are just looking for a quiet place where nobody hurts you, where nobody humiliates you, and where nobody kills you." 
Well, I think that should be the minimum. 
How about a place of healing, of learning, and even opportunity? 
Americans and Europeans have the impression that proportionally huge numbers of refugees are coming to their country, but the reality is that 86 percent, the vast majority of refugees, are living in the developing world, in countries struggling with their own insecurity, with their own issues of helping their own populations and poverty. 
So wealthy countries in the world should recognize the humanity and the generosity of the countries that are hosting so many refugees. 
And all countries should make sure that no one fleeing war and persecution arrives at a closed border. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
But there is something more that we can do than just simply helping refugees survive. 
We can help them thrive. 
We should think of refugee camps and communities as more than just temporary population centers where people languish waiting for the war to end. 
Rather, as centers of excellence, where refugees can triumph over their trauma and train for the day that they can go home as agents of positive change and social transformation. 
It makes so much sense, but I'm reminded of the terrible war in Somalia that has been raging on for 22 years. 
And imagine living in this camp. 
I visited this camp. 
It's in Djibouti, neighboring Somalia, and it was so remote that we had to take a helicopter to fly there. 
It was dusty and it was terribly hot. 
And we went to visit a school and started talking to the children, and then I saw this girl across the room who looked to me to be the same age as my own daughter, and I went up and talked to her. 
And I asked her the questions that grown-ups ask kids, like, "What is your favorite subject?" 
and, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" 
And this is when her face turned blank, and she said to me, "I have no future. 
My schooling days are over." 
And I thought, there must be some misunderstanding, so I turned to my colleague and she confirmed to me there is no funding for secondary education in this camp. 
And how I wished at that moment that I could say to her, "We will build you a school." 
And I also thought, what a waste. 
She should be and she is the future of Somalia. 
A boy named Jacob Atem had a different chance, but not before he experienced terribly tragedy. 
He watched — this is in Sudan — as his village — he was only seven years old — burned to the ground, and he learned that his mother and his father and his entire family were killed that day. 
Only his cousin survived, and the two of them walked for seven months — this is boys like him — chased and pursued by wild animals and armed gangs, and they finally made it to refugee camps where they found safety, and he would spend the next seven years in Kenya in a refugee camp. 
But his life changed when he got the chance to be resettled to the United States, and he found love in a foster family and he was able to go to school, and he wanted me to share with you this proud moment when he graduated from university. 
(Applause) I spoke to him on Skype the other day, and he was in his new university in Florida pursuing his Ph.D. in public health, and he proudly told me how he was able to raise enough funds from the American public to establish a health clinic back in his village back home. 
So I want to take you back to Hany. 
When I told him I was going to have the chance to speak to you here on the TED stage, he allowed me to read you a poem that he sent in an email to me. 
He wrote: "I miss myself, my friends, times of reading novels or writing poems, birds and tea in the morning. 
My room, my books, myself, and everything that was making me smile. 
Oh, oh, I had so many dreams that were about to be realized." 
So here is my point: Not investing in refugees is a huge missed opportunity. 
Leave them abandoned, and they risk exploitation and abuse, and leave them unskilled and uneducated, and delay by years the return to peace and prosperity in their countries. 
I believe how we treat the uprooted will shape the future of our world. 
The victims of war can hold the keys to lasting peace, and it's the refugees who can stop the cycle of violence. 
Hany is at a tipping point. 
We would love to help him go to university and to become an engineer, but our funds are prioritized for the basics in life: tents and blankets and mattresses and kitchen sets, food rations and a bit of medicine. 
University is a luxury. 
But leave him to languish in this muddy field, and he will become a member of a lost generation. 
Hany's story is a tragedy, but it doesn't have to end that way. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

[This talk contains mature language Viewer discretion is advised] If we traveled back to the year 800 BC, in Greece, we would see that merchants whose businesses failed were forced to sit in the marketplace with a basket over their heads. 
In premodern Italy, failed business owners, who had outstanding debts, were taken totally naked to the public square where they had to bang their butts against a special stone while a crowd jeered at them. 
In the 17th century in France, failed business owners were taken to the center of the market, where the beginning of their bankruptcy was publicly announced. 
And in order to avoid immediate imprisonment, they had to wear a green bonnet so that everyone knew they were a failure. 
Of course, these are extreme examples. 
But it is important to remember that when we excessively punish those who fail, we stifle innovation and business creation, the engines of economic growth in any country. 
Time has passed, and today we don't publicly humiliate failed entrepreneurs. 
And they don't broadcast their failures on social media. 
In fact, I think that all of us can relate with the pain of failure. 
But we don't share the details of those experiences. 
And I totally get it, my friends, I have also been there. 
I had a business that failed and sharing that story was incredibly hard. 
In fact, it required seven years, a good dose of vulnerability and the company of my friends. 
This is my failure story. 
When I was in college, studying business, I met a group of indigenous women. 
They lived in a poor rural community in the state of Puebla, in central Mexico. 
They made beautiful handmade products. 
And when I met them and I saw their work, I decided I wanted to help. 
With some friends, I cofounded a social enterprise with the mission to help the women create an income stream and improve their quality of life. 
We did everything by the book, as we had learned in business school. 
We got investors, we spent a lot of time building the business and training the women. 
But soon we realized we were novices. 
The handmade products were not selling, and the financial plan we had made was totally unrealistic. 
In fact, we worked for years without a salary, hoping that a miracle would happen, that magically a great buyer would arrive and she would make the business profitable. 
But that miracle never happened. 
In the end, we had to close the business, and that broke my heart. 
I started everything to create a positive impact on the life of the artisans. 
And I felt that I have done the opposite. 
I felt so guilty that I decided to hide this failure from my conversations and my resume for years. 
I didn't know other failed entrepreneurs, and I thought I was the only loser in the world. 
One night, seven years later, I was out with some friends and we were talking about the life of the entrepreneur. 
And of course, the issue of failure came out. 
I decided to confess to my friends the story of my failed business. 
And they shared similar stories. 
In that moment, a thought became really clear in my mind: all of my friends were failures. 
(Laughter) Being more serious, that night I realized that A: I wasn't the only loser in the world, and B: we all have hidden failures. 
Please tell me if that is not true. 
That night was like an exorcism for me. 
I realized that sharing your failures makes you stronger, not weaker. 
And being open to my vulnerability helped me connect with others in a deeper and more meaningful way and embrace life lessons I wouldn't have learned previously. 
As a consequence of this experience of sharing stories of businesses that didn't work, we decided to create a platform of events to help others share their failure stories. 
And we called it Fuckup Nights. 
Years later, we also created a research center devoted to the story of failure and its implications on business, people and society and as we love cool names, we called it the Failure Institute. 
It has been surprising to see that when an entrepreneur stands on a stage and shares a story of failure, she can actually enjoy that experience. 
It doesn't have to be a moment of shame and embarrassment, as it used to be in the past. 
It is an opportunity to share lessons learned and build empathy. 
We have also discovered that when the members of a team share their failures, magic happens. 
Bonds grow stronger and collaboration becomes easier. 
Through our events and research projects, we have found some interesting facts. 
For instance, that men and women react in a different way after the failure of a business. 
The most common reaction among men is to start a new business within one year of failure, but in a different sector, while women decide to look for a job and postpone the creation of a new business. 
Our hypothesis is that this happens because women tend to suffer more from the impostor syndrome. 
We feel that we need something else to be a good entrepreneur. 
But I have seen that in many, many cases women have everything that's needed. 
We just need to take the step. 
And in the case of men, it is more common to see that they feel they have enough knowledge and just need to put it in practice in another place with better luck. 
Another interesting finding has been that there are regional differences on how entrepreneurs cope with failure. 
For instance, the most common reaction after the failure of a business in the American continent is to go back to school. 
While in Europe, the most common reaction is to look for a therapist. 
(Laughter) We're not sure which is a better reaction after the failure of a business, but this is something we will study in the future. 
Another interesting finding has been the profound impact that public policy has on failed entrepreneurs. 
For instance, in my country, in Mexico, the regulatory environment is so hard, that closing a business can take you a lot of time and a lot of money. 
Let's begin with the money. 
In the best possible scenario, meaning you don't have problems with partners, providers, clients, employees, in the best possible scenario, officially closing a business will cost you 2,000 dollars. 
Which is a lot of money in Mexico. 
Someone who earns the minimum wage would have to work for 15 months to save this amount. 
Now, let's talk about the time. 
As you may know, in most of the developing world, the average life expectancy of a business is two years. 
In Mexico, the process of officially closing a business takes two years. 
What happens when the average life expectancy of a business is so similar to the time it will take you to close it if it doesn't work? 
Of course, this discourages business creation and promotes informal economy. 
In fact, econometric research has proved that if the process of declaring bankruptcy takes less time and less money, more new firms will enter the market. 
For this reason, in 2017, we proposed a series of public policy recommendations for the procedure of officially closing businesses in Mexico. 
For a whole year, we worked with entrepreneurs from all over the country and with Congress. 
And the good news is that we managed to help change the law. 
Yay! 
(Applause) The idea is that when the new regulation comes into force, entrepreneurs will be able to close their businesses in an online procedure that is faster and inexpensive. 
(Sighs) On the night we invented Fuckup Nights, we never imagined that the movement would grow this big. 
We are in 80 countries now. 
In that moment, our only intention was to put the topic of failure on the table. 
To help our friends see that failure is something we must talk about. 
It is not a cause of humiliation, as it used to be in the past, or a cause of celebration, as some people say. 
In fact, I want to confess something. 
Every time I listen to Silicon Valley types or students bragging about failing fast and often like it's no big deal, I cringe. 
Because I think that there is a dark side on the mantra "fail fast." 
Of course, failing fast is a great way to accelerate learning and avoid wasting time. 
But I fear that when we present rapid failure to entrepreneurs as their one and only option, we might be promoting laziness. 
We might be promoting that entrepreneurs give up too easily. 
I also fear that the culture of rapid failure could be minimizing the devastating consequences of the failure of a business. 
For instance, when my social enterprise died, the worst part was that I had to go back to the indigenous community and tell the women that the business had failed and it was my fault. 
For some people this could be seen like a great learning opportunity for me, but the truth is that the closure of this business represented much more than that. 
It meant that the women would stop receiving an income that they really needed. 
For this reason, I want to propose something. 
I want to propose that just as we put aside the idea of publicly humiliating failed entrepreneurs, we must put aside the idea that failing fast is always the best. 
And I want to propose a new mantra: fail mindfully. 
We must remember that businesses are made of people, businesses are not entities that appear and disappear magically without consequences. 
When a firm dies, some people will lose their jobs. 
And others will lose their money. 
And in the case of social and green enterprises, the death of this business can have a negative impact on the ecosystems or communities they were trying to serve. 
But what does it mean to fail mindfully? 
It means being aware of the impact, of the consequences of the failure of that business. 
Being aware of the lessons learned. 
And being aware of the responsibility to share those learnings with the world. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

(Music) (Applause) 

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

When is seeing not believing? 
A couple years ago, my friend sent me this photo from Ürümqi, which is the capital of Xinjiang province in northwest China. 
On this particular day, she couldn't believe her eyes. 
Checking the quality of the air outside using this app on her iPad, the numbers were telling her the air quality was good, one on a scale of 500. 
But when she looked outside, she saw something much different. 
Yes, those are buildings in the background. 
(Laughter) But the data were simply not telling the truth of what people were seeing and breathing, and it's because they were failing to measure PM2.5, or fine particulate pollution. 
When PM2.5 levels went off the charts in 2012, or "crazy bad," as the US Embassy once described it in a tweet, Chinese denizens took to social media and they started to question why it was that they were seeing this disconnect between official air quality statistics and what they were seeing and breathing for themselves. 
Now, this questioning has led to an environmental awakening of sorts in China, forcing China's government to tackle its pollution problems. 
Now China has the opportunity to become a global environmental leader. 
But the picture that I'll paint for you today is one that's mixed. 
There are some signs that are very promising, and there are other trends that are more troubling that warrant closer attention. 
But now let's go back to the story at hand. 
I started to witness the beginnings of China's green evolution when I was a PhD student conducting fieldwork in China in 2011. 
I traveled all across the country seeking answers to the question that I often got myself from the skeptical outsider: What, you mean China is doing something on the environment? 
They have environmental policies? 
What policies? 
At that time, PM2.5 data was considered too politically sensitive and so the government was keeping it secret, but citizens were becoming aware of its harmful human health effects, and they were demanding greater transparency on the part of the government. 
I actually started to see some of this growing evolution and awareness myself cropping up all over China. 
Department stores, for example, started to market these air purifiers that could filter out harmful PM2.5. 
Citizens were also adopting PM2.5 as the title of musical festivals. 
(Laughter) And then I went to a golf course in Shenzhen, which is in southern China, and you can see from this banner, they're advertising a retreat from PM2.5. 
Golf sub-par, but don't breathe sub-par air. 
And then Shanghai's Environmental Protection Bureau decided to create a mascot named after the air quality index to better communicate the air quality data to its people. 
I call her AQI Girl, and her expression and hair color changes depending on the quality of air outside. 
Five years later and she's still the mostly smiling face of Shanghai's air quality. 
And then in 2015, former CCTV reporter Chai Jing created this documentary called "Under the Dome." 
It would be likened to Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring." 
And much like Rachel Carson brought to attention the fact that pesticides were harming human health, "Under the Dome" stamped into the popular consciousness that air pollution was leading to one million premature deaths every year in China alone. 
This video garnered more than a hundred million views in a single weekend before China's government, fearing that it might incite some type of social unrest, pulled it from the internet. 
But the damage had already been done. 
Public outcry over air pollution galvanized China's government, perhaps in an act of self-preservation, to think big and decisively about how it could tackle the root of its air pollution and many of its other environmental problems: its energy system. 
For you see, in China, about two thirds of its electricity comes from coal. 
China has more coal-fired power plants than any other country in the world, about 40 percent of the global total, and it's because of this fact that China's government has decided since 2014 to wage a war on coal, shutting down small coal mines, setting limits on coal consumption, even canceling an Australia's worth of coal-fired power plants. 
They've also been making enormous investments when it comes to clean and renewable energy, like hydropower, wind and solar, and the pace and the scale of this transformation has been absolutely mind-blowing. 
Let me give you a couple of statistics to show you what I mean. 
China leads the world when it comes to hydropower, with a third of total capacity. 
There's enough for every Chinese citizen to power two homes in a single year from hydropower alone. 
You may have heard of the Three Gorges Dam, pictured here, which is the largest power station in the world, and it's powered by water. 
In terms of wind power, China has a third of the global capacity. 
This makes it the number one leader by far. 
When we look at solar, China's also leading. 
In fact, they crushed their 2020 target of installing 105 gigawatts of solar power. 
This is after the government already revised upwards several times its solar energy target between 2009 and 2015. 
Last year, in seven months alone, China was able to install a whopping 35 gigawatts of solar power. 
This is more than half of what the US has combined in total and China did this in just seven months alone. 
We can verify this remarkable growth in solar power from space, like the startup SpaceKnow has done in this slide. 
By 2020, China is on track to generate Germany's entire electricity consumption from just wind and solar power alone. 
It's pretty darn remarkable. 
And we see some evidence now that China's efforts on clean energy is actually having an effect, not just on air pollution reduction, but also on global climate change, where China has the world's largest carbon footprint. 
If we look at some of the data, we can see that China's coal consumption may have already reached a peak as early as 2013. 
This is a major reason why China's government announced that actually they've already achieved their 2020 carbon reduction pledge ahead of schedule. 
This reduction in coal consumption is also directly driving improvements in air quality across the country, as I've shown here in blue. 
In most major Chinese cities, air pollution has fallen by as much as 30 percent. 
And this reduction in air pollution is actually leading people to live longer lives in China, on average two and a half years more than they would have in 2013. 
In yellow, we can see the cities that have experienced the greatest improvements in air quality. 
But of course, as I mentioned at the beginning of this talk, we have to temper some of this optimism with a healthy dose of caution, and that's largely because the data are still being determined. 
At the end of last year, after roughly three years of pretty steady global carbon emissions, scientific projections suggest that global emissions may be on the rise again and that could be due to increases in China's fossil fuel consumptions, so they may not have reached that peak that I showed earlier. 
But of course, the statistics and the data are still murky and that's because China regularly revises its coal statistics after the fact. 
Actually, it's funny, since I've been here I've been having a debate on Twitter with other climate modelers, trying to figure out whether China's carbon emissions have gone up, gone down or whether they're staying relatively stable. 
And of course, China is still a rapidly developing country. 
It's still experimenting with a range of policies, like dockless bike sharing, which has been hailed as a possible sustainable transport solution. 
But then we have images of this bicycle graveyard that tell a more cautionary tale. 
Sometimes, solutions can move too fast and outpace demand. 
And of course, coal is still king in China, at least for now. 
So why should we care about what China is doing on the environment? 
Well, what China does at home on the environment can have global implications for the rest of us. 
To borrow a line from Chai Jing, we're all under the same dome, and air pollution that originates in China can travel beyond its borders and affect populations as far away as those in North America. 
China's not only exporting air pollution, but they're also exporting aid, infrastructure, technology abroad. 
President Xi Jinping in 2013 announced the One Belt, One Road Initiative, a massive, one-trillion-US-dollar infrastructure investment project in more than 60 other countries. 
And historically, when we've seen that China has made these infrastructure investments abroad, they haven't always been clean. 
The Global Environment Institute, a Chinese civil society group, found that in the last 15 years, China has invested in more than 240 coal-fired power plants in more than 68 countries affiliated with the One Belt, One Road Initiative. 
That's more than a quarter of China's own domestic coal-fired capacity that is exported abroad. 
So we can see that even though China is cleaning up at home, it's exporting some of that pollution to other countries, and greenhouse gas emissions simply don't have a passport. 
So when we're trying to evaluate this question of whether or not China is actually leading, we can see it's still very much an open debate. 
But time is running out. 
I've studied the climate models, and the outlook is not good. 
We still have a gap between current policies and what needs to happen if we want to avoid dangerous climate change. 
Leadership is what we desperately need, but it's not coming from the US, for example. 
The US administration last June announced its intent to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, so now people are looking towards China to fill that leadership void. 
So China is very much in the driver's seat determining our global environmental future. 
What they do on carbon trading, on clean energy, on air pollution, we can learn many lessons. 
One of those lessons is that clean energy is not just good for the environment, it can save lives by reducing air pollution. 
It's also good for the economy. 
We can see that last year, China was responsible for 30 percent of the global growth in green jobs. 
The US? Only six. 
So the picture that I just painted for you hopefully seems much different from those murky, foggy air quality statistics to a much clearer picture of China's clean energy. 
And even though China is headed in the right direction, we know that there's still a very long road ahead. 
So let me ask you once more: Is seeing believing? 
Can we trust the data and the statistics that show that China's air quality is coming down and that its war on coal is actually having an effect? 
Well, let's take a look at some of the latest satellite images of China's solar power installations. 
I want you to look very closely at this image. 
Can you see? 
The proof may just be in the pandas. 
Thank you so much. 
(Applause) 

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

Six thousand miles of road, 600 miles of subway track, 400 miles of bike lanes and a half a mile of tram track, if you've ever been to Roosevelt Island. 
These are the numbers that make up the infrastructure of New York City. 
These are the statistics of our infrastructure. 
They're the kind of numbers you can find released in reports by city agencies. 
For example, the Department of Transportation will probably tell you how many miles of road they maintain. 
The MTA will boast how many miles of subway track there are. 
This is from a report this year from the Taxi and Limousine Commission, where we learn that there's about 13,500 taxis here in New York City. 
Pretty interesting, right? 
But did you ever think about where these numbers came from? 
Because for these numbers to exist, someone at the city agency had to stop and say, hmm, here's a number that somebody might want want to know. 
Here's a number that our citizens want to know. 
So they go back to their raw data, they count, they add, they calculate, and then they put out reports, and those reports will have numbers like this. 
The problem is, how do they know all of our questions? 
We have lots of questions. 
In fact, in some ways there's literally an infinite number of questions that we can ask about our city. 
The agencies can never keep up. 
So the paradigm isn't exactly working, and I think our policymakers realize that, because in 2012, Mayor Bloomberg signed into law what he called the most ambitious and comprehensive open data legislation in the country. 
In a lot of ways, he's right. 
In the last two years, the city has released 1,000 datasets on our open data portal, and it's pretty awesome. 
So you go and look at data like this, and instead of just counting the number of cabs, we can start to ask different questions. 
So I had a question. 
When's rush hour in New York City? 
It can be pretty bothersome. When is rush hour exactly? 
And I thought to myself, these cabs aren't just numbers, these are GPS recorders driving around in our city streets recording each and every ride they take. 
There's data there, and I looked at that data, and I made a plot of the average speed of taxis in New York City throughout the day. 
You can see that from about midnight to around 5:18 in the morning, speed increases, and at that point, things turn around, and they get slower and slower and slower until about 8:35 in the morning, when they end up at around 11 and a half miles per hour. 
The average taxi is going 11 and a half miles per hour on our city streets, and it turns out it stays that way for the entire day. 
(Laughter) So I said to myself, I guess there's no rush hour in New York City. 
There's just a rush day. 
Makes sense. And this is important for a couple of reasons. 
If you're a transportation planner, this might be pretty interesting to know. 
But if you want to get somewhere quickly, you now know to set your alarm for 4:45 in the morning and you're all set. 
New York, right? 
But there's a story behind this data. 
This data wasn't just available, it turns out. 
It actually came from something called a Freedom of Information Law Request, or a FOIL Request. 
This is a form you can find on the Taxi and Limousine Commission website. 
In order to access this data, you need to go get this form, fill it out, and they will notify you, and a guy named Chris Whong did exactly that. 
Chris went down, and they told him, "Just bring a brand new hard drive down to our office, leave it here for five hours, we'll copy the data and you take it back." 
And that's where this data came from. 
Now, Chris is the kind of guy who wants to make the data public, and so it ended up online for all to use, and that's where this graph came from. 
And the fact that it exists is amazing. These GPS recorders -- really cool. 
But the fact that we have citizens walking around with hard drives picking up data from city agencies to make it public -- it was already kind of public, you could get to it, but it was "public," it wasn't public. 
And we can do better than that as a city. 
We don't need our citizens walking around with hard drives. 
Now, not every dataset is behind a FOIL Request. 
Here is a map I made with the most dangerous intersections in New York City based on cyclist accidents. 
So the red areas are more dangerous. 
And what it shows is first the East side of Manhattan, especially in the lower area of Manhattan, has more cyclist accidents. 
That might make sense because there are more cyclists coming off the bridges there. 
But there's other hotspots worth studying. 
There's Williamsburg. There's Roosevelt Avenue in Queens. 
And this is exactly the kind of data we need for Vision Zero. 
This is exactly what we're looking for. 
But there's a story behind this data as well. 
This data didn't just appear. 
How many of you guys know this logo? 
Yeah, I see some shakes. 
Have you ever tried to copy and paste data out of a PDF and make sense of it? 
I see more shakes. 
More of you tried copying and pasting than knew the logo. I like that. 
So what happened is, the data that you just saw was actually on a PDF. 
In fact, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of PDF put out by our very own NYPD, and in order to access it, you would either have to copy and paste for hundreds and hundreds of hours, or you could be John Krauss. 
John Krauss was like, I'm not going to copy and paste this data. I'm going to write a program. 
It's called the NYPD Crash Data Band-Aid, and it goes to the NYPD's website and it would download PDFs. 
Every day it would search; if it found a PDF, it would download it and then it would run some PDF-scraping program, and out would come the text, and it would go on the Internet, and then people could make maps like that. 
And the fact that the data's here, the fact that we have access to it -- Every accident, by the way, is a row in this table. 
You can imagine how many PDFs that is. 
The fact that we have access to that is great, but let's not release it in PDF form, because then we're having our citizens write PDF scrapers. 
It's not the best use of our citizens' time, and we as a city can do better than that. 
Now, the good news is that the de Blasio administration actually recently released this data a few months ago, and so now we can actually have access to it, but there's a lot of data still entombed in PDF. 
For example, our crime data is still only available in PDF. 
And not just our crime data, our own city budget. 
Our city budget is only readable right now in PDF form. 
And it's not just us that can't analyze it -- our own legislators who vote for the budget also only get it in PDF. 
So our legislators cannot analyze the budget that they are voting for. 
And I think as a city we can do a little better than that as well. 
Now, there's a lot of data that's not hidden in PDFs. 
This is an example of a map I made, and this is the dirtiest waterways in New York City. 
Now, how do I measure dirty? 
Well, it's kind of a little weird, but I looked at the level of fecal coliform, which is a measurement of fecal matter in each of our waterways. 
The larger the circle, the dirtier the water, so the large circles are dirty water, the small circles are cleaner. 
What you see is inland waterways. 
This is all data that was sampled by the city over the last five years. 
And inland waterways are, in general, dirtier. 
That makes sense, right? 
And the bigger circles are dirty. And I learned a few things from this. 
Number one: Never swim in anything that ends in "creek" or "canal." 
But number two: I also found the dirtiest waterway in New York City, by this measure, one measure. 
In Coney Island Creek, which is not the Coney Island you swim in, luckily. 
It's on the other side. 
But Coney Island Creek, 94 percent of samples taken over the last five years have had fecal levels so high that it would be against state law to swim in the water. 
And this is not the kind of fact that you're going to see boasted in a city report, right? 
It's not going to be the front page on nyc.gov. 
You're not going to see it there, but the fact that we can get to that data is awesome. 
But once again, it wasn't super easy, because this data was not on the open data portal. 
If you were to go to the open data portal, you'd see just a snippet of it, a year or a few months. 
It was actually on the Department of Environmental Protection's website. 
And each one of these links is an Excel sheet, and each Excel sheet is different. 
Every heading is different: you copy, paste, reorganize. 
When you do you can make maps and that's great, but once again, we can do better than that as a city, we can normalize things. 
And we're getting there, because there's this website that Socrata makes called the Open Data Portal NYC. 
This is where 1,100 data sets that don't suffer from the things I just told you live, and that number is growing, and that's great. 
Whatever you want, you can download the data that way. 
The problem is, once you do, you will find that each agency codes their addresses differently. 
So one is street name, intersection street, street, borough, address, building, building address. 
So once again, you're spending time, even when we have this portal, you're spending time normalizing our address fields. 
And that's not the best use of our citizens' time. 
We can do better than that as a city. 
We can standardize our addresses, and if we do, we can get more maps like this. 
This is a map of fire hydrants in New York City, but not just any fire hydrants. 
These are the top 250 grossing fire hydrants in terms of parking tickets. 
(Laughter) So I learned a few things from this map, and I really like this map. 
Number one, just don't park on the Upper East Side. 
Just don't. It doesn't matter where you park, you will get a hydrant ticket. 
Number two, I found the two highest grossing hydrants in all of New York City, and they're on the Lower East Side, and they were bringing in over 55,000 dollars a year in parking tickets. 
And that seemed a little strange to me when I noticed it, so I did a little digging and it turns out what you had is a hydrant and then something called a curb extension, which is like a seven-foot space to walk on, and then a parking spot. 
And so these cars came along, and the hydrant -- "It's all the way over there, I'm fine," and there was actually a parking spot painted there beautifully for them. 
They would park there, and the NYPD disagreed with this designation and would ticket them. 
And it wasn't just me who found a parking ticket. 
This is the Google Street View car driving by finding the same parking ticket. 
So I wrote about this on my blog, on I Quant NY, and the DOT responded, and they said, "While the DOT has not received any complaints about this location, we will review the roadway markings and make any appropriate alterations." 
And I thought to myself, typical government response, all right, moved on with my life. 
But then, a few weeks later, something incredible happened. 
They repainted the spot, and for a second I thought I saw the future of open data, because think about what happened here. 
For five years, this spot was being ticketed, and it was confusing, and then a citizen found something, they told the city, and within a few weeks the problem was fixed. 
It's amazing. And a lot of people see open data as being a watchdog. 
It's not, it's about being a partner. 
We can empower our citizens to be better partners for government, and it's not that hard. 
All we need are a few changes. 
If you're FOILing data, if you're seeing your data being FOILed over and over again, let's release it to the public, that's a sign that it should be made public. 
And if you're a government agency releasing a PDF, let's pass legislation that requires you to post it with the underlying data, because that data is coming from somewhere. 
I don't know where, but it's coming from somewhere, and you can release it with the PDF. 
And let's adopt and share some open data standards. 
Let's start with our addresses here in New York City. 
Let's just start normalizing our addresses. 
Because New York is a leader in open data. 
Despite all this, we are absolutely a leader in open data, and if we start normalizing things, and set an open data standard, others will follow. The state will follow, and maybe the federal government, Other countries could follow, and we're not that far off from a time where you could write one program and map information from 100 countries. 
It's not science fiction. We're actually quite close. 
And by the way, who are we empowering with this? 
Because it's not just John Krauss and it's not just Chris Whong. 
There are hundreds of meetups going on in New York City right now, active meetups. 
There are thousands of people attending these meetups. 
These people are going after work and on weekends, and they're attending these meetups to look at open data and make our city a better place. 
Groups like BetaNYC, who just last week released something called citygram.nyc that allows you to subscribe to 311 complaints around your own home, or around your office. 
You put in your address, you get local complaints. 
And it's not just the tech community that are after these things. 
It's urban planners like the students I teach at Pratt. 
It's policy advocates, it's everyone, it's citizens from a diverse set of backgrounds. 
And with some small, incremental changes, we can unlock the passion and the ability of our citizens to harness open data and make our city even better, whether it's one dataset, or one parking spot at a time. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm Michael Shermer, director of the Skeptics Society, publisher of "Skeptic" magazine. 
We investigate claims of the paranormal, pseudo-science, fringe groups and cults, and claims of all kinds between, science and pseudo-science and non-science and junk science, voodoo science, pathological science, bad science, non-science, and plain old non-sense. 
And unless you've been on Mars recently, you know there's a lot of that out there. 
Some people call us debunkers, which is kind of a negative term. 
But let's face it, there's a lot of bunk. 
We are like the bunko squads of the police departments out there -- well, we're sort of like the Ralph Naders of bad ideas, (Laughter) trying to replace bad ideas with good ideas. 
I'll show you an example of a bad idea. 
I brought this with me, this was given to us by NBC Dateline to test. 
It's produced by the Quadro Corporation of West Virginia. 
It's called the Quadro 2000 Dowser Rod. 
(Laughter) This was being sold to high-school administrators for $900 apiece. 
It's a piece of plastic with a Radio Shack antenna attached to it. 
You could dowse for all sorts of things, but this particular one was built to dowse for marijuana in students' lockers. 
(Laughter) So the way it works is you go down the hallway, and you see if it tilts toward a particular locker, and then you open the locker. 
So it looks something like this. 
I'll show you. 
(Laughter) Well, it has kind of a right-leaning bias. 
Well, this is science, so we'll do a controlled experiment. 
It'll go this way for sure. 
(Laughter) Sir, do you want to empty your pockets, please, sir? 
(Laughter) So the question was, can it actually find marijuana in students' lockers? 
And the answer is, if you open enough of them, yes. 
(Laughter) (Applause) But in science, we have to keep track of the misses, not just the hits. 
And that's probably the key lesson to my short talk here: This is how psychics work, astrologers, tarot card readers and so on. 
People remember the hits and forget the misses. 
In science, we keep the whole database, and look to see if the number of hits somehow stands out from the total number you'd expect by chance. 
In this case, we tested it. 
We had two opaque boxes: one with government-approved THC marijuana, and one with nothing. 
And it got it 50 percent of the time -- (Laughter) which is exactly what you'd expect with a coin-flip model. 
So that's just a fun little example here of the sorts of things we do. 
"Skeptic" is the quarterly publication. Each one has a particular theme. 
Are people getting smarter or dumber? 
I have an opinion of this myself because of the business I'm in, but in fact, people, it turns out, are getting smarter. 
Sort of an interesting thing. 
With science, don't think of skepticism as a thing, or science as a thing. 
Are science and religion compatible? 
It's like, are science and plumbing compatible? 
They're just two different things. 
Science is not a thing. It's a verb. 
It's a way of thinking about things. 
It's a way of looking for natural explanations for all phenomena. 
I mean, what's more likely: that extraterrestrial intelligences or multi-dimensional beings travel across vast distances of interstellar space to leave a crop circle in Farmer Bob's field in Puckerbrush, Kansas to promote skeptic.com, our web page? 
And in all cases we have to ask -- (Laughter) What's the more likely explanation? 
Before we say something is out of this world, we should first make sure that it's not in this world. 
What's more likely: that Arnold had extraterrestrial help in his run for the governorship, or that the "World Weekly News" makes stuff up? 
(Laughter) The same theme is expressed nicely here in this Sidney Harris cartoon. 
I think you need to be more explicit here in step two." 
This single slide completely dismantles the intelligent design arguments. 
There's nothing more to it than that. 
(Applause) You can say a miracle occurs, it's just that it doesn't explain anything or offer anything. 
There's nothing to test. 
It's the end of the conversation for intelligent design creationists. 
And it's true, scientists sometimes throw terms out as linguistic place fillers -- dark energy or dark matter, something like that -- until we figure out what it is, we'll call it this. 
It's the beginning of the causal chain for science. 
For intelligent design creationists, it's the end of the chain. 
So again, we can ask this: what's more likely? 
Are UFOs alien spaceships, or perceptual cognitive mistakes, or even fakes? 
This is a UFO shot from my house in Altadena, California, looking down over Pasadena. 
And if it looks a lot like a Buick hubcap, it's because it is. 
You don't even need Photoshop or high-tech equipment, you don't need computers. 
This was shot with a throwaway Kodak Instamatic camera. 
You just have somebody off on the side with a hubcap ready to go. 
Camera's ready -- that's it. 
(Laughter) So, although it's possible that most of these things are fake or illusions or so on, and that some of them are real, it's more likely that all of them are fake, like the crop circles. 
On a more serious note, in all of science we're looking for a balance between data and theory. 
In the case of Galileo, he had two problems when he turned his telescope to Saturn. 
First of all, there was no theory of planetary rings. 
Second of all, his data was grainy and fuzzy, and he couldn't quite make out what he was looking at. 
So he wrote that he had seen -- "I have observed that the furthest planet has three bodies." 
And this is what he ended up concluding that he saw. 
So without a theory of planetary rings and with only grainy data, you can't have a good theory. 
It wasn't solved until 1655. 
This is Christiaan Huygens's book that catalogs all the mistakes people made trying to figure out what was going on with Saturn. 
It wasn't till Huygens had two things: He had a good theory of planetary rings and how the solar system operated, and he had better telescopic, more fine-grain data in which he could figure out that as the Earth is going around faster -- according to Kepler's Laws -- than Saturn, then we catch up with it. 
And we see the angles of the rings at different angles, there. 
And that, in fact, turns out to be true. 
The problem with having a theory is that it may be loaded with cognitive biases. 
So one of the problems of explaining why people believe weird things is that we have things, on a simple level, and then I'll go to more serious ones. 
This is the face on Mars. 
In 1976, where there was a whole movement to get NASA to photograph that area because people thought this was monumental architecture made by Martians. 
Here's the close-up of it from 2001. 
If you squint, you can still see the face. 
And when you're squinting, you're turning that from fine-grain to coarse-grain, so you're reducing the quality of your data. 
And if I didn't tell you what to look for, you'd still see the face, because we're programmed by evolution to see faces. 
Faces are important for us socially. 
And of course, happy faces, faces of all kinds are easy to see. 
You see the happy face on Mars, there. 
(Laughter) If astronomers were frogs, perhaps they'd see Kermit the Frog. 
Do you see him there? Little froggy legs. 
Or if geologists were elephants? 
Religious iconography. 
(Laughter) Discovered by a Tennessee baker in 1996. 
He charged five bucks a head to come see the nun bun till he got a cease-and-desist from Mother Teresa's lawyer. 
Here's Our Lady of Guadalupe and Our Lady of Watsonville, just down the street, or is it up the street from here? 
Tree bark is particularly good because it's nice and grainy, branchy, black-and-white splotchy and you can get the pattern-seeking -- humans are pattern-seeking animals. 
Here's the Virgin Mary on the side of a glass window in Sao Paulo. 
Here's when the Virgin Mary made her appearance on a cheese sandwich -- which I got to actually hold in a Las Vegas casino -- of course, this being America. 
(Laughter) This casino paid $28,500 on eBay for the cheese sandwich. 
(Laughter) But who does it really look like? The Virgin Mary? 
(Laughter) It has that sort of puckered lips, 1940s-era look. 
Virgin Mary in Clearwater, Florida. 
I actually went to see this one. 
There was a lot of people there. 
The faithful come in their wheelchairs and crutches, and so on. 
We went down and investigated. 
Just to give you a size, that's Dawkins, me and The Amazing Randi, next to this two, two and a half story-sized image. 
All these candles, thousands of candles people had lit in tribute to this. 
So we walked around the backside, to see what was going on. 
It turns out wherever there's a sprinkler head and a palm tree, you get the effect. 
Here's the Virgin Mary on the backside, which they started to wipe off. 
I guess you can only have one miracle per building. 
(Laughter) So is it really a miracle of Mary, or is it a miracle of Marge? 
(Laughter) And now I'm going to finish up with another example of this, with auditory illusions. 
There's this film, "White Noise," with Michael Keaton, about the dead talking back to us. 
By the way, the whole business of talking to the dead is not that big a deal. 
Anybody can do it, turns out. 
It's getting the dead to talk back that's the really hard part. 
(Laughter) In this case, supposedly, these messages are hidden in electronic phenomena. 
There's a ReverseSpeech.com web page where I downloaded this stuff. 
This is the most famous one of all of these. 
Here's the forward version of the very famous song. 
(Music ends) Couldn't you just listen to that all day? 
All right, here it is backwards, and see if you can hear the hidden messages that are supposedly in there. 
(Unintelligible lyrics continue) What did you get? Audience: Satan! 
Satan. OK, at least we got "Satan". 
Now, I'll prime the auditory part of your brain to tell you what you're supposed to hear, and then hear it again. 
(Music with lyrics) (Music ends) (Laughter) (Applause) You can't miss it when I tell you what's there. 
(Laughter) I'm going to just end with a positive, nice little story. 
The Skeptics is a nonprofit educational organization. 
We're always looking for little good things that people do. 
And in England, there's a pop singer. 
One of the top popular singers in England today, Katie Melua. 
And she wrote a beautiful song. 
It was in the top five in 2005, called, "Nine Million Bicycles in Beijing." 
It's a love story -- she's sort of the Norah Jones of the UK -- about how she much loves her guy, and compared to nine million bicycles, and so forth. 
And she has this one passage here. 
(Music) (Lyrics) We are 12 billion light-years from the edge That's a guess, No one can ever say it's true, But I know that I will always be with you. 
Michael Shermer: Well, that's nice. At least she got it close. 
In America it'd be, "We're 6,000 light years from the edge." 
(Laughter) But my friend, Simon Singh, the particle physicist now turned science educator, who wrote the book "The Big Bang," and so on, uses every chance he gets to promote good science. 
And so he wrote an op-ed piece in "The Guardian" about Katie's song, in which he said, well, we know exactly how far from the edge. 
You know, it's 13.7 billion light years, and it's not a guess. 
We know within precise error bars how close it is. 
So we can say, although not absolutely true, it's pretty close to being true. 
And, to his credit, Katie called him up after this op-ed piece came out, and said, "I'm so embarrassed. I was in the astronomy club. 
I should've known better." 
So I will end with the new version. 
(Music with lyrics) We are 13.7 billion light years from the edge of the observable universe. 
That's a good estimate with well-defined error bars. 
And with the available information, I predict that I will always be with you. 
(Laughter) How cool is that? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This back here was my brain cancer. 
Isn't it nice? 
(Laughter) The key phrase is "was," phew. 
(Applause) Having brain cancer was really, as you can imagine, shocking news for me. 
I knew nothing about cancer. 
In Western cultures, when you have cancer, it's as if you disappear in a way. 
Your life as a complex human being is replaced by medical data: Your images, your exams, your lab values, a list of medicines. 
And everyone changes as well. 
You suddenly become a disease on legs. 
Doctors start speaking a language which you don't understand. 
They start pointing their fingers at your body and your images. 
People start changing as well because they start dealing with the disease, instead of with the human being. 
They say, "What did the doctor say?" 
before even saying, "Hello." 
And in the meanwhile, you're left with questions to which nobody gives an answer. 
These are the "Can I?" questions: Can I work while I have cancer? 
Can I study? Can I make love? Can I be creative? 
And you wonder, "What have I done to deserve this?" 
You wonder, "Can I change something about my lifestyle?" 
You wonder, "Can I do something? 
Are there any other options?" 
And, obviously, doctors are the good guys in all these scenarios, because they are very professional and dedicated to curing you. 
But they also are very used to having to deal with patients, so I'd say that they sometimes lose the idea that this is torture for you and that you become, literally, a patient -- "patient" means "the one who waits." 
(Laughter) Things are changing, but classically, they tend to not engage you in any way to learn about your condition, to get your friends and family engaged, or showing you ways in which you can change your lifestyle to minimize the risks of what you're going through. 
But instead, you're forced there to wait in the hands of a series of very professional strangers. 
While I was in the hospital, I asked for a printed-out picture of my cancer and I spoke with it. 
It was really hard to obtain, because it's not common practice to ask for a picture of your own cancer. 
I talked to it and I said, "Okay, cancer, you're not all there is to me. 
There's more to me. 
A cure, whichever it is, will have to deal with the whole of me." 
And so, the next day, I left the hospital against medical advice. 
I was determined to change my relationship with the cancer and I was determined to learn more about my cancer before doing anything as drastic as a surgery. 
I'm an artist, I use several forms of open-source technologies and open information in my practice. 
So my best bet was to get it all out there, get the information out there, and use it so that it could be accessed by anyone. 
So I created a website, which is called La Cura, on which I put my medical data, online. 
I actually had to hack it and that's a thing which we can talk about in another speech. 
(Laughter) I chose this word, La Cura -- La Cura in Italian means "the cure" -- because in many different cultures, the word "cure" can mean many different things. 
In our Western cultures, it means eradicating or reversing a disease, but in different cultures, for example, a culture from Asia, from the Mediterranean, from Latin countries, from Africa, it can mean many more things. 
Of course, I was interested in the opinions of doctors and healthcare providers, but I was also interested in the cure of the artist, of the poet, of the designer, of, who knows, the musicians. 
I was interested in the social cure, I was interested in the psychological cure, I was interested in the spiritual cure, I was interested in the emotional cure, I was interested in any form of cure. 
And, it worked. 
The La Cura website went viral. 
I received lots of media attention from Italy and from abroad and I quickly received more than 500,000 contacts -- emails, social networking -- most of them were a suggestion on how to cure my cancer, but more of them were about how to cure myself as a full individual. 
For example, many thousands of videos, images, pictures, art performances were produced for La Cura. 
For example, here we see Francesca Fini in her performance. 
Or, as artist Patrick Lichty has done: He produced a 3D sculpture of my tumor and put it on sale on Thingiverse. 
Now you can have my cancer, too! 
(Laughter) Which is a nice thing, if you think about it, we can share our cancer. 
And this was going on -- scientists, the traditional medicine experts, several researchers, doctors -- all connected with me to give advice. 
With all this information and support, I was able to form a team of several neurosurgeons, traditional doctors, oncologists, and several hundred volunteers with whom I was able to discuss the information I was receiving, which is very important. 
And together, we were able to form a strategy for my own cure in many languages, according to many cultures. 
And the current strategy spans the whole world and thousands of years of human history, which is quite remarkable for me. 
[Surgery] The follow-up MRIs showed, luckily, little to no growth of the cancer. 
So I was able to take my time and choose. 
I chose the doctor I wanted to work with, I chose the hospital I wanted to stay in, and in the meanwhile, I was supported by thousands of people, none of whom felt pity for me. 
Everyone felt like they could take an active role in helping me to get well, and this was the most important part of La Cura. 
What are the outcomes? 
I'm fine, as you can see, pretty fine. 
(Applause) I had excellent news after the surgery -- I have -- I had a very low-grade glioma, which is a "good" kind of cancer which doesn't grow a lot. 
I have completely changed my life and my lifestyle. 
Everything I did was thoughtfully designed to get me engaged. 
Up until the very last few minutes of the surgery, which was very intense, a matrix of electrodes was implanted in my brain from this side, to be able to build a functional map of what the brain controls. 
And right before the operation, we were able to discuss the functional map of my brain with the doctor, to understand which risks I was running into and if there were any I wanted to avoid. 
Obviously, there were. 
[Open] And this openness was really the fundamental part of La Cura. 
Thousands of people shared their stories, their experiences. 
Doctors got to talk with people they don't usually consult when they think about cancer. 
I'm a self-founding, continuous state of translation among many different languages, in which science meets emotion and conventional research meets traditional research. 
[Society] The most important thing of La Cura was to feel like a part of a really engaged and connected society whose wellness really depends on the wellness of all of its components. 
This global performance is my open-source cure for cancer. 
And from what I feel, it's a cure for me, but for us all. 
Thank you. 
(Applause). 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When I was raising investment for my startup, a venture capitalist said to me, "Ashwini, I think you're going to raise a few million dollars. 
And your company -- it's going to sell for 50 to 70 million. 
You're going to be really excited. 
Your early investors are going to be really excited. 
And I'm going to be really upset. 
So I'm not going to invest in this deal." 
I remember just being dumbstruck. 
Who would be unhappy with putting four or five million dollars into a company and having it sell for 50 to 70 million? 
I was a first-time founder. 
I didn't have a wealthy network of individuals to turn to for investment, so I went to venture capitalists the most common form of investor in a technology company. 
But I'd never taken the time to understand what was motivating that VC to invest. 
I believe we're living in a golden era of entrepreneurship. 
There is more opportunity to build companies than ever before. 
But the financial systems designed to fund that innovation, venture capital, they haven't evolved in the past 20 to 30 years. 
Venture capital was designed to pour large sums of money into a small number of companies that can sell for over a billion dollars. 
It was not designed to sprinkle capital across many companies that have the potential to succeed but for less, like my own. 
That limits the number of ideas that get funded, the number of companies that are created and who can actually receive that funding to grow. 
And I think it inspires a tough question: What's our goal with entrepreneurship? 
If our goal is to create a tiny number of billion-dollar companies, let's stick with venture capital, it's working. 
But if our goal is to inspire innovation and empower more people to build companies of all sizes, we need a new way to fund those ideas. 
We need a more flexible system that doesn't squeeze entrepreneurs and investors into one rigid financial outcome. 
We need to democratize access to capital. 
In the summer of 2017, I went out to San Francisco, to join a tech accelerator with 30 other companies. 
The accelerator was supposed to teach us how to raise venture capital. 
But when I got out there, the startup community was buzzing about ICOs, or Initial Coin Offerings. 
For the first time, ICOs had raised more money for young startups than venture capital had. 
It was the first week of the program. 
Tequila Friday. 
And the founders couldn't stop talking. 
"I'm going to raise an ICO." 
"I'm going to raise an ICO." 
Until one guy goes, "How cool if we did this all together? 
We should do an ICO that combines the value of all of our companies and raise money as a group." 
At that point, I had to ask the obvious question, "Guys, what's an ICO?" 
ICOs were a way for young companies to raise money by issuing a digital currency tied to the value and services that the company provides. 
The currency acts similar to shares in a company, like on the public stock market, increasing in value as it's traded online. 
Most important, ICOs expanded the investor pool, from a few hundred venture capital firms to millions of everyday people, excited to invest. 
This market represented more money. 
It represented more investors. 
Which meant a greater likelihood to get funded. 
I was sold. 
The idea, though, of doing it together still seemed a little crazy. 
Startups compete with each other for investment, it takes hundreds of meetings to get a check. 
That I would spend my precious 15 minutes in front of an investor talking not just about my own company, but all the companies in the batch, was unprecedented. 
But the idea caught on. 
And we decided to cooperate, rather than compete. 
Every company put 10 percent of their equity into a communal pool that we then split into tradable cryptocurrency that investors could buy and sell. 
Six months and four law firms later -- (Laughter) in January 2018, we launched the very first ICO that represented the value of nearly 30 companies and an entirely new way to raise capital. 
We got a lot of press. 
My favorite headline about us read, "VCs, read this and weep." 
(Laughter) Our fund was naturally more diverse. 
Twenty percent of the founders were women. 
Fifty percent were international. 
The investors were more excited, too. 
They had a chance to get better returns, because we took out the middleman fees of venture capital. 
And they could take their money and reinvest it, potentially funding more new ideas faster. 
I believe this creates a virtuous cycle of capital that allows many more entrepreneurs to succeed. 
Because access to capital is access to opportunity. 
And we have only just begun to imagine what democratizing access to capital will do. 
I would have never thought that my own search for funding would lead me to this stage, having helped nearly 30 companies get investment. 
Imagine if other entrepreneurs tried to invent new ways to access capital rather than following the traditional route. 
It would change what gets built, who builds it and the long-term impact on the economy. 
And I believe that's way more exciting than just trying to invest in the next billion-dollar startup. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Do you think the world is going to be a better place next year? 
In the next decade? 
Can we end hunger, achieve gender equality, halt climate change, all in the next 15 years? 
Well, according to the governments of the world, yes we can. 
In the last few days, the leaders of the world, meeting at the UN in New York, agreed a new set of Global Goals for the development of the world to 2030. 
And here they are: these goals are the product of a massive consultation exercise. 
The Global Goals are who we, humanity, want to be. 
Now that's the plan, but can we get there? 
Can this vision for a better world really be achieved? 
Well, I'm here today because we've run the numbers, and the answer, shockingly, is that maybe we actually can. 
But not with business as usual. 
Now, the idea that the world is going to get a better place may seem a little fanciful. 
Watch the news every day and the world seems to be going backwards, not forwards. 
And let's be frank: it's pretty easy to be skeptical about grand announcements coming out of the UN. 
But please, I invite you to suspend your disbelief for just a moment. 
Because back in 2001, the UN agreed another set of goals, the Millennium Development Goals. 
And the flagship target there was to halve the proportion of people living in poverty by 2015. 
The target was to take from a baseline of 1990, when 36 percent of the world's population lived in poverty, to get to 18 percent poverty this year. 
Did we hit this target? 
Well, no, we didn't. 
We exceeded it. 
This year, global poverty is going to fall to 12 percent. 
Now, that's still not good enough, and the world does still have plenty of problems. 
But the pessimists and doomsayers who say that the world can't get better are simply wrong. 
So how did we achieve this success? 
Well, a lot of it was because of economic growth. 
Some of the biggest reductions in poverty were in countries such as China and India, which have seen rapid economic growth in recent years. 
So can we pull off the same trick again? 
Can economic growth get us to the Global Goals? 
Well, to answer that question, we need to benchmark where the world is today against the Global Goals and figure out how far we have to travel. 
But that ain't easy, because the Global Goals aren't just ambitious, they're also pretty complicated. 
Over 17 goals, there are then 169 targets and literally hundreds of indicators. 
Also, while some of the goals are pretty specific -- end hunger -- others are a lot vaguer -- promote peaceful and tolerant societies. 
So to help us with this benchmarking, I'm going to use a tool called the Social Progress Index. 
What this does is measures all the stuff the Global Goals are trying to achieve, but sums it up into a single number that we can use as our benchmark and track progress over time. 
The Social Progress Index basically asks three fundamental questions about a society. 
First of all, does everyone have the basic needs of survival: food, water, shelter, safety? 
Secondly, does everyone have the building blocks of a better life: education, information, health and a sustainable environment? 
And does everyone have the opportunity to improve their lives, through rights, freedom of choice, freedom from discrimination, and access to the world's most advanced knowledge? 
The Social Progress Index sums all this together using 52 indicators to create an aggregate score on a scale of 0 to 100. 
And what we find is that there's a wide diversity of performance in the world today. 
The highest performing country, Norway, scores 88. 
The lowest performing country, Central African Republic, scores 31. 
And we can add up all the countries together, weighting for the different population sizes, and that global score is 61. 
In concrete terms, that means that the average human being is living on a level of social progress about the same of Cuba or Kazakhstan today. 
That's where we are today: 61 out of 100. 
What do we have to get to to achieve the Global Goals? 
Now, the Global Goals are certainly ambitious, but they're not about turning the world into Norway in just 15 years. 
So having looked at the numbers, my estimate is that a score of 75 would not only be a giant leap forward in human well-being, it would also count as hitting the Global Goals target. 
So there's our target, 75 out of 100. 
Can we get there? 
Well, the Social Progress Index can help us calculate this, because as you might have noticed, there are no economic indicators in there; there's no GDP or economic growth in the Social Progress Index model. 
And what that lets us do is understand the relationship between economic growth and social progress. 
Let me show you on this chart. 
So here on the vertical axis, I've put social progress, the stuff the Global Goals are trying to achieve. 
Higher is better. 
And then on the horizontal axis, is GDP per capita. 
Further to the right means richer. 
And in there, I'm now going to put all the countries of the world, each one represented by a dot, and on top of that I'm going to put the regression line that shows the average relationship. 
And what this tells us is that as we get richer, social progress does tend to improve. 
However, as we get richer, each extra dollar of GDP is buying us less and less social progress. 
So here is the world in 2015. 
We have a social progress score of 61 and a GDP per capita of $14,000. 
And the place we're trying to get to, remember, is 75, that Global Goals target. 
So here we are today, $14,000 per capita GDP. 
How rich are we going to be in 2030? 
That's what we need to know next. 
Well, the best forecast we can find comes from the US Department of Agriculture, which forecasts 3.1 percent average global economic growth over the next 15 years, which means that in 2030, if they're right, per capita GDP will be about $23,000. 
So now the question is: if we get that much richer, how much social progress are we going to get? 
Well, we asked a team of economists at Deloitte who checked and crunched the numbers, and they came back and said, well, look: if the world's average wealth goes from $14,000 a year to $23,000 a year, social progress is going to increase from 61 to 62.4. 
(Laughter) Just 62.4. Just a tiny increase. 
Now this seems a bit strange. 
Economic growth seems to have really helped in the fight against poverty, but it doesn't seem to be having much impact on trying to get to the Global Goals. 
So what's going on? 
Well, I think there are two things. 
The first is that in a way, we're the victims of our own success. 
We've used up the easy wins from economic growth, and now we're moving on to harder problems. 
And also, we know that economic growth comes with costs as well as benefits. 
There are costs to the environment, costs from new health problems like obesity. 
So that's the bad news. 
We're not going to get to the Global Goals just by getting richer. 
So are the pessimists right? 
Well, maybe not. 
Because the Social Progress Index also has some very good news. 
Let me take you back to that regression line. 
So this is the average relationship between GDP and social progress, and this is what our last forecast was based on. 
But as you saw already, there is actually lots of noise around this trend line. 
What that tells us, quite simply, is that GDP is not destiny. 
We have countries that are underperforming on social progress, relative to their wealth. 
Russia has lots of natural resource wealth, but lots of social problems. 
China has boomed economically, but hasn't made much headway on human rights or environmental issues. 
India has a space program and millions of people without toilets. 
Now, on the other hand, we have countries that are overperforming on social progress relative to their GDP. 
Costa Rica has prioritized education, health and environmental sustainability, and as a result, it's achieving a very high level of social progress, despite only having a rather modest GDP. 
And Costa Rica's not alone. 
From poor countries like Rwanda to richer countries like New Zealand, we see that it's possible to get lots of social progress, even if your GDP is not so great. 
And that's really important, because it tells us two things. 
First of all, it tells us that we already in the world have the solutions to many of the problems that the Global Goals are trying to solve. 
It also tells us that we're not slaves to GDP. 
Our choices matter: if we prioritize the well-being of people, then we can make a lot more progress than our GDP might expect. 
How much? Enough to get us to the Global Goals? 
Well, let's look at some numbers. 
What we know already: the world today is scoring 61 on social progress, and the place we want to get to is 75. 
If we rely on economic growth alone, we're going to get to 62.4. 
So let's assume now that we can get the countries that are currently underperforming on social progress -- the Russia, China, Indias -- just up to the average. 
How much social progress does that get us? 
Well, that takes us to 65. 
It's a bit better, but still quite a long way to go. 
So let's get a little bit more optimistic and say, what if every country gets a little bit better at turning its wealth into well-being? 
Well then, we get to 67. 
And now let's be even bolder still. 
What if every country in the world chose to be like Costa Rica in prioritizing human well-being, using its wealth for the well-being of its citizens? 
Well then, we get to nearly 73, very close to the Global Goals. 
Can we achieve the Global Goals? 
Certainly not with business as usual. 
Even a flood tide of economic growth is not going to get us there, if it just raises the mega-yachts and the super-wealthy and leaves the rest behind. 
If we're going to achieve the Global Goals we have to do things differently. 
We have to prioritize social progress, and really scale solutions around the world. 
I believe the Global Goals are a historic opportunity, because the world's leaders have promised to deliver them. 
Let's not dismiss the goals or slide into pessimism; let's hold them to that promise. 
And we need to hold them to that promise by holding them accountable, tracking their progress all the way through the next 15 years. 
And I want to finish by showing you a way to do that, called the People's Report Card. 
The People's Report Card brings together all this data into a simple framework that we'll all be familiar with from our school days, to hold them to account. 
It grades our performance on the Global Goals on a scale from F to A, where F is humanity at its worst, and A is humanity at its best. 
Our world today is scoring a C-. 
The Global Goals are all about getting to an A, and that's why we're going to be updating the People's Report Card annually, for the world and for all the countries of the world, so we can hold our leaders to account to achieve this target and fulfill this promise. 
Because getting to the Global Goals will only happen if we do things differently, if our leaders do things differently, and for that to happen, that needs us to demand it. 
So let's reject business as usual. 
Let's demand a different path. 
Let's choose the world that we want. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Michael. 
Michael, just one question: the Millennium Development Goals established 15 years ago, they were kind of applying to every country but it turned out to be really a scorecard for emerging countries. 
Now the new Global Goals are explicitly universal. 
They ask for every country to show action and to show progress. 
How can I, as a private citizen, use the report card to create pressure for action? 
Michael Green: This is a really important point; it's a big shift in priorities -- it's no longer about poor countries and just poverty. 
It's about every country. 
And every country is going to have challenges in getting to the Global Goals. 
Even, I'm sorry to say, Bruno, Switzerland has got to work to do. 
And so that's why we're going to produce these report cards in 2016 for every country in the world. 
Then we can really see, how are we doing? 
And it's not going to be rich countries scoring straight A's. 
And that, then, I think, is to provide a point of focus for people to start demanding action and start demanding progress. 
BG: Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

I come from Egypt, which is also called Umm al-Dunya, the Mother of the World. 
It's a rich country filled with stories of rebellion, stories of civilizational triumph and downfall and the rich, religious, ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity. 
Growing up in such an environment, I became a strong believer in the power of storytelling. 
As I searched for the medium with which to tell my story, I stumbled upon graphic design. 
I would like to share with you a project of how graphic design can bring the Arabic language to life. 
But first, let me tell you why I want to do this. 
I believe that graphic design can change the world. 
At least in my very own city of Cairo, it helped overthrow two separate dictators. 
As you can see from those photos, the power and potential of graphic design as a tool for positive change is undeniably strong. 
Egypt's 2011 revolution was also a grassroots design revolution. 
Everyone became a creator. 
People were the real designers and, just overnight, Cairo was flooded with posters, signage, graffiti. 
Visual communication was the medium that spoke far louder than words when the population of over 90 million voices were suppressed for almost 30 years. 
It was precisely this political and social suppression, coupled with decades of colonialism and miseducation that slowly eroded the significance of the Arabic script in the region. 
All of these countries once used Arabic. 
Now it's just the green and the blue. 
To put it simply, the Arabic script is dying. 
In postcolonial Arab countries functioning in an increasingly globalized world, it is a growing alarm that less and less people are using the Arabic script to communicate. 
As I was studying my master's in Italy, I noticed myself missing Arabic. 
I missed looking at the letters, digesting their meaning. 
So one day, I walked into one of the biggest libraries in Italy in search of an Arabic book. 
I was surprised to find that this is what they had under the category of "Arabic/Middle Eastern books." 
(Laughter) Fear, terrorism and destruction. 
One word: ISIS. 
My heart ached that this is how we are portrayed to the world, even from a literary perspective. 
I asked myself: Whatever happened to the world-renowned writers like Naguib Mahfouz, Khalil Gibran, iconic poets like Mutanabbi, Nizar Qabbani? 
Think about this. 
The cultural products of an entire region of the world, as rich, as diverse, have been deemed redundant, if not ignored altogether. 
The cultural products of an entire region of the world have been barred from imparting any kind of real impact on global media productions and contemporary social discourse. 
And then I reminded myself of my number one belief: design can change the world. 
All you need is for someone to catch a glimpse of your work, feel, connect. 
And so I started. 
I thought about how can I stop the world from seeing us as evil, as terrorists of this planet, and start perceiving us as equals, fellow humans? 
How can I save and honor the Arabic script and share it with other people, other cultures? 
And then it hit me: What if I combined the two most significant symbols of innocence and Arab identity? 
Maybe then people could resonate. 
What's more pure, innocent and fun as LEGO? 
It's a universal child's toy. 
You play with them, you build with them, and with them, you imagine endless possibilities. 
My eureka moment was to find a bilingual solution for Arabic education, because effective communication and education is the road to more tolerant communities. 
However, the Arabic and Latin scripts do not only represent different worlds but also create technical difficulties for both Eastern and Western communities on a daily basis. 
There are so many reasons why Arabic and Latin are different, but here are some of the main ones. 
Yes, both use upward and downward strokes, but have completely different baselines. 
Arabic tends to be more calligraphic and connectivity is important to the Arabic language, whose letters have to be mostly joined in order to articulate a given word. 
It also uses an entirely different system of punctuation and diacritics. 
But most importantly, Arabic has no capital letters. 
Instead it has four different letter forms: initial, medial, isolated and final. 
I want to introduce the Arabic language to young learners, foreign speakers, but most importantly help refugees integrate to their host societies through creating a bilingual learning system, a two-way flow of communication. 
And I called it "Let's Play." 
The idea is to simply create a fun and engaging way of learning Modern Standard Arabic through LEGO. 
These are the two words. "Let's Play." 
Every colored bar marks an Arabic letter. 
As you can see, the letter is explained in form, sound and examples of words in function, in addition to the equivalent in Latin. 
Together, they form a fun pocket book with the 29 Arabic letters and the four different forms, plus a 400-word dictionary. 
So this is how the page looks like. 
You have the letter, the transliteration in Latin and the description underneath. 
I'll take you through the process. 
So first in my tiny studio in Florence, I built the letters. 
I photographed each letter separately, and then I retouched every letter and chose the correct color background and typefaces to use. 
Ultimately, I created the full letter set, which is 29 letters times four different forms. 
That's 116 letters build just in one week. 
I believe that information should and can be fun, portable. 
This book is the final product, which I would eventually like to publish and translate into as many languages in the world, so that Arabic teaching and learning becomes fun, easy and accessible globally. 
With this book, I hope to save my nation's beautiful script. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
Working on this project was a form of visual meditation, like a Sufi dance, a prayer to a better planet. 
One set of building blocks made two languages. 
LEGO is just a metaphor. 
It's because we are all made of the same building unit, is that I can see a future where the barriers between people all come tumbling down. 
So no matter how ugly the world around us gets, or how many discouraging books on ISIS, the terrorist group, and not Isis, the ancient Egyptian goddess, continue to be published, I will keep building one colorful world. 
Shukran, which means "thank you." 
(Applause) Thank you. Thank you so much. 
Thank you. 

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

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

Jenni Chang: When I told my parents I was gay, the first thing they said to me was, "We're bringing you back to Taiwan." 
(Laughter) In their minds, my sexual orientation was America's fault. 
The West had corrupted me with divergent ideas, and if only my parents had never left Taiwan, this would not have happened to their only daughter. 
In truth, I wondered if they were right. 
Of course, there are gay people in Asia, just as there are gay people in every part of the world. 
But is the idea of living an "out" life, in the "I'm gay, this is my spouse, and we're proud of our lives together" kind of way just a Western idea? 
If I had grown up in Taiwan, or any place outside of the West, would I have found models of happy, thriving LGBT people? 
Lisa Dazols: I had similar notions. 
As an HIV social worker in San Francisco, I had met many gay immigrants. 
They told me their stories of persecution in their home countries, just for being gay, and the reasons why they escaped to the US. 
I saw how this had beaten them down. 
After 10 years of doing this kind of work, I needed better stories for myself. 
I knew the world was far from perfect, but surely not every gay story was tragic. 
JC: So as a couple, we both had a need to find stories of hope. 
So we set off on a mission to travel the world and look for the people we finally termed as the "Supergays." 
(Laughter) These would be the LGBT individuals who were doing something extraordinary in the world. 
They would be courageous, resilient, and most of all, proud of who they were. 
They would be the kind of person that I aspire to be. 
Our plan was to share their stories to the world through film. 
LD: There was just one problem. 
We had zero reporting and zero filmmaking experience. 
(Laughter) We didn't even know where to find the Supergays, so we just had to trust that we'd figure it all out along the way. 
So we picked 15 countries in Asia, Africa and South America, countries outside the West that varied in terms of LGBT rights. 
We bought a camcorder, ordered a book on how to make a documentary -- (Laughter) you can learn a lot these days -- and set off on an around-the-world trip. 
JC: One of the first countries that we traveled to was Nepal. 
Despite widespread poverty, a decade-long civil war, and now recently, a devastating earthquake, Nepal has made significant strides in the fight for equality. 
One of the key figures in the movement is Bhumika Shrestha. 
A beautiful, vibrant transgendered woman, Bhumika has had to overcome being expelled from school and getting incarcerated because of her gender presentation. 
But, in 2007, Bhumika and Nepal's LGBT rights organization successfully petitioned the Nepali Supreme Court to protect against LGBT discrimination. 
Here's Bhumika: (Video) BS: What I'm most proud of? 
I'm a transgendered person. 
I'm so proud of my life. 
On December 21, 2007, the supreme court gave the decision for the Nepal government to give transgender identity cards and same-sex marriage. 
LD: I can appreciate Bhumika's confidence on a daily basis. 
Something as simple as using a public restroom can be a huge challenge when you don't fit in to people's strict gender expectations. 
Traveling throughout Asia, I tended to freak out women in public restrooms. 
They weren't used to seeing someone like me. 
I had to come up with a strategy, so that I could just pee in peace. 
(Laughter) So anytime I would enter a restroom, I would thrust out my chest to show my womanly parts, and try to be as non-threatening as possible. 
Putting out my hands and saying, "Hello", just so that people could hear my feminine voice. 
This all gets pretty exhausting, but it's just who I am. 
I can't be anything else. 
JC: After Nepal, we traveled to India. 
On one hand, India is a Hindu society, without a tradition of homophobia. 
On the other hand, it is also a society with a deeply patriarchal system, which rejects anything that threatens the male-female order. 
When we spoke to activists, they told us that empowerment begins with ensuring proper gender equality, where the women's status is established in society. 
And in that way, the status of LGBT people can be affirmed as well. 
LD: There we met Prince Manvendra. 
He's the world's first openly gay prince. 
Prince Manvendra came out on the "Oprah Winfrey Show," very internationally. 
His parents disowned him and accused him of bringing great shame to the royal family. 
We sat down with Prince Manvendra and talked to him about why he decided to come out so very publicly. 
Here he is: (Video) Prince Manvendra: I felt there was a lot of need to break this stigma and discrimination which is existing in our society. 
And that instigated me to come out openly and talk about myself. 
Whether we are gay, we are lesbian, we are transgender, bisexual or whatever sexual minority we come from, we have to all unite and fight for our rights. 
Gay rights cannot be won in the court rooms, but in the hearts and the minds of the people. 
JC: While getting my hair cut, the woman cutting my hair asked me, "Do you have a husband?" 
Now, this was a dreaded question that I got asked a lot by locals while traveling. 
When I explained to her that I was with a woman instead of a man, she was incredulous, and she asked me a lot of questions about my parents' reactions and whether I was sad that I'd never be able to have children. 
I told her that there are no limitations to my life and that Lisa and I do plan to have a family some day. 
Now, this woman was ready to write me off as yet another crazy Westerner. 
She couldn't imagine that such a phenomenon could happen in her own country. 
That is, until I showed her the photos of the Supergays that we interviewed in India. 
She recognized Prince Manvendra from television and soon I had an audience of other hairdressers interested in meeting me. 
(Laughter) And in that ordinary afternoon, I had the chance to introduce an entire beauty salon to the social changes that were happening in their own country. 
LD: From India, we traveled to East Africa, a region known for intolerance towards LGBT people. 
In Kenya, 89 percent of people who come out to their families are disowned. 
Homosexual acts are a crime and can lead to incarceration. 
In Kenya, we met the soft-spoken David Kuria. 
David had a huge mission of wanting to work for the poor and improve his own government. 
So he decided to run for senate. 
He became Kenya's first openly gay political candidate. 
David wanted to run his campaign without denying the reality of who he was. 
But we were worried for his safety because he started to receive death threats. 
(Video) David Kuria: At that point, I was really scared because they were actually asking for me to be killed. 
And, yeah, there are some people out there who do it and they feel that they are doing a religious obligation. 
JC: David wasn't ashamed of who he was. 
Even in the face of threats, he stayed authentic. 
LD: At the opposite end of the spectrum is Argentina. 
Argentina's a country where 92 percent of the population identifies as Catholic. 
Yet, Argentina has LGBT laws that are even more progressive than here in the US. 
In 2010, Argentina became the first country in Latin America and the 10th in the world to adopt marriage equality. 
There, we met María Rachid. 
María was a driving force behind that movement. 
María Rachid (Spanish): I always say that, in reality, the effects of marriage equality are not only for those couples that get married. 
They are for a lot of people that, even though they may never get married, will be perceived differently by their coworkers, their families and neighbors, from the national state's message of equality. 
I feel very proud of Argentina because Argentina today is a model of equality. 
And hopefully soon, the whole world will have the same rights. 
JC: When we made the visit to my ancestral lands, I wish I could have shown my parents what we found there. 
Because here is who we met: (Video) One, two, three. Welcome gays to Shanghai! 
(Laughter) A whole community of young, beautiful Chinese LGBT people. 
Sure, they had their struggles. 
But they were fighting it out. 
In Shanghai, I had the chance to speak to a local lesbian group and tell them our story in my broken Mandarin Chinese. 
In Taipei, each time we got onto the metro, we saw yet another lesbian couple holding hands. 
And we learned that Asia's largest LGBT pride event happens just blocks away from where my grandparents live. 
If only my parents knew. 
LD: By the time we finished our not-so-straight journey around the world, (Laughter) we had traveled 50,000 miles and logged 120 hours of video footage. 
We traveled to 15 countries and interviewed 50 Supergays. 
Turns out, it wasn't hard to find them at all. 
JC: Yes, there are still tragedies that happen on the bumpy road to equality. 
And let's not forget that 75 countries still criminalize homosexuality today. 
But there are also stories of hope and courage in every corner of the world. 
What we ultimately took away from our journey is, equality is not a Western invention. 
LD: One of the key factors in this equality movement is momentum, momentum as more and more people embrace their full selves and use whatever opportunities they have to change their part of the world, and momentum as more and more countries find models of equality in one another. 
When Nepal protected against LGBT discrimination, India pushed harder. 
When Argentina embraced marriage equality, Uruguay and Brazil followed. 
When Ireland said yes to equality, (Applause) the world stopped to notice. 
When the US Supreme Court makes a statement to the world that we can all be proud of. 
(Applause) JC: As we reviewed our footage, what we realized is that we were watching a love story. 
It wasn't a love story that was expected of me, but it is one filled with more freedom, adventure and love than I could have ever possibly imagined. 
One year after returning home from our trip, marriage equality came to California. 
And in the end, we believe, love will win out. 
(Video) By the power vested in me, by the state of California and by God Almighty, I now pronounce you spouses for life. 
You may kiss. 
(Applause) 

(Music) Sometimes when I'm on a long plane flight, I gaze out at all those mountains and deserts and try to get my head around how vast our Earth is. 
And then I remember that there's an object we see every day that would literally fit one million Earths inside it. 
The sun seems impossibly big, but in the great scheme of things, it's a pinprick, one of about 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which you can see on a clear night as a pale, white mist stretched across the sky. 
And it gets worse. 
There are maybe 100 billion galaxies detectable by our telescopes, so if each star was the size of a single grain of sand, just the Milky Way has enough stars to fill a 30 foot by 30 foot stretch of beach three feet deep with sand. 
And the entire Earth doesn't have enough beaches to represent the stars in the overall universe. 
Such a beach would continue for literally hundreds of millions of miles. 
Holy Stephen Hawking, that is a lot of stars. 
But he and other physicists now believe in a reality that is unimaginably bigger still. 
I mean, first of all, the 100 billion galaxies within range of our telescopes are probably a minuscule fraction of the total. 
Space itself is expanding at an accelerating pace. The vast majority of the galaxies are separating from us so fast that light from them may never reach us. 
Still, our physical reality here on Earth is intimately connected to those distant, invisible galaxies. 
We can think of them as part of our universe. 
They make up a single, giant edifice, obeying the same physical laws and all made from the same types of atoms, electrons, protons, quarks, neutrinos that make up you and me. 
However, recent theories in physics, including one called string theory, are now telling us there could be countless other universes, built on different types of particles, with different properties, obeying different laws. 
Most of these universes could never support life, and might flash in and out of existence in a nanosecond, but nonetheless, combined they make up a vast multiverse of possible universes. 
in up to 11 dimensions, featuring wonders beyond our wildest imagination. 
And the leading version of string theory predicts a multiverse made of up to 10 to the 500 universes. 
That's a one followed by 500 zeroes, a number so vast that if every atom in our observable universe had its own universe and all of the atoms in all of those universes each had their own universe, and you repeated that for two more cycles, you'd still be at a tiny fraction of the total -- namely, one trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillionth. 
But even that number is minuscule compared to another number: infinity. 
Some physicists think the space-time continuum is literally infinite, and that it contains an infinite number of so-called pocket universes with varying properties. 
How's your brain doing? 
But quantum theory adds a whole new wrinkle. 
I mean, the theory's been proven true beyond all doubt, but interpreting it is baffling. 
And some physicists think you can only un-baffle it if you imagine that huge numbers of parallel universes are being spawned every moment, and many of these universes would actually be very like the world we're in, would include multiple copies of you. 
In one such universe, you'd graduate with honors and marry the person of your dreams. 
In another, not so much. 
There are still some scientists who would say, hogwash. 
The only meaningful answer to the question of how many universes there are is one, only one universe. 
And a few philosophers and mystics might argue that even our own universe is an illusion. 
So, as you can see, right now there is no agreement on this question, not even close. 
All we know is, the answer is somewhere between zero and infinity. 
Well, I guess we know one other thing: This is a pretty cool time to be studying physics. 
We just might be undergoing the biggest paradigm shift in knowledge that humanity has ever seen. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slavery, the treatment of human beings as property, deprived of personal rights, has occurred in many forms throughout the world. 
But one institution stands out for both its global scale and its lasting legacy. 
The Atlantic slave trade, occurring from the late 15th to the mid 19th century and spanning three continents, forcibly brought more than 10 million Africans to the Americas. 
The impact it would leave affected not only these slaves and their descendants, but the economies and histories of large parts of the world. 
There had been centuries of contact between Europe and Africa via the Mediterranean. 
But the Atlantic slave trade began in the late 1400s with Portuguese colonies in West Africa, and Spanish settlement of the Americas shortly after. 
The crops grown in the new colonies, sugar cane, tobacco, and cotton, were labor intensive, and there were not enough settlers or indentured servants to cultivate all the new land. 
American Natives were enslaved, but many died from new diseases, while others effectively resisted. 
And so to meet the massive demand for labor, the Europeans looked to Africa. 
African slavery had existed for centuries in various forms. 
Some slaves were indentured servants, with a limited term and the chance to buy one's freedom. 
Others were more like European serfs. 
In some societies, slaves could be part of a master's family, own land, and even rise to positions of power. 
But when white captains came offering manufactured goods, weapons, and rum for slaves, African kings and merchants had little reason to hesitate. 
They viewed the people they sold not as fellow Africans but criminals, debtors, or prisoners of war from rival tribes. 
By selling them, kings enriched their own realms, and strengthened them against neighboring enemies. 
African kingdoms prospered from the slave trade, but meeting the European's massive demand created intense competition. 
Slavery replaced other criminal sentences, and capturing slaves became a motivation for war, rather than its result. 
To defend themselves from slave raids, neighboring kingdoms needed European firearms, which they also bought with slaves. 
The slave trade had become an arms race, altering societies and economies across the continent. 
As for the slaves themselves, they faced unimaginable brutality. 
After being marched to slave forts on the coast, shaved to prevent lice, and branded, they were loaded onto ships bound for the Americas. 
About 20% of them would never see land again. 
Most captains of the day were tight packers, cramming as many men as possible below deck. 
While the lack of sanitation caused many to die of disease, and others were thrown overboard for being sick, or as discipline, the captain's ensured their profits by cutting off slave's ears as proof of purchase. 
Some captives took matters into their own hands. 
Many inland Africans had never seen whites before, and thought them to be cannibals, constantly taking people away and returning for more. 
Afraid of being eaten, or just to avoid further suffering, they committed suicide or starved themselves, believing that in death, their souls would return home. 
Those who survived were completley dehumanized, treated as mere cargo. 
Women and children were kept above deck and abused by the crew, while the men were made to perform dances in order to keep them exercised and curb rebellion. 
What happened to those Africans who reached the New World and how the legacy of slavery still affects their descendants today is fairly well known. 
But what is not often discussed is the effect that the Atlantic slave trade had on Africa's future. 
Not only did the continent lose tens of millions of its able-bodied population, but because most of the slaves taken were men, the long-term demographic effect was even greater. 
When the slave trade was finally outlawed in the Americas and Europe, the African kingdoms whose economies it had come to dominate collapsed, leaving them open to conquest and colonization. 
And the increased competition and influx of European weapons fueled warfare and instability that continues to this day. 
The Atlantic slave trade also contributed to the development of racist ideology. 
Most African slavery had no deeper reason than legal punishment or intertribal warfare, but the Europeans who preached a universal religion, and who had long ago outlawed enslaving fellow Christians, needed justification for a practice so obviously at odds with their ideals of equality. 
So they claimed that Africans were biologically inferior and destined to be slaves, making great efforts to justify this theory. 
Thus, slavery in Europe and the Americas acquired a racial basis, making it impossible for slaves and their future descendants to attain equal status in society. 
In all of these ways, the Atlantic slave trade was an injustice on a massive scale whose impact has continued long after its abolition. 

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

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

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

A 13,000 mile dragon of earth and stone winds its way through the countryside of China with a history almost as long and serpentine as the structure. 
The Great Wall began as multiple walls of rammed earth built by individual feudal states during the Chunqiu period to protect against nomadic raiders north of China and each other. 
When Emperor Qin Shi Huang unified the states in 221 BCE, the Tibetan Plateau and Pacific Ocean became natural barriers, but the mountains in the north remained vulnerable to Mongol, Turkish, and Xiongnu invasions. 
To defend against them, the Emperor expanded the small walls built by his predecessors, connecting some and fortifying others. 
As the structures grew from Lintao in the west to Liaodong in the east, they collectively became known as The Long Wall. 
To accomplish this task, the Emperor enlisted soldiers and commoners, not always voluntarily. 
Of the hundreds of thousands of builders recorded during the Qin Dynasty, many were forcibly conscripted peasants and others were criminals serving out sentences. 
Under the Han Dynasty, the wall grew longer still, reaching 3700 miles, and spanning from Dunhuang to the Bohai Sea. 
Forced labor continued under the Han Emperor Han-Wudi , and the walls reputation grew into a notorious place of suffering. 
Poems and legends of the time told of laborers buried in nearby mass graves, or even within the wall itself. 
And while no human remains have been found inside, grave pits do indicate that many workers died from accidents, hunger and exhaustion. 
The wall was formidable but not invincible. 
Both Genghis and his son Khublai Khan managed to surmount the wall during the Mongol invasion of the 13th Century. 
After the Ming dynasty gained control in 1368, they began to refortify and further consolidate the wall using bricks and stones from local kilns. 
Averaging 23 feet high and 21 feet wide, the walls 5500 miles were punctuated by watchtowers. 
When raiders were sighted, fire and smoke signals traveled between towers until reinforcements arrived. 
Small openings along the wall let archers fire on invaders, while larger ones were used to drop stones and more. 
But even this new and improved wall was not enough. 
In 1644, northern Manchu clans overthrew the Ming to establish the Qing dynasty, incorporating Mongolia as well, Thus, for the second time, China was ruled by the very people the wall had tried to keep out. 
With the empire's borders now extending beyond the Great Wall, the fortifications lost their purpose. 
And without regular reinforcement, the wall fell into disrepair, rammed earth eroded, while brick and stone were plundered for building materials. 
But its job wasn't finished. 
During World War II, China used sections for defense against Japanese invasion, and some parts are still rumored to be used for military training. 
But the Wall's main purpose today is cultural. 
As one of the largest man-made structures on Earth, it was granted UNESCO World Heritage Status in 1987. 
Originally built to keep people out of China, the Great Wall now welcomes millions of visitors each year. 
In fact, the influx of tourists has caused the wall to deteriorate, leading the Chinese government to launch preservation initiatives. 
It's also often acclaimed as the only man-made structure visible from space. 
Unfortunately, that's not at all true. 
In low Earth orbit, all sorts of structures, like bridges, highways and airports are visible, and the Great Wall is only barely discernible. 
From the moon, it doesn't stand a chance. 
But regardless, it's the Earth we should be studying it from because new sections are still discovered every few years, branching off from the main body and expanding this remarkable monument to human achievement. 

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

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

Around the globe, there are approximately 60 million people who have been forced to leave their homes to escape war, violence, and persecution. 
The majority of them have become internally displaced persons, which means they have fled their homes but are still within their own countries. 
Others have crossed a border and sought shelter outside of their own countries. 
They are commonly referred to as refugees. 
But what exactly does that term mean? 
The world has known refugees for millennia, but the modern definition was drafted in the UN's 1951 Convention relating to the status of refugees in response to mass persecutions and displacements of the Second World War. 
It defines a refugee as someone who is outside their country of nationality, and is unable to return to their home country because of well-founded fears of being persecuted. 
That persecution may be due to their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, and is often related to war and violence. 
Today, roughly half the world's refugees are children, some of them unaccompanied by an adult, a situation that makes them especially vulnerable to child labor or sexual exploitation. 
Each refugee's story is different, and many must undergo dangerous journeys with uncertain outcomes. 
But before we get to what their journeys involve, let's clear one thing up. 
There's a lot of confusion regarding the difference between the terms "migrant" and "refugee." 
"Migrants" usually refers to people who leave their country for reasons not related to persecution, such as searching for better economic opportunities or leaving drought-stricken areas in search of better circumstances. 
There are many people around the world who have been displaced because of natural disasters, food insecurities, and other hardships, but international law, rightly or wrongly, only recognizes those fleeing conflict and violence as refugees. 
So what happens when someone flees their country? 
Most refugee journeys are long and perilous with limited access to shelter, water, or food. 
Since the departure can be sudden and unexpected, belongings might be left behind, and people who are evading conflict often do not have the required documents, like visas, to board airplanes and legally enter other countries. 
Financial and political factors can also prevent them from traveling by standard routes. 
This means they can usually only travel by land or sea, and may need to entrust their lives to smugglers to help them cross borders. 
Whereas some people seek safety with their families, others attempt passage alone and leave their loved ones behind with the hopes of being reunited later. 
This separation can be traumatic and unbearably long. 
While more than half the world's refugees are in cities, sometimes the first stop for a person fleeing conflict is a refugee camp, usually run by the United Nations Refugee Agency or local governments. 
Refugee camps are intended to be temporary structures, offering short-term shelter until inhabitants can safely return home, be integrated to the host country, or resettle in another country. 
But resettlement and long-term integration options are often limited. 
So many refugees are left with no choice but to remain in camps for years and sometimes even decades. 
Once in a new country, the first legal step for a displaced person is to apply for asylum. 
At this point, they are an asylum seeker and not officially recognized as a refugee until the application has been accepted. 
While countries by and large agree on one definition of refugee, every host country is responsible for examining all requests for asylum and deciding whether applicants can be granted the status of refugee. 
Different countries guidelines can vary substantially. 
Host countries have several duties towards people they have recognized as refugees, like the guarantee of a minimum standard of treatment and non-discrimination. 
The most basic obligation towards refugees is non-refoulement, a principle preventing a nation from sending an individual to a country where their life and freedom are threatened. 
In reality, however, refugees are frequently the victims of inconsistent and discriminatory treatment. 
They're increasingly obliged to rebuild their lives in the face of xenophobia and racism. 
And all too often, they aren't permitted to enter the work force and are fully dependent on humanitarian aid. 
In addition, far too many refugee children are out of school due to lack of funding for education programs. 
If you go back in your own family history, chances are you will discover that at a certain point, your ancestors were forced from their homes, either escaping a war or fleeing discrimination and persecution. 
It would be good of us to remember their stories when we hear of refugees currently displaced, searching for a new home. 

The most basic function of bodily fat is self-storage of food reserves. 
In prehistoric times, natural selection favored genotypes that could endure harsh conditions by stocking the most fat. 
With chronic malnutrition being the norm for most of human history, genetics evolved to favor fat storage. 
So when did body fat become problematic? 
The negative impacts of being overweight were not even noted in medical literature until as late as the 18th century. 
Then, technological advances coupled with public health measures resulted in the betterment of the quantity, quality, and variety of food. 
Sustained abundance of good food enabled a healthier population to boom economically. 
Output increased, and with it, leisure time and waistlines. 
By the mid 19th century, being excessively overweight, or obese, was recognized as a cause of ill health, and another century later, declared deadly. 
What is the distinction between being overweight and being obese? 
A calculation called the BMI breaks it down for us. 
For example, if someone weighs 65 kilgorams and is 1.5 meters tall, they have a BMI of about 29. 
Obesity is a condition of excess body fat that occurs when a person's BMI is above 30, just over the overweight range of 25 to 29.9. 
While BMI can be a helpful estimate of healthy weight, actual body fat percentage can only really be determined by also considering information like waist circumference and muscle mass. 
Athletes, for instance, have a naturally higher BMI. 
So how does a person become obese? 
At its most basic, obesity is caused by energy imbalance. 
If the energy input from calories is greater than the energy output from physical activity, the body stores the extra calories as fat. 
In most cases, this imbalance comes from a combination of circumstances and choices. 
Adults should be getting at least 2.5 hours of exercise each week, and children a whole hour per day. 
But globally, one in four adults and eight out of ten adolescents aren't active enough. 
Calorie-dense processed foods and growing portion sizes coupled with pervasive marketing lead to passive overeating. 
And scarce resources, and a lack of access to healthy, affordable foods creates an even greater risk in disadvantaged communities. 
Yet, our genetic makeup also plays a part. 
Studies on families and on separated twins have shown a clear causal hereditary relationship to weight gain. 
Recent studies have also found a link between obesity and variations in the bacteria species that live in our digestive systems. 
No matter the cause, obesity is an escalating global epidemic. 
It substantially raises the probability of diseases, like diabetes, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, and cancer. 
It affects virtually all ages, genders, and socioeconomic groups in both developed and developing countries. 
With a 60% rise in child obesity globally over just two decades, the problem is too significant to ignore. 
Once a person is obese, the climb to recovery becomes progressively steeper. 
Hormonal and metabolic changes reduce the body's response to overeating. 
After losing weight, a formerly overweight person burns less calories doing the same exercises as a person who is naturally the same weight, making it much more difficult to shed the excess fat. 
And as people gain weight, damage to signaling pathways makes it increasingly difficult for the brain to measure food intake and fat storage. 
There is, however, some evidence that well-monitored, long-term changes in behavior can lead to improvements in obesity-related health issues. 
And weight loss from sustained lifestyle changes, or invasive treatments like bariatric surgery, can improve insulin resistance and decrease inflammation. 
What was once an advantage for survival is now working against us. 
As the world's population continues to slow down and get bigger, moving and consciously eating our way towards a healthier weight is essential to our overall well-being. 
And with the epidemic affecting every country in the world for different socioeconomic reasons, obesity cannot be seen as an isolated issue. 
More global measures for prevention are essential to manage the weight of the world. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today, what I want to share with you is something that happened to me, actually, around four weeks ago, it happened. 
Words were said to me that I never thought I would ever hear it said to my face by another human being. 
And those words, they shattered my heart. 
And at the same time, they filled it with so much hope. 
And the whole experience renewed my commitment to the idea that I came to share with you today. 
You see, I tell everyone that I am a haunted person. 
What haunts me is the impossible stories, story after story after story after story of young people, my people, people like me dying out there on the ocean, right now, laying at the bottom of the ocean, serving as fish food. 
Do you really think that's the best we can do? 
To serve as fish food? 
And for those of them who are trying to migrate to Europe -- because that's what it is all about, they are trying to migrate to Europe to find a job. 
Going through Libya. 
Do you know what happens to us when we're trying to cross through Libya and we're trapped over there? 
Well, we're being sold as slaves. 
For 300 dollars, maybe sometimes 500 dollars. 
Sometimes I hear stories of bodies that fall off an airplane. 
Somebody hid in the landing gear of a plane or in the cargo section of a plane, and then you find them frozen to death. 
Wouldn't you be haunted if, like me, from the moment you were a little girl, you hear these stories and they keep repeating themselves, over and over and over? 
Wouldn't you be haunted? 
That's my case. 
And at the same time, you know, as my people are dying, my culture is also dying. 
There, I said it. 
Because, you know, we have this culture inferiority, which means that anything that comes from us is not good enough. 
But you know, in my situation, and because I was raised to criticize by creating, it's Michelangelos. 
My father said, "Do not come to me with problems unless you thought of a couple alternatives. 
They don't have to be right, but I just want to know that you thought of something." 
So, I have this attitude in life -- something is wrong, find a way to fix it. 
And that's why I start the businesses that I start, that's usually consumer brands, that have embedded in them the very best of my African culture. 
And what I do is it's all packaged, 21st century, world-class tendered, and I bring that to one of the most sophisticated markets in the world, which is the US. 
First company was a beverage company, second one is a skin care company, third one is launching next month, and they all have that in common. 
So, why are these people leaving? 
They're leaving because they have no jobs. 
They're leaving because where they are, there's no jobs. 
So ... 
But poverty, that's really striking them, is the root cause of why they're leaving. 
Now, why are people poor? 
People are poor because they have no money. 
You have no money because you have no source of income. 
And for most of us, what is a source of income? 
For most of us, what is our source of income, what is it, tell me? 
Jobs, thank you. 
Where do jobs come from? 
Come from where? 
Businesses, thank you. 
Now, if jobs is what fixes poverty, and jobs come from businesses, don't you think -- especially, they come from small and medium size enterprises, SMEs -- then don't you think, maybe for a second, that we should focus on making it easy for a small-business person to start and run their business? 
Don't you think that it makes sense? 
Why is it that when I look at the Doing Business index ranking of the World Bank, that ranks every country in the world in terms of how easy or hard it is to start a company, you tell me why African countries, all 50 of them, are basically at the bottom of that list? 
That's why we're poor. 
We're poor because it is literally impossible to do businesses in these countries of ours. 
But I'm going to tell you exactly what it means on the ground for someone like me. 
I have a manufacturing facility in Senegal. 
Did you know that for all my raw material that I can't find in the country, I have to pay a 45 percent tariff on everything that comes in? 
Forty-five percent tariff. 
Do you know that, even to look for fine cardboard to ship my finished products to the US, I can't find new, finished cardboard? 
Impossible. 
Because the distributors are not going to come here to start their business, because it makes no sense, either. 
So right now, I have to mobilize 3000 dollars' worth of cardboard in my warehouse, so that I can have cardboard, and they won't arrive for another five weeks. 
The fact that we are stifled with the most nonsensical laws out there. 
That's why we can't run businesses. 
It's like swimming through molasses. 
So, what can you do about that? 
I told you today that someone said to me words that marked me, because I explained the same thing to my employees in Senegal. 
And one of them started crying -- her name is Yahara. 
She started crying. 
I said, "Why are you crying?" 
She said, "I'm crying because I had come to believe -- always seeing us represented as poor people -- I had come to believe that maybe, yes, maybe we are inferior. 
Because, otherwise, how do you explain that we're always in the begging situation?" 
That's what broke my heart. 
But at the same time that she said that, because of how I explained just what I explained to you, she said, "But now, I know that I am not the problem. 
It is my environment in which I live, that's my problem." 
I said, "Yes." 
And that's what gave me hope -- that once people get it, they now change their outlook on life. 
Here, what are some of our solutions, then? 
If jobs is a solution, don't you think, then, that we should be simplifying the business environment of all of these countries? 
Don't you think? 
And along with you, I would like for all of your friends from the other 50 countries that are on the bottom of that list to do the same thing. 
You do that, we do the rest of the job. 
I'm doing my part of the game, what are you doing? 
(Applause) What are you doing? 
(Applause) What are you doing? 
(Applause) And as for you, everybody here in this room, I leave you with two marching orders. 
Get in the game, and the way you get in it is educate yourself, build awareness around yourself, and then also advocate for e-government solutions. 
He said, "Oh, corruption, how do we fight corruption?" 
Well, as a matter of fact, I'm here to tell you that yes, you can do it by the stroke of a pen. 
You do not need anyone to tell you when and how to do that. 
It is one thing, actually, that you don't need to wait for anyone to do, so do it. 
Otherwise, don't come and tell me that you want to fix corruption. 
You and your other 50 friends from the other 50 countries that are at the bottom of that list. 
That's how you fight corruption. 
If you were only charging me 5 percent to get my stuff in the country, my raw material, instead of the 45 percent, do you really think that I would have to go a pay a bribe? 
That's what breeds corruption. 
Bad laws, sets of horrible, nonsense laws. 
(Applause) (Cheers) Right? 
(Applause) You want to fight corruption? 
That's what you do. 
And again, remember, you don't need to wait for anyone. 
You can do that by yourself. 
Unless you're telling me that maybe you have no sovereignty, and that's a whole other problem. 
OK, so, from here on, I have simple words for our "leaders." 
This can go two ways. 
It can go the nasty way, because we have hundreds of millions of young people coming to life right now, here, and if they don't have an outlook in life, they are going to go for a revolution. 
They're going to go for violence. 
And none of us wants that. 
None, none of us. 
That's the one way it can go. 
Or the second way it can go is, all this happens peacefully, productively, and everything is good, and you do what you need to do, you get out of my way, you let people like me do our job, we create all these jobs we need, and then Africa becomes this very prosperous country that it's designed to be, it should have been for a long time. 
It happens like that, everybody's happy, we move on with our lives. 
It can happen in two ways -- pick violence or you pick the calm, productive way. 
I want the calm, productive way. 
None of us should ever, ever even try to think about what else could happen if we don't go there. 
So, please. 
And the time has come. 
This type of picture -- prosperity, happiness, human flourishing -- that's what I see if we do our job. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) (Cheering) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hi. My name is Marwa, and I'm an architect. 
I was born and raised in Homs, a city in the central western part of Syria, and I've always lived here. 
After six years of war, Homs is now a half-destroyed city. 
My family and I were lucky; our place is still standing. 
Although for two years, we were like prisoners at home. 
Outside there were demonstrations and battles and bombings and snipers. 
My husband and I used to run an architecture studio in the old town main square. 
It's gone, as is most of the old town itself. 
Half of the city's other neighborhoods are now rubble. 
Since the ceasefire in late 2015, large parts of Homs have been more or less quiet. 
The economy is completely broken, and people are still fighting. 
The merchants who had stalls in the old city market now trade out of sheds on the streets. 
Under our apartment, there is a carpenter, sweetshops, a butcher, a printing house, workshops, among many more. 
I have started teaching part-time, and with my husband, who juggles several jobs, we've opened a small bookshop. 
Other people do all sorts of jobs to get by. 
When I look at my destroyed city, of course, I ask myself: What has led to this senseless war? 
Syria was largely a place of tolerance, historically accustomed to variety, accommodating a wide range of beliefs, origins, customs, goods, food. 
How did my country -- a country with communities living harmoniously together and comfortable in discussing their differences -- how did it degenerate into civil war, violence, displacement and unprecedented sectarian hatred? 
There were many reasons that had led to the war -- social, political and economic. 
They all have played their role. 
But I believe there is one key reason that has been overlooked and which is important to analyze, because from it will largely depend whether we can make sure that this doesn't happen again. 
And that reason is architecture. 
Architecture in my country has played an important role in creating, directing and amplifying conflict between warring factions, and this is probably true for other countries as well. 
There is a sure correspondence between the architecture of a place and the character of the community that has settled there. 
Architecture plays a key role in whether a community crumbles or comes together. 
Syrian society has long lived the coexistence of different traditions and backgrounds. 
Syrians have experienced the prosperity of open trade and sustainable communities. 
They have enjoyed the true meaning of belonging to a place, and that was reflected in their built environment, in the mosques and churches built back-to-back, in the interwoven souks and public venues, and the proportions and sizes based on principles of humanity and harmony. 
This architecture of mixity can still be read in the remains. 
The old Islamic city in Syria was built over a multilayered past, integrating with it and embracing its spirit. 
So did its communities. 
People lived and worked with each other in a place that gave them a sense of belonging and made them feel at home. 
They shared a remarkably unified existence. 
But over the last century, gradually this delicate balance of these places has been interfered with; first, by the urban planners of the colonial period, when the French went enthusiastically about, transforming what they saw as the un-modern Syrian cities. 
They blew up city streets and relocated monuments. 
They called them improvements, and they were the beginning of a long, slow unraveling. 
The traditional urbanism and architecture of our cities assured identity and belonging not by separation, but by intertwining. 
But over time, the ancient became worthless, and the new, coveted. 
The harmony of the built environment and social environment got trampled over by elements of modernity -- brutal, unfinished concrete blocks, neglect, aesthetic devastation, divisive urbanism that zoned communities by class, creed or affluence. 
And the same was happening to the community. 
As the shape of the built environment changed, so the lifestyles and sense of belonging of the communities also started changing. 
From a register of togetherness, of belonging, architecture became a way of differentiation, and communities started drifting apart from the very fabric that used to unite them, and from the soul of the place that used to represent their common existence. 
While many reasons had led to the Syrian war, we shouldn't underestimate the way in which, by contributing to the loss of identity and self-respect, urban zoning and misguided, inhumane architecture have nurtured sectarian divisions and hatred. 
Over time, the united city has morphed into a city center with ghettos along its circumference. 
And in turn, the coherent communities became distinct social groups, alienated from each other and alienated from the place. 
From my point of view, losing the sense of belonging to a place and a sense of sharing it with someone else has made it a lot easier to destroy. 
The clear example can be seen in the informal housing system, which used to host, before the war, over 40 percent of the population. 
Yes, prior to the war, almost half of the Syrian population lived in slums, peripheral areas without proper infrastructure, made of endless rows of bare block boxes containing people, people who mostly belonged to the same group, whether based on religion, class, origin or all of the above. 
This ghettoized urbanism proved to be a tangible precursor of war. 
Conflict is much easier between pre-categorized areas -- where the "others" live. 
The ties that used to bind the city together -- whether they were social, through coherent building, or economic, through trade in the souk, or religious, through the coexistent presence -- were all lost in the misguided and visionless modernization of the built environment. 
Allow me an aside. 
When I read about heterogeneous urbanism in other parts of the world, involving ethnic neighborhoods in British cities or around Paris or Brussels, I recognize the beginning of the kind of instability we have witnessed so disastrously here in Syria. 
We have severely destroyed cities, such as Homs, Aleppo, Daraa and many others, and almost half of the population of the country is now displaced. 
Hopefully, the war will end, and the question that, as an architect, I have to ask, is: How do we rebuild? 
What are the principles that we should adopt in order to avoid repeating the same mistakes? 
From my point of view, the main focus should be on creating places that make their people feel they belong. 
Architecture and planning need to recapture some of the traditional values that did just that, creating the conditions for coexistence and peace, values of beauty that don't exhibit ostentation, but rather, approachability and ease, moral values that promote generosity and acceptance, architecture that is for everyone to enjoy, not just for the elite, just as used to be in the shadowed alleys of the old Islamic city, mixed designs that encourage a sense of community. 
There is a neighborhood here in Homs that's called Baba Amr that has been fully destroyed. 
Almost two years ago, I introduced this design into a UN-Habitat competition for rebuilding it. 
The idea was to create an urban fabric inspired by a tree, capable of growing and spreading organically, echoing the traditional bridge hanging over the old alleys, and incorporating apartments, private courtyards, shops, workshops, places for parking and playing and leisure, trees and shaded areas. 
It's far from perfect, obviously. 
I drew it during the few hours of electricity we get. 
And there are many possible ways to express belonging and community through architecture. 
But compare it with the freestanding, disconnected blocks proposed by the official project for rebuilding Baba Amr. 
Architecture is not the axis around which all human life rotates, but it has the power to suggest and even direct human activity. 
In that sense, settlement, identity and social integration are all the producer and product of effective urbanism. 
The coherent urbanism of the old Islamic city and of many old European towns, for instance, promote integration, while rows of soulless housing or tower blocks, even when they are luxurious, tend to promote isolation and "otherness." 
Even simple things like shaded places or fruit plants or drinking water inside the city can make a difference in how people feel towards the place, and whether they consider it a generous place that gives, a place that's worth keeping, contributing to, or whether they see it as an alienating place, full of seeds of anger. 
In order for a place to give, its architecture should be giving, too. 
Our built environment matters. 
The fabric of our cities is reflected in the fabric of our souls. 
And whether in the shape of informal concrete slums or broken social housing or trampled old towns or forests of skyscrapers, the contemporary urban archetypes that have emerged all across the Middle East have been one cause of the alienation and fragmentation of our communities. 
We can learn from this. 
We can learn how to rebuild in another way, how to create an architecture that doesn't contribute only to the practical and economic aspects of people's lives, but also to their social, spiritual and psychological needs. 
Those needs were totally overlooked in the Syrian cities before the war. 
We need to create again cities that are shared by the communities that inhabit them. 
If we do so, people will not feel the need to seek identities opposed to the other identities all around, because they will all feel at home. 
Thank you for listening. 

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

In 2013, I was an executive at an international engineering firm in San Francisco. 
It was my dream job. 
A culmination of all the skills that I've acquired over the years: storytelling, social impact, behavior change. 
I was the head of marketing and culture and I worked with the nation's largest health care systems, using technology and culture change to radically reduce their energy and water use and to improve their social impact. 
I was creating real change in the world. 
And it was the worst professional experience of my life. 
I hit the glass ceiling hard. 
It hurt like hell. 
While there were bigger issues, most of what happened were little behaviors and patterns that slowly chipped away at my ability to do my work well. 
They ate away at my confidence, my leadership, my capacity to innovate. 
For example, my first presentation at the company. 
I walk up to the front of the room to give a presentation on the strategy that I believe is right for the company. 
The one they hired me to create. 
And I look around the room at my fellow executives. 
And I watch as they pick up their cell phones and look down at their laptops. 
They're not paying attention. 
As soon as I start to speak, the interruptions begin and people talk over me again and again and again. 
Some of my ideas are flat out dismissed and then brought up by somebody else and championed. 
I was the only woman in that room. 
And I could have used an ally. 
Little behaviors and pattern like this, every day, again and again, they wear you down. 
Pretty soon, my energy was absolutely tapped. 
At a real low point, I read an article about toxic workplace culture and microaggressions. 
Microaggressions -- everyday slights, insults, negative verbal and nonverbal communication, whether intentional or not, that impede your ability to do your work well. 
That sounded familiar. 
I started to realize that I wasn't failing. 
The culture around me was failing me. 
And I wasn't alone. 
Behaviors and patterns like this every day affect underrepresented people of all backgrounds in the workplace. 
And that has a real impact on our colleagues, on our companies and our collective capacity to innovate. 
So, in the tech industry, we want quick solutions. 
But there is no magic wand for correcting diversity and inclusion. 
Change happens one person at a time, one act at a time, one word at a time. 
We make a mistake when we see diversity and inclusion as that side project over there the diversity people are working on, rather than this work inside all of us that we need to do together. 
And that work begins with unlearning what we know about success and opportunity. 
We've been told our whole lives that if we work hard, that hard work pays off, we'd get what we deserve, we'd live our dream. 
But that isn't true for everyone. 
Some people have to work 10 times as hard to get to the same place due to many barriers put in front of them by society. 
Your gender, your race, your ethnicity, your religion, your disability, your sexual orientation, your class, your geography, all of these can give you more of fewer opportunities for success. 
And that's where allyship comes in. 
Allyship is about understanding that imbalance in opportunity and working to correct it. 
Allyship is really seeing the person next to us. 
And the person missing, who should be standing next to us. 
And first, just knowing what they're going through. 
And then, helping them succeed and thrive with us. 
When we work together to develop more diverse and inclusive teams, data shows we will be more innovative, more productive and more profitable. 
So, who is an ally? 
All of us. 
We can all be allies for each other. 
As a white, cisgendered woman in the United States, there are many ways I'm very privileged. 
And some ways I'm not. 
And I work hard every day to be an ally for people with less privilege than me. 
And I still need allies, too. 
In the tech industry, like in many industries, there are many people who are underrepresented, or face barriers and discrimination. 
Women, people who are nonbinary -- so people who don't necessarily identify as man or woman -- racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA, people with disabilities, veterans, anybody over age 35. 
(Laughter) We have a major bias toward youth in the tech industry. 
And many others. 
There is always someone with less privilege than you. 
On this stage, in this room. 
At your company, on your team, in your city or town. 
So, people are allies for different reasons. 
Find your reason. 
It could be for the business case, because data shows diverse and inclusive teams will be more productive, more profitable and more innovative. 
It could be for fairness and social justice. 
Because we have a long history of oppression and inequity that we need to work on together. 
Or it could be for your kids, so your kids grow up with equal opportunities. 
And they grow up creating equal opportunities for others. 
Find your reason. 
For me, it's all three. 
Find your reason and step up to be there for someone who needs you. 
So, what can you do as an ally? 
Start by doing no harm. 
It's our job as allies to know what microaggressions are and to not do them. 
It's our job as allies to listen, to learn, to unlearn and to relearn, and to make mistakes and to keep learning. 
Give me your full attention. 
Close your laptops, put down your cellphones and pay attention. 
If somebody is new or the only person in the room like them, or they're just nervous, this is going to make a huge difference in how they show up. 
Don't interrupt. 
Underrepresented people are more likely to be interrupted, so just take a step back and listen. 
Echo and attribute. 
If I have a great idea, echo my idea and then attribute it to me, and we thrive together. 
Learn the language I use to describe my identity. 
Know how to pronounce my name. 
Know my pronouns -- he, she, they. 
Know the language I use to describe my disability, my ethnicity, my religion. 
This really matters to people, so if you don't know, just ask. 
Listen and learn. 
An executive told me recently that after doing allyship on his team, the whole team started to normalize calling themselves out and each other out for interrupting. 
"I'm so sorry I'm interrupting you right now, carry on." 
"Hey, she's got a great idea, let's listen." 
Number two, advocate for underrepresented people in small ways. 
Intervene; you can change the power dynamics in the room. 
If you see somebody is the only person in the room like them and they are being belittled, they are being interrupted, do something, say something. 
Invite underrepresented people to speak. 
And say no to panels without underrepresented speakers. 
Refer someone for a job and encourage them to take that job and to take new opportunities. 
And this one's really important -- help normalize allyship. 
If you're a person with privilege, it's easier for you to advocate for allies. 
So use that privilege to create change. 
Three, change someone's life significantly. 
So, be there for somebody throughout their career. 
Mentor or sponsor them, give them opportunities as they grow. 
Volunteer -- volunteer for a STEM program, serving underserved youth. 
Transform your team to be more diverse and inclusive. 
And make real commitments to creating change here. 
Hold yourself and your team accountable for creating change. 
And lastly, help advocate for change across your company. 
When companies teach their people to be allies, diversity and inclusion programs are stronger. 
You and I can be allies for each other, whether we're inside or outside of work. 
So, I realized recently that I still have lingering shame and fear from that moment in my career when I felt utterly alone, shut out and unsupported. 
There are millions of people out there, like me, right now, feeling that way. 
And it doesn't take much for us to be there for each other. 
And when we're there for each other, when we support one another, we thrive together. 
And when we thrive, we build better teams, better products and better companies. 
Allyship is powerful. 
Try it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Who do you want to be? 
It's a simple question, and whether you know it or not, you're answering it every day through your actions. 
This one question will define your professional success more than any other, because how you show up and treat people means everything. 
Either you lift people up by respecting them, making them feel valued, appreciated and heard, or you hold people down by making them feel small, insulted, disregarded or excluded. 
And who you choose to be means everything. 
I study the effects of incivility on people. 
What is incivility? 
It's disrespect or rudeness. 
It includes a lot of different behaviors, from mocking or belittling someone to teasing people in ways that sting to telling offensive jokes to texting in meetings. 
And what's uncivil to one person may be absolutely fine to another. 
Take texting while someone's speaking to you. 
Some of us may find it rude, others may think it's absolutely civil. 
So it really depends. 
It's all in the eyes of the beholder and whether that person felt disrespected. 
We may not mean to make someone feel that way, but when we do, it has consequences. 
Over 22 years ago, I vividly recall walking into this stuffy hospital room. 
It was heartbreaking to see my dad, this strong, athletic, energetic guy, lying in the bed with electrodes strapped to his bare chest. 
What put him there was work-related stress. 
For over a decade, he suffered an uncivil boss. 
And for me, I thought he was just an outlier at that time. 
But just a couple years later, I witnessed and experienced a lot of incivility in my first job out of college. 
I spent a year going to work every day and hearing things from coworkers like, "Are you an idiot? That's not how it's done," and, "If I wanted your opinion, I'd ask." 
So I did the natural thing. 
I quit, and I went back to grad school to study the effects of this. 
There, I met Christine Pearson. 
And she had a theory that small, uncivil actions can lead to much bigger problems like aggression and violence. 
We believed that incivility affected performance and the bottom line. 
So we launched a study, and what we found was eye-opening. 
We sent a survey to business school alumni working in all different organizations. 
We asked them to write a few sentences about one experience where they were treated rudely, disrespectfully or insensitively, and to answer questions about how they reacted. 
One person told us about a boss that made insulting statements like, "That's kindergartner's work," and another tore up someone's work in front of the entire team. 
And what we found is that incivility made people less motivated: 66 percent cut back work efforts, 80 percent lost time worrying about what happened, and 12 percent left their job. 
And after we published these results, two things happened. 
One, we got calls from organizations. 
Cisco read about these numbers, took just a few of these and estimated, conservatively, that incivility was costing them 12 million dollars a year. 
The second thing that happened was, we heard from others in our academic field who said, "Well, people are reporting this, but how can you really show it? 
Does people's performance really suffer?" 
I was curious about that, too. 
With Amir Erez, I compared those that experienced incivility to those that didn't experience incivility. 
And what we found is that those that experience incivility do actually function much worse. 
"OK," you may say. "This makes sense. 
After all, it's natural that their performance suffers." 
But what about if you're not the one who experiences it? 
What if you just see or hear it? 
You're a witness. 
We wondered if it affected witnesses, too. 
So we conducted studies where five participants would witness an experimenter act rudely to someone who arrived late to the study. 
The experimenter said, "What is it with you? 
You arrive late, you're irresponsible. 
Look at you! How do you expect to hold a job in the real world?" 
And in another study in a small group, we tested the effects of a peer insulting a group member. 
Now, what we found was really interesting, because witnesses' performance decreased, too -- and not just marginally, quite significantly. 
Incivility is a bug. 
It's contagious, and we become carriers of it just by being around it. 
And this isn't confined to the workplace. 
We can catch this virus anywhere -- at home, online, in schools and in our communities. 
It affects our emotions, our motivation, our performance and how we treat others. 
It even affects our attention and can take some of our brainpower. 
And this happens not only if we experience incivility or we witness it. 
It can happen even if we just see or read rude words. 
Let me give you an example of what I mean. 
To test this, we gave people combinations of words to use to make a sentence. 
But we were very sneaky. 
Half the participants got a list with 15 words used to trigger rudeness: impolitely, interrupt, obnoxious, bother. 
Half the participants received a list of words with none of these rude triggers. 
And what we found was really surprising, because the people who got the rude words were five times more likely to miss information right in front of them on the computer screen. 
And as we continued this research, what we found is that those that read the rude words took longer to make decisions, to record their decisions, and they made significantly more errors. 
This can be a big deal, especially when it comes to life-and-death situations. 
Steve, a physician, told me about a doctor that he worked with who was never very respectful, especially to junior staff and nurses. 
But Steve told me about this one particular interaction where this doctor shouted at a medical team. 
Right after the interaction, the team gave the wrong dosage of medication to their patient. 
Steve said the information was right there on the chart, but somehow everyone on the team missed it. 
He said they lacked the attention or awareness to take it into account. 
Simple mistake, right? 
Well, that patient died. 
Researchers in Israel have actually shown that medical teams exposed to rudeness perform worse not only in all their diagnostics, but in all the procedures they did. 
This was mainly because the teams exposed to rudeness didn't share information as readily, and they stopped seeking help from their teammates. 
And I see this not only in medicine but in all industries. 
So if incivility has such a huge cost, why do we still see so much of it? 
I was curious, so we surveyed people about this, too. 
The number one reason is stress. 
People feel overwhelmed. 
The other reason that people are not more civil is because they're skeptical and even concerned about being civil or appearing nice. 
They believe they'll appear less leader-like. 
They wonder: Do nice guys finish last? 
Or in other words: Do jerks get ahead? 
(Laughter) It's easy to think so, especially when we see a few prominent examples that dominate the conversation. 
Well, it turns out, in the long run, they don't. 
There's really rich research on this by Morgan McCall and Michael Lombardo when they were at the Center for Creative Leadership. 
They found that the number one reason tied to executive failure was an insensitive, abrasive or bullying style. 
There will always be some outliers that succeed despite their incivility. 
Sooner or later, though, most uncivil people sabotage their success. 
For example, with uncivil executives, it comes back to hurt them when they're in a place of weakness or they need something. 
People won't have their backs. 
But what about nice guys? 
Does civility pay? 
Yes, it does. 
And being civil doesn't just mean that you're not a jerk. 
Not holding someone down isn't the same as lifting them up. 
Being truly civil means doing the small things, like smiling and saying hello in the hallway, listening fully when someone's speaking to you. 
Now, you can have strong opinions, disagree, have conflict or give negative feedback civilly, with respect. 
Some people call it "radical candor," where you care personally, but you challenge directly. 
So yes, civility pays. 
In a biotechnology firm, colleagues and I found that those that were seen as civil were twice as likely to be viewed as leaders, and they performed significantly better. 
Why does civility pay? 
Because people see you as an important -- and a powerful -- unique combination of two key characteristics: warm and competent, friendly and smart. 
In other words, being civil isn't just about motivating others. 
It's about you. 
If you're civil, you're more likely to be seen as a leader. 
You'll perform better, and you're seen as warm and competent. 
But there's an even bigger story about how civility pays, and it ties to one of the most important questions around leadership: What do people want most from their leaders? 
We took data from over 20,000 employees around the world, and we found the answer was simple: respect. 
Being treated with respect was more important than recognition and appreciation, useful feedback, even opportunities for learning. 
Those that felt respected were healthier, more focused, more likely to stay with their organization and far more engaged. 
So where do you start? 
How can you lift people up and make people feel respected? 
Well, the nice thing is, it doesn't require a huge shift. 
Small things can make a big difference. 
I found that thanking people, sharing credit, listening attentively, humbly asking questions, acknowledging others and smiling has an impact. 
Patrick Quinlan, former CEO of Ochsner Health [System], told me about the effects of their 10-5 way, where if you're within 10 feet of someone, you make eye contact and smile, and if you're within five feet, you say hello. 
He explained that civility spread, patient satisfaction scores rose, as did patient referrals. 
Civility and respect can be used to boost an organization's performance. 
When my friend Doug Conant took over as CEO of Campbell's Soup Company in 2001, the company's market share had just dropped in half. 
Sales were declining, lots of people had just been laid off. 
A Gallup manager said it was the least engaged organization that they had surveyed. 
And as Doug drove up to work his first day, he noticed that the headquarters was surrounded by barbwire fence. 
There were guard towers in the parking lot. 
He said it looked like a minimum security prison. 
It felt toxic. 
Within five years, Doug had turned things around. 
And within nine years, they were setting all-time performance records and racking up awards, including best place to work. 
How did he do it? 
On day one, Doug told employees that he was going to have high standards for performance, but they were going to do it with civility. 
He walked the talk, and he expected his leaders to. 
For Doug, it all came down to being tough-minded on standards and tenderhearted with people. 
For him, he said it was all about these touch points, or these daily interactions he had with employees, whether in the hallway, in the cafeteria or in meetings. 
And if he handled each touch point well, he'd make employees feel valued. 
Another way that Doug made employees feel valued and showed them that he was paying attention is that he handwrote over 30,000 thank-you notes to employees. 
And this set an example for other leaders. 
Leaders have about 400 of these touch points a day. 
Most don't take long, less than two minutes each. 
The key is to be agile and mindful in each of these moments. 
Civility lifts people. 
We'll get people to give more and function at their best if we're civil. 
Incivility chips away at people and their performance. 
It robs people of their potential, even if they're just working around it. 
What I know from my research is that when we have more civil environments, we're more productive, creative, helpful, happy and healthy. 
We can do better. 
Each one of us can be more mindful and can take actions to lift others up around us, at work, at home, online, in schools and in our communities. 
In every interaction, think: Who do you want to be? 
Let's put an end to incivility bug and start spreading civility. 
After all, it pays. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

I'm a painter. 
I make large-scale figurative paintings, which means I paint people like this. 
But I'm here tonight to tell you about something personal that changed my work and my perspective. 
It's something we all go through, and my hope is that my experience may be helpful to somebody. 
To give you some background on me, I grew up the youngest of eight. 
Yes, eight kids in my family. 
I have six older brothers and a sister. 
To give you a sense of what that's like, when my family went on vacation, we had a bus. 
(Laughter) My supermom would drive us all over town to our various after-school activities -- not in the bus. 
We had a regular car, too. 
She would take me to art classes, and not just one or two. 
She took me to every available art class from when I was eight to 16, because that's all I wanted to do. 
She even took a class with me in New York City. 
Now, being the youngest of eight, I learned a few survival skills. 
Rule number one: don't let your big brother see you do anything stupid. 
So I learned to be quiet and neat and careful to follow the rules and stay in line. 
But painting was where I made the rules. 
That was my private world. 
By 14, I knew I really wanted to be an artist. 
My big plan was to be a waitress to support my painting. 
So I continued honing my skills. 
I went to graduate school and I got an MFA, and at my first solo show, my brother asked me, "What do all these red dots mean next to the paintings?" 
Nobody was more surprised than me. 
The red dots meant that the paintings were sold and that I'd be able to pay my rent with painting. 
Now, my apartment had four electrical outlets, and I couldn't use a microwave and a toaster at the same time, but still, I could pay my rent. 
So I was very happy. 
Here's a painting from back around that time. 
I needed it to be as realistic as possible. 
It had to be specific and believable. 
This was the place where I was isolated and in total control. 
Since then, I've made a career of painting people in water. 
Bathtubs and showers were the perfect enclosed environment. 
It was intimate and private, and water was this complicated challenge that kept me busy for a decade. 
I made about 200 of these paintings, some of them six to eight feet, like this one. 
For this painting, I mixed flour in with the bathwater to make it cloudy and I floated cooking oil on the surface and stuck a girl in it, and when I lit it up, it was so beautiful I couldn't wait to paint it. 
I was driven by this kind of impulsive curiosity, always looking for something new to add: vinyl, steam, glass. 
I once put all this Vaseline in my head and hair just to see what that would look like. 
Don't do that. 
(Laughter) So it was going well. 
I was finding my way. 
I was eager and motivated and surrounded by artists, always going to openings and events. 
I was having some success and recognition and I moved into an apartment with more than four outlets. 
My mom and I would stay up very late talking about our latest ideas and inspiring each other. 
She made beautiful pottery. 
I have a friend named Bo who made this painting of his wife and I dancing by the ocean, and he called it "The Light Years." 
I asked him what that meant, and he said, "Well, that's when you've stepped into adulthood, you're no longer a child, but you're not yet weighed down by the responsibilities of life." 
That was it. It was the light years. 
On October 8, 2011, the light years came to an end. 
My mom was diagnosed with lung cancer. 
It had spread to her bones, and it was in her brain. 
When she told me this, I fell to my knees. 
I totally lost it. 
And when I got myself together and I looked at her, I realized, this isn't about me. 
This is about figuring out how to help her. 
My father is a doctor, and so we had a great advantage having him in charge, and he did a beautiful job taking care of her. 
But I, too, wanted to do everything I could to help, so I wanted to try everything. 
We all did. 
I researched alternative medicines, diets, juicing, acupuncture. 
Finally, I asked her, "Is this what you want me to do?" 
And she said, "No." 
She said, "Pace yourself. I'm going to need you later." 
She knew what was happening, and she knew what the doctors and the experts and the internet didn't know: how she wanted to go through this. 
I just needed to ask her. 
I realized that if I tried to fix it, I would miss it. 
So I just started to be with her, whatever that meant and whatever situation came up, just really listen to her. 
If before I was resisting, then now I was surrendering, giving up trying to control the uncontrollable and just being there in it with her. 
Time slowed down, and the date was irrelevant. 
We developed a routine. 
Early each morning I would crawl into bed with her and sleep with her. 
My brother would come for breakfast and we'd be so glad to hear his car coming up the driveway. 
So I'd help her up and take both her hands and help her walk to the kitchen. 
She had this huge mug she made she loved to drink her coffee out of, and she loved Irish soda bread for breakfast. 
Afterwards was the shower, and she loved this part. 
She loved the warm water, so I made this as indulgent as I could, like a spa. 
My sister would help sometimes. 
We had warm towels and slippers ready immediately so she never got cold for a second. 
I'd blow-dry her hair. 
My brothers would come in the evenings and bring their kids, and that was the highlight of her day. 
Over time, we started to use a wheelchair, and she didn't want to eat so much, and she used the tiniest little teacup we could find to drink her coffee. 
I couldn't support her myself anymore, so we hired an aide to help me with the showers. 
These simple daily activities became our sacred ritual, and we repeated them day after day as the cancer grew. 
It was humbling and painful and exactly where I wanted to be. 
We called this time "the beautiful awful." 
She died on October 26, 2012. 
It was a year and three weeks after her diagnosis. 
She was gone. 
My brothers, sister, and father and I all came together in this supportive and attentive way. 
It was as though our whole family dynamic and all our established roles vanished and we were just all together in this unknown, feeling the same thing and taking care of each other. 
I'm so grateful for them. 
As someone who spends most of my time alone in a studio working, I had no idea that this kind of connection could be so important, so healing. 
This was the most important thing. 
It was what I always wanted. 
So after the funeral, it was time for me to go back to my studio. 
So I packed up my car and I drove back to Brooklyn, and painting is what I've always done, so that's what I did. 
And here's what happened. 
It's like a release of everything that was unraveling in me. 
That safe, very, very carefully rendered safe place that I created in all my other paintings, it was a myth. 
It didn't work. 
And I was afraid, because I didn't want to paint anymore. 
So I went into the woods. 
I thought, I'll try that, going outside. 
I got my paints, and I wasn't a landscape painter, but I wasn't really much of any kind of painter at all, so I had no attachment, no expectation, which allowed me to be reckless and free. 
I actually left one of these wet paintings outside overnight next to a light in the woods. 
By the morning it was lacquered with bugs. 
But I didn't care. It didn't matter. It didn't matter. 
I took all these paintings back to my studio, and scraped them, and carved into them, and poured paint thinner on them, put more paint on top, drew on them. 
I had no plan, but I was watching what was happening. 
This is the one with all the bugs in it. 
I wasn't trying to represent a real space. 
It was the chaos and the imperfections that were fascinating me, and something started to happen. 
I got curious again. 
This is another one from the woods. 
There was a caveat now, though. 
I couldn't be controlling the paint like I used to. 
It had to be about implying and suggesting, not explaining or describing. 
And that imperfect, chaotic, turbulent surface is what told the story. 
I started to be as curious as I was when I was a student. 
So the next thing was I wanted to put figures in these paintings, people, and I loved this new environment, so I wanted to have both people and this atmosphere. 
When the idea hit me of how to do this, I got kind of nauseous and dizzy, which is really just adrenaline, probably, but for me it's a really good sign. 
And so now I want to show you what I've been working on. 
It's something I haven't shown yet, and it's like a preview, I guess, of my upcoming show, what I have so far. 
Expansive space instead of the isolated bathtub. 
I'm going outside instead of inside. 
Loosening control, savoring the imperfections, allowing the -- allowing the imperfections. 
And in that imperfection, you can find a vulnerability. 
I could feel my deepest intention, what matters most to me, that human connection that can happen in a space where there's no resisting or controlling. 
I want to make paintings about that. 
So here's what I learned. 
We're all going to have big losses in our lives, maybe a job or a career, relationships, love, our youth. 
We're going to lose our health, people we love. 
These kinds of losses are out of our control. 
They're unpredictable, and they bring us to our knees. 
And so I say, let them. 
Fall to your knees. Be humbled. 
Let go of trying to change it or even wanting it to be different. 
It just is. 
And then there's space, and in that space feel your vulnerability, what matters most to you, your deepest intention. 
And be curious to connect to what and who is really here, awake and alive. 
It's what we all want. 
Let's take the opportunity to find something beautiful in the unknown, in the unpredictable, and even in the awful. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

Today, there are 1.8 billion young people between the ages of 10 and 24 in the world. 
It is the largest cohort in human history. 
Meeting their needs will be a big challenge. 
But it's also a big opportunity. 
They hold our shared future in their hands. 
Every day, we read about young people lending their ideas and passions to fighting for change, social change, political change, change in their communities. 
Imagine what they'll create: breakthroughs, inventions. 
Maybe new medicines, new modes of transportation, new ways to communicate, sustainable economies and maybe even a world at peace. 
But this opportunity, this youth dividend, is not a given. 
One point eight billion young women and young men are standing at the door of adulthood. 
Are they ready? 
Right now, too few of them are. 
My favorite part of my job at UNICEF is a chance to talk to, meet with and hear from young people all around the world. 
And they tell me about their hopes and dreams. 
And they have amazing hopes and dreams for what they'll accomplish in their lives. 
But what they're also telling me is that they have fears. 
They feel that they're facing a series of urgent crises. 
A crisis of demographics, a crisis of education, a crisis of employment, a crisis of violence and a crisis for girls. 
If you look at these crises, you realize that they're urgent and they need to be addressed now. 
Because they tell us that they're worried. 
They're worried that they might not get the education that they need. 
And you know what? 
They're right. 
Two hundred million adolescents are out of school worldwide, about the population of Brazil. 
And those that are in school feel that they may not be getting the right skills. 
Globally, six in 10 children and young people do not meet the minimum proficiency level for reading and mathematics. 
No country can be successful if nearly half of its population of young people are unable to read or write. 
And what about the lucky few who are in secondary school? 
Many of them are dropping out because they're worried that they're not getting skills that they can use to make a livelihood. 
And sometimes, their parents can no longer afford the fees. 
It's a tragedy. 
And young people are also telling me that they're worried about employment, that they won't be able to find a job. 
And again, they're right. 
Every month, 10 million young people reach working age. 
It's a staggering number. 
Some will go on for further education, but many will enter the workforce. 
And our world is not creating 10 million new jobs each month. 
The competition is fierce for the jobs that are available. 
So, imagine being a young person today, needing a job, seeking a livelihood, ready to build a future, and opportunities are hard to find. 
Young people are also telling me that they're worried that they're not getting the skills that they need. 
And again, they're right. 
We are finding ourselves at a time in the world when the world is changing so fast for work. 
We're in the fourth industrial revolution. 
Young people do not want to be on the farms and in rural communities. 
They want to go to the cities. 
They want to learn future skills for future work. 
They want to learn digital technology and green technologies. 
They want to have a chance to learn modern agriculture. 
They want to learn business and entrepreneurship, so that they can create a business of their own. 
They want to be nurses and radiologists and pharmacists and doctors. 
And they want to have all of the skills that they'll need for the future. 
They also want to learn the trades, like construction and electricians. 
These are all the professions that a country needs, as well as the professions that have not been invented yet. 
And young people are also telling me that they're worried about violence. 
At home, online, in school, in their communities. 
And again, they're right. 
A young person can have hundreds of friends on social media, but when they need to find a friendly face, someone who can be there as their friend, to talk to, they do not find one. 
They face bullying, harassment and more. 
And hundreds of millions are facing exploitation and abuse, and violence. 
Every seven minutes, an adolescent boy or girl somewhere in the world is killed by an act of violence. 
And girls are telling me that they're especially worried about their futures. 
And sadly, they're right, too. 
Girls face prejudice and discrimination. 
They face early childhood marriage and they face life-threatening early pregnancy. 
Imagine a population of the United States. 
Now double it. 
That's the number of women who were married before their 18th birthday. 
Six hundred and fifty million. 
And many were mothers while they were still children themselves. 
One out of every three women will face physical abuse or sexual abuse in her lifetime. 
So, no wonder girls are worried about their futures. 
These urgent crises may not be a reality in your life or in your neighborhood. 
And perhaps you've had opportunities for a good education and for marketable skills, and for getting a job. 
And maybe you've never faced violence, or prejudice, or discrimination. 
But there are tens of millions of young people who are not so lucky. 
And they are sounding the alarm for their futures. 
And that is why UNICEF and our many public and private partners are launching a new global initiative. 
Young people themselves have named it. 
And it's called Generation Unlimited or Gen-U or Gen you. 
So, what they're saying is, it's our time, it's our turn, it's our future. 
Our goal is very straightforward. 
We want every young person in school, learning, training, or age-appropriate employment by the year 2030. 
This goal is urgent, it's necessary, it's ambitious. 
But we think it's also achievable. 
So we're calling out for cutting-edge solutions and new ideas. 
Ideas that will give young people a fighting chance for their futures. 
We don't know all the answers, so we're reaching out to businesses and governments, and nonprofits, and academia, and communities, and innovators for help. 
Gen-U is to be an open platform, where people can come and share their ideas and solutions about what works, what does not work, and importantly, what might work. 
So if we can take these ideas and add a little bit of seed money, and add some good partners, and add good political will, we think they can scale up to reach thousands and millions of people around the world. 
And with this project, we're also going to do something new. 
We're going to co-design and co-create with young people. 
So with Gen-U, they're going to be in the driver's seat, steering us all along the way. 
In Argentina, there's a program where we connect students who are in rural, remote, hard to reach mountainous communities, with something they've seldom seen: a secondary school teacher. 
So these students come to a classroom, they're joined by a community teacher and they're connected to urban schools online. 
And there is the secondary school teacher, who is teaching them about digital technology and a good secondary school education, without them ever having to leave their own communities. 
And in South Africa, there's a program called Techno Girls. 
And these are girls from disadvantaged neighborhoods who are studying the STEM program area: science, technology, engineering and math. 
And they have a chance to job shadow. 
This is the way that they then can see themselves in jobs that are in engineering, in science, and maybe in the space program. 
In Bangladesh, we have partners who are training tens of thousands of young people in the trades, so that they can become motorcycle repair people, or mobile phone service people. 
But these are a chance to see their own livelihoods. 
And maybe even to have a business of their own. 
And in Vietnam, there's a program where we are pairing young entrepreneurs with the needs in their own local communities. 
So with this program, a group gathered and they decided that they would solve the problem of transportation for people with disabilities in their communities. 
So with a mentor and a bit of seed funding, they've now developed a new app to help the whole community. 
And I've seen how these programs can make a difference. 
When I was in Lebanon, I visited a program called Girls Got IT, or Girls Got It. 
And in this program, girls who have been studying computer skills and the STEM program have a chance to work side by side with young professionals, so that they can learn firsthand what it's like to be an architect, a designer or a scientist. 
And when you see these girls, smiles on their faces, the hot lights in their eyes, they are so excited, they have hope for the future. 
They want to change the world. 
And now, with this program and these mentors, they'll be able to do it. 
But these ideas and programs are just a start. 
They'll only reach a fraction of the young people that we need to reach. 
We want to take these ideas and find ways to scale them up. 
To reach more young people in more communities, in more places around the world. 
And we want to dream big. 
Could every school, everywhere in the world, no matter how remote or mountainous, or even if it's in a refugee camp, could they be connected to the internet? 
Could we have instant translation for young people, so that you could get a good education in your own language, anywhere in the world? 
And would it be possible that we could connect the education in your school with skills that you're going to need to get a job in your own community? 
So that you actually can move from school to work. 
And more. 
Can each one of us help? 
In our everyday lives and in our workplaces, are there ways that we could support young people? 
Young people are asking us for apprenticeships, for job shadowing, for internships. 
Could we do this? 
Young people are also asking us for work-study programs, places where they can learn and earn. 
Could we do this and could we reach out to a community that's nearby, that's less advantaged, and help them? 
Young people are also saying that they want to help other young people. 
They want more space and more voice, so that they can gather to help each other. 
In HIV centers, in refugee camps, but also to stop online bullying and early child marriage. 
We need ideas, we need ideas that are big and small, ideas that are local and global. 
This, in the end, is our responsibility. 
A massive generation of young people are about to inherit our world. 
It is our duty to leave a legacy of hope and opportunity for them but also with them. 
Young people are 25 percent of our population. 
But they are 100 percent of our future. 
And they're calling out for a fighting chance to build a better world. 
So their call should be our calling. 
The calling of our time. 
The time is now, the need is urgent. 
And 1.8 billion young people are waiting. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

What is a parent? 
What is a parent? 
It's not an easy question. 
Today we have adoption, stepfamilies, surrogate mothers. 
Many parents face tough questions and tough decisions. 
Shall we tell our child about the sperm donation? 
If so, when? 
What words to use? 
Sperm donors are often referred to as "biological fathers," but should we really be using the word "father?" 
As a philosopher and social scientist, I have been studying these questions about the concept of parenthood. 
But today, I will talk to you about what I learned from talking to parents and children. 
I will show you that they know what matters most in a family, even though their family looks a little different. 
I will show you their creative ways of dealing with tough questions. 
But I will also show you the parents' uncertainties. 
We interviewed couples who received fertility treatment at Ghent University Hospital, using sperm from a donor. 
In this treatment timeline, you can see two points at which we conducted interviews. 
We included heterosexual couples, where the man for some reason did not have good-quality sperm, and lesbian couples who obviously needed to find sperm elsewhere. 
We also included children. 
I wanted to know how those children define concepts like parenthood and family. 
In fact, that is what I asked them, only not in that way. 
I drew an apple tree instead. 
This way, I could ask abstract, philosophical questions in a way that did not make them run off. 
So as you can see, the apple tree is empty. 
And that illustrates my research approach. 
By designing techniques like this, I can bring as little meaning and content as possible to the interview, because I want to hear that from them. 
I asked them: What would your family look like if it were an apple tree? 
And they could take a paper apple for everyone who, in their view, was a member of the family, write a name on it and hang it wherever they wanted. 
And I would ask questions. 
Most children started with a parent or a sibling. 
One started with "Boxer," the dead dog of his grandparents. 
At this point, none of the children started mentioning the donor. 
So, I asked them about their birth story. 
I said, "Before you were born, it was just your mom and dad, or mom and mommy. 
Can you tell me how you came into the family?" 
And they explained. 
One said, "My parents did not have good seeds, but there are friendly men out there who have spare seeds. 
They bring them to the hospital, and they put them in a big jar. 
My mommy went there, and she took two from the jar, one for me and one for my sister. 
She put the seeds in her belly -- somehow -- and her belly grew really big, and there I was." 
Hmm. 
So only when they started mentioning the donor, I asked questions about him, using their own words. 
I said, "If this would be an apple for the friendly man with the seeds, what would you do with it?" 
And one boy was thinking out loud, holding the apple. 
And he said, "I won't put this one up there with the others. 
He's not part of my family. 
But I will not put him on the ground. 
That's too cold and too hard. 
I think he should be in the trunk, because he made my family possible. 
If he would not have done this, that would really be sad because my family would not be here, and I would not be here." 
So also, parents constructed family tales -- tales to tell their children. 
One couple explained their insemination by taking their children to a farm to watch a vet inseminate cows. 
And why not? 
It's their way of explaining; their do-it-yourself with family narratives. 
DIY. 
And we had another couple who made books -- a book for each child. 
They were really works of art containing their thoughts and feelings throughout the treatment. 
They even had the hospital parking tickets in there. 
So it is DIY: finding ways, words and images to tell your family story to your child. 
And these stories were highly diverse, but they all had one thing in common: it was a tale of longing for a child and a quest for that child. 
It was about how special and how deeply loved their child was. 
And research so far shows that these children are doing fine. 
They do not have more problems than other kids. 
Yet, these parents also wanted to justify their decisions through the tales they tell. 
They hoped that their children would understand their reasons for making the family in this way. 
Underlying was a fear that their children might disapprove and would reject the non-genetic parent. 
And that fear is understandable, because we live in a very heteronormative and geneticized society -- a world that still believes that true families consist of one mom, one dad and their genetically related children. 
Well. 
I want to tell you about a teenage boy. 
He was donor-conceived but not part of our study. 
One day, he had an argument with his father, and he yelled, "You're telling me what to do? 
You're not even my father!" 
That was exactly what the parents in our study feared. 
Now, the boy soon felt sorry, and they made up. 
But it is the reaction of his father that is most interesting. 
He said, "This outburst had nothing to do with the lack of a genetic link. 
It was about puberty -- being difficult. 
It's what they do at that age. 
It will pass." 
What this man shows us is that when something goes wrong, we should not immediately think it is because the family is a little different. 
These things happen in all families. 
And every now and then, all parents may wonder: Am I a good enough parent? 
These parents, too. 
They, above all, wanted to do what's best for their child. 
But they also sometimes wondered: Am I a real parent? 
And their uncertainties were present long before they even were parents. 
At the start of treatment, when they first saw the counselor, they paid close attention to the counselor, because they wanted to do it right. 
Even 10 years later, they still remember the advice they were given. 
So when they thought about the counselor and the advice they were given, we discussed that. 
And we saw one lesbian couple who said, "When our son asks us, 'Do I have a dad?' we will say 'No, you do not have a dad.' But we will say nothing more, not unless he asks, because he might not be ready for that. 
The counselor said so." 
Well. 
I don't know; that's quite different from how we respond to children's questions. 
Like, "Milk -- is that made in a factory?" 
We will say, "No, it comes from cows," and we will talk about the farmer, and the way the milk ends up in the shop. 
We will not say, "No, milk is not made in a factory." 
So something strange happened here, and of course these children noticed that. 
One boy said, "I asked my parents loads of questions, but they acted really weird. 
So, you know, I have a friend at school, and she's made in the same way. 
When I have a question, I just go and ask her." 
Clever guy. 
Problem solved. 
But his parents did not notice, and it certainly was not what they had in mind, nor what the counselor had in mind when they were saying how important it is to be an open-communication family. 
And that's the strange thing about advice. 
When we offer people pills, we gather evidence first. 
We do tests, we do follow-up studies. 
We want to know, and rightly so, what this pill is doing and how it affects people's lives. 
And advice? 
It is not enough for advice, or for professionals to give advice that is theoretically sound, or well-meant. 
It should be advice that there is evidence for -- evidence that it actually improves patients' lives. 
So the philosopher in me would now like to offer you a paradox: I advise you to stop following advice. 
But, yes. 
(Applause) I will not end here with what went wrong; I would not be doing justice to the warmth we found in those families. 
Remember the books and the trip to the farmer? 
When parents do things that work for them, they do brilliant things. 
What I want you to remember as members of families, in no matter what form or shape, is that what families need are warm relationships. 
And we do not need to be professionals to create those. 
Most of us do just fine, although it may be hard work, and from time to time, we can do with some advice. 
In that case, bear in mind three things. 
Work with advice that works for your family. 
Remember -- you're the expert, because you live your family life. 
And finally, believe in your abilities and your creativity, because you can do it yourself. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

If I asked you to picture the air, what do you imagine? 
Most people think about either empty space or clear blue sky or sometimes trees dancing in the wind. 
And then I remember my high school chemistry teacher with really long socks at the blackboard, drawing diagrams of bubbles connected to other bubbles, and describing how they vibrate and collide in a kind of frantic soup. 
But really, we tend not to think about the air that much at all. 
We notice it mostly when there's some kind of unpleasant sensory intrusion upon it, like a terrible smell or something visible like smoke or mist. 
But it's always there. 
It's touching all of us right now. 
It's even inside us. 
Our air is immediate, vital and intimate. 
And yet, it's so easily forgotten. 
So what is the air? 
It's the combination of the invisible gases that envelop the Earth, attracted by the Earth's gravitational pull. 
And even though I'm a visual artist, I'm interested in the invisibility of the air. 
I'm interested in how we imagine it, how we experience it and how we all have an innate understanding of its materiality through breathing. 
All life on Earth changes the air through gas exchange, and we're all doing it right now. 
Actually, why don't we all right now together take one big, collective, deep breath in. 
Ready? In. (Inhales) And out. (Exhales) That air that you just exhaled, you enriched a hundred times in carbon dioxide. 
So roughly five liters of air per breath, 17 breaths per minute of the 525,600 minutes per year, comes to approximately 45 million liters of air, enriched 100 times in carbon dioxide, just for you. 
Now, that's equivalent to about 18 Olympic-sized swimming pools. 
For me, air is plural. 
It's simultaneously as small as our breathing and as big as the planet. 
And it's kind of hard to picture. 
Maybe it's impossible, and maybe it doesn't matter. 
Through my visual arts practice, I try to make air, not so much picture it, but to make it visceral and tactile and haptic. 
I try to expand this notion of the aesthetic, how things look, so that it can include things like how it feels on your skin and in your lungs, and how your voice sounds as it passes through it. 
I explore the weight, density and smell, but most importantly, I think a lot about the stories we attach to different kinds of air. 
This is a work I made in 2014. 
It's called "Different Kinds of Air: A Plant's Diary," where I was recreating the air from different eras in Earth's evolution, and inviting the audience to come in and breathe them with me. 
And it's really surprising, so drastically different. 
Now, I'm not a scientist, but atmospheric scientists will look for traces in the air chemistry in geology, a bit like how rocks can oxidize, and they'll extrapolate that information and aggregate it, such that they can pretty much form a recipe for the air at different times. 
Then I come in as the artist and take that recipe and recreate it using the component gases. 
I was particularly interested in moments of time that are examples of life changing the air, but also the air that can influence how life will evolve, like Carboniferous air. 
It's from about 300 to 350 million years ago. 
It's an era known as the time of the giants. 
So for the first time in the history of life, lignin evolves. 
That's the hard stuff that trees are made of. 
So trees effectively invent their own trunks at this time, and they get really big, bigger and bigger, and pepper the Earth, releasing oxygen, releasing oxygen, releasing oxygen, such that the oxygen levels are about twice as high as what they are today. 
And this rich air supports massive insects -- huge spiders and dragonflies with a wingspan of about 65 centimeters. 
To breathe, this air is really clean and really fresh. 
It doesn't so much have a flavor, but it does give your body a really subtle kind of boost of energy. 
It's really good for hangovers. 
(Laughter) Or there's the air of the Great Dying -- that's about 252.5 million years ago, just before the dinosaurs evolve. 
It's a really short time period, geologically speaking, from about 20- to 200,000 years. 
Really quick. 
This is the greatest extinction event in Earth's history, even bigger than when the dinosaurs died out. 
Eighty-five to 95 percent of species at this time die out, and simultaneous to that is a huge, dramatic spike in carbon dioxide, that a lot of scientists agree comes from a simultaneous eruption of volcanoes and a runaway greenhouse effect. 
Oxygen levels at this time go to below half of what they are today, so about 10 percent. 
So this air would definitely not support human life, but it's OK to just have a breath. 
And to breathe, it's oddly comforting. 
It's really calming, it's quite warm and it has a flavor a little bit like soda water. 
It has that kind of spritz, quite pleasant. 
So with all this thinking about air of the past, it's quite natural to start thinking about the air of the future. 
And instead of being speculative with air and just making up what I think might be the future air, I discovered this human-synthesized air. 
That means that it doesn't occur anywhere in nature, but it's made by humans in a laboratory for application in different industrial settings. 
Why is it future air? 
Well, this air is a really stable molecule that will literally be part of the air once it's released, for the next 300 to 400 years, before it's broken down. 
So that's about 12 to 16 generations. 
And this future air has some very sensual qualities. 
It's very heavy. 
It's about eight times heavier than the air we're used to breathing. 
It's so heavy, in fact, that when you breathe it in, whatever words you speak are kind of literally heavy as well, so they dribble down your chin and drop to the floor and soak into the cracks. 
It's an air that operates quite a lot like a liquid. 
Now, this air comes with an ethical dimension as well. 
Humans made this air, but it's also the most potent greenhouse gas that has ever been tested. 
Its warming potential is 24,000 times that of carbon dioxide, and it has that longevity of 12 to 16 generations. 
So this ethical confrontation is really central to my work. 
(In a lowered voice) It has another quite surprising quality. 
It changes the sound of your voice quite dramatically. 
(Laughter) So when we start to think -- ooh! It's still there a bit. 
(Laughter) When we think about climate change, we probably don't think about giant insects and erupting volcanoes or funny voices. 
The images that more readily come to mind are things like retreating glaciers and polar bears adrift on icebergs. 
We think about pie charts and column graphs and endless politicians talking to scientists wearing cardigans. 
But perhaps it's time we start thinking about climate change on the same visceral level that we experience the air. 
Like air, climate change is simultaneously at the scale of the molecule, the breath and the planet. 
It's immediate, vital and intimate, as well as being amorphous and cumbersome. 
And yet, it's so easily forgotten. 
Climate change is the collective self-portrait of humanity. 
It reflects our decisions as individuals, as governments and as industries. 
And if there's anything I've learned from looking at air, it's that even though it's changing, it persists. 
It may not support the kind of life that we'd recognize, but it will support something. 
And if we humans are such a vital part of that change, I think it's important that we can feel the discussion. 
Because even though it's invisible, humans are leaving a very vibrant trace in the air. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

In 2015, the leaders of the world made a big promise. 
A promise that over the next 15 years, the lives of billions of people are going to get better with no one left behind. 
That promise is the Sustainable Development Goals -- the SDGs. 
We're now three years in; a fifth of the way into the journey. 
The clock is ticking. 
If we offtrack now, it's going to get harder and harder to hit those goals. 
So what I want to do for you today is give you a snapshot on where we are today, some projections on where we're heading and some ideas on things we might need to do differently. 
Now, the SDGs are of course spectacularly complicated. 
I would expect nothing less from the United Nations. 
(Laughter) How many goals? 
Maybe something tried and tested, like three, seven or 10. 
No, let's pick a prime number higher than 10. 
Seventeen goals. 
I congratulate those of you who've memorized them already. 
For the rest of us, here they are. 
Seventeen goals ranging from ending poverty to inclusive cities to sustainable fisheries; all a comprehensive plan for the future of our world. 
But sadly, a plan without the data to measure it. 
So how are we going to track progress? 
Well, I'm going to use today the Social Progress Index. 
It's a measure of the quality of life of countries, ranging from the basic needs of survival -- food, water, shelter, safety -- through to the foundations of well-being -- education, information, health and the environment -- and opportunity -- rights, freedom of choice, inclusiveness and access to higher education. 
Now, the Social Progress Index doesn't look like the SDGs, but fundamentally, it's measuring the same concepts, and the Social Progress Index has the advantage that we have the data. 
We have 51 indicators drawn from trusted sources to measure these concepts. 
And also, what we can do because it's an index, is add together all those indicators to give us an aggregate score about how we're performing against the total package of the SDGs. 
Now, one caveat. 
The Social Progress Index is a measure of quality of life. 
We're not looking at whether this can be achieved within the planet's environmental limits. 
You will need other tools to do that. 
So how are we doing on the SDGs? 
Well, I'm going to put the SDGs on a scale of zero to 100. 
And zero is the absolute worst score on each of those 51 indicators: absolute social progress, zero. 
And then 100 is the minimum standard required to achieve those SDGs. 
A hundred is where we want to get to by 2030. 
So, where did we start on this journey? 
Fortunately, not at zero. 
In 2015, the world score against the SDGs was 69.1. 
Some way on the way there but quite a long way to go. 
Now let me also emphasize that this world forecast, which is based on data from 180 countries, is population weighted. 
So China has more weight in than Comoros; India has more weight in than Iceland. 
But we could unpack this and see how the countries are doing. 
And the country today that is closest to achieving the SDGs is Denmark. 
And the country with the furthest to go is Central African Republic. 
And everyone else is somewhere in between. 
So the challenge for the SDGs is to try and sweep all these dots across to the right, to 100 by 2030. 
Can we get there? 
Well, with the Social Progress Index, we've got some time series data. 
So we have some idea of the trend that the countries are on, on which we can build some projections. 
So let's have a look. 
Let's start with our top-performing country, Denmark. 
And yes, I'm pleased to say that Denmark is forecast to achieve the SDGs by 2030. 
Maybe not surprising, but I'll take a win. 
Let's look at some of the other richer countries of the world -- the G7. 
And we find that Germany and Japan will get there or thereabouts. 
But Canada, France, the UK and Italy are all going to fall short. 
And the United States? 
Quite some way back. 
Now, this is sort of worrying news. 
But these are the richest countries in the world, not the most populous. 
So let's take a look now at the biggest countries in the world, the ones that will most affect whether or not we achieve the SDGs. 
And here they are -- countries in the world with a population of higher than 100 million, ranging from China to Ethiopia. 
Obviously, the US and Japan would be in that list, but we've looked at them already. 
So here we are. 
The biggest countries in the world; the dealbreakers for the SDGs. 
And the country that's going to make most progress towards the SDGs is Mexico. 
Mexico is going to get to about 87, so just shy of where the US is going to get but quite some way off our SDG target. 
Russia comes next. 
Then China and Indonesia. 
Then Brazil -- might've expected Brazil to do a bit better. 
Philippines, and then a step down to India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, and then Ethiopia. 
So none of these countries are going to hit the SDGs. 
And we can then take these numbers in all the countries of the world to give ourselves a world forecast on achieving that total package of the SDGs. 
So remember, in 2015 we started at 69.1. 
I'm pleased to say that over the last three years, we have made some progress. 
In 2018, we've hit 70.5, and if we project that rate of progress forward to 2030, that's going to get us to 75.2, which is obviously a long way short of our target. 
Indeed, on current trends, we won't hit the 2030 targets until 2094. 
Now, I don't know about you, but I certainly don't want to wait that long. 
So what can we do about this? 
Well, the first thing to do is we've got to call out the rich countries. 
Here are the countries closest to the SDGs, with the greatest resources, and they're falling short. 
Maybe they think that this is like the Old World where goals for the UN are just for poor countries and not for them. 
Well, you're wrong. 
The SDGs are for every country, and it's shameful that these wealthy countries are falling short. 
Every country needs a plan to implement the SDGs and deliver them for their citizens. 
G7, other rich countries -- get your act together. 
The second thing we can do is look a bit further into the data and see where there are opportunities to accelerate progress or there are negative trends that we can reverse. 
So I'm going to take you into three areas. 
One where we're doing quite well, one where we really should be doing better and another where we've got some real problems. 
Let's start with the good news, and I want to talk about what we call nutrition and basic medical care. 
This covers SDG 2 on no hunger and the basic elements of SDG 3 on health, so maternal and child mortality, infectious diseases, etc ... 
This is an area where most of the rich world has hit the SDGs. 
And we also find, looking at our big countries, that the most advanced have got pretty close. 
Here are our 11 big countries, and if you look at the top, Brazil and Russia are pretty close to the SDG target. 
But at the bottom -- Ethiopia, Pakistan -- a long way to go. 
That's where we are in 2018. 
What's our trajectory? 
On the current trajectory, how far are we going to get by 2030? 
Well, let's have a look. 
Well, what we see is a lot of progress. 
See Bangladesh in the middle. 
If Bangladesh maintains its current rate of progress, it could get very close to that SDG target. 
And Ethiopia at the bottom is making a huge amount of progress at the moment. 
If that can be maintained, Ethiopia could get a long way. 
We add this all up for all the countries of the world and our projection is a score of 94.5 by 2030. 
And if countries like the Philippines, which have grown more slowly, could accelerate progress, then we could get a lot closer. 
So there are reasons to be optimistic about SDGs 2 and 3. 
But there's another very basic area of the SDGs where we're doing less well, which is SDG 6, on water and sanitation. 
Again, it's an SDG where most of the rich countries have already achieved the targets. 
And again, for our big countries -- our big 11 emerging countries, we see that some of the countries, like Russia and Mexico, are very close to the target, but Nigeria and other countries are a very long way back. 
So how are we doing on this target? 
What progress are we going to make over the next 12 years based on the current direction of travel? 
Well, here we go ... 
and yes, there is some progress. 
Our top four countries are all hitting the SDG targets -- some are moving forward quite quickly. 
But it's not enough to really move us forward significantly. 
What we see is that for the world as a whole, we're forecasting a score of around 85, 86 by 2030 -- not fast enough. 
Now, obviously this is not good news, but I think what this data also shows is that we could be doing a lot better. 
Water and sanitation is a solved problem. 
It's about scaling that solution everywhere. 
So if we could accelerate progress in some of those countries who are improving more slowly -- Nigeria, the Philippines, etc. -- then we could get a lot closer to the goal. 
Indeed, I think SDG 6 is probably the biggest opportunity of all the SDGs for a step change. 
So that's an area we could do better. 
Let's look finally at an area where we are struggling, which is what we call personal rights and inclusiveness. 
This is covering concepts across a range of SDGs. 
SDG 1 on poverty, SDG 5 on gender equality, SDG 10 on inequality, SDG 11 on inclusive cities and SDG 16 on peace and justice. 
So across those SDGs there are themes around rights and inclusiveness, and those may seem less immediate or pressing than things like hunger and disease, but rights and inclusion are critical to an agenda of no one left behind. 
So how are we doing on those issues? 
Let's start off with personal rights. 
What I'm going to do first is show you our big countries in 2015. 
So here they are, and I've put the USA and Japan back in, so it's our 13 biggest countries in the world. 
And we see a wide range of scores. 
The United States at the top with Japan hitting the goals; China a long way behind. 
So what's been our direction of travel on the rights agenda over the last three years? 
Let's have a look. 
Well, what we see is actually pretty ugly. 
The majority of the countries are standing still or moving backwards, and big countries like Brazil, India, China, Bangladesh have all seen significant declines. 
This is worrying. 
Let's have a look now at inclusiveness. 
And inclusiveness is looking at things like violence and discrimination against minorities, gender equity, LGBT inclusion, etc... 
And as a result, we see that the scores for our big countries are generally lower. 
Every country, rich and poor alike, is struggling with building an inclusive society. 
But what's our direction of travel? 
Are we building more inclusive countries? 
Let's have a look -- progress to 2018. 
And again we see the world moving backwards: most countries static, a lot of countries going backwards -- Bangladesh moving backwards -- but also, two of the countries that were leading -- Brazil and the United States -- have gone backwards significantly over the last three years. 
Let's sum this up now for the world as a whole. 
And what we see on personal rights for the whole world is we're forecasting actually a decline in the score on personal rights to about 60, and then this decline in the score of inclusiveness to about 42. 
Now, obviously these things can change quite quickly with rights and with changes in law, changes in attitudes, but we have to accept that on current trends, this is probably the most worrying aspect of the SDGs. 
How I've depressed you ... 
(Laughter) I hope not because I think what we do see is that progress is happening in a lot of places and there are opportunities for accelerating progress. 
We are living in a world that is tantalizingly close to ensuring that no one need die of hunger or malaria or diarrhea. 
If we can focus our efforts, mobilize resources, galvanize the political will, that step change is possible. 
But in focusing on those really basic, solvable SDGs, we mustn't forget the whole package. 
The goals are an unwieldy set of indicators, goals and targets, but they also include the challenges our world faces. 
The fact that the SDGs are focusing attention on the fact that we face a crisis in personal rights and inclusiveness is a positive. 
If we forget that, if we choose to double down on the SDGs that we can solve, if we go for SDG à la carte and pick the most easy SDGs, then we will have missed the point of the SDGs, we will miss the goals and we will have failed on the promise of the SDGs. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with the Guinness Book of World Records, and I really wanted to set a world record myself. 
But there was just one small problem: I had absolutely no talent. 
So I decided to set a world record in something that demanded absolutely no skill at all. 
I decided to set a world record in crawling. 
(Laughter) Now, the record at the time was 12 and a half miles, and for some reason, this seemed totally manageable. 
(Laughter) I recruited my friend Anne, and together we decided, we didn't even need to train. 
(Laughter) And on the day of our record attempt, we put furniture pads on the outside of our good luck jeans and we set off, and right away, we were in trouble, because the denim was against our skin and it began to chafe, and soon our knees were being chewed up. 
Hours in, it began to rain. 
Then, Anne dropped out. 
Then, it got dark. 
Now, by now, my knees were bleeding through my jeans, and I was hallucinating from the cold and the pain and the monotony. 
And to give you an idea of the suffer-fest that I was undergoing, the first lap around the high school track took 10 minutes. 
The last lap took almost 30. 
After 12 hours of crawling, I stopped, and I had gone eight and a half miles. 
So I was short of the 12-and-a-half-mile record. 
Now, for many years, I thought this was a story of abject failure, but today I see it differently, because when I was attempting the world record, I was doing three things. 
I was getting outside my comfort zone, I was calling upon my resilience, and I was finding confidence in myself and my own decisions. 
I didn't know it then, but those are not the attributes of failure. 
Those are the attributes of bravery. 
Now, in 1989, at the age of 26, I became a San Francisco firefighter, and I was the 15th woman in a department of 1,500 men. 
(Applause) And as you can imagine, when I arrived there were many doubts about whether we could do the job. 
So even though I was a 5'10", 150-pound collegiate rower, and someone who could endure 12 hours of searing knee pain -- (Laughter) I knew I still had to prove my strength and fitness. 
So one day a call came in for a fire, and sure enough, when my engine group pulled up, there was black smoke billowing from a building off an alleyway. 
And I was with a big guy named Skip, and he was on the nozzle, and I was right behind, and it was a typical sort of fire. 
It was smoky, it was hot, and all of a sudden, there was an explosion, and Skip and I were blown backwards, my mask was knocked sideways, and there was this moment of confusion. 
And then I picked myself up, I groped for the nozzle, and I did what a firefighter was supposed to do: I lunged forward, opened up the water and I tackled the fire myself. 
The explosion had been caused by a water heater, so nobody was hurt, and ultimately it was not a big deal, but later Skip came up to me and said, "Nice job, Caroline," in this surprised sort of voice. 
(Laughter) And I was confused, because the fire hadn't been difficult physically, so why was he looking at me with something like astonishment? 
And then it became clear: Skip, who was by the way a really nice guy and an excellent firefighter, not only thought that women could not be strong, he thought that they could not be brave either. 
And he wasn't the only one. 
Friends, acquaintances and strangers, men and women throughout my career ask me over and over, "Caroline, all that fire, all that danger, aren't you scared?" 
Honestly, I never heard a male firefighter asked this. 
And I became curious. 
Why wasn't bravery expected of women? 
Now, the answer began to come when a friend of mine lamented to me that her young daughter was a big scaredy-cat, and so I began to notice, and yes, the daughter was anxious, but more than that, the parents were anxious. 
Most of what they said to her when she was outside began with, "Be careful," "Watch out," or "No." 
Now, my friends were not bad parents. 
They were just doing what most parents do, which is cautioning their daughters much more than they caution their sons. 
There was a study involving a playground fire pole, ironically, in which researchers saw that little girls were very likely to be warned by both their moms and dads about the fire pole's risk, and if the little girls still wanted to play on the fire pole, a parent was very likely to assist her. 
But the little boys? 
They were encouraged to play on the fire pole despite any trepidations that they might have, and often the parents offered guidance on how to use it on their own. 
So what message does this send to both boys and girls? 
Well, that girls are fragile and more in need of help, and that boys can and should master difficult tasks by themselves. 
It says that girls should be fearful and boys should be gutsy. 
Now, the irony is that at this young age, girls and boys are actually very alike physically. 
In fact, girls are often stronger until puberty, and more mature. 
And yet we adults act as if girls are more fragile and more in need of help, and they can't handle as much. 
This is the message that we absorb as kids, and this is the message that fully permeates as we grow up. 
We women believe it, men believe it, and guess what? 
As we become parents, we pass it on to our children, and so it goes. 
Well, so now I had my answer. 
This is why women, even firewomen, were expected to be scared. 
This is why women often are scared. 
Now, I know some of you won't believe me when I tell you this, but I am not against fear. 
I know it's an important emotion, and it's there to keep us safe. 
But the problem is when fear is the primary reaction that we teach and encourage in girls whenever they face something outside their comfort zone. 
So I was a paraglider pilot for many years -- (Applause) and a paraglider is a parachute-like wing, and it does fly very well, but to many people I realize it looks just like a bedsheet with strings attached. 
(Laughter) And I spent a lot of time on mountaintops inflating this bedsheet, running off and flying. 
And I know what you're thinking. 
You're like, Caroline, a little fear would make sense here. 
And you're right, it does. 
I assure you, I did feel fear. 
But on that mountaintop, waiting for the wind to come in just right, I felt so many other things, too: exhilaration, confidence. 
I knew I was a good pilot. 
I knew the conditions were good, or I wouldn't be there. 
I knew how great it was going to be a thousand feet in the air. 
So yes, fear was there, but I would take a good hard look at it, assess just how relevant it was and then put it where it belonged, which was more often than not behind my exhilaration, my anticipation and my confidence. 
So I'm not against fear. 
I'm just pro-bravery. 
Now, I'm not saying your girls must be firefighters or that they should be paragliders, but I am saying that we are raising our girls to be timid, even helpless, and it begins when we caution them against physical risk. 
The fear we learn and the experiences we don't stay with us as we become women and morphs into all those things that we face and try to shed: our hesitation in speaking out, our deference so that we can be liked and our lack of confidence in our own decisions. 
So how do we become brave? 
Well, here's the good news. 
Bravery is learned, and like anything learned, it just needs to be practiced. 
So first, we have to take a deep breath and encourage our girls to skateboard, climb trees and clamber around on that playground fire pole. 
This is what my own mother did. 
She didn't know it then, but researchers have a name for this. 
They call it risky play, and studies show that risky play is really important for kids, all kids, because it teaches hazard assessment, it teaches delayed gratification, it teaches resilience, it teaches confidence. 
In other words, when kids get outside and practice bravery, they learn valuable life lessons. 
Second, we have to stop cautioning our girls willy-nilly. 
So notice next time you say, "Watch out, you're going to get hurt," or, "Don't do that, it's dangerous." 
And remember that often what you're really telling her is that she shouldn't be pushing herself, that she's really not good enough, that she should be afraid. 
Third, we women have to start practicing bravery, too. 
We cannot teach our girls until we teach ourselves. 
So here's another thing: fear and exhilaration feel very similar -- the shaky hands, the heightened heart rate, the nervous tension, and I'm betting that for many of you the last time you thought you were scared out of your wits, you may have been feeling mostly exhilaration, and now you've missed an opportunity. 
So practice. 
And while girls should be getting outside to learn to be gutsy, I get that adults don't want to get on hoverboards or climb trees, so we all should be practicing at home, in the office and even right here getting up the guts to talk to someone that you really admire. 
Finally, when your girl is, let's say, on her bike on the top of the steep hill that she insists she's too scared to go down, guide her to access her bravery. 
Ultimately, maybe that hill really is too steep, but she'll come to that conclusion through courage, not fear. 
Because this is not about the steep hill in front of her. 
This is about the life ahead of her and that she has the tools to handle and assess all the dangers that we cannot protect her from, all the challenges that we won't be there to guide her through, everything that our girls here and around the world face in their future. 
So by the way, the world record for crawling today -- (Laughter) is 35.18 miles, and I would really love to see a girl go break that. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

Last year ... 
was hell. 
(Laughter) It was my first time eating Nigerian "jollof." 
(Laughter) Actually, in all seriousness, I was going through a lot of personal turmoil. 
Faced with enormous stress, I suffered an anxiety attack. 
On some days, I could do no work. 
On other days, I just wanted to lay in my bed and cry. 
My doctor asked if I'd like to speak with a mental health professional about my stress and anxiety. 
Mental health? 
I clammed up and violently shook my head in protest. 
I felt a profound sense of a shame. 
I felt the weight of stigma. 
I have a loving, supportive family and incredibly loyal friends, yet I could not entertain the idea of speaking to anyone about my feeling of pain. 
I felt suffocated by the rigid architecture of our African masculinity. 
"People have real problems, Sangu. 
Get over yourself!" 
The first time I heard "mental health," I was a boarding school student fresh off the boat from Ghana, at the Peddie School in New Jersey. 
I had just gone through the brutal experience of losing seven loved ones in the same month. 
The school nurse, concerned about what I'd gone through -- God bless her soul -- she inquired about my mental health. 
"Is she mental?" I thought. 
Does she not know I'm an African man? 
(Laughter) Like Okonkwo in "Things Fall Apart," we African men neither process nor express our emotions. 
We deal with our problems. 
(Applause) We deal with our problems. 
I called my brother and laughed about "Oyibo" people -- white people -- and their strange diseases -- depression, ADD and those "weird things." 
Growing up in West Africa, when people used the term "mental," what came to mind was a madman with dirty, dread-locked hair, bumbling around half-naked on the streets. 
We all know this man. 
Our parents warned us about him. 
"Mommy, mommy, why is he mad?" 
"Drugs! 
If you even look at drugs, you end up like him." 
(Laughter) Come down with pneumonia, and your mother will rush you to the nearest hospital for medical treatment. 
But dare to declare depression, and your local pastor will be driving out demons and blaming witches in your village. 
According to the World Health Organization, mental health is about being able to cope with the normal stressors of life; to work productively and fruitfully; and to be able to make a contribution to your community. 
Mental health includes our emotional, psychological and social well-being. 
Globally, 75 percent of all mental illness cases can be found in low-income countries. 
Yet most African governments invest less than one percent of their health care budget in mental health. 
Even worse, we have a severe shortage of psychiatrists in Africa. 
Nigeria, for example, is estimated to have 200 -- in a country of almost 200 million. 
In all of Africa, 90 percent of our people lack access to treatment. 
As a result, we suffer in solitude, silenced by stigma. 
We as Africans often respond to mental health with distance, ignorance, guilt, fear and anger. 
In a study conducted by Arboleda-Flórez, directly asking, "What is the cause of mental illness?" 
34 percent of Nigerian respondents cited drug misuse; 19 percent said divine wrath and the will of God -- (Laughter) 12 percent, witchcraft and spiritual possession. 
But few cited other known causes of mental illness, like genetics, socioeconomic status, war, conflict or the loss of a loved one. 
The stigmatization against mental illness often results in the ostracizing and demonizing of sufferers. 
Photojournalist Robin Hammond has documented some of these abuses ... 
in Uganda, in Somalia, and here in Nigeria. 
For me, the stigma is personal. 
In 2009, I received a frantic call in the middle of the night. 
My best friend in the world -- a brilliant, philosophical, charming, hip young man -- was diagnosed with schizophrenia. 
I witnessed some of the friends we'd grown up with recoil. 
I heard the snickers. 
I heard the whispers. 
"Did you hear he has gone mad?" 
(Kru English) "He has gone crazy!" 
Derogatory, demeaning commentary about his condition -- words we would never say about someone with cancer or someone with malaria. 
Somehow, when it comes to mental illness, our ignorance eviscerates all empathy. 
I stood by his side as his community isolated him, but our love never wavered. 
Tacitly, I became passionate about mental health. 
Inspired by his plight, I helped found the mental health special interest alumni group at my college. 
And during my tenure as a resident tutor in graduate school, I supported many undergraduates with their mental health challenges. 
I saw African students struggle and unable to speak to anyone. 
Even with this knowledge and with their stories in tow, I, in turn, struggled, and could not speak to anyone when I faced my own anxiety, so deep is our fear of being the madman. 
All of us -- but we Africans especially -- need to realize that our mental struggles do not detract from our virility, nor does our trauma taint our strength. 
We need to see mental health as important as physical health. 
We need to stop suffering in silence. 
We must stop stigmatizing disease and traumatizing the afflicted. 
Talk to your friends. 
Talk to your loved ones. 
Talk to health professionals. 
Be vulnerable. 
Do so with the confidence that you are not alone. 
Speak up if you're struggling. 
Being honest about how we feel does not make us weak; it makes us human. 
It is time to end the stigma associated with mental illness. 
So the next time your hear "mental," do not just think of the madman. 
Think of me. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

As patients, we usually remember the names of our doctors, but often we forget the names of our nurses. 
I remember one. 
I had breast cancer a few years ago, and somehow I managed to get through the surgeries and the beginning of the treatment just fine. 
I could hide what was going on. 
Everybody didn't really have to know. 
I could walk my daughter to school, I could go out to dinner with my husband; I could fool people. 
But then my chemo was scheduled to begin and that terrified me because I knew that I was going to lose every single hair on my body because of the kind of chemo that I was going to have. 
I wasn't going to be able to pretend anymore as though everything was normal. 
I was scared. 
I knew what it felt like to have everybody treating me with kid gloves, and I just wanted to feel normal. 
I had a port installed in my chest. 
I went to my first day of chemotherapy, and I was an emotional wreck. 
My nurse, Joanne, walked in the door, and every bone in my body was telling me to get up out of that chair and take for the hills. 
But Joanne looked at me and talked to me like we were old friends. 
And then she asked me, "Where'd you get your highlights done?" 
(Laughter) And I was like, are you kidding me? 
You're going to talk to me about my hair when I'm on the verge of losing it? 
I was kind of angry, and I said, "Really? Hair?" 
And with a shrug of her shoulders she said, "It's gonna grow back." 
And in that moment she said the one thing I had overlooked, and that was that at some point, my life would get back to normal. 
She really believed that. 
And so I believed it, too. 
Now, worrying about losing your hair when you're fighting cancer may seem silly at first, but it's not just that you're worried about how you're going to look. 
It's that you're worried that everybody's going to treat you so carefully. 
Joanne made me feel normal for the first time in six months. 
We talked about her boyfriends, we talked about looking for apartments in New York City, and we talked about my reaction to the chemotherapy -- all kind of mixed in together. 
And I always wondered, how did she so instinctively know just how to talk to me? 
Joanne Staha and my admiration for her marked the beginning of my journey into the world of nurses. 
A few years later, I was asked to do a project that would celebrate the work that nurses do. 
I started with Joanne, and I met over 100 nurses across the country. 
I spent five years interviewing, photographing and filming nurses for a book and a documentary film. 
With my team, we mapped a trip across America that would take us to places dealing with some of the biggest public health issues facing our nation -- aging, war, poverty, prisons. 
And then we went places where we would find the largest concentration of patients dealing with those issues. 
Then we asked hospitals and facilities to nominate nurses who would best represent them. 
One of the first nurses I met was Bridget Kumbella. 
Bridget was born in Cameroon, the oldest of four children. 
Her father was at work when he had fallen from the fourth floor and really hurt his back. 
And he talked a lot about what it was like to be flat on your back and not get the kind of care that you need. 
And that propelled Bridget to go into the profession of nursing. 
Now, as a nurse in the Bronx, she has a really diverse group of patients that she cares for, from all walks of life, and from all different religions. 
And she's devoted her career to understanding the impact of our cultural differences when it comes to our health. 
She spoke of a patient -- a Native American patient that she had -- that wanted to bring a bunch of feathers into the ICU. 
That's how he found spiritual comfort. 
And she spoke of advocating for him and said that patients come from all different religions and use all different kinds of objects for comfort; whether it's a holy rosary or a symbolic feather, it all needs to be supported. 
This is Jason Short. 
Jason is a home health nurse in the Appalachian mountains, and his dad had a gas station and a repair shop when he was growing up. 
So he worked on cars in the community that he now serves as a nurse. 
When he was in college, it was just not macho at all to become a nurse, so he avoided it for years. 
He drove trucks for a little while, but his life path was always pulling him back to nursing. 
As a nurse in the Appalachian mountains, Jason goes places that an ambulance can't even get to. 
In this photograph, he's standing in what used to be a road. 
Top of the mountain mining flooded that road, and now the only way for Jason to get to the patient living in that house with black lung disease is to drive his SUV against the current up that creek. 
The day I was with him, we ripped the front fender off the car. 
The next morning he got up, put the car on the lift, fixed the fender, and then headed out to meet his next patient. 
I witnessed Jason caring for this gentleman with such enormous compassion, and I was struck again by how intimate the work of nursing really is. 
When I met Brian McMillion, he was raw. 
He had just come back from a deployment and he hadn't really settled back in to life in San Diego yet. 
He talked about his experience of being a nurse in Germany and taking care of the soldiers coming right off the battlefield. 
Very often, he would be the first person they would see when they opened their eyes in the hospital. 
And they would look at him as they were lying there, missing limbs, and the first thing they would say is, "When can I go back? I left my brothers out there." 
And Brian would have to say, "You're not going anywhere. 
You've already given enough, brother." 
Brian is both a nurse and a soldier who's seen combat. 
So that puts him in a unique position to be able to relate to and help heal the veterans in his care. 
This is Sister Stephen, and she runs a nursing home in Wisconsin called Villa Loretto. 
And the entire circle of life can be found under her roof. 
She grew up wishing they lived on a farm, so given the opportunity to adopt local farm animals, she enthusiastically brings them in. 
And in the springtime, those animals have babies. 
And Sister Stephen uses those baby ducks, goats and lambs as animal therapy for the residents at Villa Loretto who sometimes can't remember their own name, but they do rejoice in the holding of a baby lamb. 
The day I was with Sister Stephen, I needed to take her away from Villa Loretto to film part of her story. 
And before we left, she went into the room of a dying patient. 
And she leaned over and she said, "I have to go away for the day, but if Jesus calls you, you go. 
You go straight home to Jesus." 
I was standing there and thinking it was the first time in my life I witnessed that you could show someone you love them completely by letting go. 
We don't have to hold on so tightly. 
I saw more life rolled up at Villa Loretto than I have ever seen at any other time at any other place in my life. 
We live in a complicated time when it comes to our health care. 
It's easy to lose sight of the need for quality of life, not just quantity of life. 
As new life-saving technologies are created, we're going to have really complicated decisions to make. 
These technologies often save lives, but they can also prolong pain and the dying process. 
How in the world are we supposed to navigate these waters? 
We're going to need all the help we can get. 
Nurses have a really unique relationship with us because of the time spent at bedside. 
During that time, a kind of emotional intimacy develops. 
This past summer, on August 9, my father died of a heart attack. 
My mother was devastated, and she couldn't imagine her world without him in it. 
Four days later she fell, she broke her hip, she needed surgery and she found herself fighting for her own life. 
Once again I found myself on the receiving end of the care of nurses -- this time for my mom. 
My brother and my sister and I stayed by her side for the next three days in the ICU. 
And as we tried to make the right decisions and follow my mother's wishes, we found that we were depending upon the guidance of nurses. 
And once again, they didn't let us down. 
They had an amazing insight in terms of how to care for my mom in the last four days of her life. 
They brought her comfort and relief from pain. 
They knew to encourage my sister and I to put a pretty nightgown on my mom, long after it mattered to her, but it sure meant a lot to us. 
And they knew to come and wake me up just in time for my mom's last breath. 
And then they knew how long to leave me in the room with my mother after she died. 
I have no idea how they know these things, but I do know that I am eternally grateful that they've guided me once again. 
Thank you so very much. 
(Applause) 

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

When ultraviolet sunlight hits our skin, it affects each of us a little differently. 
Depending on skin color, it will take only minutes of exposure to turn one person beetroot-pink, while another requires hours to experience the slightest change. 
So what's to account for that difference and how did our skin come to take on so many different hues to begin with? 
Whatever the color, our skin tells an epic tale of human intrepidness and adaptability, revealing its variance to be a function of biology. 
It all centers around melanin, the pigment that gives skin and hair its color. 
This ingredient comes from skin cells called melanocytes and takes two basic forms. 
There's eumelanin, which gives rise to a range of brown skin tones, as well as black, brown, and blond hair, and pheomelanin, which causes the reddish browns of freckles and red hair. 
But humans weren't always like this. 
Our varying skin tones were formed by an evolutionary process driven by the Sun. 
In began some 50,000 years ago when our ancestors migrated north from Africa and into Europe and Asia. 
These ancient humans lived between the Equator and the Tropic of Capricorn, a region saturated by the Sun's UV-carrying rays. 
When skin is exposed to UV for long periods of time, the UV light damages the DNA within our cells, and skin starts to burn. 
If that damage is severe enough, the cells mutations can lead to melanoma, a deadly cancer that forms in the skin's melanocytes. 
Sunscreen as we know it today didn't exist 50,000 years ago. 
So how did our ancestors cope with this onslaught of UV? 
The key to survival lay in their own personal sunscreen manufactured beneath the skin: melanin. 
The type and amount of melanin in your skin determines whether you'll be more or less protected from the sun. 
This comes down to the skin's response as sunlight strikes it. 
When it's exposed to UV light, that triggers special light-sensitive receptors called rhodopsin, which stimulate the production of melanin to shield cells from damage. 
For light-skin people, that extra melanin darkens their skin and produces a tan. 
Over the course of generations, humans living at the Sun-saturated latitudes in Africa adapted to have a higher melanin production threshold and more eumelanin, giving skin a darker tone. 
This built-in sun shield helped protect them from melanoma, likely making them evolutionarily fitter and capable of passing this useful trait on to new generations. 
But soon, some of our Sun-adapted ancestors migrated northward out of the tropical zone, spreading far and wide across the Earth. 
The further north they traveled, the less direct sunshine they saw. 
This was a problem because although UV light can damage skin, it also has an important parallel benefit. 
UV helps our bodies produce vitamin D, an ingredient that strengthens bones and lets us absorb vital minerals, like calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphate, and zinc. 
Without it, humans experience serious fatigue and weakened bones that can cause a condition known as rickets. 
For humans whose dark skin effectively blocked whatever sunlight there was, vitamin D deficiency would have posed a serious threat in the north. 
But some of them happened to produce less melanin. 
They were exposed to small enough amounts of light that melanoma was less likely, and their lighter skin better absorbed the UV light. 
So they benefited from vitamin D, developed strong bones, and survived well enough to produce healthy offspring. 
Over many generations of selection, skin color in those regions gradually lightened. 
As a result of our ancestor's adaptability, today the planet is full of people with a vast palette of skin colors, typically, darker eumelanin-rich skin in the hot, sunny band around the Equator, and increasingly lighter pheomelanin-rich skin shades fanning outwards as the sunshine dwindles. 
Therefore, skin color is little more than an adaptive trait for living on a rock that orbits the Sun. 
It may absorb light, but it certainly does not reflect character. 

Imagine you're watching a runaway trolley barreling down the tracks straight towards five workers who can't escape. 
You happen to be standing next to a switch that will divert the trolley onto a second track. 
Here's the problem. 
That track has a worker on it, too, but just one. 
What do you do? 
Do you sacrifice one person to save five? 
This is the trolley problem, a version of an ethical dilemma that philosopher Philippa Foot devised in 1967. 
It's popular because it forces us to think about how to choose when there are no good choices. 
Do we pick the action with the best outcome or stick to a moral code that prohibits causing someone's death? 
In one survey, about 90% of respondents said that it's okay to flip the switch, letting one worker die to save five, and other studies, including a virtual reality simulation of the dilemma, have found similar results. 
These judgments are consistent with the philosophical principle of utilitarianism which argues that the morally correct decision is the one that maximizes well-being for the greatest number of people. 
The five lives outweigh one, even if achieving that outcome requires condemning someone to death. 
But people don't always take the utilitarian view, which we can see by changing the trolley problem a bit. 
This time, you're standing on a bridge over the track as the runaway trolley approaches. 
Now there's no second track, but there is a very large man on the bridge next to you. 
If you push him over, his body will stop the trolley, saving the five workers, but he'll die. 
To utilitarians, the decision is exactly the same, lose one life to save five. 
But in this case, only about 10% of people say that it's OK to throw the man onto the tracks. 
Our instincts tell us that deliberately causing someone's death is different than allowing them to die as collateral damage. 
It just feels wrong for reasons that are hard to explain. 
This intersection between ethics and psychology is what's so interesting about the trolley problem. 
The dilemma in its many variations reveal that what we think is right or wrong depends on factors other than a logical weighing of the pros and cons. 
For example, men are more likely than women to say it's okay to push the man over the bridge. 
So are people who watch a comedy clip before doing the thought experiment. 
And in one virtual reality study, people were more willing to sacrifice men than women. 
Researchers have studied the brain activity of people thinking through the classic and bridge versions. 
Both scenarios activate areas of the brain involved in conscious decision-making and emotional responses. 
But in the bridge version, the emotional response is much stronger. 
So is activity in an area of the brain associated with processing internal conflict. 
Why the difference? 
One explanation is that pushing someone to their death feels more personal, activating an emotional aversion to killing another person, but we feel conflicted because we know it's still the logical choice. 
"Trolleyology" has been criticized by some philosophers and psychologists. 
They argue that it doesn't reveal anything because its premise is so unrealistic that study participants don't take it seriously. 
But new technology is making this kind of ethical analysis more important than ever. 
For example, driver-less cars may have to handle choices like causing a small accident to prevent a larger one. 
Meanwhile, governments are researching autonomous military drones that could wind up making decisions of whether they'll risk civilian casualties to attack a high-value target. 
If we want these actions to be ethical, we have to decide in advance how to value human life and judge the greater good. 
So researchers who study autonomous systems are collaborating with philosophers to address the complex problem of programming ethics into machines, which goes to show that even hypothetical dilemmas can wind up on a collision course with the real world. 

Let's say you despise Western democracy. 
Democracy, in all its trappings, free elections, town halls, endless debates about the proper role of government. 
Too messy, too unpredictable, too constraining for your taste. 
And the way these democracies band together and lecture everyone else about individual rights and freedoms -- it gets under your skin. 
So what to do about it? 
You can call out the hypocrisy and failures of Western democracies and explain how your way is better, but that's never really worked for you. 
What if you could get the people whose support is the very foundation of these democracies to start questioning the system? 
Make the idea occur in their own minds that democracy and its institutions are failing them, their elite are corrupt puppet masters and the country they knew is in free fall. 
To do that, you'll need to infiltrate the information spheres of these democracies. 
You'll need to turn their most powerful asset -- an open mind -- into their greatest vulnerability. 
You'll need people to question the truth. 
Now, you'll be familiar of hacking and leaks that happened in 2016. 
One was the Democratic National Committee's networks, and the personal email accounts of its staff, later released on WikiLeaks. 
After that, various online personas, like a supposed Romanian cybercriminal who didn't speak Romanian, aggressively pushed news of these leaks to journalists. 
The media took the bait. 
They were consumed by how much the DNC hated Bernie. 
At the time, it was that narrative that far outshined the news that a group of Russian government sponsored hackers who we called "Advanced Persistent Threat 28," or "APT28" for short, was carrying out these operations against the US. 
And there was no shortage of evidence. 
This group of Russian government hackers hadn't just appeared out of nowhere in 2016. 
We had started tracking this group back in 2014. 
And the tools that APT28 used to compromise its victims' networks demonstrated a thoughtful, well-resourced effort that had taken place for now over a decade in Moscow's time zone from about 9 am to 6 pm. 
APT28 loved to prey on the emails and contacts of journalists in Chechnya, the Georgian government, eastern European defense attachés -- all targets with an undeniable interest to the Russian government. 
We weren't the only ones onto this. 
Governments, research teams across the world, were coming to similar conclusions and observing the same types of operations. 
But what Russia was doing in 2016 went far beyond espionage. 
The DNC hack was just one of many where stolen data was posted online accompanied by a sensational narrative, then amplified in social media for lightning-speed adoption by the media. 
This didn't ring the alarm bells that a nation-state was trying to interfere with the credibility of another's internal affairs. 
So why, collectively, did we not see this coming? 
Why did it take months before Americans understood that they were under a state-sponsored information attack? 
The easy answer is politics. 
The Obama Administration was caught in a perfect catch-22. 
By raising the specter that the Russian government was interfering in the US presidential campaign, the Administration risked appearing to meddle in the campaign itself. 
But the better answer, I think, is that the US and the West were utterly unequipped to recognize and respond to a modern information operation, despite the fact that the US had wielded information with devastating success in an era not so long ago. 
Look, so while the US and the West spent the last 20 years caught up in cybersecurity -- what networks to harden, which infrastructure to deem critical, how to set up armies of cyber warriors and cyber commands -- Russia was thinking in far more consequential terms. 
Before the first iPhone even hit the shelf, the Russian government understood the risks and the opportunity that technology provided and the inter-communication and instant communication it provided us. 
As our realities are increasingly based on the information that we're consuming at the palm of our hand and from the news feeds that we're scanning and the hashtags and stories that we see trending, the Russian government was the first to recognize how this evolution had turned your mind into the most exploitable device on the planet. 
And your mind is particularly exploitable if you're accustomed to an unfettered flow of information, now increasingly curated to your own tastes. 
This panorama of information that's so interesting to you gives a state, or anyone for that matter, a perfect back door into your mind. 
It's this new brand of state-sponsored information operations that can be that much more successful, more insidious, and harder for the target audience -- that includes the media -- to decipher and characterize. 
If you can get a hashtag trending on Twitter, or chum the waters with fake news directed to audiences primed to receive it, or drive journalists to dissect terabytes of email for a cent of impropriety -- all tactics used in Russian operations -- then you've got a shot at effectively camouflaging your operations in the mind of your target. 
This is what Russia's long called "reflexive control." 
It's the ability to use information on someone else so that they make a decision on their own accord that's favorable to you. 
This is nation-state-grade image control and perception management, and it's conducted by any means, with any tools, network-based or otherwise, that will achieve it. 
Take this for another example. 
In early February 2014, a few weeks before Russia would invade Crimea, a phone call is posted on YouTube. 
In it, there's two US diplomats. 
They sound like they're playing kingmaker in Ukraine, and worse, they curse the EU for its lack of speed and leadership in resolving the crisis. 
The media covers the phone call, and then the ensuing diplomatic backlash leaves Washington and Europe reeling. 
And it creates a fissured response and a feckless attitude towards Russia's land grab in Ukraine. 
Mission accomplished. 
So while hacked phone calls and emails and networks keep grabbing the headlines, the real operations are the ones that are influencing the decisions you make and the opinions you hold, all in the service of a nation-state's strategic interest. 
This is power in the information age. 
And this information is all that much more seductive, all that much easier to take at face value and pass on, when it's authentic. 
Who's not interested in the truth that's presented in phone calls and emails that were never intended for public consumption? 
But how meaningful is that truth if you don't know why it's being revealed to you? 
We must recognize that this place where we're increasingly living, which we've quaintly termed "cyberspace," isn't defined by ones and zeroes, but by information and the people behind it. 
This is far more than a network of computers and devices. 
This is a network composed of minds interacting with computers and devices. 
And for this network, there's no encryption, there's no firewall, no two-factor authentication, no password complex enough to protect you. 
What you have for defense is far stronger, it's more adaptable, it's always running the latest version. 
It's the ability to think critically: call out falsehood, press for the facts. 
And above all, you must have the courage to unflinchingly pursue the truth. 
(Applause) 

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

Namaskar. 
I'm a movie star, I'm 51 years of age, and I don't use Botox as yet. 
(Laughter) So I'm clean, but I do behave like you saw like a 21-year-old in my movies. 
Yeah, I do that. 
I sell dreams, and I peddle love to millions of people back home in India who assume that I'm the best lover in the world. 
(Laughter) If you don't tell anyone, I'm going to tell you I'm not, but I never let that assumption go away. 
(Laughter) I've also been made to understand there are lots of you here who haven't seen my work, and I feel really sad for you. 
(Laughter) (Applause) That doesn't take away from the fact that I'm completely self-obsessed, as a movie star should be. 
(Laughter) That's when my friends, Chris and Juliet called me here to speak about the future "you." 
Naturally, it follows I'm going to speak about the present me. 
(Laughter) Because I truly believe that humanity is a lot like me. 
(Laughter) It is. It is. 
It's an aging movie star, grappling with all the newness around itself, wondering whether it got it right in the first place, and still trying to find a way to keep on shining regardless. 
I was born in a refugee colony in the capital city of India, New Delhi. 
And my father was a freedom fighter. 
My mother was, well, just a fighter like mothers are. 
And much like the original homo sapiens, we struggled to survive. 
When I was in my early 20s, I lost both my parents, which I must admit seems a bit careless of me now, but -- (Laughter) I do remember the night my father died, and I remember the driver of a neighbor who was driving us to the hospital. 
He mumbled something about "dead people don't tip so well" and walked away into the dark. 
And I was only 14 then, and I put my father's dead body in the back seat of the car, and my mother besides me, I started driving back from the hospital to the house. 
And in the middle of her quiet crying, my mother looked at me and she said, "Son, when did you learn to drive?" 
And I thought about it and realized, and I said to my mom, "Just now, Mom." 
(Laughter) So from that night onwards, much akin to humanity in its adolescence, I learned the crude tools of survival. 
And the framework of life was very, very simple then, to be honest. 
You know, you just ate what you got and did whatever you were told to do. 
I thought celiac was a vegetable, and vegan, of course, was Mr. Spock's lost comrade in "Star Trek." 
(Laughter) You married the first girl that you dated, and you were a techie if you could fix the carburetor in your car. 
I really thought that gay was a sophisticated English word for happy. 
And Lesbian, of course, was the capital of Portugal, as you all know. 
(Laughter) Where was I? 
We relied on systems created through the toil and sacrifice of generations before to protect us, and we felt that governments actually worked for our betterment. 
Science was simple and logical, Apple was still then just a fruit owned by Eve first and then Newton, not by Steve Jobs, until then. 
And "Eureka!" was what you screamed when you wanted to run naked on the streets. 
You went wherever life took you for work, and people were mostly welcoming of you. 
Migration was a term then still reserved for Siberian cranes, not human beings. 
Most importantly, you were who you were and you said what you thought. 
Then in my late 20s, I shifted to the sprawling metropolis of Mumbai, and my framework, like the newly industrialized aspirational humanity, began to alter. 
In the urban rush for a new, more embellished survival, things started to look a little different. 
I met people who had descended from all over the world, faces, races, genders, money-lenders. 
Definitions became more and more fluid. 
Work began to define you at that time in an overwhelmingly equalizing manner, and all the systems started to feel less reliable to me, almost too thick to hold on to the diversity of mankind and the human need to progress and grow. 
Ideas were flowing with more freedom and speed. 
And I experienced the miracle of human innovation and cooperation, and my own creativity, when supported by the resourcefulness of this collective endeavor, catapulted me into superstardom. 
I started to feel that I had arrived, and generally, by the time I was 40, I was really, really flying. 
I was all over the place. 
You know? I'd done 50 films by then and 200 songs, and I'd been knighted by the Malaysians. 
I had been given the highest civil honor by the French government, the title of which for the life of me I can't pronounce even until now. 
(Laughter) I'm sorry, France, and thank you, France, for doing that. 
But much bigger than that, I got to meet Angelina Jolie -- (Laughter) for two and a half seconds. 
(Laughter) And I'm sure she also remembers that encounter somewhere. 
OK, maybe not. 
And I sat next to Hannah Montana on a round dinner table with her back towards me most of the time. 
Like I said, I was flying, from Miley to Jolie, and humanity was soaring with me. 
We were both pretty much flying off the handle, actually. 
And then you all know what happened. 
The internet happened. 
I was in my late 40s, and I started tweeting like a canary in a birdcage and assuming that, you know, people who peered into my world would admire it for the miracle I believed it to be. 
But something else awaited me and humanity. 
You know, we had expected an expansion of ideas and dreams with the enhanced connectivity of the world. 
We had not bargained for the village-like enclosure of thought, of judgment, of definition that flowed from the same place that freedom and revolution was taking place in. 
Everything I said took a new meaning. 
Everything I did -- good, bad, ugly -- was there for the world to comment upon and judge. 
As a matter of fact, everything I didn't say or do also met with the same fate. 
Four years ago, my lovely wife Gauri and me decided to have a third child. 
It was claimed on the net that he was the love child of our first child who was 15 years old. 
Apparently, he had sown his wild oats with a girl while driving her car in Romania. 
And yeah, there was a fake video to go with it. 
And we were so disturbed as a family. 
My son, who is 19 now, even now when you say "hello" to him, he just turns around and says, "But bro, I didn't even have a European driving license." 
(Laughter) Yeah. 
In this new world, slowly, reality became virtual and virtual became real, and I started to feel that I could not be who I wanted to be or say what I actually thought, and humanity at this time completely identified with me. 
I think both of us were going through our midlife crisis, and humanity, like me, was becoming an overexposed prima donna. 
I started to sell everything, from hair oil to diesel generators. 
Humanity was buying everything from crude oil to nuclear reactors. 
You know, I even tried to get into a skintight superhero suit to reinvent myself. 
I must admit I failed miserably. 
And just an aside I want to say on behalf of all the Batmen, Spider-Men and Supermen of the world, you have to commend them, because it really hurts in the crotch, that superhero suit. 
(Laughter) Yeah, I'm being honest. I need to tell you this here. 
Really. 
And accidentally, I happened to even invent a new dance form which I didn't realize, and it became a rage. 
So if it's all right, and you've seen a bit of me, so I'm quite shameless, I'll show you. 
It was called the Lungi dance. 
So if it's all right, I'll just show you. I'm talented otherwise. 
(Cheers) So it went something like this. 
Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. 
Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. 
Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi dance. Lungi. 
That's it. It became a rage. 
(Cheers) It really did. 
Like you notice, nobody could make any sense of what was happening except me, and I didn't give a damn, really, because the whole world, and whole humanity, seemed as confused and lost as I was. 
I didn't give up then. 
I even tried to reconstruct my identity on the social media like everyone else does. 
I thought if I put on philosophical tweets out there people will think I'm with it, but some of the responses I got from those tweets were extremely confusing acronyms which I didn't understand. You know? 
ROFL, LOL. 
"Adidas," somebody wrote back to one of my more thought-provoking tweets and I was wondering why would you name a sneaker, I mean, why would you write back the name of a sneaker to me? 
And I asked my 16-year-old daughter, and she enlightened me. 
"Adidas" now means "All day I dream about sex." 
(Laughter) Really. 
I didn't know if you know that. 
So I wrote back, "WTF" in bold to Mr. Adidas, thanking secretly that some acronyms and things won't change at all. 
WTF. 
But here we are. 
I am 51 years old, like I told you, and mind-numbing acronyms notwithstanding, I just want to tell you if there has been a momentous time for humanity to exist, it is now, because the present you is brave. 
The present you is hopeful. 
The present you is innovative and resourceful, and of course, the present you is annoyingly indefinable. 
And in this spell-binding, imperfect moment of existence, feeling a little brave just before I came here, I decided to take a good, hard look at my face. 
And I realized that I'm beginning to look more and more like the wax statue of me at Madame Tussaud's. 
(Laughter) Yeah, and in that moment of realization, I asked the most central and pertinent question to humanity and me: Do I need to fix my face? 
Really. I'm an actor, like I told you, a modern expression of human creativity. 
The land I come from is the source of inexplicable but very simple spirituality. 
In its immense generosity, India decided somehow that I, the Muslim son of a broke freedom fighter who accidentally ventured into the business of selling dreams, should become its king of romance, the "Badhshah of Bollywood," the greatest lover the country has ever seen ... 
with this face. 
Yeah. 
(Laughter) Which has alternately been described as ugly, unconventional, and strangely, not chocolatey enough. 
(Laughter) The people of this ancient land embraced me in their limitless love, and I've learned from these people that neither power nor poverty can make your life more magical or less tortuous. 
I've learned from the people of my country that the dignity of a life, a human being, a culture, a religion, a country actually resides in its ability for grace and compassion. 
I've learned that whatever moves you, whatever urges you to create, to build, whatever keeps you from failing, whatever helps you survive, is perhaps the oldest and the simplest emotion known to mankind, and that is love. 
A mystic poet from my land famously wrote, (Recites poem in Hindi) (Poem ends) Which loosely translates into that whatever -- yeah, if you know Hindi, please clap, yeah. 
(Applause) It's very difficult to remember. 
Which loosely translates into actually saying that all the books of knowledge that you might read and then go ahead and impart your knowledge through innovation, through creativity, through technology, but mankind will never be the wiser about its future unless it is coupled with a sense of love and compassion for their fellow beings. 
The two and a half alphabets which form the word "प्रेम," which means "love," if you are able to understand that and practice it, that itself is enough to enlighten mankind. 
So I truly believe the future "you" has to be a you that loves. 
Otherwise it will cease to flourish. 
It will perish in its own self-absorption. 
So you may use your power to build walls and keep people outside, or you may use it to break barriers and welcome them in. 
You may use your faith to make people afraid and terrify them into submission, or you can use it to give courage to people so they rise to the greatest heights of enlightenment. 
You can use your energy to build nuclear bombs and spread the darkness of destruction, or you can use it to spread the joy of light to millions. 
You may filthy up the oceans callously and cut down all the forests. 
You can destroy the ecology, or turn to them with love and regenerate life from the waters and trees. 
You may land on Mars and build armed citadels, or you may look for life-forms and species to learn from and respect. 
And you can use all the moneys we all have earned to wage futile wars and give guns in the hands of little children to kill each other with, or you can use it to make more food to fill their stomachs with. 
My country has taught me the capacity for a human being to love is akin to godliness. 
It shines forth in a world which civilization, I think, already has tampered too much with. 
In the last few days, the talks here, the wonderful people coming and showing their talent, talking about individual achievements, the innovation, the technology, the sciences, the knowledge we are gaining by being here in the presence of TED Talks and all of you are reasons enough for us to celebrate the future "us." 
But within that celebration the quest to cultivate our capacity for love and compassion has to assert itself, has to assert itself, just as equally. 
So I believe the future "you" is an infinite you. 
It's called a chakra in India, like a circle. 
It ends where it begins from to complete itself. 
A you that perceives time and space differently understands both your unimaginable and fantastic importance and your complete unimportance in the larger context of the universe. 
A you that returns back to the original innocence of humanity, which loves from the purity of heart, which sees from the eyes of truth, which dreams from the clarity of an untampered mind. 
The future "you" has to be like an aging movie star who has been made to believe that there is a possibility of a world which is completely, wholly, self-obsessively in love with itself. 
A world -- really, it has to be a you to create a world which is its own best lover. 
That I believe, ladies and gentlemen, should be the future "you." 
Thank you very much. 
Shukriya. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Do you ever think about how important the oceans are in our daily lives? 
The oceans cover two-thirds of our planet. 
They provide half the oxygen we breathe. 
They moderate our climate. 
And they provide jobs and medicine and food including 20 percent of protein to feed the entire world population. 
People used to think that the oceans were so vast that they wouldn't be affected by human activities. 
Well today I'm going to tell you about a serious reality that is changing our oceans called ocean acidification, or the evil twin of climate change. 
Did you know that the oceans have absorbed 25 percent of all of the carbon dioxide that we have emitted to the atmosphere? 
Now this is just another great service provided by the oceans since carbon dioxide is one of the greenhouse gases that's causing climate change. 
But as we keep pumping more and more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere more is dissolving into the oceans. 
And this is what's changing our ocean chemistry. 
When carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater, it undergoes a number of chemical reactions. 
Now lucky for you, I don't have time to get into the details of the chemistry for today. 
But I'll tell you as more carbon dioxide enters the ocean, the seawater pH goes down. 
And this basically means that there is an increase in ocean acidity. 
And this whole process is called ocean acidification. 
And it's happening alongside climate change. 
Scientists have been monitoring ocean acidification for over two decades. 
This figure is an important time series in Hawaii, and the top line shows steadily increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide, or CO2 gas, in the atmosphere. 
And this is directly as a result of human activities. 
The line underneath shows the increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide that is dissolved in the surface of the ocean which you can see is increasing at the same rate as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since measurements began. 
The line on the bottom shows then shows the change in chemistry. 
As more carbon dioxide has entered the ocean, the seawater pH has gone down, which basically means there has been an increase in ocean acidity. 
Now in Ireland, scientists are also monitoring ocean acidification -- scientists at the Marine Institute and NUI Galway. 
And we, too, are seeing acidification at the same rate as these main ocean time-series sites around the world. 
So it's happening right at our doorstep. 
Now I'd like to give you an example of just how we collect our data to monitor a changing ocean. 
Firstly we collect a lot of our samples in the middle of winter. 
So as you can imagine, in the North Atlantic we get hit with some seriously stormy conditions -- so not for any of you who get a little motion sickness, but we are collecting some very valuable data. 
So we lower this instrument over the side of the ship, and there are sensors that are mounted on the bottom that can tell us information about the surrounding water, such as temperature or dissolved oxygen. 
And then we can collect our seawater samples in these large bottles. 
So we start at the bottom, which can be over four kilometers deep just off our continental shelf, and we take samples at regular intervals right up to the surface. 
We take the seawater back on the deck, and then we can either analyze them on the ship or back in the laboratory for the different chemicals parameters. 
But why should we care? 
How is ocean acidification going to affect all of us? 
Well, here are the worrying facts. 
There has already been an increase in ocean acidity of 26 percent since pre-industrial times, which is directly due to human activities. 
Unless we can start slowing down our carbon dioxide emissions, we're expecting an increase in ocean acidity of 170 percent by the end of this century. 
I mean this is within our children's lifetime. 
This rate of acidification is 10 times faster than any acidification in our oceans for over 55 million years. 
So our marine life have never, ever experienced such a fast rate of change before. 
So we literally could not know how they're going to cope. 
Now there was a natural acidification event millions of years ago, which was much slower than what we're seeing today. 
And this coincided with a mass extinction of many marine species. 
So is that what we're headed for? 
Well, maybe. 
Studies are showing some species are actually doing quite well but many are showing a negative response. 
One of the big concerns is as ocean acidity increases, the concentration of carbonate ions in seawater decrease. 
Now these ions are basically the building blocks for many marine species to make their shells, for example crabs or mussels, oysters. 
Another example are corals. 
They also need these carbonate ions in seawater to make their coral structure in order to build coral reefs. 
As ocean acidity increases and the concentration of carbonate ions decrease, these species first find it more difficult to make their shells. 
And at even even lower levels, they can actually begin to dissolve. 
This here is a pteropod, it's called a sea butterfly. 
And it's an important food source in the ocean for many species, from krill to salmon right up to whales. 
The shell of the pteropod was placed into seawater at a pH that we're expecting by the end of this century. 
After only 45 days at this very realistic pH, you can see the shell has almost completely dissolved. 
So ocean acidification could affect right up through the food chain -- and right onto our dinner plates. 
I mean who here likes shellfish? Or salmon? 
Or many other fish species whose food source in the ocean could be affected? 
These are cold-water corals. 
And did you know we actually have cold-water corals in Irish waters, just off our continental shelf? 
And they support rich biodiversity, including some very important fisheries. 
It's projected that by the end of this century, 70 percent of all known cold-water corals in the entire ocean will be surrounded by seawater that is dissolving their coral structure. 
The last example I have are these healthy tropical corals. 
They were placed in seawater at a pH we're expecting by the year 2100. 
After six months, the coral has almost completely dissolved. 
Now coral reefs support 25 percent of all marine life in the entire ocean. 
All marine life. 
So you can see: ocean acidification is a global threat. 
I have an eight-month-old baby boy. 
Unless we start now to slow this down, I dread to think what our oceans will look like when he's a grown man. 
We will see acidification. 
We have already put too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. 
But we can slow this down. 
We can prevent the worst-case scenario. 
The only way of doing that is by reducing our carbon dioxide emissions. 
This is important for both you and I, for industry, for governments. 
We need to work together, slow down global warming slow down ocean acidification and help to maintain a healthy ocean and a healthy planet for our generation and for generations to come. 
(Applause) 

I have a two-year-old daughter named Naya who is under the mistaken impression that this conference is named in honor of her father. 
(Laughter) Who am I to contradict my baby girl? 
As many of you know, there's something about becoming a parent that concentrates the mind on long-term problems like climate change. 
It was the birth of my daughter that inspired me to launch this climate organization, in order to counteract the excessive polarization of this issue in the United States, and to find a conservative pathway forward. 
Yes, folks, a Republican climate solution is possible, and you know what? 
It may even be better. 
(Laughter) Let me try to prove that to you. 
What we really need is a killer app to climate policy. 
In the technology world, a killer app is an application so transformative that it creates its own market, like Uber. 
In the climate world, a killer app is a new solution so promising that it can break through the seemingly insurmountable barriers to progress. 
These include the psychological barrier. 
Climate advocates have long been encouraging their fellow citizens to make short-term sacrifices now for benefits that accrue to other people in other countries 30 or 40 years in the future. 
It just doesn't fly because it runs contrary to basic human nature. 
Next is the geopolitical barrier. 
Under the current rules of global trade, countries have a strong incentive to free ride off the emissions reductions of other nations, instead of strengthening their own programs. 
This has been the curse of every international climate negotiations, including Paris. 
Finally, we have the partisan barrier. 
Even the most committed countries -- Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada -- are nowhere near reducing emissions at the required scale and speed. 
Not even close. 
And the partisan climate divide is far more acute here in the United States. 
We are fundamentally stuck, and that is why we need a killer app of climate policy to break through each of these barriers. 
I'm convinced that the road to climate progress in the United States runs through the Republican Party and the business community. 
So in launching the Climate Leadership Council, I started by reaching out to a who's who of Republican elder statesmen and business leaders, including James Baker and George Schultz, the two most respected Republican elder statesmen in America; Martin Feldstein and Greg Mankiw, the two most respected conservative economists in the country; and Henry Paulson and Rob Walton, two of the most successful and admired business leaders. 
Together, we co-authored "The Conservative Case For Carbon Dividends." 
This represents the first time that Republican leaders put forth a concrete market-based climate solution. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) We presented our plan at the White House two weeks after President Trump moved in. 
Almost every leading editorial board in the country has since endorsed our plan, and Fortune 100 companies from a wide range of industries are now getting behind it. 
So by now you're probably wondering, what exactly is this plan? 
Well, our carbon dividends solution is based on four pillars. 
The first is a gradually rising carbon tax. 
Although capitalism is a wonderful system, like many operating systems, it's prone to bugs, which, in this case, are called "market failures." 
By far the largest is that market prices fail to take social and environmental costs into account. 
That means every market transaction is based on incorrect information. 
This fundamental bug of capitalism, more than any other single factor, is to blame for our climate predicament. 
Now in theory, this should be an easy problem to fix. 
Economists agree that the best solution is to put a price on the carbon content of fossil fuels, otherwise known as a carbon tax. 
This would discourage carbon emissions in every single economic transaction, every day of the year. 
However, a carbon tax by itself has proven to be unpopular and a political dead end. 
The answer is to return all the money raised directly to citizens, in the form of equal monthly dividends. 
This would transform an unpopular carbon tax into a popular and populist solution, and it would also solve the underlying psychological barrier that we discussed, by giving everyone a concrete benefit in the here and now. 
And these benefits would be significant. 
Assuming a carbon tax rate that starts at 40 dollars per ton, a family of four would receive 2,000 dollars per year from the get-go. 
According to the US Treasury Department, the bottom 70 percent of Americans would receive more in dividends than they would pay in increased energy prices. 
That means 223 million Americans would win economically from solving climate change. 
And that -- (Applause) is revolutionary, and could fundamentally alter climate politics. 
But there's another revolutionary element here. 
The amount of the dividend would grow as the carbon tax rate increases. 
The more we protect our climate, the more our citizens benefit. 
This creates a positive feedback loop, which is crucial, because the only way we will reach our long-term emission-reduction goals is if the carbon tax rate goes up every year. 
The third pillar of our program is eliminating regulations that are no longer needed once a carbon dividends plan is enacted. 
This is a key selling point to Republicans and business leaders. 
So why should we trade climate regulations for a price on carbon? 
Well, let me show you. 
Our plan would achieve nearly twice the emissions reductions of all Obama-era climate regulations combined, and nearly three times the new baseline after President Trump repeals all of those regulations. 
That assumes a carbon tax starting at 40 dollars per ton, which translates into roughly an extra 36 cents per gallon of gas. 
Our plan by itself would meet the high end of America's commitment under the Paris Climate Agreement, and as you can see, the emissions reductions would continue over time. 
This illustrates the power of a conservative climate solution based on free markets and limited government. 
We would end up with less regulation and far less pollution at the same time, while helping working-class Americans get ahead. 
Doesn't that sound like something we could all support? 
(Applause) The fourth and final pillar of our program is a new climate domino effect, based on border carbon adjustments. 
Now that may sound complicated, but it, too, is revolutionary, because it provides us a whole new strategy to reach a global price on carbon, which is ultimately what we need. 
Let me show you an example. 
Suppose Country A adopts a carbon dividends plan, and Country B does not. 
Well, to level the playing field and protect the competitiveness of its industries, Country A would tax imports from Country B based on their carbon content. 
Fair enough. 
But here's where it gets really interesting, because the money raised at the border would increase the dividends going to the citizens of Country A. 
Well, how long do you think it would take the public in Country B to realize that that money should be going to them, and to push for a carbon dividends plan in their own land? 
Add a few more countries, and we get a new climate domino effect. 
Once one major country or region adopts carbon dividends with border carbon adjustments, other countries are compelled to follow suit. 
One by one the dominoes fall. 
And this domino effect could start anywhere. 
My preference, strongly, is the United States, but it could also start in the United Kingdom, in Germany or another European country, or even in China. 
Let's take China as an example. 
China is committed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but what its leaders care even more about is transitioning their economy to consumer-led economic development. 
Well, nothing could do more to hasten that transition than giving every Chinese citizen a monthly dividend. 
In fact, this is the only policy solution that would enable China to meet its environmental and economic goals at the same time. 
That's why this is the killer app of climate policy, because it would enable us to overcome each of the barriers we discussed earlier: the psychological barrier, the partisan barrier, and, as we've just seen, the geopolitical barrier. 
All we need is a country to lead the way. 
And one method of finding what you're looking for is to take out an ad. 
So let's read this one together. 
Wanted: country to pioneer carbon dividends plan. 
Cost to country: zero. 
Starting date: as soon as possible. 
Advantages: most effective climate solution, popular and populist, pro-growth and pro-business, shrinks government and helps the working class. 
Additional compensation: gratitude of current and future generations, including my daughter. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Just one question for you, Ted. 
I'm actually not sure I've seen a conservative get a standing O at TED before that. 
That's pretty cool. 
The logic seems really powerful, but some people you talk to in politics say it's hard to imagine this still getting through Congress. 
How are you feeling about momentum behind this? 
Ted Halstead: So I understand that many are very pessimistic about what's happening in the United States with President Trump. 
I'm less pessimistic; here's why. 
The actions of this White House, the early actions on climate, are just the first move in a complex game of climate chess. 
So far it's been a repeal-only strategy; the pressure is going to mount for a replacement program, which is where we come in. 
And there are three reasons why, which I'll go through real quickly. 
One, the business community is fundamentally parting ways with the White House on climate change. 
In fact, we're finding a number of Fortune 100 companies supporting our program. 
Within two months, we're going to be announcing some really surprising names coming out in favor of this program. 
Two, there is no issue in American politics where there's a more fundamental gap between the Republican base and the Republican leadership than climate change. 
And three, thinking of this analogy of chess, the big decision up ahead is: Does the administration stay in Paris? 
Well, let's pan it out both ways. 
If it stays in Paris, as many are pushing for in the administration, well then that begs a question: What's the plan? 
We have the plan. 
But if they don't stay in Paris, the international pressure will be overwhelming. 
Our Secretary of State will be asking other countries for NATO contributions, and they'll be saying, "No, give us our Paris commitment. 
Come through on your commitments, we'll come through on ours." 
So, international, business and even the Republican base will all be calling for a Republican replacement plan. 
And, hopefully, we've provided one. 
CA: Thank you so much, Ted. 
TH: Thank you, Chris. 
(Applause) 

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

I want to share with you something my father taught me: no condition is permanent. 
It's a lesson he shared with me again and again, and I learned it to be true the hard way. 
Here I am in my fourth-grade class. 
This is my yearbook picture taken in my class in school in Monrovia, Liberia. 
My parents migrated from India to West Africa in the 1970s, and I had the privilege of growing up there. 
I was nine years old, I loved kicking around a soccer ball, and I was a total math and science geek. 
I was living the kind of life that, really, any child would dream of. 
But no condition is permanent. 
On Christmas Eve in 1989, civil war erupted in Liberia. 
The war started in the rural countryside, and within months, rebel armies had marched towards our hometown. 
My school shut down, and when the rebel armies captured the only international airport, people started panicking and fleeing. 
My mom came knocking one morning and said, "Raj, pack your things -- we have to go." 
We were rushed to the center of town, and there on a tarmac, we were split into two lines. 
I stood with my family in one line, and we were stuffed into the cargo hatch of a rescue plane. 
And there on a bench, I was sitting with my heart racing. 
As I looked out the open hatch, I saw hundreds of Liberians in another line, children strapped to their backs. 
When they tried to jump in with us, I watched soldiers restrain them. 
They were not allowed to flee. 
We were the lucky ones. 
We lost what we had, but we resettled in America, and as immigrants, we benefitted from the community of supporters that rallied around us. 
They took my family into their home, they mentored me. 
And they helped my dad start a clothing shop. 
I'd visit my father on weekends as a teenager to help him sell sneakers and jeans. 
And every time business would get bad, he'd remind me of that mantra: no condition is permanent. 
That mantra and my parents' persistence and that community of supporters made it possible for me to go through college and eventually to medical school. 
I'd once had my hopes crushed in a war, but because of them, I had a chance to pursue my dream to become a doctor. 
My condition had changed. 
It had been 15 years since I escaped that airfield, but the memory of those two lines had not escaped my mind. 
I was a medical student in my mid-20s, and I wanted to go back to see if I could serve the people we'd left behind. 
But when I got back, what I found was utter destruction. 
The war had left us with just 51 doctors to serve a country of four million people. 
It would be like the city of San Francisco having just 10 doctors. 
So if you got sick in the city where those few doctors remain, you might stand a chance. 
But if you got sick in the remote, rural rainforest communities, where you could be days from the nearest clinic -- I was seeing my patients die from conditions no one should die from, all because they were getting to me too late. 
Imagine you have a two-year-old who wakes up one morning with a fever, and you realize she could have malaria, and you know the only way to get her the medicine she needs would be to take her to the riverbed, get in a canoe, paddle to the other side and then walk for up to two days through the forest just to reach the nearest clinic. 
One billion people live in the world's most remote communities, and despite the advances we've made in modern medicine and technology, our innovations are not reaching the last mile. 
These communities have been left behind, because they've been thought too hard to reach and too difficult to serve. 
Illness is universal; access to care is not. 
And realizing this lit a fire in my soul. 
No one should die because they live too far from a doctor or clinic. 
No condition should be permanent. 
And help in this case didn't come from the outside, it actually came from within. 
It came from the communities themselves. 
Meet Musu. 
Way out in rural Liberia, where most girls have not had a chance to finish primary school, Musu had been persistent. 
At the age of 18, she completed high school, and she came back to her community. 
She saw that none of the children were getting treatment for the diseases they needed treatment for -- deadly diseases, like malaria and pneumonia. 
So she signed up to be a volunteer. 
There are millions of volunteers like Musu in rural parts around our world, and we got to thinking -- community members like Musu could actually help us solve a puzzle. 
Our health care system is structured in such a way that the work of diagnosing disease and prescribing medicines is limited to a team of nurses and doctors like me. 
But nurses and doctors are concentrated in cities, so rural communities like Musu's have been left behind. 
So we started asking some questions: What if we could reorganize the medical care system? 
What if we could have community members like Musu be a part or even be the center of our medical team? 
What if Musu could help us bring health care from clinics in cities to the doorsteps of her neighbors? 
Musu was 48 when I met her. 
And despite her amazing talent and grit, she hadn't had a paying job in 30 years. 
So what if technology could support her? 
What if we could invest in her with real training, equip her with real medicines, and have her have a real job? 
Well, in 2007, I was trying to answer these questions, and my wife and I were getting married that year. 
We asked our relatives to forgo the wedding registry gifts and instead donate some money so we could have some start-up money to launch a nonprofit. 
I promise you, I'm a lot more romantic than that. 
(Laughter) We ended up raising $6,000, teamed up with some Liberians and Americans and launched a nonprofit called Last Mile Health. 
Our goal is to bring a health worker within reach of everyone, everywhere. 
We designed a three-step process -- train, equip and pay -- to invest more deeply in volunteers like Musu to become paraprofessionals, to become community health workers. 
First we trained Musu to prevent, diagnose and treat the top 10 diseases afflicting families in her village. 
A nurse supervisor visited her every month to coach her. 
We equipped her with modern medical technology, like this $1 malaria rapid test, and put it in a backpack full of medicines like this to treat infections like pneumonia, and crucially, a smartphone, to help her track and report on epidemics. 
Last, we recognized the dignity in Musu's work. 
With the Liberian government, we created a contract, paid her and gave her the chance to have a real job. 
And she's amazing. 
Musu has learned over 30 medical skills, from screening children for malnutrition, to assessing the cause of a child's cough with a smartphone, to supporting people with HIV and providing follow-up care to patients who've lost their limbs. 
Working as part of our team, working as paraprofessionals, community health workers can help ensure that a lot of what your family doctor would do reaches the places that most family doctors could never go. 
One of my favorite things to do is to care for patients with community health workers. 
So last year I was visiting A.B., and like Musu, A.B. had had a chance to go to school. 
He was in middle school, in the eighth grade, when his parents died. 
He became an orphan and had to drop out. 
Last year, we hired and trained A.B. as a community health worker. 
And while he was making door to door house calls, he met this young boy named Prince, whose mother had had trouble breastfeeding him, and by the age of six months, Prince had started to waste away. 
A.B. had just been taught how to use this color-coded measuring tape that wraps around the upper arm of a child to diagnose malnutrition. 
A.B. noticed that Prince was in the red zone, which meant he had to be hospitalized. 
So A.B. took Prince and his mother to the river, got in a canoe and paddled for four hours to get to the hospital. 
Later, after Prince was discharged, A.B. taught mom how to feed baby a food supplement. 
A few months ago, A.B. took me to visit Prince, and he's a chubby little guy. 
(Laughter) He's meeting his milestones, he's pulled himself up to a stand, and is even starting to say a few words. 
I'm so inspired by these community health workers. 
I often ask them why they do what they do, and when I asked A.B., he said, "Doc, since I dropped out of school, this is the first time I'm having a chance to hold a pen to write. 
My brain is getting fresh." 
The stories of A.B. and Musu have taught me something fundamental about being human. 
Our will to serve others can actually help us transform our own conditions. 
I was so moved by how powerful the will to serve our neighbors can be a few years ago, when we faced a global catastrophe. 
In December 2013, something happened in the rainforests across the border from us in Guinea. 
A toddler named Emile fell sick with vomiting, fever and diarrhea. 
He lived in an area where the roads were sparse and there had been massive shortages of health workers. 
Emile died, and a few weeks later his sister died, and a few weeks later his mother died. 
And this disease would spread from one community to another. 
And it wasn't until three months later that the world recognized this as Ebola. 
When every minute counted, we had already lost months, and by then the virus had spread like wildfire all across West Africa, and eventually to other parts of the world. 
Businesses shut down, airlines started canceling routes. 
At the height of the crisis, when we were told that 1.4 million people could be infected, when we were told that most of them would die, when we had nearly lost all hope, I remember standing with a group of health workers in the rainforest where an outbreak had just happened. 
We were helping train and equip them to put on the masks, the gloves and the gowns that they needed to keep themselves safe from the virus while they were serving their patients. 
I remember the fear in their eyes. 
And I remember staying up at night, terrified if I'd made the right call to keep them in the field. 
When Ebola threatened to bring humanity to its knees, Liberia's community health workers didn't surrender to fear. 
They did what they had always done: they answered the call to serve their neighbors. 
Community members across Liberia learned the symptoms of Ebola, teamed up with nurses and doctors to go door-to-door to find the sick and get them into care. 
They tracked thousands of people who had been exposed to the virus and helped break the chain of transmission. 
Some ten thousand community health workers risked their own lives to help hunt down this virus and stop it in its tracks. 
(Applause) Today, Ebola has come under control in West Africa, and we've learned a few things. 
We've learned that blind spots in rural health care can lead to hot spots of disease, and that places all of us at greater risk. 
We've learned that the most efficient emergency system is actually an everyday system, and that system has to reach all communities, including rural communities like Emile's. 
And most of all, we've learned from the courage of Liberia's community health workers that we as people are not defined by the conditions we face, no matter how hopeless they seem. 
We're defined by how we respond to them. 
For the past 15 years, I've seen the power of this idea to transform everyday citizens into community health workers -- into everyday heroes. 
And I've seen it play out everywhere, from the forest communities of West Africa, to the rural fishing villages of Alaska. 
It's true, these community health workers aren't doing neurosurgery, but they're making it possible to bring health care within reach of everyone everywhere. 
So now what? 
Well, we know that there are still millions of people dying from preventable causes in rural communities around the world. 
And we know that the great majority of these deaths are happening in these 75 blue-shaded countries. 
What we also know is that if we trained an army of community health workers to learn even just 30 lifesaving skills, we could save the lives of nearly 30 million people by 2030. 
Thirty services could save 30 million lives by 2030. 
That's not just a blueprint -- we're proving this can be done. 
In Liberia, the Liberian government is training thousands of workers like A.B. and Musu after Ebola, to bring health care to every child and family in the country. 
And we've been honored to work with them, and are now teaming up with a number of organizations that are working across other countries to try to help them do the same thing. 
If we could help these countries scale, we could save millions of lives, and at the same time, we could create millions of jobs. 
We simply can't do that, though, without technology. 
People are worried that technology is going to steal our jobs, but when it comes to community health workers, technology has actually been vital for creating jobs. 
Without technology -- without this smartphone, without this rapid test -- it would have been impossible for us to be able to employ A.B. and Musu. 
And I think it's time for technology to help us train, to help us train people faster and better than ever before. 
As a doctor, I use technology to stay up-to-date and keep certified. 
I use smartphones, I use apps, I use online courses. 
But when A.B. wants to learn, he's got to jump back in that canoe and get to the training center. 
And when Musu shows up for training, her instructors are stuck using flip charts and markers. 
Why shouldn't they have the same access to learn as I do? 
If we truly want community health workers to master those lifesaving skills and even more, we've got to change this old-school model of education. 
Tech can truly be a game changer here. 
I've been in awe of the digital education revolution that the likes of Khan Academy and edX have been leading. 
And I've been thinking that it's time; it's time for a collision between the digital education revolution and the community health revolution. 
And so, this brings me to my TED Prize wish. 
I wish -- I wish that you would help us recruit the largest army of community health workers the world has ever known by creating the Community Health Academy, a global platform to train, connect and empower. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
Here's the idea: we'll create and curate the best in digital education resources. 
We will bring those to community health workers around the world, including A.B. and Musu. 
They'll get video lessons on giving kids vaccines and have online courses on spotting the next outbreak, so they're not stuck using flip charts. 
We'll help these countries accredit these workers, so that they're not stuck remaining an under-recognized, undervalued group, but become a renowned, empowered profession, just like nurses and doctors. 
And we'll create a network of companies and entrepreneurs who've created innovations that can save lives and help them connect to workers like Musu, so she can help better serve her community. 
And we'll work tirelessly to persuade governments to make community health workers a cornerstone of their health care plans. 
We plan to test and prototype the academy in Liberia and a few other partner countries, and then we plan to take it global, including to rural North America. 
With the power of this platform, we believe countries can be more persuaded that a health care revolution really is possible. 
My dream is that this academy will contribute to the training of hundreds of thousands of community members to help bring health care to their neighbors -- the hundreds of millions of them that live in the world's most remote communities, from the forest communities of West Africa, to the fishing villages of rural Alaska; from the hilltops of Appalachia, to the mountains of Afghanistan. 
If this vision is aligned with yours, head to communityhealthacademy.org, and join this revolution. 
Let us know if you or your organization or someone you know could help us as we try to build this academy over the next year. 
Now, as I look out into this room, I realize that our journeys are not self-made; they're shaped by others. 
And there have been so many here that have been part of this cause. 
We're so honored to be part of this community, and a community that's willing to take on a cause as audacious as this one, so I wanted to offer, as I end, a reflection. 
I think a lot more about what my father taught me. 
These days, I too have become a dad. 
I have two sons, and my wife and I just learned that she's pregnant with our third child. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) I was recently caring for a woman in Liberia who, like my wife, was in her third pregnancy. 
But unlike my wife, had had no prenatal care with her first two babies. 
She lived in an isolated community in the forest that had gone for 100 years without any health care until ... 
until last year when a nurse trained her neighbors to become community health workers. 
So here I was, seeing this patient who was in her second trimester, and I pulled out the ultrasound to check on the baby, and she started telling us stories about her first two kids, and I had the ultrasound probe on her belly, and she just stopped mid-sentence. 
She turned to me and she said, "Doc, what's that sound?" 
It was the first time she'd ever heard her baby's heartbeat. 
And her eyes lit up in the same way my wife's eyes and my own eyes lit up when we heard our baby's heartbeat. 
For all of human history, illness has been universal and access to care has not. 
But as a wise man once told me: no condition is permanent. 
It's time. 
It's time for us to go as far as it takes to change this condition together. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

She wrote: "When I become famous, I will tell everyone that I know a hero named Marlon Peterson." 
Heroes rarely look like me. 
In fact, I'm what garbage looks like. 
No, not the most appealing way to open a talk or start a conversation, and perhaps you have some questions going through your head about that. 
Why would this man say such a thing about himself? 
What does he mean? 
How can someone view him as a hero when he sees himself as garbage? 
I believe we learn more from questions than we do from answers. 
Because when we're questioning something, we're invested in taking in some sort of new information, or grappling with some sort of ignorance that makes us feel uncomfortable. 
And that's why I'm here: to push us to question, even when it makes us uncomfortable. 
My parents are from Trinidad and Tobago, the southernmost island in the Caribbean. 
Trinidad is also home to the only acoustic instrument invented in the 20th century: the steel pan. 
Deriving from the African drums and evolving from the genius of one of the ghettos in Trinidad, a city called Laventille, and the disregard of the American military ... 
Well, I should tell you, America, during WWII, had military bases set up in Trinidad, and when the war ended, they left the island littered with empty oil drums -- their trash. 
So people from Laventille repurposed the old drums left behind into the full chromatic scale: the steel pan. 
Playing music now from Beethoven to Bob Marley to 50 Cent, those people literally made music out of garbage. 
Twelve days before my 20th birthday, I was arrested for my role in a violent robbery attempt in lower Manhattan. 
While people were sitting in a coffee shop, four people were shot. 
Two were killed. 
We were all the products of Trinidad and Tobago. 
We were the "bad immigrants," or the "anchor babies" that Trump and millions of Americans easily malign. 
I was discarded, like waste material -- and justifiably so to many. 
I eventually served 10 years, two months and seven days of a prison sentence. 
I was sentenced to a decade of punishment in a correctional institution. 
I was sentenced to irrelevance -- the opposite of humanity. 
Interestingly, it was during those years in prison that a series of letters redeemed me, helped me move beyond the darkness and the guilt associated with the worst moment of my young life. 
It gave me a sense that I was useful. 
She was 13 years old. 
She had wrote that she saw me as a hero. 
I remember reading that, and I remember crying when I read those words. 
She was one of over 50 students and 150 letters that I wrote during a mentoring correspondence program that I co-designed with a friend who was a teacher at a middle school in Brooklyn, my hometown. 
We called it the Young Scholars Program. 
Every time those young people shared their stories with me, their struggles, every time they drew a picture of their favorite cartoon character and sent it to me, every time they said they depended on my letters or my words of advice, it boosted my sense of worthiness. 
It gave me a sense of what I could contribute to this planet. 
It transformed my life. 
Because of those letters and what they shared with me, their stories of teen life, they gave me the permission, they gave me the courage to admit to myself that there were reasons -- not excuses -- but that there were reasons for that fateful day in October of 1999; that the trauma associated with living in a community where guns are easier to get than sneakers; that the trauma associated with being raped at gunpoint at the age of 14; that those are reasons for me why making that decision, that fatal decision, was not an unlikely proposition. 
Because those letters mattered so much to me, because writing and receiving and having that communication with those folks so hugely impacted my life, I decided to share the opportunity with some friends of mine who were also inside with me. 
My friends Bill and Cory and Arocks, all in prison for violent crimes also, shared their words of wisdom with the young people as well, and received the sense of relevancy in return. 
We are now published writers and youth program innovators and trauma experts and gun violence prevention advocates, and TED talkers and -- (Laughter) and good daddies. 
That's what I call a positive return of investment. 
Above all else, what building that program taught me was that when we sow, when we invest in the humanity of people no matter where they're at, we can reap amazing rewards. 
In this latest era of criminal justice reform, I often question and wonder why -- why is it that so many believe that only those who have been convicted of nonviolent drug offenses merit empathy and recognized humanity? 
Criminal justice reform is human justice. 
Am I not human? 
When we invest in resources that amplify the relevancy of people in communities like Laventille or parts of Brooklyn or a ghetto near you, we can literally create the communities that we want. 
We can do better. 
We can do better than investing solely in law enforcement as a resource, because they don't give us a sense of relevancy that is at the core of why so many of us do so many harmful things in the pursuit of mattering. 
See, gun violence is just a visible display of a lot of underlying traumas. 
When we invest in the redemptive value of relevancy, we can render a return of both personal responsibility and healing. 
That's the people work I care about, because people work. 
Family, I'm asking you to do the hard work, the difficult work, the churning work of bestowing undeserved kindness upon those who we can relegate as garbage, who we can disregard and discard easily. 
I'm asking myself. 
Over the past two months, I've lost two friends to gun violence, both innocent bystanders. 
One was caught in a drive-by while walking home. 
The other was sitting in a café while eating breakfast, while on vacation in Miami. 
I'm asking myself to see the redemptive value of relevancy in the people that murdered them, because of the hard work of seeing the value in me. 
I'm pushing us to challenge our own capacity to fully experience our humanity, by understanding the full biography of people who we can easily choose not to see, because heroes are waiting to be recognized, and music is waiting to be made. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

Ten years ago, computer vision researchers thought that getting a computer to tell the difference between a cat and a dog would be almost impossible, even with the significant advance in the state of artificial intelligence. 
Now we can do it at a level greater than 99 percent accuracy. 
This is called image classification -- give it an image, put a label to that image -- and computers know thousands of other categories as well. 
I'm a graduate student at the University of Washington, and I work on a project called Darknet, which is a neural network framework for training and testing computer vision models. 
So let's just see what Darknet thinks of this image that we have. 
When we run our classifier on this image, we see we don't just get a prediction of dog or cat, we actually get specific breed predictions. 
That's the level of granularity we have now. 
And it's correct. 
My dog is in fact a malamute. 
So we've made amazing strides in image classification, but what happens when we run our classifier on an image that looks like this? 
Well ... 
We see that the classifier comes back with a pretty similar prediction. 
And it's correct, there is a malamute in the image, but just given this label, we don't actually know that much about what's going on in the image. 
We need something more powerful. 
I work on a problem called object detection, where we look at an image and try to find all of the objects, put bounding boxes around them and say what those objects are. 
So here's what happens when we run a detector on this image. 
Now, with this kind of result, we can do a lot more with our computer vision algorithms. 
We see that it knows that there's a cat and a dog. 
It knows their relative locations, their size. 
It may even know some extra information. 
There's a book sitting in the background. 
And if you want to build a system on top of computer vision, say a self-driving vehicle or a robotic system, this is the kind of information that you want. 
You want something so that you can interact with the physical world. 
Now, when I started working on object detection, it took 20 seconds to process a single image. 
And to get a feel for why speed is so important in this domain, here's an example of an object detector that takes two seconds to process an image. 
So this is 10 times faster than the 20-seconds-per-image detector, and you can see that by the time it makes predictions, the entire state of the world has changed, and this wouldn't be very useful for an application. 
If we speed this up by another factor of 10, this is a detector running at five frames per second. 
This is a lot better, but for example, if there's any significant movement, I wouldn't want a system like this driving my car. 
This is our detection system running in real time on my laptop. 
So it smoothly tracks me as I move around the frame, and it's robust to a wide variety of changes in size, pose, forward, backward. 
This is great. 
This is what we really need if we're going to build systems on top of computer vision. 
(Applause) So in just a few years, we've gone from 20 seconds per image to 20 milliseconds per image, a thousand times faster. 
How did we get there? 
Well, in the past, object detection systems would take an image like this and split it into a bunch of regions and then run a classifier on each of these regions, and high scores for that classifier would be considered detections in the image. 
But this involved running a classifier thousands of times over an image, thousands of neural network evaluations to produce detection. 
Instead, we trained a single network to do all of detection for us. 
It produces all of the bounding boxes and class probabilities simultaneously. 
With our system, instead of looking at an image thousands of times to produce detection, you only look once, and that's why we call it the YOLO method of object detection. 
So with this speed, we're not just limited to images; we can process video in real time. 
And now, instead of just seeing that cat and dog, we can see them move around and interact with each other. 
This is a detector that we trained on 80 different classes in Microsoft's COCO dataset. 
It has all sorts of things like spoon and fork, bowl, common objects like that. 
It has a variety of more exotic things: animals, cars, zebras, giraffes. 
And now we're going to do something fun. 
We're just going to go out into the audience and see what kind of things we can detect. 
Does anyone want a stuffed animal? 
There are some teddy bears out there. 
And we can turn down our threshold for detection a little bit, so we can find more of you guys out in the audience. 
Let's see if we can get these stop signs. 
We find some backpacks. 
Let's just zoom in a little bit. 
And this is great. 
And all of the processing is happening in real time on the laptop. 
And it's important to remember that this is a general purpose object detection system, so we can train this for any image domain. 
The same code that we use to find stop signs or pedestrians, bicycles in a self-driving vehicle, can be used to find cancer cells in a tissue biopsy. 
And there are researchers around the globe already using this technology for advances in things like medicine, robotics. 
This morning, I read a paper where they were taking a census of animals in Nairobi National Park with YOLO as part of this detection system. 
And that's because Darknet is open source and in the public domain, free for anyone to use. 
(Applause) But we wanted to make detection even more accessible and usable, so through a combination of model optimization, network binarization and approximation, we actually have object detection running on a phone. 
(Applause) And I'm really excited because now we have a pretty powerful solution to this low-level computer vision problem, and anyone can take it and build something with it. 
So now the rest is up to all of you and people around the world with access to this software, and I can't wait to see what people will build with this technology. 
Thank you. 

How many companies have you interacted with today? 
Well, you got up in the morning, took a shower, washed your hair, used a hair dryer, ate breakfast -- ate cereals, fruit, yogurt, whatever -- had coffee -- tea. 
You took public transport to come here, or maybe used your private car. 
You interacted with the company that you work for or that you own. 
You interacted with your clients, your customers, and so on and so forth. 
I'm pretty sure there are at least seven companies you've interacted with today. 
Let me tell you a stunning statistic. 
One out of seven large, public corporations commit fraud every year. 
This is a US academic study that looks at US companies -- I have no reason to believe that it's different in Europe. 
This is a study that looks at both detected and undetected fraud using statistical methods. 
This is not petty fraud. 
These frauds cost the shareholders of these companies, and therefore society, on the order of 380 billion dollars per year. 
We can all think of some examples, right? 
The car industry's secrets aren't quite so secret anymore. 
Fraud has become a feature, not a bug, of the financial services industry. 
That's not me who's claiming that, that's the president of the American Finance Association who stated that in his presidential address. 
That's a huge problem if you think about, especially, an economy like Switzerland, which relies so much on the trust put into its financial industry. 
On the other hand, there are six out of seven companies who actually remain honest despite all temptations to start engaging in fraud. 
There are whistle-blowers like Michael Woodford, who blew the whistle on Olympus. 
These whistle-blowers risk their careers, their friendships, to bring out the truth about their companies. 
There are journalists like Anna Politkovskaya who risk even their lives to report human rights violations. 
She got killed -- every year, around 100 journalists get killed because of their conviction to bring out the truth. 
So in my talk today, I want to share with you some insights I've obtained and learned in the last 10 years of conducting research in this. 
I'm a researcher, a scientist working with economists, financial economists, ethicists, neuroscientists, lawyers and others trying to understand what makes humans tick, and how can we address this issue of fraud in corporations and therefore contribute to the improvement of the world. 
I want to start by sharing with you two very distinct visions of how people behave. 
First, meet Adam Smith, founding father of modern economics. 
His basic idea was that if everybody behaves in their own self-interests, that's good for everybody in the end. 
Self-interest isn't a narrowly defined concept just for your immediate utility. 
It has a long-run implication. 
Let's think about that. 
Think about this dog here. 
That might be us. 
There's this temptation -- I apologize to all vegetarians, but -- (Laughter) Dogs do like the bratwurst. 
(Laughter) Now, the straight-up, self-interested move here is to go for that. 
So my friend Adam here might jump up, get the sausage and thereby ruin all this beautiful tableware. 
But that's not what Adam Smith meant. 
He didn't mean disregard all consequences -- to the contrary. 
He would have thought, well, there may be negative consequences, for example, the owner might be angry with the dog and the dog, anticipating that, might not behave in this way. 
That might be us, weighing the benefits and costs of our actions. 
How does that play out? 
Well, many of you, I'm sure, have in your companies, especially if it's a large company, a code of conduct. 
And then if you behave according to that code of conduct, that improves your chances of getting a bonus payment. 
And on the other hand, if you disregard it, then there are higher chances of not getting your bonus or its being diminished. 
In other words, this is a very economic motivation of trying to get people to be more honest, or more aligned with the corporation's principles. 
Similarly, reputation is a very powerful economic force, right? 
We try to build a reputation, maybe for being honest, because then people trust us more in the future. 
Right? 
Adam Smith talked about the baker who's not producing good bread out of his benevolence for those people who consume the bread, but because he wants to sell more future bread. 
In my research, we find, for example, at the University of Zurich, that Swiss banks who get caught up in media, and in the context, for example, of tax evasion, of tax fraud, have bad media coverage. 
They lose net new money in the future and therefore make lower profits. 
That's a very powerful reputational force. 
Benefits and costs. 
Here's another viewpoint of the world. 
Meet Immanuel Kant, 18th-century German philosopher superstar. 
He developed this notion that independent of the consequences, some actions are just right and some are just wrong. 
It's just wrong to lie, for example. 
So, meet my friend Immanuel here. 
He knows that the sausage is very tasty, but he's going to turn away because he's a good dog. 
He knows it's wrong to jump up and risk ruining all this beautiful tableware. 
If you believe that people are motivated like that, then all the stuff about incentives, all the stuff about code of conduct and bonus systems and so on, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. 
People are motivated by different values perhaps. 
So, what are people actually motivated by? 
These two gentlemen here have perfect hairdos, but they give us very different views of the world. 
What do we do with this? 
Well, I'm an economist and we conduct so-called experiments to address this issue. 
We strip away facts which are confusing in reality. 
Reality is so rich, there is so much going on, it's almost impossible to know what drives people's behavior really. 
So let's do a little experiment together. 
Imagine the following situation. 
You're in a room alone, not like here. 
There's a five-franc coin like the one I'm holding up right now in front of you. 
Here are your instructions: toss the coin four times, and then on a computer terminal in front of you, enter the number of times tails came up. 
This is the situation. 
Here's the rub. 
For every time that you announce that you had a tails throw, you get paid five francs. 
So if you say I had two tails throws, you get paid 10 francs. 
If you say you had zero, you get paid zero francs. 
If you say, "I had four tails throws," then you get paid 20 francs. 
It's anonymous, nobody's watching what you're doing, and you get paid that money anonymously. 
I've got two questions for you. 
(Laughter) You know what's coming now, right? 
First, how would you behave in that situation? 
The second, look to your left and look to your right -- (Laughter) and think about how the person sitting next to you might behave in that situation. 
We did this experiment for real. 
We did it at the Manifesta art exhibition that took place here in Zurich recently, not with students in the lab at the university but with the real population, like you guys. 
First, a quick reminder of stats. 
If I throw the coin four times and it's a fair coin, then the probability that it comes up four times tails is 6.25 percent. 
And I hope you can intuitively see that the probability that all four of them are tails is much lower than if two of them are tails, right? 
Here are the specific numbers. 
Here's what happened. 
People did this experiment for real. 
Around 30 to 35 percent of people said, "Well, I had four tails throws." 
That's extremely unlikely. 
(Laughter) But the really amazing thing here, perhaps to an economist, is there are around 65 percent of people who did not say I had four tails throws, even though in that situation, nobody's watching you, the only consequence that's in place is you get more money if you say four than less. 
You leave 20 francs on the table by announcing zero. 
I don't know whether the other people all were honest or whether they also said a little bit higher or lower than what they did because it's anonymous. 
We only observed the distribution. 
But what I can tell you -- and here's another coin toss. 
There you go, it's tails. 
(Laughter) Don't check, OK? 
(Laughter) What I can tell you is that not everybody behaved like Adam Smith would have predicted. 
So what does that leave us with? 
Well, it seems people are motivated by certain intrinsic values and in our research, we look at this. 
We look at the idea that people have so-called protected values. 
A protected value isn't just any value. 
A protected value is a value where you're willing to pay a price to uphold that value. 
You're willing to pay a price to withstand the temptation to give in. 
And the consequence is you feel better if you earn money in a way that's consistent with your values. 
Let me show you this again in the metaphor of our beloved dog here. 
If we succeed in getting the sausage without violating our values, then the sausage tastes better. 
That's what our research shows. 
If, on the other hand, we do so -- if we get the sausage and in doing so we actually violate values, we value the sausage less. 
Quantitatively, that's quite powerful. 
We can measure these protected values, for example, by a survey measure. 
Simple, nine-item survey that's quite predictive in these experiments. 
If you think about the average of the population and then there's a distribution around it -- people are different, we all are different. 
People who have a set of protected values that's one standard deviation above the average, they discount money they receive by lying by about 25 percent. 
That means a dollar received when lying is worth to them only 75 cents without any incentives you put in place for them to behave honestly. 
It's their intrinsic motivation. 
By the way, I'm not a moral authority. 
I'm not saying I have all these beautiful values, right? 
But I'm interested in how people behave and how we can leverage that richness in human nature to actually improve the workings of our organizations. 
So there are two very, very different visions here. 
On the one hand, you can appeal to benefits and costs and try to get people to behave according to them. 
On the other hand, you can select people who have the values and the desirable characteristics, of course -- competencies that go in line with your organization. 
I do not yet know where these protected values really come from. 
Is it nurture or is it nature? 
What I can tell you is that the distribution looks pretty similar for men and women. 
It looks pretty similar for those who had studied economics or those who had studied psychology. 
It looks even pretty similar around different age categories among adults. 
But I don't know yet how this develops over a lifetime. 
That will be the subject of future research. 
The idea I want to leave you with is it's all right to appeal to incentives. 
I'm an economist; I certainly believe in the fact that incentives work. 
But do think about selecting the right people rather than having people and then putting incentives in place. 
Selecting the right people with the right values may go a long way to saving a lot of trouble and a lot of money in your organizations. 
In other words, it will pay off to put people first. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Here's an intriguing fact. 
In the developed world, everywhere, women live an average of six to eight years longer than men do. 
Six to eight years longer. 
That's, like, a huge gap. 
In 2015, the "Lancet" published an article showing that men in rich countries are twice as likely to die as women are at any age. 
But there is one place in the world where men live as long as women. 
It's a remote, mountainous zone, a blue zone, where super longevity is common to both sexes. 
This is the blue zone in Sardinia, an Italian island in the Mediterranean, between Corsica and Tunisia, where there are six times as many centenarians as on the Italian mainland, less than 200 miles away. 
There are 10 times as many centenarians as there are in North America. 
It's the only place where men live as long as women. 
But why? 
My curiosity was piqued. 
I decided to research the science and the habits of the place, and I started with the genetic profile. 
I discovered soon enough that genes account for just 25 percent of their longevity. 
The other 75 percent is lifestyle. 
So what does it take to live to 100 or beyond? 
What are they doing right? 
What you're looking at is an aerial view of Villagrande. 
It's a village at the epicenter of the blue zone where I went to investigate this, and as you can see, architectural beauty is not its main virtue, density is: tightly spaced houses, interwoven alleys and streets. 
It means that the villagers' lives constantly intersect. 
And as I walked through the village, I could feel hundreds of pairs of eyes watching me from behind doorways and curtains, from behind shutters. 
Because like all ancient villages, Villagrande couldn't have survived without this structure, without its walls, without its cathedral, without its village square, because defense and social cohesion defined its design. 
Urban priorities changed as we moved towards the industrial revolution because infectious disease became the risk of the day. 
But what about now? 
Now, social isolation is the public health risk of our time. 
Now, a third of the population says they have two or fewer people to lean on. 
But let's go to Villagrande now as a contrast to meet some centenarians. 
Meet Giuseppe Murinu. He's 102, a supercentenarian and a lifelong resident of the village of Villagrande. 
He was a gregarious man. 
He loved to recount stories such as how he lived like a bird from what he could find on the forest floor during not one but two world wars, how he and his wife, who also lived past 100, raised six children in a small, homey kitchen where I interviewed him. 
Here he is with his sons Angelo and Domenico, both in their 70s and looking after their father, and who were quite frankly very suspicious of me and my daughter who came along with me on this research trip, because the flip side of social cohesion is a wariness of strangers and outsiders. 
But Giuseppe, he wasn't suspicious at all. 
He was a happy-go-lucky guy, very outgoing with a positive outlook. 
And I wondered: so is that what it takes to live to be 100 or beyond, thinking positively? 
Actually, no. 
(Laughter) Meet Giovanni Corrias. He's 101, the grumpiest person I have ever met. 
(Laughter) And he put a lie to the notion that you have to be positive to live a long life. 
And there is evidence for this. 
When I asked him why he lived so long, he kind of looked at me under hooded eyelids and he growled, "Nobody has to know my secrets." 
(Laughter) But despite being a sourpuss, the niece who lived with him and looked after him called him "Il Tesoro," "my treasure." 
And she respected him and loved him, and she told me, when I questioned this obvious loss of her freedom, "You just don't understand, do you? 
Looking after this man is a pleasure. 
It's a huge privilege for me. 
This is my heritage." 
And indeed, wherever I went to interview these centenarians, I found a kitchen party. 
Here's Giovanni with his two nieces, Maria above him and beside him his great-niece Sara, who came when I was there to bring fresh fruits and vegetables. 
And I quickly discovered by being there that in the blue zone, as people age, and indeed across their lifespans, they're always surrounded by extended family, by friends, by neighbors, the priest, the barkeeper, the grocer. 
People are always there or dropping by. 
They are never left to live solitary lives. 
This is unlike the rest of the developed world, where as George Burns quipped, "Happiness is having a large, loving, caring family in another city." 
(Laughter) Now, so far we've only met men, long-living men, but I met women too, and here you see Zia Teresa. 
She, at over 100, taught me how to make the local specialty, which is called culurgiones, which are these large pasta pockets like ravioli about this size, this size, and they're filled with high-fat ricotta and mint and drenched in tomato sauce. 
And she showed me how to make just the right crimp so they wouldn't open, and she makes them with her daughters every Sunday and distributes them by the dozens to neighbors and friends. 
And that's when I discovered a low-fat, gluten-free diet is not what it takes to live to 100 in the blue zone. 
(Applause) Now, these centenarians' stories along with the science that underpins them prompted me to ask myself some questions too, such as, when am I going to die and how can I put that day off? 
And as you will see, the answer is not what we expect. 
Julianne Holt-Lunstad is a researcher at Brigham Young University and she addressed this very question in a series of studies of tens of thousands of middle aged people much like this audience here. 
And she looked at every aspect of their lifestyle: their diet, their exercise, their marital status, how often they went to the doctor, whether they smoked or drank, etc. 
She recorded all of this and then she and her colleagues sat tight and waited for seven years to see who would still be breathing. 
And of the people left standing, what reduced their chances of dying the most? 
That was her question. 
So let's now look at her data in summary, going from the least powerful predictor to the strongest. 
OK? 
So clean air, which is great, it doesn't predict how long you will live. 
Whether you have your hypertension treated is good. 
Still not a strong predictor. 
Whether you're lean or overweight, you can stop feeling guilty about this, because it's only in third place. 
How much exercise you get is next, still only a moderate predictor. 
Whether you've had a cardiac event and you're in rehab and exercising, getting higher now. 
Whether you've had a flu vaccine. 
Did anybody here know that having a flu vaccine protects you more than doing exercise? 
Whether you were drinking and quit, or whether you're a moderate drinker, whether you don't smoke, or if you did, whether you quit, and getting towards the top predictors are two features of your social life. 
First, your close relationships. 
These are the people that you can call on for a loan if you need money suddenly, who will call the doctor if you're not feeling well or who will take you to the hospital, or who will sit with you if you're having an existential crisis, if you're in despair. 
Those people, that little clutch of people are a strong predictor, if you have them, of how long you'll live. 
And then something that surprised me, something that's called social integration. 
This means how much you interact with people as you move through your day. 
How many people do you talk to? 
And these mean both your weak and your strong bonds, so not just the people you're really close to, who mean a lot to you, but, like, do you talk to the guy who every day makes you your coffee? 
Do you talk to the postman? 
Do you talk to the woman who walks by your house every day with her dog? 
Do you play bridge or poker, have a book club? 
Those interactions are one of the strongest predictors of how long you'll live. 
Now, this leads me to the next question: if we now spend more time online than on any other activity, including sleeping, we're now up to 11 hours a day, one hour more than last year, by the way, does it make a difference? 
Why distinguish between interacting in person and interacting via social media? 
Is it the same thing as being there if you're in contact constantly with your kids through text, for example? 
Well, the short answer to the question is no, it's not the same thing. 
Face-to-face contact releases a whole cascade of neurotransmitters, and like a vaccine, they protect you now in the present and well into the future. 
So simply making eye contact with somebody, shaking hands, giving somebody a high-five is enough to release oxytocin, which increases your level of trust and it lowers your cortisol levels. 
So it lowers your stress. 
And dopamine is generated, which gives us a little high and it kills pain. 
It's like a naturally produced morphine. 
Now, all of this passes under our conscious radar, which is why we conflate online activity with the real thing. 
But we do have evidence now, fresh evidence, that there is a difference. 
So let's look at some of the neuroscience. 
Elizabeth Redcay, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, tried to map the difference between what goes on in our brains when we interact in person versus when we're watching something that's static. 
And what she did was she compared the brain function of two groups of people, those interacting live with her or with one of her research associates in a dynamic conversation, and she compared that to the brain activity of people who were watching her talk about the same subject but in a canned video, like on YouTube. 
And by the way, if you want to know how she fit two people in an MRI scanner at the same time, talk to me later. 
So what's the difference? 
This is your brain on real social interaction. 
What you're seeing is the difference in brain activity between interacting in person and taking in static content. 
In orange, you see the brain areas that are associated with attention, social intelligence -- that means anticipating what somebody else is thinking and feeling and planning -- and emotional reward. 
And these areas become much more engaged when we're interacting with a live partner. 
Now, these richer brain signatures might be why recruiters from Fortune 500 companies evaluating candidates thought that the candidates were smarter when they heard their voices compared to when they just read their pitches in a text, for example, or an email or a letter. 
Now, our voices and body language convey a rich signal. 
It shows that we're thinking, feeling, sentient human beings who are much more than an algorithm. 
Now, this research by Nicholas Epley at the University of Chicago Business School is quite amazing because it tells us a simple thing. 
If somebody hears your voice, they think you're smarter. 
I mean, that's quite a simple thing. 
Now, to return to the beginning, why do women live longer than men? 
And one major reason is that women are more likely to prioritize and groom their face-to-face relationships over their lifespans. 
Fresh evidence shows that these in-person friendships create a biological force field against disease and decline. 
And it's not just true of humans but their primate relations, our primate relations as well. 
Anthropologist Joan Silk's work shows that female baboons who have a core of female friends show lower levels of stress via their cortisol levels, they live longer and they have more surviving offspring. 
At least three stable relationships. 
That was the magic number. 
Think about it. 
I hope you guys have three. 
The power of such face-to-face contact is really why there are the lowest rates of dementia among people who are socially engaged. 
It's why women who have breast cancer are four times more likely to survive their disease than loners are. 
Why men who've had a stroke who meet regularly to play poker or to have coffee or to play old-timer's hockey -- I'm Canadian, after all -- (Laughter) are better protected by that social contact than they are by medication. 
Why men who've had a stroke who meet regularly -- this is something very powerful they can do. 
This face-to-face contact provides stunning benefits, yet now almost a quarter of the population says they have no one to talk to. 
We can do something about this. 
Like Sardinian villagers, it's a biological imperative to know we belong, and not just the women among us. 
Building in-person interaction into our cities, into our workplaces, into our agendas bolsters the immune system, sends feel-good hormones surging through the bloodstream and brain and helps us live longer. 
I call this building your village, and building it and sustaining it is a matter of life and death. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Helen Walters: Susan, come back. I have a question for you. 
I'm wondering if there's a middle path. 
So you talk about the neurotransmitters connecting when in face-to-face, but what about digital technology? 
We've seen enormous improvements in digital technology like FaceTime, things like that. 
Does that work too? 
I mean, I see my nephew. 
He plays Minecraft and he's yelling at his friends. 
It seems like he's connecting pretty well. 
Is that useful? Is that helpful? 
Susan Pinker: Some of the data are just emerging. 
The data are so fresh that the digital revolution happened and the health data trailed behind. 
So we're just learning, but I would say there are some improvements that we could make in the technology. 
For example, the camera on your laptop is at the top of the screen, so for example, when you're looking into the screen, you're not actually making eye contact. 
So something as simple as even just looking into the camera can increase those neurotransmitters, or maybe changing the position of the camera. 
So it's not identical, but I think we are getting closer with the technology. 
HW: Great. Thank you so much. 
SP: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

These are some photos of me volunteering in a Cambodian orphanage in 2006. 
When these photos were taken, I thought I was doing a really good thing and that I was really helping those kids. 
I had a lot to learn. 
It all started for me when I was 19 years old and went backpacking through Southeast Asia. 
When I reached Cambodia, I felt uncomfortable being on holiday surrounded by so much poverty and wanted to do something to give back. 
So I visited some orphanages and donated some clothes and books and some money to help the kids that I met. 
But one of the orphanages I visited was desperately poor. 
I had never encountered poverty like that before in my life. 
They didn't have funds for enough food, clean water or medical treatment, and the sad little faces on those kids were heartbreaking. 
So I was compelled to do something more to help. 
I fund-raised in Australia and returned to Cambodia the following year to volunteer at the orphanage for a few months. 
I taught English and bought water filters and food and took all of the kids to the dentist for the first time in their lives. 
But over the course of the next year, I came to discover that this orphanage that I had been supporting was terribly corrupt. 
The director had been embezzling every cent donated to the orphanage, and in my absence, the children were suffering such gross neglect that they were forced to catch mice to feed themselves. 
I also found out later that the director had been physically and sexually abusing the kids. 
I couldn't bring myself to turn my back on children who I had come to know and care about and return to my life in Australia. 
So I worked with a local team and the local authorities to set up a new orphanage and rescue the kids to give them a safe new home. 
But this is where my story takes another unexpected turn. 
As I adjusted to my new life running an orphanage in Cambodia, (Khmer) I learned to speak Khmer fluently, which means that I learned to speak the Khmer language fluently. 
And when I could communicate properly with the kids, I began to uncover some strange things. 
Most of the children we had removed from the orphanage were not, in fact, orphans at all. 
They had parents, and the few that were orphaned had other living relatives, like grandparents and aunties and uncles and other siblings. 
So why were these children living in an orphanage when they weren't orphans? 
Since 2005, the number of orphanages in Cambodia has risen by 75 percent, and the number of children living in Cambodian orphanages has nearly doubled, despite the fact that the vast majority of children living in these orphanages are not orphans in the traditional sense. 
They're children from poor families. 
So if the vast majority of children living in orphanages are not orphans, then the term "orphanage" is really just a euphemistic name for a residential care institution. 
These institutions go by other names as well, like "shelters," "safe houses," "children's homes," "children's villages," even "boarding schools." 
And this problem is not just confined to Cambodia. 
This map shows some of the countries that have seen a dramatic increase in the numbers of residential care institutions and the numbers of children being institutionalized. 
In Uganda, for example, the number of children living in institutions has increased by more than 1,600 percent since 1992. 
And the problems posed by putting kids into institutions don't just pertain to the corrupt and abusive institutions like the one that I rescued the kids from. 
The problems are with all forms of residential care. 
Over 60 years of international research has shown us that children who grow up in institutions, even the very best institutions, are at serious risk of developing mental illnesses, attachment disorders, growth and speech delays, and many will struggle with an inability to reintegrate back into society later in life and form healthy relationships as adults. 
These kids grow up without any model of family or of what good parenting looks like, so they then can struggle to parent their own children. 
So if you institutionalize large numbers of children, it will affect not only this generation, but also the generations to come. 
We've learned these lessons before in Australia. 
It's what happened to our "Stolen Generations," the indigenous children who were removed from their families with the belief that we could do a better job of raising their children. 
Just imagine for a moment what residential care would be like for a child. 
Firstly, you have a constant rotation of caregivers, with somebody new coming on to the shift every eight hours. 
And then on top of that you have a steady stream of visitors and volunteers coming in, showering you in the love and affection you're craving and then leaving again, evoking all of those feelings of abandonment, and proving again and again that you are not worthy of being loved. 
We don't have orphanages in Australia, the USA, the UK anymore, and for a very good reason: one study has shown that young adults raised in institutions are 10 times more likely to fall into sex work than their peers, 40 times more likely to have a criminal record, and 500 times more likely to take their own lives. 
There are an estimated eight million children around the world living in institutions like orphanages, despite the fact that around 80 percent of them are not orphans. 
Most have families who could be caring for them if they had the right support. 
But for me, the most shocking thing of all to realize is what's contributing to this boom in the unnecessary institutionalization of so many children: it's us -- the tourists, the volunteers and the donors. 
It's the well-meaning support from people like me back in 2006, who visit these children and volunteer and donate, who are unwittingly fueling an industry that exploits children and tears families apart. 
It's really no coincidence that these institutions are largely set up in areas where tourists can most easily be lured in to visit and volunteer in exchange for donations. 
Of the 600 so-called orphanages in Nepal, over 90 percent of them are located in the most popular tourist hotspots. 
The cold, hard truth is, the more money that floods in in support of these institutions, the more institutions open and the more children are removed from their families to fill their beds. 
It's just the laws of supply and demand. 
I had to learn all of these lessons the hard way, after I had already set up an orphanage in Cambodia. 
I had to eat a big piece of humble pie to admit that I had made a mistake and inadvertently become a part of the problem. 
I had been an orphanage tourist, a voluntourist. 
I then set up my own orphanage and facilitated orphanage tourism in order to generate funds for my orphanage, before I knew better. 
What I came to learn is that no matter how good my orphanage was, it was never going to give those kids what they really needed: their families. 
I know that it can feel incredibly depressing to learn that helping vulnerable children and overcoming poverty is not as simple as we've all been led to believe it should be. 
But thankfully, there is a solution. 
These problems are reversible and preventable, and when we know better, we can do better. 
The organization that I run today, the Cambodian Children's Trust, is no longer an orphanage. 
In 2012, we changed the model in favor of family-based care. 
I now lead an amazing team of Cambodian social workers, nurses and teachers. 
Together, we work within communities to untangle a complex web of social issues and help Cambodian families escape poverty. 
Our primary focus is on preventing some of the most vulnerable families in our community from being separated in the first place. 
But in cases where it's not possible for a child to live with its biological family, we support them in foster care. 
Family-based care is always better than placing a child in an institution. 
Do you remember that first photo that I showed you before? 
See that girl who is just about to catch the ball? 
Her name is Torn She's a strong, brave and fiercely intelligent girl. 
But in 2006, when I first met her living in that corrupt and abusive orphanage, she had never been to school. 
She was suffering terrible neglect, and she yearned desperately for the warmth and love of her mother. 
But this is a photo of Torn today with her family. 
Her mother now has a secure job, her siblings are doing well in high school and she is just about to finish her nursing degree at university. 
For Torn's family -- (Applause) for Torn's family, the cycle of poverty has been broken. 
The family-based care model that we have developed at CCT has been so successful, that it's now being put forward by UNICEF Cambodia and the Cambodian government as a national solution to keep children in families. 
And one of the best -- (Applause) And one of the best ways that you can help to solve this problem is by giving these eight million children a voice and become an advocate for family-based care. 
If we work together to raise awareness, we can make sure the world knows that we need to put an end to the unnecessary institutionalization of vulnerable children. 
How do we achieve that? 
By redirecting our support and our donations away from orphanages and residential care institutions towards organizations that are committed to keeping children in families. 
I believe we can make this happen in our lifetime, and as a result, we will see developing communities thrive and ensure that vulnerable children everywhere have what all children need and deserve: a family. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Before I get to bulk of what I have to say, I feel compelled just to mention a couple of things about myself. 
I am not some mystical, spiritual sort of person. 
I'm a science writer. 
I studied physics in college. 
I used to be a science correspondent for NPR. 
OK, that said: in the course of working on a story for NPR, I got some advice from an astronomer that challenged my outlook, and frankly, changed my life. 
You see, the story was about an eclipse, a partial solar eclipse that was set to cross the country in May of 1994. 
And the astronomer -- I interviewed him, and he explained what was going to happen and how to view it, but he emphasized that, as interesting as a partial solar eclipse is, a much rarer total solar eclipse is completely different. 
In a total eclipse, for all of two or three minutes, the moon completely blocks the face of the sun, creating what he described as the most awe-inspiring spectacle in all of nature. 
And so the advice he gave me was this: "Before you die," he said, "you owe it to yourself to experience a total solar eclipse." 
Well honestly, I felt a little uncomfortable hearing that from someone I didn't know very well; it felt sort of intimate. 
But it got my attention, and so I did some research. 
Now the thing about total eclipses is, if you wait for one to come to you, you're going to be waiting a long time. 
Any given point on earth experiences a total eclipse about once every 400 years. 
But if you're willing to travel, you don't have to wait that long. 
And so I learned that a few years later, in 1998, a total eclipse was going to cross the Caribbean. 
Now, a total eclipse is visible only along a narrow path, about a hundred miles wide, and that's where the moon's shadow falls. 
It's called the "path of totality." 
And in February 1998, the path of totality was going to cross Aruba. 
So I talked to my husband, and we thought: February? Aruba? 
Sounded like a good idea anyway. 
(Laughter) So we headed south, to enjoy the sun and to see what would happen when the sun briefly went away. 
Well, the day of the eclipse found us and many other people out behind the Hyatt Regency, on the beach, waiting for the show to begin. 
And we wore eclipse glasses with cardboard frames and really dark lenses that enabled us to look at the sun safely. 
A total eclipse begins as a partial eclipse, as the moon very slowly makes its way in front of the sun. 
So first it looked the sun had a little notch in its edge, and then that notch grew larger and larger, turning the sun into a crescent. 
And it was all very interesting, but I wouldn't say it was spectacular. 
I mean, the day remained bright. 
If I hadn't known what was going on overhead, I wouldn't have noticed anything unusual. 
Well, about 10 minutes before the total solar eclipse was set to begin, weird things started to happen. 
A cool wind kicked up. 
Daylight looked odd, and shadows became very strange; they looked bizarrely sharp, as if someone had turned up the contrast knob on the TV. 
Then I looked offshore, and I noticed running lights on boats, so clearly it was getting dark, although I hadn't realized it. 
Well soon, it was obvious it was getting dark. 
It felt like my eyesight was failing. 
And then all of a sudden, the lights went out. 
Well, at that, a cheer erupted from the beach, and I took off my eclipse glasses, because at this point during the total eclipse, it was safe to look at the sun with the naked eye. 
And I glanced upward, and I was just dumbstruck. 
Now, consider that, at this point, I was in my mid-30s. 
I had lived on earth long enough to know what the sky looks like. 
I mean -- (Laughter) I'd seen blue skies and grey skies and starry skies and angry skies and pink skies at sunrise. 
But here was a sky I had never seen. 
First, there were the colors. 
Up above, it was a deep purple-grey, like twilight. 
But on the horizon it was orange, like sunset, 360 degrees. 
And up above, in the twilight, bright stars and planets had come out. 
So there was Jupiter and there was Mercury and there was Venus. 
They were all in a line. 
And there, along this line, was this thing, this glorious, bewildering thing. 
It looked like a wreath woven from silvery thread, and it just hung out there in space, shimmering. 
That was the sun's outer atmosphere, the solar corona. 
And pictures just don't do it justice. 
It's not just a ring or halo around the sun; it's finely textured, like it's made out of strands of silk. 
And although it looked nothing like our sun, of course, I knew that's what it was. 
So there was the sun, and there were the planets, and I could see how the planets revolve around the sun. 
It's like I had left our solar system and was standing on some alien world, looking back at creation. 
And for the first time in my life, I just felt viscerally connected to the universe in all of its immensity. 
Time stopped, or it just kind of felt nonexistent, and what I beheld with my eyes -- I didn't just see it, it felt like a vision. 
And I stood there in this nirvana for all of 174 seconds -- less than three minutes -- when all of a sudden, it was over. 
The sun burst out, the blue sky returned, the stars and the planets and the corona were gone. 
The world returned to normal. 
But I had changed. 
And that's how I became an umbraphile -- an eclipse chaser. 
(Laughter) So, this is how I spend my time and hard-earned money. 
Every couple of years, I head off to wherever the moon's shadow will fall to experience another couple minutes of cosmic bliss, and to share the experience with others: with friends in Australia, with an entire city in Germany. 
In 1999, in Munich, I joined hundreds of thousands who filled the streets and the rooftops and cheered in unison as the solar corona emerged. 
And over time, I've become something else: an eclipse evangelist. 
I see it as my job to pay forward the advice that I received all those years ago. 
And so let me tell you: before you die, you owe it to yourself to experience a total solar eclipse. 
It is the ultimate experience of awe. 
Now, that word, "awesome," has grown so overused that it's lost its original meaning. 
True awe, a sense of wonder and insignificance in the face of something enormous and grand, is rare in our lives. 
But when you experience it, it's powerful. 
Awe dissolves the ego. 
It makes us feel connected. 
Indeed, it promotes empathy and generosity. 
Well, there is nothing truly more awesome than a total solar eclipse. 
Unfortunately, few Americans have seen one, because it's been 38 years since one last touched the continental United States and 99 years since one last crossed the breadth of the nation. 
But that is about to change. 
Over the next 35 years, five total solar eclipses will visit the continental United States, and three of them will be especially grand. 
Six weeks from now, on August 21, 2017 -- (Applause) the moon's shadow will race from Oregon to South Carolina. 
April 8, 2024, the moon's shadow heads north from Texas to Maine. 
In 2045, on August 12, the path cuts from California to Florida. 
I say: What if we made these holidays? 
What if we -- (Laughter) (Applause) What if we all stood together, as many people as possible, in the shadow of the moon? 
Just maybe, this shared experience of awe would help heal our divisions, get us to treat each other just a bit more humanely. 
Now, admittedly, some folks consider my evangelizing a little out there; my obsession, eccentric. 
I mean, why focus so much attention on something so brief? 
Why cross the globe -- or state lines, for that matter -- for something that lasts three minutes? 
As I said: I am not a spiritual person. 
I don't believe in God. 
I wish I did. 
But when I think of my own mortality -- and I do, a lot -- when I think of everyone I have lost, my mother in particular, what soothes me is that moment of awe I had in Aruba. 
I picture myself on that beach, looking at that sky, and I remember how I felt. 
My existence may be temporary, but that's OK because, my gosh, look at what I'm a part of. 
And so this is a lesson I've learned, and it's one that applies to life in general: duration of experience does not equal impact. 
One weekend, one conversation -- hell, one glance -- can change everything. 
Cherish those moments of deep connection with other people, with the natural world, and make them a priority. 
Yes, I chase eclipses. 
You might chase something else. 
But it's not about the 174 seconds. 
It's about how they change the years that come after. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

This is a talk about sugar and cancer. 
I became interested in sugar when I was in college. 
Not this kind of sugar. 
It was the sugar that our biology professors taught us about in the context of the coating of your cells. 
Maybe you didn't know that your cells are coated with sugar. 
And I didn't know that, either, until I took these courses in college, but back then -- and this was in, let's just call it the 1980s -- people didn't know much about why our cells are coated with sugar. 
And when I dug through my notes, what I noticed I had written down is that the sugar coating on our cells is like the sugar coating on a peanut M and M. 
And people thought the sugar coating on our cells was like a protective coating that somehow made our cells stronger or tougher. 
But we now know, many decades later, that it's much more complicated than that, and that the sugars on our cells are actually very complex. 
And if you could shrink yourself down to a little miniature airplane and fly right along the surface of your cells, it might look something like this -- with geographical features. 
And now, the complex sugars are these trees and bushes -- weeping willows that are swaying in the wind and moving with the waves. 
And when I started thinking about all these complex sugars that are like this foliage on our cells, it became one of the most interesting problems that I encountered as a biologist and also as a chemist. 
And so now we tend to think about the sugars that are populating the surface of our cells as a language. 
They have a lot of information stored in their complex structures. 
But what are they trying to tell us? 
I can tell you that we do know some information that comes from these sugars, and it's turned out already to be incredibly important in the world of medicine. 
For example, one thing your sugars are telling us is your blood type. 
So your blood cells, your red blood cells, are coated with sugars, and the chemical structures of those sugars determine your blood type. 
So for example, I know that I am blood type O. 
How many people are also blood type O? 
Put your hands up. 
It's a pretty common one, so when so few hands go up, either you're not paying attention or you don't know your blood type, and both of those are bad. 
(Laughter) But for those of you who share the blood type O with me, what this means is that we have this chemical structure on the surface of our blood cells: three simple sugars linked together to make a more complex sugar. 
And that, by definition, is blood type O. 
Now, how many people are blood type A? 
Right here. 
That means you have an enzyme in your cells that adds one more building block, that red sugar, to build a more complex structure. 
And how many people are blood type B? 
Quite a few. 
You have a slightly different enzyme than the A people, so you build a slightly different structure, and those of you that are AB have the enzyme from your mother, the other enzyme from your father, and now you make both of these structures in roughly equal proportions. 
And when this was figured out, which is now back in the previous century, this enabled one of the most important medical procedures in the world, which, of course, is the blood transfusion. 
And by knowing what your blood type is, we can make sure, if you ever need a transfusion, that your donor has the same blood type, so that your body doesn't see foreign sugars, which it wouldn't like and would certainly reject. 
What else are the sugars on the surface of your cells trying to tell us? 
Well, those sugars might be telling us that you have cancer. 
So a few decades ago, correlations began to emerge from the analysis of tumor tissue. 
And the typical scenario is a patient would have a tumor detected, and the tissue would be removed in a biopsy procedure and then sent down to a pathology lab where that tissue would be analyzed to look for chemical changes that might inform the oncologist about the best course of treatment. 
And what was discovered from studies like that is that the sugars have changed when the cell transforms from being healthy to being sick. 
And those correlations have come up again and again and again. 
But a big question in the field has been: Why? 
Why do cancers have different sugars? What's the importance of that? 
Why does it happen, and what can we do about it if it does turn out to be related to the disease process? 
So, one of the changes that we study is an increase in the density of a particular sugar that's called sialic acid. 
And I think this is going to be one of the most important sugars of our times, so I would encourage everybody to get familiar with this word. 
Sialic acid is not the kind of sugar that we eat. 
Those are different sugars. 
This is a kind of sugar that is actually found at certain levels on all of the cells in your body. 
It's actually quite common on your cells. 
But for some reason, cancer cells, at least in a successful, progressive disease, tend to have more sialic acid than a normal, healthy cell would have. 
And why? 
What does that mean? 
Well, what we've learned is that it has to do with your immune system. 
So let me tell you a little bit about the importance of your immune system in cancer. 
And this is something that's, I think, in the news a lot these days. 
You know, people are starting to become familiar with the term "cancer immune therapy." 
And some of you might even know people who are benefiting from these very new ways of treating cancer. 
What we now know is that your immune cells, which are the white blood cells coursing through your bloodstream, protect you on a daily basis from things gone bad -- including cancer. 
And so in this picture, those little green balls are your immune cells, and that big pink cell is a cancer cell. 
And these immune cells go around and taste all the cells in your body. 
That's their job. 
And most of the time, the cells taste OK. 
But once in a while, a cell might taste bad. 
Hopefully, that's the cancer cell, and when those immune cells get the bad taste, they launch an all-out strike and kill those cells. 
So we know that. 
We also know that if you can potentiate that tasting, if you can encourage those immune cells to actually take a big old bite out of a cancer cell, you get a better job protecting yourself from cancer every day and maybe even curing a cancer. 
And there are now a couple of drugs out there in the market that are used to treat cancer patients that act exactly by this process. 
They activate the immune system so that the immune system can be more vigorous in protecting us from cancer. 
In fact, one of those drugs may well have spared President Jimmy Carter's life. 
Do you remember, President Carter had malignant melanoma that had metastasized to his brain, and that diagnosis is one that is usually accompanied by numbers like "months to live." 
But he was treated with one of these new immune-stimulating drugs, and now his melanoma appears to be in remission, which is remarkable, considering the situation only a few years ago. 
In fact, it's so remarkable that provocative statements like this one: "Cancer is having a penicillin moment," people are saying, with these new immune therapy drugs. 
I mean, that's an incredibly bold thing to say about a disease which we've been fighting for a long time and mostly losing the battle with. 
So this is very exciting. 
Now what does this have to do with sugars? 
Well, I'll tell you what we've learned. 
When an immune cell snuggles up against a cancer cell to take a taste, it's looking for signs of disease, and if it finds those signs, the cell gets activated and it launches a missile strike and kills the cell. 
But if that cancer cell has a dense forest of that sugar, sialic acid, well, it starts to taste pretty good. 
And there's a protein on immune cells that grabs the sialic acid, and if that protein gets held at that synapse between the immune cell and the cancer cell, it puts that immune cell to sleep. 
The sialic acids are telling the immune cell, "Hey, this cell's all right. Nothing to see here, move along. 
Look somewhere else." 
So in other words, as long as our cells are wearing a thick coat of sialic acid, they look fabulous, right? 
It's amazing. 
And what if you could strip off that coat and take that sugar away? 
Well, your immune system might be able to see that cancer cell for what it really is: something that needs to be destroyed. 
And so this is what we're doing in my lab. 
We're developing new medicines that are basically cell-surface lawnmowers -- molecules that go down to the surface of these cancer cells and just cut off those sialic acids, so that the immune system can reach its full potential in eliminating those cancer cells from our body. 
So in closing, let me just remind you again: your cells are coated with sugars. 
The sugars are telling cells around that cell whether the cell is good or bad. 
And that's important, because our immune system needs to leave the good cells alone. 
Otherwise, we'd have autoimmune diseases. 
But once in a while, cancers get the ability to express these new sugars. 
And now that we understand how those sugars mesmerize the immune system, we can come up with new medicines to wake up those immune cells, tell them, "Ignore the sugars, eat the cell and have a delicious snack, on cancer." 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Whether you like it or not, radical transparency and algorithmic decision-making is coming at you fast, and it's going to change your life. 
That's because it's now easy to take algorithms and embed them into computers and gather all that data that you're leaving on yourself all over the place, and know what you're like, and then direct the computers to interact with you in ways that are better than most people can. 
Well, that might sound scary. 
I've been doing this for a long time and I have found it to be wonderful. 
My objective has been to have meaningful work and meaningful relationships with the people I work with, and I've learned that I couldn't have that unless I had that radical transparency and that algorithmic decision-making. 
I want to show you why that is, I want to show you how it works. 
And I warn you that some of the things that I'm going to show you probably are a little bit shocking. 
Since I was a kid, I've had a terrible rote memory. 
And I didn't like following instructions, I was no good at following instructions. 
But I loved to figure out how things worked for myself. 
When I was 12, I hated school but I fell in love with trading the markets. 
I caddied at the time, earned about five dollars a bag. 
And I took my caddying money, and I put it in the stock market. 
And that was just because the stock market was hot at the time. 
And the first company I bought was a company by the name of Northeast Airlines. 
Northeast Airlines was the only company I heard of that was selling for less than five dollars a share. 
(Laughter) And I figured I could buy more shares, and if it went up, I'd make more money. 
So, it was a dumb strategy, right? 
But I tripled my money, and I tripled my money because I got lucky. 
The company was about to go bankrupt, but some other company acquired it, and I tripled my money. 
And I was hooked. 
And I thought, "This game is easy." 
With time, I learned this game is anything but easy. 
In order to be an effective investor, one has to bet against the consensus and be right. 
And it's not easy to bet against the consensus and be right. 
One has to bet against the consensus and be right because the consensus is built into the price. 
And in order to be an entrepreneur, a successful entrepreneur, one has to bet against the consensus and be right. 
I had to be an entrepreneur and an investor -- and what goes along with that is making a lot of painful mistakes. 
So I made a lot of painful mistakes, and with time, my attitude about those mistakes began to change. 
I began to think of them as puzzles. 
That if I could solve the puzzles, they would give me gems. 
And the puzzles were: What would I do differently in the future so I wouldn't make that painful mistake? 
And the gems were principles that I would then write down so I would remember them that would help me in the future. 
And because I wrote them down so clearly, I could then -- eventually discovered -- I could then embed them into algorithms. 
And those algorithms would be embedded in computers, and the computers would make decisions along with me; and so in parallel, we would make these decisions. 
And I could see how those decisions then compared with my own decisions, and I could see that those decisions were a lot better. 
And that was because the computer could make decisions much faster, it could process a lot more information and it can process decisions much more -- less emotionally. 
So it radically improved my decision-making. 
Eight years after I started Bridgewater, I had my greatest failure, my greatest mistake. 
It was late 1970s, I was 34 years old, and I had calculated that American banks had lent much more money to emerging countries than those countries were going to be able to pay back and that we would have the greatest debt crisis since the Great Depression. 
And with it, an economic crisis and a big bear market in stocks. 
It was a controversial view at the time. 
People thought it was kind of a crazy point of view. 
But in August 1982, Mexico defaulted on its debt, and a number of other countries followed. 
And we had the greatest debt crisis since the Great Depression. 
And because I had anticipated that, I was asked to testify to Congress and appear on "Wall Street Week," which was the show of the time. 
Just to give you a flavor of that, I've got a clip here, and you'll see me in there. 
(Video) Mr. Chairman, Mr. Mitchell, it's a great pleasure and a great honor to be able to appear before you in examination with what is going wrong with our economy. 
The economy is now flat -- teetering on the brink of failure. 
Martin Zweig: You were recently quoted in an article. 
You said, "I can say this with absolute certainty because I know how markets work." 
Ray Dalio: I can say with absolute certainty that if you look at the liquidity base in the corporations and the world as a whole, that there's such reduced level of liquidity that you can't return to an era of stagflation." 
I look at that now, I think, "What an arrogant jerk!" 
(Laughter) I was so arrogant, and I was so wrong. 
I mean, while the debt crisis happened, the stock market and the economy went up rather than going down, and I lost so much money for myself and for my clients that I had to shut down my operation pretty much, I had to let almost everybody go. 
And these were like extended family, I was heartbroken. 
And I had lost so much money that I had to borrow 4,000 dollars from my dad to help to pay my family bills. 
It was one of the most painful experiences of my life ... 
but it turned out to be one of the greatest experiences of my life because it changed my attitude about decision-making. 
Rather than thinking, "I'm right," I started to ask myself, "How do I know I'm right?" 
I gained a humility that I needed in order to balance my audacity. 
I wanted to find the smartest people who would disagree with me to try to understand their perspective or to have them stress test my perspective. 
I wanted to make an idea meritocracy. 
In other words, not an autocracy in which I would lead and others would follow and not a democracy in which everybody's points of view were equally valued, but I wanted to have an idea meritocracy in which the best ideas would win out. 
And in order to do that, I realized that we would need radical truthfulness and radical transparency. 
What I mean by radical truthfulness and radical transparency is people needed to say what they really believed and to see everything. 
And we literally tape almost all conversations and let everybody see everything, because if we didn't do that, we couldn't really have an idea meritocracy. 
In order to have an idea meritocracy, we have let people speak and say what they want. 
Just to give you an example, this is an email from Jim Haskel -- somebody who works for me -- and this was available to everybody in the company. 
"Ray, you deserve a 'D-' for your performance today in the meeting ... 
you did not prepare at all well because there is no way you could have been that disorganized." 
Isn't that great? 
(Laughter) That's great. 
It's great because, first of all, I needed feedback like that. 
I need feedback like that. 
And it's great because if I don't let Jim, and people like Jim, to express their points of view, our relationship wouldn't be the same. 
And if I didn't make that public for everybody to see, we wouldn't have an idea meritocracy. 
So for that last 25 years that's how we've been operating. 
We've been operating with this radical transparency and then collecting these principles, largely from making mistakes, and then embedding those principles into algorithms. 
And then those algorithms provide -- we're following the algorithms in parallel with our thinking. 
That has been how we've run the investment business, and it's how we also deal with the people management. 
In order to give you a glimmer into what this looks like, I'd like to take you into a meeting and introduce you to a tool of ours called the "Dot Collector" that helps us do this. 
A week after the US election, our research team held a meeting to discuss what a Trump presidency would mean for the US economy. 
Naturally, people had different opinions on the matter and how we were approaching the discussion. 
The "Dot Collector" collects these views. 
It has a list of a few dozen attributes, so whenever somebody thinks something about another person's thinking, it's easy for them to convey their assessment; they simply note the attribute and provide a rating from one to 10. 
For example, as the meeting began, a researcher named Jen rated me a three -- in other words, badly -- (Laughter) for not showing a good balance of open-mindedness and assertiveness. 
As the meeting transpired, Jen's assessments of people added up like this. 
Others in the room have different opinions. 
That's normal. 
Different people are always going to have different opinions. 
And who knows who's right? 
Let's look at just what people thought about how I was doing. 
Some people thought I did well, others, poorly. 
With each of these views, we can explore the thinking behind the numbers. 
Here's what Jen and Larry said. 
Note that everyone gets to express their thinking, including their critical thinking, regardless of their position in the company. 
Jen, who's 24 years old and right out of college, can tell me, the CEO, that I'm approaching things terribly. 
This tool helps people both express their opinions and then separate themselves from their opinions to see things from a higher level. 
When Jen and others shift their attentions from inputting their own opinions to looking down on the whole screen, their perspective changes. 
They see their own opinions as just one of many and naturally start asking themselves, "How do I know my opinion is right?" 
That shift in perspective is like going from seeing in one dimension to seeing in multiple dimensions. 
And it shifts the conversation from arguing over our opinions to figuring out objective criteria for determining which opinions are best. 
Behind the "Dot Collector" is a computer that is watching. 
It watches what all these people are thinking and it correlates that with how they think. 
And it communicates advice back to each of them based on that. 
Then it draws the data from all the meetings to create a pointilist painting of what people are like and how they think. 
And it does that guided by algorithms. 
Knowing what people are like helps to match them better with their jobs. 
For example, a creative thinker who is unreliable might be matched up with someone who's reliable but not creative. 
Knowing what people are like also allows us to decide what responsibilities to give them and to weigh our decisions based on people's merits. 
We call it their believability. 
Here's an example of a vote that we took where the majority of people felt one way ... 
but when we weighed the views based on people's merits, the answer was completely different. 
This process allows us to make decisions not based on democracy, not based on autocracy, but based on algorithms that take people's believability into consideration. 
Yup, we really do this. 
(Laughter) We do it because it eliminates what I believe to be one of the greatest tragedies of mankind, and that is people arrogantly, naïvely holding opinions in their minds that are wrong, and acting on them, and not putting them out there to stress test them. 
And that's a tragedy. 
And we do it because it elevates ourselves above our own opinions so that we start to see things through everybody's eyes, and we see things collectively. 
Collective decision-making is so much better than individual decision-making if it's done well. 
It's been the secret sauce behind our success. 
It's why we've made more money for our clients than any other hedge fund in existence and made money 23 out of the last 26 years. 
So what's the problem with being radically truthful and radically transparent with each other? 
People say it's emotionally difficult. 
Critics say it's a formula for a brutal work environment. 
Neuroscientists tell me it has to do with how are brains are prewired. 
There's a part of our brain that would like to know our mistakes and like to look at our weaknesses so we could do better. 
I'm told that that's the prefrontal cortex. 
And then there's a part of our brain which views all of this as attacks. 
I'm told that that's the amygdala. 
In other words, there are two you's inside you: there's an emotional you and there's an intellectual you, and often they're at odds, and often they work against you. 
It's been our experience that we can win this battle. 
We win it as a group. 
It takes about 18 months typically to find that most people prefer operating this way, with this radical transparency than to be operating in a more opaque environment. 
There's not politics, there's not the brutality of -- you know, all of that hidden, behind-the-scenes -- there's an idea meritocracy where people can speak up. 
And that's been great. 
It's given us more effective work, and it's given us more effective relationships. 
But it's not for everybody. 
We found something like 25 or 30 percent of the population it's just not for. 
And by the way, when I say radical transparency, I'm not saying transparency about everything. 
I mean, you don't have to tell somebody that their bald spot is growing or their baby's ugly. 
So, I'm just talking about -- (Laughter) talking about the important things. 
So -- (Laughter) So when you leave this room, I'd like you to observe yourself in conversations with others. 
Imagine if you knew what they were really thinking, and imagine if you knew what they were really like ... 
and imagine if they knew what you were really thinking and what were really like. 
It would certainly clear things up a lot and make your operations together more effective. 
I think it will improve your relationships. 
Now imagine that you can have algorithms that will help you gather all of that information and even help you make decisions in an idea-meritocratic way. 
This sort of radical transparency is coming at you and it is going to affect your life. 
And in my opinion, it's going to be wonderful. 
So I hope it is as wonderful for you as it is for me. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

When someone mentions Cuba, what do you think about? 
Classic, classic cars? 
Perhaps good cigars? 
Maybe you think of a famous baseball player. 
What about when somebody mentions North Korea? 
You think about those missile tests, maybe their notorious leader or his good friend, Dennis Rodman. 
(Laughter) One thing that likely doesn't come to mind is a vision of a country, an open economy, whose citizens have access to a wide range of affordable consumer products. 
I'm not here to argue how these countries got to where they are today. 
I simply want to use them as an example of countries and citizens who have been affected, negatively affected, by a trade policy that restricts imports and protects local industries. 
Recently we've heard a number of countries talk about restricting imports and protecting their local, domestic industries. 
Now, this may sound fine in a sound bite, but what it really is is protectionism. 
We heard a lot about this during the 2016 presidential election. 
We heard about it during the Brexit debates and most recently during the French elections. 
In fact, it's been a really important topic being talked about around the world, and many aspiring political leaders are running on platforms positioning protectionism as a good thing. 
Now, I could see why they think protectionism is good, because sometimes it seems like trade is unfair. 
Some have blamed trade for some of the problems we've been having here at home in the US. 
For years we've been hearing about the loss of high-paying US manufacturing jobs. 
Many think that manufacturing is declining in the US because companies are moving their operations offshore to markets with lower-cost labor like China, Mexico and Vietnam. 
They also think trade agreements sometimes are unfair, like NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, because these trade agreements allow companies to reimport those cheaply produced goods back into the US and other countries from where the jobs were taken. 
So it kind of feels like the exporters win and the importers lose. 
Now, the reality is output in the manufacturing sector in the US is actually growing, but we are losing jobs. 
We're losing lots of them. 
In fact, from 2000 to 2010, 5.7 million manufacturing jobs were lost. 
But they're not being lost for the reasons you might think. 
Mike Johnson in Toledo, Ohio didn't lose his jobs at the factory to Miguel Sanchez in Monterrey, Mexico. 
No. 
Mike lost his job to a machine. 
87 percent of lost manufacturing jobs have been eliminated because we've made improvements in our own productivity through automation. 
So that means that one out of 10 lost manufacturing jobs was due to offshoring. 
Now, this is not just a US phenomenon. 
No. 
In fact, automation is spreading to every production line in every country around the world. 
But look, I get it: if you just lost your job and then you read in the newspaper that your old company just struck up a deal with China, it's easy to think you were just replaced in a one-for-one deal. 
When I hear stories like this, I think that what people picture is that trade happens between only two countries. 
Manufacturers in one country produce products and they export them to consumers in other countries, and it feels like the manufacturing countries win and the importing countries lose. 
Well, reality's a little bit different. 
I'm a supply chain professional, and I live and work in Mexico. 
And I work in the middle of a highly connected network of manufacturers all collaborating from around the world to produce many of the products we use today. 
What I see from my front-row seat in Mexico City actually looks more like this. 
And this is a more accurate depiction of what trade really looks like. 
I've had the pleasure of being able to see how many different products are manufactured, from golf clubs to laptop computers to internet servers, automobiles and even airplanes. 
And believe me, none of it happens in a straight line. 
Let me give you an example. 
A few months ago, I was touring the manufacturing plant of a multinational aerospace company in Querétaro, Mexico, and the VP of logistics points out a completed tail assembly. 
It turns out the tail assemblies are assembled from panels that are manufactured in France, and they're assembled in Mexico using components imported from the US. 
When those tail assemblies are done, they're exported via truck to Canada to their primary assembly plant where they come together with thousands of other parts, like the wings and the seats and the little shades over the little windows, all coming in to become a part of a new airplane. 
Think about it. 
These new airplanes, before they even take their first flight, they have more stamps in their passports than Angelina Jolie. 
Now, this approach to processing goes on all around the world to manufacture many of the products we use every day, from skin cream to airplanes. 
When you go home tonight, take a look in your house. 
You might be surprised to find a label that looks like this one: "Manufactured in the USA from US and foreign parts." 
Economist Michael Porter described what's going on here best. 
Many decades ago, he said that it's most beneficial for a country to focus on producing the products it can produce most efficiently and trading for the rest. 
So what he's talking about here is shared production, and efficiency is the name of the game. 
You've probably seen an example of this at home or at work. 
Let's take a look at an example. 
Think about how your house was built or your kitchen renovated. 
Typically, there's a general contractor who is responsible for coordinating the efforts of all the different contractors: an architect to draw the plans, an earth-moving company to dig the foundation, a plumber, a carpenter and so on. 
So why doesn't the general contractor pick just one company to do all the work, like, say, the architect? 
Because this is silly. 
The general contractor selects experts because it takes years to learn and master how to do each of the tasks it takes to build a house or renovate a kitchen, some of them requiring special training. 
Think about it: Would you want your architect to install your toilet? 
Of course not. 
So let's apply this process to the corporate world. 
Companies today focus on manufacturing what they produce best and most efficiently, and they trade for everything else. 
So this means they rely on a global, interconnected, interdependent network of manufacturers to produce these products. 
In fact, that network is so interconnected it's almost impossible to dismantle and produce products in just one country. 
Let's take a look at the interconnected web we saw a few moments ago, and let's focus on just one strand between the US and Mexico. 
The Wilson Institute says that shared production represents 40 percent of the half a trillion dollars in trade between the US and Mexico. 
That's about 200 billion dollars, or the same as the GDP for Portugal. 
So let's just imagine that the US decides to impose a 20 percent border tax on all imports from Mexico. 
OK, fine. 
But do you think Mexico is just going to stand by and let that happen? 
No. No way. 
So in retaliation, they impose a similar tax on all goods being imported from the US, and a little game of tit-for-tat ensues, and 20 percent -- just imagine that 20 percent duties are added to every good, product, product component crossing back and forth across the border, and you could be looking at more than a 40 percent increase in duties, or 80 billion dollars. 
Now, don't kid yourself, these costs are going to be passed along to you and to me. 
Now, let's think about what impact that might have on some of the products, or the prices of the products, that we buy every day. 
So if a 30 percent increase in duties were actually passed along, we would be looking at some pretty important increases in prices. 
A Lincoln MKZ would go from 37,000 dollars to 48,000. 
And the price of a Sharp 60-inch HDTV would go from 898 dollars to 1,167 dollars. 
And the price of a 16-ounce jar of CVS skin moisturizer would go from 13 dollars to 17 dollars. 
Now, remember, this is only looking at one strand of the production chain between the US and Mexico, so multiply this out across all of the strands. 
The impact could be considerable. 
Now, just think about this: even if we were able to dismantle this network and produce products in just one country, which by the way is easier said than done, we would still only be saving or protecting one out of 10 lost manufacturing jobs. 
That's right, because remember, most of those jobs, 87 percent, were lost due to improvements in our own productivity. 
And unfortunately, those jobs, they're gone for good. 
So the real question is, does it make sense for us to drive up prices to the point where many of us can't afford the basic goods we use every day for the purpose of saving a job that might be eliminated in a couple of years anyway? 
The reality is that shared production allows us to manufacture higher quality products at lower costs. 
It's that simple. 
It allows us to get more out of the limited resources and expertise we have and at the same time benefit from lower prices. 
It's really important to remember that for shared production to be effective, it relies on efficient cross-border movement of raw materials, components and finished products. 
So remember this: the next time you're hearing somebody try to sell you on the idea that protectionism is a good deal, it's just not. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Where does the end begin? 
Well, for me, it all began with this little fellow. 
This adorable organism -- well, I think it's adorable -- is called Tetrahymena and it's a single-celled creature. 
It's also been known as pond scum. 
So that's right, my career started with pond scum. 
Now, it was no surprise I became a scientist. 
Growing up far away from here, as a little girl I was deadly curious about everything alive. 
I used to pick up lethally poisonous stinging jellyfish and sing to them. 
And so starting my career, I was deadly curious about fundamental mysteries of the most basic building blocks of life, and I was fortunate to live in a society where that curiosity was valued. 
Now, for me, this little pond scum critter Tetrahymena was a great way to study the fundamental mystery I was most curious about: those bundles of DNA in our cells called chromosomes. 
And it was because I was curious about the very ends of chromosomes, known as telomeres. 
Now, when I started my quest, all we knew was that they helped protect the ends of chromosomes. 
It was important when cells divide. 
It was really important, but I wanted to find out what telomeres consisted of, and for that, I needed a lot of them. 
And it so happens that cute little Tetrahymena has a lot of short linear chromosomes, around 20,000, so lots of telomeres. 
And I discovered that telomeres consisted of special segments of noncoding DNA right at the very ends of chromosomes. 
But here's a problem. 
Now, we all start life as a single cell. 
It multiples to two. Two becomes four. Four becomes eight, and on and on to form the 200 million billion cells that make up our adult body. 
And some of those cells have to divide thousands of times. 
In fact, even as I stand here before you, all throughout my body, cells are furiously replenishing to, well, keep me standing here before you. 
So every time a cell divides, all of its DNA has to be copied, all of the coding DNA inside of those chromosomes, because that carries the vital operating instructions that keep our cells in good working order, so my heart cells can keep a steady beat, which I assure you they're not doing right now, and my immune cells can fight off bacteria and viruses, and our brain cells can save the memory of our first kiss and keep on learning throughout life. 
But there is a glitch in the way DNA is copied. 
It is just one of those facts of life. 
Every time the cell divides and the DNA is copied, some of that DNA from the ends gets worn down and shortened, some of that telomere DNA. 
And think about it like the protective caps at the ends of your shoelace. 
And those keep the shoelace, or the chromosome, from fraying, and when that tip gets too short, it falls off, and that worn down telomere sends a signal to the cells. 
"The DNA is no longer being protected." 
It sends a signal. Time to die. 
So, end of story. 
Well, sorry, not so fast. 
It can't be the end of the story, because life hasn't died off the face of the earth. 
So I was curious: if such wear and tear is inevitable, how on earth does Mother Nature make sure we can keep our chromosomes intact? 
Now, remember that little pond scum critter Tetrahymena? 
The craziest thing was, Tetrahymena cells never got old and died. 
Their telomeres weren't shortening as time marched on. 
Sometimes they even got longer. 
Something else was at work, and believe me, that something was not in any textbook. 
So working in my lab with my extraordinary student Carol Greider -- and Carol and I shared the Nobel Prize for this work -- we began running experiments and we discovered cells do have something else. 
It was a previously undreamed-of enzyme that could replenish, make longer, telomeres, and we named it telomerase. 
And when we removed our pond scum's telomerase, their telomeres ran down and they died. 
So it was thanks to their plentiful telomerase that our pond scum critters never got old. 
OK, now, that's an incredibly hopeful message for us humans to be receiving from pond scum, because it turns out that as we humans age, our telomeres do shorten, and remarkably, that shortening is aging us. 
Generally speaking, the longer your telomeres, the better off you are. 
It's the overshortening of telomeres that leads us to feel and see signs of aging. 
My skin cells start to die and I start to see fine lines, wrinkles. 
Hair pigment cells die. 
You start to see gray. 
Immune system cells die. 
You increase your risks of getting sick. 
In fact, the cumulative research from the last 20 years has made clear that telomere attrition is contributing to our risks of getting cardiovascular diseases, Alzheimer's, some cancers and diabetes, the very conditions many of us die of. 
And so we have to think about this. 
What is going on? 
This attrition, we look and we feel older, yeah. 
Our telomeres are losing the war of attrition faster. 
And those of us who feel youthful longer, it turns out our telomeres are staying longer for longer periods of time, extending our feelings of youthfulness and reducing the risks of all we most dread as the birthdays go by. 
OK, seems like a no-brainer. 
Now, if my telomeres are connected to how quickly I'm going to feel and get old, if my telomeres can be renewed by my telomerase, then all I have to do to reverse the signs and symptoms of aging is figure out where to buy that Costco-sized bottle of grade A organic fair trade telomerase, right? 
Great! Problem solved. 
(Applause) Not so fast, I'm sorry. 
Alas, that's not the case. 
OK. And why? 
It's because human genetics has taught us that when it comes to our telomerase, we humans live on a knife edge. 
OK, simply put, yes, nudging up telomerase does decrease the risks of some diseases, but it also increases the risks of certain and rather nasty cancers. 
So even if you could buy that Costco-sized bottle of telomerase, and there are many websites marketing such dubious products, the problem is you could nudge up your risks of cancers. 
And we don't want that. 
Now, don't worry, and because, while I think it's kind of funny that right now, you know, many of us may be thinking, "Well, I'd rather be like pond scum," ... 
(Laughter) there is something for us humans in the story of telomeres and their maintenance. 
But I want to get one thing clear. 
It isn't about enormously extending human lifespan or immortality. 
It's about health span. 
Now, health span is the number of years of your life when you're free of disease, you're healthy, you're productive, you're zestfully enjoying life. 
Disease span, the opposite of health span, is the time of your life spent feeling old and sick and dying. 
So the real question becomes, OK, if I can't guzzle telomerase, do I have control over my telomeres' length and hence my well-being, my health, without those downsides of cancer risks? 
OK? 
So, it's the year 2000. 
Now, I've been minutely scrutinizing little teeny tiny telomeres very happily for many years, when into my lab walks a psychologist named Elissa Epel. 
Now, Elissa's expertise is in the effects of severe, chronic psychological stress on our mind's and our body's health. 
And there she was standing in my lab, which ironically overlooked the entrance to a mortuary, and -- (Laughter) And she had a life-and-death question for me. 
"What happens to telomeres in people who are chronically stressed?" 
she asked me. 
You see, she'd been studying caregivers, and specifically mothers of children with a chronic condition, be it gut disorder, be it autism, you name it -- a group obviously under enormous and prolonged psychological stress. 
I have to say, her question changed me profoundly. 
See, all this time I had been thinking of telomeres as those miniscule molecular structures that they are, and the genes that control telomeres. 
And when Elissa asked me about studying caregivers, I suddenly saw telomeres in a whole new light. 
I saw beyond the genes and the chromosomes into the lives of the real people we were studying. 
And I'm a mom myself, and at that moment, I was struck by the image of these women dealing with a child with a condition very difficult to deal with, often without help. 
And such women, simply, often look worn down. 
So was it possible their telomeres were worn down as well? 
So our collective curiosity went into overdrive. 
Elissa selected for our first study a group of such caregiving mothers, and we wanted to ask: What's the length of their telomeres compared with the number of years that they have been caregiving for their child with a chronic condition? 
So four years go by and the day comes when all the results are in, and Elissa looked down at our first scatterplot and literally gasped, because there was a pattern to the data, and it was the exact gradient that we most feared might exist. 
It was right there on the page. 
The longer, the more years that is, the mother had been in this caregiving situation, no matter her age, the shorter were her telomeres. 
And the more she perceived her situation as being more stressful, the lower was her telomerase and the shorter were her telomeres. 
So we had discovered something unheard of: the more chronic stress you are under, the shorter your telomeres, meaning the more likely you were to fall victim to an early disease span and perhaps untimely death. 
Our findings meant that people's life events and the way we respond to these events can change how you maintain your telomeres. 
So telomere length wasn't just a matter of age counted in years. 
Elissa's question to me, back when she first came to my lab, indeed had been a life-and-death question. 
Now, luckily, hidden in that data there was hope. 
We noticed that some mothers, despite having been carefully caring for their children for many years, had been able to maintain their telomeres. 
So studying these women closely revealed that they were resilient to stress. 
Somehow they were able to experience their circumstances not as a threat day in and day out but as a challenge, and this has led to a very important insight for all of us: we have control over the way we age all the way down into our cells. 
OK, now our initial curiosity became infectious. 
Thousands of scientists from different fields added their expertise to telomere research, and the findings have poured in. 
It's up to over 10,000 scientific papers and counting. 
So several studies rapidly confirmed our initial finding that yes, chronic stress is bad for telomeres. 
And now many are revealing that we have more control over this particular aging process than any of us could ever have imagined. 
A few examples: a study from the University of California, Los Angeles of people who are caring for a relative with dementia, long-term, and looked at their caregiver's telomere maintenance capacity and found that it was improved by them practicing a form of meditation for as little as 12 minutes a day for two months. 
Attitude matters. 
If you're habitually a negative thinker, you typically see a stressful situation with a threat stress response, meaning if your boss wants to see you, you automatically think, "I'm about to be fired," and your blood vessels constrict, and your level of the stress hormone cortisol creeps up, and then it stays up, and over time, that persistently high level of the cortisol actually damps down your telomerase. 
Not good for your telomeres. 
On the other hand, if you typically see something stressful as a challenge to be tackled, then blood flows to your heart and to your brain, and you experience a brief but energizing spike of cortisol. 
And thanks to that habitual "bring it on" attitude, your telomeres do just fine. 
So ... 
What is all of this telling us? 
Your telomeres do just fine. 
You really do have power to change what is happening to your own telomeres. 
But our curiosity just got more and more intense, because we started to wonder, what about factors outside our own skin? 
Could they impact our telomere maintenance as well? 
You know, we humans are intensely social beings. 
Was it even possible that our telomeres were social as well? 
And the results have been startling. 
As early as childhood, emotional neglect, exposure to violence, bullying and racism all impact your telomeres, and the effects are long-term. 
Can you imagine the impact on children of living years in a war zone? 
People who can't trust their neighbors and who don't feel safe in their neighborhoods consistently have shorter telomeres. 
So your home address matters for telomeres as well. 
On the flip side, tight-knit communities, being in a marriage long-term, and lifelong friendships, even, all improve telomere maintenance. 
So what is all this telling us? 
It's telling us that I have the power to impact my own telomeres, and I also have the power to impact yours. 
Telomere science has told us just how interconnected we all are. 
But I'm still curious. 
I do wonder what legacy all of us will leave for the next generation? 
Will we invest in the next young woman or man peering through a microscope at the next little critter, the next bit of pond scum, curious about a question we don't even know today is a question? 
It could be a great question that could impact all the world. 
And maybe, maybe you're curious about you. 
Now that you know how to protect your telomeres, are you curious what are you going to do with all those decades of brimming good health? 
And now that you know you could impact the telomeres of others, are you curious how will you make a difference? 
And now that you know the power of curiosity to change the world, how will you make sure that the world invests in curiosity for the sake of the generations that will come after us? 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

I'd like for you to take a moment to imagine this with me. 
You're a little girl of five years old. 
Sitting in front of a mirror, you ask yourself, "Do I exist?" 
In this space, there is very little context, and so you move into a different one, one filled with people. 
Surely, now you know you're not a figment of your own imagination. 
You breathe their air. 
You see them, so they must see you. 
And yet, you still can't help but wonder: Do I only exist when people speak to me? 
Pretty heavy thoughts for a child, right? 
But through various artworks that reflect upon our society, I came to understand how a young black girl can grow up feeling as if she's not seen, and perhaps she doesn't exist. 
You see, if young people don't have positive images of themselves and all that remains are negative stereotypes, this affects their self-image. 
But it also affects the way that the rest of society treats them. 
I discovered this having lived in Cape Town for about five years at the time. 
I felt a deep sense of dislocation and invisibility. 
I couldn't see myself represented. 
I couldn't see the women who've raised me, the ones who've influenced me, and the ones that have made South Africa what it is today. 
I decided to do something about it. 
What do you think when you see this? 
If you were a black girl, how would it make you feel? 
Walking down the street, what does the city you live in say to you? 
What symbols are present? 
Which histories are celebrated? 
And on the other hand, which ones are omitted? 
You see, public spaces are hardly ever as neutral as they may seem. 
I discovered this when I made this performance in 2013 on Heritage Day. 
Cape Town is teeming with masculine architecture, monuments and statues, such as Louis Botha in that photograph. 
This overt presence of white colonial and Afrikaner nationalist men not only echoes a social, gender and racial divide, but it also continues to affect the way that women -- and the way, particularly, black women -- see themselves in relation to dominant male figures in public spaces. 
For this reason, among others, I don't believe that we need statues. 
The preservation of history and the act of remembering can be achieved in more memorable and effective ways. 
As part of a year-long public holiday series, I use performance art as a form of social commentary to draw people's attention to certain issues, as well as addressing the absence of the black female body in memorialized public spaces, especially on public holidays. 
Women's Day was coming up. 
I looked at what the day means -- the Women's March to the union buildings in 1956, petitioning against the pass laws. 
Juxtaposed with the hypocrisy of how women are treated, especially in public spaces today, I decided to do something about it. 
Headline: [Women in miniskirt attacked at taxi rank] How do I comment on such polar opposites? 
In the guise of my great-grandmother, I performed bare-breasted, close to the taxi rank in KwaLanga. 
This space is also called Freedom Square, where women were a part of demonstrations against apartheid laws. 
I was not comfortable with women being seen as only victims in society. 
You might wonder how people reacted to this. 
(Video) Woman: (Cheering) Woman 2 (offscreen): Yes! 
Sethembile Msezane: Pretty cool, huh? 
(Applause) So I realized that through my performances, I've been able to make regular people reflect upon their society, looking at the past as well as the current democracy. 
(Video) Man (offscreen): She's been there since three o'clock. 
Man 2 (offscreen): Just before three. About an hour still? 
Man 1: Yeah. It's just a really hot day. 
Man 1: It's very interesting. 
It's very powerful. 
I think it's cool. 
I think a lot of people are quick to join a group that's a movement towards something, but not many people are ready to do something as an individual. 
Man 2: So it's the individual versus the collective. 
Man 1: Yeah. 
So I think her pushing her own individual message in performance ... 
it's powerful. 
Yeah, I think it's quite powerful that she's doing it on her own. 
I'd be interested to know why she's using hair extensions as wings, or whatever those things are meant to be. 
They are wings, yes? 
Woman 3: With her standing there right now, I think it's just my interpretation that we are bringing the statue down and bringing up something that's supposed to represent African pride, I think. 
Or something like that. 
Something should stand while Rhodes falls, I think that's what it's saying. Yeah. 
Yes. Thank you. 
Man 3: What is behind me represents the African culture. 
We can't have the colonialist law, so we need to remove all these colonial statues. 
We have have our own statues now, our African leaders -- Bhambatha, Moshoeshoe, Kwame Nkrumah -- all those who paid their lives for our liberation. 
We can't continue in the 21st century, and after 21 years of democracy, have the colonizers in our own country. 
They belong somewhere. Maybe in a museum; not here. 
I mean learning institutions, places where young people, young minds are being shaped. 
So we cannot continue to have Louis Botha, Rhodes, all these people, because they're representing the colonialism. 
(Applause) Sethembile Msezane: On April 9, 2015, the Cecil John Rhodes statue was scheduled to be removed after a month of debates for and against its removal by various stakeholders. 
This caused a widespread interest in statues in South Africa. 
Opinions varied, but the media focused on problematizing the removal of statues. 
On that -- well, that year, I had just begun my master's at the University of Cape Town. 
During the time of the debate of the statue, I had been having reoccurring dreams about a bird. 
And so I started conjuring her mentally, spiritually and through dress. 
On that day, I happened to be having a meeting with my supervisors, and they told me that the statue was going to fall on that day. 
I told them that I'd explain later, but we had to postpone the meeting because I was going to perform her as the statue came down. 
Her name was Chapungu. 
She was a soapstone bird that was looted from Great Zimbabwe in the late 1800s, and is still currently housed in Cecil John Rhodes's estate in Cape Town. 
On that day, I embodied her existence using my body, while standing in the blazing sun for nearly four hours. 
As the time came, the crane came alive. 
The people did, too -- shouting, screaming, clenching their fists and taking pictures of the moment on their phones and cameras. 
Chapungu's wings, along with the crane, rose to declare the fall of Cecil John Rhodes. 
(Applause) Euphoria filled the air as he became absent from his base, while she remained still, very present, half an hour after his removal. 
Twenty-three years after apartheid, a new generation of radicals has arisen in South Africa. 
The story of Chapungu and Rhodes in the same space and time asks important questions related to gender, power, self-representation, history making and repatriation. 
From then on, I realized that my spiritual beliefs and dreams texture my material reality. 
But for me, Chapungu's story felt incomplete. 
This soapstone bird, a spiritual medium and messenger of God and the ancestors, needed me to continue her story. 
And so I dabbled in the dream space a little bit more, and this is how "Falling" was born. 
[A film by Sethembile Msezane] (Video) (A capella singing) [FALLING] (Applause) In the film, Zimbabwe, South Africa and Germany share a common story about the soapstone birds that were looted from Great Zimbabwe. 
After Zimbabwe gained its independence, all the birds except for one were returned to the monument. 
"Falling" explores the mythological belief that there will be unrest until the final bird is returned. 
Through my work, I have realized a lot about the world around me: how we move through spaces, who we choose to celebrate and who we remember. 
Now I look in the mirror and not only see an image of myself, but of the women who have made me who I am today. 
I stand tall in my work, celebrating women's histories, in the hope that perhaps one day, no little black girl has to ever feel like she doesn't exist. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

We humans are becoming an urban species, so cities, they are our natural habitat. 
That is where we live. 
In 2014, over 54 percent of the world population was living in cities, and I can bet you that so many of these people have thought of how they would do things differently, like if I only had the tools to change things in my city, what would I do? 
What would my dream city be like? 
And these tools, this is just what we gave them. 
Two years ago, my team and I, we released a game, "Cities: Skylines." 
It is a game about building cities. 
So I have always been interested in cities as systems. 
It's something that I find immensely interesting. 
But what I didn't understand was that I am not alone in this. 
People love cities. 
They are interested. They have ideas. 
The game was an instant hit. 
So far, over three and a half million people have played it. 
And it's not just about playing. 
We also have really awesome sharing systems. 
So people play, they create cities and then they are sharing these creations, showing off what they have made. 
And what I will show you is some of these cities created by the players. 
So the game is about self-expression, creativity, not just overcoming the challenges posed by the simulation. 
It is about showing what your cities look like. 
So I have a couple of videos. 
These are from YouTube. 
And these are some of the most interesting city designs I have seen. 
So they are all different, and I hope you like all of these. 
This one is called The Netherlands. 
It's by Silvarret. 
And when you start the game, you have an empty piece of land. 
This land, it can be based on the real world, it can be hand-crafted in the map editor, or you can, of course, download a city made by someone else and play in that. 
But what Silvarret has done here is that what he wanted to make was not a real city. 
This is a fantasy city, even though it looks real. 
So what he wanted to do was a fantasy city that could be in the Netherlands. 
So he kind of investigated what are the characteristics of cities in the Netherlands and combined a couple of those, and this is what he created. 
So it is a city, but it is not a real city, but it could be. 
It looks just like the Netherlands. 
So the places are really densely populated. 
So what you need is highways, trains, anything connecting these small town centers together. 
Lots of people, lots of moving, so transportation is the key here. 
But then let's go even more on the fantasy side. 
Let's go into the future. 
This is one of my personal favorites. 
These city designs are what I love the most. 
So this is a tiered city by Conflictnerd, and the basic idea is that you have concentric circle routes. 
So the city is a big circle with tinier circles inside. 
And the thing is that you put all of the services in the center, and then people actually live on the outer ring, because there is less traffic, less noise, less pollution, so that is where you want to live. 
But the services are still really close by. 
They are in the center. 
And this is the soul of the game. 
The player has to understand what are the wishes, what are the needs of the tiny people living in the cities. 
So you need to know where you should put the things. 
Like, it's not enough to have a hospital. 
It needs to be accessible. 
Citizens need to reach the hospital. 
And this is one way to do it. 
So maybe this is something that we might be seeing someday. 
And then even more into the future. 
Astergea by Yuttho. 
So Yuttho does YouTube videos and plays the game. 
What he did here was actually a 12-point series of creating this city. 
So what he does is he plays the game, he records it and he explains as he's going what he's doing and why. 
And as a part of this series, he actually did an interview with an actual urban planner called Jeff Speck. 
And Speck is an expert on the concept of walkability. 
The basic idea is that if you want your citizens to walk, which is kind of beneficial, you actually need to have walking as a reasonable means of transportation. 
It should be a good way to reach places. 
So what Yuttho did was that he explained this concept, he had Speck explain it, too, and then he applied it to the city that he was building. 
So what we are seeing is Yuttho's vision of the future: lots of public transportation, walkways, plazas, connecting high-rise buildings. 
Maybe this is what the future might look like. 
And the game system works really well for this. 
We are seeing some real-world uses to this game. 
So we know that some urban planners are using it as a sketching tool, so while the simulation is not completely realistic, it is realistic enough that if something works in the game, it is highly likely that it will also work in the real world, so that you can actually try out things, see if this intersection might fit this kind of a situation. 
If we build a new road, would it help? 
And this is what you can do with this game. 
There was one really interesting contest held by the Finnish city of Hämeenlinna. 
So what they did was that they had a new area that they wanted to develop in the city. 
They made a map with the existing city, they left empty the area that they would want to develop and shared this map. 
So anyone could download the map, play the game, build the area and submit their creations to the city council. 
So they have not yet built anything, but it might just be that they use one of these plans made with the game to actually build the real city. 
And these videos that I have shown you, these are the people who are coming up with new kinds of solutions. 
We know that cities are growing. 
They're getting bigger as we go, and the percentage of population living in cities is projected to rise. 
So we need the solutions and these people, playing the game, they are trying out different kinds of solutions. 
They might have something that is really important. 
So what we are seeing here is dream cities that might be real one day. 
So it might be that this is not just a game. 
It might be a way to decide our own fate. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I want us to start by thinking about this device, the phone that's very likely in your pockets right now. 
Over 40 percent of Americans check their phones within five minutes of waking up every morning. 
And then they look at it another 50 times during the day. 
Grownups consider this device to be a necessity. 
But now I want you to imagine it in the hands of a three-year-old, and as a society, we get anxious. 
Parents are very worried that this device is going to stunt their children's social growth; that it's going to keep them from getting up and moving; that somehow, this is going to disrupt childhood. 
So, I want to challenge this attitude. 
I can envision a future where we would be excited to see a preschooler interacting with a screen. 
These screens can get kids up and moving even more. 
They have the power to tell us more about what a child is learning than a standardized test can. 
And here's the really crazy thought: I believe that these screens have the power to prompt more real-life conversations between kids and their parents. 
Now, I was perhaps an unlikely champion for this cause. 
I studied children's literature because I was going to work with kids and books. 
But about 20 years ago, I had an experience that shifted my focus. 
I was helping lead a research study about preschoolers and websites. 
And I walked in and was assigned a three-year-old named Maria. 
Maria had actually never seen a computer before. 
So the first thing I had to do was teach her how to use the mouse, and when I opened up the screen, she moved it across the screen, and she stopped on a character named X the Owl. 
And when she did that, the owl lifted his wing and waved at her. 
Maria dropped the mouse, pushed back from the table, leaped up and started waving frantically back at him. 
Her connection to that character was visceral. 
This wasn't a passive screen experience. 
This was a human experience. 
And it was exactly appropriate for a three-year-old. 
I've now worked at PBS Kids for more than 15 years, and my work there is focused on harnessing the power of technology as a positive in children's lives. 
I believe that as a society, we're missing a big opportunity. 
We're letting our fear and our skepticism about these devices hold us back from realizing their potential in our children's lives. 
Fear about kids and technology is nothing new; we've been here before. 
Over 50 years ago, the debate was raging about the newly dominant media: the television. 
That box in the living room? 
It might be separating kids from one another. 
It might keep them away from the outside world. 
But this is the moment when Fred Rogers, the long-running host of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," challenged society to look at television as a tool, a tool that could promote emotional growth. 
Here's what he did: he looked out from the screen, and he held a conversation, as if he were speaking to each child individually about feelings. 
And then he would pause and let them think about them. 
You can see his influence across the media landscape today, but at the time, this was revolutionary. 
He shifted the way we looked at television in the lives of children. 
Today it's not just one box. 
Kids are surrounded by devices. 
And I'm also a parent -- I understand this feeling of anxiety. 
But I want us to look at three common fears that parents have, and see if we can shift our focus to the opportunity that's in each of them. 
So. 
Fear number one: "Screens are passive. 
This is going to keep our kids from getting up and moving." 
Chris Kratt and Martin Kratt are zoologist brothers who host a show about animals called "Wild Kratts." 
And they approached the PBS team to say, "Can we do something with those cameras that are built into every device now? 
Could those cameras capture a very natural kid play pattern -- pretending to be animals?" 
So we started with bats. 
And when kids came in to play this game, they loved seeing themselves on-screen with wings. 
But my favorite part of this, when the game was over and we turned off the screens? 
The kids kept being bats. 
They kept flying around the room, they kept veering left and right to catch mosquitoes. 
And they remembered things. 
They remembered that bats fly at night. 
And they remembered that when bats sleep, they hang upside down and fold their wings in. 
This game definitely got kids up and moving. 
But also, now when kids go outside, do they look at a bird and think, "How does a bird fly differently than I flew when I was a bat?" 
The digital technology prompted embodied learning that kids can now take out into the world. 
Fear number two: "Playing games on these screens is just a waste of time. 
It's going to distract children from their education." 
Game developers know that you can learn a lot about a player's skill by looking at the back-end data: Where did a player pause? 
Where did they make a few mistakes before they found the right answer? 
My team wanted to take that tool set and apply it to academic learning. 
Our producer in Boston, WGBH, created a series of Curious George games focused on math. 
And researchers came in and had 80 preschoolers play these games. 
They then gave all 80 of those preschoolers a standardized math test. 
We could see early on that these games were actually helping kids understand some key skills. 
But our partners at UCLA wanted us to dig deeper. 
They focus on data analysis and student assessment. 
And they wanted to take that back-end game-play data and see if they could use it to predict a child's math scores. 
So they made a neural net -- they essentially trained the computer to use this data, and here are the results. 
This is a subset of the children's standardized math scores. 
And this is the computer's prediction of each child's score, based on playing some Curious George games. 
The prediction is astonishingly accurate, especially considering the fact that these games weren't built for assessment. 
The team that did this study believes that games like these can teach us more about a child's cognitive learning than a standardized test can. 
What if games could reduce testing time in the classroom? 
What if they could reduce testing anxiety? 
How could they give teachers snapshots of insight to help them better focus their individualized learning? 
So the third fear I want to address is the one that I think is often the biggest. 
And that's this: "These screens are isolating me from my child." 
Let's play out a scenario. 
Let's say that you are a parent, and you need 25 minutes of uninterrupted time to get dinner ready. 
And in order to do that, you hand a tablet to your three-year-old. 
Now, this is a moment where you probably feel very guilty about what you just did. 
But now imagine this: Twenty minutes later, you receive a text message. 
on that cell phone that's always within arm's reach. 
And it says: "Alex just matched five rhyming words. 
Ask him to play this game with you. 
Can you think of a word that rhymes with 'cat'? 
Or how about 'ball'?" 
In our studies, when parents receive simple tips like these, they felt empowered. 
They were so excited to play these games at the dinner table with their kids. 
And the kids loved it, too. 
Not only did it feel like magic that their parents knew what they had been playing, kids love to play games with their parents. 
Just the act of talking to kids about their media can be incredibly powerful. 
Last summer, Texas Tech University published a study that the show "Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood" could promote the development of empathy among children. 
But there was a really important catch to this study: the greatest benefit was only when parents talked to kids about what they watched. 
Neither just watching nor just talking about it was enough; it was the combination that was key. 
So when I read this study, I started thinking about how rarely parents of preschoolers actually talk to kids about the content of what they're playing and what they're watching. 
And so I decided to try it with my four-year-old. 
I said, "Were you playing a car game earlier today?" 
And Benjamin perked up and said, "Yes! And did you see that I made my car out of a pickle? 
It was really hard to open the trunk." 
(Laughter) This hilarious conversation about what was fun in the game and what could have been better continued all the way to school that morning. 
I'm not here to suggest to you that all digital media is great for kids. 
There are legitimate reasons for us to be concerned about the current state of children's content on these screens. 
And it's right for us to be thinking about balance: Where do screens fit against all the other things that a child needs to do to learn and to grow? 
But when we fixate on our fears about it, we forget a really major point, and that is, that kids are living in the same world that we live in, the world where the grownups check their phones more than 50 times a day. 
Screens are a part of children's lives. 
And if we pretend that they aren't, or if we get overwhelmed by our fear, kids are never going to learn how and why to use them. 
What if we start raising our expectations for this media? 
What if we start talking to kids regularly about the content on these screens? 
What if we start looking for the positive impacts that this technology can have in our children's lives? 
That's when the potential of these tools can become a reality. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

So what does it mean to be a woman? 
We all have XX chromosomes, right? 
Actually, that's not true. 
Some women are mosaics. 
They have a mix of chromosome types with X, with XY or with XXX. 
If it's not just about our chromosomes, then what is being a woman about? 
Being feminine? 
Getting married? 
Having kids? 
You don't have to look far to find fantastic exceptions to these rules, but we all share something that makes us women. 
Maybe that something is in our brains. 
You might have heard theories from last century about how men are better at math than women because they have bigger brains. 
These theories have been debunked. 
The average man has a brain about three times smaller than the average elephant, but that doesn't mean the average man is three times dumber than an elephant ... 
or does it? 
(Laughter) There's a new wave of female neuroscientists that are finding important differences between female and male brains in neuron connectivity, in brain structure, in brain activity. 
They're finding that the brain is like a patchwork mosaic -- a mixture. 
Women have mostly female patches and a few male patches. 
With all this new data, what does it mean to be a woman? 
This is something that I've been thinking about almost my entire life. 
When people learn that I'm a woman who happens to be transgender, they always ask, "How do you know you're a woman?" 
As a scientist, I'm searching for a biological basis of gender. 
I want to understand what makes me me. 
New discoveries at the front edge of science are shedding light on the biomarkers that define gender. 
My colleagues and I in genetics, neuroscience, physiology and psychology, we're trying to figure out exactly how gender works. 
These vastly different fields share a common connection -- epigenetics. 
In epigenetics, we're studying how DNA activity can actually radically and permanently change, even though the sequence stays the same. 
DNA is the long, string-like molecule that winds up inside our cells. 
There's so much DNA that it actually gets tangled into these knot-like things -- we'll just call them knots. 
So external factors change how those DNA knots are formed. 
You can think of it like this: inside our cells, there's different contraptions building things, connecting circuits, doing all the things they need to make life happen. 
Here's one that's sort of reading the DNA and making RNA. 
And then this one is carrying a huge sac of neurotransmitters from one end of the brain cell to the other. 
Don't they get hazard pay for this kind of work? 
(Laughter) This one is an entire molecular factory -- some say it's the secret to life. 
It's call the ribosome. 
I've been studying this since 2001. 
One of the stunning things about our cells is that the components inside them are actually biodegradable. 
They dissolve, and then they're rebuilt each day, kind of like a traveling carnival where the rides are taken down and then rebuilt every single day. 
A big difference between our cells and the traveling carnival is that in the carnival, there are skilled craftsmen that rebuild the rides each day. 
In our cells, there are no such skilled craftsmen, only dumb builder machines that build whatever's written in the plans, no matter what those plans say. 
Those plans are the DNA. 
The instructions for every nook and cranny inside our cells. 
If everything in, say, our brain cells dissolves almost every day, then how can the brain remember anything past one day? 
That's where DNA comes in. 
DNA is one of the those things that does not dissolve. 
But for DNA to remember that something happened, it has to change somehow. 
We know the change can't be in the sequence; if it changed sequence all the time, then we might be growing like, a new ear or a new eyeball every single day. 
(Laughter) So, instead it changes shape, and that's where those DNA knots come in. 
You can think of them like DNA memory. 
When something big in our life happens, like a traumatic childhood event, stress hormones flood our brain. 
The stress hormones don't affect the sequence of DNA, but they do change the shape. 
They affect that part of DNA with the instructions for molecular machines that reduce stress. 
That piece of DNA gets wound up into a knot, and now the dumb builder machines can't read the plans they need to build the machines that reduce stress. 
That's a mouthful, but it's what's happening on the microscale. 
On the macroscale, you practically lose the ability to deal with stress, and that's bad. 
And that's how DNA can remember what happens in the past. 
This is what I think was happening to me when I first started my gender transition. 
I knew I was a woman on the inside, and I wore women's clothes on the outside, but everyone saw me as a man in a dress. 
I felt like no matter how many things I try, no one would ever really see me as a woman. 
In science, your credibility is everything, and people were snickering in the hallways, giving me stares, looks of disgust -- afraid to be near me. 
I remember my first big talk after transition. 
It was in Italy. 
I'd given prestigious talks before, but this one, I was terrified. 
I looked out into the audience, and the whispers started -- the stares, the smirks, the chuckles. 
To this day, I still have social anxiety around my experience eight years ago. 
I lost hope. 
Don't worry, I've had therapy so I'm OK -- I'm OK now. 
(Laughter) (Cheers) (Applause) But I felt enough is enough: I'm a scientist, I have a doctorate in astrophysics, I've published in the top journals, in wave-particle interactions, space physics, nucleic acid biochemistry. 
I've actually been trained to get to the bottom of things, so -- (Laughter) I went online -- (Applause) So I went online, and I found fascinating research papers. 
I learned that these DNA knot things are not always bad. 
Actually, the knotting and unknotting -- it's like a complicated computer language. 
It programs our bodies with exquisite precision. 
So when we get pregnant, our fertilized eggs grow into newborn babies. 
This process requires thousands of DNA decisions to happen. 
Should an embryo cell become a blood cell? 
A heart cell? A brain cell? 
And the decisions happen at different times during pregnancy. 
Some in the first trimester, some in the second trimester and some in the third trimester. 
To truly understand DNA decision-making, we need to see the process of knot formation in atomic detail. 
Even the most powerful microscopes can't see this. 
What if we tried to simulate these on a computer? 
For that we'd need a million computers to do that. 
That's exactly what we have at Los Alamos Labs -- a million computers connected in a giant warehouse. 
So here we're showing the DNA making up an entire gene folded into very specific shapes of knots. 
For the first time, my team has simulated an entire gene of DNA -- the largest biomolecular simulation performed to date. 
For the first time, we're beginning to understand the unsolved problem of how hormones trigger the formation of these knots. 
DNA knot formation can be seen beautifully in calico cats. 
The decision between orange and black happens early on in the womb, so that orange-and-black patchy pattern, it's an exact readout of what happened when that cat was just a tiny little kitten embryo inside her mom's womb. 
And the patchy pattern actually happens in our brains and in cancer. 
It's directly related to intellectual disability and breast cancer. 
These DNA decisions also happen in other parts of the body. 
It turns out that the precursor genitals transform into either female or male during the first trimester of pregnancy. 
The precursor brains, on the other hand, transform into female or male during the second trimester of pregnancy. 
So the current working model is that a unique mix in my mom's womb caused the precursor genitals to transform one way, but the precursor brain to transform the other way. 
Most of epigenetic research has really focused on stress, anxiety, depression -- kind of a downer, kind of bad things. 
(Laughter) But nowadays -- the latest stuff -- people are looking at relaxation. 
Can that have a positive effect on your DNA? 
Right now we're missing key data from mice models. 
We know that mice relax, but could they meditate like the Dalai Lama? 
Achieve enlightenment? 
Could they move stones with their mind like Jedi Master Yoda? 
(Yoda voice): Hm, a Jedi mouse must feel the force flow, hm. 
(Laughter) (Applause) I wonder if the support I've had since that talk back in Italy has tried to unwind my DNA. 
Having a great circle of friends, supportive parents and being in a loving relationship has actually given me strength and hope to help others. 
At work I wear a rainbow bracelet. 
Sometimes it raises eyebrows, but it also raises awareness. 
There's so many transgender people -- especially women of color -- that are just one demeaning comment away from taking their own lives. 
Forty percent of us attempt suicide. 
If you're listening and you feel like you have no other option, try to call a friend, go online or try to get in a support group. 
If you're a woman who's not transgender but you know pain of isolation, of sexual assault -- reach out. 
So what does it mean to be a woman? 
The latest research is showing that female and male brains do develop differently in the womb, possibly giving us females this innate sense of being a woman. 
On the other hand, maybe it's our shared sense of commonality that makes us women. 
We come in so many different shapes and sizes that asking what it means to be a woman may not be the right question. 
It's like asking a calico cat what it means to be a calico cat. 
Maybe becoming a woman means accepting ourselves for who we really are and acknowledging the same in each other. 
I see you. 
And you've just seen me. 
(Applause and cheers) 

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

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

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

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

When was I was 21 years old, I had all this physics homework. 
Physics homework requires taking breaks, and Wikipedia was relatively new, so I took a lot of breaks there. 
I kept going back to the same articles, reading them again and again, on glaciers, Antarctica and Greenland. 
How cool would it be to visit these places and what would it take to do so? 
Well, here we are on a repurposed Air Force cargo plane operated by NASA flying over the Greenland ice sheet. 
There's a lot to see here, but there's more that is hidden, waiting to be uncovered. 
What the Wikipedia articles didn't tell me is that there's liquid water hidden inside the ice sheet, because we didn't know that yet. 
I did learn on Wikipedia that the Greenland ice sheet is huge, the size of Mexico, and its ice from top to bottom is two miles thick. 
But it's not just static. 
The ice flows like a river downhill towards the ocean. 
As it flows around bends, it deforms and cracks. 
I get to study these amazing ice dynamics, which are located in one of the most remote physical environments remaining on earth. 
To work in glaciology right now is like getting in on the ground floor at Facebook in the 2000s. 
(Laughter) Our capability to fly airplanes and satellites over the ice sheets is revolutionizing glaciology. 
It's just starting to do for science what the smartphone has done for social media. 
The satellites are reporting a wealth of observations that are revealing new hidden facts about the ice sheets continuously. 
For instance, we have observations of the size of the Greenland ice sheet every month going back to 2002. 
You can look towards the bottom of the screen here to see the month and the year go forward. 
You can see that some areas of the ice sheet melt or lose ice in the summer. 
Other areas experience snowfall or gain ice back in the winter. 
This seasonal cycle, though, is eclipsed by an overall rate of mass loss that would have stunned a glaciologist 50 years ago. 
We never thought that an ice sheet could lose mass into the ocean this quickly. 
Since these measurements began in 2002, the ice sheet has lost so much ice that if that water were piled up on our smallest continent, it would drown Australia knee-deep. 
How is this possible? 
Well, under the ice lies the bedrock. 
We used radar to image the hills, valleys, mountains and depressions that the ice flows over. 
Hidden under the ice sheet are channels the size of the Grand Canyon that funnel ice and water off of Greenland and into the ocean. 
The reason that radar can reveal the bedrock is that ice is entirely transparent to radar. 
You can do an experiment. 
Go home and put an ice cube in the microwave. 
It won't melt, because microwaves, or radar, pass straight through the ice without interacting. 
If you want to melt your ice cube, you have to get it wet, because water heats up easily in the microwave. 
That's the whole principle the microwave oven is designed around. 
Radar can see water. 
And radar has revealed a vast pool of liquid water hidden under my colleague Olivia, seven stories beneath her feet. 
Here, she's used a pump to bring some of that water back to the ice sheet's surface. 
Just six years ago, we had no idea this glacier aquifer existed. 
The aquifer formed when snow melts in the summer sun and trickles downward. 
It puddles up in huge pools. 
From there, the snow acts as an igloo, insulating this water from the cold and the wind above. 
So the water can stay hidden in the ice sheet in liquid form year after year. 
The question is, what happens next? 
Does the water stay there forever? 
It could. 
Or does it find a way out to reach the global ocean? 
One possible way for the water to reach the bedrock and from there the ocean is a crevasse, or a crack in the ice. 
When cracks fill with water, the weight of the water forces them deeper and deeper. 
This is how fracking works to extract natural gas from deep within the earth. 
Pressurized fluids fracture rocks. 
All it takes is a crack to get started. 
Well, we recently discovered that there are cracks available in the Greenland ice sheet near this glacier aquifer. 
You can fly over most of the Greenland ice sheet and see nothing, no cracks, no features on the surface, but as this helicopter flies towards the coast, the path that water would take on its quest to flow downhill, one crack appears, then another and another. 
Are these cracks filled with liquid water? 
And if so, how deep do they take that water? 
Can they take it to the bedrock and the ocean? 
To answer these questions, we need something beyond remote sensing data. 
We need numeric models. 
I write numeric models that run on supercomputers. 
A numeric model is simply a set of equations that works together to describe something. 
It can be as simple as the next number in a sequence -- one, three, five, seven -- or it can be a more complex set of equations that predict the future based on known conditions in the present. 
In our case, what are the equations for how ice cracks? 
Well, engineers already have a very good understanding of how aluminum, steel and plastics fracture under stress. 
It's an important problem in our society. 
And it turns out that the engineering equations for how materials fracture are not that different from my physics homework. 
So I borrowed them, adapted them for ice, and then I had a numeric model for how a crevasse can fracture when filled with water from the aquifer. 
This is the power of math. 
It can help us understand real processes in our world. 
I'll show you now the results of my numeric model, but first I should point out that the crevasse is about a thousand times narrower than it is deep, so in the main panel here, we've zoomed in to better see the details. 
You can look to the smaller panel on the right to see the true scale for how tall and skinny the crevasse is. 
As the aquifer water flows into the crevasse, some of it refreezes in the negative 15 degree Celsius ice. 
That's about as cold as your kitchen freezer. 
But this loss can be overcome if the flow rate in from the glacier aquifer is high enough. 
In our case, it is, and the aquifer water drives the crevasse all the way to the base of the ice sheet a thousand meters below. 
From there, it has a clear path to reach the ocean. 
So the aquifer water is a part of the three millimeters per year of sea level rise that we experience as a global society. 
But there's more: the aquifer water might be punching above its weight. 
The ice flows in complex ways. 
In some places, the ice flows very fast. 
There tends to be water at the base of the ice sheet here. 
In other places, not so fast. 
Usually, there's not water present at the base there. 
Now that we know the aquifer water is getting to the base of the ice sheet, the next question is: Is it making the ice itself flow faster into the ocean? 
We're trying to uncover these mysteries hidden inside the Greenland ice sheet so that we can better plan for the sea level rise it holds. 
The amount of ice that Greenland has lost since 2002 is just a small fraction of what that ice sheet holds. 
Ice sheets are immense, powerful machines that operate on long timescales. 
In the next 80 years, global sea levels will rise at least 20 centimeters, perhaps as much as one meter, and maybe more. 
Our understanding of future sea level rise is good, but our projections have a wide range. 
It's our role as glaciologists and scientists to narrow these uncertainties. 
How much sea level rise is coming, and how fast will it get here? 
We need to know how much and how fast, so the world and its communities can plan for the sea level rise that's coming. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

There are two powerful phenomena unfolding on earth: the rise of global warming and the rise of women and girls. 
The link between them is often overlooked, but gender equity is a key answer to our planetary challenge. 
Let me explain. 
For the last few years, I have been working on an effort called "Project Drawdown." 
Our team has scoured humanity's wisdom for solutions to draw down heat-trapping, climate-changing emissions in the atmosphere -- not "someday, maybe, if we're lucky" solutions, the 80 best practices and technologies already in hand: clean, renewable energy, including solar and wind; green buildings, both new and retrofitted; efficient transportation from Brazil to China; thriving ecosystems through protection and restoration; reducing waste and reclaiming its value; growing food in good ways that regenerates soil; shifting diets to less meat, more plants; and equity for women and girls. 
Gender and climate are inextricably linked. 
Drawing down emissions depends on rising up. 
First, a bit of context. 
We are in a situation of urgency, severity and scope never before faced by humankind. 
So far, our response isn't anywhere close to adequate. 
But you already know that. 
You know it in your gut, in your bones. 
We are each part of the planet's living systems, knitted together with almost 7.7 billion human beings and 1.8 million known species. 
We can feel the connections between us. 
We can feel the brokenness and the closing window to heal it. 
This earth, our home, is telling us that a better way of being must emerge, and fast. 
In my experience, to have eyes wide open is to hold a broken heart every day. 
It's a grief that I rarely speak, though my work calls on the power of voice. 
I remind myself that the heart can simply break, or it can break open. 
A broken-open heart is awake and alive and calls for action. 
It is regenerative, like nature, reclaiming ruined ground, growing anew. 
Life moves inexorably toward more life, toward healing, toward wholeness. 
That's a fundamental ecological truth. 
And we, all of us, we are life force. 
On the face of it, the primary link between women, girls and a warming world is not life but death. 
Awareness is growing that climate impacts hit women and girls hardest, given existing vulnerabilities. 
There is greater risk of displacement, higher odds of being injured or killed during a natural disaster. 
Prolonged drought can precipitate early marriage as families contend with scarcity. 
Floods can force last-resort prostitution as women struggle to make ends meet. 
The list goes on and goes wide. 
These dynamics are most acute under conditions of poverty, from New Orleans to Nairobi. 
Too often, the story ends here. 
But not today. 
Another empowering truth begs to be seen. 
If we gain ground on gender equity, we also gain ground on addressing global warming. 
This connection comes to light in three key areas, three areas where we can secure the rights of women and girls, shore up resilience and avert emissions at the same time. 
Women are the primary farmers of the world. 
They produce 60 to 80 percent of food in lower-income countries, often operating on fewer than five acres. 
That's what the term "smallholder" means. 
Compared with men, women smallholders have less access to resources, including land rights, credit and capital, training, tools and technology. 
They farm as capably and efficiently as men, but this well-documented disparity in resources and rights means women produce less food on the same amount of land. 
Close those gaps, and farm yields rise by 20 to 30 percent. 
That means 20 to 30 percent more food from the same garden or the same field. 
The implications for hunger, for health, for household income -- they're obvious. 
Let's follow the thread to climate. 
We humans need land to grow food. 
Unfortunately, forests are often cleared to supply it, and that causes emissions from deforestation. 
But if existing farms produce enough food, forests are less likely to be lost. 
So there's a ripple effect. 
Support women smallholders, realize higher yields, avoid deforestation and sustain the life-giving power of forests. 
Project Drawdown estimates that addressing inequity in agriculture could prevent two billion tons of emissions between now and 2050. 
That's on par with the impact household recycling can have globally. 
Addressing this inequity can also help women cope with the challenges of growing food as the climate changes. 
There is life force in cultivation. 
At last count, 130 million girls are still denied their basic right to attend school. 
Gaps are greatest in secondary school classrooms. 
Too many girls are missing a vital foundation for life. 
Education means better health for women and their children, better financial security, greater agency at home and in society, more capacity to navigate a climate-changing world. 
Education can mean options, adaptability, strength. 
It can also mean lower emissions. 
For a variety of reasons, when we have more years of education, we typically choose to marry later and to have fewer children. 
So our families end up being smaller. 
What happens at the individual level adds up across the world and over time. 
One by one by one, the right to go to school impacts how many human beings live on this planet and impacts its living systems. 
That's not why girls should be educated. 
It's one meaningful outcome. 
Education is one side of a coin. 
The other is family planning: access to high-quality, voluntary reproductive health care. 
To have children by choice rather than chance is a matter of autonomy and dignity. 
Yet in the US, 45 percent of pregnancies are unintended. 
Two hundred and fourteen million women in lower-income countries say they want to decide whether and when to become pregnant but aren't using contraception. 
Listening to women's needs, addressing those needs, advancing equity and well-being: those must be the aims of family planning, period. 
Curbing the growth of our human population is a side effect, though a potent one. 
It could dramatically reduce demand for food, transportation, electricity, buildings, goods and all the rest, thereby reducing emissions. 
Close the gaps on access to education and family planning, and by mid-century, we may find one billion fewer people inhabiting earth than we would if we do nothing more. 
According to Project Drawdown, one billion fewer people could mean we avoid nearly 120 billion tons of emissions. 
At that level of impact, gender equity is a top solution to restore a climate fit for life. 
At that level of impact, gender equity is on par with wind turbines and solar panels and forests. 
There is life force in learning and life force in choice. 
Now, let me be clear: this does not mean women and girls are responsible for fixing everything. 
(Laughter) Though we probably will. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Equity for women in agriculture, education and family planning: these are solutions within a system of drawdown solutions. 
Together, they comprise a blueprint of possibility. 
And let me be even clearer about this: population cannot be seen in isolation from production or consumption. 
Some segments of the human family cause exponentially greater harm, while others suffer outsized injustice. 
The most affluent -- we are the most accountable. 
We have the most to do. 
The gender-climate connection extends beyond negative impacts and beyond powerful solutions. 
Women are vital voices and agents for change on this planet, and yet we're too often missing or even barred from the proverbial table. 
We're too often ignored or silenced when we speak. 
We are too often passed over when plans are laid or investments made. 
According to one analysis, just 0.2 percent of philanthropic funds go specifically towards women and the environment, merely 110 million dollars globally, the sum spent by one man on a single Basquiat painting last year. 
These dynamics are not only unjust, they are setting us up for failure. 
To rapidly, radically reshape society, we need every solution and every solver, every mind, every bit of heart, every set of hands. 
We often crave a simple call to action, but this challenge demands more than a fact sheet and more than a checklist. 
We need to function more like an ecosystem, finding strength in our diversity. 
You know what your superpowers are. 
You're an educator, farmer, healer, creator, campaigner, wisdom-keeper. 
How might you link arms where you are to move solutions forward? 
There is one role I want to ask that all of you play: the role of messenger. 
This is a time of great awakening. 
We need to break the silence around the condition of our planet; move beyond manufactured debates about climate science; share solutions; speak truth with a broken-open heart; teach that to address climate change, we must make gender equity a reality. 
And in the face of a seemingly impossible challenge, women and girls are a fierce source of possibility. 
It is a magnificent thing to be alive in a moment that matters so much. 
This earth, our home, is calling for us to be bold, reminding us we are all in this together -- women, men, people of all gender identities, all beings. 
We are life force, one earth, one chance. 
Let's seize it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

After decades of research and billions of dollars spent in clinical trials, we still have a problem with cancer drug delivery. 
We still give patients chemotherapy, which is so non-specific that even though it kills the cancer cells, it kind of kills the rest of your body, too. 
And yes, we have developed more selective drugs, but it's still a challenge to get them into the tumor, and they end up accumulating in the other organs as well or passing through your urine, which is a total waste. 
And fields like mine have emerged where we try to encapsulate these drugs to protect them as they travel through the body. 
But these modifications cause problems that we make more modifications to fix. 
So what I'm really trying to say is we need a better drug delivery system. 
And I propose, rather than using solely human design, why not use nature's? 
Immune cells are these versatile vehicles that travel throughout our body, patrolling for signs of disease and arriving at a wound mere minutes after injury. 
So I ask you guys: If immune cells are already traveling to places of injury or disease in our bodies, why not add an extra passenger? 
Why not use immune cells to deliver drugs to cure some of our biggest problems in disease? 
I am a biomedical engineer, and I want to tell you guys a story about how I use immune cells to target one of the largest problems in cancer. 
Did you know that over 90 percent of cancer deaths can be attributed to its spread? 
So if we can stop these cancer cells from going from the primary tumor to a distant site, we can stop cancer right in its tracks and give people more of their lives back. 
To do this special mission, we decided to deliver a nanoparticle made of lipids, which are the same materials that compose your cell membrane. 
And we've added two special molecules. 
One is called e-selectin, which acts as a glue that binds the nanoparticle to the immune cell. 
And the second one is called trail. 
Trail is a therapeutic drug that kills cancer cells but not normal cells. 
Now, when you put both of these together, you have a mean killing machine on wheels. 
To test this, we ran an experiment in a mouse. 
So what we did was we injected the nanoparticles, and they bound almost immediately to the immune cells in the bloodstream. 
And then we injected the cancer cells to mimic a process through which cancer cells spread throughout our bodies. 
And we found something very exciting. 
We found that in our treated group, over 75 percent of the cancer cells we initially injected were dead or dying, in comparison to only around 25 percent. 
So just imagine: these fewer amount of cells were available to actually be able to spread to a different part of the body. 
And this is only after two hours of treatment. 
Our results were amazing, and we had some pretty interesting press. 
My favorite title was actually, "Sticky balls may stop the spread of cancer." 
(Laughter) I can't tell you just how smug my male colleagues were, knowing that their sticky balls might one day cure cancer. 
(Laughter) But I can tell you they made some pretty, pretty, exciting, pretty ballsy t-shirts. 
This was also my first experience talking to patients where they asked how soon our therapy would be available. 
And I keep these stories with me to remind me of the importance of the science, the scientists and the patients. 
Now, our fast-acting results were pretty interesting, but we still had one lingering question: Can our sticky balls, our particles actually attached to the immune cells, actually stop the spread of cancer? 
So we went to our animal model, and we found three important parts. 
Our primary tumors were smaller in our treated animals, there were fewer cells in circulation, and there was little to no tumor burden in the distant organs. 
Now, this wasn't just a victory for us and our sticky balls. 
This was also a victory to me in drug delivery, and it represents a paradigm shift, a revolution -- to go from just using drugs, just injecting them and hoping they go to the right places in the body, to using immune cells as special delivery drivers in your body. 
For this example, we used two molecules, e-selectin and trail, but really, the possibility of drugs you can use are endless. 
And I talked about cancer, but where disease goes, so do immune cells. 
So this could be used for any disease. 
Imagine using immune cells to deliver crucial wound-healing agents after a spinal cord injury, or using immune cells to deliver drugs past the blood-brain barrier to treat Parkinson's or Alzheimer's disease. 
These are the ideas that excite me about science the most. 
And from where I stand, I see so much promise and opportunity. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

To avoid dangerous climate change, we're going to need to cut emissions rapidly. 
That should be a pretty uncontentious statement, certainly with this audience. 
But here's something that's slightly more contentious: it's not going to be enough. 
We will munch our way through our remaining carbon budget for one and a half degrees in a few short years, and the two degree budget in about two decades. 
We need to not only cut emissions extremely rapidly, we also need to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. 
Thank you. 
(Laughter) I work assessing a whole range of these proposed techniques to see if they can work. 
We could use plants to take CO2 out, and then store it in trees, in the soil, deep underground or in the oceans. 
We could build large machines, so-called artificial trees, that will scrub CO2 from the air. 
For these ideas to be feasible, we need to understand whether they can be applied at a vast scale in a way that is safe, economic and socially acceptable. 
All of these ideas come with tradeoffs. 
None of them are perfect, but many have potential. 
It's unlikely that any one of them will solve it on its own. 
There is no silver bullet, but potentially together, they may form the silver buckshot that we need to stop climate change in its tracks. 
I'm working independently on one particular idea which uses natural gas to generate electricity in a way that takes carbon dioxide out of the air. 
Huh? How does that work? 
So the Origen Power Process feeds natural gas into a fuel cell. 
About half the chemical energy is converted into electricity, and the remainder into heat, which is used to break down limestone into lime and carbon dioxide. 
Now at this point, you're probably thinking that I'm nuts. 
It's actually generating carbon dioxide. 
But the key point is, all of the carbon dioxide generated, both from the fuel cell and from the lime kiln, is pure, and that's really important, because it means you can either use that carbon dioxide or you can store it away deep underground at low cost. 
And then the lime that you produce can be used in industrial processes, and in being used, it scrubs CO2 out of the air. 
Overall, the process is carbon negative. 
It removes carbon dioxide from the air. 
If you normally generate electricity from natural gas, you emit about 400 grams of CO2 into the air for every kilowatt-hour. 
With this process, that figure is minus 600. 
At the moment, power generation is responsible for about a quarter of all carbon dioxide emissions. 
Hypothetically, if you replaced all power generation with this process, then you would not only eliminate all of the emissions from power generation but you would start removing emissions from other sectors as well, potentially cutting 60 percent of overall carbon emissions. 
You could even use the lime to add it directly to seawater to counteract ocean acidification, one of the other issues that is caused by CO2 in the atmosphere. 
In fact, you get more bang for your buck. 
You absorb about twice as much carbon dioxide when you add it to seawater as when you use it industrially. 
But this is where it gets really complicated. 
While counteracting ocean acidification is a good thing, we don't fully understand what the environmental consequences are, and so we need to assess whether this treatment is actually better than the disease that it is seeking to cure. 
We need to put in place step-by-step governance for experiments to assess this safely. 
And the scale: to avoid dangerous climate change, we are going to need to remove trillions -- and yes, that's trillions with a T -- trillions of tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in the decades ahead. 
It will cost a few percent of GDP -- think defense-sized expenditure, lots of industrial activity and inevitably harmful side effects. 
But if the scale seems enormous, it is only because of the scale of the problem that we are seeking to solve. 
It's enormous as well. 
We can no longer avoid these thorny issues. 
We face risks whichever way we turn: a world changed by climate change or a world changed by climate change and our efforts to counter climate change. 
Would that it were not so, but we can no longer afford to close our eyes, block our ears, and say la-la-la. 
We need to grow up and face the consequences of our actions. 
(Applause) Does talk of curing climate change undermine the will to cut emissions? 
This is a real concern, so we need to emphasize the paramount importance of reducing emissions and how speculative these ideas are. 
But having done so, we still need to examine them. 
Can we cure climate change? 
I don't know, but we certainly can't if we don't try. 
We need ambition without arrogance. 
We need the ambition to restore the atmosphere, to draw down carbon dioxide back to a level that is compatible with a stable climate and healthy oceans. 
This will be an enormous undertaking. 
You could describe it as a cathedral project. 
Those involved at the outset may draft the plans and dig the foundations, but they will not raise the spire to its full height. 
That task, that privilege, belongs to our descendants. 
None of us will see that day, but we must start in the hope that future generations will be able to finish the job. 
So, do you want to change the world? 
I don't. 
I do not seek the change the world, but rather keep it as it's meant to be. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Thanks. I just want to ask you a couple of other questions. 
Tell us a bit more about this idea of putting lime in the ocean. 
I mean, on the face of it, it's pretty compelling -- anti-ocean acidification -- and it absorbs more CO2. 
You talked about, we need to do an experiment on this. 
What would a responsible experiment look like? 
Tim Kruger: So I think you need to do a series of experiments, but you need to do them just very small stage-by-stage. 
In the same way, when you're trialing a new drug, you wouldn't just go into human trials straight off. 
You would do a small experiment. 
And so the first things to do are experiments entirely on land, in special containers, away from the environment. 
And then once you are confident that that can be done safely, you move to the next stage. 
If you're not confident, you don't. 
But step by step. 
CA: And who would fund such experiments? 
Because they kind of impact the whole planet at some level. 
Is that why nothing is happening on this? 
TK: So I think you can do small-scale experiments in national waters, and then it's probably the requirement of national funders to do that. 
But ultimately, if you wanted to counter ocean acidification in this way on a global scale, you would need to do it in international waters, and then you would need to have an international community working on it. 
CA: Even in national waters, you know, the ocean's all connected. 
That lime is going to get out there. 
And people feel outraged about doing experiments on the planet, as we've heard. 
How do you counter that? 
TK: I think you touch on something which is really important. 
It's about a social license to operate. 
And I think it may be that it is impossible to do, but we need to have the courage to try, to move this forward, to see what we can do, and to engage openly. 
And we need to engage with people in a transparent way. 
We need to ask them beforehand. 
And I think if we ask them, we have to be open to the possibility that the answer will come back, "No, don't do it." 
CA: Thanks so much. That was really fascinating. 
TK: Thank you. (Applause) 

About two years ago, I got a phone call that changed my life. 
"Hey, this is your cousin Hassen." 
I froze. 
You see, I have well over 30 first cousins, but I didn't know anybody named Hassen. 
It turned out that Hassen was actually my mom's cousin and had just arrived in Montreal as a refugee. 
And over the next few months, I would have three more relatives coming to Canada to apply for asylum with little more than the clothes on their back. 
And in the two years since that phone call, my life has completely changed. 
I left academia and now lead a diverse team of technologists, researchers and refugees that is developing customized self-help resources for newcomers. 
We want to help them overcome language, cultural and other barriers that make them feel like they've lost control over their own lives. 
And we feel that AI can help restore the rights and the dignity that many people lose when seeking help. 
My family's refugee experience is not unique. 
According to the UNHCR, every minute, 20 people are newly displaced by climate change, economic crisis and social and political instability. 
And it was while volunteering at a local YMCA shelter that my cousin Hassen and other relatives were sent to that we saw and learned to appreciate how much effort and coordination resettlement requires. 
When you first arrive, you need to find a lawyer and fill out legal documents within two weeks. 
You also need to schedule a medical exam with a pre-authorized physician, just so that you can apply for a work permit. 
And you need to start looking for a place to live before you receive any sort of social assistance. 
With thousands fleeing the United States to seek asylum in Canada over the past few years, we quickly saw what it looks like when there are more people who need help than there are resources to help them. 
Social services doesn't scale quickly, and even if communities do their best to help more people with limited resources, newcomers end up spending more time waiting in limbo, not knowing where to turn. 
In Montreal, for example, despite millions of dollars being spent to support resettlement efforts, nearly 50 percent of newcomers still don't know that there are free resources that exist to help them with everything from filling out paperwork to finding a job. 
The challenge is not that this information doesn't exist. 
On the contrary, those in need are often bombarded with so much information that it's difficult to make sense of it all. 
"Don't give me more information, just tell me what to do," was a sentiment we heard over and over again. 
And it reflects how insanely difficult it could be to get your bearings when you first arrive in a new country. 
Hell, I struggled with the same issues when I got to Montreal, and I have a PhD. 
(Laughter) As another member of our team, himself also a refugee, put it: "In Canada, a SIM card is more important than food, because we will not die from hunger." 
But getting access to the right resources and information can be the difference between life and death. 
Let me say that again: getting access to the right resources and information can be the difference between life and death. 
In order to address these issues, we built Atar, the first-ever AI-powered virtual advocate that guides you step-by-step through your first week of arriving in a new city. 
Just tell Atar what you need help with. 
Atar will then ask you some basic questions to understand your unique circumstances and determine your eligibility for resources. 
For example: Do you have a place to stay tonight? 
If not, would you prefer an all-women's shelter? 
Do you have children? 
Atar will then generate a custom, step-by-step to-do list that tells you everything that you need to know, from where to go, how to get there, what to bring with you and what to expect. 
You can ask a question at any time, and if Atar doesn't have an answer, you'll be connected with a real person who does. 
But what's most exciting is that we help humanitarian and service organizations collect the data and the analytics that's necessary to understand the changing needs of newcomers in real time. 
That's a game changer. 
We've already partnered with the UNHCR to provide this technology in Canada, and in our work have conducted campaigns in Arabic, English, French, Creole and Spanish. 
When we talk about the issue of refugees, we often focus on the official statistic of 65.8 million forcibly displaced worldwide. 
But the reality is much greater than that. 
By 2050, there will be an additional 140 million people who are at risk of being displaced due to environmental degradation. 
And today -- that is today -- there are nearly one billion people who already live in illegal settlements and slums. 
Resettlement and integration is one of the greatest challenges of our time. 
and our hope is that Atar can provide every single newcomer an advocate. 
Our hope is that Atar can amplify existing efforts and alleviate pressure on a social safety net that's already stretched beyond imagination. 
But what's most important to us is that our work helps restore the rights and the dignity that refugees lose throughout resettlement and integration by giving them the resources that they need in order to help themselves. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hi, I'm Jack, and I'm transgender. 
Let me take a guess at some of thoughts that might be running through your head right now. 
"Transgender? 
Wait, does that mean that they're actually a man or actually a woman?" 
"I wonder if he's had the surgery yet ... 
Oh, now I'm looking at his crotch. 
Look to the right, that's a safe place to look." 
"Yes, I knew it! No real man has hips like those." 
"My friend's daughter is transgender -- I wonder if they know each other." 
"Oh my gosh, he is so brave. 
I would totally support his right to use the men's bathroom. 
Wait, but how does he use the bathroom? 
How does he have sex?" 
OK, OK, let's stop those hypothetical questions before we get too close for my comfort. 
I mean, don't get me wrong, I did come here today to share my personal experiences being transgender, but I did not wake up this morning wanting to tell an entire audience about my sex life. 
Of course, that's the problem with being trans, right? 
People are pretty much always wondering how we have sex and what kind of equipment we're working with below the belt. 
Being trans is awkward. 
And not just because the gender I was assigned at birth mismatches the one I really am. 
Being trans is awkward because everyone else gets awkward when they're around me. 
People who support me and all other trans people wholeheartedly are often so scared to say to wrong thing, so embarrassed to not know what they think they should, that they never ask. 
Part of what was so nerve-racking about coming out as transgender was knowing that people wouldn't know what I meant. 
And when someone comes out as gay, people know what that means, but when you come out as trans, you have to face the misconceptions that will color other people's impressions of you even after you've educated them ... 
And you will have to educate them. 
When I came out, I wrote at 10-page encyclopedic document with a zip-file attachment of music and videos that I sent to every single person I came out to. 
(Laughter) And I kept it in my email signature for months afterwards, because you also don't ever stop coming out. 
I came out to the accountant helping me with my taxes and the TSA agents who didn't know which one of them should pat me down, the man or the woman. 
I mean, I just came out to everyone watching this. 
When I came out to my dad, to my great relief, he was totally cool with me being trans, but as soon as I started talking about physically transitioning, he freaked. 
And I quickly realized it was because he, like so many other people, think that physical transition means just one thing: the surgery. 
Now, listen, if there were one magical surgery that could turn me into a tall, muscular, societally perfect image of a man overnight, I'd sign up in a heartbeat. 
Unfortunately, it isn't that simple. 
There are dozens of different gender-affirming surgeries from chest surgeries to bottom surgeries to facial feminization and man-sculpting. 
Many trans people will only ever undergo one procedure in their lifetime, if that. 
Maybe because they don't personally feel the need but also because they're expensive, and health insurance is only beginning to cover them. 
Instead, the first step for a trans person seeking physical transition is usually hormone replacement therapy. 
Hormones are why I have a deeper voice and some sparse whiskers on my neck and a giant pimple on my chin. 
Basically, they put you through a second puberty ... 
it's a blast. 
(Laughter) Now, because our transitions are slower and steadier than historic misconceptions can lead people to believe, there can be some confusion about when to call someone by their new name and pronouns. 
There's no distinct point in physical transition at which a trans person becomes their true gender. 
As soon as they tell you their new name and pronouns, that's when you start using them. 
It can be difficult to make the change. 
You might slip up here and there; I've slipped up myself with other trans people. 
But I always think to myself, if we can change from calling Puff Daddy to P. Diddy, and if we apologize profusely when we've used the wrong gender pronoun for someone's pet cat -- I mean, I think we can make the same effort for the real humans in our lives. 
Now, there is no topic that makes other people more awkward about trans people than public bathrooms. 
Ah, the bathrooms -- the latest political flash point for LGBT opponents. 
Here's a fun fact about bathrooms: more US congressmen have been convicted of assaulting someone in a public bathroom than trans people have been. 
(Laughter) The truth is we trans people are so much more scared of you than you are of us. 
It's a huge point of discussion in trans communities about which bathroom to start using and when, so we don't attract attention that could lead to violence against us. 
I personally started using the men's room when I started getting confused and frightened looks in the women's room, even though I was petrified to start going into the men's room. 
And often we opt to just not go to the bathroom at all. 
A 2015 national survey of trans people found that eight percent of us had had a urinary tract infection in the past year as a result of avoiding restrooms. 
These bathroom bills aren't protecting anyone. 
All they're doing is ensuring that when trans people are assaulted in bathrooms, the law will no longer be on our side when we report it. 
Being trans means a daily onslaught of these misconceptions. 
And I have it pretty easy. 
I am a white, able-bodied guy sitting nearly at the peak of privilege mountain. 
For non-binary people, for trans women, for trans people of color, it is so much harder. 
So I've given you a starter pack of trans knowledge that I hope will lead to more learning on your own. 
Talk to trans people. 
Listen to us. 
Amplify our voices. 
Take the heat off of us and educate those around you so we don't have to every time. 
Maybe someday, when I say, "Hi, I'm Jack, and I'm transgender," the only response I'll get is, "Hi, nice to meet you." 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

"All I wanted was a much-deserved promotion, and he told me to 'Get up on the desk and spread 'em.'" "All the men in my office wrote down on a piece of paper the sexual favors that I could do for them. 
All I had asked for was an office with a window." 
"I asked for his advice about how I could get a bill out of committee; he asked me if I brought my kneepads." 
Those are just a few of the horrific stories that I heard from women over the last year, as I've been investigating workplace sexual harassment. 
And what I found out is that it's an epidemic across the world. 
It's a horrifying reality for millions of women, when all they want to do every day is go to work. 
Sexual harassment doesn't discriminate. 
You can wear a skirt, hospital scrubs, army fatigues. 
You can be young or old, married or single, black or white. 
You can be a Republican, a Democrat or an Independent. 
I heard from so many women: police officers, members of our military, financial assistants, actors, engineers, lawyers, bankers, accountants, teachers ... 
journalists. 
Sexual harassment, it turns out, is not about sex. 
It's about power, and about what somebody does to you to try and take away your power. 
And I'm here today to encourage you to know that you can take that power back. 
(Applause) On July 6, 2016, I jumped off a cliff all by myself. 
It was the scariest moment of my life; an excruciating choice to make. 
I fell into an abyss all alone, not knowing what would be below. 
But then, something miraculous started to happen. 
Thousands of women started reaching out to me to share their own stories of pain and agony and shame. 
They told me that I became their voice -- they were voiceless. 
And suddenly, I realized that even in the 21st century, every woman still has a story. 
Like Joyce, a flight attendant supervisor whose boss, in meetings every day, would tell her about the porn that he'd watched the night before while drawing penises on his notepad. 
She went to complain. 
She was called "crazy" and fired. 
Like Joanne, Wall Street banker. 
Her male colleagues would call her that vile c-word every day. 
She complained -- labeled a troublemaker, never to do another Wall Street deal again. 
Like Elizabeth, an army officer. 
Her male subordinates would wave one-dollar bills in her face, and say, "Dance for me!" 
And when she went to complain to a major, he said, "What? Only one dollar? 
You're worth at least five or ten!" 
After reading, replying to all and crying over all of these emails, I realized I had so much work to do. 
Here are the startling facts: one in three women -- that we know of -- have been sexually harassed in the workplace. 
Seventy-one percent of those incidences never get reported. 
Why? 
Because when women come forward, they're still called liars and troublemakers and demeaned and trashed and demoted and blacklisted and fired. 
Reporting sexual harassment can be, in many cases, career-ending. 
Of all the women that reached out to me, almost none are still today working in their chosen profession, and that is outrageous. 
I, too, was silent in the beginning. 
It happened to me at the end of my year as Miss America, when I was meeting with a very high-ranking TV executive in New York City. 
I thought he was helping me throughout the day, making a lot of phone calls. 
We went to dinner, and in the back seat of a car, he suddenly lunged on top of me and stuck his tongue down my throat. 
I didn't realize that to "get into the business" -- silly me -- he also intended to get into my pants. 
And just a week later, when I was in Los Angeles meeting with a high-ranking publicist, it happened again. 
Again, in a car. 
And he took my neck in his hand, and he shoved my head so hard into his crotch, I couldn't breathe. 
These are the events that suck the life out of all of your self-confidence. 
These are the events that, until recently, I didn't even call assault. 
And this is why we have so much work to do. 
After my year as Miss America, I continued to meet a lot of well-known people, including Donald Trump. 
When this picture was taken in 1988, nobody could have ever predicted where we'd be today. 
(Laughter) Me, fighting to end sexual harassment in the workplace; he, president of the United States in spite of it. 
And shortly thereafter, I got my first gig in television news in Richmond, Virginia. 
Check out that confident smile with the bright pink jacket. 
Not so much the hair. 
(Laughter) I was working so hard to prove that blondes have a lot of brains. 
But ironically, one of the first stories I covered was the Anita Hill hearings in Washington, DC. 
And shortly thereafter, I, too, was sexually harassed in the workplace. 
I was covering a story in rural Virginia, and when we got back into the car, my cameraman started saying to me, wondering how much I had enjoyed when he touched my breasts when he put the microphone on me. 
And it went downhill from there. 
I was bracing myself against the passenger door -- this was before cellphones. 
I was petrified. 
I actually envisioned myself rolling outside of that door as the car was going 50 miles per hour like I'd seen in the movies, and wondering how much it would hurt. 
When the story about Harvey Weinstein came to light -- one the most well-known movie moguls in all of Hollywood -- the allegations were horrific. 
But so many women came forward, and it made me realize what I had done meant something. 
(Applause) He had such a lame excuse. 
He said he was a product of the '60s and '70s, and that that was the culture then. 
Yeah, that was the culture then, and unfortunately, it still is. 
Why? 
Because of all the myths that are still associated with sexual harassment. 
"Women should just take another job and find another career." 
Yeah, right. 
Tell that to the single mom working two jobs, trying to make ends meet, who's also being sexually harassed. 
"Women -- they bring it on themselves." 
By the clothes that we wear and the makeup that we put on. 
Yeah, I guess those hoodies that Uber engineers wear in Silicon Valley are just so provocative. 
"Women make it up." 
Yeah, because it's so fun and rewarding to be demeaned and taken down. 
I would know. 
"Women bring these claims because they want to be famous and rich." 
Our own president said that. 
I bet Taylor Swift, one of the most well-known and richest singers in the world, didn't need more money or fame when she came forward with her groping case for one dollar. 
And I'm so glad she did. 
Breaking news: the untold story about women and sexual harassment in the workplace: women just want a safe, welcoming and harass-free environment. 
That's it. 
(Applause) So how do we go about getting our power back? 
I have three solutions. 
Number one: we need to turn bystanders and enablers into allies. 
Ninety-eight percent of United States corporations right now have sexual harassment training policies. 
Seventy percent have prevention programs. 
But still, overwhelmingly, bystanders and witnesses don't come forward. 
In 2016, the Harvard Business Review called it the "bystander effect." 
And yet -- remember 9/11. 
Millions of times we've heard, "If you see something, say something." 
Imagine how impactful that would be if we carried that through to bystanders in the workplace regarding sexual harassment -- to recognize and interrupt these incidences; to confront the perpetrators to their face; to help and protect the victims. 
This is my shout-out to men: we need you in this fight. 
And to women, too -- enablers to allies. 
Number two: change the laws. 
How many of you out there know whether or not you have a forced arbitration clause in your employment contract? 
Not a lot of hands. 
And if you don't know, you should, and here's why. 
TIME Magazine calls it, right there on the screen, "The teeny tiny little print in contracts that keeps sexual harassment claims unheard." 
Here's what it is. 
Forced arbitration takes away your Seventh Amendment right to an open jury process. 
It's secret. 
You don't get the same witnesses or depositions. 
In many cases, the company picks the arbitrator for you. 
There are no appeals, and only 20 percent of the time does the employee win. 
But again, it's secret, so nobody ever knows what happened to you. 
This is why I've been working so diligently on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC to change the laws. 
And here's what I tell the Senators: sexual harassment is apolitical. 
Before somebody harasses you, they don't ask you if you're a Republican or Democrat first. 
They just do it. 
And this is why we should all care. 
Number three: be fierce. 
It starts when we stand tall, and we build that self-confidence. 
And we stand up and we speak up, and we tell the world what happened to us. 
I know it's scary, but let's do it for our kids. 
Let's stop this for the next generations. 
I know that I did it for my children. 
They were paramount in my decision-making about whether or not I would come forward. 
My beautiful children, my 12-year-old son, Christian, my 14-year-old daughter, Kaia. 
And boy, did I underestimate them. 
The first day of school last year happened to be the day my resolution was announced, and I was so anxious about what they would face. 
My daughter came home from school and she said, "Mommy, so many people asked me what happened to you over the summer." 
Then she looked at me in the eyes and she said, "And mommy, I was so proud to say that you were my mom." 
And two weeks later, when she finally found the courage to stand up to two kids who had been making her life miserable, she came home to me and she said, "Mommy, I found the courage to do it because I saw you do it." 
(Applause) You see, giving the gift of courage is contagious. 
And I hope that my journey has inspired you, because right now, it's the tipping point. 
We are watching history happen. 
More and more women are coming forward and saying, "Enough is enough." 
(Applause) Here's my one last plea to companies. 
Let's hire back all those women whose careers were lost because of some random jerk. 
Because here's what I know about women: we will not longer be underestimated, intimidated or set back; we will not be silenced by the ways of the establishment or the relics of the past. 
No. 
We will stand up and speak up and have our voices heard. 
We will be the women we were meant to be. 
And above all, we will always be fierce. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Most people think that new technology or advanced technology can never start in Africa. 
Instead, they think that the best way to help the continent advance is by providing aid or services that the continent can't provide for itself. 
So while we see advanced technology like robotics and artificial intelligence growing exponentially in the developed world, those same people are worried that a technologically backward Africa is falling behind. 
That attitude couldn't be more wrong. 
I'm a robotics entrepreneur who's spent a lot of time here in Africa. 
And in 2014 we created Zipline, which is a company that uses electric autonomous aircraft to deliver medicine to hospitals and health centers on demand. 
Last year, we launched the world's first automated delivery system operating at national scale. 
And guess what? 
We did not do that in the US, we didn't do it in Japan, and we didn't do it in Europe. 
It was actually President Paul Kagame and the Rwandan Ministry of Health that made a big bet on the potential of this technology and signed a commercial contract to deliver a majority of the country's blood on demand. 
(Applause) Yeah, they deserve the applause. 
So why is blood important? 
Rwanda collects between 60- and 80,000 units of blood a year. 
So this is a product that when you need it, you really, really need it. 
But blood is also challenging, because it has a very short shelf life, there are lots of different storage requirements, and it's really hard to predict the demand for all of these different blood groups before a patient actually needs something. 
But the cool thing is that using this technology, Rwanda has been able to keep more blood centralized and then provide it when a patient needs something to any hospital or health center in an average of just 20 or 30 minutes. 
Do you guys want to see how it works? 
(Audience) Yes. 
All right. Nobody believes me, so ... better to show. 
This is our distribution center, which is about 20 kilometers outside of Kigali. 
This actually used to be a cornfield nine months ago, and with the Rwandan government, we leveled it and built this center in a couple weeks. 
So when a patient is having an emergency, a doctor or a nurse at that hospital can send us a WhatsApp, telling us what they need. 
And then our team will immediately spring into action. 
We pull the blood from our stock, which is delivered from the National Center for Blood Transfusion; we scan the blood into our system so the Ministry of Health knows where the blood is going; and then we'll basically pack it into a Zip, which is what we call these little autonomous airplanes that run on batteries. 
And then once that Zip is ready to go, we accelerate it from zero to 100 kilometers an hour in about half of a second. 
(Audience) Whoa! 
And from the moment it leaves the end of the launcher, it's completely autonomous. 
(Video: Air traffic controller directs traffic) This is our air traffic controller calling it in to Kigali International Airport. 
And when the Zip arrives at the hospital, it descends to about 30 feet and drops the package. 
We use a really simple paper parachute -- simple things are best -- that allows the package to come to the ground gently and reliably in the same place every time. 
So it's just like ride sharing; the doctors get a text message one minute before we arrive, saying, "Walk outside and receive your delivery." 
(Laughter) And then -- (Applause) and then the doctors have what they need to save a patient's life. 
This is actually watching a delivery happen from our distribution center; this vehicle is about 50 kilometers away. 
We're able to watch the vehicle as it makes a delivery at a hospital in real time. 
You may have noticed there are pings that are coming off of that vehicle on the screen. 
Those pings are actually data packets that we're getting over the cell phone networks. 
So these planes have SIM cards just like your cell phone does, and they're communicating over the cell network to tell us where they are and how they're doing at all times. 
Believe it or not, we actually buy family plans -- (Laughter) for this fleet of vehicles, because that's how we get the best rates. 
(Laughter) It's actually not a joke. 
(Laughter) So today, we're delivering about 20 percent of the national blood supply of Rwanda outside of Kigali. 
We serve about 12 hospitals, and we're adding hospitals to that network at an accelerating rate. 
All of those hospitals only receive blood in this way, and most of those hospitals actually place multiple orders every day. 
So the reason -- in all of health care logistics, you're always trading off waste against access. 
So if you want to solve waste, you keep everything centralized. 
As a result, when patients are having emergencies, sometimes they don't have the medical product they need. 
If you want to solve access, you stock a lot of medicine at the last mile, at hospitals or health centers, and then patients have the medicine they need. 
But you end up throwing a lot of medicine out, which is very expensive. 
What's so amazing is that the Rwandan government has been able to break this cycle permanently. 
Because doctors can get what they need instantly, they actually stock less blood at the hospitals. 
So although use of blood products has increased substantially at all the hospitals we serve, in the last nine months, zero units of blood have expired at any of these hospitals. 
(Applause) That's an amazing result. 
That's actually not been achieved by any other health care system on the planet, and it happened here. 
But obviously, when we're talking about delivering medical products instantly, the most important thing is patients. 
Let me give you an example. 
A couple months ago, a 24-year-old mother came into one of the hospitals that we serve, and she gave birth via C-section. 
But that led to complications, and she started to bleed. 
Luckily, the doctors had some blood of her blood type on hand that had been delivered via Zipline's routine service, and so they transfused her with a couple units of blood. 
But she bled out of those units in about 10 minutes. 
In this case, that mother's life is in grave danger -- in any hospital in the world. 
But luckily, the doctors who were taking care of her immediately called our distribution center, they placed an emergency order, and our team actually did emergency delivery after emergency delivery after emergency delivery. 
They ended up sending seven units of red blood cells, four units of plasma and two units of platelets. 
That's more blood than you have in your entire body. 
All of it was transfused into her, the doctors were able to stabilize her, and she is healthy today. 
(Applause) Since we launched, we've done about 400 emergency deliveries like that, and there's a story like that one behind most of those emergencies. 
Here are just a couple of the moms who have received transfusions in this way in the last couple months. 
We're always reminded: when we can help a doctor save a mom's life, it's not just her life that you're saving. 
That's also a baby boy or a baby girl who has a mother while they're growing up. 
(Applause) But I want to be clear: postpartum hemorrhaging -- it's not a Rwanda problem, it's not a developing-world problem -- this is a global problem. 
Maternal health is a challenge everywhere. 
The main difference is that Rwanda was the first country to use radical technology to do something about it. 
And that's the reason this attitude of Africa being disrupted or advanced technology not working here or needing aid is so totally wrong. 
Africa can be the disrupter. 
These small, agile, developing economies can out-innovate large, rich ones. 
And they can totally leapfrog over the absence of legacy infrastructure to go straight to newer and better systems. 
In 2000, if you had said that high-quality cellular networks were about to roll out across all of Africa, people would have told you that you were crazy. 
And yet, no one anticipated how fast those networks were going to connect and empower people. 
Today, 44 percent of the GDP of Kenya flows through M-Pesa, their mobile payment platform. 
And not only that, but our autonomous fleet of vehicles relies on that cellular network. 
Over the next few years as we start serving private health care facilities, we'll also use that mobile payment platform to collect fees for deliveries. 
So innovation leads to more innovation leads to more innovation. 
And meanwhile, most people who live in developed economies think that drone delivery is technologically impossible, let alone happening at national scale in East Africa. 
And I do mean East Africa, not just Rwanda. 
On Thursday, just a couple days ago, the Tanzanian Ministry of Health announced that they are going to use this same technology to provide instant delivery of a wide range of medical products to 10 million of the hardest to reach people in the country. 
(Applause) It's actually going to be the largest autonomous system anywhere in the world. 
To give you a sense of what this looks like, this is one of the first distribution centers. 
You can see a 75-kilometer service radius around the distribution center, and that allows us to serve hundreds of health facilities and hospitals, all of which are rural, from that single distribution center. 
But to serve over 20 percent of the population of Tanzania, we're going to need multiple distribution centers. 
We'll actually need four. 
And from these distribution centers, we expect to be doing several hundred lifesaving deliveries every day, and this system will ultimately serve over 1,000 health facilities and hospitals in the country. 
So yeah, East Africa is moving really fast. 
One thing that people, I think, often miss is that these kinds of leaps generate compounding gains. 
For example, Rwanda, by investing in this infrastructure for health care, now has an aerial logistics network that they can use to catalyze other parts of their economy, like agriculture or e-commerce. 
Even more importantly, 100 percent of the teams we hire at these distribution centers are local. 
So here's our Rwandan team, which is a group of extraordinary engineers and operators. 
They run the world's only automated delivery system operating at national scale. 
They have been able to master something that the largest technology companies in the world have not yet been able to figure out. 
So they are total heroes. 
(Applause) They're total heroes. 
Our team's mission is to deliver basic access to medicine to all seven billion people on the planet, no matter how hard it is to reach them. 
We often tell people about that mission, and they say, "That's so generous of you, it's so philanthropic." 
No! 
Philanthropy has nothing to do with it. 
Because of the commercial contracts that we sign with ministries of health, these networks are 100 percent sustainable and scalable. 
And the reason we feel so strongly about correcting that misperception is that entrepreneurship is the only force in human history that has lifted millions of people out of poverty. 
(Applause) No amount of foreign aid is going to sustainably employ 250 million African youth. 
And the jobs that these kids may have gotten 10 years ago are largely being automated or are being changed dramatically by technology. 
So they are looking for new skill sets, new competitive advantages. 
They're looking for start-ups. 
So why aren't there more start-ups that are tackling these global problems that are faced by billions of people in developing economies? 
The reason is that investors and entrepreneurs are totally blind to the opportunity. 
We think these problems are the domain of NGOs or governments, not private companies. 
That's what we have to change. 
You may have noticed I left something out of the video that I showed you. 
I didn't show you how the planes land when they get back to the distribution center. 
So, it might be obvious to you: none of our planes have landing gear. 
We also don't have runways where we operate. 
So we have to be able to decelerate the plane from about 100 kilometers an hour to zero in half of a second. 
And the way we do that is we actually use a wire that tracks that plane as it comes in, with centimeter-level accuracy. 
We snag the plane out of the sky, and then we gently plop it onto an actively inflated cushion. 
This is basically a combination of an aircraft carrier and a bouncy castle. 
(Laughter) So let me show you. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And it might be obvious to you why I wanted to end with this video. 
I wanted to show you the kids and the teenagers who line up on the fence every day. 
They cheer every launch and every landing. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Sometimes I actually show up at the distribution center early because I'm jet-lagged. 
I'll show up an hour before we begin operation. 
And there will be kids on the fence getting good seats. 
(Laughter) And you go up and you ask them, "What do you think about the planes?" 
And they'll say, "Oh, it's a sky ambulance." 
So they get it. 
I mean, they get it more than most adults. 
So I was asking earlier: Who is going to be creating the disruptive technology companies of Africa over the next decade? 
Ultimately, it's going to be up to these kids. 
They are the engineers of Rwanda and Africa. 
They are the engineers of our shared future. 
But the only way they can build that future is if we realize that world-changing companies can scale in Africa, and that disruptive technology can start here first. 
Thanks. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do you remember where you were on June 12th, 2016? 
A few of you might, but I'm betting the vast majority probably don't. 
On June 12th, 2016, a lone gunman walked into Pulse Nightclub, killing 46 people in the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman in U.S. history. 
Now let's go back about a decade. 
How about August 29th, 2005. 
Do you remember where you were? 
We've got a few heads nodding out there. 
That was Hurricane Katrina. 
Over 1,800 dead in the costliest natural disaster ever to hit the North American continent. 
Now let's go back another few years and go for 100 percent recognition. 
Do you remember where you were on September 11th, 2001? 
Everybody's head nodding now. 
The September 11th attacks left over 3,000 dead in the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history. 
Do you remember how you felt? 
Were you confused? 
Afraid? 
Did you feel sick? 
Were you vulnerable? 
Every time this happens, we're becoming more and more desensitized. 
We frequently see news coverage of mass shootings, natural disasters that result in enormous loss of life, terrorist attacks, and then we change the channel to watch something more friendly. 
This is the society that we live in today, but the impact of these traumatic events are no less serious on those who are directly affected, and now the impact of emotional pain on our society is more problematic than ever. 
Do you remember where you were on April 20th, 1999? 
Two students walked into Columbine High School armed with shotguns, semi-automatic rifles, and a bevy of homemade explosives, killing 12 students and a teacher, in what was, at the time, the worst high school shooting in U.S. history. 
I remember where I was. 
I had just walked into the library with my best friend in order to meet others preparing to go to lunch. 
Moments later, a teacher ran through the same doors we'd just entered yelling for everyone to get under the tables; that somebody had a gun. 
I remember how I felt. 
I was confused. 
I was afraid. 
I felt sick. 
And I was vulnerable. 
And just minutes later, I was playing dead underneath a table next to a pool of blood. 
I had just been shot, and I had witnessed my best friend murdered right in front of me as we were huddled together waiting for help to come. 
I was broken. 
I was in shock, and I was in pain. 
But my understanding of pain that day was nothing like my understanding of pain today. 
What's the first thing you think of when you think of pain? 
Is it a broken arm? Headache? Sprained ankle? 
Maybe a gunshot wound? 
Those are the things that I used to associate with pain, and they're pretty in line with the medical definition of pain: A variably unpleasant sensation associated with actual or potential tissue damage and mediated by specific nerve fibers to the brain where its conscious appreciation may be modified by various factors. 
Do you notice anything missing from that definition? 
Do you see any mention of the emotional components of pain? 
Me neither. 
In 1996, the American Pain Society introduced the phrase, "Pain is the fifth vital sign," meaning that when you walked into an emergency room, the initial assessment of your condition was based on five data points: pulse rate, temperature, respiration rate, blood pressure, and pain. 
This was brought about by a cultural movement that was adamant that we were under-treating pain. 
And patient satisfaction surveys were put in place in order to track the outcome and effectiveness of this new implementation. 
And what better way to promote these new policies than to tie physician and hospital compensation to patient satisfaction? 
A recent survey by the industry group Physicians Practice reports that three out of ten doctors are paid bonuses based upon patient satisfaction surveys, and hospitals with better scores receive bigger payments from insurers. 
Naturally, administrators and physicians began to support this new movement with the goal being to get everyone's pain to zero on the scale. 
That was the mark. 
The ethical dilemma immediately became, "Do I issue this person narcotics in order to keep them happy, or deny them, and potentially hurt my compensation, the revenue of the hospital, or at worst, open myself up to a grievance for under-treating pain that could potentially result in the loss of my job?" 
I have experience with pain. 
Less than an hour after scrambling out the back door of the Columbine High School library, I was medicated on a variety of substances that were intended to sedate and to relieve pain. 
I was 17 years old and I'd never drank a beer or smoked weed, much less anything harder. 
I had no idea of what these medications were even supposed to do. 
All I knew at age 17 was that a lot of highly educated people had prescribed me medications that were intended to make me feel better and they were working, only not in the fashion that they were intended. 
Now if you only remember one thing from my talk today, let it be this: Opioids are profoundly more effective at relieving the symptoms of emotional pain than they are at relieving the symptoms of physical pain. 
I often think back to my pain that day and if I were to rate it on the pain scale, my physical pain would've been a three or a four, and that was likely the response I offered when I was asked. 
But my emotional pain was an absolute ten. 
I was in agony beyond comprehension. 
But that was never asked; it was never talked about. 
Acute physical pain ends relatively quick; complex emotional pain does not. 
My physical pain had subsided in just a matter of days but my emotional pain was just as debilitating as it was lying in the hospital bed that day, so I continued taking the medication that was prescribed for my pain. 
I was addicted before I even knew what was happening. 
A recent survey by the American Society of Addiction Medicine reports that 86 percent of heroin users began by taking prescription opioids. 
And in 2012 alone, over 259 million opioid prescriptions were filled in the U.S. 
That is more than enough to give every American adult their own bottle of pills. 
I very quickly began drug-seeking in order to soothe my emotional pain and it was only a matter of months before the prescriptions had turned to alcohol, marijuana, and elicit narcotics. 
And as addiction always does, over the course of the next decade, my tolerance continued to build, my life continued to be unmanageable, and my emotional pain stayed unresolved. 
It was like I had pressed a pause button on my emotional growth. 
I was managing my pain in the only way I knew how, and I wasn't alone. 
I believe that emotional pain is what's driving the addiction epidemic. 
Think of someone you know who struggles with addiction. 
I'm betting you can point to an element of unaddressed or unresolved emotional pain in that person. 
Now think of a time you were in intense emotional pain and how desperate you were to stop it. 
What if you had been offered an immediate route to feeling better. 
Imagine for a moment breaking your leg in an avalanche. 
Now that injury alone can be a fairly traumatic experience, but it's manageable. 
With short term pain management, most would make a full recovery. 
But now imagine sustaining that exact same injury, only this time your close friend was skiing next to you, and they didn't make it out of the avalanche alive. 
It seems so crystal clear to me that there would be two very different pain management strategies for what would appear to be an identical physiological injury, only there's not. 
Emotional pain is toxic, it's pervasive, and society has programmed us to avoid it. 
We medicate with alcohol and drugs, sex and pornography, even television and technology, and oftentimes, we're doing this without even knowing it. 
Our society is literally being defined by this pain. 
And now, more and more people are dying every month because they're looking for solace in the only way they know how. 
It's the way they were programmed. 
Everyone has pain; it's unavoidable. 
And I have a simple summary for how we got here. 
We built a society that is filled with emotional pain and trauma. 
We combined that with a healthcare system that's intended to primarily treat physiological symptoms, and then we put Big Pharma in the driver's seat, aimed directly at profits with regulations that are easy to manipulate. 
And now we're in the midst of what the former Surgeon General called the worst public health crisis the nation has ever seen - two years ago. 
It has since worsened, and what was then the addiction epidemic is now commonly referred to as the addiction pandemic. 
And here's a glimpse of where we're at today. 
The New York Times reported last month that overdose deaths rose by 19 percent in 2016, and preliminary data for 2017 shows that this trend is only worsening. 
We've now far surpassed the worst years ever recorded for deaths caused by guns, AIDS, and automobile accidents. 
This data is appalling to me. 
There are people in our society today who will still write this off under the guise of, "They're just a bunch of junkies." 
Well, I'm here to tell you ... 
they're not. 
They're fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, they're children, sometimes not even in their teens. 
They're people just like you and me, trying to cope in the only way they know how, and they're dying by the thousands every single month at an ever-increasing rate. 
Addiction is the only disease where we commonly wait until it's at the highest levels of acuity before we try to do something about it. 
And by then, it's often too late. 
We have to start sooner. 
We have to practice early interventions. 
We have to educate youth with real world methods. 
We have to stop thinking that people can be rehabilitated in thirty days, and then we have to improve accessibility to long-term treatment. 
We have to eliminate the stigma associated with addiction and most importantly, we have to reform a broken healthcare system that is slowly coming to terms with the fact that they are responsible for this pandemic. 
(Applause) (Cheers) It took me over a decade of active addiction and many more in recovery before I finally learned the difference between feeling better and actually being better. 
Because I had to learn to lean into the pain. 
I had to quit looking for the fast road to relief. 
I had to do the emotional work that needed to be done no matter how much it hurt. 
And after multiple attempts at short-term treatment, I finally found a willingness to do whatever it took, and I stayed in a continuum of care for 14 consecutive months in order to figure it out. 
I had to go through the stages of grief that I should've been going through at age 17, at age 29. 
But I refused to keep running, and it worked. 
(Applause) Fortunately for us, there is such a thing as post-traumatic growth, and you're witnessing that on the stage before you today. 
Post-traumatic growth is defined as the positive psychological change that can occur in a person after they've experienced a traumatic life event. 
It implies that by finding a way to endure through significant suffering, you can actually have meaningful development of personal character and elevate yourself to a higher level of functioning. 
But achieving post-traumatic growth requires that you lean into the pain. 
You can't run from it. 
You can't medicate it. 
So now I have a challenge for you. 
Take an audit of your current level of emotional pain. 
Do you have grief or heartache that you aren't dealing with? 
Has something traumatic happened to you that you haven't healed from? 
If so, take a step towards addressing this pain. 
Call a friend, talk to a therapist, just speak your truth to a stranger. 
Take one small step to shed light on this darkness because I've seen what darkness can do. 
I've seen it in hospital rooms when just one more didn't end up the way it was intended. 
I've seen it in jails with people who were born addicted and never had a chance to learn anything else. 
I've seen it at funerals for children who died before they ever had a chance to truly live. 
And I've seen it from underneath a table in the library of my high school. 
I want to leave you all with something that I wish I had known at age 17. 
Whoever you are, whatever you're going through, in whatever way you might be going through it, just know this: in order to heal it, you have to feel it. 
We're not going to solve the addiction pandemic overnight but we will make progress when people start to understand the difference between physical and emotional pain, and then choose to do something about it. 
In recovery, we often say, you keep what you have by giving it away. 
Find the courage to lean into the pain, and you can be a force in helping others. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

When I heard those bars slam hard, I knew it was for real. 
I feel confused. 
I feel betrayed. 
I feel overwhelmed. 
I feel silenced. 
What just happened? 
How could they send me here? 
I don't belong here. 
How could they make such a huge mistake without any repercussions whatsoever to their actions? 
I see large groups of women in tattered uniforms surrounded by huge walls and gates, enclosed by iron barbed wires, and I get hit by an awful stench, and I ask myself, how did I move from working in the respected financial banking sector, having worked so hard in school, to now being locked up in the largest correctional facility for women in Kenya? 
My first night at Langata Women Maximum Security Prison was the toughest. 
In January of 2009, I was informed that I had handled a fraudulent transaction unknowingly at the bank where I worked. 
I was shocked, scared and terrified. 
I would lose a career that I loved passionately. 
But that was not the worst. 
It got even worse than I could have ever imagined. 
I got arrested, maliciously charged and prosecuted. 
The absurdity of it all was the arresting officer asking me to pay him 10,000 US dollars and the case would disappear. 
I refused. 
Two and a half years on, in and out of courts, fighting to prove my innocence. 
It was all over the media, in the newspapers, TV, radio. 
They came to me again. 
This time around, said to me, "If you give us 50,000 US dollars, the judgement will be in your favor," irrespective of the fact that there was no evidence whatsoever that I had any wrongdoing on the charges that I was up against. 
I remember the events of my conviction six years ago as if it were yesterday. 
The cold, hard face of the judge as she pronounced my sentence on a cold Thursday morning for a crime that I hadn't committed. 
I remember holding my three-month-old beautiful daughter whom I had just named Oma, which in my dialect means "truth and justice," as that was what I had longed so much for all this time. 
I dressed her in her favorite purple dress, and here she was, about to accompany me to serve this one-year sentence behind bars. 
The guards did not seem sensitive to the trauma that this experience was causing me. 
My dignity and humanity disappeared with the admission process. 
It involved me being searched for contrabands, changed from my ordinary clothes to the prison uniform, forced to squat on the ground, a posture that I soon came to learn would form the routine of the thousands of searches, number counts, that lay ahead of me. 
The women told me, "You'll adjust to this place. 
You'll fit right in." 
I was no longer referred to as Teresa Njoroge. 
The number 415/11 was my new identity, and I soon learned that was the case with the other women who we were sharing this space with. 
And adjust I did to life on the inside: the prison food, the prison language, the prison life. 
Prison is certainly no fairytale world. 
What I didn't see come my way was the women and children whom we served time and shared space with, women who had been imprisoned for crimes of the system, the corruption that requires a fall guy, a scapegoat, so that the person who is responsible could go free, a broken system that routinely vilifies the vulnerable, the poorest amongst us, people who cannot afford to pay bail or bribes. 
And so we moved on. 
As I listened to story after story of these close to 700 women during that one year in prison, I soon realized that crime was not what had brought these women to prison, most of them, far from it. 
It had started with the education system, whose supply and quality is not equal for all; lack of economic opportunities that pushes these women to petty survival crimes; the health system, social justice system, the criminal justice system. 
If any of these women, who were mostly from poor backgrounds, fall through the cracks in the already broken system, the bottom of that chasm is a prison, period. 
By the time I completed my one-year sentence at Langata Women Maximum Prison, I had a burning conviction to be part of the transformation to resolve the injustices that I had witnessed of women and girls who were caught up in a revolving door of a life in and out of prison due to poverty. 
After my release, I set up Clean Start. 
Clean Start is a social enterprise that seeks to give these women and girls a second chance. 
What we do is we build bridges for them. 
We go into the prisons, train them, give them skills, tools and support to enable them to be able to change their mindsets, their behaviors and their attitudes. 
We also build bridges into the prisons from the corporate sector -- individuals, organizations that will partner with Clean Start to enable us to provide employment, places to call home, jobs, vocational training, for these women, girls, boys and men, upon transition back into society. 
I never thought that one day I would be giving stories of the injustices that are so common within the criminal justice system, but here I am. 
Every time I go back to prison, I feel a little at home, but it is the daunting work to achieve the vision that keeps me awake at night, connecting the miles to Louisiana, which is deemed as the incarceration capital of the world, carrying with me stories of hundreds of women whom I have met within the prisons, some of whom are now embracing their second chances, and others who are still on that bridge of life's journey. 
I embody a line from the great Maya Angelou. 
"I come as one, but I stand as 10,000." 
(Applause) For my story is singular, but imagine with me the millions of people in prisons today, yearning for freedom. 
Three years post my conviction and two years post my release, I got cleared by the courts of appeal of any wrongdoing. 
(Applause) Around the same time, I got blessed with my son, whom I named Uhuru, which in my dialect means "freedom." 
(Applause) Because I had finally gotten the freedom that I so longed for. 
I come as one, but I stand as 10,000, encouraged by the hard-edged hope that thousands of us have come together to reform and transform the criminal justice system, encouraged that we are doing our jobs as we are meant to do them. 
And let us keep doing them with no apology. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

My name is Jon Gray. 
They call me "The Dishwasher." 
I cofounded Ghetto Gastro, a Bronx-based collective that works at the intersection of food, design and art. 
We create experiences that challenge people's perceptions of the Bronx, the place that I call home. 
It's a funny thing. 
I just touched down in Vancouver from Paris a few days ago. 
We took over the Place Vendôme with the Bronx Brasserie. 
Oui oui, chérie. 
(Laughter) It's wild, because in Paris, they have this saying, "le Bronx," which means something is in disarray or a problem. 
That's the Place Vendôme. 
We shut it down one time. 
(Laughter) This lingo came into play when the Bronx was burning, and movies like "The Warriors" and "Fort Apache" still make an impression. 
Some may disagree, but I believe the Bronx was designed to fail. 
The power broker was a joker. 
Robert Moses, instead of parting the Red Sea, he parted the Bronx with a six-lane highway and redlined my community. 
My great-grandparents had a home on Featherbed Lane, and contrary to the name, they couldn't get a good night's rest due to the constant blasting and drilling that was necessary to build the cross-Bronx expressway a block away. 
I consider these policy decisions design crimes. 
(Applause) Being the resilient people that we are uptown, out of the systematic oppression hip-hop culture rose from the rubble and the ashes like a phoenix. 
Hip-hop is now a trillion-dollar industry, but this economic activity doesn't make it back to the Bronx or communities like it. 
Let's take it back to 1986. 
I was born in the heart of the AIDS crisis, the crack epidemic and the War on Drugs. 
The only thing that trickled down from Reaganomics was ghettonomics: pain, prison and poverty. 
I was raised by brilliant, beautiful and accomplished black women. 
Even so, my pops wasn't in the picture, and I couldn't resist the allure of the streets. 
Like Biggie said, you're either slinging crack rock or you got a wicked jump shot. 
Don't get it twisted, my jumper was wet. 
(Laughter) My shit was wet. 
(Applause) But when I turned 15, I started selling weed, I didn't finish high school, the New York Board of Education banned me from all of those, but I did graduate to selling cocaine when I turned 18. 
I did well. 
That was until I got jammed up, caught a case, when I was 20. 
I was facing 10 years. 
I posted bail, signed up at the Fashion Institute, I applied the skills that I learned in the streets to start my own fashion brand. 
My lawyer peeked my ambition, so he suggested that the judge grant me a suspended sentence. 
For once in my life, a suspension was a good thing. 
(Laughter) Over the course of two years and many court dates, my case got dismissed. 
Both of my brothers have done jail time, so escaping the clutches of the prison industrial system didn't seem realistic to me. 
Right now, one of my brothers is facing 20 years. 
My mother put in great effort in taking me out to eat, making sure we visited museums and traveled abroad, basically exposing me to as much culture as she could. 
I remembered how as a kid, I used to take over the dinner table and order food for everybody. 
Breaking bread has always allowed me to break the mold and connect with people. 
Me and my homie Les, we grew up on the same block in the Bronx, two street dudes. 
He happened to be a chef. 
We always discussed the possibility of doing something in the food game for the benefit of our neighborhood. 
Les had just won the food show "Chopped." 
Our homie Malcolm was gearing up to run a pastry kitchen at Noma, yeah, world's best Noma in Copenhagen, you know the vibes. 
My man P had just finished training in I-I-Italy, Milano to be exact. 
We decided the world needed some Bronx steasoning on it, so we mobbed up and formed Ghetto Gastro. 
(Applause) While I'm aware our name makes a lot of people uncomfortable, for us "ghetto" means home. 
Similar to the way someone in Mumbai or Nairobi might use the word "slum," it's to locate our people and to indict the systems of neglect that created these conditions. 
(Applause) So what is Ghetto Gastro? 
Ultimately, it's a movement and a philosophy. 
We view the work we do as gastrodiplomacy, using food and finesse to open borders and connect culture. 
Last year in Tokyo, we did a Caribbean patty, we do jerk wagyu beef, shio kombu. 
We remixed the Bronx classic with the Japanese elements. 
And for Kwanzaa, we had to pay homage to our Puerto Ricans, and we did a coconut charcoal cognac coquito. Dímelo! 
(Laughter) This here is our Black Power waffle with some gold leaf syrup. 
Make sure you don't slip on the drip. 
(Laughter) Here we got the 36 Brix plant-based velato. 
Strawberry fields, you know the deal. 
Compressed watermelon, basil seeds, a little bit of strawberries up there. 
Back to the Bronx Brasserie, you know we had to hit them in the head with that caviar and cornbread. 
(Laughter) (Applause) We also practice du-rag diplomacy. 
(Laughter) Because, we don't edit who we are when we do our thing. 
Due to our appearance, we often get mistaken for rappers or athletes. 
It happened here last year at TED. 
This dude ran down on me and asked me when I was going to perform. 
How about now? 
(Applause) So you see, we've been bringing the Bronx to the world but now we focus on bringing the world to the Bronx. 
We just opened our spot, an idea kitchen where we make and design products, create content -- (Music) and host community events. 
The intention is to build financial capital and creative capital in our hood. 
We're also collaborating with world-renowned chef Massimo Bottura on a refettorio in the Bronx. 
A refettorio is a design-focused soup kitchen and community center. 
You see the vibes. 
(Applause) The recent outpouring of grief about the murder of rapper and entrepreneur Nipsey Hussle is largely due to the fact that he decided to stay and evolve in place, rather than leave his hood. 
After his death, some may see this decision as foolish, but I'm making that same decision every day: to live in the Bronx, to create in the Bronx, to invest in the Bronx. 
(Applause) At Ghetto Gastro, we don't run from the word "ghetto," and we don't run from the ghetto. 
Because at the end of the day, Ghetto Gastro is about showing you what we already know: the hood is good. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hello. 
I'd like to introduce you to someone. 
This is Jomny. 
That's "Jonny" but spelled accidentally with an "m," in case you were wondering, because we're not all perfect. 
Jomny is an alien who has been sent to earth with a mission to study humans. 
Jomny is feeling lost and alone and far from home, and I think we've all felt this way. 
Or, at least I have. 
I wrote this story about this alien at a moment in my life when I was feeling particularly alien. 
I had just moved to Cambridge and started my doctoral program at MIT, and I was feeling intimidated and isolated and very much like I didn't belong. 
But I had a lifeline of sorts. 
See, I was writing jokes for years and years and sharing them on social media, and I found that I was turning to doing this more and more. 
Now, for many people, the internet can feel like a lonely place. 
It can feel like this, a big, endless, expansive void where you can constantly call out to it but no one's ever listening. 
But I actually found a comfort in speaking out to the void. 
I found, in sharing my feelings with the void, eventually the void started to speak back. 
And it turns out that the void isn't this endless lonely expanse at all, but instead it's full of all sorts of other people, also staring out into it and also wanting to be heard. 
Now, there have been many bad things that have come from social media. 
I'm not trying to dispute that at all. 
To be online at any given point is to feel so much sadness and anger and violence. 
It can feel like the end of the world. 
Yet, at the same time, I'm conflicted because I can't deny the fact that so many of my closest friends are people that I had met originally online. 
And I think that's partly because there's this confessional nature to social media. 
It can feel like you are writing in this personal, intimate diary that's completely private, yet at the same time you want everyone in the world to read it. 
And I think part of that, the joy of that is that we get to experience things from perspectives from people who are completely different from ourselves, and sometimes that's a nice thing. 
For example, when I first joined Twitter, I found that so many of the people that I was following were talking about mental health and going to therapy in ways that had none of the stigma that they often do when we talk about these issues in person. 
Through them, the conversation around mental health was normalized, and they helped me realize that going to therapy was something that would help me as well. 
Now, for many people, it sounds like a scary idea to be talking about all these topics so publicly and so openly on the internet. 
I feel like a lot of people think that it is a big, scary thing to be online if you're not already perfectly and fully formed. 
But I think the internet can be actually a great place to not know, and I think we can treat that with excitement, because to me there's something important about sharing your imperfections and your insecurities and your vulnerabilities with other people. 
(Laughter) Now, when someone shares that they feel sad or afraid or alone, for example, it actually makes me feel less alone, not by getting rid of any of my loneliness but by showing me that I am not alone in feeling lonely. 
And as a writer and as an artist, I care very much about making this comfort of being vulnerable a communal thing, something that we can share with each other. 
I'm excited about externalizing the internal, about taking those invisible personal feelings that I don't have words for, holding them to the light, putting words to them, and then sharing them with other people in the hopes that it might help them find words to find their feelings as well. 
Now, I know that sounds like a big thing, but ultimately I'm interested in putting all these things into small, approachable packages, because when we can hide them into these smaller pieces, I think they are easier to approach, I think they're more fun. 
I think they can more easily help us see our shared humanness. 
Sometimes that takes the form of a short story, sometimes that takes the form of a cute book of illustrations, for example. 
And sometimes that takes the form of a silly joke that I'll throw on the internet. 
For example, a few months ago, I posted this app idea for a dog-walking service where a dog shows up at your door and you have to get out of the house and go for a walk. 
(Laughter) If there are app developers in the audience, please find me after the talk. 
Or, I like to share every time I feel anxious about sending an email. 
When I sign my emails "Best," it's short for "I am trying my best," which is short for "Please don't hate me, I promise I'm trying my best!" 
Or my answer to the classic icebreaker, if I could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, I would. 
I am very lonely. 
(Laughter) And I find that when I post things like these online, the reaction is very similar. 
People come together to share a laugh, to share in that feeling, and then to disburse just as quickly. 
(Laughter) Yes, leaving me once again alone. 
But I think sometimes these little gatherings can be quite meaningful. 
For example, when I graduated from architecture school and I moved to Cambridge, I posted this question: "How many people in your life have you already had your last conversation with?" 
And I was thinking about my own friends who had moved away to different cities and different countries, even, and how hard it would be for me to keep in touch with them. 
But other people started replying and sharing their own experiences. 
Somebody talked about a family member they had a falling out with. 
Someone talked about a loved one who had passed away quickly and unexpectedly. 
Someone else talked about their friends from school who had moved away as well. 
But then something really nice started happening. 
Instead of just replying to me, people started replying to each other, and they started to talk to each other and share their own experiences and comfort each other and encourage each other to reach out to that friend that they hadn't spoken to in a while or that family member that they had a falling out with. 
And eventually, we got this little tiny microcommunity. 
It felt like this support group formed of all sorts of people coming together. 
And I think every time we post online, every time we do this, there's a chance that these little microcommunities can form. 
There's a chance that all sorts of different creatures can come together and be drawn together. 
And sometimes, through the muck of the internet, you get to find a kindred spirit. 
Sometimes that's in the reading the replies and the comments sections and finding a reply that is particularly kind or insightful or funny. 
Sometimes that's in going to follow someone and seeing that they already follow you back. 
And sometimes that's in looking at someone that you know in real life and seeing the things that you write and the things that they write and realizing that you share so many of the same interests as they do, and that brings them closer together to you. 
Sometimes, if you're lucky, you get to meet another alien. 
[when two aliebns find each other in a strange place, it feels a litle more like home] But I am worried, too, because as we all know, the internet for the most part doesn't feel like this. 
We all know that for the most part, the internet feels like a place where we misunderstand each other, where we come into conflict with each other, where there's all sorts of confusion and screaming and yelling and shouting, and it feels like there's too much of everything. 
It feels like chaos, and I don't know how to square away the bad parts with the good, because as we know and as we've seen, the bad parts can really, really hurt us. 
It feels to me that the platforms that we use to inhabit these online spaces have been designed either ignorantly or willfully to allow for harassment and abuse, to propagate misinformation, to enable hatred and hate speech and the violence that comes from it, and it feels like none of our current platforms are doing enough to address and to fix that. 
But still, and maybe probably unfortunately, I'm still drawn to these online spaces, as many others are, because sometimes it just feels like that's where all the people are. 
And I feel silly and stupid sometimes for valuing these small moments of human connection in times like these. 
But I've always operated under this idea that these little moments of humanness are not superfluous. 
They're not retreats from the world at all, but instead they're the reasons why we come to these spaces. 
They are important and vital and they affirm and they give us life. 
And they are these tiny, temporary sanctuaries that show us that we are not as alone as we think we are. 
And so yes, even though life is bad and everyone's sad and one day we're all going to die -- [look. life is bad. everyones sad. 
We're all gona die, but i alredy bought this inflatable bouncey castle so are u gona take Ur shoes off or not] I think the inflatable metaphorical bouncy castle in this case is really our relationships and our connections to other people. 
And so one night, when I was feeling particularly sad and hopeless about the world, I shouted out to the void, to the lonely darkness. 
I said, "At this point, logging on to social media feels like holding someone's hand at the end of the world." 
And this time, instead of the void responding, it was people who showed up, who started replying to me and then who started talking to each other, and slowly this little tiny community formed. 
Everybody came together to hold hands. 
And in these dangerous and unsure times, in the midst of it all, I think the thing that we have to hold on to is other people. 
And I know that is a small thing made up of small moments, but I think it is one tiny, tiny sliver of light in all the darkness. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Thank you. 
I'm here to talk about dogs, but more specifically, I'm here to talk about bad dogs, and why I love them. 
I'm a conservation biologist, meaning I study weird species and try to count them. 
And I'm also a trainer of detection dogs, and where those two worlds meet is where I live, and where I work. 
Most of the dogs that we get for this kind of work, we scour shelters for because these are bad dogs, and they don't make great pets. 
And you know these dogs. 
You go to your friend's barbecue, and that dog comes up, and she is so happy to see you she pees on your feet, and she drops this big, slabbery ball in your lap, and you just throw it to try to get as much distance between yourself and this dog as possible, and it comes back, and then by 950th throw you're just thinking, "Oh, just why didn't they get rid of this dog?" 
And often they do. 
They end up in shelters because they often have this overwhelming desire to bring you things. 
(Laughter) They think that you're really enjoying this. 
The dog is so happy, thinking that you're all enjoying this game because you're throwing something and it's bringing it to you. 
And they're telling you where this thing is, and that's what we've asked them to do over the evolution of time, our companionship with dogs, we've asked them to bring us stuff. 
And they do a great job. 
They bring us our livestock, and they bring us food and game, and this is the only species on the planet that can be bothered to bring us stuff and bothered to tell us what they know. 
I mean you can ask a camel or a bear, or you can ask your cat, and you get nothing. 
(Laughter) But dogs love telling you what they know. 
And the ones that really really really love this, they are over the top, they have this unbelievable energy, just unrelenting go and drive. 
And we categorize that often as just a reject dog. 
It is just too much, it's destructive, it's all of these things. 
But those are the characteristics I like to work with in dogs. 
Inability to quit: it's not even a desire, it's an inability to quit, It's what resilience is. 
For a dog that doesn't stop, you can train that dog to do lots of things and bring you information. 
I'd like to tell you a little bit about this particular dog, his name is Ruger. 
And he's a really bad dog. 
He is the first anti-poaching dog in Zambia, lives right next to a national park where animals are being poached and snared and trafficked out of the park, and even, you know, elephant ivory from the Congo Basin is moving through Tanzania and through Zambia out to ports to be shipped abroad. 
And this dog is trained to find ivory and rhino horn, bush meat, other wild life contraband and guns and ammunition. 
I trained him, and I found him to be a horrible dog. 
He bit and snapped at people, he was scary to approach, he was everything you fear in a dog, and it turns out he was going blind. 
So I take this dog to Zambia, and I pair him with these scouts who don't have any history of having pets or being with dogs except throwing rocks at village dogs. 
And they learned to think of this dog as a colleague. 
And after four months of intensive training with dogs, they started setting up roadblocks and looking for illegal contraband being trafficked in vehicles along the roads outside this park. 
And they checked vehicles, and by a human doing it, it can take hours, especially for a bus loaded with luggage and food, like this one up in the top corner. 
And Ruger just checked it in a few minutes as this is their first practice training on a roadblock. 
And he alerted, which means he sat, and he stared at his handler, and the handler was like, "Oh, dear!" 
They searched it, looked through it, and they found nothing, and so their spirits dropped. 
But they unloaded that minivan, and they have luggage out, and again Ruger picked a piece of luggage and he sat, and they searched through it and found nothing. 
And Ruger insisted, and they went back, and then Ruger hit on a tiny matchbox wrapped in a plastic bag inside clothes. 
And inside that matchbox was a primer cap, which is an illegal firing pin for a handmade rifle. 
And so everyone, all the passengers on that bus, all the scouts, they suddenly believed. 
They believed that Ruger knew what he was doing because he didn't quit. 
He has an even more interesting backstory. 
He came off of an Indian reservation, the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana. 
And he was a horrible puppy, and the owner of this litter shot all of the dogs. 
Somehow Ruger escaped, he ended up in a shelter in Helena. 
Someone found him and noticed how bad he was and brought him to us to be trained as a conservation detection dog. 
He has made a huge difference. 
Because of his unrelenting energy and desire to work and love of work, he brings us amazing information. 
Then there is another dog I'd like you to meet. 
His name is Pepin, and he is with our executive, Dr. Pete Coppolillo, who is going to tell you a little bit more, and I'm going to work Pepin for you. 
PC: Well, Megan, Pepin get ready. 
I'll give you a little update on Ruger. 
The four months after he made his first find in the minibus, he detected and the scouts he works with confiscated 15 guns. 
Mostly homemade muzzleloaders, which are their gun of preference for elephant poaching. 
They're also used because guns are hard to come by in Africa, by sometimes seven, sometimes 10, sometimes more different poachers. 
So, as of now, there may be 100-150 different poachers who are out of business thanks to Ruger. 
(Applause) (Cheers) And for these exceptional, really high-drive dogs, you know, Ruger is really the rule rather than the exception. 
And I'll tell you about a couple more. 
This is Seamus. 
Seamus is trained to detect dyer’s woad, which is the weed that's in that pot there. 
And speaking of resilience, dyer’s woad drops between 12,000 and 15,000 seeds a year. 
So it's a noxious weed, and when it gets established, it's very hard to get rid of. 
So people were working on getting rid of it on Mount Sentinel in Missoula for about 10 years, and they weren't making any progress. 
So in 2011, we brought in Seamus. 
And Seamus is able to do something that we human searchers can't, which is find it by smell before it flowers. 
Seamus has knocked back dyer’s woad by over 95 percent. 
Thanks to him, we're going to do something that was unthinkable just a few years ago, which is eradicate a noxious weed, a bad infestation of a noxious weed. 
And this is Wicket. Wicket is one of the best stories. 
She was in a shelter in Anaconda, Montana, and when we came to get her, the director of the shelter said, "You don't want that dog. That dog is crazy." 
(Laughter) And now Aimee famously said, "I think she might be the right kind of crazy." 
Wicket is now the most accomplished conservation detection dog in the world. 
She's worked on three continents, she's worked in dozens of US states, and here she is searching a boat for zebra mussels which have a microscopic larval stage that we can't see. 
Speaking of accomplished and crazy, (Laughter) now you guys will get to watch Pepin do his thing. 
So Meg's put his vest on. 
That is his signal that it's time to work. You can see he's low-focused. 
(Laughter) He is ready to go. 
So I hid ivory. I hid some ivory in the room. 
Pepin is one of the ivory dogs, and I hid some ivory in the room. 
You, guys, just stay put. 
He's also not trained on narcotics, so no one has to make a run, (Laughter) for the door or anything like that, and when Meg tells him to go, he'll do his thing. 
So what you're going to see is you're going to see him work, and you can watch his head, he'll move his head up and down, it's a little hard indoors because there's not much air moving around in here. 
But he'll search, and you may see him whip around, change directions, his alert is something we call "passive alert." 
He sits. 
And the reason he does that is because we have him trained not to disturb the samples. 
Sometimes it's a crime scene, so they want to collect evidence. 
Sometimes we collect scats for DNA or things like that. 
Normally, he works in big open places. 
He is trained on grizzly bear, he is trained on wolverine, so he runs on big, high meadows and pastures, but he's also trained on containers, vehicles and buildings. 
And he's checking there. 
You see he's got scent now. 
There he goes. Good job, pal! 
That's his alert. 
And she has a command that is, "Show me!" 
And he'll show where it is. 
So that's a broken ivory tusk. 
(Applause) Well done. Thank you! 
(Applause) 

Leah Chase: Oh, this is beautiful. 
Oh, gosh, I never saw such a room and beauty and strength like I'm looking at. 
That's gorgeous. It is. 
It is a beautiful room. 
Pat Mitchell: I almost said your age, because you gave me permission, but I realized that I was about to make you a year older. 
You're only 94. 
(Laughter) (Applause) LC: Yeah, I'm only 94. 
(Applause) I mean, you get this old and parts start wearing out. 
Your legs start wearing out. 
The one thing that my children always say: "But nothing happened to your mouth." 
(Laughter) So you've got to have something going, so I've got my mouth going. 
(Laughter) PM: So Mrs. Chase, the first time we were there, I brought a group of young women, who work with us at TED, into the kitchen, and we were all standing around and you had already cooked lunch for hundreds of people, as you do every day, and you looked up at them. 
You have to share with this audience what you said to those young women. 
LC: Well, you know, I talk to young women all the time, and it's beginning to bother me, because look how far I came. 
I'd come with women that had to really hustle and work hard, and they knew how to be women. 
They didn't play that man down. 
And, well, we didn't have the education you have today, and God, I'm so proud when I see those women with all that education under their belt. 
That's why I worked hard, tried to get everybody to use those resources. 
So they just don't know their power, and I always tell them, just look at my mother, had 12 girls before she had a boy. 
(Laughter) So you know how I came out. 
(Laughter) Now, she had 14 children. 
She raised 11 of us out of that 14, and up until last year, we were all still living, a bunch of old biddies, but we're still here. 
(Laughter) And sometimes we can be just cantankerous and blah blah blah blah blah, but we still go. 
And I love to see women. 
You don't know what it does for me to see women in the position that you're in today. 
I never thought I'd see that. 
I never thought I'd see women be able to take places and positions that we have today. 
It is just a powerful thing. 
I had a young woman come to me. 
She was an African-American woman. 
And I said, "Well, what do you do, honey?" 
She said, "I am a retired Navy pilot." 
Oh God, that just melted me, because I knew how hard it was to integrate that Navy. 
You know, the Navy was the last thing to really be integrated, and that was done by Franklin Roosevelt as a favor to an African-American man, Lester Granger, that I knew very well. 
He was the head of the National Urban League back there, and when Roosevelt asked him, he wanted to appoint Lester as maybe one of his cabinet members. 
Lester said, "No, I don't want that. 
All I want you to do is integrate that Navy." 
And that was what Franklin did. 
Well, Franklin didn't live to do it, but Truman did it. 
But when this woman told me, "I have flown everything there is to fly," bombers, just all kinds of planes, it just melted me, you know, just to see how far women have come. 
And I told her, I said, "Well, you could get into the space program." 
She said, "But Ms. Chase, I'm too old." 
She was already 60-some years old, and, you know, you're over the hill then. 
(Laughter) They don't want you flying up in the sky at 60-something years old. 
Stay on the ground. 
When I meet women, and today everybody comes to my kitchen, and you know that, and it upsets Stella, my daughter. 
She doesn't like people coming in the kitchen. 
But that's where I am, and that's where you're going to see me, in the kitchen. 
So when they come there, I meet all kinds of people. 
And that is the thing that really uplifts me, is when I meet women on the move. 
When I meet women on the move, it is good for me. 
Now, I'm not one of these flag-waving women. 
You're not going to see me out there waving. 
No, I don't do that. 
(Laughter) No, I don't do that, and I don't want any of you to do that. 
Just be good women. 
And you know, my mother taught us ... 
she was tough on us, and she said, "You know, Leah," she gave us all this plaque, "to be a good woman, you have to first look like a girl." 
Well, I thought I looked like a girl. 
"Act like a lady." 
That, I never learned to do. 
(Laughter) "Think like a man." 
Now don't act like that man; think like a man. 
And "work like a dog." 
(Laughter) So we learned that the hard way. 
And they taught you that. 
They taught you what women had to do. 
We were taught that women controlled the behavior of men. 
How you act, they will act. 
So you've got to do that, and I tell you all the time. 
You know, don't play this man down. 
It upsets me when you may have a husband that maybe he doesn't have as much education under his belt as you have, but still you can't play him down. 
You've got to keep lifting him up, because you don't want to live with a mouse. 
So you want that man to be a man, and do what he has to do. 
And anyway, always remember, he runs on cheap gas. 
(Laughter) So fill him up with cheap gas -- (Laughter) and then, you got him. 
It's just so -- (Laughter) It's just -- PM: You have to give us a minute to take that in. 
(Laughter) LC: When I heard this young lady speak before I came out -- she was so beautiful, and I wished I could be like that, and my husband, poor darling -- I lost him after we were married 70 years -- didn't agree on one thing, never did, nothing, but we got along together because he learned to understand me, and that was just hard, because he was so different. 
And that lady reminded me. 
I said, "If I would have just been like her, Dooky would have really loved it." 
(Laughter) But I wasn't. 
I was always pushy, always moving, always doing this, and he used to come to me all the time, and he said, "Honey, God's going to punish you." 
(Laughter) "You -- you're just not grateful." 
But it isn't that I'm not grateful, but I think, as long as you're living, you've got to keep moving, you've got to keep trying to get up and do what you've got to do. 
(Applause) You cannot sit down. 
You have to keep going, keep trying to do a little bit every day. 
Every day, you do a little bit, try to make it better. 
And that's been my whole life. 
Well, I came up in the country, small town, had to do everything, had to haul the water, had to wash the clothes, do this, do that, pick the dumb strawberries, all that kind of stuff. 
(Laughter) But still, my daddy insisted that we act nice, we be kind. 
And that's all. 
When I heard this young woman -- oh, she sounds so beautiful -- I said, "I wish I could be like that." 
PM: Mrs. Chase, we don't want you to be any different than you are. 
There is no question about that. 
Let me ask you. 
This is why it's so wonderful to have a conversation with someone who has such a long view -- LC: A long time. 
PM: to remembering Roosevelt and the person he did that favor for. 
What is in your head and your mind and what you have seen and witnessed ... 
One of the things that it's good to remember, always, is that when you opened that restaurant, whites and blacks could not eat together in this city. 
It was against the law. 
And yet they did, at Dooky Chase. Tell me about that. 
LC: They did, there. 
Well, my mother-in-law first started this, and the reason she started is, because her husband was sickly, and he would go out -- and people from Chicago and all the places, you would call his job a numbers runner. 
But in New Orleans, we are very sophisticated -- (Laughter) so it wasn't a numbers runner, it was a lottery vendor. 
(Laughter) So you see, we put class to that. 
But that's how he did it. 
And he couldn't go from house to house to get his clients and all that, because he was sick, so she opened up this little sandwich shop, so she was going to take down the numbers, because he was sick a lot. 
He had ulcers. He was really bad for a long a time. 
So she did that -- and not knowing anything, but she knew she could make a sandwich. 
She knew she could cook, and she borrowed 600 dollars from a brewery. 
Can you imagine starting a business today with 600 dollars and no knowledge of what you're doing? 
And it always just amazed me what she could do. 
She was a good money manager. 
That, I am not. 
My husband used to call me a bankrupt sister. 
(Laughter) "She'll spend everything you got." 
And I would, you know. 
PM: But you kept the restaurant open, though, even in those times of controversy, when people were protesting and almost boycotting. 
I mean, it was a controversial move that you and your husband made. 
LC: It was, and I don't know how we did it, but as I said, my mother-in-law was a kind, kind person, and you didn't have any African-Americans on the police force at that time. 
They were all white. 
But they would come around, and she would say, "Bebe, I'm gonna fix you a little sandwich." 
So she would fix them a sandwich. 
Today they would call that bribery. 
(Laughter) But she was just that kind of person. 
She liked to do things for you. 
She liked to give. 
So she would do that, and maybe that helped us out, because nobody ever bothered us. 
We had Jim Dombrowski, Albert Ben Smith, who started all kinds of things right in that restaurant, and nobody ever bothered us. 
So we just did it. 
PM: Excuse me. 
You talked to me that day about the fact that people considered the restaurant a safe haven where they could come together, particularly if they were working on civil rights, human rights, working to change the laws. 
LC: Well, because once you got inside those doors, nobody ever, ever bothered you. 
The police would never come in and bother our customers, never. 
So they felt safe to come there. 
They could eat, they could plan. 
All the Freedom Riders, that's where they planned all their meetings. 
They would come and we would serve them a bowl of gumbo and fried chicken. 
(Laughter) So I said, we'd changed the course of America over a bowl of gumbo and some fried chicken. 
(Applause) I would like to invite the leaders, now, just come have a bowl of gumbo and some fried chicken, talk it over and we'd go and we'd do what we have to do. 
(Applause) And that's all we did. 
PM: Could we send you a list to invite to lunch? 
(Laughter) LC: Yeah, invite. 
Because that's what we're not doing. 
We're not talking. 
Come together. 
I don't care if you're a Republican or what you are -- come together. 
Talk. 
And I know those old guys. 
I was friends with those old guys, like Tip O'Neill and all of those people. 
They knew how to come together and talk, and you would disagree maybe. 
That's OK. 
But you would talk, and we would come to a good thing and meet. 
And so that's what we did in that restaurant. 
They would plan the meeting, Oretha's mother, Oretha Haley's mother. 
She was big in CORE. 
Her mother worked for me for 42 years. 
And she was like me. 
We didn't understand the program. 
Nobody our age understood this program, and we sure didn't want our children to go to jail. 
Oh, that was ... oh God. 
But these young people were willing to go to jail for what they believed. 
We were working with Thurgood and A.P. Tureaud and all those people with the NAACP. 
But that was a slow move. 
We would still be out here trying to get in the door, waiting for them. 
(Laughter) PM: Is that Thurgood Marshall you're talking about? 
LC: Thurgood Marshall. But I loved Thurgood. 
He was a good movement. 
They wanted to do this without offending anybody. 
I'll never forget A.P. Tureaud: "But you can't offend the white people. 
Don't offend them." 
But these young people didn't care. 
They said, "We're going. Ready or not, we're going to do this." 
And so we had to support them. 
These were the children we knew, righteous children. 
We had to help them. 
PM: And they brought the change. LC: And they brought the change. 
You know, it was hard, but sometimes you do hard things to make changes. 
PM: And you've seen so many of those changes. 
The restaurant has been a bridge. 
You have been a bridge between the past and now, but you don't live in the past, do you? 
You live very much in the present. 
LC: And that's what you have to tell young people today. 
OK, you can protest, but put the past behind you. 
I can't make you responsible for what your grandfather did. 
That's your grandfather. 
I have to build on that. 
I have to make changes. 
I can't stay there and say, "Oh, well, look what they did to us then. 
Look what they do to us now." 
No, you remember that, but that makes you keep going on, but you don't harp on it every day. 
You move, and you move to make a difference, and everybody should be involved. 
My children said, "Mother, don't get political," you know. 
(Laughter) "Don't get political, because you know we don't like that." 
But you have to be political today. 
You have to be involved. 
Be a part of the system. 
Look how it was when we couldn't be a part of the system. 
When Dutch Morial became the mayor, it was a different feeling in the African-American community. 
We felt a part of things. 
Now we've got a mayor. 
We feel like we belong. 
Moon tried before Dutch came. 
PM: Mayor Landrieu's father, Moon Landrieu. 
LC: Mayor Landrieu's father, he took great, great risks by putting African-Americans in city hall. 
He took a whipping for that for a long time, but he was a visionary, and he did those things that he knew was going to help the city. 
He knew we had to get involved. 
So that's what we have to do. 
We don't harp on that. 
We just keep moving, and Mitch, you know, I tell Moon all the time, "You did a good thing," but Mitch did one bigger than you and better than you. 
When he pulled those statues down, I said, "Boy, you're crazy!" 
(Applause) You're crazy. 
But it was a good political move. 
You know, when I saw P.T. Beauregard come down, I was sitting looking at the news, and it just hit me what this was all about. 
To me, it wasn't about race; it was a political move. 
And I got so furious, I got back on that kitchen the next morning, and I said, come on, pick up your pants, and let's go to work, because you're going to get left behind. 
And that's what you have to do. 
You have to move on people, move on what they do. 
It was going to bring visibility to the city. 
So you got that visibility -- move on it, uplift yourself, do what you have to do, and do it well. 
And that's all we do. 
That's all I try to do. 
PM: But you just gave the formula for resilience. Right? 
So you are clearly the best example we could find anywhere of resilience, so there must be something you think -- LC: I like emotional strength. 
I like people with emotional and physical strength, and maybe that's bad for me. 
My favorite all-time general was George Patton. 
You know, that wasn't too cool. 
(Laughter) PM: It's surprising. 
LC: I've got George Patton hanging in my dining room because I want to remember. 
He set goals for himself, and he was going to set out to reach those goals. 
He never stopped. 
And I always remember his words: "Lead, follow, or get out of the way." 
Now, I can't lead -- (Applause) I can't be a leader, but I can follow a good leader, but I am not getting out of the way. 
(Applause) But that's just what you have to do. 
(Applause) If you can't lead -- leaders need followers, so if I help you up there, I'm going to ride on your coattails, and I can't count the coattails I've ridden upon. 
(Laughter) Feed you good. You'll help me out. 
(Laughter) And that's what life is all about. 
Everybody can do something, but please get involved. 
Do something. 
The thing we have to do in this city, in all cities -- mommas have to start being mommas today. 
You know? 
They have to start understanding -- when you bring this child in the world, you have to make a man out of it, you have to make a woman out of it, and it takes some doing. 
It takes sacrifice. 
Maybe you won't have the long fingernails, maybe you won't have the pretty hair. 
But that child will be on the move, and that's what you have to do. 
We have to concentrate on educating and making these children understand what it's all about. 
And I hate to tell you, gentlemen, it's going to take a good woman to do that. 
It's going to take a good woman to do that. 
(Applause) Men can do their part. 
The other part is to just do what you have to do and bring it home, but we can handle the rest, and we will handle the rest. 
If you're a good woman, you can do that. 
PM: You heard that first here. 
We can handle the rest. 
LC: We can handle the rest. 
Mrs. Chase, thank you so much -- LC: Thank you. 
PM: for taking time out from the work you do every day in this community. 
LC: But you don't know what this does for me. 
When I see all of these people, and come together -- people come to my kitchen from all over the world. 
I had people come from London, now twice this happened to me. 
First a man came, and I don't know why he came to this -- Every year, the chefs do something called "Chef's Charity." 
Well, it so happened I was the only woman there, and the only African-American there on that stage doing these demonstrations, and I would not leave until I saw another woman come up there, too. 
I'm not going up -- they're going to carry me up there until you bring another woman up here. 
(Laughter) So they have another one now, so I could step down. 
But this man was from London. 
So after that, I found the man in my kitchen. 
He came to my kitchen, and he said, "I want to ask you one question." 
OK, I thought I was going to ask something about food. 
"Why do all these white men hang around you?" 
(Laughter) What? 
(Laughter) I couldn't understand. 
He couldn't understand that. 
I said, "We work together. 
This is the way we live in this city. 
I may never go to your house, you may never come to my house. 
But when it comes to working, like raising money for this special school, we come together. 
That's what we do. 
And still here comes another, a woman, elegantly dressed, about a month ago in my kitchen. 
She said, "I don't understand what I see in your dining room." 
I said, "What do you see?" 
She saw whites and blacks together. 
That's what we do. 
We meet. We talk. 
And we work together, and that's what we have to do. 
You don't have to be my best friend to work to better your city, to better your country. 
We just have to come together and work, and that's what we do in this city. 
We're a weird bunch down here. 
(Laughter) Nobody understands us, but we feed you well. 
(Laughter) (Applause) (Cheering) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

(Music) (Music ends) (Applause) (Applause ends) Hi, everyone. I'm Sirena. 
I'm 11 years old and from Connecticut. 
(Audience cheers) (Applause) Well, I'm not really sure why I'm here. 
(Laughter) I mean, what does this have to do with technology, entertainment and design? 
Well, I count my iPod, cellphone and computer as technology, but this has nothing to do with that. 
So I did a little research on it. 
Well, this is what I found. 
Of course, I hope I can memorize it. 
(Clears throat) The violin is made of a wood box and four metal strings. 
By pulling a string, it vibrates and produces a sound wave, which passes through a piece of wood called a bridge, and goes down to the wood box and gets amplified, but ... let me think. 
(Laughter) Placing your finger at different places on the fingerboard changes the string length, and that changes the frequency of the sound wave. 
(Laughter) OK, this is sort of technology, but I can call it a 16th-century technology. 
But actually, the most fascinating thing that I found was that even the audio system or wave transmission nowadays are still based on the same principle of producing and projecting sound. 
Isn't that cool? 
(Laughter) (Applause) Design -- I love its design. 
I remember when I was little, my mom asked me, "Would you like to play the violin or the piano?" 
I looked at that giant monster and said to myself -- "I am not going to lock myself on that bench the whole day!" 
(Laughter) This is small and lightweight. 
I can play from standing, sitting or walking. 
And, you know what? 
The best of all is that if I don't want to practice, (Whispering) I can hide it. 
(Laughter) The violin is very beautiful. 
Some people relate it as the shape of a lady. 
But whether you like it or not, it's been so for more than 400 years, unlike modern stuff [that] easily looks dated. 
But I think it's very personal and unique that, although each violin looks pretty similar, no two violins sound the same -- even from the same maker or based on the same model. 
Entertainment -- I love the entertainment. 
But actually, the instrument itself isn't very entertaining. 
I mean, when I first got my violin and tried to play around on it, it was actually really bad, because it didn't sound the way I'd heard from other kids -- it was so horrible and so scratchy. 
So, it wasn't entertaining at all. 
But besides, my brother found this very funny: Yuk! Yuk! Yuk! 
(Laughter) A few years later, I heard a joke about the greatest violinist, Jascha Heifetz. 
After Mr. Heifetz's concert, a lady came over and complimented him: "Oh, Mr. Heifetz, your violin sounded so great tonight!" 
And Mr. Heifetz was a very cool person, so he picked up his violin and said, "Funny -- I don't hear anything." 
(Laughter) Now I realize that as the musician, we human beings, with our great mind, artistic heart and skill, can change this 16th-century technology and a legendary design to a wonderful entertainment. 
Now I know why I'm here. 
(Music) (Music ends) (Applause) At first, I thought I was just going to be here to perform, but unexpectedly, I learned and enjoyed much more. 
But ... although some of the talks were quite up there for me. 
(Laughter) Like the multi-dimension stuff. 
I mean, honestly, I'd be happy enough if I could actually get my two dimensions correct in school. 
(Laughter) But actually, the most impressive thing to me is that -- well, actually, I would also like to say this for all children is to say thank you to all adults, for actually caring for us a lot, and to make our future world much better. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) (Applause ends) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) 

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

I'm a storyteller, but I'm also a troublemaker. 
(Laughter) And I have a habit of asking difficult questions. 
It started when I was 10 years old, and my mother, who was raising six children, had no time for them. 
At 14, fed up with my increasingly annoying questions, she recommended that I begin writing for the local English-language newspaper in Pakistan, to put my questions out to the entire country, she said. 
(Laughter) At 17, I was an undercover investigative journalist. 
I don't even think my editor knew just how young I was when I sent in a story that named and shamed some very powerful people. 
The men I'd written about wanted to teach me a lesson. 
They wanted to shame me and my family. 
They spray-painted my name and my family's name with unspeakable profanities across our front gate and around our neighborhood. 
And they felt that my father, who was a strict man of tradition, would stop me. 
Instead, my father stood in front of me and said, "If you speak the truth, I will stand with you, and so will the world." 
And then he got -- (Applause) And then he got a group of people together and they whitewashed the walls. 
(Laughter) I've always wanted my stories to jolt people, to shake them into having difficult conversations. 
And I felt that I would be more effective if I did something visual. 
And so at 21, I became a documentary filmmaker, turning my camera onto marginalized communities on the front lines in war zones, eventually returning home to Pakistan, where I wanted to document violence against women. 
Pakistan is home to 200 million people. 
And with its low levels of literacy, film can change the way people perceive issues. 
An effective storyteller speaks to our emotions, elicits empathy and compassion, and forces us to look at things differently. 
In my country, film had the potential to go beyond cinema. 
It could change lives. 
The issues that I've always wanted to raise -- I've always wanted to hold up a mirror to society -- they've been driven by my barometer of anger. 
And my barometer of anger led me, in 2014, to honor killings. 
Honor killings take place in many parts of the world, where men punish women who transgress rules made by them: women who choose to marry on their own free will; or women who are looking for a divorce; or women who are suspected of having illicit relationships. 
In the rest of the world, honor killings would be known as murder. 
I always wanted to tell that story from the perspective of a survivor. 
But women do not live to tell their tale and instead end up in unmarked graves. 
So one morning when I was reading the newspaper, and I read that a young woman had miraculously survived after being shot in the face by her father and her uncle because she chose to marry a man out of her free will, I knew I had found my storyteller. 
Saba was determined to send her father and her uncle to jail, but in the days after leaving the hospital, pressure mounted on her to forgive. 
You see, there was a loophole in the law that allowed for victims to forgive perpetrators, enabling them to avoid jail time. 
And she was told that she would be ostracized and her family, her in-laws, they would all be shunned from the community, because many felt that her father had been well within his right, given her transgression. 
She fought on -- for months. 
But on the final day in court, she gave a statement forgiving them. 
As filmmakers, we were devastated, because this was not the film that we had set out to make. 
In hindsight, had she pressed charges, fought the case and won, hers would have been an exception. 
When such a strong woman is silenced, what chance did other women have? 
And we began to think about using our film to change the way people perceived honor killings, to impact the loophole in the law. 
And then our film was nominated for an Academy Award, and honor killings became headline news, and the prime minister, while sending his congratulations, offered to host the first screening of the film at his office. 
Of course, we jumped at the chance, because no prime minister in the history of the country had ever done so. 
And at the screening, which was carried live on national television, he said something that reverberated throughout the country: "There is no honor in honor killings," he said. 
(Applause) At the Academy Awards in LA, many of the pundits had written us off, but we felt that in order for the legislative push to continue, we needed that win. 
And then, my name was announced, and I bounded up the steps in flip-flops, because I didn't expect to be onstage. 
(Laughter) And I accepted the statue, telling a billion people watching that the prime minister of Pakistan had pledged to change the law, because, of course, that's one way of holding the prime minister accountable. 
(Laughter) And -- (Applause) Back home, the Oscar win dominated headline news, and more people joined the fray, asking for the loophole in the law to be closed. 
And then in October 2016, after months of campaigning, the loophole was indeed closed. 
(Applause) And now men who kill women in the name of honor receive life imprisonment. 
(Applause) Yet, the very next day, a woman was killed in the name of honor, and then another and another. 
We had impacted legislation, but that wasn't enough. 
We needed to take the film and its message to the heartland, to small towns and villages across the country. 
You see, for me, cinema can play a very positive role in changing and molding society in a positive direction. 
But how would we get to these places? 
How would we get to these small towns and villages? 
We built a mobile cinema, a truck that would roll through the length and breadth of the country, that would stop in small towns and villages. 
We outfitted it with a large screen that would light up the night sky, and we called it "Look But With Love." 
It would give the community an opportunity to come together and watch films in the evening. 
We knew we could attract men and children in the mobile cinema. 
They would come out and watch. 
But what about women? 
In these small, rural communities that are segregated, how would we get women to come out? 
We had to work with prevailing cultural norms in order to do so, and so we built a cinema inside the cinema, outfitting it with seats and a screen where women could go inside and watch without fearing or being embarrassed or harassment. 
We began to introduce everyone to films that opened up their minds to competing worldviews, encouraging children to build critical thinking so that they could ask questions. 
And we expanded our scope beyond honor killings, talking about income inequality, the environment, talking about ethnic relations, religious tolerance and compassion. 
And inside, for women, we showed them films in which they were heroes, not victims, and we told them how they could navigate the court system, the police system, educating them about their rights, telling them where they could seek refuge if they were victims of domestic violence, where they could go and get help. 
We were surprised that we were welcomed in so many of the places that we went to. 
Many of the towns had never seen television or social media, and they were eager for their children to learn. 
But there was also pushback and blowback with the ideas that we were bringing with us. 
Two members of our mobile cinema team resigned because of threats from villages. 
And in one of the villages that we were screening in, they shut it down and said they didn't want the women to know about their rights. 
But on the flip side, in another village when a screening was shut down, a plainclothes policeman got up and ordered it back on, and stood by, protecting our team, telling everyone that it was his duty to expose the young minds to an alternative worldview and to this content. 
He was an ordinary hero. 
But we've come across so many of these heroes on our journey. 
In another town, where the men said that only they could watch and the women had to stay home, a community elder got up, got a group of people together, had a discussion, and then both men and women sat down to watch together. 
We are documenting what we are doing. 
We talk to people. 
We adapt. 
We change the lineup of films. 
When we show men films that show perpetrators of violence behind bars, we want to hit home the fact that if men are violent, there will be repercussions. 
But we also show films where men are seen as championing women, because we want to encourage them to take on those roles. 
For women, when we show them films in which they are heads of state or where they are lawyers and doctors and in leadership positions, we talk to them and encourage them to step into those roles. 
We are changing the way people in these villages interact, and we're taking our learnings into other places. 
Recently, a group contacted us and wants to take our mobile cinema to Bangladesh and Syria, and we're sharing our learnings with them. 
We feel it's really important to take what we are doing and spread it across the world. 
In small towns and villages across Pakistan, men are changing the way they interact with women, children are changing the way they see the world, one village at a time, through cinema. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

In 1969 in July, three Americans launched into space. 
Now, they went to the surface of the moon, they famously made the great leap for mankind. 
Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, they walked on the surface, they planted this flag. 
It's rightly celebrated as a moment that in America we say is a triumph. 
We think it was this amazing accomplishment. 
They didn't just leave behind this flag, though. 
They also left behind a plaque. 
This plaque is a beautiful object, and one that I want to talk to you a little bit about. 
First, you might notice that there's two globes, representing all of earth. 
And then there's this beautiful statement: "We came in peace for all mankind." 
Now, at first, this is just nice poetic language, but it's also set in a typeface that's perfect for this moment. 
It seems industrial, it seems engineered. 
It also is the best possible name you could come up with for something on the moon: Futura. 
Now, I want to talk to you about fonts, and why this typeface is perfect for this moment. 
But it's actually more than just ceremonial. 
Now, when all of you arrived here today, you actually had to think about fonts. 
You might not realize it, but you're all unconscious experts on typography. 
Typography is the study of how fonts inhabit our world, they're the visual language of the words we use. 
Here's the thing that's funny about this, though. 
I know you're probably not like me, you're not a font nerd, maybe some of you are, but if you're not, that's alright, because I might spend hours every day trying to pick the perfect typeface for the perfect project, or I might spend thousands of dollars every year, trying to get ones with the right features. 
But all of you actually spend hours every day, evaluating fonts. 
If you don't believe me, think about how you got here. 
Each of you had to judge by the signs and maybe even on your phone, which signals to trust and which to ignore. 
You were evaluating fonts. 
Or maybe when you're just buying a new product, you have to think about whether something is expensive or cheap or hard to get or easy to find. 
And the funny thing about it is, this may not seem extraordinary to you, but the moment you see something out of place, you recognize it right away. 
(Laughter) The thing I love about typography, and why I love fonts and why I love Futura, is that, for me, what I study is everywhere. 
Every street that I walk down, every book that I pick up, every thing that I read is filled with the thing I love. 
Now, once you understand the history and what happens with typography, you actually have a history of everything before you. 
And this is the typeface Futura. 
As previously we've discussed, this is modernism in miniature. 
This is a way in which modernism infiltrated this country and became perhaps the most popular, or promiscuous typeface, of the twentieth century. 
"Less is more," right, these are the aphorisms of modernism. 
And in the visual arts, the same thing happened. 
Let's focus on the essentials, focus on the basic shapes, focus on geometry. 
So Futura actually holds this to its core. 
You might notice that the shapes inherent in Futura have circles, squares, triangles. 
Some of the shapes are all based on circles, like the O, D and C, or others have this pointed apex of the triangle. 
Others just look like they might have been made with a ruler or a compass. 
They feel geometric, they feel mathematic, precise. 
In fact, this whole system carries through with the way that the typeface was designed. 
To not look like it was made like other typefaces, to be something new. 
Here it is in the lightweight, the medium weight and the bold weight. 
The whole family has different things to commend to it. 
This was a conscious break from the past, something that looked like it was made by a machine, and not by hand. 
When I say not made by hand, this is what I mean. 
This is what we think about maybe, when you might create something with a calligraphic brush or a pen. 
That there's thicks and thins. 
And even more traditional typefaces, say like a Garamond, holds vestiges of this old system in which you can see the A where it get little bit thinner at the top and thicker down below, because it's trying to look like someone had made it by hand. 
But Futura, in contrast, is designed to look like no one had touched it at all, that this was made by a machine, for a machine age, for an industrial age. 
There's actually a sleight of hand here that Paul Renner, the designer who made this in 1927, employed. 
If you look at the way in which the circular shape joins with the vertical shaft, you'll notice that it tapers just every so slightly. 
And this is one of hundreds of ways in which this typeface was designed to look geometrically perfect, even though it's mathematically not. 
And this is what typeface designers do all the time to make typefaces work, every day. 
Now, there were other designers doing this at the same time in Europe and America. 
These are a few other excellent examples from Europe, trying to create something new for the new age, a new moment in time. 
These are some other ones in Germany that in some ways look very similar to Futura, maybe with higher waist or lower waist or different proportions. 
Then why did Futura take over the world? 
In this case, if you can read the titles there, some of these names don't quite roll off the tongue: Erbar, Kabel Light, Berthold-Grotesk, Elegant-Grotesk. 
These aren't exactly household names, are they? 
And so when you compare that to Futura, you realize that this was a really good choice by the marketing team. 
What's amazing about this name -- you know, what's in this name is that this is a name that actually invokes hope and an idea about the future. 
And this isn't actually the word for future in German, it wasn't a German name, they actually picked something that would speak to a wider, larger audience, a universal audience. 
And when you compare it to what was being done in America -- these are the typefaces from the same period in the United States in the 1920s, bold, brash, braggadocios. 
You almost think of this as exactly like what the stock market looked like when they were all going nuts in the 1920s. 
And you realize that Futura is doing something revolutionary. 
I want to step back and talk about an example of the typeface in use. 
So this is a magazine that we all probably know today, "Vanity Fair." 
This is what it looked like in 1929, in the summer. 
And in many ways, there's nothing wrong with this design. 
This is absolutely typical of the 1920s. 
There's a photograph of an important person, in this case Franklin Roosevelt, then-governor of New York. 
Everything seems centered, everything seems symmetrical. 
There's still a little bit of ornamentation, so this is still maybe having some vestiges of the painted lady and not fully modernistic. 
But everything seems kid of solid. 
There's even drop caps to help you get into the text. 
But this all changed very quickly and in October of 1929, a Berlin-based designer came and redesigned "Vanity Fair." 
And this is what it looks like with Futura. 
Instead of the governor now we have a photograph of an abstract, beautiful setting, in this case, the ocean. 
Instead of drop caps, there's nothing at all. 
And replaced with a centered layout is now asymmetry. 
And it gets even more radical the further you enter the magazine. 
In this case, even more dramatic asymmetry. 
In this case, illustrations by Pablo Picasso, moving across the page and breaking the gutter of the two pages. 
And there's something even more radical. 
If you look closely at the Futura, you might notice something. 
You might not pick it up at first, but there are no capital letters in the title or the captions on this page. 
You might not think that's very radical, but pick up any magazine, any book or go to any website, and I guarantee, you are not going to find it very easily. 
This is still a radical idea. 
And why is that radical? 
When we think about what capital letters denote, they denote something important, whether it's our names, or our titles. 
Or maybe even just the name of our corporations, or maybe our trademarks. 
Actually, in some ways, America's the home of capitalization. 
We love putting capitals in everything. 
(Laughter) But think about how radical this would be to introduce a magazine where you're taking away all the capital letters. 
This has maybe had the same political force that we now argue over things like pronouns in our society today. 
In the 1920s, this is just shortly after Soviet Russia had a communist revolution. 
And for them, this actually represented a socialist infiltration into America. 
All lowercase letters meant that this was an egalitarian, complete lowering of everything into one equal playing field. 
Now this is still kind of a radical idea. 
Think about how often you do capitalize something to have more power or prestige to it. 
So for them to do this was a way in which Futura was using this idea. 
Now, other designers were doing other things with Futura. 
Others brought other ideas of modernism with it, whether it was interesting new illustration styles, or interesting new collage types of illustration. 
Or even just new book covers, whether they were from Europe. 
But here's the funny thing. 
In the 1920s, if you wanted to use a new typeface, you couldn't just go download it onto your computer. 
You actually had to have pieces of lead. 
So for Americans who wanted to adopt this and make it part of their own system, something they could use in everyday typography, whether in ads or anything else, they actually had to have metal type. 
So being good American capitalists, what did we do? 
We made all sorts of copies. 
Ones that had nothing to do with the name Futura, but looked identical to it, whether it was Spartan or Tempo. 
And in fact, by the time that World War II started, American corporations were actually trying to boycott Nazi goods. 
But they said, "Go ahead and use our copies. 
Use 20th Century, use Spartan, use Vogue, use Tempo. 
These are identical to Futura." 
And in fact, for most people, they didn't even learn the new names, they just still called it all Futura. 
So America took this typeface in, conquered it and made it its own. 
So by the time World War II finishes, Americans are using this on everything, whether it be catalogs, or atlases, or encyclopedias or charts and graphs, or calendars, or even political material. 
And even the logo for a new expansion football team. 
And in fact, it was used even on some of the most important advertising of the 20th century. 
So it's in this context that when the US government was picking a typeface to use after World War II for new maps and new projects, they picked Futura. 
It wasn't an astounding choice, it wasn't a radical choice, it didn't have anything to do with communism. 
But in this case, it was used on some of the most important maps, so this one, an air force map in 1962, or used for the maps in Vietnam in '66. 
And so it wasn't a surprise that when astronauts first started the Mercury program, such as John Glenn orbiting the earth, that charts and maps that he was using were in Futura. 
And in fact, by the time Mercury morphed into Apollo, it started getting used more and more for more things. 
So in this case for a safety plan, or even starting to get used on instrument panels, or navigational aids. 
Or even on diagrams to show how the whole system worked. 
But here's the amazing thing, it didn't just get used for papers that they handed out to people. 
It started to get used for an interface, for an entire system that helped the astronauts know how to use the machine. 
NASA wasn't just one big corporation making everything. 
There was hundreds of contractors -- Boeing, IBM, McDonnell Douglas -- all making different machines. 
Now imagine if astronauts had to use different typefaces and different systems for each component they had in the space shuttles. 
This would have been impossible to navigate and there would have been a cognitive overload every time they had to open up a new system. 
So in this case, Futura being used on the interface helped them navigate complexity and make it more clear. 
And it wasn't just used on buttons, it was used on labels, and it was used on their food rations, and it was used on their tool kits. 
It was used on knobs and levers to tell them what to do. 
In fact, maybe even some of the places where they needed to have things that were complex be more simple to them, instructions were printed entirely in Futura, so that they could know what to do with that one moment. 
They didn't have to remember everything in their head, they could have it out there in the world to see and refer to. 
In this case, Futura helped make that system, which was already a very difficult and complex system, a little less complex. 
In fact, the very first or last thing an astronaut might have seen when they were entering or exiting the spacecraft would have been in Futura. 
One of my favorite examples of how Futura worked in this way is actually this camera. 
This is a Hasselblad that was made by the Swedish company. 
It's a perfectly good camera, some of you might have used one, it's prized by photographers as a really great camera. 
And you might notice, if you know anything about cameras, that there's some modifications made to it. 
In this case, there are stickers placed all over the film canisters, or other parts of the camera here. 
What this enabled NASA to do, was make something really great out of the astronauts. 
They're not photographers, they're not experts in art. 
But they could ensure that they would know how to use this camera because of the labels placed there in Futura. 
So in this case, Futura acquired and made sure that they had legitimacy with the things they were using. 
In this case to not take off the film before it would expose. 
Which, in this case, we would have never had some of the amazing photos we had without this label. 
When we see something as decorative as this, a ceremonial patch, or something like this plaque on the moon, we realize that Futura was more than just something ceremonial, something more than something that had just been picked for its design. 
In fact, Futura had authority, had legitimacy and had power because of this choice. 
There's one other thing I want to talk about in closing. 
And that is that Futura tells a story. 
And this is what I love about typefaces, is that all of them tell stories. 
And in this case, this typeface tells a very powerful story about assimilation, about something being taken into America and being made part of its culture. 
And that's one of the best and worst things America does, is we take things into our culture and we spit them out back again and claim them our own. 
And in this case, Futura mirrors exactly what happened with the technology undergirding the whole system. 
Futura was a German typeface, taken in, made into an American commodity. 
And so were the technologies: the rockets, the scientists all came from Germany as well. 
So in some ways, this German typeface on an American plaque perfectly mirrors what happened with the technology. 
And in this case, when you think about this story, you realize that typography on the moon represents legitimacy, represents authority, and this gave them, the astronauts, the power to get to the moon. 
Thank you. 

(Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Thank you! 
(Applause continues) Thank you very much. 
Like the speaker before me -- I am a TED virgin, I guess. 
I'm also the first time here, and ... 
(Applause) I'm really happy that Mr. Anderson invited me. 
I'm really grateful that I get a chance to play for everyone. 
And the song that I just played was by Josef Hofmann. 
It's called "Kaleidoscope." 
And Hofmann is a Polish pianist and composer of the late 19th century, and he's widely considered one of the greatest pianists of all time. 
I have another piece that I'd like to play for you. 
It's called "Abegg Variations," by Robert Schumann, a German 19th-century composer. 
The name "Abegg" is actually A-B-E-G-G, and that's the main theme in the melody. 
(Plays the notes A, B, E, G and G) That comes from the last name of one of Schumann's female friends. 
(Laughter) But he wrote that for his wife. 
(Laughter) So actually, if you listen carefully, there are supposed to be five variations on this Abegg theme. 
It's written around 1834, so even though it's old, I hope you'll like it. 
(Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Now comes the part that I hate. 
Well, because Mr. Anderson told me that this session is called "Sync and Flow," I was wondering, "What do I know that these geniuses don't?" 
(Laughter) So, I'll talk about musical composition, even though I don't know where to start. 
How do I compose? 
I think Yamaha does a really good job of teaching us how to compose. 
What I do first is, I make a lot of little musical ideas you can just improvise here at the piano -- and I choose one of those to become my main theme, my main melody, like the Abegg that you just heard. 
And once I choose my main theme, I have to decide: Out of all the styles in music, what kind of style do I want? 
And this year, I composed a Romantic style. 
So for inspiration, I listened to Liszt and Tchaikovsky and all the great Romantic composers. 
Next, I make the structure of the entire piece with my teachers. 
They help me plan out the whole piece. 
And then the hard part is filling it in with musical ideas, because then you have to think. 
(Laughter) And then, when the piece takes somewhat of a solified form -- solidified, excuse me -- solidified form, you're supposed to actually polish the piece, polish the details, and then polish the overall performance of the composition. 
And another thing that I enjoy doing is drawing. 
Drawing, because I like to draw, you know, Japanese anime art. 
I think that's a craze among teens right now. 
And once I realized it, there's a parallel between creating music and creating art, because for your motive, or your little initial idea for your drawing, it's your character -- you want to decide who you want to draw, or if you want to draw an original character. 
And then you want to decide: How are you going to draw the character? 
Like, am I going to use one page? Am I going to draw it on the computer? 
Am I going to use a two-page spread like a comic book? 
For a more grandiose effect, I guess. 
And then you have to do the initial sketch of the character, which is like your structure of a piece, and then you add pen and pencil, and whatever details that you need -- that's polishing the drawing. 
And another thing that both of these have in common is your state of mind, because I know I'm one of those teenagers that are really easily distracted. 
So if I'm trying to do homework and I don't feel like it, I'll try to draw or, you know, waste my time. 
And then what happens is, sometimes I absolutely can't draw or I can't compose at all, and then it's like there's too much on your mind. 
And sometimes, if you manage to use your time wisely and work on it, you'll get something out of it, but it doesn't come naturally. 
What happens is, if something magical happens, if something natural happens to you, you're able to produce all this beautiful stuff instantly, and then that's what I consider "flow," because that's when everything clicks and you're able to do anything. 
You feel like you're on top of your game and you can do anything you want. 
I'm not going to play my own composition today because, although I did finish it, it's way too long. 
Instead, I'd like to try something called "improvisation." 
I have here seven note cards, one with each note of the musical alphabet. 
And I'd like someone to come up here and choose five -- anyone to come up here and choose five -- and then I can make it into some sort of melody, and I'll improvise it. 
Wow. A volunteer, yay! 
(Laughter) (Applause) Jennifer Lin: Nice to meet you. 
Goldie Hawn: Thank you. Choose five? 
JL: Yes, five cards. Any five cards. 
GH: OK, one. JL: OK. 
GH: Three. 
(Laughter) JL: One more. GH: OK. "E" for "effort." 
JL: Would you mind reading them out in the order that you chose them? 
GH: OK -- C, G, B, A and E. 
JL: Thank you very much! 
GH: You're welcome. And what about these? 
JL: I won't use them. Thank you! 
(Applause) Now, she chose C, G, B, A, E. 
I'm going to try to put that in some sort of order. 
(Plays notes) OK, that's nice. 
So, I'm going to have a moment to think, and I'll try to make something out of it. 
(Plays the five notes) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) The next song, or the encore that I'm going to play is called "Bumble Boogie," by Jack Fina. 
(Applause) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) 

So one of the most important solutions to the global challenge posed by climate change lies right under our foot every day. 
It's soil. 
Soil's just the thin veil that covers the surface of land, but it has the power to shape our planet's destiny. 
See, a six-foot or so of soil, loose soil material that covers the earth's surface, represents the difference between life and lifelessness in the earth system, and it can also help us combat climate change if we can only stop treating it like dirt. 
(Laughter) Climate change is happening, the earth's atmosphere is warming, because of the increasing amount of greenhouse gases we keep releasing into the atmosphere. 
You all know that. 
But what I assume you might not have heard is that one of the most important things our human society could do to address climate change lies right there in the soil. 
I'm a soil scientist who has been studying soil since I was 18, because I'm interested in unlocking the secrets of soil and helping people understand this really important climate change solution. 
So here are the facts about climate. 
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere has increased by 40 percent just in the last 150 years or so. 
Human actions are now releasing 9.4 billion metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere, from activities such as burning fossil fuels and intensive agricultural practices, and other ways we change the way we use land, including deforestation. 
But the concentration of carbon dioxide that stays in the atmosphere is only increasing by about half of that, and that's because half of the carbon we keep releasing into the atmosphere is currently being taken up by land and the seas through a process we know as carbon sequestration. 
So in essence, whatever consequence you think we're facing from climate change right now, we're only experiencing the consequence of 50 percent of our pollution, because the natural ecosystems are bailing us out. 
But don't get too comfortable, because we have two major things working against us right now. 
One: unless we do something big, and then fast, emissions will continue to rise. 
And second: the ability of these natural ecosystems to take up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and sequester it in the natural habitats is currently getting compromised, as they're experiencing serious degradation because of human actions. 
So it's not entirely clear that we will continue to get bailed out by these natural ecosystems if we continue on this business-as-usual path that we've been. 
Here's where the soil comes in: there is about three thousand billion metric tons of carbon in the soil. 
That's roughly about 315 times the amount of carbon that we release into the atmosphere currently. 
And there's twice more carbon in soil than there is in vegetation and air. 
Think about that for a second. 
There's more carbon in soil than there is in all of the world's vegetation, including the lush tropical rainforests and the giant sequoias, the expansive grasslands, all of the cultivated systems, and every kind of flora you can imagine on the face of the earth, plus all the carbon that's currently up in the atmosphere, combined, and then twice over. 
Hence, a very small change in the amount of carbon stored in soil can make a big difference in maintenance of the earth's atmosphere. 
But soil's not just simply a storage box for carbon, though. 
It operates more like a bank account, and the amount of carbon that's in soil at any given time is a function of the amount of carbon coming in and out of the soil. 
Carbon comes into the soil through the process of photosynthesis, when green plants take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and use it to make their bodies, and upon death, their bodies enter the soil. 
And carbon leaves the soil and goes right back up into the atmosphere when the bodies of those formerly living organisms decay in soil by the activity of microbes. 
See, decomposition releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, as well as other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide, but it also releases all the nutrients we all need to survive. 
One of the things that makes soil such a fundamental component of any climate change mitigation strategy is because it represents a long-term storage of carbon. 
Carbon that would have lasted maybe a year or two in decaying residue if it was left on the surface can stay in soil for hundreds of years, even thousands and more. 
Soil biogeochemists like me study exactly how the soil system makes this possible, by locking away the carbon in physical association with minerals, inside aggregates of soil minerals, and formation of strong chemical bonds that bind the carbon to the surfaces of the minerals. 
See when carbon is entrapped in soil, in these kinds of associations with soil minerals, even the wiliest of the microbes can't easily degrade it. 
And carbon that's not degrading fast is carbon that's not going back into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases. 
But the benefit of carbon sequestration is not just limited to climate change mitigation. 
Soil that stores large amounts of carbon is healthy, fertile, soft. 
It's malleable. It's workable. 
It makes it like a sponge. 
It can hold on to a lot of water and nutrients. 
Healthy and fertile soils like this support the most dynamic, abundant and diverse habitat for living things that we know of anywhere on the earth system. 
It makes life possible for everything from the tiniest of the microbes, such as bacteria and fungi, all the way to higher plants, and fulfills the food, feed and fiber needs for all animals, including you and I. 
So at this point, you would assume that we should be treating soil like the precious resource that it is. 
Unfortunately, that's not the case. 
Soils around the world are experiencing unprecedented rates of degradation through a variety of human actions that include deforestation, intensive agricultural production systems, overgrazing, excessive application of agricultural chemicals, erosion and similar things. 
Half of the world's soils are currently considered degraded. 
Soil degradation is bad for many reasons, but let me just tell you a couple. 
One: degraded soils have diminished potential to support plant productivity. 
And hence, by degrading soil, we're compromising our own abilities to provide the food and other resources that we need for us and every member of living things on the face of the earth. 
And second: soil use and degradation, just in the last 200 years or so, has released 12 times more carbon into the atmosphere compared to the rate at which we're releasing carbon into the atmosphere right now. 
I'm afraid there's even more bad news. 
This is a story of soils at high latitudes. 
Peatlands in polar environments store about a third of the global soil carbon reserves. 
These peatlands have a permanently frozen ground underneath, the permafrost, and the carbon was able to build up in these soils over long periods of time because even though plants are able to photosynthesize during the short, warm summer months, the environment quickly turns cold and dark, and then microbes are not able to efficiently break down the residue. 
So the soil carbon bank in these polar environments built up over hundreds of thousands of years. 
But right now, with atmospheric warming, the permafrost is thawing and draining. 
And when permafrost thaws and drains, it makes it possible for microbes to come in and rather quickly decompose all this carbon, with the potential to release hundreds of billions of metric tons of carbon into the atmosphere in the form of greenhouse gases. 
And this release of additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will only contribute to further warming that makes this predicament even worse, as it starts a self-reinforcing positive feedback loop that could go on and on and on, dramatically changing our climate future. 
Fortunately, I can also tell you that there is a solution for these two wicked problems of soil degradation and climate change. 
Just like we created these problems, we do know the solution, and the solution lies in simultaneously working to address these two things together, through what we call climate-smart land management practices. 
What do I mean here? 
I mean managing land in a way that's smart about maximizing how much carbon we store in soil. 
And we can accomplish this by putting in place deep-rooted perennial plants, putting back forests whenever possible, reducing tillage and other disturbances from agricultural practices, including optimizing the use of agricultural chemicals and grazing and even adding carbon to soil, whenever possible, from recycled resources such as compost and even human waste. 
This kind of land stewardship is not a radical idea. 
It's what made it possible for fertile soils to be able to support human civilizations since time immemorial. 
In fact, some are doing it just right now. 
There's a global effort underway to accomplish exactly this goal. 
This effort that started in France is known as the "4 per 1000" effort, and it sets an aspirational goal to increase the amount of carbon stored in soil by 0.4 percent annually, using the same kind of climate-smart land management practices I mentioned earlier. 
And if this effort's fully successful, it can offset a third of the global emissions of fossil-fuel-derived carbon into the atmosphere. 
But even if this effort is not fully successful, but we just start heading in that direction, we still end up with soils that are healthier, more fertile, are able to produce all the food and resources that we need for human populations and more, and also soils that are better capable of sequestering carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and helping with climate change mitigation. 
I'm pretty sure that's what politicians call a win-win solution. 
And we all can have a role to play here. 
We can start by treating the soil with the respect that it deserves: respect for its ability as the basis of all life on earth, respect for its ability to serve as a carbon bank and respect for its ability to control our climate. 
And if we do so, we can then simultaneously address two of the most pressing global challenges of our time: climate change and soil degradation. 
And in the process, we would be able to provide food and nutritional security to our growing human family. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

Hello, my name is Dessa, and I'm a member of a hip-hop collective called Doomtree. 
I'm the one in the tank top. 
(Laughter) And I make my living as a performing, touring rapper and singer. 
When we perform as a collective, this is what our shows look like. 
I'm the one in the boots. 
There's a lot of jumping. There's a lot of sweating. 
It's loud. It's very high-energy. 
Sometimes there are unintentional body checks onstage. 
Sometimes there are completely intentional body checks onstage. 
It's kind of a hybrid between an intramural hockey game and a concert. 
However, when I perform my own music as a solo artist, I tend to gravitate towards more melancholy sounds. 
A few years ago, I gave my mom the rough mixes of a new album, and she said, "Baby, it's beautiful, but why is it always so sad?" 
(Laughter) "You always make music to bleed out to." 
And I thought, "Who are you hanging out with that you know that phrase?" 
(Laughter) But over the course of my career, I've written so many sad love songs that I got messages like this from fans: "Release new music or a book. I need help with my breakup." 
(Laughter) And after performing and recording and touring those songs for a long time, I found myself in a position in which my professional niche was essentially romantic devastation. 
What I hadn't been public about, however, was the fact that most of these songs had been written about the same guy. 
And for two years, we tried to sort ourselves out, and then for five and on and off for 10. 
And I was not only heartbroken, but I was kind of embarrassed that I couldn't rebound from what other people seemed to recover from so regularly. 
And even though I knew it wasn't doing either of us any good, I just couldn't figure out how to put the love down. 
Then, drinking white wine one night, I saw a TED Talk by a woman named Dr. Helen Fisher, and she said that in her work, she'd been able to map the coordinates of love in the human brain. 
And I thought, well, if I could find my love in my brain, maybe I could get it out. 
So I went to Twitter. 
"Anybody got access to an fMRI lab, like at midnight or something? 
I'll trade for backstage passes and whiskey." 
(Laughter) And that's Dr. Cheryl Olman, who works at the University of Minnesota's Center for Magnetic Resonance Research. 
She took me up on it. 
I explained Dr. Fisher's protocol, and we decided to recreate it with a sample size of one, me. 
(Laughter) So I got decked out in a pair of forest green scrubs, and I was laid on a gurney and wheeled into an fMRI machine. 
If you're unfamiliar with that technology, essentially, an fMRI machine is a big, tubular magnet that tracks the progress of deoxygenated iron in your blood. 
So it's essentially figuring out what parts of your brain are making the biggest metabolic demand at any given moment. 
And in that way, it can figure out which structures are associated with a task, like tapping your finger, for example, will always light up the same region, or in my case, looking at pictures of your ex-boyfriend and then looking at pictures of a dude who just sort of resembled my ex-boyfriend but for whom I had no strong feelings. 
He was the control. 
(Laughter) And when I left the machine, we had these really high-resolution images of my brain. 
We could cleave the two halves apart. 
We could inflate the cortex to see inside all of the wrinkles, essentially, in a view that Dr. Cheryl Olman called the "brain skin rug." 
(Laughter) And we could see how my brain had behaved when I looked at images of both men. 
And this was important. 
We could track all of the activity when I looked at the control and when I looked at my ex, and it was in comparing these data sets that we'd be able to find the love alone, in the same way that, if I were to step on a scale fully dressed and then step on it again naked, the difference between those numbers would be the weight of my clothing. 
So when we did that data comparison, we subtracted one from the other, we found activity in exactly the regions that Dr. Fisher would have predicted. 
That's me. 
And that's my brain in love. 
There was activity in that little orange dot, the ventral tegmental area, that kind of loop of red is the anterior cingulate and that golden set of horns is the caudates. 
After she had had time to analyze the data with her team and a couple of partners, Andrea and Phil, Cheryl sent me an image, a single slide. 
It was my brain in cross section, with one bright dot of activity that represented my feelings for this dude. 
And I'd known I was in love, and that's the whole reason I was going to these outrageous lengths. 
But having an image that proved it felt like such a vindication, like, "Yeah, it's all in my head, but now I know exactly where." 
(Laughter) And I also felt like an assassin who had her mark. 
That was what I had to annihilate. 
So I decided to embark on a course of treatment called "neurofeedback." 
I worked with a woman named Penijean Gracefire, and she explained that what we'd be doing was training my brain. 
We're not lobotomizing anything. 
We're training it in the way that we would train a muscle, so that it would be flexible enough and resilient enough to respond appropriately to my circumstances. 
So when we're on the treadmill, we would anticipate that our heart would beat and pound, and when we're asleep, we would ask that that muscle slow. 
Similarly, when I'm in a long-term, viable, loving romantic relationship, the emotional centers of my brain should engage, and when I'm not in a long-term, viable, emotional, loving relationship, they should eventually chill out. 
So she came over with a set of electrodes just smaller than a dime that were sensitive enough to detect my brainwaves through my bone and hair and scalp. 
And when she rigged me up, I could see my brain working in real time. 
And in another view that she showed me, I could see exactly which parts of my brain were hyperactive, here displayed in red; hypoactive, here displayed in blue; and the healthy threshold of behavior, the green zone, the Goldilocks zone, which is where I wanted to go. 
And we can, in fact, isolate just those parts of my brain that were associated with the romantic regulation that we'd identified in the Fisher study. 
So Penijean, several times, hooked me up with all her electrodes, and she explained that I didn't have to do or think anything. 
I just essentially had to hold pretty still and stay awake and watch. 
(Harp and vibraphone sounds play) So I did. 
And every time my brain operated in that healthy threshold, I got a little run of harp or vibraphone music. 
And I just watched my brain rotate at roughly the speed of a gyro machine on my dad's flat-screen TV. 
And that was counterintuitive. 
She said the learning would be essentially unconscious. 
But then I thought about the other things I had learned without actively engaging my conscious mind. 
When you ride a bike, I don't really know what, like, my left calf muscle is doing, or how my latissimus dorsi knows to engage when I wobble to the right. 
The body just learns. 
And similarly, Pavlov's dogs probably don't know a lot about, like, protein structures or the waveform of a ringing bell, but they salivate nonetheless because the body paired the stimuli. 
Finished the sessions, went back to Dr. Cheryl Olman's fMRI machine, and we repeated the protocol, the same images -- of the ex, of the control and, in the interest of scientific rigor, Cheryl and her team didn't know who was who, so that they couldn't influence the results. 
And after she had time to analyze that second set of data, she sent me that image. 
She said, "Dude A's dominance of your brain seems to essentially have been eradicated. 
I think this is the desired result," comma, yes, question mark. 
(Laughter) And that was the exactly the desired result. 
And finally, I allowed myself a moment to introspect, like, how did I feel? 
And in one way, it felt like it was the same inventory of feelings that I'd had at the outset. 
This isn't "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." 
The dude wasn't a stranger. 
But I'd had love and jealousy and amity and attraction and respect and all those complicated feelings that you amass after long-term love. 
But it felt like the benevolent feelings had risen to the surface, and the feelings of fixation and the less-generous feelings weren't quite so present. 
And that sounds like a small thing in some way, this resequencing of feelings, but to me it felt like the biggest thing. 
Like, if I told you, "I'm going to anesthetize you, and I'm also going to take out your wisdom teeth," it would really matter to you the sequence in which I did those two things. 
(Laughter) And I also felt like I'd had this really unusual philosophical privilege to understand love. 
The lab offered to 3D-print my caudate. 
I got to hold love in my hand. 
(Laughter) And then I bronzed it, and I made it into a necklace and sold it at the merch table at my shows. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And then, with the help of a couple of friends back in Minneapolis, one of them Becky, we made an enormous disco ball of it -- (Laughter) that could descend from the ceiling at my big shows. 
And I felt like I'd had the opportunity to better understand love, even the compulsive parts. 
It isn't a neat, symmetrical Valentine's heart. 
It's bodily, it's systemic, it is a hideous pair of ram's horns buried somewhere deep within your skull, and when that special boy walks by, it lights up, and if he likes you back and you make each other happy, then you fan the flames. 
And if he doesn't, then you assemble a team of neuroscientists to snuff them out by force. 
(Laughter) Thanks. 
(Applause) 

As an actor, I get scripts and it's my job to stay on script, to say my lines and bring to life a character that someone else wrote. 
Over the course of my career, I've had the great honor playing some of the greatest male role models ever represented on television. 
You might recognize me as "Male Escort #1." 
(Laughter) "Photographer Date Rapist," "Shirtless Date Rapist" from the award-winning "Spring Break Shark Attack." 
(Laughter) "Shirtless Medical Student," "Shirtless Steroid-Using Con Man" and, in my most well-known role, as Rafael. 
(Applause) A brooding, reformed playboy who falls for, of all things, a virgin, and who is only occasionally shirtless. 
(Laughter) Now, these roles don't represent the kind of man I am in my real life, but that's what I love about acting. 
I get to live inside characters very different than myself. 
But every time I got one of these roles, I was surprised, because most of the men I play ooze machismo, charisma and power, and when I look in the mirror, that's just not how I see myself. 
But it was how Hollywood saw me, and over time, I noticed a parallel between the roles I would play as a man both on-screen and off. 
I've been pretending to be a man that I'm not my entire life. 
I've been pretending to be strong when I felt weak, confident when I felt insecure and tough when really I was hurting. 
I think for the most part I've just been kind of putting on a show, but I'm tired of performing. 
And I can tell you right now that it is exhausting trying to be man enough for everyone all the time. 
Now -- right? 
(Laughter) My brother heard that. 
Now, for as long as I can remember, I've been told the kind of man that I should grow up to be. 
As a boy, all I wanted was to be accepted and liked by the other boys, but that acceptance meant I had to acquire this almost disgusted view of the feminine, and since we were told that feminine is the opposite of masculine, I either had to reject embodying any of these qualities or face rejection myself. 
This is the script that we've been given. 
Right? Girls are weak, and boys are strong. 
This is what's being subconsciously communicated to hundreds of millions of young boys and girls all over the world, just like it was with me. 
Well, I came here today to say, as a man that this is wrong, this is toxic, and it has to end. 
(Applause) Now, I'm not here to give a history lesson. 
We likely all know how we got here, OK? 
But I'm just a guy that woke up after 30 years and realized that I was living in a state of conflict, conflict with who I feel I am in my core and conflict with who the world tells me as a man I should be. 
But I don't have a desire to fit into the current broken definition of masculinity, because I don't just want to be a good man. 
I want to be a good human. 
And I believe the only way that can happen is if men learn to not only embrace the qualities that we were told are feminine in ourselves but to be willing to stand up, to champion and learn from the women who embody them. 
Now, men -- (Laughter) I am not saying that everything we have learned is toxic. OK? 
I'm not saying there's anything inherently wrong with you or me, and men, I'm not saying we have to stop being men. 
But we need balance, right? 
We need balance, and the only way things will change is if we take a real honest look at the scripts that have been passed down to us from generation to generation and the roles that, as men, we choose to take on in our everyday lives. 
So speaking of scripts, the first script I ever got came from my dad. 
My dad is awesome. 
He's loving, he's kind, he's sensitive, he's nurturing, he's here. 
(Applause) He's crying. 
(Laughter) But, sorry, Dad, as a kid I resented him for it, because I blamed him for making me soft, which wasn't welcomed in the small town in Oregon that we had moved to. 
Because being soft meant that I was bullied. 
See, my dad wasn't traditionally masculine, so he didn't teach me how to use my hands. 
He didn't teach me how to hunt, how to fight, you know, man stuff. 
Instead he taught me what he knew: that being a man was about sacrifice and doing whatever you can to take care of and provide for your family. 
But there was another role I learned how to play from my dad, who, I discovered, learned it from his dad, a state senator who later in life had to work nights as a janitor to support his family, and he never told a soul. 
That role was to suffer in secret. 
And now three generations later, I find myself playing that role, too. 
So why couldn't my grandfather just reach out to another man and ask for help? 
Why does my dad to this day still think he's got to do it all on his own? 
I know a man who would rather die than tell another man that they're hurting. 
But it's not because we're just all, like, strong silent types. 
It's not. A lot of us men are really good at making friends, and talking, just not about anything real. 
(Laughter) If it's about work or sports or politics or women, we have no problem sharing our opinions, but if it's about our insecurities or our struggles, our fear of failure, then it's almost like we become paralyzed. 
At least, I do. 
So some of the ways that I have been practicing breaking free of this behavior are by creating experiences that force me to be vulnerable. 
So if there's something I'm experiencing shame around in my life, I practice diving straight into it, no matter how scary it is -- and sometimes, even publicly. 
Because then in doing so I take away its power, and my display of vulnerability can in some cases give other men permission to do the same. 
As an example, a little while ago I was wrestling with an issue in my life that I knew I needed to talk to my guy friends about, but I was so paralyzed by fear that they would judge me and see me as weak and I would lose my standing as a leader that I knew I had to take them out of town on a three-day guys trip -- (Laughter) Just to open up. And guess what? 
It wasn't until the end of the third day that I finally found the strength to talk to them about what I was going through. 
But when I did, something amazing happened. 
I realized that I wasn't alone, because my guys had also been struggling. 
And as soon as I found the strength and the courage to share my shame, it was gone. 
Now, I've learned over time that if I want to practice vulnerability, then I need to build myself a system of accountability. 
So I've been really blessed as an actor. 
I've built a really wonderful fan base, really, really sweet and engaged, and so I decided to use my social platform as kind of this Trojan horse wherein I could create a daily practice of authenticity and vulnerability. 
The response has been incredible. 
It's been affirming, it's been heartwarming. 
I get tons of love and press and positive messages daily. 
But it's all from a certain demographic: women. 
(Laughter) This is real. 
Why are only women following me? 
Where are the men? 
(Laughter) About a year ago, I posted this photo. 
Now, afterwards, I was scrolling through some of the comments, and I noticed that one of my female fans had tagged her boyfriend in the picture, and her boyfriend responded by saying, "Please stop tagging me in gay shit. 
Thx." 
(Laughter) As if being gay makes you less of a man, right? 
So I took a deep breath, and I responded. 
I said, very politely, that I was just curious, because I'm on an exploration of masculinity, and I wanted to know why my love for my wife qualified as gay shit. 
And then I said, honestly I just wanted to learn. 
(Laughter) Now, he immediately wrote me back. 
I thought he was going to go off on me, but instead he apologized. 
He told me how, growing up, public displays of affection were looked down on. 
He told me that he was wrestling and struggling with his ego, and how much he loved his girlfriend and how thankful he was for her patience. 
And then a few weeks later, he messaged me again. 
This time he sent me a photo of him on one knee proposing. 
(Applause) And all he said was, "Thank you." 
I've been this guy. 
I get it. 
See, publicly, he was just playing his role, rejecting the feminine, right? 
But secretly he was waiting for permission to express himself, to be seen, to be heard, and all he needed was another man holding him accountable and creating a safe space for him to feel, and the transformation was instant. 
I loved this experience, because it showed me that transformation is possible, even over direct messages. 
So I wanted to figure out how I could reach more men, but of course none of them were following me. 
(Laughter) So I tried an experiment. 
I started posting more stereotypically masculine things -- (Laughter) Like my challenging workouts, my meal plans, my journey to heal my body after an injury. 
And guess what happened? 
Men started to write me. 
And then, out of the blue, for the first time in my entire career, a male fitness magazine called me, and they said they wanted to honor me as one of their game-changers. 
(Laughter) Was that really game-changing? 
Or is it just conforming? 
And see, that's the problem. 
It's totally cool for men to follow me when I talk about guy stuff and I conform to gender norms. 
But if I talk about how much I love my wife or my daughter or my 10-day-old son, how I believe that marriage is challenging but beautiful, or how as a man I struggle with body dysmorphia, or if I promote gender equality, then only the women show up. 
Where are the men? 
So men, men, men, men! 
(Applause) I understand. 
Growing up, we tend to challenge each other. 
We've got to be the toughest, the strongest, the bravest men that we can be. 
And for many of us, myself included, our identities are wrapped up in whether or not at the end of the day we feel like we're man enough. 
But I've got a challenge for all the guys, because men love challenges. 
(Laughter) I challenge you to see if you can use the same qualities that you feel make you a man to go deeper into yourself. 
Your strength, your bravery, your toughness: Can we redefine what those mean and use them to explore our hearts? 
Are you brave enough to be vulnerable? 
To reach out to another man when you need help? 
To dive headfirst into your shame? 
Are you strong enough to be sensitive, to cry whether you are hurting or you're happy, even if it makes you look weak? 
Are you confident enough to listen to the women in your life? 
To hear their ideas and their solutions? 
To hold their anguish and actually believe them, even if what they're saying is against you? 
And will you be man enough to stand up to other men when you hear "locker room talk," when you hear stories of sexual harassment? 
When you hear your boys talking about grabbing ass or getting her drunk, will you actually stand up and do something so that one day we don't have to live in a world where a woman has to risk everything and come forward to say the words "me too?" 
(Applause) This is serious stuff. 
I've had to take a real, honest look at the ways that I've unconsciously been hurting the women in my life, and it's ugly. 
My wife told me that I had been acting in a certain way that hurt her and not correcting it. 
Basically, sometimes when she would go to speak, at home or in public, I would just cut her off mid-sentence and finish her thought for her. 
It's awful. 
The worst part was that I was completely unaware when I was doing it. 
It was unconscious. 
So here I am doing my part, trying to be a feminist, amplifying the voices of women around the world, and yet at home, I am using my louder voice to silence the woman I love the most. 
So I had to ask myself a tough question: am I man enough to just shut the hell up and listen? 
(Laughter) (Applause) I've got to be honest. I wish that didn't get an applause. 
(Laughter) Guys, this is real. 
And I'm just scratching the surface here, because the deeper we go, the uglier it gets, I guarantee you. 
I don't have time to get into porn and violence against women or the split of domestic duties or the gender pay gap. 
But I believe that as men, it's time we start to see past our privilege and recognize that we are not just part of the problem. 
Fellas, we are the problem. 
The glass ceiling exists because we put it there, and if we want to be a part of the solution, then words are no longer enough. 
There's a quote that I love that I grew up with from the Bahá'í writings. 
It says that "the world of humanity is possessed of two wings, the male and the female. 
So long as these two wings are not equivalent in strength, the bird will not fly." 
So women, on behalf of men all over the world who feel similar to me, please forgive us for all the ways that we have not relied on your strength. 
And now I would like to ask you to formally help us, because we cannot do this alone. 
We are men. We're going to mess up. 
We're going to say the wrong thing. We're going to be tone-deaf. 
We're more than likely, probably, going to offend you. 
But don't lose hope. 
We're only here because of you, and like you, as men, we need to stand up and become your allies as you fight against pretty much everything. 
We need your help in celebrating our vulnerability and being patient with us as we make this very, very long journey from our heads to our hearts. 
And finally to parents: instead of teaching our children to be brave boys or pretty girls, can we maybe just teach them how to be good humans? 
So back to my dad. 
Growing up, yeah, like every boy, I had my fair share of issues, but now I realize that it was even thanks to his sensitivity and emotional intelligence that I am able to stand here right now talking to you in the first place. 
The resentment I had for my dad I now realize had nothing to do with him. 
It had everything to do with me and my longing to be accepted and to play a role that was never meant for me. 
So while my dad may have not taught me how to use my hands, he did teach me how to use my heart, and to me that makes him more a man than anything. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I've been intrigued by this question of whether we could evolve or develop a sixth sense -- a sense that would give us seamless access and easy access to meta-information or information that may exist somewhere that may be relevant to help us make the right decision about whatever it is that we're coming across. 
And some of you may argue, "Well, don't today's cell phones do that already?" 
But I would say no. 
When you meet someone here at TED -- and this is the top networking place, of course, of the year -- you don't shake somebody's hand and then say, "Can you hold on for a moment while I take out my phone and Google you?" 
Or when you go to the supermarket and you're standing there in that huge aisle of different types of toilet papers, you don't take out your cell phone, and open a browser, and go to a website to try to decide which of these different toilet papers is the most ecologically responsible purchase to make. 
So we don't really have easy access to all this relevant information that can just help us make optimal decisions about what to do next and what actions to take. 
And so my research group at the Media Lab has been developing a series of inventions to give us access to this information in a sort of easy way, without requiring that the user changes any of their behavior. 
And I'm here to unveil our latest effort, and most successful effort so far, which is still very much a work in process. 
I'm actually wearing the device right now and we've sort of cobbled it together with components that are off the shelf -- and that, by the way, only cost 350 dollars at this point in time. 
I'm wearing a camera, just a simple web cam, a portable, battery-powered projection system with a little mirror. 
These components communicate to my cell phone in my pocket which acts as the communication and computation device. 
And in the video here we see my student Pranav Mistry, who's really the genius who's been implementing and designing this whole system. 
And we see how this system lets him walk up to any surface and start using his hands to interact with the information that is projected in front of him. 
The system tracks the four significant fingers. 
In this case, he's wearing simple marker caps that you may recognize. 
But if you want a more stylish version, you could also paint your nails in different colors. 
And the camera basically tracks these four fingers and recognizes any gestures that he's making so he can just go to, for example, a map of Long Beach, zoom in and out, etc. 
The system also recognizes iconic gestures such as the "take a picture" gesture, and then takes a picture of whatever is in front of you. 
And when he then walks back to the Media Lab, he can just go up to any wall and project all the pictures that he's taken, sort through them and organize them, and re-size them, etc., again using all natural gestures. 
So, some of you most likely were here two years ago and saw the demo by Jeff Han, or some of you may think, "Well, doesn't this look like the Microsoft Surface Table?" 
And yes, you also interact using natural gestures, both hands, etc. 
But the difference here is that you can use any surface, you can walk up to any surface, including your hand, if nothing else is available, and interact with this projected data. 
The device is completely portable, and can be -- (Applause) (Applause ends) So, one important difference is that it's totally mobile. 
Another even more important difference is that in mass production, this would not cost more tomorrow than today's cell phones and would actually not sort of be a bigger packaging -- could look a lot more stylish than this version that I'm wearing around my neck. 
But other than letting some of you live out your fantasy of looking as cool as Tom Cruise in "Minority Report," the reason why we're really excited about this device is that it really can act as one of these sixth-sense devices that gives you relevant information about whatever is in front of you. 
So we see Pranav here going into the supermarket and he's shopping for some paper towels. 
And, as he picks up a product, the system can recognize the product that he's picking up, using either image recognition or marker technology, and give him the green light or an orange light. 
He can ask for additional information. 
So this particular choice here is a particularly good choice, given his personal criteria. 
Some of you may want the toilet paper with the most bleach in it rather than the most ecologically responsible choice. 
(Laughter) If he picks up a book in the bookstore, he can get an Amazon rating -- it gets projected right on the cover of the book. 
This is Juan's book, our previous speaker, which gets a great rating, by the way, at Amazon. 
And so, Pranav turns the page of the book and can then see additional information about the book -- reader comments, maybe sort of information by his favorite critic, etc. 
If he turns to a particular page, he finds an annotation by maybe an expert or a friend of ours that gives him a little bit of additional information about whatever is on that particular page. 
Reading the newspaper -- it never has to be outdated. 
(Laughter) You can get video annotations of the events that you're reading about. 
You can get the latest sports scores, etc. 
This is a more controversial one. 
(Laughter) As you interact with someone at TED, maybe you can see a word cloud of the tags, the words that are associated with that person in their blog and personal web pages. 
In this case, the student is interested in cameras, etc. 
On your way to the airport, if you pick up your boarding pass, it can tell you that your flight is delayed, that the gate has changed, etc. 
And, if you need to know what the current time is, it's as simple as drawing a watch -- (Laughter) (Applause) on your arm. 
So that's where we're at so far in developing this sixth sense that would give us seamless access to all this relevant information about the things that we may come across. 
My student Pranav, who's really, like I said, the genius behind this. 
(Applause and cheering) (Applause ends) He does deserve a lot of applause, because I don't think he's slept much in the last three months, actually. 
And his girlfriend is probably not very happy about him either. 
But it's not perfect yet, it's very much a work in progress. 
And who knows, maybe in another 10 years we'll be here with the ultimate sixth sense brain implant. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

The world today has many problems. 
And they're all very complicated and interconnected and difficult. 
But there is something we can do. 
I believe that girls' education is the closest thing we have to a silver bullet to help solve some of the world's most difficult problems. 
But you don't have to take my word for it. 
The World Bank says that girls' education is one of the best investments that a country can make. 
It helps to positively impact nine of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals. 
Everything from health, nutrition, employment -- all of these are positively impacted when girls are educated. 
Additionally, climate scientists have recently rated girls' education at number six out of 80 actions to reverse global warming. 
At number six, it's rated higher than solar panels and electric cars. 
And that's because when girls are educated, they have smaller families, and the resulting reduction in population reduces carbon emissions significantly. 
But more than that, you know, it's a problem we have to solve once. 
Because an educated mother is more than twice as likely to educate her children. 
Which means that by doing it once, we can close the gender and literacy gap forever. 
I work in India, which has made incredible progress in bringing elementary education for all. 
However, we still have four million out-of-school girls, one of the highest in the world. 
And girls are out of school because of, obviously poverty, social, cultural factors. 
But there's also this underlying factor of mindset. 
I have met a girl whose name was Naraaz Nath. 
Naaraaz means angry. 
And when I asked her, "Why is your name 'angry'?" 
she said, "Because everybody was so angry when a girl was born." 
Another girl called Antim Bala, which means the last girl. 
Because everybody hoped that would be the last girl to be born. 
A girl called Aachuki. 
It means somebody who has arrived. 
Not wanted, but arrived. 
And it is this mindset that keeps girls from school or completing their education. 
It's this belief that a goat is an asset and a girl is a liability. 
My organization Educate Girls works to change this. 
And we work in some of the most difficult, rural, remote and tribal villages. 
And how do we do it? 
We first and foremost find young, passionate, educated youth from the same villages. 
Both men and women. 
And we call them Team Balika, balika just means the girl child, so this is a team that we are creating for the girl child. 
And so once we recruit our community volunteers, we train them, we mentor them, we hand-hold them. 
That's when our work starts. 
And the first piece we do is about identifying every single girl who's not going to school. 
But the way we do it is a little different and high-tech, at least in my view. 
Each of our frontline staff have a smartphone. 
It has its own Educate Girls app. 
And this app has everything that our team needs. 
It has digital maps of where they're going to be conducting the survey, it has the survey in it, all the questions, little guides on how best to conduct the survey, so that the data that comes to us is in real time and is of good quality. 
So armed with this, our teams and our volunteers go door-to-door to every single household to find every single girl who may either we never enrolled or dropped out of school. 
And because we have this data and technology piece, very quickly we can figure out who the girls are and where they are. 
Because each of our villages are geotagged, and we can actually build that information out very, very quickly. 
And so once we know where the girls are, we actually start the process of bringing them back into school. 
And that actually is just our community mobilization process, it starts with village meetings, neighborhood meetings, and as you see, individual counseling of parents and families, to be able to bring the girls back into school. 
And this can take anything from a few weeks to a few months. 
And once we bring the girls into the school system, we also work with the schools to make sure that schools have all the basic infrastructure so that the girls will be able to stay. 
And this would include a separate toilet for girls, drinking water, things that will help them to be retained. 
But all of this would be useless if our children weren't learning. 
So we actually run a learning program. 
And this is a supplementary learning program, and it's very, very important, because most of our children are first-generation learners. 
That means there's nobody at home to help them with homework, there's nobody who can support their education. 
Their parents can't read and write. 
So it's really, really key that we do the support of the learning in the classrooms. 
So this is essentially our model, in terms of finding, bringing the girls in, making sure that they're staying and learning. 
And we know that our model works. 
And we know this because a most recent randomized control evaluation confirms its efficacy. 
Our evaluator found that over a three-year period Educate Girls was able to bring back 92 percent of all out-of-school girls back into school. 
(Applause) And in terms of learning, our children's learning went up significantly as compared to control schools. 
So much so, that it was like an additional year of schooling for the average student. 
And that's enormous, when you think about a tribal child who's entering the school system for the first time. 
So here we have a model that works; we know it's scalable, because we are already functioning at 13,000 villages. 
We know it's smart, because of the use of data and technology. 
We know that it's sustainable and systemic, because we work in partnership with the community, it's actually led by the community. 
And we work in partnership with the government, so there's no creation of a parallel delivery system. 
And so because we have this innovative partnership with the community, the government, this smart model, we have this big, audacious dream today. 
And that is to solve a full 40 percent of the problem of out-of-school girls in India in the next five years. 
(Applause) And you're thinking, that's a little ... 
You know, how am I even thinking about doing that, because India is not a small place, it's a huge country. 
It's a country of over a billion people. 
We have 650,000 villages. 
How is it that I'm standing here, saying that one small organization is going to solve a full 40 percent of the problem? 
And that's because we have a key insight. 
And that is, because of our entire approach, with data and with technology, that five percent of villages in India have 40 percent of the out-of-school girls. 
And this is a big, big piece of the puzzle. 
Which means, I don't have to work across the entire country. 
I have to work in those five percent of the villages, about 35,000 villages, to actually be able to solve a large piece of the problem. 
And that's really key, because these villages not only have high burden of out-of-school girls, but also a lot of related indicators, right, like malnutrition, stunting, poverty, infant mortality, child marriage. 
So by working and focusing here, you can actually create a large multiplier effect across all of these indicators. 
And it would mean that we would be able to bring back 1.6 million girls back into school. 
(Applause) I have to say, I have been doing this for over a decade, and I have never met a girl who said to me, you know, "I want to stay at home," "I want to graze the cattle," "I want to look after the siblings," "I want to be a child bride." 
Every single girl I meet wants to go to school. 
And that's what we really want to do. 
We want to be able to fulfill those 1.6 million dreams. 
And it doesn't take much. 
To find and enroll a girl with our model is about 20 dollars. 
To make sure that she is learning and providing a learning program, it's another 40 dollars. 
But today is the time to do it. 
Because she is truly the biggest asset we have. 
I am Safeena Husain, and I educate girls. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

I am a capitalist, and after a 30-year career in capitalism spanning three dozen companies, generating tens of billions of dollars in market value, I'm not just in the top one percent, I'm in the top .01 percent of all earners. 
Today, I have come to share the secrets of our success, because rich capitalists like me have never been richer. 
So the question is, how do we do it? 
How do we manage to grab an ever-increasing share of the economic pie every year? 
Is it that rich people are smarter than we were 30 years ago? 
Is it that we're working harder than we once did? 
Are we taller, better looking? 
Sadly, no. 
It all comes down to just one thing: economics. 
Because, here's the dirty secret. 
There was a time in which the economics profession worked in the public interest, but in the neoliberal era, today, they work only for big corporations and billionaires, and that is creating a little bit of a problem. 
We could choose to enact economic policies that raise taxes on the rich, regulate powerful corporations or raise wages for workers. 
We have done it before. 
But neoliberal economists would warn that all of these policies would be a terrible mistake, because raising taxes always kills economic growth, and any form of government regulation is inefficient, and raising wages always kills jobs. 
Well, as a consequence of that thinking, over the last 30 years, in the USA alone, the top one percent has grown 21 trillion dollars richer while the bottom 50 percent have grown 900 billion dollars poorer, a pattern of widening inequality that has largely repeated itself across the world. 
And yet, as middle class families struggle to get by on wages that have not budged in about 40 years, neoliberal economists continue to warn that the only reasonable response to the painful dislocations of austerity and globalization is even more austerity and globalization. 
So, what is a society to do? 
Well, it's super clear to me what we need to do. 
We need a new economics. 
So, economics has been described as the dismal science, and for good reason, because as much as it is taught today, it isn't a science at all, in spite of all of the dazzling mathematics. 
In fact, a growing number of academics and practitioners have concluded that neoliberal economic theory is dangerously wrong and that today's growing crises of rising inequality and growing political instability are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory. 
What we now know is that the economics that made me so rich isn't just wrong, it's backwards, because it turns out it isn't capital that creates economic growth, it's people; and it isn't self-interest that promotes the public good, it's reciprocity; and it isn't competition that produces our prosperity, it's cooperation. 
What we can now see is that an economics that is neither just nor inclusive can never sustain the high levels of social cooperation necessary to enable a modern society to thrive. 
So where did we go wrong? 
Well, it turns out that it's become painfully obvious that the fundamental assumptions that undergird neoliberal economic theory are just objectively false, and so today first I want to take you through some of those mistaken assumptions and then after describe where the science suggests prosperity actually comes from. 
So, neoliberal economic assumption number one is that the market is an efficient equilibrium system, which basically means that if one thing in the economy, like wages, goes up, another thing in the economy, like jobs, must go down. 
So for example, in Seattle, where I live, when in 2014 we passed our nation's first 15 dollar minimum wage, the neoliberals freaked out over their precious equilibrium. 
"If you raise the price of labor," they warned, "businesses will purchase less of it. 
Thousands of low-wage workers will lose their jobs. 
The restaurants will close." 
Except ... 
they didn't. 
The unemployment rate fell dramatically. 
The restaurant business in Seattle boomed. 
Why? 
Because there is no equilibrium. 
Because raising wages doesn't kill jobs, it creates them; because, for instance, when restaurant owners are suddenly required to pay restaurant workers enough so that now even they can afford to eat in restaurants, it doesn't shrink the restaurant business, it grows it, obviously. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
The second assumption is that the price of something is always equal to its value, which basically means that if you earn 50,000 dollars a year and I earn 50 million dollars a year, that's because I produce a thousand times as much value as you. 
Now, it will not surprise you to learn that this is a very comforting assumption if you're a CEO paying yourself 50 million dollars a year but paying your workers poverty wages. 
But please, take it from somebody who has run dozens of businesses: this is nonsense. 
People are not paid what they are worth. 
They are paid what they have the power to negotiate, and wages' falling share of GDP is not because workers have become less productive but because employers have become more powerful. 
And -- (Applause) And by pretending that the giant imbalance in power between capital and labor doesn't exist, neoliberal economic theory became essentially a protection racket for the rich. 
The third assumption, and by far the most pernicious, is a behavioral model that describes human beings as something called "homo economicus," which basically means that we are all perfectly selfish, perfectly rational and relentlessly self-maximizing. 
But just ask yourselves, is it plausible that every single time for your entire life, when you did something nice for somebody else, all you were doing was maximizing your own utility? 
Is it plausible that when a soldier jumps on a grenade to defend fellow soldiers, they're just promoting their narrow self-interest? 
If you think that's nuts, contrary to any reasonable moral intuition, that's because it is and, according to the latest science, not true. 
But it is this behavioral model which is at the cold, cruel heart of neoliberal economics, and it is as morally corrosive as it is scientifically wrong because, if we accept at face value that humans are fundamentally selfish, and then we look around the world at all of the unambiguous prosperity in it, then it follows logically, then it must be true by definition, that billions of individual acts of selfishness magically transubstantiate into prosperity and the common good. 
If we humans are merely selfish maximizers, then selfishness is the cause of our prosperity. 
Under this economic logic, greed is good, widening inequality is efficient, and the only purpose of the corporation can be to enrich shareholders, because to do otherwise would be to slow economic growth and harm the economy overall. 
And it is this gospel of selfishness which forms the ideological cornerstone of neoliberal economics, a way of thinking which has produced economic policies which have enabled me and my rich buddies in the top one percent to grab virtually all of the benefits of growth over the last 40 years. 
But, if instead we accept the latest empirical research, real science, which correctly describes human beings as highly cooperative, reciprocal and intuitively moral creatures, then it follows logically that it must be cooperation and not selfishness that is the cause of our prosperity, and it isn't our self-interest but rather our inherent reciprocity that is humanity's economic superpower. 
So at the heart of this new economics is a story about ourselves that grants us permission to be our best selves, and, unlike the old economics, this is a story that is virtuous and also has the virtue of being true. 
Now, I want to emphasize that this new economics is not something I have personally imagined or invented. 
Its theories and models are being developed and refined in universities around the world building on some of the best new research in economics, complexity theory, evolutionary theory, psychology, anthropology and other disciplines. 
And although this new economics does not yet have its own textbook or even a commonly agreed upon name, in broad strokes its explanation of where prosperity comes from goes something like this. 
So, market capitalism is an evolutionary system in which prosperity emerges through a positive feedback loop between increasing amounts of innovation and increasing amounts of consumer demand. 
Innovation is the process by which we solve human problems, consumer demand is the mechanism through which the market selects for useful innovations, and as we solve more problems, we become more prosperous. 
But as we become more prosperous, our problems and solutions become more complex, and this increasing technical complexity requires ever higher levels of social and economic cooperation in order to produce the more highly specialized products that define a modern economy. 
Now, the old economics is correct, of course, that competition plays a crucial role in how markets work, but what it fails to see is that it is largely a competition between highly cooperative groups -- competition between firms, competition between networks of firms, competition between nations -- and anyone who has ever run a successful business knows that building a cooperative team by including the talents of everyone is almost always a better strategy than just a bunch of selfish jerks. 
So how do we leave neoliberalism behind and build a more sustainable, more prosperous and more equitable society? 
The new economics suggests just five rules of thumb. 
First is that successful economies are not jungles, they're gardens, which is to say that markets, like gardens, must be tended, that the market is the greatest social technology ever invented for solving human problems, but unconstrained by social norms or democratic regulation, markets inevitably create more problems than they solve. 
Climate change, the great financial crisis of 2008 are two easy examples. 
The second rule is that inclusion creates economic growth. 
So the neoliberal idea that inclusion is this fancy luxury to be afforded if and when we have growth is both wrong and backwards. 
The economy is people. 
Including more people in more ways is what causes economic growth in market economies. 
The third principle is the purpose of the corporation is not merely to enrich shareholders. 
The greatest grift in contemporary economic life is the neoliberal idea that the only purpose of the corporation and the only responsibility of executives is to enrich themselves and shareholders. 
The new economics must and can insist that the purpose of the corporation is to improve the welfare of all stakeholders: customers, workers, community and shareholders alike. 
Rule four: greed is not good. 
Being rapacious doesn't make you a capitalist, it makes you a sociopath. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And in an economy as dependent upon cooperation at scale as ours, sociopathy is as bad for business as it is for society. 
And fifth and finally, unlike the laws of physics, the laws of economics are a choice. 
Now, neoliberal economic theory has sold itself to you as unchangeable natural law, when in fact it's social norms and constructed narratives based on pseudoscience. 
If we truly want a more equitable, more prosperous and more sustainable economy, if we want high-functioning democracies and civil society, we must have a new economics. 
And here's the good news: if we want a new economics, all we have to do is choose to have it. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Moderator: So Nick, I'm sure you get this question a lot. 
If you're so unhappy with the economic system, why not just give all your money away and join the 99 percent? 
Nick Hanauer: Yeah, no, yes, right. 
You get that a lot. You get that a lot. 
"If you care so much about taxes, why don't you pay more, and if you care so much about wages, why don't you pay more?" 
And I could do that. 
The problem is, it doesn't make that much difference, and I have discovered a strategy that works literally a hundred thousand times better -- Moderator: OK. 
NH: which is to use my money to build narratives and to pass laws that will require all the other rich people to pay taxes and pay their workers better. 
(Applause) And so, for example, the 15-dollar minimum wage that we cooked up has now affected 30 million workers. 
So that works better. 
Moderator: That's great. 
If you change your mind, we'll find some takers for you. 
NH: OK. Thank you. Moderator: Thank you very much. 

[This is an improvised talk (and intro) based on a suggested topic from the audience. 
The speaker doesn't know the content of the slides.] Moderator: Our next speaker -- (Laughter) is an -- incredibly -- (Laughter) Is an incredibly experienced linguist working at a lab at MIT with a small group of researchers, and through studying our language and the way that we communicate with other people, he has stumbled upon the secret of human intimacy. 
Here to give us his perspective, please welcome to the stage, Anthony Veneziale. 
(Applause) (Laughter) Anthony Veneziale: You might think I know what you're going through. 
You might be looking at me here on the red dot, or you might be looking at me on the screen. 
There's a one sixth of a second delay. 
Did I catch myself? I did. 
I could see myself before I turned, and that small delay creates a little bit of a divide. 
(Laughter) And a divide is exactly what happens with human language, and the processing of that language. 
I of course am working out of a small lab at MIT. 
(Laughter) And we are scraping for every insight that we can get. 
(Laughter) This is not often associated with a computational challenge, but in this case, we found that persistence of vision and auditory intake actually have more in common than we ever realized, and we can see it in this first slide. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Immediately your processing goes to, "Is that a hard-boiled egg?" 
(Laughter) "Is that perhaps the structural integrity of the egg being able to sustain the weight of what seems to be a rock? 
Aha, is it in fact a real rock?" 
We go to questions when we see visual information. 
But when we hear information, this is what happens. 
(Laughter) The floodgates in our mind open much like the streets of Shanghai. 
(Applause) So many pieces of information to process, so many ideas, concepts, feelings and, of course, vulnerabilities that we don't often wish to share. 
And so we hide, and we hide behind what we like to call the floodgate of intimacy. 
(Laughter) And what might that floodgate be holding? 
What is the dike upon which it is built? 
Well, first off -- (Laughter) we found that it's different for six different genotypes. 
(Applause) And, of course, we can start categorizing these genotypes into a neuronormative experience and a neurodiverse experience. 
(Laughter) On the right-hand side of the screen, you're seeing spikes for the neurodiverse thinking. 
Now, there are generally only two emotional states that a neurodiverse brain can tabulate and keep count of at any given time, thereby eliminating the possibility for them to be emotionally, sometimes, attuned to the present situation. 
But on the left-hand side, you can see the neuronormative brain, which can often handle about five different pieces of emotional cognitive information at any given time. 
These are the slight variances that you are seeing in the 75, 90 and 60 percentile, and then of course that dramatic difference of the 25, 40 and 35 percentile. 
(Laughter) But of course, what is the neural network that is helping to bridge and build these different discrepancies? 
(Laughter) Fear. 
(Laughter) (Applause) And as we all know, fear resides in the amygdala, and it is a very natural response, and it is very closely linked with visual perception. 
It is not as closely linked with verbal perception, so our fear receptors often will be going off in advance of any of our cognitive usage around verbal and words and cues of language. 
So as we see these fear moments, we of course are taken aback. 
We stumble in a certain direction, generally away from the intimacy. 
(Laughter) Now of course, there's a difference between the male perception and the female perception and of trans and those who are in between, all of those as well, and outside of the gender spectrum. 
(Laughter) But fear is the central underlying underpinning of all of our response systems. 
Fight-or-flight is one of the earliest, some say reptilian, response to our environment. 
How can we disengage or unhook ourselves from the horns of the amygdala? 
(Laughter) Well, I'd like to tell you the secret right now. 
(Applause) This is all making much, much too much sense. 
(Laughter) The secret lies in turning our backs to one another, and I know that that sounds absolutely like the opposite of what you were expecting, but when in a relationship you turn your back to your partner and place your back upon their back -- (Laughter) you eliminate visual cues. 
(Laughter) (Applause) You are more readily available to failing first, and failing first -- (Laughter) far outweighs the lengths we go to to appeal to others, to our partners and to ourselves. 
We spend billions and billions of dollars on clothing, on makeup, on the latest trend of glasses, but what we don't spend money and time on is connecting with each other in a way that is truthful and honest and stripped of those visual receptors. 
(Applause) (Laughter) It sounds hard, doesn't it? 
(Laughter) But we want to be aggressive about this. 
We don't want to just sit on the couch. 
As a historian said earlier today, it's important to get up and circumvent sometimes that couch. 
And how can we do it? 
Well yes, ice is a big part of it. 
Insights, compassion and empathy: I, C, E. 
(Applause) And when we start using this ice method, well, the possibilities become much bigger than us. 
In fact, they become smaller than you. 
On a molecular level, I believe that that insight is the unifying theme for every talk you have seen so far at TED and will continue as we of course embark on this journey here on this tiny planet, on the ledge, on the precipice, as we are seeing, yes, death is inevitable. 
(Laughter) Will it meet all of us at the same time, I think, is the variable we are inquiring. 
(Laughter) I think that timeline gets a bit longer when we use ice and when we rest our backs upon one another and build together, leaving behind the fear and working towards -- (Laughter) they'll edit this part out -- (Laughter) a ripened experience of love, compassion, intimacy based on a truth that you are sharing from your mind's eye and the heart that we all can touch, tactilely feel, have maybe potentially a mushy experience that we don't just throw out because it is browned, but let us slice in half the experience we have gathered, let us seed what the heart, the core, the seed of that idea in each of us is, and let us share it back to back. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

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

So ... we're in a real live war at the moment, and it's a war that we're truly losing. 
It's a war on superbugs. 
So you might wonder, if I'm going to talk about superbugs, why I'm showing you a photograph of some soccer fans -- Liverpool soccer fans celebrating a famous victory in Istanbul, a decade ago. 
In the back, in the red shirt, well, that's me, and next to me in the red hat, that's my friend Paul Rice. 
So a couple of years after this picture was taken, Paul went into hospital for some minor surgery, and he developed a superbug-related infection, and he died. 
And I was truly shocked. 
He was a healthy guy in the prime of life. 
So there and then, and actually with a lot of encouragement from a couple of TEDsters, I declared my own personal war on superbugs. 
So let's talk about superbugs for a moment. 
The story actually starts in the 1940s with the widespread introduction of antibiotics. 
And since then, drug-resistant bacteria have continued to emerge, and so we've been forced to develop newer and newer drugs to fight these new bacteria. 
And this vicious cycle actually is the origin of superbugs, which is simply bacteria for which we don't have effective drugs. 
I'm sure you'll recognize at least some of these superbugs. 
These are the more common ones around today. 
Last year, around 700,000 people died from superbug-related diseases. 
Looking to the future, if we carry on on the path we're going, which is basically a drugs-based approach to the problem, the best estimate by the middle of this century is that the worldwide death toll from superbugs will be 10 million. 
10 million. 
Just to put that in context, that's actually more than the number of people that died of cancer worldwide last year. 
So it seems pretty clear that we're not on a good road, and the drugs-based approach to this problem is not working. 
I'm a physicist, and so I wondered, could we take a physics-based approach -- a different approach to this problem. 
And in that context, the first thing we know for sure, is that we actually know how to kill every kind of microbe, every kind of virus, every kind of bacteria. 
And that's with ultraviolet light. 
We've actually known this for more than 100 years. 
I think you all know what ultraviolet light is. 
It's part of a spectrum that includes infrared, it includes visible light, and the short-wavelength part of this group is ultraviolet light. 
The key thing from our perspective here is that ultraviolet light kills bacteria by a completely different mechanism from the way drugs kill bacteria. 
So ultraviolet light is just as capable of killing a drug-resistant bacteria as any other bacteria, and because ultraviolet light is so good at killing all bugs, it's actually used a lot these days to sterilize rooms, sterilize working surfaces. 
What you see here is a surgical theater being sterilized with germicidal ultraviolet light. 
But what you don't see in this picture, actually, is any people, and there's a very good reason for that. 
Ultraviolet light is actually a health hazard, so it can damage cells in our skin, cause skin cancer, it can damage cells in our eye, cause eye diseases like cataract. 
So you can't use conventional, germicidal, ultraviolet light when there are people are around. 
And of course, we want to sterilize mostly when there are people around. 
So the ideal ultraviolet light would actually be able to kill all bacteria, including superbugs, but would be safe for human exposure. 
And actually that's where my physics background kicked into this story. 
Together with my physics colleagues, we realized there actually is a particular wavelength of ultraviolet light that should kill all bacteria, but should be safe for human exposure. 
That wavelength is called far-UVC light, and it's just the short-wavelength part of the ultraviolet spectrum. 
So let's see how that would work. 
What you're seeing here is the surface of our skin, and I'm going to superimpose on that some bacteria in the air above the skin. 
Now we're going to see what happens when conventional, germicidal, ultraviolet light impinges on this. 
So what you see is, as we know, germicidal light is really good at killing bacteria, but what you also see is that it penetrates into the upper layers of our skin, and it can damage those key cells in our skin which ultimately, when damaged, can lead to skin cancer. 
So let's compare now with far-UVC light -- same situation, skin and some bacteria in the air above them. 
So what you're seeing now is that again, far-UVC light's perfectly fine at killing bacteria, but what far-UVC light can't do is penetrate into our skin. 
And there's a good, solid physics reason for that: far-UVC light is incredibly, strongly absorbed by all biological materials, so it simply can't go very far. 
Now, viruses and bacteria are really, really, really small, so the far-UVC light can certainly penetrate them and kill them, but what it can't do is penetrate into skin, and it can't even penetrate the dead-cell area right at the very surface of our skin. 
So far-UVC light should be able to kill bacteria, but kill them safely. 
So that's the theory. 
It should work, should be safe. 
What about in practice? 
Does it really work? 
Is it really safe? 
So that's actually what our lab has been working on the past five or six years, and I'm delighted to say the answer to both these questions is an emphatic yes. 
Yes, it does work, but yes, it is safe. 
So I'm delighted to say that, but actually I'm not very surprised to say that, because it's purely the laws of physics at work. 
So let's look to the future. 
I'm thrilled that we now have a completely new weapon, and I should say an inexpensive weapon, in our fight against superbugs. 
For example, I see far-UVC lights in surgical theaters. 
I see far-UVC lights in food preparation areas. 
And in terms of preventing the spread of viruses, I see far-UVC lights in schools, preventing the spread of influenza, preventing the spread of measles, and I see far-UVC lights in airports or airplanes, preventing the global spread of viruses like H1N1 virus. 
So back to my friend Paul Rice. 
He was actually a well-known and well-loved local politician in his and my hometown of Liverpool, and they put up a statue in his memory in the center of Liverpool, and there it is. 
But me, I want Paul's legacy to be a major advance in this war against superbugs. 
Armed with the power of light, that's actually within our grasp. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: Stay up here, David, I've got a question for you. 
(Applause) David, tell us where you're up to in developing this, and what are the remaining obstacles to trying to roll out and realize this dream? 
David Brenner: Well, I think we now know that it kills all bacteria, but we sort of knew that before we started, but we certainly tested that. 
So we have to do lots and lots of tests about safety, and so it's more about safety than it is about efficacy. 
And we need to do short-term tests, and we need to do long-term tests to make sure you can't develop melanoma many years on. 
So those studies are pretty well done at this point. 
The FDA of course is something we have to deal with, and rightly so, because we certainly can't use this in the real world without FDA approval. 
CA: Are you trying to launch first in the US, or somewhere else? 
DB: Actually, in a couple of countries. 
In Japan and in the US, both. 
CA: Have you been able to persuade biologists, doctors, that this is a safe approach? 
DB: Well, as you can imagine, there is a certain skepticism because everybody knows that UV light is not safe. 
So when somebody comes along and says, "Well, this particular UV light is safe," there is a barrier to be crossed, but the data are there, and I think that's what we're going to be standing on. 
CA: Well, we wish you well. 
This is potentially such important work. 
Thank you so much for sharing this with us. 
Thank you, David. 
(Applause) 

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

Hello. 
My name is Herman, and I've always been struck by how the most important, impactful, tsunami-like changes to our culture and our society always come from those things that we least think are going to have that impact. 
I mean, as a computer scientist, I remember when Facebook was just image-sharing in dorm rooms, and depending upon who you ask, it's now involved in toppling elections. 
I remember when cryptocurrency or automated trading were sort of ideas by a few renegades in the financial institutions in the world for automated trading, or online, for cryptocurrency, and they're now coming to quickly shape the way that we operate. 
And I think each of you can recall that moment where one of these ideas felt like some ignorable, derisive thing, and suddenly, oh, crap, the price of Bitcoin is what it is. 
Or, oh, crap, guess who's been elected. 
The reality is that, you know, from my perspective, I think that we're about to encounter that again. 
And I think one of the biggest, most impactful changes in the way we live our lives, to the ways we're educated, probably even to how we end up making an income, is about to come not from AI, not from space travel or biotech -- these are all very important future inventions -- but in the next five years, I think it's going to come from video games. 
So that's a bold claim, OK. 
I see some skeptical faces in the audience. 
But if we take a moment to try to look at what video games are already becoming in our lives today, and what just a little bit of technological advancement is about to create, it starts to become more of an inevitability. 
And I think the possibilities are quite electrifying. 
So let's just take a moment to think about scale. 
I mean, there's already 2.6 billion people who play games. 
And the reality is that's a billion more than five years ago. 
A billion more people in that time. 
No religion, no media, nothing has spread like that. 
And there's likely to be a billion more when Africa and India gain the infrastructure to sort of fully realize the possibilities of gaming. 
But what I find really special is -- and this often shocks a lot of people -- is that the average age of a gamer, like, have a guess, think about it. 
It's not six, it's not 18, it's not 12. 
It's 34. 
[Average age of an American gamer] It's older than me. 
And that tells us something, that this isn't entertainment for children anymore. 
This is already a medium like literature or anything else that's becoming a fundamental part of our lives. 
One stat I like is that people who generally picked up gaming in the last sort of 15, 20 years generally don't stop. 
Something changed in the way that this medium is organized. 
And more than that, it's not just play anymore, right? 
You've heard some examples today, but people are earning an income playing games. 
And not in the obvious ways. 
Yes, there's e-sports, there's prizes, there's the opportunity to make money in a competitive way. 
But there's also people earning incomes modding games, building content in them, doing art in them. 
I mean, there's something at a scale akin to the Florentine Renaissance, happening on your kid's iPhone in your living room. 
And it's being ignored. 
Now, what's even more exciting for me is what's about to happen. 
And when you think about gaming, you're probably already imagining that it features these massive, infinite worlds, but the truth is, games have been deeply limited for a very long time in a way that kind of we in the industry have tried very hard to cover up with as much trickery as possible. 
The metaphor I like to use, if you'd let me geek out for a moment, is the notion of a theater. 
For the last 10 years, games have massively advanced the visual effects, the physical immersion, the front end of games. 
But behind the scenes, the actual experiential reality of a game world has remained woefully limited. 
I'll put that in perspective for a moment. 
I could leave this theater right now, I could do some graffiti, get in a fight, fall in love. 
I might actually do all of those things after this, but the point is that all of that would have consequence. 
It would ripple through reality -- all of you could interact with that at the same time. 
It would be persistent. 
And those are very important qualities to what makes the real world real. 
Now, behind the scenes in games, we've had a limit for a very long time. 
And the limit is, behind the visuals, the actual information being exchanged between players or entities in a single game world has been deeply bounded by the fact that games mostly take place on a single server or a single machine. 
Even The World of Warcraft is actually thousands of smaller worlds. 
When you hear about concerts in Fortnite, you're actually hearing about thousands of small concerts. 
You know, individual, as was said earlier today, campfires or couches. 
There isn't really this possibility to bring it all together. 
Let's take a moment to just really understand what that means. 
When you look at a game, you might see this, beautiful visuals, all of these things happening in front of you. 
But behind the scenes in an online game, this is what it looks like. 
To a computer scientist, all you see is just a little bit of information being exchanged by a tiny handful of meaningful entities or objects. 
You might be thinking, "I've played in an infinite world." 
Well it's more that you've played on a treadmill. 
As you've been walking through that world, we've been cleverly causing the parts of it that you're not in to vanish, and the parts of it in front of you to appear. 
A good trick, but not the basis for the revolution that I promised you in the beginning of this talk. 
But the reality is, for those of you that are passionate gamers and might be excited about this, and for those of you that are afraid and may not be, all of that is about to change. 
Because finally, the technology is in place to go well beyond the limits that we've previously seen. 
I've dedicated my career to this, there are many others working on the problem -- I'd hardly take credit for it myself, but we're at the point now where we can finally do this impossible hard thing of weaving together thousands of disparate machines into single simulations that are convenient enough to not be one-offs, but to be buildable by anybody. 
And to be at the point where we can start to experience those things that we can't yet fathom. 
Let's just take a moment to visualize that. 
I'm talking about not individual little simulations but a massive possibility of huge networks of interaction. 
Massive global events that can happen inside that. 
Things that even in the real world become challenging to produce at that kind of scale. 
And I know some of you are gamers, so I'm going to show you some footage of some things that I'm pretty sure I'm allowed to do, from some of our partners. 
TED and me had a back-and-forth on this. 
These are a few things that not many people have seen before, some new experiences powered by this type of technology. 
I'll just [take] a moment to show you some of this stuff. 
This is a single game world with thousands of simultaneous people participating in a conflict. 
It also has its own ecosystem, its own sense of predator and prey. 
Every single object you see here is simulated in some way. 
This is a game being built by one of the biggest companies in the world, NetEase, a huge Chinese company. 
And they've made an assistant creative simulation where groups of players can cocreate together, across multiple devices, in a world that doesn't vanish when you're done. 
It's a place to tell stories and have adventures. 
Even the weather is simulated. 
And that's kind of awesome. 
And this is my personal favorite. 
This is a group of people, pioneers in Berlin, a group called Klang Games, and they're completely insane, and they'll love me for saying that. 
And they found a way to model, basically, an entire planet. 
They're going to have a simulation with millions of non-player characters and players engaging. 
They actually grabbed Lawrence Lessig to help understand the political ramifications of the world they're creating. 
This is the sort of astounding set of experiences, well beyond what we might have imagined, that are now going to be possible. 
And that's just the first step in this technology. 
So if we step beyond that, what happens? 
Well, computer science tends to be all exponential, once we crack the really hard problems. 
And I'm pretty sure that very soon, we're going to be in a place where we can make this type of computational power look like nothing. 
And when that happens, the opportunities ... 
It's worth taking a moment to try to imagine what I'm talking about here. 
Hundreds of thousands or millions of people being able to coinhabit the same space. 
The last time any of us as a species had the opportunity to build or do something together with that may people was in antiquity. 
And the circumstances were less than optimal, shall we say. 
Mostly conflicts or building pyramids. 
Not necessarily the best thing for us to be spending our time doing. 
But if you bring together that many people, the kind of shared experience that can create ... 
I think it exercises a social muscle in us that we've lost and forgotten. 
Going even beyond that, I want to take a moment to think about what it means for relationships, for identity. 
If we can give each other worlds, experiences at scale where we can spend a meaningful amount of our time, we can change what it means to be an individual. 
We can go beyond a single identity to a diverse set of personal identities. 
The gender, the race, the personality traits you were born with might be something you want to experiment differently with. 
You might be someone that wants to be more than one person. 
We all are, inside, multiple people. 
We rarely get the opportunity to flex that. 
It's also about empathy. 
I have a grandmother who I have literally nothing in common with. 
I love her to bits, but every story she has begins in 1940 and ends sometime in 1950. 
And every story I have is like 50 years later. 
But if we could coinhabit, co-experience things together, that undiminished by physical frailty or by lack of context, create opportunities together, that changes things, that bonds people in different ways. 
I'm struck by how social media has amplified our many differences, and really made us more who we are in the presence of other people. 
I think games could really start to create an opportunity for us to empathize again. 
To have shared adversity, shared opportunity. 
I mean, statistically, at this moment in time, there are people who are on the opposite sides of a conflict, who have been matchmade together into a game and don't even know it. 
That's an incredible opportunity to change the way we look at things. 
Finally, for those of you who perhaps are more cynical about all of this, who maybe don't think that virtual worlds and games are your cup of tea. 
There's a reality you have to accept, and that is that the economic impact of what I'm talking about will be profound. 
Right now, thousands of people have full-time jobs in gaming. 
Soon, it will be millions of people. 
Wherever there's a mobile phone, there will be a job. 
An opportunity for something that is creative and rich and gives you an income, no matter what country you're in, no matter what skills or opportunities you might think you have. 
Probably the first dollar most kids born today make might be in a game. 
That will be the new paper route, that will be the new opportunity for an income at the earliest time in your life. 
So I kind of want to end with almost a plea, really, more than thoughts. 
A sense of, I think, how we need to face this new opportunity a little differently to some we have in the past. 
It's so hypocritical for yet another technologist to stand up on stage and say, "The future will be great, technology will fix it." 
And the reality is, this is going to have downsides. 
But those downsides will only be amplified if we approach, once again, with cynicism and derision, the opportunities that this presents. 
The worst thing that we could possibly do is let the same four or five companies end up dominating yet another adjacent space. 
(Applause) Because they're not just going to define how and who makes money from this. 
The reality is, we're now talking about defining how we think, what the rules are around identity and collaboration, the rules of the world we live in. 
This has got to be something we all own, we all cocreate. 
So, my final plea is really to those engineers, those scientists, those artists in the audience today. 
Maybe some of you dreamed of working on space travel. 
The reality is, there are worlds you can build right here, right now, that can transform people's lives. 
There are still huge technological frontiers that need to be overcome here, akin to those we faced when building the early internet. 
All the technology behind virtual worlds is different. 
So, my plea to you is this. 
Let's engage, let's all engage, let's actually try to make this something that we shape in a positive way, rather than once again have be done to us. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

So, in 2016, I was commissioned to produce a photo essay about the water crisis in Flint, Michigan. 
And that's been going on since 2014. 
And I accepted the commission with the idea that I would photograph three generations of women dealing with the crisis on a daily basis. 
I was fortunate to meet two best friends, artists, activists and poets Amber Hasan and Shea Cobb, who took me around Flint. 
As a school bus driver, Shea Cobb became the central figure of the photo essay, along with her mother, Ms. Renée, and her eight-year-old daughter, Zion. 
I obsessively followed Shea's school bus routes. 
And when Shea wasn't driving the bus, she would be watching over Zion, making sure she was studying. 
I embedded myself in every intimate facet of Shea's life. 
When Shea took me to Zion's school, and I saw the water fountains covered with signs that said, "Contaminated. Do not drink," I couldn't pick up my camera to photograph it. 
It rocked me to the core to see that in America, we can go from fountains that say "Whites" or "Blacks only," to today seeing fountains that say, "Contaminated water. Do not drink." 
And somehow, that's acceptable? 
The residents in Flint have been forced to drink with, cook with and bathe with bottled water, while paying the highest water bills in the country for water that is infected with deadly legionella bacteria. 
It was natural for me to go to Flint, because industrial pollution, bacteria-contaminated water were all too familiar for me growing up in my hometown, Braddock, Pennsylvania, where my mother and I battled cancer and autoimmune disorders like lupus. 
Our 14-year collaboration, "The Notion of Family," was created out of our struggle to survive environmental racism, healthcare inequity and chemical emissions that were being deregulated and released from the United States Steel Corporation, making Braddock the town with the highest asthma and infant mortality rates in the country. 
From the Monongahela River to the Flint River, in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois, "The town, the whole valley, has turned its back upon the river. 
It has used it as a sewer, as a drain, as a place for throwing their waste." 
General Motors has been cited for dumping chemicals in the Flint River for decades. 
When my photo essay "Flint is Family" came out in August of 2016, it was released to remind America that although Flint was no longer headline news, the water crisis was far from over. 
And, of course, I knew it was going to take more than a series of photographs on my part to bring relief to the people in Vehicle City. 
Shea and I bonded over our mothers and grandmothers. 
Amber and I bonded over our battles with lupus. 
Together, we decided to remain in each other's life and continue our creative efforts. 
In 2017, Shea and Amber cofounded artist collective The Sister Tour, whose mission is to provide a safe space for Flint artists. 
One year later, I mounted my solo exhibition, "Flint is Family," here in New York City at Gavin Brown's Enterprise on West 127th Street. 
As the audience approaches the facade of the building, they see a 30-foot billboard. 
The 30-foot billboard is made of three large color negatives with the message "Water Is Life," spelled out in Nestle water bottles by The Sister Tour. 
Nestle, the largest water-bottling company in the world, pumps 400 gallons of water per minute out of aquifers in Lake Michigan, nearly free of charge. 
The company also extracts millions of liters of water from First Nation reservations, while they have no access to clean water at all. 
This is a fundraiser print that I used to raise money to send The Sister Tour to different venues to educate people on the ongoing crisis. 
I also continued to keep it in the public eye by producing countdown flags that were raised on institutions across the country. 
This past June, Amber emailed me with the news that Michigan's attorney general dropped all criminal charges in the Flint Water Crisis investigation, where eight state and city employees were facing charges as serious as manslaughter. 
I could no longer idly stand by and wait for the government to do its job. 
Justice has been delayed, and justice has been denied. 
It's been five years, and we're still waiting on justice for the men, women and children in Flint. 
I asked Amber, "What can I do?" 
She told me about a man named Moses West that she met in Puerto Rico, who invented a 26,000-pound atmospheric water generator. 
Amber took Moses to elected officials in the city of Flint. 
None of them seemed interested in bringing the machine for relief to Flint at all. 
Amber needed to get the machine from a military base in Texas all the way to Flint. 
Nobody in Flint had that kind of money lying around. 
And it was at that point that I decided to take the proceeds from my solo exhibition "Flint is Family," along with the generous match grant from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, and sent it to Moses West. 
This past July, Moses West and his atmospheric water generator arrived to Flint, Michigan, on North Saginaw between Marengo and Pulaski, and is actually still there right now, operating. 
This community that sits three miles from downtown has been stripped of its schools, access to healthy grocery stores and clean water. 
Socially, it's viewed as a violent, poor community. 
But I see something completely different. 
Moses, an officer, Ranger, veteran, was very clear about his water rescue mission: Bring relief of free, clean water to the people in Flint. 
Teach them how to use the machine, teach them how to take care of it, and most importantly, take ownership of the machine. 
Tell everybody across the city to bring all their containers and come and take as much water as they can stock up on, especially before the winter season hits; the machine doesn't extract moisture in freezing temperatures. 
This technology pulls air through a high-volume air filter. 
It mechanically creates condensation, which produces 2,000 gallons of water per day. 
Residents are free to walk up to the machine anywhere between 9am and 8pm daily and take as much as they want, alleviating them from standing in long lines for bottled water. 
I've been at the machine, interviewing people, asking them, "What does it mean to see Moses and his machine in [your] community?" 
And, "What has it been like living without access to clean water?" 
Alita told me, "It's a miracle that God gave Moses the knowledge and technology to provide us with pure drinking water." 
She also told me that prior to the machine coming, she had severe headaches, and the water made her so sick to her stomach, she couldn't eat. 
Tina told me that the lead-contaminated water made her hair fall out. 
Usually, she's weak and very light-headed. 
Since using the machine, she's had energy and strength. 
David, he was overwhelmed with joy that someone from Texas cared. 
When he tasted the water, he thought to himself, "Now, this is the way God intended water to be." 
He brings three seven-gallon containers to refill to use at his barbecue stand. 
Through creativity and solidarity, Amber Hasan, Shea Cobb, Tuklor Senegal, The Sister Tour, myself, the people of Flint, Dexter Moon, Moses West and his atmospheric water generator have been able to provide 120,000 gallons of free, clean water. 
(Applause) The people in Flint deserve access to clean water. 
Water is life. 
It is the spirit that binds us from sickness, death and destruction. 
Imagine how many millions of lives we could save if Moses's machine were in places like Newark, New Jersey, South Africa and India, with compassion instead of profit motives. 
I loaded my camera, I locked my focus, and I placed my finger over the shutter release, as Shea and Zion went to take their first sip of clean water. 
When the shutter released, I was overcome with a deep sense of joy and righteousness. 
When I sent Shea some of the photographs, she wrote, "Thank you again for the light that you bring to my city." 
I immediately replied, "The light was already there within you." 
It's been four years since I've been photographing in Flint, and finally, I've been able to render a poetic justice. 
No matter how dark a situation may be, a camera can extract the light and turn a negative into a positive. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

If you're here today -- and I'm very happy that you are -- you've all heard about how sustainable development will save us from ourselves. 
However, when we're not at TED, we are often told that a real sustainability policy agenda is just not feasible, especially in large urban areas like New York City. 
And that's because most people with decision-making powers, in both the public and the private sector, really don't feel as though they're in danger. 
The reason why I'm here today, in part, is because of a dog -- an abandoned puppy I found back in the rain, back in 1998. 
She turned out to be a much bigger dog than I'd anticipated. 
When she came into my life, we were fighting against a huge waste facility planned for the East River waterfront despite the fact that our small part of New York City already handled more than 40 percent of the entire city's commercial waste: a sewage treatment pelletizing plant, a sewage sludge plant, four power plants, the world's largest food-distribution center, as well as other industries that bring more than 60,000 diesel truck trips to the area each week. 
So when I was contacted by the Parks Department about a $10,000 seed-grant initiative to help develop waterfront projects, I thought they were really well-meaning, but a bit naive. 
I'd lived in this area all my life, and you could not get to the river, because of all the lovely facilities that I mentioned earlier. 
Then, while jogging with my dog one morning, she pulled me into what I thought was just another illegal dump. 
There were weeds and piles of garbage and other stuff that I won't mention here, but she kept dragging me, and lo and behold, at the end of that lot was the river. 
I knew that this forgotten little street-end, abandoned like the dog that brought me there, was worth saving. 
And I knew it would grow to become the proud beginnings of the community-led revitalization of the new South Bronx. 
And just like my new dog, it was an idea that got bigger than I'd imagined. 
We garnered much support along the way, and the Hunts Point Riverside Park became the first waterfront park that the South Bronx had had in more than 60 years. 
And in the fall, I'm going to exchange marriage vows with my beloved. 
(Applause) That's him pressing my buttons back there, which he does all the time. 
(Laughter) (Applause) But those of us living in environmental justice communities are the canary in the coal mine. 
Environmental justice, for those of you who may not be familiar with the term, goes something like this: no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other. 
Unfortunately, race and class are extremely reliable indicators as to where one might find the good stuff, like parks and trees, and where one might find the bad stuff, like power plants and waste facilities. 
As a black person in America, I am twice as likely as a white person to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest risk to my health. 
I am five times more likely to live within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility, which I do. 
These land-use decisions created the hostile conditions that lead to problems like obesity, diabetes and asthma. 
Why would someone leave their home to go for a brisk walk in a toxic neighborhood? 
Our 27 percent obesity rate is high even for this country, and diabetes comes with it. 
One out of four South Bronx children has asthma. 
Our asthma hospitalization rate is seven times higher than the national average. 
These impacts are coming everyone's way. 
And we all pay dearly for solid waste costs, health problems associated with pollution and more odiously, the cost of imprisoning our young black and Latino men, who possess untold amounts of untapped potential. 
Fifty percent of our residents live at or below the poverty line; 25 percent of us are unemployed. 
Low-income citizens often use emergency-room visits as primary care. 
This comes at a high cost to taxpayers and produces no proportional benefits. 
Poor people are not only still poor, they are still unhealthy. 
Fortunately, there are many people like me who are striving for solutions that won't compromise the lives of low-income communities of color in the short term, and won't destroy us all in the long term. 
None of us want that, and we all have that in common. 
So what else do we have in common? 
Well, first of all, we're all incredibly good-looking. 
(Laughter) Graduated high school, college, post-graduate degrees, traveled to interesting places, didn't have kids in your early teens, financially stable, never been imprisoned. 
OK. Good. 
(Laughter) But, besides being a black woman, I am different from most of you in some other ways. 
I watched nearly half of the buildings in my neighborhood burn down. 
My big brother Lenny fought in Vietnam, only to be gunned down a few blocks from our home. 
Yeah, I'm a poor black child from the ghetto. 
These things make me different from you. 
But the things we have in common set me apart from most of the people in my community, and I am in between these two worlds with enough of my heart to fight for justice in the other. 
In the late '40s, my dad -- a Pullman porter, son of a slave -- bought a house in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx, and a few years later, he married my mom. 
At the time, the community was a mostly white, working-class neighborhood. 
My dad was not alone. 
And as others like him pursued their own version of the American dream, white flight became common in the South Bronx and in many cities around the country. 
Red-lining was used by banks, wherein certain sections of the city, including ours, were deemed off-limits to any sort of investment. 
Many landlords believed it was more profitable to torch their buildings and collect insurance money rather than to sell under those conditions -- dead or injured former tenants notwithstanding. 
Hunts Point was formerly a walk-to-work community, but now residents had neither work nor home to walk to. 
A national highway construction boom was added to our problems. 
In New York State, Robert Moses spearheaded an aggressive highway-expansion campaign. 
One of its primary goals was to make it easier for residents of wealthy communities in Westchester County to go to Manhattan. 
The South Bronx, which lies in between, did not stand a chance. 
Residents were often given less than a month's notice before their buildings were razed. 
600,000 people were displaced. 
The common perception was that only pimps and pushers and prostitutes were from the South Bronx. 
And if you are told from your earliest days that nothing good is going to come from your community, that it's bad and ugly, how could it not reflect on you? 
So now, my family's property was worthless, save for that it was our home, and all we had. 
And luckily for me, that home and the love inside of it, along with help from teachers, mentors and friends along the way, was enough. 
Now, why is this story important? 
Because from a planning perspective, economic degradation begets environmental degradation, which begets social degradation. 
The disinvestment that began in the 1960s set the stage for all the environmental injustices that were to come. 
Antiquated zoning and land-use regulations are still used to this day to continue putting polluting facilities in my neighborhood. 
Are these factors taken into consideration when land-use policy is decided? 
What costs are associated with these decisions? 
And who pays? Who profits? 
Does anything justify what the local community goes through? 
This was "planning" -- in quotes -- that did not have our best interests in mind. 
That small park I told you about earlier was the first stage of building a Greenway movement in the South Bronx. 
I wrote a one-and-a-quarter-million dollar federal transportation grant to design the plan for a waterfront esplanade with dedicated on-street bike paths. 
Physical improvements help inform public policy regarding traffic safety, the placement of the waste and other facilities, which, if done properly, don't compromise a community's quality of life. 
They provide opportunities to be more physically active, as well as local economic development. 
Think bike shops, juice stands. 
This is Lafayette Avenue -- and that's redesigned by Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects. 
And once this path is constructed, it'll connect the South Bronx with more than 400 acres of Randall's Island Park. 
Right now we're separated by about 25 feet of water, but this link will change that. 
As we nurture the natural environment, its abundance will give us back even more. 
We run a project called the Bronx [Environmental] Stewardship Training, which provides job training in the fields of ecological restoration, so that folks from our community have the skills to compete for these well-paying jobs. 
Little by little, we're seeding the area with green-collar jobs -- and with people that have both a financial and personal stake in their environment. 
The Sheridan Expressway is an underutilized relic of the Robert Moses era, built with no regard for the neighborhoods that were divided by it. 
Even during rush hour, it goes virtually unused. 
The community created an alternative transportation plan that allows for the removal of the highway. 
We have the opportunity now to bring together all the stakeholders to re-envision how this 28 acres can be better utilized for parkland, affordable housing and local economic development. 
We also built New York City's first green and cool roof demonstration project on top of our offices. 
Cool roofs are highly-reflective surfaces that don't absorb solar heat, and pass it on to the building or atmosphere. 
Green roofs are soil and living plants. 
Both can be used instead of petroleum-based roofing materials that absorb heat, contribute to urban "heat island" effect and degrade under the sun, which we in turn breathe. 
Green roofs also retain up to 75 percent of rainfall, so they reduce a city's need to fund costly end-of-pipe solutions -- which, incidentally, are often located in environmental justice communities like mine. 
And they provide habitats for our little friends! 
[Butterfly] (Laughter) So cool! 
Anyway, the demonstration project is a springboard for our own green roof installation business, bringing jobs and sustainable economic activity to the South Bronx. 
[Green is the new black ...] (Laughter) (Applause) I like that, too. 
Anyway, I know Chris told us not to do pitches up here, but since I have all of your attention: We need investors. End of pitch. 
It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. 
Anyway -- (Laughter) (Applause) OK. Katrina. 
Prior to Katrina, the South Bronx and New Orleans' Ninth Ward had a lot in common. 
Both were largely populated by poor people of color, both hotbeds of cultural innovation: think hip-hop and jazz. 
Both are waterfront communities that host both industries and residents in close proximity of one another. 
In the post-Katrina era, we have still more in common. 
We're at best ignored, and maligned and abused, at worst, by negligent regulatory agencies, pernicious zoning and lax governmental accountability. 
Neither the destruction of the Ninth Ward nor the South Bronx was inevitable. 
But we have emerged with valuable lessons about how to dig ourselves out. 
We are more than simply national symbols of urban blight or problems to be solved by empty campaign promises of presidents come and gone. 
Now will we let the Gulf Coast languish for a decade or two, like the South Bronx did? 
Or will we take proactive steps and learn from the homegrown resource of grassroots activists that have been born of desperation in communities like mine? 
Now listen, I do not expect individuals, corporations or government to make the world a better place because it is right or moral. 
This presentation today only represents some of what I've been through. 
Like a tiny little bit. You've no clue. 
But I'll tell you later, if you want to know. 
(Laughter) But -- I know it's the bottom line, or one's perception of it, that motivates people in the end. 
I'm interested in what I like to call the "triple bottom line" that sustainable development can produce. 
Developments that have the potential to create positive returns for all concerned: the developers, government and the community where these projects go up. 
And we are operating with a comprehensive urban-planning deficit. 
A parade of government subsidies is going to propose big-box and stadium developments in the South Bronx, but there is scant coordination between city agencies on how to deal with the cumulative effects of increased traffic, pollution, solid waste and the impacts on open space. 
And their approaches to local economic and job development are so lame it's not even funny. 
Because on top of that, the world's richest sports team is replacing the House That Ruth Built by destroying two well-loved community parks. 
Now, we'll have even less than that stat I told you about earlier. 
And although less than 25 percent of South Bronx residents own cars, these projects include thousands of new parking spaces, yet zip in terms of mass public transit. 
Now, what's missing from the larger debate is a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis between not fixing an unhealthy, environmentally-challenged community, versus incorporating structural, sustainable changes. 
My agency is working closely with Columbia University and others to shine a light on these issues. 
Ours is a city, not a wilderness preserve. 
And, but I don't have -- (Laughter) You probably all have, and if you haven't, you need to. 
(Laughter) So I don't have a problem with developers making money. 
There's enough precedent out there to show that a sustainable, community-friendly development can still make a fortune. 
Fellow TEDsters Bill McDonough and Amory Lovins -- both heroes of mine by the way -- have shown that you can actually do that. 
I do have a problem with developments that hyper-exploit politically vulnerable communities for profit. 
That it continues is a shame upon us all, because we are all responsible for the future that we create. 
But one of the things I do to remind myself of greater possibilities, is to learn from visionaries in other cities. 
This is my version of globalization. 
Let's take Bogota. 
Poor, Latino, surrounded by runaway gun violence and drug trafficking; a reputation not unlike that of the South Bronx. 
However, this city was blessed in the late 1990s with a highly-influential mayor named Enrique Peñalosa. 
He looked at the demographics. 
If you're a mayor, you can do something about that. 
His administration narrowed key municipal thoroughfares from five lanes to three, outlawed parking on those streets, expanded pedestrian walkways and bike lanes, created public plazas, created one of the most efficient bus mass-transit systems in the entire world. 
But as people began to see that they were being put first on issues reflecting their day-to-day lives, incredible things happened. 
People stopped littering. 
Crime rates dropped, because the streets were alive with people. 
His administration attacked several typical urban problems at one time, and on a third-world budget, at that. 
But the bottom line is: their people-first agenda was not meant to penalize those who could actually afford cars, but rather, to provide opportunities for all Bogotanos to participate in the city's resurgence. 
That development should not come at the expense of the majority of the population is still considered a radical idea here in the U.S. 
But Bogota's example has the power to change that. 
You, however, are blessed with the gift of influence. 
That's why you're here and why you value the information we exchange. 
Use your influence in support of comprehensive, sustainable change everywhere. 
Don't just talk about it at TED. 
This is a nationwide policy agenda I'm trying to build, and as you all know, politics are personal. 
Help me make green the new black. 
Make it a part of your dinner and cocktail conversations. 
Help me fight for environmental and economic justice. 
Support investments with a triple-bottom-line return. 
Help me democratize sustainability by bringing everyone to the table, and insisting that comprehensive planning can be addressed everywhere. 
Oh good, glad I have a little more time! 
Listen -- when I spoke to Mr. Gore the other day after breakfast, I asked him how environmental justice activists were going to be included in his new marketing strategy. 
His response was a grant program. 
I don't think he understood that I wasn't asking for funding. 
(Applause) What troubled me was that this top-down approach is still around. 
Now, don't get me wrong, we need money. 
(Laughter) But grassroots groups are needed at the table during the decision-making process. 
Of the 90 percent of the energy that Mr. Gore reminded us that we waste every day, don't add wasting our energy, intelligence and hard-earned experience to that count. 
(Applause) I have come from so far to meet you like this. 
Please don't waste me. 
By working together, we can become one of those small, rapidly-growing groups of individuals who actually have the audacity and courage to believe that we actually can change the world. 
We might have come to this conference from very, very different stations in life, but believe me, we all share one incredibly powerful thing. 
We have nothing to lose and everything to gain. 
Ciao, bellos! 

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

I am an ideas activist. 
That means I fight for ideas I believe in to have their place in the sun, regardless of which side of the equator they were born. 
As well I should. 
I myself am from that part of the world often euphemistically referred to as either "the Global South" or "the developing world." 
But let's be blunt about it: when we say those words, what we really mean is the poor world -- those corners of the world with ready-made containers for the hand-me-down ideas of other places and other people. 
But I'm here to depart a little bit from the script and to try and convince you that these places are actually alive and bubbling with ideas. 
My real issue is: Where do I even start? 
So maybe Egypt, Alexandria, where we meet Rizwan. 
When he walks outside his souk, walks into a pharmacy for heart medicine that can prevent the blood in his arteries from clotting, he confronts the fact that, despite a growing epidemic that currently accounts for 82 percent of all deaths in Egypt, it is the medicines that can address these conditions that counterfeiters, ever the evil geniuses they are, have decided to target. 
Counterfeiters making knockoff medicines. 
Luckily for Rizwan, my team and I, working in partnership with the largest pharmaceutical company in Africa, have placed unique codes -- think of them like one-time passwords -- on each pack of the best-selling heart medicine in Egypt. 
So when Rizwan buys heart medicine, he can key in these one-time passwords to a toll-free short code that we've set up on all the telecom companies in Egypt for free. 
He gets a message -- call it the message of life -- which reassures him that this medicine is not one of the 12 percent of all medicines in Egypt that are counterfeits. 
From the gorgeous banks of the Nile, we glide into the beautiful Rift Valley of Kenya. 
In Narok Town, we meet Ole Lenku, salt-of-the-earth fellow. 
When he walks into an agrodealer's shop, all he wants is certified and proper cabbage seeds that, if he were to plant them, will yield a harvest rich enough that he can pay for the school fees of his children. 
That's all he wants. 
Unfortunately, by the reckoning of most international organizations, 40 percent of all the seeds sold in Eastern and Southern Africa are of questionable quality, sometimes outrightly fake. 
Luckily for Ole, once again, our team has been at work, and, working with the leading agriculture regulator in Kenya, we've digitized the entire certification process for seeds in that country, every seed -- millet, sorghum, maize -- such that when Ole Lenku keys in a code on a packet of millet, he's able to retrieve a digital certificate that assures him that the seed is properly certified. 
From Kenya, we head to Noida in India, where the irrepressible Ambika is holding on very fast to her dream of becoming an elite athlete, safe in the knowledge that because of our ingredients rating technology, she's not going to ingest something accidentally, which will mess up her doping tests and kick her out of the sports she loves. 
Finally, we alight in Ghana, my own home country, where another problem needs addressing -- the problem of under-vaccination or poor-quality vaccination. 
You see, when you put some vaccines into the bloodstream of an infant, you are giving them a lifetime insurance against dangerous diseases that can cripple them or kill them. 
Sometimes, this is for a lifetime. 
The problem is that vaccines are delicate organisms really, and they need to be stored between two degrees and eight degrees. 
And if you don't do that, they lose their potency, and they no longer confer the immunity the child deserves. 
Working with computer vision scientists, we've converted simple markers on the vials of vaccines into what you might regard as crude thermometers. 
So then, these patterns change slowly over time in response to temperature until they leave a distinct pattern on the surface of the vaccine, such that a nurse, with a scan of the phone, can detect if the vaccine was stored properly in the right temperature and therefore is still good for use before administering this to the child -- literally securing the next generation. 
These are some of the solutions at work saving lives, redeeming societies, in these parts of the world. 
But I would remind you that there are powerful ideas behind them, and I'll recap a few. 
One, that social trust is not the same as interpersonal trust. 
Two, that the division between consumption and regulation in an increasingly interdependent world is no longer viable. 
And three, that decentralized autonomy, regardless of what our blockchain enthusiasts in the West -- whom I respect a lot -- say, are not as important as reinforcing social accountability feedback loops. 
These are some of the ideas. 
Now, every time I go somewhere and I give this speech and I make these comments and I provide these examples, people say, "If these ideas are so damn brilliant, why aren't they everywhere? 
I've never heard of them." 
I want to assure you, the reason why you have not heard of these ideas is exactly the point I made in the beginning. 
And that is that there are parts of the world whose good ideas simply don't scale because of the latitude on which they were born. 
I call that "mental latitude imperialism." 
(Laughter) That really is the reason. 
But you may counter and say, "Well, maybe it's an important problem, but it's sort of an obscure problem in parts of the world. 
Why do you want to globalize such problems? 
I mean, they are better local." 
What if, in response, I told you that actually, underlying each of these problems that I've described is a fundamental issue of the breakdown of trust in markets and institutions, and that there's nothing more global, more universal, closer to you and I than the problem of trust. 
For example, a quarter of all the seafood marketed in the US is falsely labeled. 
So when you buy a tuna or salmon sandwich in Manhattan, you are eating something that could be banned for being toxic in Japan. 
Literally. 
Most of you have heard of a time when horsemeat was masquerading as beef in burger patties in Europe? 
You have. 
What you don't know is that a good chunk of these fake meat patties were also contaminated with cadmium, which can damage your kidneys. 
This was Europe. 
Many of you are aware of plane crashes and you worry about plane crashes, because every now and then, one of them intrudes into your consciousness. 
But I bet you don't know that a single investigation uncovered one million counterfeit incidents in the aeronautical supply chain in the US. 
So this is a global problem, full stop. 
It's a global problem. 
The only reason we are not addressing it with the urgency it deserves is that the best solutions, the most advanced solutions, the most progressive solutions, are, unfortunately, in parts of the world where solutions don't scale. 
And that is why it is not surprising that attempts to create this same verification models for pharmaceuticals are now a decade behind in the USA and Europe, while it's already available in Nigeria. 
A decade, and costing a hundred times more. 
And that is why, when you walk into a Walgreens in New York, you cannot check the source of your medicine, but you can in Maiduguri in Northern Nigeria. 
That is the reality. 
(Applause) That is the reality. 
(Applause) So we go back to the issue of ideas. 
Remember, solutions are merely packaged ideas, so it is the ideas that are most important. 
In a world where we marginalize the ideas of the Global South, we cannot create globally inclusive problem-solving models. 
Now, you might say, "Well, that's bad, but in such a world where we have so many other problems, do we need another cause?" 
I say yes, we need another cause. 
Actually, that cause will surprise you: the cause of intellectual justice. 
You say, "What? Intellectual justice? In a world of human rights abuses?" 
And I explain this way: all the solutions to the other problems that affect us and confront us need solutions. 
So you need the best ideas to address them. 
And that is why today I ask you, can we all give it one time for intellectual justice? 
(Applause) 

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

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

I want to tell you guys something about neuroscience. 
I'm a physicist by training. 
About three years ago, I left physics to come and try to understand how the brain works. 
And this is what I found. 
Lots of people are working on depression. 
And that's really good, depression is something that we really want to understand. 
Here's how you do it: you take a jar and you fill it up, about halfway, with water. 
And then you take a mouse, and you put the mouse in the jar, OK? 
And the mouse swims around for a little while and then at some point, the mouse gets tired and decides to stop swimming. 
And when it stops swimming, that's depression. 
OK? 
And I'm from theoretical physics, so I'm used to people making very sophisticated mathematical models to precisely describe physical phenomena, so when I saw that this is the model for depression, I though to myself, "Oh my God, we have a lot of work to do." 
(Laughter) But this is a kind of general problem in neuroscience. 
So for example, take emotion. 
Lots of people want to understand emotion. 
But you can't study emotion in mice or monkeys because you can't ask them how they're feeling or what they're experiencing. 
So instead, people who want to understand emotion, typically end up studying what's called motivated behavior, which is code for "what the mouse does when it really, really wants cheese." 
OK, I could go on and on. 
I mean, the point is, the NIH spends about 5.5 billion dollars a year on neuroscience research. 
And yet there have been almost no significant improvements in outcomes for patients with brain diseases in the past 40 years. 
And I think a lot of that is basically due to the fact that mice might be OK as a model for cancer or diabetes, but the mouse brain is just not sophisticated enough to reproduce human psychology or human brain disease. 
OK? 
So if the mouse models are so bad, why are we still using them? 
Well, it basically boils down to this: the brain is made up of neurons which are these little cells that send electrical signals to each other. 
If you want to understand how the brain works, you have to be able to measure the electrical activity of these neurons. 
But to do that, you have to get really close to the neurons with some kind of electrical recording device or a microscope. 
And so you can do that in mice and you can do it in monkeys, because you can physically put things into their brain but for some reason we still can't do that in humans, OK? 
So instead, we've invented all these proxies. 
So the most popular one is probably this, functional MRI, fMRI, which allows you to make these pretty pictures like this, that show which parts of your brain light up when you're engaged in different activities. 
But this is a proxy. 
You're not actually measuring neural activity here. 
What you're doing is you're measuring, essentially, like, blood flow in the brain. 
Where there's more blood. 
It's actually where there's more oxygen, but you get the idea, OK? 
The other thing that you can do is you can do this -- electroencephalography -- you can put these electrodes on your head, OK? 
And then you can measure your brain waves. 
And here, you're actually measuring electrical activity. 
But you're not measuring the activity of neurons. 
You're measuring these electrical currents, sloshing back and forth in your brain. 
So the point is just that these technologies that we have are really measuring the wrong thing. 
Because, for most of the diseases that we want to understand -- like, Parkinson's is the classic example. 
In Parkinson's, there's one particular kind of neuron deep in your brain that is responsible for the disease, and these technologies just don't have the resolution that you need to get at that. 
And so that's why we're still stuck with the animals. 
Not that anyone wants to be studying depression by putting mice into jars, right? 
It's just that there's this pervasive sense that it's not possible to look at the activity of neurons in healthy humans. 
So here's what I want to do. 
I want to take you into the future. 
To have a look at one way in which I think it could potentially be possible. 
And I want to preface this by saying, I don't have all the details. 
So I'm just going to provide you with a kind of outline. 
But we're going to go the year 2100. 
Now what does the year 2100 look like? 
Well, to start with, the climate is a bit warmer that what you're used to. 
(Laughter) And that robotic vacuum cleaner that you know and love went through a few generations, and the improvements were not always so good. 
(Laughter) It was not always for the better. 
But actually, in the year 2100 most things are surprisingly recognizable. 
It's just the brain is totally different. 
For example, in the year 2100, we understand the root causes of Alzheimer's. 
So we can deliver targeted genetic therapies or drugs to stop the degenerative process before it begins. 
So how did we do it? 
Well, there were essentially three steps. 
The first step was that we had to figure out some way to get electrical connections through the skull so we could measure the electrical activity of neurons. 
And not only that, it had to be easy and risk-free. 
Something that basically anyone would be OK with, like getting a piercing. 
Because back in 2017, the only way that we knew of to get through the skull was to drill these holes the size of quarters. 
You would never let someone do that to you. 
So in the 2020s, people began to experiment -- rather than drilling these gigantic holes, drilling microscopic holes, no thicker than a piece of hair. 
And the idea here was really for diagnosis -- there are lots of times in the diagnosis of brain disorders when you would like to be able to look at the neural activity beneath the skull and being able to drill these microscopic holes would make that much easier for the patient. 
In the end, it would be like getting a shot. 
You just go in and you sit down and there's a thing that comes down on your head, and a momentary sting and then it's done, and you can go back about your day. 
So we're eventually able to do it using lasers to drill the holes. 
And with the lasers, it was fast and extremely reliable, you couldn't even tell the holes were there, any more than you could tell that one of your hairs was missing. 
And I know it might sound crazy, using lasers to drill holes in your skull, but back in 2017, people were OK with surgeons shooting lasers into their eyes for corrective surgery So when you're already here, it's not that big of a step. 
OK? 
So the next step, that happened in the 2030s, was that it's not just about getting through the skull. 
To measure the activity of neurons, you have to actually make it into the brain tissue itself. 
And the risk, whenever you put something into the brain tissue, is essentially that of stroke. 
That you would hit a blood vessel and burst it, and that causes a stroke. 
So, by the mid 2030s, we had invented these flexible probes that were capable of going around blood vessels, rather than through them. 
And thus, we could put huge batteries of these probes into the brains of patients and record from thousands of their neurons without any risk to them. 
And what we discovered, sort of to our surprise, is that the neurons that we could identify were not responding to things like ideas or emotion, which was what we had expected. 
They were mostly responding to things like Jennifer Aniston or Halle Berry or Justin Trudeau. 
I mean -- (Laughter) In hindsight, we shouldn't have been that surprised. 
I mean, what do your neurons spend most of their time thinking about? 
(Laughter) But really, the point is that this technology enabled us to begin studying neuroscience in individuals. 
So much like the transition to genetics, at the single cell level, we started to study neuroscience, at the single human level. 
But we weren't quite there yet. 
Because these technologies were still restricted to medical applications, which meant that we were studying sick brains, not healthy brains. 
Because no matter how safe your technology is, you can't stick something into someone's brain for research purposes. 
They have to want it. 
And why would they want it? 
Because as soon as you have an electrical connection to the brain, you can use it to hook the brain up to a computer. 
Oh, well, you know, the general public was very skeptical at first. 
I mean, who wants to hook their brain up to their computers? 
Well just imagine being able to send an email with a thought. 
(Laughter) Imagine being able to take a picture with your eyes, OK? 
(Laughter) Imagine never forgetting anything anymore, because anything that you choose to remember will be stored permanently on a hard drive somewhere, able to be recalled at will. 
(Laughter) The line here between crazy and visionary was never quite clear. 
But the systems were safe. 
So when the FDA decided to deregulate these laser-drilling systems, in 2043, commercial demand just exploded. 
People started signing their emails, "Please excuse any typos. 
Sent from my brain." 
(Laughter) Commercial systems popped up left and right, offering the latest and greatest in neural interfacing technology. 
There were 100 electrodes. 
A thousand electrodes. 
High bandwidth for only 99.99 a month. 
(Laughter) Soon, everyone had them. 
And that was the key. 
Because, in the 2050s, if you were a neuroscientist, you could have someone come into your lab essentially from off the street. 
And you could have them engaged in some emotional task or social behavior or abstract reasoning, things you could never study in mice. 
And you could record the activity of their neurons using the interfaces that they already had. 
And then you could also ask them about what they were experiencing. 
So this link between psychology and neuroscience that you could never make in the animals, was suddenly there. 
So perhaps the classic example of this was the discovery of the neural basis for insight. 
That "Aha!" moment, the moment it all comes together, it clicks. 
And this was discovered by two scientists in 2055, Barry and Late, who observed, in the dorsal prefrontal cortex, how in the brain of someone trying to understand an idea, how different populations of neurons would reorganize themselves -- you're looking at neural activity here in orange -- until finally their activity aligns in a way that leads to positive feedback. 
Right there. 
That is understanding. 
So finally, we were able to get at the things that make us human. 
And that's what really opened the way to major insights from medicine. 
Because, starting in the 2060s, with the ability to record the neural activity in the brains of patients with these different mental diseases, rather than defining the diseases on the basis of their symptoms, as we had at the beginning of the century, we started to define them on the basis of the actual pathology that we observed at the neural level. 
So for example, in the case of ADHD, we discovered that there are dozens of different diseases, all of which had been called ADHD at the start of the century, that actually had nothing to do with each other, except that they had similar symptoms. 
And they needed to be treated in different ways. 
So it was kind of incredible, in retrospect, that at the beginning of the century, we had been treating all those different diseases with the same drug, just by giving people amphetamine, basically is what we were doing. 
And schizophrenia and depression are the same way. 
So rather than prescribing drugs to people essentially at random, as we had, we learned how to predict which drugs would be most effective in which patients, and that just led to this huge improvement in outcomes. 
OK, I want to bring you back now to the year 2017. 
Some of this may sound satirical or even far fetched. 
And some of it is. 
I mean, I can't actually see into the future. 
I don't actually know if we're going to be drilling hundreds or thousands of microscopic holes in our heads in 30 years. 
But what I can tell you is that we're not going to make any progress towards understanding the human brain or human diseases until we figure out how to get at the electrical activity of neurons in healthy humans. 
And almost no one is working on figuring out how to do that today. 
That is the future of neuroscience. 
And I think it's time for neuroscientists to put down the mouse brain and to dedicate the thought and investment necessary to understand the human brain and human disease. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Shah Rukh Khan: Be it Mumbai or Delhi, Chennai or Kolkata, all our big cities have one great thing in common, they happily welcome people from smaller places arriving in search of work. 
What is also true is that this warm welcome leads to consequences. 
Problems like housing in these cities are born. 
Today we have with us a human settlement expert and researcher: Dr. Gautam Bhan, who is re-imagining a solution to this increasing problem. 
He will share with us the new picture of urban India that he can see. 
TED Talks India New Thoughts welcomes Dr. Gautam Bhan. 
Dr. Gautam Bhan, everyone. 
(Applause) Gautam Bhan: In this country, until a few years ago, if you asked someone: "Where are you from?" 
the answer would be Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata. 
You'd immediately ask again: "Where do you belong?" 
Until recently in India, nobody was from a city; people only migrated to the city. 
This is changing. 
Urbanization is changing India, but are our cities prepared? 
Let's assume you were born somewhere else. 
Your parents worked as laborers all day. 
Then you too would have come to a city for progress. 
Or maybe, like it happens today, you were born in the city itself. 
One day you go out looking for an accommodation in the city, to buy or maybe just to rent. 
Will you be able find an affordable home? 
The government says we are falling short of at least 20 million homes. 
20 million homes, that's 100 million people. 
And this is not the shortage of <i>3 BHKs</i> (bedroom hall kitchen). 
95 percent of the shortage is for people earning 10 to 15,000 rupees per month. 
Will you be able to find an affordable home in this budget? 
If this happened with you, what would you do? 
Home is not a car or some sort of jewellery. 
Home is food and clothes. 
Nobody can live without it. 
If you couldn't find a home in a city to either buy or rent, you too would be driven to do what most people end up doing. 
Make a home wherever possible. 
You too would make a <i>settlement.</i> The government may keep calling it a <i>slum,</i> but like the people living there, I too will call it a settlement. 
One hundred million are not homeless. 
They have homes. 
But most of these homes are in settlements. 
This is the truth of an affordable home in India. 
The homes in settlements are cheap, but not sturdy. 
The homes outside are sturdy, but not cheap. 
(Applause) We will have to lay the foundation of a new thought from here itself. 
A settlement is not a problem; it is a solution. 
We just have to make it secure and sturdy. 
To fulfill the shortage of 20 million homes you cannot make 20 million 25 square foot flats, and neither should you be making them. 
For example take the Karnataka government. 
They have a very good record in this. 
By 2020, Karnataka needs 2.6 million homes. 
In the last ten years they have managed to make 350,000 homes. 
Even if a government tries with complete sincerity, it cannot fulfill this need in the next couple of lifetimes. 
If we do not make new homes, then what is the next solution? 
How to make a settlement secure? 
Firstly, eviction needs to be stopped. 
Bulldozing needs to be stopped. 
Never has that resulted in progress in the past, nor will it in the future. 
(Applause) We have to start believing that the laborers who build and run the city have a right over the land of that city. 
(Applause) I know you are thinking that settlements are made on illegally captured land, but capturing of land never happens in the dead of the night. 
Whether the land belongs to the government or not, a settlement is never formed secretly. 
It is inhabited over time. 
The government also agrees that the settlements in our cities have been there for over 10, 20, 30, even 40 years. 
What kind of illegally captured land is this, which was ignored for 30 years and suddenly a day before eviction is declared illegal? 
A settlement can easily accommodate 15 to 60 percent of a city's population by using just one, two or maximum ten percent of the land. 
Can such a huge number of people not have a right over this small bit of land? 
A city's progress is often measured by the cost of its land. 
How do you ascribe a cost to the life of a person living on a piece of land? 
A settlement is not asking you for shiny homes; all it's asking for is basic necessities: electricity, roads, water, toilets and drainage. 
We call this <i>upgradation.</i> Here's an example of upgradation. 
In Ahmedabad, they started a program where for ten years, 44 settlements were promised there wouldn't be any eviction. 
Only a promise. 
Nothing written, no documents. 
And basic necessities were provided to them. 
In ten years that slum changed into a locality, a place, a world of its own. 
The government didn't have to build even a single new home. 
(Applause) Thailand launched this program at national scale, benefiting 100,000 people in 137 cities. 
And every person was given the right to live over that land. 
But pay attention here. 
Not the right to sell, but the right to live there, use it, settle on it. 
The whole world knows now that to move forward, we cannot remove settlements. 
We can only advance when we think of ways to make settlements secure and sturdy. 
But just one thing. 
If we know it, then why doesn't it happen? 
To apply this new thinking to settlements, we, that is you and me, need to look deep within and get rid of the disgust, disrespect and apprehensions that we have. 
Actually I should not be standing here in front of you today. 
A person from the settlement who lives there should be standing here. 
But if someone like that came here, you wouldn't have listened to him. 
You are listening to me, because you think I am not from a settlement. 
This is the very thought that needs to be changed. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) SRK: Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Gautam Bhan. 
Please tell me, you just gave an example of Thailand and the big thing there is the homes are for people to settle in, not to sell. 
They cannot be used for sale. 
Is there a similar thought process or program in our country too, inspired by your talks and those of people around you? 
GB: I wouldn't say by me, but by the people movement who are fighting for rights in the city. 
That is making a difference. 
For instance, in Odisha the Chief Minister, Mr. Patnaik, announced the same scheme: that all the people in settlements will have rights over that land. 
(Applause) And I think this scheme shouldn't be called populism; it should be called an economic development strategy. 
Because economic development does not happen from the top, but from the bottom. 
(Applause) SRK: I too promise I will only say settlements, and not slums, ever again. 100 percent. 
(Applause) Dr. Bhan you came here and said such wonderful things. 
There is a song. I will not sing it, as I am a terrible singer. 
GB: I too am a terrible singer. 
SRK: But we can't keep shut also, because we are saying wonderful things. 
(laughter) So we will just say it. 
Slowly the heart will find settlement. 
SRK: Only then will life be filled with love and fun times. 
(Applause) Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Gautam Bhan. Thank you. 

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

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

I was thinking about my place in the universe, and about my first thought about what infinity might mean, when I was a child. 
And I thought that if time could reach forwards and backwards infinitely, doesn't that mean that every point in time is really infinitely small, and therefore somewhat meaningless. 
So we don't really have a place in the universe, as far as on a time line. 
But nothing else does either. 
Therefore every moment really is the most important moment that's ever happened, including this moment right now. 
And so therefore this music you're about to hear is maybe the most important music you'll ever hear in your life. 
(Laughter) (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) (Applause) For those of you who I'll be fortunate enough to meet afterwards, you could please refrain from saying, "Oh my god, you're so much shorter in real life." 
(Laughter) Because it's like the stage is an optical illusion, for some reason. 
(Laughter) Somewhat like the curving of the universe. 
I don't know what it is. I get asked in interviews a lot, "My god, you're guitars are so gigantic!" 
(Laughter) "You must get them custom made -- special, humongous guitars." 
(Laughter) (Applause) Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

I'm here to honor the sacredness of life that I see at the border in south Texas. 
In 2014, I visited a detention facility where hundreds of little children, immigrant children, were detained for several weeks in conditions that were very heartbreaking. 
They were dirty and muddy and crying. 
Their faces were full of tears. 
I had the opportunity to go in and be with them. 
And they were all around me. 
They were little ones, some of them not older than five years old. 
And they were saying to me, (Spanish) "Sácame de aquí." 
"Get me out of here." 
(Spanish) "Por favor, ayúdame." 
"Please, help me." 
It was so difficult to be there with them. 
I started to cry with them, and I told them, "Let us pray." 
(Spanish) "Vamos a rezar." 
And they repeated after me, (Spanish) "Diosito, ayúdanos." 
"God, please, help us." 
As we prayed, I could see the Border Patrol officers looking through a glass window. 
They were at the verge of tears. 
As they heard the children praying and witness. 
I had a little boy get close to me, closer, because they were all over, we could barely fit in that little cell. 
And this little boy tells me, (Spanish) "Ayúdame. 
Quiero irme con mi mamá." 
"Please, help me. 
I want to be with my mother. 
She is here, I was separated from her." 
I said to him, "Mijo, if your mom is here, I'm certain you will be reunited." 
When I walked out of the cell, an officer got close to me and said to me, "Sister, thank you. 
You have helped us realize that they are human beings." 
You know, sometimes, no matter what job we have, we must never forget to recognize the humanity in others. 
Otherwise, we will lose our own humanity. 
Let me tell you a bit about what I see and what I do in the southern border of the United States where I live and where I work. 
Hundreds of families enter the United States by crossing the Rio Grande river. 
And once they are in the United States, many of them are given permission to continue their process of immigration at another point in the United States. 
What has amazed me for all these years has been the amazing humanitarian response of the community there in south Texas. 
Thousands of volunteers have given of their time so generously. 
For me, they're all amazing people. 
And the whole community, city government, from local business leaders to civic organizations, all faith communities, in the Border Patrol and ICE. 
We have all come together in an effort to help 150,000 or more immigrants since that first day that we got started. 
Back in those first days when we were first involved in helping the immigrants, we were at our respite center, and an officer from the city walks in and tells me, "Sister, what are you doing here?" 
I turned and looked to see what was happening at the respite center. 
I was amazed at what I was seeing. 
There were hundreds of volunteers helping so many families there that needed help. 
Giving them ways to get cleaned up and to get clean clothing, food, hygiene items. 
Just love and compassion was seen everywhere. 
So I turned back and I responded to him and I said, "Restoring human dignity. 
That's what we're doing." 
I don't think he expected that answer from me, because he took a step back and then approached me again and said, "Sister, if I had a magic wand, what would that magic wand do for you?" 
"Showers?" 
Sure enough, that evening we had a mobile unit of eight showers. 
Amazing. 
And after that, we had 100 percent support of the city government. 
We were there, wanting to make sure that we were helping and be successful with our response to so many families that we were seeing every single day. 
I think that we must help others see what we see. 
I think it's important that we can share that with others. 
You probably heard this idea before -- that we must always see God's children as equal. 
But in order to do that, I think it's important to be able to see them as people. 
To be able to have a personal encounter, when we can feel what they feel, when we can understand what they're hurting. 
To really meet up with them. 
It is then that we are present to them and we can make their humanity a part of our own humanity. 
And we'd recognize that we are all part of the same human family. 
During those days, I had a lady approach me and tell me, "Sister, I am 100 percent against what you do, helping these illegal aliens." 
And I said to her, "Let me tell you what I do and why." 
So I shared with her and introduced her to the families and the children, shared the stories that they are living. 
When I finished talking with her, she turns and looks at me and says, "Sister, I am 100 percent in favor of what you do." 
(Laughter and applause) That evening, her husband calls me, he tells me, "Sister, I don't know what you did to my wife. 
But this evening she came home and she said, 'If Sister Norma ever calls you, you make sure you do what she tells you.' So I'm just reporting to let you know I'm here to help in any way." 
Well, you know ... 
I'm thinking that -- was it a personal encounter that she had? 
I think it's a nice idea, a nice message, but I don't think it's the whole story. 
In that encounter, we must put aside our prejudice that we have toward others, that separate us and don't allow us to see them, our walls that we put up in our own heart that keep us separated from others. 
When we are able to do that, we're able to reach out to them. 
You know, I think what doesn't make it possible is fear -- that we're afraid. 
And because we're afraid -- more than likely it's because we've seen in the media all this negative rhetoric that we hear about immigrants, they are demonized, like they're not human, that we can discard them and we can get rid of them, and not even feel bad that we're doing that. 
Immigrant families are not criminals. 
Immigrant families are like our families, like our neighbors. 
They're good people who are entering our country and coming to the United States only simply because they're fleeing away from violence and they want to be safe. 
Unfortunately, what we see at the border is terrible. 
People are hurting and suffering. 
Thousands of them are. 
And mostly I feel it's because of those walls that we put up, that we have in our hearts, that makes us not care. 
So we have policies that are returning people back to Mexico, so they can wait. 
And they wait there for months. 
In conditions that are horrible, where people are suffering and hurting. 
Abuses. 
And not even the means to be OK. 
I think that it is true that we must keep our country safe, that we must make sure who enters our country, that criminals should be put away. 
But it is also true that we must not lose our humanity in doing this. 
That we must have policies and procedures that do not contribute to the human suffering that people are already suffering. 
And that we can find solutions that are respectful to all human life. 
We can do this, if we can allow the best in us to come out. 
Because what I see at the border are families, men, who will take a child and will try to comfort that child that is crying because that child is crying for their own dad. 
And these men are crying with that child. 
I see men and women who drop to their knees, praying. 
As they pray in thanksgiving. 
I see children who have been separated from their parents for months. 
And when they're reunited, they're afraid to separate themselves from them, because they're afraid they will lose their mom again. 
Once a child looked up to me after she was reunited and she said to me, (Spanish) "Hoy no voy a llorar." 
"Today I'm not going to cry." 
And I said, (Spanish) "Por qué, mi hija?" 
She said, "Because I have been crying for the past whole month, because I didn't know where my mother was. 
But tonight, I'm going to be with her." 
The day I visited the detention facility back in 2014, there was a little boy who approached me and asked me for me to help him find his mom. 
Well, that evening, when I was at the humanitarian respite center, the little boy walked in with his mother. 
And as soon as he spotted me, he runs toward me, I go down to greet him, and he just throws himself to hug me. 
It was so beautiful, that was truly a beautiful human encounter. 
I think it's humanity at its best. 
It is what we all are called to do. 
Think about it. 
We just need to allow ourselves to get close enough to see, and we will care. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

In the mid-19th century, suspension bridges were collapsing all across Europe. 
Their industrial cables frayed during turbulent weather and snapped under the weight of their decks. 
So when a German-American engineer named John Roebling proposed building the largest and most expensive suspension bridge ever conceived over New York’s East River, city officials were understandably skeptical. 
But Manhattan was increasingly overcrowded, and commuters from Brooklyn clogged the river. 
In February of 1867, the government approved Roebling’s proposal. 
To avoid the failures of European bridges, Roebling designed a hybrid bridge model. 
From suspension bridges, he incorporated large cables supported by central pillars and anchored at each bank. 
This design was ideal for supporting long decks, which hung from smaller vertical cables. 
But Roebling’s model also drew from cable-stayed bridges. 
These shorter structures held up their decks with diagonal cables that ran directly to support towers. 
By adding these additional cables, Roebling improved the bridge’s stability, while also reducing the weight on its anchor cables. 
Similar designs had been used for some other bridges but the scope of Roebling’s plan here dwarfed them all. 
His new bridge’s deck spanned over 480 meters— 1.5 times longer than any previously built suspension bridge. 
Since standard hemp rope would tear under the deck’s 14,680 tons, his proposal called for over 5,600 kilometers of metal wire to create the bridge’s cables. 
To support all this weight, the towers would need to stand over 90 meters above sea level— making them the tallest structures in the Western Hemisphere. 
Roebling was confident his design would work, but while surveying the site in 1869, an incoming boat crushed his foot against the dock. 
Within a month, tetanus had claimed his life. 
Fortunately, John Roebling's son, Washington, was also a trained engineer and took over his father’s role. 
The following year, construction on the tower foundations finally began. 
This first step in construction was also the most challenging. 
Building on the rocky river bed involved the use of a largely untested technology: pneumatic caissons. 
Workers lowered these airtight wooden boxes into the river, where a system of pipes pumped pressurized air in and water out. 
Once established, air locks allowed workers to enter the chamber and excavate the river bottom. 
They placed layers of stone on top of the caisson as they dug. 
When it finally hit the bedrock, they filled it with concrete, becoming the tower’s permanent foundation. 
Working conditions in these caissons were dismal and dangerous. 
Lit only by candles and gas lamps, the chambers caught fire several times, forcing them to be evacuated and flooded. 
Even more dangerous was a mysterious ailment called "the bends." 
Today, we understand this as decompression sickness, but at the time, it appeared to be an unexplainable pain or dizziness that killed several workmen. 
In 1872, it nearly claimed the life of the chief engineer. 
Washington survived, but was left paralyzed and bedridden. 
Yet once again, the Roeblings proved indomitable. 
Washington’s wife Emily not only carried communications between her husband and the engineers, but soon took over day-to-day project management. 
Unfortunately, the bridge’s troubles were far from over. 
By 1877, construction was over budget and behind schedule. 
Worse still, it turned out the bridge’s cable contractor had been selling them faulty wires. 
This would have been a fatal flaw if not for the abundant failsafes in John Roebling’s design. 
After reinforcing the cables with additional wires, they suspended the deck piece by piece. 
It took 14 years, the modern equivalent of over 400 million dollars, and the life’s work of three different Roeblings, but when the Brooklyn Bridge finally opened on May 24, 1883, its splendor was undeniable. 
Today, the Brooklyn Bridge still stands atop its antique caissons, supporting the gothic towers and intersecting cables that frame a gateway to New York City. 

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

At roughly 4pm on July 20, 1969, mankind was just minutes away from landing on the surface of the moon. 
But before the astronauts began their final descent, an emergency alarm lit up. 
Something was overloading the computer, and threatened to abort the landing. 
Back on Earth, Margaret Hamilton held her breath. 
She'd led the team developing the pioneering in-flight software, so she knew this mission had no room for error. 
But the nature of this last-second emergency would soon prove her software was working exactly as planned. 
Born 33 years earlier in Paoli, Indiana, Hamilton had always been inquisitive. 
In college, she studied mathematics and philosophy, before taking a research position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to pay for grad school. 
Here, she encountered her first computer while developing software to support research into the new field of chaos theory. 
Next at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, Hamilton developed software for America’s first air defense system to search for enemy aircraft. 
But when she heard that renowned engineer Charles Draper was looking for help sending mankind to the moon, she immediately joined his team. 
NASA looked to Draper and his group of over 400 engineers to invent the first compact digital flight computer, the Apollo Guidance Computer. 
Using input from astronauts, this device would be responsible for guiding, navigating and controlling the spacecraft. 
At a time when unreliable computers filled entire rooms, the AGC needed to operate without any errors, and fit in one cubic foot of space. 
Draper divided the lab into two teams, one for designing hardware and one for developing software. 
Hamilton led the team that built the on-board flight software for both the Command and Lunar Modules. 
This work, for which she coined the term “software engineering," was incredibly high stakes. 
Human lives were on the line, so every program had to be perfect. 
Margaret’s software needed to quickly detect unexpected errors and recover from them in real time. 
But this kind of adaptable program was difficult to build, since early software could only process jobs in a predetermined order. 
To solve this problem, Margaret designed her program to be “asynchronous,” meaning the software's more important jobs would interrupt less important ones. 
Her team assigned every task a unique priority to ensure that each job occurred in the correct order and at the right time— regardless of any surprises. 
After this breakthrough, Margaret realized her software could help the astronauts work in an asynchronous environment as well. 
She designed Priority Displays that would interrupt astronaut’s regularly scheduled tasks to warn them of emergencies. 
The astronaut could then communicate with Mission Control to determine the best path forward. 
This marked the first time flight software communicated directly— and asynchronously— with a pilot. 
It was these fail safes that triggered the alarms just before the lunar landing. 
Buzz Aldrin quickly realized his mistake— he’d inadvertently flipped the rendezvous radar switch. 
This radar would be essential on their journey home, but here it was using up vital computational resources. 
Fortunately, the Apollo Guidance Computer was well equipped to manage this. 
During the overload, the software restart programs allowed only the highest priority jobs to be processed— including the programs necessary for landing. 
The Priority Displays gave the astronauts a choice— to land or not to land. 
With minutes to spare, Mission Control gave the order. 
The Apollo 11 landing was about the astronauts, Mission Control, software and hardware all working together as an integrated system of systems. 
Hamilton’s contributions were essential to the work of engineers and scientists inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s goal to reach the Moon. 
And her life-saving work went far beyond Apollo 11— no bugs were ever found in the in-flight software for any crewed Apollo missions. 
After her work on Apollo, Hamilton founded a company that uses its unique universal systems language to create breakthroughs for systems and software. 
In 2003, NASA honored her achievements with the largest financial award they’d ever given to an individual. 
And 47 years after her software first guided astronauts to the moon, Hamilton was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for changing the way we think about technology. 

Hi, everyone, my name is Elizabeth, and I work on the trading floor. 
But I'm still pretty new to it. 
I graduated from college about a year and a half ago, and to be quite honest, I'm still recovering from the recruiting process I had to go through to get here. 
(Laughter) Now, I don't know about you, but this is the most ridiculous thing that I still remember about the whole process, was asking insecure college students what their biggest passion was. 
Like, do you expect me to have an answer for that? 
(Laughter) Of course I did. 
And to be quite honest, I really showed those recruiters just how passionate I was by telling them all about my early interest in the global economy, which, conveniently, stemmed from the conversations that I would overhear my immigrant parents having about money and the fluctuating value of the Mexican peso. 
They love a good personal story. 
But you know what? 
I lied. 
(Laughter) And not because the things I said weren't true -- I mean, my parents were talking about this stuff. 
But that's not really why I decided to jump into finance. 
I just really wanted to pay my rent. 
(Laughter) And here's the thing. 
The reality of having to pay my rent and do real adult things is something that we're rarely willing to admit to employers, to others and even to ourselves. 
I know I wasn't about to tell my recruiters that I was there for the money. 
And that's because for the most part, we want to see ourselves as idealists and as people who do what they believe in and pursue the things that they find the most exciting. 
But the reality is very few of us actually have the privilege to do that. 
Now, I can't speak for everyone, but this is especially true for young immigrant professionals like me. 
And the reason this is true has something to do with the narratives that society has kept hitting us with in the news, in the workplace and even by those annoyingly self-critical voices in our heads. 
So what narratives am I referring to? 
Well, there's two that come to mind when it comes to immigrants. 
The first is the idea of the immigrant worker. 
You know, people that come to the US in search of jobs as laborers, or field workers, dish washers. 
You know, things that we might consider low-wage jobs but the immigrants? 
That's a good opportunity. 
The news nowadays has convoluted that whole thing quite a bit. 
You could say that it's made America's relationship with immigrants complicated. 
And as immigrant expert George Borjas would have put it, it's kind of like America wanted workers, but then, they got confused when we got people instead. 
(Laughter) I mean, it's natural that people want to strive to put a roof over their heads and live a normal life, right? 
So for obvious reasons, this narrative has been driving me a little bit crazy. 
But it's not the only one. 
The other narrative that I'm going to talk about is the idea of the superimmigrant. 
In America, we love to idolize superimmigrants as the ideal symbols of American success. 
I grew up admiring superimmigrants, because their existence fueled my dreams and it gave me hope. 
The problem with this narrative is that it also seems to cast a shadow on those that don't succeed or that don't make it in that way, as less than. 
And for years, I got caught up in the ways in which it seemed to celebrate one type of immigrant while villainizing the other. 
I mean, were my parents' sacrifices not enough? 
Was the fact that my dad came home from the metal factory covered in corrosive dust, was that not super? 
Don't get me wrong, I've internalized both of these narratives to some degree, and in many ways, seeing my heroes succeed, it has pushed me to do the same. 
But both of these narratives are flawed in the ways in which they dehumanize people if they don't fit within a certain mold or succeed in a certain way. 
And this really affected my self-image, because I started to question these ideas for who my parents were and who I was, and I started to wonder, "Am I doing enough to protect my family and my community from the injustices that we felt every day?" 
So why did I choose to "sell out" while watching tragedies unfold right in front of me? 
Now, it took me a long time to come to terms with my decisions. 
And I really have to thank the people running the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, or HSF, for validating this process early on. 
And the way that HSF -- an organization that strives to help students achieve higher education through mentorship and scholarships -- the way that they helped calm my anxiety, it was by telling me something super familiar. 
Something that you all probably have heard before in the first few minutes after boarding a flight. 
In case of an emergency, put your oxygen mask on first before helping those around you. 
Now I understand that this means different things to different people. 
But for me, it meant that immigrants couldn't and would never be able to fit into any one narrative, because most of us are actually just traveling along a spectrum, trying to survive. 
And although there may be people that are further along in life with their oxygen mask on and secured in place, there are undoubtedly going to be others that are still struggling to put theirs on before they can even think about helping those around them. 
Now, this lesson really hit home for me, because my parents, while they wanted us to be able to take advantage of opportunities in a way that we wouldn't have been able to do so anywhere else -- I mean, we were in America, and so as a child, this made me have these crazy, ambitious and elaborate dreams for what my future could look like. 
But the ways in which the world sees immigrants, it affects more than just the narratives in which they live. 
It also impacts the ways laws and systems can affect communities, families and individuals. 
I know this firsthand, because these laws and systems, well, they broke up my family, and they led my parents to return to Mexico. 
And at 15, my eight-year-old brother and I, we found ourselves alone and without the guidance that our parents had always provided us with. 
Despite being American citizens, we both felt defeated by what we had always known to be the land of opportunity. 
Now, in the weeks that followed my parents' return to Mexico, when it became clear that they wouldn't be able to come back, I had to watch as my eight-year-old brother was pulled out of school to be with his family. 
And during this same time, I wondered if going back would be validating my parents' sacrifices. 
And so I somehow convinced my parents to let me stay, without being able to guarantee them that I'd find somewhere to live or that I'd be OK. 
But to this day, I will never forget how hard it was having to say goodbye. 
And I will never forget how hard it was watching my little brother crumble in their arms as I waved goodbye from the other side of steel grates. 
Now, it would be naive to credit grit as the sole reason for why I've been able to take advantage of so many opportunities since that day. 
I mean, I was really lucky, and I want you to know that. 
Because statistically speaking, students that are homeless or that have unstable living conditions, well, they rarely complete high school. 
But I do think that it was because my parents had the trust in letting me go that I somehow found the courage and strength to take on opportunities even when I felt unsure or unqualified. 
Now, there's no denying that there is a cost to living the American dream. 
You do not have to be an immigrant or the child of immigrants to know that. 
But I do know that now, today, I am living something close to what my parents saw as their American dream. 
Because as soon as I graduated from college, I flew my younger brother to the United States to live with me, so that he, too, could pursue his education. 
Still, I knew that it would be hard flying my little brother back. 
I knew that it would be hard having to balance the demands and professionalism required of an entry-level job while being responsible for a child with dreams and ambitions of his own. 
But you can imagine how fun it is to be 24 years old, at the peak of my youth, living in New York, with an angsty teenage roommate who hates doing the dishes. 
(Laughter) The worst. 
(Laughter) But when I see my brother learning how to advocate for himself, and when I see him get excited about his classes and school, I do not doubt anything. 
Because I know that this bizarre, beautiful and privileged life that I now live is the true reason for why I decided to pursue a career that would help me and my family find financial stability. 
I did not know it back then, but during those eight years that I lived without my family, I had my oxygen mask on and I focused on survival. 
And during those same eight years, I had to watch helplessly the pain and hurt that it caused my family to be apart. 
What airlines don't tell you is that putting your oxygen mask on first while seeing those around you struggle -- it takes a lot of courage. 
But being able to have that self-control is sometimes the only way that we are able to help those around us. 
Now I'm super lucky to be in a place where I can be there for my little brother so that he feels confident and prepared to take on whatever he chooses to do next. 
But I also know that because I am in this position of privilege, I also have the responsibility to make sure that my community finds spaces where they can find guidance, access and support. 
I can't claim to know where each and every one of you are on your journey through life, but I do know that our world is one that flourishes when different voices come together. 
My hope is that you will find the courage to put your oxygen mask on when you need to, and that you will find the strength to help those around you when you can. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

For me they normally happen, these career crises, often, actually, on a Sunday evening, just as the sun is starting to set, and the gap between my hopes for myself and the reality of my life starts to diverge so painfully that I normally end up weeping into a pillow. 
I'm mentioning all this -- I'm mentioning all this because I think this is not merely a personal problem; you may think I'm wrong in this, but I think we live in an age when our lives are regularly punctuated by career crises, by moments when what we thought we knew -- about our lives, about our careers -- comes into contact with a threatening sort of reality. 
It's perhaps easier now than ever before to make a good living. 
It's perhaps harder than ever before to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety. 
I want to look now, if I may, at some of the reasons why we might be feeling anxiety about our careers. 
Why we might be victims of these career crises, as we're weeping softly into our pillows. 
One of the reasons why we might be suffering is that we are surrounded by snobs. 
In a way, I've got some bad news, particularly to anybody who's come to Oxford from abroad. 
There's a real problem with snobbery, because sometimes people from outside the U.K. 
imagine that snobbery is a distinctively U.K. phenomenon, fixated on country houses and titles. 
The bad news is that's not true. 
Snobbery is a global phenomenon; we are a global organization, this is a global phenomenon. 
What is a snob? 
A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you, and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are. 
That is snobbery. 
The dominant kind of snobbery that exists nowadays is job snobbery. 
You encounter it within minutes at a party, when you get asked that famous iconic question of the early 21st century, "What do you do?" 
According to how you answer that question, people are either incredibly delighted to see you, or look at their watch and make their excuses. 
(Laughter) Now, the opposite of a snob is your mother. 
(Laughter) Not necessarily your mother, or indeed mine, but, as it were, the ideal mother, somebody who doesn't care about your achievements. 
Unfortunately, most people are not our mothers. 
Most people make a strict correlation between how much time, and if you like, love -- not romantic love, though that may be something -- but love in general, respect -- they are willing to accord us, that will be strictly defined by our position in the social hierarchy. 
And that's a lot of the reason why we care so much about our careers and indeed start caring so much about material goods. 
You know, we're often told that we live in very materialistic times, that we're all greedy people. 
I don't think we are particularly materialistic. 
I think we live in a society which has simply pegged certain emotional rewards to the acquisition of material goods. 
It's not the material goods we want; it's the rewards we want. 
It's a new way of looking at luxury goods. 
The next time you see somebody driving a Ferrari, don't think, "This is somebody who's greedy." 
Think, "This is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love." 
(Laughter) Feel sympathy, rather than contempt. 
There are other reasons -- (Laughter) There are other reasons why it's perhaps harder now to feel calm than ever before. 
One of these, and it's paradoxical, because it's linked to something that's rather nice, is the hope we all have for our careers. 
Never before have expectations been so high about what human beings can achieve with their lifespan. 
We're told, from many sources, that anyone can achieve anything. 
We've done away with the caste system, we are now in a system where anyone can rise to any position they please. 
And it's a beautiful idea. 
Along with that is a kind of spirit of equality; we're all basically equal. 
There are no strictly defined hierarchies. 
There is one really big problem with this, and that problem is envy. 
Envy, it's a real taboo to mention envy, but if there's one dominant emotion in modern society, that is envy. 
And it's linked to the spirit of equality. 
I think it would be very unusual for anyone here, or anyone watching, to be envious of the Queen of England. 
Even though she is much richer than any of you are, and she's got a very large house, the reason why we don't envy her is because she's too weird. 
(Laughter) She's simply too strange. 
We can't relate to her, she speaks in a funny way, she comes from an odd place. 
So we can't relate to her, and when you can't relate to somebody, you don't envy them. 
The closer two people are -- in age, in background, in the process of identification -- the more there's a danger of envy, which is incidentally why none of you should ever go to a school reunion, because there is no stronger reference point than people one was at school with. 
The problem of modern society is it turns the whole world into a school. 
Everybody's wearing jeans, everybody's the same. 
And yet, they're not. 
So there's a spirit of equality combined with deep inequality, which can make for a very stressful situation. 
It's probably as unlikely that you would nowadays become as rich and famous as Bill Gates, as it was unlikely in the 17th century that you would accede to the ranks of the French aristocracy. 
But the point is, it doesn't feel that way. 
It's made to feel, by magazines and other media outlets, that if you've got energy, a few bright ideas about technology, a garage -- you, too, could start a major thing. 
(Laughter) The consequences of this problem make themselves felt in bookshops. 
When you go to a large bookshop and look at the self-help sections, as I sometimes do -- if you analyze self-help books produced in the world today, there are basically two kinds. 
The first kind tells you, "You can do it! You can make it! Anything's possible!" 
The other kind tells you how to cope with what we politely call "low self-esteem," or impolitely call, "feeling very bad about yourself." 
There's a real correlation between a society that tells people that they can do anything, and the existence of low self-esteem. 
So that's another way in which something quite positive can have a nasty kickback. 
There is another reason why we might be feeling more anxious -- about our careers, about our status in the world today, than ever before. 
And it's, again, linked to something nice. 
And that nice thing is called meritocracy. 
Everybody, all politicians on Left and Right, agree that meritocracy is a great thing, and we should all be trying to make our societies really, really meritocratic. 
In other words -- what is a meritocratic society? 
A meritocratic society is one in which, if you've got talent and energy and skill, you will get to the top, nothing should hold you back. 
It's a beautiful idea. 
The problem is, if you really believe in a society where those who merit to get to the top, get to the top, you'll also, by implication, and in a far more nasty way, believe in a society where those who deserve to get to the bottom also get to the bottom and stay there. 
In other words, your position in life comes to seem not accidental, but merited and deserved. 
And that makes failure seem much more crushing. 
You know, in the Middle Ages, in England, when you met a very poor person, that person would be described as an "unfortunate" -- literally, somebody who had not been blessed by fortune, an unfortunate. 
Nowadays, particularly in the United States, if you meet someone at the bottom of society, they may unkindly be described as a "loser." 
There's a real difference between an unfortunate and a loser, and that shows 400 years of evolution in society and our belief in who is responsible for our lives. 
It's no longer the gods, it's us. We're in the driving seat. 
That's exhilarating if you're doing well, and very crushing if you're not. 
It leads, in the worst cases -- in the analysis of a sociologist like Emil Durkheim -- it leads to increased rates of suicide. 
There are more suicides in developed, individualistic countries than in any other part of the world. 
And some of the reason for that is that people take what happens to them extremely personally -- they own their success, but they also own their failure. 
Is there any relief from some of these pressures that I've been outlining? 
I think there is. 
Let's take meritocracy. 
This idea that everybody deserves to get where they get to, I think it's a crazy idea, completely crazy. 
I will support any politician of Left and Right, with any halfway-decent meritocratic idea; I am a meritocrat in that sense. 
But I think it's insane to believe that we will ever make a society that is genuinely meritocratic; it's an impossible dream. 
The idea that we will make a society where literally everybody is graded, the good at the top, bad at the bottom, exactly done as it should be, is impossible. 
There are simply too many random factors: accidents, accidents of birth, accidents of things dropping on people's heads, illnesses, etc. 
We will never get to grade them, never get to grade people as they should. 
I'm drawn to a lovely quote by St. Augustine in "The City of God," where he says, "It's a sin to judge any man by his post." 
In modern English that would mean it's a sin to come to any view of who you should talk to, dependent on their business card. 
It's not the post that should count. 
According to St. Augustine, only God can really put everybody in their place; he's going to do that on the Day of Judgment, with angels and trumpets, and the skies will open. 
Insane idea, if you're a secularist person, like me. 
But something very valuable in that idea, nevertheless. 
In other words, hold your horses when you're coming to judge people. 
You don't necessarily know what someone's true value is. 
That is an unknown part of them, and we shouldn't behave as though it is known. 
There is another source of solace and comfort for all this. 
When we think about failing in life, when we think about failure, one of the reasons why we fear failing is not just a loss of income, a loss of status. 
What we fear is the judgment and ridicule of others. 
The number one organ of ridicule, nowadays, is the newspaper. 
If you open the newspaper any day of the week, it's full of people who've messed up their lives. 
They've slept with the wrong person, taken the wrong substance, passed the wrong piece of legislation -- whatever it is, and then are fit for ridicule. 
In other words, they have failed. And they are described as "losers." 
Now, is there any alternative to this? 
I think the Western tradition shows us one glorious alternative, which is tragedy. 
Tragic art, as it developed in the theaters of ancient Greece, in the fifth century B.C., was essentially an art form devoted to tracing how people fail, and also according them a level of sympathy, which ordinary life would not necessarily accord them. 
A few years ago, I was thinking about this, and I went to "The Sunday Sport," a tabloid newspaper I don't recommend you start reading if you're not familiar with it already. 
(Laughter) And I went to talk to them about certain of the great tragedies of Western art. 
I wanted to see how they would seize the bare bones of certain stories, if they came in as a news item at the news desk on a Saturday afternoon. 
I mentioned Othello; they'd not heard of it but were fascinated. 
(Laughter) I asked them to write a headline for the story. 
They came up with "Love-Crazed Immigrant Kills Senator's Daughter." 
Splashed across the headline. 
I gave them the plotline of Madame Bovary. 
Again, a book they were enchanted to discover. 
And they wrote "Shopaholic Adulteress Swallows Arsenic After Credit Fraud." 
(Laughter) And then my favorite -- they really do have a kind of genius of their own, these guys -- my favorite is Sophocles' Oedipus the King: "Sex With Mum Was Blinding." 
(Laughter) (Applause) In a way, if you like, at one end of the spectrum of sympathy, you've got the tabloid newspaper. 
At the other end of the spectrum, you've got tragedy and tragic art. 
And I suppose I'm arguing that we should learn a little bit about what's happening in tragic art. 
It would be insane to call Hamlet a loser. 
He is not a loser, though he has lost. 
And I think that is the message of tragedy to us, and why it's so very, very important, I think. 
The other thing about modern society and why it causes this anxiety, is that we have nothing at its center that is non-human. 
We are the first society to be living in a world where we don't worship anything other than ourselves. 
We think very highly of ourselves, and so we should; we've put people on the Moon, done all sorts of extraordinary things. 
And so we tend to worship ourselves. Our heroes are human heroes. 
That's a very new situation. 
Most other societies have had, right at their center, the worship of something transcendent: a god, a spirit, a natural force, the universe, whatever it is -- something else that is being worshiped. 
We've slightly lost the habit of doing that, which is, I think, why we're particularly drawn to nature. 
Not for the sake of our health, though it's often presented that way, but because it's an escape from the human anthill. 
It's an escape from our own competition, and our own dramas. 
And that's why we enjoy looking at glaciers and oceans, and contemplating the Earth from outside its perimeters, etc. 
We like to feel in contact with something that is non-human, and that is so deeply important to us. 
What I think I've been talking about really is success and failure. 
And one of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. 
If I said that there's somebody behind the screen who's very successful, certain ideas would immediately come to mind. 
You'd think that person might have made a lot of money, achieved renown in some field. 
My own theory of success -- I'm somebody who's very interested in success, I really want to be successful, always thinking, how can I be more successful? 
But as I get older, I'm also very nuanced about what that word "success" might mean. 
Here's an insight that I've had about success: You can't be successful at everything. 
We hear a lot of talk about work-life balance. 
Nonsense. 
So any vision of success has to admit what it's losing out on, where the element of loss is. 
And I think any wise life will accept, as I say, that there is going to be an element where we're not succeeding. 
And the thing about a successful life is that a lot of the time, our ideas of what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. 
They're sucked in from other people; chiefly, if you're a man, your father, and if you're a woman, your mother. 
Psychoanalysis has been drumming home this message for about 80 years. 
No one's quite listening hard enough, but I very much believe it's true. 
And we also suck in messages from everything from the television, to advertising, to marketing, etc. 
These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. 
When we're told that banking is a very respectable profession, a lot of us want to go into banking. 
When banking is no longer so respectable, we lose interest in banking. 
We are highly open to suggestion. 
So what I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but we should make sure that they are our own. 
We should focus in on our ideas, and make sure that we own them; that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions. 
Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want, and find out, at the end of the journey, that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along. 
So, I'm going to end it there. 
But what I really want to stress is: by all means, success, yes. 
But let's accept the strangeness of some of our ideas. 
Let's probe away at our notions of success. 
Let's make sure our ideas of success are truly our own. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: That was fascinating. 
But how do you reconcile this idea of it being bad to think of someone as a "loser," with the idea that a lot of people like, of seizing control of your life, and that a society that encourages that, perhaps has to have some winners and losers? 
Alain De Botton: Yes, I think it's merely the randomness of the winning and losing process that I want to stress, because the emphasis nowadays is so much on the justice of everything, and politicians always talk about justice. 
Now I'm a firm believer in justice, I just think that it's impossible. 
So we should do everything we can to pursue it, but we should always remember that whoever is facing us, whatever has happened in their lives, there will be a strong element of the haphazard. 
That's what I'm trying to leave room for; otherwise, it can get quite claustrophobic. 
CA: I mean, do you believe that you can combine your kind of kinder, gentler philosophy of work with a successful economy? 
Or do you think that you can't, but it doesn't matter that much that we're putting too much emphasis on that? 
AB: The nightmare thought is that frightening people is the best way to get work out of them, and that somehow the crueler the environment, the more people will rise to the challenge. 
You want to think, who would you like as your ideal dad? 
And your ideal dad is somebody who is tough but gentle. 
And it's a very hard line to make. 
We need fathers, as it were, the exemplary father figures in society, avoiding the two extremes, which is the authoritarian disciplinarian on the one hand, and on the other, the lax, no-rules option. 
CA: Alain De Botton. 
AB: Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

So on May 6 of 2019, the sun was shining, the sky was blue, clouds were that puffy white. 
It was a perfect spring day. 
I was walking back to my office, and my phone rang. 
And it was one of my lieutenants. 
I said, "Hey, John. 
How are you?" 
He said, "Sir, I'm good. 
But I've got some bad news." 
He said our executive officer died that weekend. 
We went back and forth, "What do you mean, what are you talking about?" 
I asked him what happened. 
He said, "Sir, he killed himself." 
I walked around my office for a couple of hours in a complete fog, trying to understand what had happened, why. 
I had just communicated with him a few months earlier. 
And I had no idea that this officer was in trouble. 
And I fault myself as a leader for not having known that. 
I went on this process of trying to figure out why, what's happening in the veteran community, why are these things going on. 
I read reports from the Department of Veteran Affairs, Department of Defense, I've read national studies on mental health and the issues associated with it. 
I'm going to share with you some of the things I found out. 
Department of Veteran Affairs has taken the lead on veteran suicide, and it's actually their number one priority. 
Based on the reports they have and the numbers that I've calculated, between 2001 and 2019, during the time of the Global War on Terror, my approximation is there's 115,000 veterans who have died by their own hands. 
I also looked at the Department of Defense report that lists casualties. 
This particular report lists the casualties from October of 2001 specifically to November 18 of last year. 
During that time frame and the Global War on Terror, there have been 5,440 active duty members killed in action. 
So by my numbers, 115,000 approximate suicides, 5,440 killed in action. 
What does that mean to me? 
We have approximately 21 veterans ending their lives by their own hand for every one that is killed by an enemy combatant. 
It's a staggering, staggering number. 
These national studies that deal with mental health tell us that if you have any type of genetic mental health issue within your family that can be passed on, or if something has happened to you in your childhood that was traumatic, your ability to deal with post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, significantly decreases. 
They also tell us that if you want to have a full evaluation, determine if somebody has PTSD, you need to have a minimum of one hour interview with a mental health expert that's trained to detect what PTSD is to determine if you suffer from it. 
Now let me talk about what happens when you enter into the military. 
When you join the armed forces, you're going to go through a medical exam, you're going to take a physical fitness test, you're going to take a drug test, you're going to take a vocational test so they can figure out what you're good at and hopefully place you in that type of job category. 
But would you believe that with approximately 115,000 suicides over the last 20 years, and the data that we know from the national studies on how to determine if somebody is going to be able to cope with post-traumatic stress disorder, we still don't have a standardized mental health evaluation for our recruits entering into the service. 
That's something I think that needs to change. 
Number two, when you leave the service -- When I left the service in 2003, I had to attend some mandatory classes, about two days' worth of classes, and then I was on my way. 
Today, it's a little different. 
Today you'll actually get a call if you're on what we call terminal leave or paid time off that you're trying to use up before you actually are fully discharged. 
I talked to one veteran who got a call. 
He was on his way home from work, and the only thing he could think of was, "How quick can I get off this?" 
And I think the call lasted maybe 10 or 15 minutes. 
But yet the national studies tell us it needs to be an in-person, one-hour interview. 
I think that's something that we can improve upon. 
There's another thing that the Department of Veteran Affairs talked about in the reports. 
They said that our service members that are self-medicating tend to be at a significantly higher risk of suicide. 
So those veterans that are self-medicating with alcohol, or drug abuse -- and in fact, the Department of Veteran Affairs has classified opioid use disorder, OUD, as one of the epidemics. 
So as I talked to marines from my unit and tried to learn more about it, I started to find out some really, really alarming things. 
I had a marine who came back from Iraq and he went to the hospital for a "back pain" and he was prescribed some opioids. 
He also suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. 
He became addicted to these painkillers, because not only did it mask the pain in his back, but it helped him to cope with some of the horrific things that he had to see, experience and do over in the Middle East. 
And he eventually overdosed. 
Another challenge we have is that when you're on active duty, you are under the Department of Defense. 
And so all of your doctors, all your health care is in that category. 
When you leave the service, you are now part of the Department of Veteran Affairs. 
So these active duty members that seek help for their mental health issues and are diagnosed with PTSD or other mental health issues, when they leave the service, there's no transition to a doctor that's in the Department of Veteran Affairs or perhaps out in the civilian world because of privacy acts. 
Now there's some good news in this. 
Just recently, it was legislated that a database will be built that will house both Department of Defense health records and Department of Veteran Affairs health records. 
But I want to take that thought a step further. 
My company was 204 marines and sailors strong. 
As I looked at and I talked to my marines from my unit, what we came up with is we are well in excess of a dozen of our members that committed suicide. 
When I talk to senior leadership in the battalion, and battalion is about six to seven hundred marines, they estimate that we're in the hundreds who have committed suicide. 
So let's take this database that we're building, and let's go a little bit further with it. 
What if when a veteran passes away, whether it's natural causes, overdose or suicide, we're able to feed that into the Veteran Affairs who is then able to access Department of Defense records, identify what type of units they were in, what contingencies and operations did they participate in, and let's build the data points to try to figure out are there units that are more susceptible to develop post-traumatic stress disorder so that we can get them the mental health prior to going on deployment, prior to being in theater. 
If they're in theater, get them the mental health while they're in theater, and get them mental health counseling and help before they even come home out of theater. 
(Applause) And by the way, if we can build those sets of data points to be able to do that, we don't just apply them to the military, we can also use that for the general population. 
If we put our minds together and our resources together, and we openly talk about this, and try to find solutions for this epidemic that's going on in America, hopefully we can save a life. 
Those are my thoughts, my ideas, I hope that this talk is not the end of this discussion but rather the beginning of it. 
And I want to thank you for your time today. 
(Applause) 

I grew up in a family where my father managed all of the money. 
But for some reason, when I was eight or nine years old, he started showing me things about money. 
We would sit at the kitchen table, and he'd show me all the bank books. 
Now, that was back in the day before the internet, when we used to have little books that we used to keep our information in. 
And he would show me how he saved in these accounts, and he'd pay bills out of these. 
And every time he would show me something about money, he would end by saying, "And don't you tell your mother." 
(Laughter) Now, to this day, I really don't know why he said that, but what I do know is, to that eight-year-old girl sitting at the kitchen table, it meant, "Don't say a word." 
Years later, when I got my first job, my father said, "You'll bring me your check, and I'll put it in the bank for you." 
But because of what he taught me years before, I said, "I'd like my bank book." 
Right then, at 16 years old, I began managing my own money. 
I went on to college and then to start my new career as a CPA, but now, with students loans, getting an apartment and a new job, I began the roller-coaster ride of accumulating debt, paying it off and accumulating more. 
Many years later, after getting married, I went through an unexpected divorce, and I was left with a house I couldn't afford and bills I couldn't pay. 
You might be wondering, "How does that happen to someone that's educated and skilled at managing people's money?" 
I had reverted back to what I learned growing up: that one person managed all the money. 
I had handed over my financial power, and I had become financially dependent. 
Financial dependency is when someone is dependent on a person, a job or a situation for money, and they feel trapped. 
People fall into two categories: dependent with choice and dependent without a choice. 
Someone is dependent with choice when they hand over their financial power and their participation. 
It can happen in personal or business relationships when one person doesn't want to be involved with the money, so they hand over the responsibility to a spouse, a partner or a professional, like an accountant or a manager. 
This was my situation. 
I spent all day long managing other people's money, so I was relieved that my husband was interested and good at managing ours. 
I was free! 
For the first time since that first job at 16 years old, I didn't have to be responsible for managing my money. 
But what I failed to realize was what felt like freedom was really dependency. 
My mistake is that I didn't stay involved or understand what was going on with our money. 
You may have experienced this yourself, or you may have heard stories of celebrities or professional athletes that have relied on family, friends and others to manage their money, and they are left broke, bankrupt and betrayed because they made the choice to hand over their financial power. 
Someone that's dependent without a choice feels trapped because of their financial situation. 
They can be in a job or career where they're unhappy or being harassed but they can't afford to leave. 
Or, someone that's had to move in with family and friends because they've had an illness or gone through a divorce or experienced a tragedy, and now they're financially dependent on others. 
And how many of us know someone that has an elderly parent or a relative that can no longer take care of themselves, and they're left to rely on others, sometimes handing over their homes, their money and other assets. 
Another type of dependency without a choice is financial abuse. 
Financial abuse is a pattern of abusive behavior used to control and intimidate a partner. 
Victims are in a relationship, and the other person has power over them, because they don't have access to money, information or the resources and support they need to leave. 
The Allstate Foundation has a program called the Purple Purse that helps victims of domestic violence through financial empowerment. 
They report that 99 percent -- in 99 out of one hundred domestic violence cases -- financial abuse helps keep victims trapped in their relationship. 
The Purple Purse has coined financial abuse "the invisible weapon," because visible abuse leaves bruises and scars but financial abuse doesn't. 
Financial abuse and financial dependency leave emotional scars that you can't see. 
They include hopelessness, guilt, shame, depression, lack of confidence and self-esteem. 
Financial dependency is also invisible, because no one's talking about it. 
Why? 
Because no one wants to show their emotional scars, and because we're taught in our homes, on our jobs and in our community not to talk about money. 
So many people that I talk to about this issue, they can relate and they have a story, but they're not telling anyone their story. 
When I was told at the kitchen table, "Don't you tell," I never told anyone. 
It's even hard for me right now to break that rule that I learned so long ago. 
So, what can I do? What can you do? 
What can we all do to disarm this invisible weapon? 
We can solve three problems. 
The first problem is lack of awareness, because knowing about money and having money aren't always the solution. 
In my situation, I was educated and experienced in managing money, but that didn't stop me from becoming financially dependent. 
Why? 
Because of the beliefs and experiences I had growing up: one person manages all the money. 
After my divorce, I had to rebuild my life financially and emotionally. 
So I took every self-development course and I read every self-help book I could find. 
And that's when I began to understand the dynamics of the family I grew up in and how they played a role in me handing over my financial power. 
When you become aware of your inner bruises and scars, you can begin to break free from financial dependency. 
The next problem is lack of information about financial literacy. 
Financial literacy is having the skills and the knowledge to make informed decisions about your money. 
It includes topics like savings and investing, budgeting and debt. 
In 2018, only 17 states required financial literacy in high school curriculums. 
This corresponds with recent studies that show that 66 percent of Americans are financially illiterate. 
If you are in a financial dependency situation, start by looking and going through your finances, making decisions, participate in making decisions about your money. 
If you are in a financial abuse situation, get access to your information. 
Look for financial documents like bank credit card statements, social security information and account pass codes. 
The last problem is lack of giving and getting support. 
Many people don't know that there are free resources online and in your local community to help you learn and establish healthy money habits. 
There are also free resources if you are a victim of financial abuse, like the Purple Purse. 
Giving support includes listening to others that are financially dependent without judgment or criticism. 
It also involves sharing your story, because when you share your story, you empower others, and you give them the permission to rewrite their own. 
It's my hope that by sharing my story, more people will learn about financial dependency, will share their own stories and will connect with others to shed a light on this hidden issue so that we can all have financial freedom. 
(Applause) 

Helen Walters: Huang, it's so good to see you. 
Thank you for joining us. How's your 2020 been? 
Huang Hung: My 2020 started totally normal. 
In January, I went to Paris, did my interview for the fashion week there, came back to Beijing on January 22nd, and finding things a little bit tense because there were a lot of rumors. 
Having lived through SARS, I wasn't that concerned. 
And on the 23rd, I had a friend of mine from New York come to my house who had a flu, and we had dinner together, and another friend who came, who left the next day for Australia for vacation on an airplane. 
So we were not taking this terribly seriously until there was a lockdown. 
HW: And we've seen that echo around the world. 
I think still some people find it hard to understand the magnitude of some of the measures that China took. 
I mean -- what else are we missing about China's response in all of this? 
HH: You know, historically, we're just two very different countries in terms of culture and history. 
I mean, these are two completely different human experiences for its people. 
So, for China, when the lockdown happens, people are OK. 
People are OK with it, because they think that's what a good parent should do. 
You know, if a kid gets sick, you put him in the other room, and you lock him up and make sure that the other kids don't get sick. 
And they expect that out of the government. 
But when it is outside of China, from America, it becomes a huge issue of the right political thing to do and whether it's infringing on personal freedom. 
So the issues that you have to deal with in a democratic society are issues that one does not have to deal with in China. 
I have to say that there's a word in Chinese that doesn't exist in any other language, and the word is called "guāi." 
It is what you call a kid who listens to his or her parents. 
So I think, as a people, we are very "guāi." 
We have this sort of authoritarian figure that Chinese always look up to, and they do expect the government to actually take the actions, and they will deal with it. 
However much suffering there is, they feel that, OK, if big brother says that this has to be done, then it must be done. 
And that really defines China as a separate mentality, Chinese has a separate mentality, as, say, people in Europe and America. 
HW: That sense of collective responsibility sometimes feels a little absent from this culture. 
At the same time, there are, I think, valid concerns around surveillance and data privacy, things like that. 
What is the balance here, and what is the right trade-off between surveillance and freedom? 
HH: I think in the internet age, it is somewhere between China and the US. 
I think when you take individual freedom versus collective safety, there has to be a balance somewhere there. 
With surveillance, the head of Baidu, Robin Li, once said the Chinese people are quite willing to give up certain individual rights in exchange for convenience. 
Actually, he was completely criticized on Chinese social media, but I think he is right. 
Chinese people are willing to give up certain rights. 
For example, we have ... 
Chinese mostly are very proud of the payment system we have, which is you can go anywhere just with your iPhone and pay for everything, and all they do is face-scan. 
I think that probably freaks Americans out. 
You know, China right now, we're still under semi-lockdown, so if you go anywhere, there's an app where you scan and you input your mobile phone number, and the app will tell the guard at the entrance of the mall, for example, where you have been for the past 14 days. 
Now, when I told that to an American, she was horrified, and she thought it was such an invasion of privacy. 
On the other hand, as someone who is Chinese and has lived in China for the past 20 years, although I understand that American mentality, I still find I'm Chinese enough to think, "I don't mind this, and I am better, I feel safer entering the mall because everybody has been scanned," whereas, I think individual freedom as an abstract concept in a pandemic like this is actually really meaningless. 
So I think the West really needs to move a step towards the East and to think about the collective as a whole rather than only think about oneself as an individual. 
HW: The rise of antagonistic rhetoric between the US and China is obviously troubling, and the thing is, the countries are interlinked whether people understand global supply chains or not. 
Where do you think we head next? 
HH: You know, this is the most horrifying thing that came out of this, the kind of nationalistic sentiments on both sides in this pandemic. 
Because I'm an optimist, I think what will come out of this is that both sides will realize that this is a fight that the entire human race has to do together and not apart. 
Despite the rhetoric, the global economy has grown to such an integration that decoupling will be extremely costly and painful for both the United States and China. 
HW: It's also been interesting to me to see the criticism that China has received quite vocally. 
For instance, they've been criticized for downplaying the death toll, arguably, also for trying to demonize Dr. Li, the Wuhan doctor who first raised the alarm about the coronavirus. 
I just saw a report in "The New York Times" that Weibo users have been posting repeatedly on the last post of Dr. Li and using this as kind of a living memorial to him, chatting to him. 
There's something like 870,000 comments and growing on that last post. 
Do you see a change in the media? 
Do you see a change in the approach to Chinese leadership that actually could lead to China swinging perhaps more to the center, just as perhaps America needs to swing more towards a Chinese model? 
HH: Unfortunately, not really, because I think there is a way between authoritarian governments and its people to communicate. 
The night that Dr. Li died, when it was announced that he died, the Chinese social media just blew up. 
Even though he was unjustly treated as a whistleblower, he still went to work in the hospital and tried to save lives as a doctor, and then he died because he contracted the disease. 
So there was anger, frustration, and all of that came out in kind of commemorating a figure that they feel that the government had wronged. 
The verdict and sort of the official voice on: "Who is Dr. Li? Is he a good guy or a bad guy?" 
completely changed 180 degrees. 
He went from a doctor who misbehaved to the hero who warned the people. 
So under authoritarian government, they still are very aware of public opinion, but, on the other hand, when people complain and when they commemorate Dr. Li, do they really want to change the system? 
And my answer is no, because they don't like that particular decision, but they don't want to change the system. 
And one of the reasons is because they have never, ever known another system. 
This is the system they know how to work. 
HW: What is wok-throwing, Huang? 
HH: Oh, wok-throwing is when you blame somebody else. 
Basically, someone who is responsible in a slang Chinese is someone who carries a black wok. 
You are made to be the scapegoat for something that is bad. 
So basically, Trump started calling it the "Chinese virus," the "Wuhan virus," and trying to blame the entire coronavirus pandemic on the Chinese. 
And then the Chinese, I think, threw the wok back at the Americans. 
So it was a very funny joke on Chinese social media, that wok-throwing. 
HW: But tell us, Huang: You're also doing dances on TikTok, right? 
HH: Oh, of course. 
I'm doing a lot of wok-throwing aerobics on TikTok. 
HW: I mean, a potential silver lining of all of this is that it has laid bare some of the inequities, inequalities in the system, some of the broken structures that we have, and if we're smart, we can rebuild better. 
HH: Yes. I think one of the silver linings of this pandemic is that we do realize that the human race has to do something together rather than to be distinguished by our race, by the color of our skin or by our nationality; that this virus obviously is not discriminating against anyone, whether you are rich or poor, important or not important or whatever skin color or nationality you are. 
So it is a time to be together, rather than to try to pull the world apart and crawl back to our own nationalistic shells. 
HW: It's a beautiful sentiment. 
Huang Hung, thank you so much for joining us from Beijing. 
Stay well, please. 
HH: Thank you, Helen, and you stay well as well. 

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

Helen Walters: So, Chris, who's up first? 
Chris Anderson: Well, we have a man who's worried about pandemics pretty much his whole life. 
He played an absolutely key role, more than 40 years ago, in helping the world get rid of the scourge of smallpox. 
And in 2006, he came to TED to warn the world of the dire risk of a global pandemic, and what we might do about it. 
So please welcome here Dr. Larry Brilliant. 
Larry, so good to see you. 
Larry Brilliant: Thank you, nice to see you. 
CA: Larry, in that talk, you showed a video clip that was a simulation of what a pandemic might look like. 
I would like to play it -- this gave me chills. 
Larry Brilliant (TED2006): Let me show you a simulation of what a pandemic looks like, so we know what we're talking about. 
Let's assume, for example, that the first case occurs in South Asia. 
It initially goes quite slowly, you get two or three discrete locations. 
Then there will be secondary outbreaks. 
And the disease will spread from country to country so fast that you won't know what hit you. 
Within three weeks, it will be everywhere in the world. 
Now if we had an undo button, and we could go back and isolate it and grab it when it first started, if we could find it early and we had early detection and early response, and we could put each one of those viruses in jail, that's the only way to deal with something like a pandemic. 
CA: Larry, that phrase you mentioned there, "early detection," "early response," that was a key theme of that talk, you made us all repeat it several times. 
Is that still the key to preventing a pandemic? 
LB: Oh, surely. 
You know, when you have a pandemic, something moving at exponential speed, if you miss the first two weeks, if you're late the first two weeks, it's not the deaths and the illness from the first two weeks you lose, it's the two weeks at the peak. 
Those are prevented if you act early. 
Early response is critical, early detection is a condition precedent. 
CA: And how would you grade the world on its early detection, early response to COVID-19? 
LB: Of course, you gave me this question earlier, so I've been thinking a lot about it. 
I think I would go through the countries, and I've actually made a list. 
I think the island republics of Taiwan, Iceland and certainly New Zealand would get an A. 
The island republic of the UK and the United States -- which is not an island, no matter how much we may think we are -- would get a failing grade. 
I'd give a B to South Korea and to Germany. 
And in between ... 
So it's a very heterogeneous response, I think. 
The world as a whole is faltering. 
We shouldn't be proud of what's happening right now. 
CA: I mean, we got the detection pretty early, or at least some doctors in China got the detection pretty early. 
LB: Earlier than the 2002 SARS, which took six months. 
This took about six weeks. 
And detection means not only finding it, but knowing what it is. 
So I would give us a pretty good score on that. 
The transparency, the communication -- those are other issues. 
CA: So what was the key mistake that you think the countries you gave an F to made? 
LB: I think fear, political incompetence, interference, not taking it seriously soon enough -- it's pretty human. 
I think throughout history, pretty much every pandemic is first viewed with denial and doubt. 
But those countries that acted quickly, and even those who started slow, like South Korea, they could still make up for it, and they did really well. 
We've had two months that we've lost. 
We've given a virus that moves exponentially a two-month head start. 
That's not a good idea, Chris. 
CA: No, indeed. 
I mean, there's so much puzzling information still out there about this virus. 
What do you think the scientific consensus is going to likely end up being on, like, the two key numbers of its infectiousness and its fatality rate? 
LB: So I think the kind of equation to keep in mind is that the virus moves dependent on three major issues. 
One is the R0, the first number of secondary cases that there are when the virus emerges. 
In this case, people talk about it being 2.2, 2.4. 
But a really important paper three weeks ago, in the "Emerging Infectious Diseases" journal came out, suggesting that looking back on the Wuhan data, it's really 5.7. 
So for argument's sake, let's say that the virus is moving at exponential speed and the exponent is somewhere between 2.2 and 5.7. 
The other two factors that matter are the incubation period or the generation time. 
The longer that is, the slower the pandemic appears to us. 
When it's really short, like six days, it moves like lightning. 
And then the last, and the most important -- and it's often overlooked -- is the density of susceptibles. 
This is a novel virus, so we want to know how many customers could it potentially have. 
And as it's novel, that's eight billion of us. 
The world is facing a virus that looks at all of us like equally susceptible. 
Doesn't matter our color, our race, or how wealthy we are. 
CA: I mean, none of the numbers that you've mentioned so far are in themselves different from any other infections in recent years. 
What is the combination that has made this so deadly? 
LB: Well, it is exactly the combination of the short incubation period and the high transmissibility. 
But you know, everybody on this call has known somebody who has the disease. 
Sadly, many have lost a loved one. 
This is a terrible disease when it is serious. 
And I get calls from doctors in emergency rooms and treating people in ICUs all over the world, and they all say the same thing: "How do I choose who is going to live and who is going to die? 
I have so few tools to deal with." 
It's a terrifying disease, to die alone with a ventilator in your lungs, and it's a disease that affects all of our organs. 
It's a respiratory disease -- perhaps misleading. 
Makes you think of a flu. 
But so many of the patients have blood in their urine from kidney disease, they have gastroenteritis, they certainly have heart failure very often, we know that it affects taste and smell, the olfactory nerves, we know, of course, about the lung. 
The question I have: is there any organ that it does not affect? 
And in that sense, it reminds me all too much of smallpox. 
CA: So we're in a mess. 
What's the way forward from here? 
LB: Well, the way forward is still the same. 
Rapid detection, rapid response. 
Finding every case, and then figuring out all the contacts. 
We've got great new technology for contact tracing, we've got amazing scientists working at the speed of light to give us test kits and antivirals and vaccines. 
We need to slow down, the Buddhists say slow down time so that you can put your heart, your soul, into that space. 
We need to slow down the speed of this virus, which is why we do social distancing. 
Just to be clear -- flattening the curve, social distancing, it doesn't change the absolute number of cases, but it changes what could be a Mount Fuji-like peak into a pulse, and then we won't also lose people because of competition for hospital beds, people who have heart attacks, need chemotherapy, difficult births, can get into the hospital, and we can use the scarce resources we have, especially in the developing world, to treat people. 
So slow down, slow down the speed of the epidemic, and then in the troughs, in between waves, jump on, double down, step on it, and find every case, trace every contact, test every case, and then only quarantine the ones who need to be quarantined, and do that until we have a vaccine. 
CA: So it sounds like we have to get past the stage of just mitigation, where we're just trying to take a general shutdown, to the point where we can start identifying individual cases again and contact-trace for them and treat them separately. 
I mean, to do that, that seems like it's going to take a step up of coordination, ambition, organization, investment, that we're not really seeing the signs of yet in some countries. 
Can we do this, how can we do this? 
LB: Oh, of course we can do this. 
I mean, Taiwan did it so beautifully, Iceland did it so beautifully, Germany, all with different strategies, South Korea. 
It really requires competent governance, a sense of seriousness, and listening to the scientists, not the politicians following the virus. 
Of course we can do this. 
Let me remind everybody -- this is not the zombie apocalypse, it's not a mass extinction event. 
You know, 98, 99 percent of us are going to get out of this alive. 
We need to deal with it the way we know we can, and we need to be the best version of ourselves. 
Both sitting at home as well as in science, and certainly in leadership. 
CA: And might there be even worse pathogens out there in the future? 
Like, can you picture or describe an even worse combination of those numbers that we should start to get ready for? 
LB: Well, smallpox had an R0 of 3.5 to 4.5, so that's probably about what I think this COVID will be. 
But it killed a third of the people. 
But we had a vaccine. 
So those are the different sets that you have. 
But what I'm mostly worried about, and the reason that we made "Contagion" and that was a fictional virus -- I repeat, for those of you watching, that's fiction. 
We created a virus that killed a lot more than this one did. 
CA: You're talking about the movie "Contagion" that's been trending on Netflix. 
And you were an advisor for. 
LB: Absolutely, that's right. 
But we made that movie deliberately to show what a real pandemic looked like, but we did choose a pretty awful virus. 
And the reason we showed it like that, going from a bat to an apple, to a pig, to a cook, to Gwyneth Paltrow, was because that is in nature what we call spillover, as zoonotic diseases, diseases of animals, spill over to human beings. 
And if I look backwards three decades or forward three decades -- looking backward three decades, Ebola, SARS, Zika, swine flu, bird flu, West Nile, we can begin almost a catechism and listen to all the cacophony of these names. 
But there were 30 to 50 novel viruses that jumped into human beings. 
And I'm afraid, looking forward, we are in the age of pandemics, we have to behave like that, we need to practice One Health, we need to understand that we're living in the same world as animals, the environment, and us, and we get rid of this fiction that we are some kind of special species. 
To the virus, we're not. 
CA: Mmm. 
You mentioned vaccines, though. 
Do you see any accelerated path to a vaccine? 
LB: I do. 
I'm actually excited to see that we're doing something that we only get to think of in computer science, which is we're changing what should have always been, or has always been, rather, multiple sequential processes. 
Do safety testing, then you test for effectiveness, then for efficiency. 
And then you manufacture. 
We're doing all three or four of those steps, instead of doing it in sequence, we're doing in parallel. 
Bill Gates has said he's going to build seven vaccine production lines in the United States, and start preparing for production, not knowing what the end vaccine is going to be. 
We're simultaneously doing safety tests and efficacy tests. 
I think the NIH has jumped up. 
I'm very thrilled to see that. 
CA: And how does that translate into a likely time line, do you think? 
A year, 18 months, is that possible? 
LB: You know, Tony Fauci is our guru in this, and he said 12 to 18 months. 
I think that we will do faster than that in the initial vaccine. 
But you may have heard that this virus may not give us the long-term immunity -- that something like smallpox would do. 
So we're trying to make vaccines where we add adjuvants that actually make the vaccine create better immunity than the disease, so that we can confer immunity for many years. 
That's going to take a little longer. 
CA: Last question, Larry. 
Back in 2006, as a winner of the TED Prize, we granted you a wish, and you wished the world would create this pandemic preparedness system that would prevent something like this happening. 
I feel like we, the world, let you down. 
If you were to make another wish now, what would it be? 
LB: Well, I don't think we're let down in terms of speed of detection. 
I'm actually pretty pleased. 
When we met in 2006, the average one of these viruses leaping from an animal to a human, it took us six months to find that -- like the first Ebola, for example. 
We're now finding the first cases in two weeks. 
I'm not unhappy about that, I'd like to push it down to a single incubation period. 
It's a bigger issue for me. 
What I found is that in the Smallpox Eradication Programme people of all colors, all religions, all races, so many countries, came together. 
And it took working as a global community to conquer a global pandemic. 
Now, I feel that we have become victims of centrifugal forces. 
We're in our nationalistic kind of barricades. 
We will not be able to conquer a pandemic unless we believe we're all in it together. 
This is not some Age of Aquarius, or Kumbaya statement, this is what a pandemic forces us to realize. 
We are all in it together, we need a global solution to a global problem. 
Anything less than that is unthinkable. 
CA: Larry Brilliant, thank you so very much. 
LB: Thank you, Chris. 

Shah Rukh Khan: The speaker you are about to meet is someone who knows and understands the value of words like no one else does. 
In his writing career spanning over four decades, this man has chosen words with beauty and versatility, like a flower springing to life ... 
like Mr. Bachchan’s memorable punches ... 
(Laughter) like a best-selling book of Urdu poetry ... 
like well ... what do I say, only Javed Akhtar Sahab. 
(Applause) Please welcome onstage, the one and only Javed Akhtar Sahab. 
(Cheers and applause) Javed Akhtar: Friends, this topic -- the power of words -- is an interesting one, and one that's very close to my heart. 
It’s strange how we often overlook things that are so close to us, near us. 
How many people question, "Why is air transparent?" 
Or, "Why is water wet?" 
How many think about what is it that has passed? 
Time has passed. What came? What went away? 
How many of us wonder? 
Similarly ... 
the words that we speak and hear all day, how many times have we really thought, "What exactly are these words?" 
Words are a strange thing. 
You once saw an animal and decided it’s a "cat." 
But cat is a sound. 
This cat has nothing to do with the animal. 
But I have decided it’s a cat. 
So a cat it is. 
After that I made a semicircle, a pyramid, cut into half, then a straight line, then another below it, and wrote: "cat." 
In these criss-crossed lines, I filled a sound and into that sound, a meaning. 
Now like with this cat, even with love, anger, a thought, an idea, pain, suffering, happiness, surprise, everything has been linked with a sound. 
And then sounds were fit into some criss-crossed lines that we call a script. 
So three things that had nothing in common were joined by us to create a word. 
A sound that is actually gibberish has been added onto it. 
And the lines, crooked lines, they formed a word. 
Incredible! 
And I have come to believe that with time, these words have become like human beings. 
A man is known by the company he keeps. 
Similarly, with words, what is the company it has been keeping? 
What are the other words being used with it? 
For an average noun or an average verb, an average mind can quickly create reference. 
Where did they hear it? See it? 
What does it remind them of? 
What is its connection? When was it last used in conversation? 
What has been my experience with it? 
A host of memories appear when you hear a word you remember. 
And a good writer or orator is one who knows that when he uses a certain word, an average mind will associate it with a certain reference, specific memories will be evoked. 
Then he can create a world around a word. 
What is the power of a word? 
Be it a mother’s lullaby, a politician’s speech, love letters from your beloved, or a complaint against someone, a protest call ... 
anger, sadness, happiness, surprise, belonging, alienation anything in the world, any feeling in the world, any emotion, any reaction, until it is expressed in a word, it will not have any meaning for you, forget getting across to anyone else. 
Words are not thoughts, just like bricks are not homes. 
But houses are made with bricks. 
If you have less bricks, you will make a small house. 
The more words you have, the clearer your thoughts, and the more clearly you can convey them. 
Nowadays I often hear, especially from young ones, “You know what I mean?" 
No, I don't know what you mean. 
(Laughter) “You know what I mean,” is running out of words. 
Everything is now moving fast so communication has to be fast as well. 
But the tragedy is that we have attained this speed at the cost of depth of words. 
We want to speak faster, so everything is faster, so the language is also faster, hence communication is faster. 
Which means that forget about other people, just look at yourself. 
You are not being able to articulate your own feelings, thoughts or emotions in a detailed manner or clearly. 
And these words, as long as words exist, they aren’t there just for a meaning. 
They are also a conveyer belt of language, words. 
They reflect your culture, your traditions, your inheritance, your cultural wealth accumulated over generations, all of that is carried forward with words. 
If you cut a man off from some words, you cut him off from a culture, a history. 
This is exactly what is happening with us today. 
So language is a very powerful thing. 
Words are extremely powerful. 
But by themselves, they are neither good nor bad. 
If we start loving words and understand their power, we would realize that everything that happens in the world is because of words. 
Or there would be nothing between us and the rest of the creatures, the rest of the animals, although we too are animals. 
The only difference is that we can pass on, through our words, our experience, our learning and our knowledge to the next generation. 
So we don’t only live on instinct but our slowly accumulated experience and knowledge over generations is passed on to the next. 
Through what? Through words. 
And if we didn’t have these words our advantage is gradually over other species would diminish over time. 
We advanced only because we have language. 
And if we didn’t have that we wouldn’t be here. 
We would be right where we started. 
So what does language mean? 
Words! 
So learn to respect words. 
Love them. 
Befriend them. 
Listen to them attentively. 
And speak attentively. 
Thank you! 
(Applause) SRK: Thanks a lot, Javed Sahab, for coming here today and sharing such wonderful things with us. 
I have known Javed Sahab since I came to Mumbai about 25 years ago. 
JA: I was really young then. 
(Laughter) SRK: Yes. You are still very young, Sir. 
But I have got a lot of my education, my ideologies and many more things from Javed Sahab. 
I’ll share a small incident. 
He got angry with us while working on a film. 
He sometimes gets angry when unlettered people like us give him suggestions that maybe we could use this word or that instead. 
So our film was called "Kuch Kuch Hota Hai." 
(Cheers) And he did not like the title at all. 
So once when he was really mad at us kids, who are like his kids even now, he retorted: "Now my heart remains neither awake nor rests. 
What do I do? Oh! I feel something strange. 
Is that what you want?" 
In fact the entire song, all the words, were thrown at us by Javed Sahab in anger. 
And that song went on to become extremely popular. 
So even when Javed Sahab throws out words in anger, they turn into golden words. 
That’s his gift. 
(Cheers) JA: Well, the incident that Shah Rukh Sahab shared is indeed true. 
So on hearing this title, "'Kuch Kuch Hota Hai," I was shocked. 
I felt it wasn’t dignified enough. 
(Laughter) Though to be honest, I regret leaving such a super hit film over its title. 
So I left the film. 
Later I also felt a little embarrassed, and he too felt bad. 
So we decided to let bygones be bygones and work on some other film. 
Hence, the film "Kal Ho Naa Ho." 
I told him that everything else is still fine but I owe you two kuchs. 
Two kuchs. 
(Laughter) So I’ll write a song and return these two to you. 
I wrote a song specially for this reason called "Kuch to hua hai, kuch ho gaya hai." 
(Cheers and applause) and he returned his two. 
(Applause) Ladies and gentlemen, big round of applause for Javed Akhtar Sahab. 
(Applause) 

Your hands, up close, are anything but smooth. 
With peaks and valleys, folds and rifts, there are plenty of hiding places for a virus to stick. 
If you then touch your face, the virus can infect you. 
But there are two extraordinarily simple ways you can keep that from happening: soap and water, and hand sanitizer. 
So which is better? 
The coronavirus that causes COVID-19 is one of many viruses whose protective outer surface is made of a lipid bilayer. 
These lipids are pin shaped molecules whose heads are attracted to water, and tails are repulsed by it. 
So in water-rich environments, lipids naturally form a shell like this, with the heads outside and the tails inside. 
Their shared reaction to water makes the lipids stick loosely together— this is called the hydrophobic effect. 
This outer structure helps the molecular machinery of the virus break through cellular membranes and hijack our cells. 
But it has thousands upon thousands of weak points where the right molecules could pry it apart. 
And this is where soap comes in. 
A single drop of any brand of soap contains quadrillions of molecules called amphiphiles, which resemble biological lipids. 
Their tails, which are similarly repulsed by water, compete for space with the lipids that make up the virus’s shell. 
But they’re just different enough to break up the regularity of the virus’s membrane, making the whole thing come crashing down. 
Those amphiphiles then form bubbles of their own around particles including the virus’s RNA and proteins. 
Apply water, and you’ll wash that whole bubble away. 
Hand sanitizers work less like a crowbar, and more like an earthquake. 
When you surround a coronavirus with water, the hydrophobic effect gives the bonds within the membrane their strength. 
That same effect also holds the big proteins that form coronavirus’s spikes in place and in the shape that enables them to infect your cells. 
If you dry the virus out in air, it keeps its stability. 
But now surround it with a high concentration of an alcohol, like the ethanol or isopropanol found in most hand-sanitizers. 
This makes the hydrophobic effect disappear, and gives the molecules room to move around. 
The overall effect is like removing all of the nails and mortar from a house and then hitting it with an earthquake. 
The cell’s membrane collapses and those spike proteins crumble. 
In either method, the actual process of destroying the virus happens in just a second or two. 
But doctors recommend at least 20 seconds of hand-washing because of the intricate landscape that is your hand. 
Soap and sanitizer need to get everywhere, including your palms, fingertips, the outsides of your hands, and between your fingers, to protect you properly. 
And when it comes to a coronavirus outbreak, doctors recommend washing your hands with soap and water whenever possible. 
Even though both approaches are similarly effective at killing the virus, soap and water has two benefits: first it washes away any dirt which could otherwise hide virus particles. 
But more importantly, it’s simply easier to fully cover your hands with soap and water for 20 seconds. 
Of course, hand sanitizer is more convenient to use on the go. 
In the absence of a sink, use the sanitizer as thoroughly as possible and rub your hands together until they’re dry. 
Unfortunately, there are billions of people who don’t have access to clean drinking water, which is a huge problem at any time but especially during an outbreak. 
Researchers and aid groups are working to provide solutions for these communities. 
One example is a device that uses salt, water, and a car battery to make chlorinated water that kills harmful pathogens and is safe for hand-washing. 
So wherever possible, soap and water are recommended for a coronavirus, but does that mean it's best for every viral outbreak? 
Not necessarily. 
Many common colds are caused by rhinoviruses that have a geometric protein structure called a capsid instead of a lipid membrane. 
The capsid doesn't have nearly as many weak points where soap amphiphiles can pry it apart, so it takes longer for soap to be effective. 
However some of its surface proteins are still vulnerable to the destabilizing effect of hand sanitizer. 
In this and similar cases, hand sanitizer may be more effective, especially if you then wash your hands to remove residual particles. 
The best way to know which to use for any given outbreak is to do what's best for all things illness-related: follow the advice of accredited medical professionals. 

Raise your hand, and be honest, if you've used the phrase "crazy busy" to describe your day, your week, your month. 
I'm an emergency-room doctor, and "crazy busy" is a phrase you will never hear me use. 
And after today, I hope you'll stop using it, too. 
Here's why you cannot afford to use "crazy" to describe your busy. 
Because when we are in what I refer to as Crazy Busy Mode, we are simply less capable of handling the busy. 
Here's what happens. 
Your stress hormones rise and stay there, your executive function in the prefrontal cortex declines. 
That means your memory, your judgment, your impulse control deteriorate, and the brain areas for anger and anxiety are activated. 
Do you feel that? 
Here's the thing. 
You can be as busy as an emergency department without feeling like you're crazy busy. 
How? 
Our brains all process stress in similar fundamental ways. 
But how we react to it has been shown by research to be modifiable, whether it's emergencies or just daily, day-in, day-out stress. 
Now contrast Crazy Busy Mode with how I think of us in the ER -- Ready Mode. 
Ready Mode means whatever comes in through those doors, whether it's a multiple-car pileup, or a patient having chest pain while stuck in an elevator, or another patient with an item stuck where it shouldn't be. 
When you're know you're dying to ask. 
(Laughter) Even on those days when you would swear you were being punked, we're not afraid of it. 
Because we know that whatever comes in through those ER double doors, that we can handle it. 
That we're ready. 
That's Ready Mode. 
We've trained for it, and you can, too. 
Here's how. 
Step one to go from Crazy Mode to Ready Mode is to relentlessly triage. 
In Crazy Mode, you're always busy, always stressed, because you're reacting to every challenge with the same response. 
Contrast that with Ready Mode, where we triage, which means we prioritize by degree of urgency. 
This isn't just a nice way to get your to-do list done. 
Work by Dr. Robert Sapolsky shows that individuals who cannot differentiate threat from non-threat and react to everything with the same response have double the level of stress hormones. 
Which is why this is the first skill to learn. 
You can't take care of them all at once, but you don't have to. 
Because we triage. 
Red -- immediately life-threatening. 
Yellow -- serious, but not immediately life-threatening. 
Green -- minor. 
And we focus our efforts first on the reds. 
Now hear this. 
Part of the problem in Crazy Mode is that you are reacting to everything as if it is red. 
So start by triaging correctly. 
Know your reds. 
They're what is most important and where you can most move the needle. 
Now it's easy to be confused by noise, but what it noisiest is not always what is most red. 
In fact, my severe asthmatic patient is most at risk when he's quiet. 
But my patient over here, demanding that I bring her flavored coffee creamer, she's noisy, but she's not red. 
I'll give you an example from my own life. 
Last spring, my house flooded, my one-year-old was in the ER, I was supposed to do a fundraiser for my four-year-old's school and the final chapter of my book was beyond late. 
Maybe not ironically, that was the chapter on stress. 
(Laughter) My red tasks were getting my one-year-old better and finishing my book. 
That was it. 
Remember, relentlessly triage. 
The house flood repair? 
Well, once we had stopped and stabilized the damage, it was no longer a red. 
It felt red, but it was in fact just noise. 
No, no really, it was quite noisy, this picture on the far right is me wearing earplugs to focus on my book, while the floor is being mechanically dried around me. 
Know your reds, and do not let your non-reds distract you from them. 
By the way, it is liberating with a green task to, every once in a while, be able to remind yourself, "That's a green task. No one's going to die." 
(Laughter) It's OK if it's not perfect. 
Now there's one last triage level that we use in the worst scenarios. 
And that is black. 
Those patients for whom there is nothing we can do. 
Where we must move on. 
And although it is gut-wrenching, I mention it, because you each have your own equivalent black tasks in your life. 
These are items that you must take off your list. 
And I think many of you know what I'm talking about. 
For me, this was the fundraiser. 
I had to step down. 
Because as we in the ER know, if you try to do everything, you have no hope of saving your reds. 
Step two to go from Crazy Mode into Ready Mode is to expect and design for crazy. 
Half of handling crazy is how you prepare for it. 
So if step one we triage, step two, we design to make those tasks easier to do. 
Science shows us that the more options we have, then the longer each decision takes. 
And the more decisions we have to make, the more exhausted our brain gets and the less it is capable of making good decisions. 
Which is why this step two is about finding ways to reduce your daily decisions. 
Here are four easy examples you can use in your daily lifestyle. 
Plan. 
Plan your entire week's meals on the weekend, so that when it's Wednesday at 6pm and everyone's hangry and requesting pizza, you have no decisions to make to get a healthy meal on the table. 
Automate. 
Never leave anything to remember that you could automate, whether it's scheduling it as recurring or saved list, or recurrent purchases. 
Colocate. 
When it comes to exercise, store all the equipment that you need for a certain activity together, charged and ready, so you don't spend energy looking for it. 
And decrease temptations, for anyone driven by sugar cravings. 
Anyone? 
Say aye, go ahead. 
That itself is its own form of Crazy Mode and self-medication for Crazy Mode, but stop working your willpower. 
Design differently. 
If a food is out of immediate reach, such that you have to use a stool to reach it, even when it's chocolate, study participants ate 70 percent less without thinking about it. 
I know. 
Let that sit for a second. 
(Laughter) Design to make the choices you wish to make easier. 
Which bring us to the third step to go from Crazy Mode to Ready Mode, and that is to get out of your head. 
Come with me. 
I'm working in a small, satellite ER, when a woman comes in in labor. 
I realize that the cord is wrapped not once but twice around the baby's neck. 
And I'm the only doctor. 
I was scared. 
But I couldn't let it derail me. 
Because, you see, we all get nervous. 
We all get scared, but it's what you do next that matters. 
That first feeling isn't the problem. 
It can be an important sign. 
The problem comes when we let it derail us. 
When that internal monologue starts and we catastrophize and we start to get that tunnel vision. 
That's how you think when you're in Crazy Mode, and you cannot solve anything that way. 
Now I promise to come back to the story, but first, how do I get out of my own head? 
There are many tactics that you may hear, but for me, I find it best in the moment to actively put my focus on someone else. 
To deliberately make myself see the person in front of me, see myself in the arena with them -- what do they need, what do they fear and how can I help? 
This may sound like a whole lot of warm and fuzzy to you, but it's not. 
In fact, research shows that when you prime your brain with what is, essentially, compassion, we disrupt that tunnel vision and internal monologue. 
You widen your perception, so your brain can actually take in broader information, so you see more possibilities and can make better decisions. 
Know that your internal monologue can derail you. 
And realize that when you get out of your own head, you get out of your own way. 
Now what happened to that baby? 
I focused not on my fear, but on the mother and the baby and what they needed me to do. 
And got the cord off of the baby's neck, and a healthy screaming, kicking baby arrived, just as the dad ran in from the parking lot, "Hi, you have a son, I'm Dr. Darria. 
Congratulations, you want to cut the cord?" 
(Laughter) And for a moment, the strong cries of a newborn drowned out the beeps and the sirens that are the normal sounds of the ER. 
But there was also something else. 
Because when I walked back out of that mother's room, I saw several of my other patients hovering nearby. 
I suddenly realized that despite their own problems that had brought them to the emergency room, they had all come together to root for this baby. 
And they now together shared in the joy. 
Because that is what happens when you go from Crazy Mode to Ready Mode. 
Others notice. 
They want it too, they just don't know how, they just need one example. 
Which could be you. 
Own the busy. 
But stop calling it crazy. 
You've always had that ability. 
But now ... 
you're ready. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

A mountain separating two lakes. 
A room papered floor to ceiling with bridal satins. 
The lid of an immense snuffbox. 
These seemingly unrelated images take us on a tour of a sperm whale’s head in Herman Melville’s "Moby Dick." 
On the surface, the book is the story of Captain Ahab’s hunt for revenge against Moby Dick, the white whale who bit off his leg. 
But though the book features pirates, typhoons, high-speed chases, and giant squid, you shouldn’t expect a conventional seafaring adventure. 
Instead, it’s a multilayered exploration of not only the intimate details of life aboard a whaling ship, but also subjects from across human and natural history, by turns playful and tragic, humorous, and urgent. 
The narrator guiding us through these explorations is a common sailor called Ishmael. 
Ishmael starts out telling his own story as he prepares to escape the “damp and drizzly November in [his] soul” by going to sea. 
But after he befriends the Pacific Islander Queequeg and joins Ahab’s crew aboard the Pequod, Ishmael becomes more of an omniscient guide for the reader than a traditional character. 
While Ahab obsesses over revenge and first mate Starbuck tries to reason with him, Ishmael takes us on his own quest for meaning throughout “the whole universe, not excluding its suburbs.” In his telling, life’s biggest questions loom large, even in the smallest details. 
Like his narrator, Melville was a restless and curious spirit, who gained an unorthodox education working as a sailor on a series of grueling voyages around the world in his youth. 
He published "Moby Dick" in 1851, when the United States’ whaling industry was at its height. 
Nantucket, where the Pequod sets sail, was the epicenter of this lucrative and bloody global industry which decimated the world’s whale populations. 
Unusually for his time, Melville doesn’t shy away from the ugly side of this industry, even taking the whale’s perspective at one point, when he speculates on how terrifying the huge shadows of the ships must be to the creature swimming below. 
The author’s first-hand familiarity with whaling is evident over and over again in Ishmael’s vivid descriptions. 
In one chapter, the skin of a whale’s penis becomes protective clothing for a crewman. 
Chapters with titles as unpromising as “Cistern and Buckets” become some of the novel’s most rewarding as Ishmael compares bailing out a sperm-whale’s head to midwifery, which leads to reflections on Plato. 
Tangling whale-lines provoke witty reflections on the “ever-present perils” entangling all mortals. 
He draws on diverse branches of knowledge, like zoology, gastronomy, law, economics, mythology, and teachings from a range of religious and cultural traditions. 
The book experiments with writing style as much as subject matter. 
In one monologue, Ahab challenges Moby Dick in Shakespearean style: “Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” One chapter is written as a playscript, where members of the Pequod’s multi-ethnic crew chime in individually and in chorus. 
African and Spanish sailors trade insults while a Tahitian seaman longs for home, Chinese and Portuguese crewmembers call for a dance, and one young boy prophesies disaster. 
In another chapter, Ishmael sings the process of decanting whale oil in epic style, as the ship pitches and rolls in the midnight sea and the casks rumble like landslides. 
A book so wide-ranging has something for everyone. 
Readers have found religious and political allegory, existential enquiry, social satire, economic analysis, and representations of American imperialism, industrial relations and racial conflict. 
As Ishmael chases meaning and Ahab chases the white whale, the book explores the opposing forces of optimism and uncertainty, curiosity and fear that characterize human existence no matter what it is we’re chasing. 
Through "Moby Dick’s" many pages, Melville invites his readers to leap into the unknown, to join him on the hunt for the “ungraspable phantom of life.” 

You’re cruising down the highway when all of a sudden endless rows of brake lights appear ahead. 
There’s no accident, no stoplight, no change in speed limit or narrowing of the road. 
So why the @#$%! is there so much traffic? 
When traffic comes to a near standstill for no apparent reason, it’s called a phantom traffic jam. 
A phantom traffic jam is an emergent phenomenon whose behavior takes on a life of its own, greater than the sum of its parts. 
But in spite of this, we can actually model these jams, even understand the principles that shape them— and we’re closer than you might think to preventing this kind of traffic in the future. 
For a phantom traffic jam to form, there must be a lot of cars on the road. 
That doesn’t mean there are necessarily too many cars to pass through a stretch of roadway smoothly, at least not if every driver maintains the same consistent speed and spacing from other drivers. 
In this dense, but flowing, traffic, it only takes a minor disturbance to set off the chain of events that causes a traffic jam. 
Say one driver brakes slightly. 
Each successive driver then brakes a little more strongly, creating a wave of brake lights that propagates backward through the cars on the road. 
These stop-and-go waves can travel along a highway for miles. 
With a low density of cars on the road, traffic flows smoothly because small disturbances, like individual cars changing lanes or slowing down at a curve, are absorbed by other drivers’ adjustments. 
But once the number of cars on the road exceeds a critical density, generally when cars are spaced less than 35 meters apart, the system’s behavior changes dramatically. 
It begins to display dynamic instability, meaning small disturbances are amplified. 
Dynamic instability isn’t unique to phantom traffic jams— it’s also responsible for raindrops, sand dunes, cloud patterns, and more. 
The instability is a positive feedback loop. 
Above the critical density, any additional vehicle reduces the number of cars per second passing through a given point on the road. 
This in turn means it takes longer for a local pileup to move out of a section of the road, increasing vehicle density even more, which eventually adds up to stop-and-go traffic. 
Drivers tend not to realize they need to break far in advance of a traffic jam, which means they end up having to brake harder to avoid a collision. 
This strengthens the wave of braking from vehicle to vehicle. 
What’s more, drivers tend to accelerate too rapidly out of a slowdown, meaning they try to drive faster than the average flow of traffic downstream of them. 
Then, they have to brake again, eventually producing another feedback loop that causes more stop-and-go traffic. 
In both cases, drivers make traffic worse simply because they don’t have a good sense of the conditions ahead of them. 
Self driving cars equipped with data on traffic conditions ahead from connected vehicles or roadway sensors might be able to counteract phantom traffic in real-time. 
These vehicles would maintain a uniform speed, safety permitting, that matches the average speed of the overall flow, preventing traffic waves from forming. 
In situations where there’s already a traffic wave, the automated vehicle would be able to anticipate it, braking sooner and more gradually than a human driver and reducing the strength of the wave. 
And it wouldn’t take that many self-driving cars— In a recent experiment, one autonomous vehicle for every 20 human drivers was enough to dampen and prevent traffic waves. 
Traffic jams are not only a daily annoyance– they’re a major cause of fatalities, wasted resources, and planet-threatening pollution. 
But new technology may help reduce these patterns, rendering our roads safer, our daily commutes more efficient, and our air cleaner. 
And the next time you’re stuck in traffic, it may help to remember that other drivers aren’t necessarily driving spitefully, but are simply unaware of road conditions ahead— and drive accordingly. 

Consider this unfortunately familiar scenario. 
Several months ago a highly infectious, sometimes deadly respiratory virus infected humans for the first time. 
It then proliferated faster than public health measures could contain it. 
Now the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared a pandemic, meaning that it’s spreading worldwide. 
The death toll is starting to rise and everyone is asking the same question: when will the pandemic end? 
The WHO will likely declare the pandemic over once the infection is mostly contained and rates of transmission drop significantly throughout the world. 
But exactly when that happens depends on what global governments choose to do next. 
They have three main options: Race through it, Delay and Vaccinate, or Coordinate and Crush. 
One is widely considered best, and it may not be the one you think. 
In the first, governments and communities do nothing to halt the spread and instead allow people to be exposed as quickly as possible. 
Without time to study the virus, doctors know little about how to save their patients, and hospitals reach peak capacity almost immediately. 
Somewhere in the range of millions to hundreds of millions of people die, either from the virus or the collapse of health care systems. 
Soon the majority of people have been infected and either perished or survived by building up their immune responses. 
Around this point herd immunity kicks in, where the virus can no longer find new hosts. 
So the pandemic fizzles out a short time after it began. 
But there’s another way to create herd immunity without such a high cost of life. 
Let’s reset the clock to the moment the WHO declared the pandemic. 
This time, governments and communities around the world slow the spread of the virus to give research facilities time to produce a vaccine. 
They buy this crucial time through tactics that may include widespread testing to identify carriers, quarantining the infected and people they’ve interacted with, and physical distancing. 
Even with these measures in place, the virus slowly spreads, causing up to hundreds of thousands of deaths. 
Some cities get the outbreak under control and go back to business as usual, only to have a resurgence and return to physical distancing when a new case passes through. 
Within the next several years, one or possibly several vaccines become widely, and hopefully freely, available thanks to a worldwide effort. 
Once 40-90% of the population has received it— the precise amount varying based on the virus— herd immunity kicks in, and the pandemic fizzles out. 
Let’s rewind the clock one more time, to consider the final strategy: Coordinate and Crush. 
The idea here is to simultaneously starve the virus, everywhere, through a combination of quarantine, social distancing, and restricting travel. 
The critical factor is to synchronize responses. 
In a typical pandemic, when one country is peaking, another may be getting its first cases. 
Instead of every leader responding to what’s happening in their jurisdiction, here everyone must treat the world as the giant interconnected system it is. 
If coordinated properly, this could end a pandemic in just a few months, with low loss of life. 
But unless the virus is completely eradicated— which is highly unlikely— there will be risks of it escalating to pandemic levels once again. 
And factors like animals carrying and transmitting the virus might undermine our best efforts altogether. 
So which strategy is best for this deadly, infectious respiratory virus? 
Racing through it is a quick fix, but would be a global catastrophe, and may not work at all if people can be reinfected. 
Crushing the virus through Coordination alone is also enticing for its speed, but only reliable with true and nearly impossible global cooperation. 
That’s why vaccination, assisted by as much global coordination as possible, is generally considered to be the winner; it’s the slow, steady, and proven option in the race. 
Even if the pandemic officially ends before a vaccine is ready, the virus may reappear seasonally, so vaccines will continue to protect people. 
And although it may take years to create, disruptions to most people’s lives won’t necessarily last the full duration. 
Breakthroughs in treatment and prevention of symptoms can make viruses much less dangerous, and therefore require less extreme containment measures. 
Take heart: the pandemic will end. 
Its legacy will be long-lasting, but not all bad; the breakthroughs, social services, and systems we develop can be used to the betterment of everyone. 
And if we take inspiration from the successes and lessons from the failures, we can keep the next potential pandemic so contained that our children’s children won’t even know its name. 

As a child, I had many fears. 
I was afraid of lightning, insects, loud noises and costumed characters. 
I also had two very severe phobias of doctors and injections. 
During my struggles to escape from our family doctor, I would become so physically combative that he actually slapped me in the face to stun me. 
I was six. 
I was all fight-or-flight back then, and holding me down for a simple vaccine took three or four adults, including my parents. 
Later, our family moved from New York to Florida just as I was starting high school, and being the new kid at the parochial school, not knowing anyone and being worried about fitting in, on the very first day of school, a teacher takes roll and calls out "Anne Marie Albano," to which I respond, [In a Staten Island accent] "Here!" 
She laughs and says, "Oh, precious, stand up. 
Say D-O-G." 
And I respond, [In a Staten Island accent] "Dog?" 
The class broke out in laughter along with the teacher. 
And so it went, because she had many more words to humiliate me with. 
I went home sobbing, distraught and begging to be sent back to New York or to some nunnery. 
I did not want to go back to that school again. No way. 
My parents listened and told me that they would investigate with the monsignor back in New York, but that I had to keep going in each day so I'd have the attendance record to transfer to ninth grade on Staten Island. 
All of this was before email and cell phones, so over the next several weeks, supposedly, there were letters being sent between the Archdiocese of Manhattan and Miami and with the Vatican, and each day, I'd go into school crying and come home crying, to which my mother would give me an update from some cardinal or bishop to "Keep her going to school while we find her a spot." 
Was I naive or what? 
(Laughter) Well, after a couple of weeks, one day, while waiting for the school bus, I met a girl named Debbie, and she introduced me to her friends. 
And they became my friends, and, well, the Pope was off the hook. 
(Laughter) I began to calm down and settle in. 
My past three decades of studying anxiety in children stems partly from my own search for self-understanding. 
And I've learned much. 
For young people, anxiety is the most common childhood psychiatric condition. 
These disorders start early, by age four, and by adolescence, one in 12 youths are severely impaired in their ability to function at home, in school and with peers. 
These kids are so frightened, worried, literally physically uncomfortable due to their anxiety. 
It's difficult for them to pay attention in school, relax and have fun, make friends and do all the things that kids should be doing. 
Anxiety can create misery for the child, and the parents are front and center in witnessing their child's distress. 
As I met more and more children with anxiety through my work, I had to go back to mom and dad and ask them a couple of questions. 
"Why did you hold me down when I was so frightened of getting injections and force them on me? 
And why tell me these tall tales to make me go to school when I was so worried about being embarrassed again?" 
They said, "Our hearts broke for you each time, but we knew that these were things that you had to do. 
We had to risk you becoming upset while we waited for you to get used to the situation with time and with more experience. 
You had to get vaccinated. 
You had to go to school." 
Little did my parents know, but they were doing more than inoculating me from the measles. 
They were also inoculating me from a lifetime of anxiety disorders. 
Excessive anxiety in a young child is like a superbug -- and infectious, even multiplying, such that many of the youth that I see come in with more than one anxiety condition occurring at the same time. 
For example, they'll have specific phobia plus separation anxiety plus social anxiety all together. 
Left untreated, anxiety in early childhood can lead to depression by adolescence. 
It can also contribute to substance abuse and to suicidality. 
My parents were not therapists. 
They didn't know any psychologists. 
All they knew is that these situations may have been uncomfortable for me, but they were not harmful. 
My excessive anxiety would harm me more over the long term if they let me avoid and escape these situations and not learn how to tolerate occasional distress. 
So in essence, mom and dad were doing their own homegrown version of exposure therapy, which is the central and key component of cognitive behavioral treatment for anxiety. 
My colleagues and I conducted the largest randomized controlled study of the treatments of anxiety in children ages seven to 17. 
We found that child-focused cognitive behavioral exposure therapy or medication with a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor are effective for 60 percent of treated youth. 
And their combination gets 80 percent of kids well within three months. 
This is all good news. 
And if they stay on the medication or do monthly exposure treatments as we did in the length of the study, they could stay well for upwards of a year. 
However, after this treatment study ended, we went back and a did a follow-up study of the participants, and we found that many of these kids relapsed over time. 
And, despite the best of evidence-based treatments, we also found that for about 40 percent of the kids with anxiety, they remained ill throughout the course of the time. 
We've thought a lot about these results. 
What were we missing? 
We've hypothesized that because we were focusing on just child-focused intervention, perhaps there's something important about addressing the parents and involving them in treatment, too. 
Studies from my own lab and from colleagues around the world have shown a consistent trend: well-meaning parents are often inadvertently drawn into the cycle of anxiety. 
They give in, and they make too many accommodations for their child, and they let their children escape challenging situations. 
I want you to think about it like this: Your child comes into the house to you crying, in tears. 
They're five or six years of age. 
"Nobody at school likes me! These kids are mean. 
No one would play with me." 
How do you feel seeing your child so upset? 
What do you do? 
The natural parenting instinct is to comfort that child, soothe them, protect them and fix the situation. 
Calling the teacher to intervene or the other parents to arrange playdates, that may be fine at age five. 
But what do you do if your child keeps coming home day after day in tears? 
Do you still fix things for them at age eight, 10, 14? 
For children, as they are developing, they invariably are going to be encountering challenging situations: sleepovers, oral reports, a challenging test that pops up, trying out for a sports team or a spot in the school play, conflicts with peers ... 
All these situations involve risk: risk of not doing well, not getting what they want, risk of maybe making mistakes or being embarrassed. 
For kids with anxiety who don't take risks and engage, they then don't learn how to manage these types of situations. 
Right? 
Because skills develop with exposure over time, repeated exposure to everyday situations that kids encounter: self-soothing skills or the ability to calm oneself down when upset; problem-solving skills, including the ability to resolve conflicts with others; delay of gratification, or the ability to keep your efforts going despite the fact that you have to wait over time to see what happens. 
These and many other skills are developing in children who take risks and engage. 
And self-efficacy takes shape, which, simply put, is the belief in oneself that you can overcome challenging situations. 
For kids with anxiety who escape and avoid these situations and get other people to do them for them, they become more and more anxious with time while less confident in themselves. 
Contrary to their peers who don't suffer with anxiety, they come to believe that they are incapable of managing these situations. 
They think that they need someone, someone like their parents, to do things for them. 
Now, while the natural parenting instinct is to comfort and protect and reassure kids, in 1930, the psychiatrist Alfred Adler had already cautioned parents that we can love a child as much as we wish, but we must not make that child dependent. 
He advised parents to begin training kids from the very beginning to stand on their own two feet. 
He also cautioned that if children get the impression that their parents have nothing better to do than be at their beck and call, they would gain a false idea of love. 
For children with anxiety in this day and age, they are always calling their parents or texting distress calls at all hours of the day and night. 
So if children with anxiety don't learn the proper coping mechanisms when young, what happens to them when they grow up? 
I run groups for parents of young adults with anxiety disorders. 
These youth are between the ages of 18 and 28. 
They are mostly living at home, dependent on their parents. 
Many of them may have attended school and college. 
Some have graduated. 
Almost all are not working, just staying at home and not doing much of anything. 
They don't have meaningful relationships with others, and they are very, very dependent on their parents to do all sort of things for them. 
Their parents still make their doctors appointments for them. 
They call the kids' old friends and beg them to come visit. 
They do the kids' laundry and cook for them. 
And they are in great conflict with their young adult, because the anxiety has flourished but the youth has not. 
These parents feel enormous guilt, but then resentment, and then more guilt. 
OK, how about some good news? 
If parents and key figures in a child's life can help the child, assist them to confront their fears and learn how to problem-solve, then it is more likely that the children are going to develop their own internal coping mechanisms for managing their anxiety. 
We teach parents now to be mindful in the moment and think about their reaction to their child's anxiety. 
We ask them, "Look at the situation and ask, 'What is this situation at hand? 
How threatening is it to my child? 
And what do I ultimately want them to learn from it?'" Now of course, we want parents to listen very carefully, because if a child is being bullied seriously or put in harm's way, we want parents to intervene, absolutely. 
But in typical, everyday anxiety-producing situations, parents can be most helpful to their child if they remain calm and matter-of-fact and warm, if they validate the child's feelings but then help the child, assist them in planning how the child is going to manage the situation. 
And then -- this is key -- to actually have the child deal with the situation themselves. 
Of course, it is heartbreaking to watch a child suffer, as my parents told me years later. 
When you see your child suffering but you think you could swoop in and save them from the pain of it, that's everything, right? 
That's what we want to do. 
But whether we are young or old, excessive anxiety leads us to overestimate risk and distress while underestimating our ability to cope. 
We know that repeated exposure to what we fear weakens anxiety, while building resources and resilience. 
My parents were on to something. 
Today's hyper-anxious youth are not being helped by overly protective parenting. 
Calmness and confidence are not just emotions. 
They are coping skills that parents and children can learn. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I was the first woman president of an African nation. 
And I do believe more countries ought to try that. 
(Laughter) (Applause and cheers) Once the glass ceiling has been broken, it can never be put back together -- however one would try to do that. 
When I assumed the presidency of Liberia in January 2006, we faced the tremendous challenges of a post-conflict nation: collapsed economy, destroyed infrastructure, dysfunctional institutions, enormous debt, bloated civil service. 
We also faced the challenges of those left behind. 
The primary victims of all civil wars: women and children. 
On my first day in office, I was excited ... 
and I was exhausted. 
It had been a very long climb to where I was. 
Women had been those who suffered most in our civil conflict, and women had been the ones to resolve it. 
Our history records many women of strength and action. 
A President of the United Nations General Assembly, a renowned circuit court judge, a president of the University of Liberia. 
I knew that I had to form a very strong team with the capacity to address the challenges of our nation. 
And I wanted to put women in all top positions. 
But I knew that was not possible. 
And so I settled for putting them in strategic positions. 
I recruited a very able economist from the World Bank to be our minister of finance, to lead our debt-relief effort. 
Another to be the minister of foreign affairs, to reactivate our bilateral and multilateral relationships. 
The first woman chief of police to address the fears of our women, who had suffered so much during the civil war. 
Another to be the minister of gender, to be able to ensure the protection and the participation of women. 
Over time, the minister of justice, the minister of public works, the minister of agriculture, the minister of commerce and industry. 
Participation in leadership was unprecedented in my administration. 
And although I knew that there were not enough women with the experience to form an all-women cabinet -- as I wanted -- I settled to appoint numerous women in junior ministerial positions, as executives, as administrators, in local government, in diplomatic service, in the judiciary, in public institutions. 
It worked. 
At the end of 2012, our economic growth had peaked at nine percent. 
Our infrastructure was being reconstructed at a very fast pace. 
Our institutions were functioning again. 
Our debt of 4.9 billion had been largely canceled. 
We had good relationships with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the African Development Bank. 
We also had good working relationships with all our sister African countries and many nations all over the world. 
Our women could sleep peacefully at night again, without fear. 
Our children were smiling again, as I promised them during my first inaugural address. 
The reputation and credibility of our nation, lost in the many years of conflict, were restored. 
But progress is never guaranteed. 
And in our legislature, in my first term, women were 14 percent. 
In the second term, it declined to eight percent, because the environment was increasingly toxic. 
I had my fair shares of criticism and toxicity. 
Nobody is perfect. 
But there's nothing more predictable than a strong woman who wants to change things, who's brave to speak out, who's bold in action. 
But I'm OK with the criticism. 
I know why I made the decisions I made, and I'm happy with the results. 
But that's why more women leaders are needed. 
For there will always be those who will tear us down, who will tear us apart, because they want the status quo to remain. 
Although sub-Saharan Africa has had major breakthroughs in women's leadership and participation, particularly in the legislature -- in parliament, as it's called -- so many women, 50 percent and over, one of our nations, well over 60 percent, the best in the world -- but we know that's not enough. 
While we must be very thankful and applaud the progress we have made, we know that there is much more work to be done. 
The work will have to address the lingering vestiges of structural ... 
something against women. 
In too many places, political parties are based on patronage, patriarchy, misogyny that try to keep women from their rightful places, that shut them out from taking leadership positions. 
Too often, women face -- while the best performers, while equal or better in competence -- unequal pay. 
And so we must continue to work to change things. 
We must be able to change the stereotyping. 
We must be able to ensure that those structural barriers that have kept women from being able to have the equity they rightfully deserve. 
And we must also work with men. 
Because increasingly, there is recognition that full gender equity will ensure a stronger economy, a more developed nation, a more peaceful nation. 
And that is why we must continue to work. 
And that is why we're partners. 
I will be launching a Center for Women and Development that will bring together -- (Applause) women who have started and are committed to their joining of leadership. 
With women who have excelled and advanced in leadership together. 
Over a 10-year period, we strongly believe that we will create this wave of women who are prepared to take, unabashedly, intentional leadership and influence throughout society. 
This is why -- (Laughs) at 81, I cannot retire. 
(Applause and laughter) (Applause and cheers) Women are working for change in Africa. 
Women are working for change throughout the world. 
I will be with them, and one of them, forever. 
(Applause) Thank you for listening. 
Go out and change the world. 
(Applause and cheers) 

At the temple of the fisherman, Quexo, the village shaman, looks out over the ocean and frowns. 
It’s a still morning– unusually still, and the lack of wind is the latest in a series of troubling signs. 
The year is 1400 BCE. 
Quexo’s village sits in the dusty, treeless desert between the towering Andes and Pacific Ocean. 
The villagers live off the sea, harvesting reeds, drying them in the sun, and using them to build fishing boats. 
Every day in the summer, the men set out on these boats to hunt shark and other fish while the women harvest shellfish and sea urchins. 
In winter, storms bring powerful waves, which cross the vast ocean unobstructed to detonate on these shores. 
Most years, Quexo’s village catches more than enough fish. 
But this year, the winds have died and the fish have dwindled. 
Quexo has seen this pattern before: the fish disappear, then the violent rains arrive, causing flash floods that dissolve mud bricks and wash away settlements. 
He needs to stop the bad weather before the storms come— his only hope is a special ritual he’s been planning. 
Quexo spends much less time in the ocean than the other villagers. 
He became a shaman after seeing a sign in the sea one morning— like his father and grandfather before him. 
This morning, he walks to the nearby sacred mountain as the sun rises. 
There, he gathers ceremonial cactus and herbs like “horse tail,” “stonebreaker," and valerian, along with the mineral hematite. 
Back in the village, everyone is preparing to leave for a religious festival at a large temple inland. 
The festival marks the beginning of what is usually the season of abundance, but with the signs pointing to storms, Quexo isn’t feeling too celebratory. 
Whole families travel to the festival, where they camp for a few days. 
They’ve packed seaweed, carved bones, gourd bowls, reed mats, and other goods to trade in the market around the temple. 
Quexo inspects the goods to make sure everything is of the finest quality. 
He brings the herbs he gathered to trade for cinnabar, a mineral that comes from the highlands in the Andes. 
He needs cinnabar for his ritual to ward off the storms. 
Around lunchtime, the sprawling temple rises out of the desert ahead. 
People have come from all along the coast and the foothills. 
The women handle trade transactions— they’re looking for cotton and ceramics. 
Men aren’t usually allowed to do the trading, but shamans are an exception. 
Though Quexo is a man, during rituals he becomes half man, half woman, and this ambiguity makes his role more flexible outside ceremonies too. 
Quexo can’t find any cinnabar in the market, so he heads to the main temple, dodging children playing in the plaza. 
He puts on his ceremonial garb: red face paint, earrings, and a necklace of shark’s teeth and vertebrae. 
Inside, the ceremonies are already underway, and the shamans have drunk the sacred cactus drink. 
Many of them are Quexo’s friends from festivals over the years, but he doesn’t see the mountain shamans who would have cinnabar. 
He begins to panic. 
If the highland shamans don’t show up, his only option will be to make the long walk into the mountains. 
It’s a dangerous journey that takes five days, precious time he doesn’t have to waste. 
But perhaps he has no choice. 
He refuses the sacred cactus and sets off toward the mountains. 
As he leaves the settlement behind, he sees a group approaching. 
He recognizes them as highlanders by their llamas. 
He dashes toward their shaman. 
Barely pausing to say hello, he offers him hematite, dried seaweed, and empty shells to grind up for lime and chew with coca leaves. 
In return, the other shaman gives him the precious cinnabar. 
With the key to his ritual in hand, Quexo heads home to the temple of the fisherman in hopes of turning the tide. 

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

According to the theories of human social development, we're now living through the fourth great epoch of technological advancement, the Information Age. 
Connectivity through digital technology is a modern miracle. 
We can say it has broken down barriers of time and space which separate people, and it's created a condition for an age where information, ideas can be shared freely. 
But are these great accomplishments in digital technology really the endgame in terms of what can be achieved? 
I don't think so, and today I'd like to share with you how I believe digital technology can take us to even greater heights. 
I'm a surgeon by profession, and as I stand here today talking to all of you, five billion people around the world lack access to safe surgical care. 
Five billion people. 
That's 70 percent of the world's population, who according to the WHO's Lancet Commission can't even access simple surgical procedures as and when they need them. 
Let's zoom in on Sierra Leone, a country of six million people, where a recent study showed that there are only 10 qualified surgeons. 
That's one surgeon for every 600,000 people. 
The numbers are staggering, and we don't even need to look that far. 
If we look around us here in the US, a recent study reported that we need an extra 100,000 surgeons by 2030 to just keep up with the demand for routine surgical procedures. 
At the rate that we're going, we won't be meeting those numbers. 
As a surgeon, this is a global issue that bothers me. 
It bothers me a lot, because I've seen firsthand how lack of access to safe and affordable healthcare can blight the lives of ordinary people. 
If you're a patient that needs an operation and there isn't a surgeon available, you're left with some really difficult choices: to wait, to travel, or not to have an operation at all. 
So what's the answer? 
Well, part of you are carrying some of that solution with you today: a smartphone, a tablet, a computer. 
Because for me, digital communications technology has the power to do so much more than just to allow us to shop online, to connect through social media platforms and to stay up to date. 
It has the power to help us solve some of the key issues that we face, like lack of access to vital surgical services. 
And today I'd like to share with you an example of how I think we can make that possible. 
The history of surgery is filled with breakthroughs in how science and technology was able to help the surgeons of the day face their greatest challenges. 
If we go back several hundred years, an understanding of microbiology led to the development of antiseptic techniques, which played a big role in making sure patients were able to stay alive postsurgery. 
Fast-forward a few hundred years and we developed keyhole or arthroscopic surgery, which combines video technology and precision instruments to make surgery less invasive. 
And more recently, a lot of you will be aware of robotic surgery, and what robotics brings to surgery is much like modern automated machinery, ultraprecision, the ability to carry out procedures at the tiniest scales with a degree of accuracy that even surpasses the human hand. 
But robotic surgery also introduced something else to surgery: the idea that a surgeon doesn't actually have to be standing at the patient's bedside to deliver care, that he could be looking at a screen and instructing a robot through a computer. 
We call this remote surgery. 
It is incumbent on us to find solutions that solve these answers in a cost-effective and scalable way, so that everyone, no matter where they are in the world, can have these problems addressed. 
So what if I told you that you didn't really need a million-dollar robot to provide remote surgery? 
That all you needed was a phone, a tablet, or a computer, an internet connection, a confident colleague on the ground and one magic ingredient: an augmented reality collaboration software. 
Using this augmented reality collaboration software, an expert surgeon can now virtually transport himself into any clinical setting simply by using his phone or tablet or computer, and he can visually and practically interact in an operation from start to finish, guiding and mentoring a local doctor through the procedure step by step. 
Well, enough of me telling you about it. 
I'd now like to show you. 
We're now going to go live to Dr. Marc Tompkins, an orthopedic surgeon at the University of Minnesota. 
He's going to perform an arthroscopic surgery for us, a keyhole surgery of the knee, and I'd like to disclose that this patient has consented to having their operation streamed. 
I'd also like to point out that in the interest of time, we're just going to go through the first steps, marking up the patient and just identifying a few key anatomical landmarks. 
Hello, Dr. Tompkins, can you hear me? 
Dr. Mark Tompkins: Good morning, Nadine. 
Nadine Hachach-Haram: Everyone from TED says hello. 
Audience: Hi. 
NHH: Alright, Dr. Tompkins, let's get started. 
So let's start with our incisions and where we're going to make these, on either side of the patellar tendon. 
So if you can make your incisions there and there, that should hopefully get us into the knee. 
MT: All right, I'm going in. 
NHH: Great. 
So we're just getting inside the joint now. 
So why don't we go around and have a quick look at the meniscus. 
MT: Perfect. 
NHH: Great, so we can see there's a small tear there on the meniscus, but otherwise it looks alright. 
And if you turn and head to this direction, follow my finger, let's have a quick look at the ACL and the PCL. 
That's your ACL there, that looks quite healthy, no problems there. 
So we've just identified that small meniscus tear there, but otherwise the fluid around the joint looks OK as well. 
All right, thank you very much, Dr. Tompkins. Thank you for your time. 
I'll let you continue. 
Have a good day. Bye. 
(Applause) So I hope through this simple demonstration I was able to illustrate to you just how powerful this technology can be. 
And I'd like to point out that I wasn't using any special equipment, just my laptop and a really simple webcam. 
We're so used to using digital technology to communicate through voice and text and video, but augmented reality can do something so much deeper. 
It allows two people to virtually interact in a way that mimics how they would collaborate in person. 
Being able to show someone what you want to do, to illustrate and demonstrate and gesture, is so much more powerful than just telling them. 
And it can make for such a great learning tool, because we learn better through direct experience. 
So how is this making a difference around the world? 
Well, back in my teaching hospital, we've been using this to support local district general hospitals and providing skin cancer surgery and trauma treatment. 
Now, patients can access care at a local level. 
This reduces their travel time, improves their access, and saves money. 
We've even started seeing its use in wound care management with nurses and in outpatient management. 
Most recently, and quite exciting, it was used in supporting a surgeon through a cancer removal of a kidney. 
And I'd like to just share with you a very quick video here. 
I apologize for some of the gruesome views. 
(Video) Doctor 1: OK. Show me again. 
Doctor 2: If you see here, that's the upper part, the most outer part of your tumor. 
Doctor 1: Yes. 
Doctor 2: So it's three centimeters deep, so this should be three centimeters. 
Doctor 1: Yes, yes. 
Doctor 2: OK, so you need to get a 3.5 margin. 
Doctor 1: I'm going to show you anyway and tell me what you think about it. 
NHH: We're also seeing the use of this technology at a global scale, and one of the most heartwarming stories I can recall is from the town of Trujillo in the north of Lima in Peru, where this technology was used to support the provision of cleft lip and palate surgery to children, children from poor backgrounds who didn't have access to health insurance. 
And in this town, there was a hospital with one surgeon working hard to provide this care, Dr. Soraya. 
Now, Dr. Soraya was struggling under the sheer demand of her local population, as well as the fact that she wasn't specifically trained in this procedure. 
And so, with the help of a charity, we were able to connect her with a cleft surgeon in California, and using this technology, he was able to guide her and her colleagues through the procedure step by step, guiding them, training them and teaching them. 
Within a few months, they were able to perform 30 percent more operations with less and less complications. 
And now Dr. Soraya and her team can perform these operations independently, competently and confidently. 
And I remember one quote from a mother who said, "This technology gave my daughter her smile." 
For me, this is the real power of this technology. 
The beauty is that it breaks boundaries. 
It transcends all technological difficulties. 
It connects people. It democratizes access. 
Wi-Fi and mobile technology are growing rapidly, and they should play a role in boosting surgical provision. 
We've even seen it used in conflict zones where there's considerable risk in getting specialist surgeons to certain locations. 
In a world where there are more mobile devices than there are human beings, it truly has a global reach. 
Of course, we've still got a long way before we can solve the problem of getting surgery to five billion people, and unfortunately, some people still don't have access to internet. 
But things are rapidly moving in the right direction. 
The potential for change is there. 
My team and I are growing our global footprint, and we're starting to see the potential of this technology. 
Through digital technology, through simple, everyday devices that we take for granted, through devices of the future, we can really do miraculous things. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

Hank Willis Thomas: I'm Deb's son. 
(Laughter) Deborah Willis: And I'm Hank's mom. 
HWT: We've said that so many times, we've made a piece about it. 
It's called "Sometimes I See Myself In You," and it speaks to the symbiotic relationship that we've developed over the years through our life and work. 
And really, it's because everywhere we go, together or apart, we carry these monikers. 
I've been following in my mother's footsteps since before I was even born and haven't figured out how to stop. 
And as I get older, it does get harder. 
No seriously, it gets harder. 
(Laughter) My mother's taught me many things, though, most of all that love overrules. 
She's taught me that love is an action, not a feeling. 
Love is a way of being, it's a way of doing, it's a way of listening and it's a way of seeing. 
DW: And also, the idea about love, photographers, they're looking for love when they make photographs. 
They're looking and looking and finding love. 
Growing up in North Philadelphia, I was surrounded by people in my family and friends who made photographs and used the family camera as a way of telling a story about life, about life of joy, about what it meant to become a family in North Philadelphia. 
So I spent most of my life searching for pictures that reflect on ideas about black love, black joy and about family life. 
So it's really important to think about the action of love overrules as a verb. 
HWT: Sometimes I wonder if the love of looking is genetic, because, like my mother, I've loved photographs since before I can even remember. 
I think sometimes that -- after my mother and her mother -- that photography and photographs were my first love. 
No offense to my father, but that's what you get for calling me a "ham" wherever you go. 
I remember whenever I'd go to my grandmother's house, she would hide all the photo albums because she was afraid of me asking, "Well, who is that in that picture?" 
and "Who are they to you and who are they to me, and how old were you when that picture was taken? 
How old was I when that picture was taken? 
And why were they in black and white? 
Was the world in black and white before I was born?" 
DW: Well, that's interesting, just to think about the world in black and white. 
I grew up in a beauty shop in North Philadelphia, my mom's beauty shop, looking at "Ebony Magazine," found images that told stories that were often not in the daily news, but in the family album. 
I wanted the family album to be energetic for me, a way of telling stories, and one day I happened upon a book in the Philadelphia Public Library called "The Sweet Flypaper of Life" by Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes. 
I think what attracted me as a seven-year-old, the title, flypaper and sweet, but to think about that as a seven-year-old, I looked at the beautiful images that Roy DeCarava made and then looked at ways that I could tell a story about life. 
And looking for me is the act that basically changed my life. 
HWT: My friend Chris Johnson told me that every photographer, every artist, is essentially trying to answer one question, and I think your question might have been, "Why doesn't the rest of the world see how beautiful we are, and what can I do to help them see our community the way I do?" 
DW: While studying in art school -- it's probably true -- I had a male professor who told me that I was taking up a good man's space. 
He tried to stifle my dream of becoming a photographer. 
He attempted to shame me in a class full of male photographers. 
He told me I was out of place and out of order as a woman, and he went on to say that all you could and would do was to have a baby when a good man could have had your seat in this class. 
I was shocked into silence into that experience. 
But I had my camera, and I was determined to prove to him that I was worthy for a seat in that class. 
But in retrospect, I asked myself: "Why did I need to prove it to him?" 
You know, I had my camera, and I knew I needed to prove to myself that I would make a difference in photography. 
I love photography, and no one is going to stop me from making images. 
HWT: But that's when I came in. 
DW: Yeah, that year I graduated, I got pregnant. 
Yep, he was right. 
And I had you, and I shook off that sexist language that he used against me and picked up my camera and made photographs daily, and made photographs of my pregnant belly as I prepared for graduate school. 
But I thought about also that black photographers were missing from the history books of photography, and I was looking for ways to tell a story. 
And I ran across Gordon Parks' book "A Choice of Weapons," which was his autobiography. 
I began photographing and making images, and I tucked away that contact sheet that I made of my pregnant belly, and then you inspired me to create a new piece, a piece that said, "A woman taking a place from a good man," "You took the space from a good man," and then I used that language and reversed it and said, "I made a space for a good man, you." 
(Applause) HWT: Thanks, ma. 
Like mother, like son. 
I grew up in a house full of photographs. 
They were everywhere, and my mother would turn the kitchen into a darkroom. 
And there weren't just pictures that she took and pictures of family members. 
But there were pictures on the wall of and by people that we didn't know, men and women that we didn't know. 
Thanks, ma. 
(Laughter) I have my own timing. 
(Laughter) Did you see her poke me? 
(Laughter) Puppet strings. 
I grew up in a house full of photographs. 
(Applause) But they weren't just pictures of men and women that we knew, but pictures of people that I didn't know, Pretty much, it was pretty clear from what I learned in school, that the rest of the world didn't either. 
And it took me a long time to figure out what she was up to, but after a while, I figured it out. 
When I was nine years old, she published this book, "Black Photographers, 1840-1940: A Bio-Bibliography." 
And it's astounding to me to consider that in 1840, African Americans were making photographs. 
What does it mean for us to think that at a time that was two, three decades before the end of slavery, that people were learning how to read, they had to learn how to do math, they had to be on the cutting edge of science and technology, to do math, physics and chemistry just to make a single photograph. 
And what compelled them to do that if not love? 
Well, that book led her to her next book, "Black Photographers, 1940-1988," and that book led to another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another book, and another. 
(Applause) And throughout my life, she's edited and published dozens of books and curated numerous exhibitions on every continent, not all about black photographers but all inspired by the curiosity of a little black girl from North Philadelphia. 
DW: What I found is that black photographers had stories to tell, and we needed to listen. 
And then I found and I discovered black photographers like Augustus Washington, who made these beautiful daguerreotypes of the McGill family in the early 1840s and '50s. 
Their stories tended to be different, black photographers, and they had a different narrative about black life during slavery, but it was also about family life, beauty and telling stories about community. 
I didn't know how to link the stories, but I knew that teachers needed to know this story. 
HWT: So I think I was my mother's first student. 
Unwillingly and unwittingly -- puppet strings -- I decided to pick up a camera, and thought that I should make my own pictures about the then and now and the now and then. 
I thought about how I could use photography to talk about how what's going on outside of the frame of the camera can affect what we see inside. 
The truth is always in the hands of the actual image maker and it's up to us to really consider what's being cut out. 
I thought I could use her research as a jumping-off point of things that I was seeing in society and I wanted to start to think about how I could use historical images to talk about the past being present and think about ways that we can speak to the perennial struggle for human rights and equal rights through my appropriation of photographs in the form of sculpture, video, installation and paintings. 
But through it all, one piece has affected me the most. 
It continues to nourish me. 
It's based off of this photograph by Ernest Withers, who took this picture in 1968 at the Memphis Sanitation Workers March of men and women standing collectively to affirm their humanity. 
They were holding signs that said "I am a man," and I found that astounding, because the phrase I grew up with wasn't "I am a man," it was "I am the man," and I was amazed at how it went from this collective statement during segregation to this seemingly selfish statement after integration. 
And I wanted to ponder that, so I decided to remix that text in as many ways as I could think of, and I like to think of the top line as a timeline of American history, and the last line as a poem, and it says, "I am the man. Who's the man. You the man. What a man. 
I am man. I am many. I am, am I. 
I am, I am. I am, Amen. 
DW: Wow, so fascinating. 
(Applause) But what we learn from this experience is the most powerful two words in the English language is, "I am." 
And we each have the capacity to love. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm a storyteller. 
And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "the danger of the single story." 
I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. 
My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. 
So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children's books. 
I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, (Laughter) and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. 
(Laughter) Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. 
I had never been outside Nigeria. 
We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to. 
My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. 
Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. 
(Laughter) And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. 
But that is another story. 
What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. 
Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. 
Now, things changed when I discovered African books. 
There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books. 
But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. 
I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. 
I started to write about things I recognized. 
Now, I loved those American and British books I read. 
They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. 
But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. 
So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are. 
I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. 
My father was a professor. 
My mother was an administrator. 
And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. 
So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. 
His name was Fide. 
The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. 
My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. 
And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing." 
So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family. 
Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. 
I was startled. 
It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. 
All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. 
Their poverty was my single story of them. 
Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. 
I was 19. 
My American roommate was shocked by me. 
She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. 
She asked if she could listen to what she called my "tribal music," and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. 
(Laughter) She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove. 
What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. 
Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. 
My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. 
In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals. 
I must say that before I went to the U.S., I didn't consciously identify as African. 
But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up, people turned to me. 
Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. 
But I did come to embrace this new identity, and in many ways I think of myself now as African. 
Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country, the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in "India, Africa and other countries." 
(Laughter) So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate's response to me. 
If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. 
I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family. 
This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. 
Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Lok, who sailed to west Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. 
After referring to the black Africans as "beasts who have no houses," he writes, "They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts." 
Now, I've laughed every time I've read this. 
And one must admire the imagination of John Lok. 
But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are "half devil, half child." 
And so, I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not "authentically African." 
Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places, but I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. 
In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was. 
The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. 
My characters drove cars. 
They were not starving. 
Therefore they were not authentically African. 
But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. 
A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. 
The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration. 
And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. 
There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing. 
I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. 
I remember first feeling slight surprise. 
And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. 
I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. 
I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself. 
So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. 
It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. 
There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is "nkali." 
It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." 
Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. 
Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. 
The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly." 
Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. 
Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story. 
I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. 
I told him that I had just read a novel called "American Psycho" -- (Laughter) -- and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation. 
(Laughter) But it would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. 
This is not because I am a better person than that student, but because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. 
I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. 
I did not have a single story of America. 
When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me. 
(Laughter) But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family. 
But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. 
My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. 
One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have water. 
I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes, my parents were not paid their salaries. 
And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. 
And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives. 
All of these stories make me who I am. 
But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. 
The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. 
They make one story become the only story. 
Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. 
But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them. 
I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. 
The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. 
It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. 
It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar. 
So what if before my Mexican trip, I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? 
What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor and hardworking? 
What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? 
What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls "a balance of stories." 
What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Muhtar Bakare, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? 
Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don't read literature. 
He disagreed. 
He felt that people who could read, would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them. 
Shortly after he published my first novel, I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview, and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, "I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending. 
Now, you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen ..." 
(Laughter) And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. 
I was not only charmed, I was very moved. 
Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. 
She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel. 
Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Funmi Iyanda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? 
What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? 
What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music, talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers. 
What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband's consent before renewing their passports? 
What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds, films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce? 
What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? 
Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition? 
Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government, but also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. 
I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer, and it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories. 
My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust, and we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist and providing books for state schools that don't have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories. 
Stories matter. 
Many stories matter. 
Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. 
Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. 
The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North. 
She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind. 
"They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained." 
I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

How many of you are tired of seeing celebrities adopting kids from the African continent? 
(Laughter) Well, it's not all that bad. 
I was adopted. 
I grew up in rural Uganda, lost both my parents when I was very, very young. 
And when my parents passed, I experienced all the negative effects of poverty, from homelessness, eating out of trash piles, you name it. 
But my life changed when I got accepted into an orphanage. 
Through one of those sponsor-an-orphan programs, I was sponsored and given an opportunity to acquire an education. 
I started off in Uganda. 
I went through school, and the way this particular program worked, you finished high school and after high school, you go learn a trade -- to become a carpenter, a mechanic or something along those lines. 
My case was a little different. 
The sponsor family that was sending these 25 dollars a month to this orphanage to sponsor me, which -- I had never met them -- said, "Well ... 
we would like to send you to college instead." 
Oh -- it gets better. 
(Laughter) And they said, "If you get the paperwork, we'll send you to school in America instead." 
So with their help, I went to the embassy and applied for the visa. 
I got the visa. 
I remember this day like it was yesterday. 
I walked out of the embassy with this piece of paper in my hand, a hop in my step, smile on my face, knowing that my life is about to change. 
I went home that night, and I slept with my passport, because I was afraid that someone might steal it. 
(Laughter) I couldn't fall asleep. 
I kept feeling it. 
I had a good idea for security. 
I was like, "OK, I'm going to put it in a plastic bag, and take it outside and dig a hole, and put it in there." 
I did that, went back in the house. 
I could not fall asleep. I was like, "Maybe someone saw me." 
I went back -- (Laughter) I pulled it out, and I put it with me the entire night -- all to say that it was an anxiety-filled night. 
(Laughter) Going to the US was, just like another speaker said, was my first time to see a plane, be on one, let alone sit on it to fly to another country. 
December 15, 2006. 
7:08pm. 
I sat in seat 7A. 
Fly Emirates. 
One of the most gorgeous, beautiful women I've ever seen walked up, red little hat with a white veil. 
I'm looking terrified, I have no idea what I'm doing. 
She hands me this warm towel -- warm, steamy, snow white. 
I'm looking at this warm towel; I don't know what to do with my life, let alone with this damn towel -- (Laughter) (Applause) I did one of the -- you know, anything anyone could do in that situation: look around, see what everyone else is doing. 
I did the same. 
Mind you, I drove about seven hours from my village to the airport that day. 
So I grab this warm towel, wipe my face just like everyone else is doing, I look at it -- damn. 
(Laughter) It was all dirt brown. 
(Laughter) I remember being so embarrassed that when she came by to pick it up, I didn't give mine. 
(Laughter) I still have it. 
(Laughter) (Applause) Going to America opened doors for me to live up to my full God-given potential. 
I remember when I arrived, the sponsor family embraced me, and they literally had to teach me everything from scratch: this is a microwave, that's a refrigerator -- things I'd never seen before. 
And it was also the first time I got immersed into a new and different culture. 
These strangers showed me true love. 
These strangers showed me that I mattered, that my dreams mattered. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
These individuals had two of their own biological children. 
And when I came in, I had needs. 
They had to teach me English, teach me literally everything, which resulted in them spending a lot of time with me. 
And that created a little bit of jealousy with their children. 
So, if you're a parent in this room, and you have those teenager children who don't want anything to do with your love and affection -- in fact, they find it repulsive -- I got a solution: adopt a child. 
(Laughter) It will solve the problem. 
(Applause) I went on to acquire two engineering degrees from one of the best institutions in the world. 
I've got to tell you: talent is universal, but opportunities are not. 
And I credit this to the individuals who embrace multiculturalism, love, empathy and compassion for others. 
We live in a world filled with hate: building walls, Brexit, xenophobia here on the African continent. 
Multiculturalism can be an answer to many of these worst human qualities. 
Today, I challenge you to help a young child experience multiculturalism. 
I guarantee you that will enrich their life, and in turn, it will enrich yours. 
And as a bonus, one of them may even give a TED Talk. 
(Laughter) (Applause) We may not be able to solve the bigotry and the racism of this world today, but certainly we can raise children to create a positive, inclusive, connected world full of empathy, love and compassion. 
Love wins. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I remember my aunt brushing my hair when I was a child. 
I felt this tingling in my stomach, this swelling in my belly. 
All her attention on me, just me. 
My beautiful Aunt Bea, stroking my hair with a fine-bristled brush. 
Do you have a memory like that that you can feel in your body right now? 
Before language, we're all sensation. 
As children, that's how we learn to differentiate ourselves in the world -- through touch. 
Everything goes in the mouth, the hands, on the skin. 
Sensation -- it is the way that we first experience love. 
It's the basis of human connection. 
We want our children to grow up to have healthy intimate relationships. 
So as parents, one of the things that we do is we teach our children about sex. 
We have books to help us, we have sex ed at school for the basics. 
There's porn to fill in the gaps -- and it will fill in the gaps. 
(Laughter) We teach our children "the talk" about biology and mechanics, about pregnancy and safe sex, and that's what our kids grow up thinking that sex is pretty much all about. 
But we can do better than that. 
We can teach our sons and daughters about pleasure and desire, about consent and boundaries, about what it feels like to be present in their body and to know when they're not. 
And we do that in the ways that we model touch, play, make eye contact -- all the ways that we engage their senses. 
We can teach our children not just about sex, but about sensuality. 
This is the kind of talk that I needed as a girl. 
I was extremely sensitive, but by the time I was an adolescent, I had numbed out. 
The shame of boys mocking my changing body and then girls exiling me for, ironically, my interest in boys, it was so much. 
I didn't have any language for what I was experiencing; I didn't know it was going to pass. 
So I did the best thing I could at the time and I checked out. 
And you can't isolate just the difficult feelings, so I lost access to the joy, the pleasure, the play, and I spent decades like that, with this his low-grade depression, thinking that this is what it meant to be a grown-up. 
For the past year, I've been interviewing men and women about their relationship to sex and I've heard my story again and again. 
Girls who were told they were too sensitive, too much. 
Boys who were taught to man up -- "don't be so emotional." 
I learned I was not alone in checking out. 
It was my daughter who reminded me of how much I used to feel. 
We were at the beach. 
It was this rare day. 
I turned off my cell phone, put in the calendar, "Day at the beach with the girls." 
I laid our towels down just out of reach of the surf and fell asleep. 
And when I woke up, I saw my daughter drizzling sand on her arm like this, and I could feel that light tickle of sand on her skin and I remembered my aunt brushing my hair. 
So I curled up next to her and I drizzled sand on her other arm and then her legs. 
And then I said, "Hey, you want me to bury you?" 
And her eyes got really big and she was like, "Yeah!" 
So we dug a hole and I covered her in sand and shells and drew this little mermaid tail. 
And then I took her home and lathered her up in the shower and massaged her scalp and I dried her off in a towel. 
And I thought, "Ah. How many times had I done that -- bathed her and dried her off -- but had I ever stopped and paid attention to the sensations that I was creating for her?" 
I'd been treating her like she was on some assembly line of children needing to be fed and put to bed. 
And I realized that when I dry my daughter off in a towel tenderly the way a lover would, I'm teaching her to expect that kind of touch. 
I'm teaching her in that moment about intimacy. 
About how to love her body and respect her body. 
I realized there are parts of the talk that can't be conveyed in words. 
In her book, "Girls and Sex," writer Peggy Orenstein finds that young women are focusing on their partner's pleasure, not their own. 
This is something I'm going to talk about with my girls when they're older, but for now, I look for ways to help them identify what gives them pleasure and to practice articulating that. 
"Rub my back," my daughter says when I tuck her in. 
And I say, "OK, how do you want me to rub your back?" 
"I don't know," she says. 
So I pause, waiting for her directions. 
Finally she says, "OK, up and to the right, like you're tickling me." 
I run my fingertips up her spine. 
"What else?" I ask. 
"Over to the left, a little harder now." 
We need to teach our children how to articulate their sensations so they're familiar with them. 
I look for ways to play games with my girls at home to do this. 
I scratch my fingernails on my daughter's arm and say, "Give me one word to describe this." 
"Violent," she says. 
I embrace her, hold her tight. 
"Protected," she tells me. 
I find opportunities to tell them how I'm feeling, what I'm experiencing, so we have common language. 
Like right now, this tingling in my scalp down my spine means I'm nervous and I'm excited. 
You are likely experiencing sensations in response to me. 
The language I'm using, the ideas I'm sharing. 
And our tendency is to judge these reactions and sort them into a hierarchy: better or worse, and then seek or avoid them. 
And that's because we live in this binary culture and we're taught from a very young age to sort the world into good and bad. 
"Did you like that book?" 
"Did you have a good day?" 
How about, "What did you notice about that story?" 
"Tell me a moment about your day. 
What did you learn?" 
Let's teach our children to stay open and curious about their experiences, like a traveler in a foreign land. 
And that way they can stay with sensation without checking out -- even the heightened and challenging ones -- the way I did, the way so many of us have. 
This sense education, this is education I want for my daughters. 
Sense education is what I needed as girl. 
It's what I hope for all of our children. 
This awareness of sensation, it's where we began as children. 
It's what we can learn from our children and it's what we can in turn remind our children as they come of age. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I want to tell you a story about Manson. 
Manson was this 28-year-old interior designer, a father to a loving daughter, and a son who found himself behind bars due to a broken-down judicial system. 
He was framed for a murder he didn't commit and was sentenced to the gallows. 
There were two victims of this murder -- the victim who actually died in the murder and Manson, who had been sentenced to prison for an offense which he did not commit. 
He was locked up in a cell, eight by seven, with 13 other grown-up men for 23 and a half hours a day. 
Food was not guaranteed that you'd get. 
And I remember yesterday, as I walked into the room where I was, I imagined the kind of cell that Manson would have been living in. 
Because the toilet -- The row of the small rooms that were there were slightly bigger than the eight-by-seven cell. 
But being in that cell as he awaited the executioner -- because in prison, he did not have a name -- Manson was known by a number. 
He was just a statistic. 
He did not know how long he would wait. 
The wait could have been a minute, the executioner could have come the next minute, the next day, or it could have taken 30 years. 
The wait had no end. 
And in the midst of the excruciating pain, the mental torture, the many unanswered questions that Manson faced, he knew he was not going to play the victim. 
He refused to play the role of the victim. 
He was angry at the justice system that had put him behind bars. 
But he knew the only way he could change that justice system or help other people get justice was not to play the victim. 
Change came to Manson when he decided to embrace forgiveness for those who had put him in prison. 
I speak that as a fact. 
Because I know who Manson is. 
I am Manson. 
My real name is Peter Manson Ouko. 
And after my conviction, after that awakening of forgiveness, I had this move to help change the system. 
I already decided I was not going to be a victim anymore. 
But how was I going to help change a system that was bringing in younger inmates every day who deserve to be with their families? 
So I started mobilizing my colleagues in prison, my fellow inmates, to write letters and memoranda to the justice system, to the Judicial Service Commission, the numerous task forces that had been set up in our country, Kenya, to help change the constitution. 
And we decided to grasp at those -- to clutch at those straws, if I may use that word -- if only to make the justice system work, and work for all. 
Just about the same time, I met a young university graduate from the UK, called Alexander McLean. 
Alexander had come in with three or four of his colleagues from university in their gap year, and they wanted to help assist, set up a library in Kamiti Maximum Prison, which if you Google, you will see is written as one of the 15 worst prisons in the world. 
That was then. 
But when Alexander came in, he was a young 20-year-old boy. 
And I was on death row at that time. 
And we took him under our wing. 
It was an honest trust issue. 
He trusted us, even though we were on death row. 
And through that trust, we saw him and his colleagues from the university refurbish the library with the latest technology and set up the infirmary to very good standards so that those of us falling sick in prison would not necessarily have to die in indignity. 
Having met Alexander, I had a chance, and he gave me the opportunity and the support, to enroll for a university degree at the University of London. 
Just like Mandela studied from South Africa, I had a chance to study at Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. 
And two years later, I became the first graduate of the program from the University of London from within the prison system. 
Having graduated, what happened next -- (Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) Having graduated, now I felt empowered. 
I was not going to play the helpless victim. 
But I felt empowered not only to assist myself, to prosecute my own case, but also to assist the other inmates who are suffering the similar injustices that have just been spoken about here. 
So I started writing legal briefs for them. 
With my other colleagues in prison, we did as much as we could. 
That wasn't enough. 
Alexander McLean and his team at the African Prisons Project decided to support more inmates. 
And as I'm speaking to you today, there are 63 inmates and staff in the Kenya Prison Service studying law at the University of London through distance learning. 
(Applause) These are changemakers who are being motivated not only to assist the most indolent in society, but also to help the inmates and others get access to justice. 
Down there in my prison cell, something kept stirring me. 
The words of Martin Luther King kept hitting me. 
And he was always telling me, "Pete, if you can't fly, you can run. 
And if you can't run, you can walk. 
But if you can't walk, then you can crawl. 
But whatever it is, whatever it takes, just keep on moving." 
And so I had this urge to keep moving. 
I still have this urge to keep moving in whatever I do. 
Because I feel the only way we can change our society, the only way we can change the justice system -- which has really improved in our country -- is to help get the systems right. 
So, on 26th October last year, after 18 years in prison, I walked out of prison on presidential pardon. 
I'm now focused on helping APP -- the African Prisons Project -- achieve its mandate of training and setting up the first law school and legal college behind bars. 
Where we are going to train -- (Applause) Where we are going to train inmates and staff not only to assist their fellow inmates, but to assist the entire wider society of the poor who cannot access legal justice. 
So as I speak before you today, I stand here in the full knowledge that we can all reexamine ourselves, we can all reexamine our situations, we can all reexamine our circumstances and not play the victim narrative. 
The victim narrative will not take us anywhere. 
I was behind bars, yeah. 
But I never felt and I was not a prisoner. 
The basic thing I got to learn was that if I thought, and if you think, you can, you will. 
But if you sit thinking that you can't, you won't. 
It's as simple as that. 
And so I'm encouraged by the peaceful revolutionaries I've heard on this stage. 
The world needs you now, the world needs you today. 
And as I finish my talk, I'd just like to ask each and every single one of you here, wonderful thinkers, changemakers, innovators, the wonderful global citizens we have at TED, just remember the words of Martin Luther King. 
Let them continue ringing in your heart and your life. 
Whatever it is, wherever you are, whatever it takes, keep on moving. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I guess because I'm from Tanzania I have a responsibility to welcome all of you once again. 
Thank you for coming. 
So, first of all, before we start, how many of you in the audience have been in the past a victim of this bug here? 
We apologize on behalf of all the mosquito catchers. 
(Laughter) Ladies and gentlemen, imagine getting seven infectious mosquito bites every day. 
That's 2,555 infectious bites every year. 
When I was in college, I moved to the Kilombero River valley in the southeastern part of Tanzania. 
This is historically one of the most malarious zones in the world at that time. 
Life here was difficult. 
In its later stages malaria manifested with extreme seizures locally known as degedege. 
It's killed both women and men, adults and children, without mercy. 
My home institution, Ifakara Health Institute, began in this valley in the 1950s to address priority health needs for the local communities. 
In fact, the name Ifakara refers to a place you go to die, which is a reflection of what life used to be here in the days before organized public health care. 
When I first moved here, my primary role was to estimate how much malaria transmission was going on across the villages and which mosquitoes were transmitting the disease. 
So my colleague and myself came 30 kilometers south of Ifakara town across the river. 
Every evening we went into the villages with flashlights and siphons. 
We rolled up our trousers, and waited for mosquitoes that were coming to bite us so we could collect them to check if they were carrying malaria. 
(Laughter) My colleague and myself selected a household, and we started inside and outside, swapping positions every half hour. 
And we did this for 12 hours every night for 24 consecutive nights. 
We slept for four hours every morning and worked the rest of the day, sorting mosquitoes, identifying them and chopping off their heads so they could be analyzed in the lab to check if they were carrying malaria parasites in their blood mouthparts. 
This way we were able to not only know how much malaria was going on here but also which mosquitoes were carrying this malaria. 
We were also able to know whether malaria was mostly inside houses or outside houses. 
Today, ladies and gentlemen, I still catch mosquitoes for a living. 
But I do this mostly to improve people's lives and well-being. 
This has been called by some people the most dangerous animal on earth -- which unfortunately is true. 
But what do we really know about mosquitoes? 
It turns out we actually know very little. 
Consider the fact that at the moment our best practice against malaria are bednets -- insecticide treated bednets. 
We know now that across Africa you have widespread resistance to insecticides. 
And these are the same insecticides, the pyrethroid class, that are put on these bednets. 
We know now that these bednets protect you from bites but only minimally kill the mosquitoes that they should. 
What it means is that we've got to do more to be able to get to zero. 
And that's part of our duty. 
At Ifakara Health Institute we focus very much on the biology of the mosquito, and we try to do this so we can identify new opportunities. 
A new approach. 
New ways to try and get new options that we can use together with things such as bednets to be able to get to zero. 
And I'm going to share with you a few examples of the things that my colleagues and myself do. 
Take this, for example. 
Mosquitoes breed in small pools of water. 
Not all of them are easy to find -- they can be scattered across villages, they can be as small as hoofprints. 
They can be behind your house or far from your house. 
And so, if you wanted to control mosquito larvae, it can actually be quite difficult to get them. 
What my colleagues and I have decided to do is to think about what if we used mosquitoes themselves to carry the insecticides from a place of our choice to their own breeding habitats so that whichever eggs they lay there shall not survive. 
This is Dickson Lwetoijera. 
This is my colleague who runs this show at Ifakara. 
And he has demonstrated cleverly that you can actually get mosquitoes to come to the place where they normally come to get blood to pick up a dose of sterilants or insecticide, carry this back to their own breeding habitat and kill all their progeny. 
And we have demonstrated that you can do this and crush populations very, very rapidly. 
This is beautiful. 
This is our mosquito city. 
It is the largest mosquito farm available in the world for malaria research. 
Here we have large-scale self-sustaining colonies of malaria mosquitoes that we rear in these facilities. 
Of course, they are disease-free. 
But what these systems allow us to do is to introduce new tools and test them immediately, very quickly, and see if we can crush these populations or control them in some way. 
And my colleagues have demonstrated that if you just put two or three positions where mosquitoes can go pick up these lethal substances, we can crush these colonies in just three months. 
That's autodissemination, as we call it. 
But what if we could use the mosquitoes' sexual behavior to also control them? 
So, first of all I would like to tell you that actually mosquitoes mate in what we call swarms. 
Male mosquitoes usually congregate in clusters around the horizon, usually after sunset. 
The males go there for a dance, the females fly into that dance and select a male mosquito of their choice, usually the best-looking male in their view. 
They clump together and fall down onto the floor. 
If you watch this, it's beautiful. 
It's a fantastic phenomenon. 
This is where our mosquito-catching work gets really interesting. 
What we have seen, when we go swarm hunting in the villages, is that these swarm locations tend to be at exactly the same location every day, every week, every month, year in, year out. 
They start at exactly the same time of the evening, and they are at exactly the same locations. 
What does this tell us? 
It means that if we can map all these locations across villages, we could actually crush these populations by just a single blow. 
Kind of, you know, bomb-spray them or nuke them out. 
And that is what we try to do with young men and women across the villages. 
We organize these crews, teach them how to identify the swarms, and spray them out. 
My colleagues and I believe we have a new window to get mosquitoes out of the valley. 
But perhaps the fact that mosquitoes eat blood, human blood, is the reason they are the most dangerous animal on earth. 
But think about it this way -- mosquitoes actually smell you. 
And they have developed incredible sensory organs. 
They can smell from as far sometimes as 100 meters away. 
And when they get closer, they can even tell the difference between two family members. 
They know who you are based on what you produce from your breath, skin, sweat and body odor. 
What we have done at Ifakara is to identify what it is in your skin, your body, your sweat or your breath that these mosquitoes like. 
Once we identified these substances, we created a concoction, kind of a mixture, a blend of synthetic substances that are reminiscent of what you produce from your body. 
And we made a synthetic blend that was attracting three to five times more mosquitoes than a human being. 
What can you do with this? 
You put in a trap, lure a lot of mosquitoes and you kill them, right? 
And of course, you can also use it for surveillance. 
At Ifakara we wish to expand our knowledge on the biology of the mosquito; to control many other diseases, including, of course, the malaria, but also those other diseases that mosquitoes transmit like dengue, Chikungunya and Zika virus. 
And this is why my colleagues, for example -- we have looked at the fact that some mosquitoes like to bite you on the leg region. 
And we've now created these mosquito repellent sandals that tourists and locals can wear when they're coming. 
And you don't get bitten -- this gives you 'round the clock protection until the time you go under your bednet. 
(Applause) My love-hate relationship with mosquitoes continues. 
(Laughter) And it's going to go a long way, I can see. 
But that's OK. 
WHO has set a goal of 2030 to eliminate malaria from 35 countries. 
The African Union has set a goal of 2030 to eliminate malaria from the continent. 
At Ifakara we are firmly behind these goals. 
And we've put together a cohort of young scientists, male and female, who are champions, who are interested in coming together to make this vision come true. 
They do what they can to make it work. 
And we are supporting them. 
We are here to make sure that these dreams come true. 
Ladies and gentlemen, even if it doesn't happen in our lifetime, even if it doesn't happen before you and me go away, I believe that your child and my child shall inherit a world free of malaria transmitting mosquitoes and free of malaria. 
Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. 
(Applause) Thank you. 
Kelo Kubu: OK, Fredros. 
Let's talk about CRISPR for a bit. 
(Laughter) It's taken the world by storm, it promises to do amazing things. 
What do you think of scientists using CRISPR to kill off mosquitoes? 
Fredros Okumu: To answer this question, let's start from what the problem is. 
First of all, we're talking about a disease that still kills -- according to the latest figures we have from WHO -- 429,000 people. 
Most of these are African children. 
Of course, we've made progress, there are countries that have achieved up to 50-60 percent reduction in malaria burden. 
But we still have to do more to get to zero. 
There is already proof of principle that gene-editing techniques, such as CRISPR, can be used effectively to transform mosquitoes so that either they do not transmit malaria -- we call this population alteration -- or that they no longer exist, population suppression. 
This is already proven in the lab. 
There is also modeling work that has demonstrated that even if you were to release just a small number of these genetically modified mosquitoes, that you can actually achieve elimination very, very quickly. 
So, CRISPR and tools like this offer us some real opportunities -- real-life opportunities to have high-impact interventions that we can use in addition to what we have now to eventually go to zero. 
This is important. 
Now, of course people always ask us -- which is a common question, I guess you're going to ask this as well -- "What happens if you eliminate mosquitoes?" 
KK: I won't ask then, you answer. 
FO: OK. In respect to this, I would just like to remind my colleagues that we have 3,500 mosquito species in this world. 
Maybe more than that. 
About 400 of these are Anophelenes, and only about 70 of them have any capacity to transmit malaria. 
In Africa, we're having to deal with three or four of these as the major guys. 
They carry most -- like 99 percent of all the malaria we have. 
If we were to go out with gene editing like CRISPR, if we were to go out with gene drives to control malaria, we would be going after only one or two. 
I don't see a diversity problem with that. 
But that's personal view. 
I think it's OK. 
And remember, by the way, all these years we've been trying to eliminate these mosquitoes effectively by spraying them -- our colleagues in America have sprayed with -- really bomb-spraying these insects out of the villages. 
In Africa we do a lot of household spraying. 
All these are aimed solely at killing the mosquitoes. 
So there's really no problem if we had a new tool. 
But having said that, I have to say we also have to be very, very responsible here. 
So there's the regulatory side, and we have to partner with our regulators and make sure that everything that we do is done correctly, is done responsibly and that we also have to do independent risk assessments, to just make sure that all these processes do not fall into the wrong hands. 
Thank you very much. 
KK: Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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. (Laughter) 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. (Laughter) 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. (Laughter) 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. (Laughter) Now -- (Applause) -- 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 and either actively endorsed or passively accepted 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. (Laughter) And this, in many ways -- (Applause) -- 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 -- (Applause) -- 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. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

There are a lot of web 2.0 consultants who make a lot of money. 
In fact, they make their living on this stuff. 
I'm going to try to save you all the time and money and go through it in the next three minutes, so bear with me. 
Started a website in 2005 with a few friends, called Reddit.com. 
It's what you'd call a social news website; basically, the democratic front page of the best stuff on the web. 
You find some interesting content -- say, a TED Talk -- submit it to Reddit, and a community of your peers votes up if they like it, down if they don't. 
That creates the front page. 
It's always rising, falling; a half million people visit every day. 
But this isn't about Reddit. 
In the last four years, we've seen all kinds of memes, all kinds of trends get born right on our front page. 
This isn't about Reddit itself, it's actually about humpback whales. 
Well, technically, it's about Greenpeace, an environmental organization that wanted to stop the Japanese government's whaling campaign. 
The whales were getting killed; they wanted to put an end to it. 
One of the ways they wanted to do it was to put a tracking chip inside one of the whales. 
So in true web fashion, they put together a poll, where they had a bunch of very erudite, very thoughtful, cultured names. 
I believe this is the Farsi word for "immortal." 
I think this means "divine power of the ocean" in a Polynesian language. 
And then there was this: "Mister Splashy Pants." 
(Laughter) And this was a special name. 
Mister Pants, or "Splashy" to his friends, was very popular on the Internet. 
In fact, someone on Reddit thought, "What a great thing, we should all vote this up." 
And Redditors responded and all agreed. 
So the voting started. 
We got behind it ourselves; we changed our logo for the day, from the alien to Splashy, to help the cause. 
And it wasn't long before other sites like Fark and Boing Boing and the rest of the Internet started saying, "We love Splashy Pants!" 
So it went from about five percent, which was when this meme started, to 70 percent at the end of voting. 
Pretty impressive, right? We won! Mister Splashy Pants was chosen. 
Just kidding -- Greenpeace actually wasn't that crazy about it, because they wanted one of the more thoughtful names to win. 
They said, "No, just kidding. We'll give it another week of voting." 
Well, that got us a little angry, so we changed it to Fightin' Splashy. 
(Laughter) And the Reddit community -- really, the rest of the Internet, really got behind this. 
Facebook groups were created. 
Facebook applications were created. 
The idea was, "Vote your conscience, vote for Mister Splashy Pants." 
People were putting up signs in the real world about this whale. 
(Laughter) This was the final vote: 78 percent of the votes. 
To give you an idea of the landslide, the next highest name pulled in three. 
There was a clear lesson: the Internet loves Mister Splashy Pants. 
Which is obvious. It's a great name. 
Everyone wants to hear their news anchor say, "Mister Splashy Pants." 
(Laughter) I think that's what helped drive this. 
What was cool were the repercussions. 
Greenpeace created an entire marketing campaign around it -- Mister Splashy Pants shirts and pins, an e-card so you could send your friend a dancing Splashy. 
But even more important was that they accomplished their mission. 
The Japanese government called off their whaling expedition. 
Mission accomplished: Greenpeace was thrilled, the whales were happy -- that's a quote. 
(Laughter) And actually, Redditors in the Internet community were happy to participate, but they weren't whale lovers. 
A few, certainly, but we're talking about a lot of people, really interested and caught up in this meme. 
Greenpeace came back to the site and thanked Reddit for its participation. 
But this wasn't really altruism; just interest in doing something cool. 
This is how the Internet works. This is that great big secret. 
The Internet provides a level playing field. 
Your link is as good as your link, which is as good as my link. 
With a browser, anyone can get to any website no matter your budget. 
Another important thing is it costs nothing to get content online. 
There are so many publishing tools available, it only takes a few minutes to produce something. 
and the cost of iteration is so cheap, you might as well. 
If you do, be genuine. Be honest, up-front. 
One of the great lessons Greenpeace learned is that it's OK to lose control, OK to take yourself a little less seriously, given that, even though it's a very serious cause, you could ultimately achieve your goal. 
That's the final message I want to share: you can do well online. 
But no longer is the message coming from just the top down. 
If you want to succeed you've got to be OK to lose control. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, what I'm going to do is just give you the latest episode of India's -- maybe the world's -- longest running soap opera, which is cricket. 
And may it run forever, because it gives people like me a living. 
It's got everything that you'd want a normal soap opera to want: It's got love, joy, happiness, sadness, tears, laughter, lots of deceit, intrigue. 
And like all good soaps, it jumps 20 years when the audience interest changes. 
And that's exactly what cricket has done. 
It's jumped 20 years into 20-over game. 
And that's what I'm going to talk about, how a small change leads to a very big revolution. 
But it wasn't always like that. 
Cricket wasn't always this speed-driven generations game. 
There was a time when you played cricket, you played timeless test matches, when you played on till the game got over. 
And there was this game in March 1939 that started on the third of March and ended on the 14th of March. 
And it only ended because the English cricketers had to go from Durban to Cape Town, which is a two-hour train journey, to catch the ship that left on the 17th, because the next ship wasn't around for a long time. 
So, the match was ended in between. 
And one of the English batsmen said, "You know what? 
Another half an hour and we would have won." 
(Laughter) Another half an hour after 12 days. 
There were two Sundays in between. But of course, Sundays are church days, so you don't play on Sundays. And one day it rained, so they all sat around making friends with each other. 
But there is a reason why India fell in love with cricket: because we had about the same pace of life. 
(Laughter) The Mahabharata was like that as well, wasn't it? 
You fought by day, then it was sunset, so everyone went back home. 
And then you worked out your strategy, and you came and fought the next day, and you went back home again. 
The only difference between the Mahabharata and our cricket was that in cricket, everybody was alive to come back and fight the next day. 
Princes patronize the game, not because they love the game, but because it was a means of ingratiating themselves to the British rulers. 
But there is one other reason why India fell in love with cricket, which was, all you needed was a plank of wood and a rubber ball, and any number of people could play it anywhere. 
Take a look: You could play it in the dump with some rocks over there, you could play it in a little alley -- you couldn't hit square anywhere, because the bat hit the wall; don't forget the air conditioning and the cable wires. 
(Laughter) You could play it on the banks of the Ganges -- that's as clean as the Ganges has been for a long time. 
Or you could play many games in one small patch of land, even if you didn't know which game you were actually in. 
(Laughter) As you can see, you can play anywhere. 
But slowly the game moved on, you know, finally. 
You don't always have five days. So, we moved on, and we started playing 50-over cricket. 
And then an enormous accident took place. 
In Indian sport we don't make things happen, accidents happen and we're in the right place at the right time, sometimes. 
And we won this World Cup in 1983. 
And suddenly we fell in love with the 50-over game, and we played it virtually every day. 
There was more 50-over cricket than anywhere. 
But there was another big date. 
1983 was when we won the World Cup. 
1991,'92, we found a finance minister and a prime minister willing to let the world look at India, rather than be this great country of intrigue and mystery in this closed country. 
And so we allowed multinationals into India. 
We cut customs duties, we reduced import duties, and we got all the multinationals coming in, with multinational budgets, who looked at per-capita income and got very excited about the possibilities in India, and were looking for a vehicle to reach every Indian. 
And there are only two vehicles in India -- one real, one scripted. 
The scripted one is what you see in the movies, the real one was cricket. 
And so one of my friends sitting right here in front of me, Ravi Dhariwal from Pepsi, decided he's going to take it all over the world. 
And Pepsi was this big revolution, because they started taking cricket all over. 
And so cricket started becoming big; cricket started bringing riches in. 
Television started covering cricket. For a long time television said, "We won't cover cricket unless you pay us to cover it." 
Then they said, "OK, the next rights are sold for 55 million dollars. 
The next rights are sold for 612 million dollars." 
So, it's a bit of a curve, that. 
And then another big accident happened in our cricket. 
England invented 20 overs cricket, and said, "The world must play 20 overs cricket." 
Just as England invented cricket, and made the rest of the world play it. 
Thank God for them. 
(Laughter) And so, India had to go and play the T20 World Cup, you see. 
India didn't want to play the T20 World Cup. 
But we were forced to play it by an 8-1 margin. 
And then something very dramatic happened. 
We got to the final, and then this moment, that will remain enshrined forever, for everybody, take a look. 
(Crowd cheering) The Pakistani batsman trying to clear the fielder. 
Announcer: And Zishan takes it! India wins! 
What a match for a Twenty20 final. 
India, the world champions. 
(Cheering) India, T20 champions. 
But what a game we had, M. S. Dhoni got it right in the air, but Misbah-ul-Haq, what a player. 
A massive, massive success: India, the world TT champions. 
Harsha Bhogle: Suddenly India discovered this power of 20-overs cricket. 
The accident, of course, there, was that the batsman thought the bowler was bowling fast. 
(Laughter) If he had bowled fast, the ball would have gone where it was meant to go, but it didn't go. And we suddenly discovered that we could be good at this game. 
And what it also did was it led to a certain pride in the fact that India could be the best in the world. 
It was at a time when investment was coming in, India was feeling a little more confident about itself. 
And so there was a feeling that there was great pride in what we can do. 
And thankfully for all of us, the English are very good at inventing things, and then the gracious people that they are, they let the world become very good at it. 
(Laughter) And so England invented T20 cricket, and allowed India to hijack it. 
It was not like reengineering that we do in medicine, we just took it straight away, as is. 
(Laughter) And so, we launched our own T20 league. 
Six weeks, city versus city. 
It was a new thing for us. We had only ever supported our country -- the only two areas in which India was very proud about their country, representing itself on the field. 
One was war, the Indian army, which we don't like to happen very often. 
The other was Indian cricket. 
Now, suddenly we had to support city leagues. 
But the people getting into these city leagues were people who were taking their cues from the West. 
America is a home of leagues. And they said, "Right, we'll build some glitzy leagues here in India." 
But was India ready for it? 
Because cricket, for a long time in India was always organized. 
It was never promoted, it was never sold -- it was organized. 
And look what they did with our beautiful, nice, simple family game. 
All of a sudden, you had that happening. 
(Music) An opening ceremony to match every other. 
This was an India that was buying Corvettes. This was an India that was buying Jaguar. 
This was an India that was adding more mobile phones per month than New Zealand's population twice over. 
So, it was a different India. 
But it was also a slightly more orthodox India that was very happy to be modern, but didn't want to say that to people. 
And so, they were aghast when the cheerleaders arrived. 
Everyone secretly watched them, but everyone claimed not to. 
(Music) (Laughter) The new owners of Indian cricket were not the old princes. 
They were not bureaucrats who were forced into sport because they didn't actually love it; these were people who ran serious companies. 
And so they started promoting cricket big time, started promoting clubs big time. 
And they've started promoting them with huge money behind it. 
I mean the IPL had 2.3 billion dollars before a ball was bowled, 1.6 billion dollars for television revenue over 10 years, and another 70 million dollars plus from all these franchises that were putting in money. And then they had to appeal to their cities, but they had to do it like the West, right? Because we are setting up leagues. 
But what they were very good at doing was making it very localized. 
So, just to give you an example of how they did it -- not Manchester United style promotion, but very Mumbai style promotion. Take a look. 
(Music) Of course, a lot of people said, "Maybe they dance better than they play." 
(Laughter) But that's all right. What it did also is it changed the way we looked at cricket. 
All along, if you wanted a young cricketer, you picked him up from the bylanes of your own little locality, your own city, and you were very proud of the system that produced those cricketers. 
Now, all of the sudden, if you were to bowl a shot -- if Mumbai were to bowl a shot, for example, they needn't go to Kalbadevi or Shivaji Park or somewhere to source them, they could go to Trinidad. 
This was the new India, wasn't it? This was the new world, where you can source from anywhere as long as you get the best product at the best price. 
And all of a sudden, Indian sport had awakened to the reality that you can source the best product for the best price anywhere in the world. 
So, the Mumbai Indians flew in Dwayne Bravo from Trinidad and Tobago, overnight. And when he had to go back to represent the West Indies, they asked him, "When do you have to reach?" 
He said, "I have to be there by a certain time, so I have to leave today." 
We said, "No, no, no. It's not about when you have to leave; it's about when do you have to reach there?" 
And so he said, "I've got to reach on date X." 
And they said, "Fine, you play to date X, minus one." 
So, he played in Hyderabad, went, straight after the game, went from the stadium to Hyderabad airport, sat in a private corporate jet -- first refueling in Portugal, second refueling in Brazil; he was in West Indies in time. 
(Laughter) Never would India have thought on this scale before. 
Never would India have said, "I want a player to play one game for me, and I will use a corporate jet to send him all the way back to Kingston, Jamaica to play a game." 
And I just thought to myself, "Wow, we've arrived somewhere in the world, you know? 
We have arrived somewhere. We are thinking big." 
But what this also did was it started marrying the two most important things in Indian cricket, which is cricket and the movies in Indian entertainment. 
There is cricket and the movies. 
And they came together because people in the movies now started owning clubs. 
And so, people started going to the cricket to watch Preity Zinta. 
They started going to the cricket to watch Shah Rukh Khan. 
And something very interesting happened. 
We started getting song and dance in Indian cricket. 
And so it started resembling the Indian movies more and more. 
And of course, if you were on Preity Zinta's team -- as you will see on the clip that follows -- if you did well, you got a hug from Preity Zinta. 
So that was the ultimate reason to do well. Take a look -- everyone's watching Preity Zinta. 
(Music) And then of course there was Shah Rukh playing the Kolkata crowd. 
We'd all seen matches in Kolkata, but we'd never seen anything like this: Shah Rukh, with the Bengali song, getting the audiences all worked up for Kolkata -- not for India, but for Kolkata. 
But take a look at this. 
(Music) An Indian film star hugging a Pakistani cricketer because they'd won in Kolkata. 
Can you imagine? 
And do you know what the Pakistani cricketer said? 
(Applause) "I wish I was playing for Preity Zinta's team." 
(Laughter) But I thought I'd take this opportunity -- there's a few people from Pakistan in here. 
I'm so happy that you're here because I think we can show that we can both be together and be friends, right? 
We can play cricket together, we can be friends. 
So thank you very much for coming, all of you from Pakistan. 
(Applause) There was criticism too because they said, "Players are being bought and sold? 
Are they grain? 
Are they cattle?" 
Because we had this auction, you see. 
How do you fix a price for a player? 
And so the auction that followed literally had people saying, "Bang! so many million dollars for so-and-so player." 
There it is. 
(Music) Auctioneer: Going at 1,500,000 dollars. Chennai. 
Shane Warne sold for 450,000 dollars. 
HB: Suddenly, a game which earned its players 50 rupees a day -- so 250 rupees for a test match, but if you finish in four days you only got 200. 
The best Indian players who played every test match -- every one of the internationals, the top of the line players -- standard contracts are 220,000 dollars in a whole year. 
Now they were getting 500,000 for six days' work. 
Then Andrew Flintoff came by from England, he got one and a half million dollars, and he went back and said, "For four weeks, I'm earning more than Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard, and I'm earning more than the footballers, wow." 
And where was he earning it from? From a little club in India. 
Could you have imagined that day would come? 
One and a half million dollars for six weeks' work. 
That's not bad, is it? 
So, at 2.3 billion dollars before the first ball was bowled. 
What India was doing, though, was benchmarking itself against the best in the world, and it became a huge brand. 
Lalit Modi was on the cover of Business Today. 
IPL became the biggest brand in India and, because our elections, had to be moved to South Africa, and we had to start the tournament in three weeks. 
Move a whole tournament to South Africa in three weeks. 
But we did it. You know why? 
Because no country works as slowly as we do till three weeks before an event, and nobody works fast as we do in the last three weeks. 
(Applause) Our population, which for a long time we thought was a problem, suddenly became our biggest asset because there were more people watching -- the huge consuming class -- everybody came to watch the cricket. 
We'd also made cricket the only sport in India, which is a pity, but in India every other sport pushes cricket to become big, which is a bit of a tragedy of our times. 
Now, this last minute before I go -- there's a couple of side effects of all this. 
For a long time, India was this country of poverty, dust, beggars, snake charmers, filth, Delhi belly -- people heard Delhi belly stories before they came. 
And, all of a sudden, India was this land of opportunity. 
Cricketers all over the world said, "You know, we love India. We love to play in India." 
And that felt good, you know? 
We said, "The dollar's quite powerful actually." 
Can you imagine, you've got the dollar on view and there's no Delhi belly in there anymore. 
There's no filth, there's no beggars, all the snake charmers have vanished, everybody's gone. This tells you how the capitalist world rules. 
Right so, finally, an English game that India usurped a little bit, but T20 is going to be the next missionary in the world. 
If you want to take the game around the world, it's got to be the shortest form of the game. 
You can't take a timeless test to China and sit through 14 days with no result in the end, or you can't take it all over the world. 
So that's what T20 is doing. 
Hopefully, it'll make everyone richer, hopefully it'll make the game bigger and hopefully it'll give cricket commentators more time in the business. 
Thank you very much. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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. 
(Laughter) You know, I went and pitched it to the studio as "'Romeo and Juliet' on a ship: "It's going to be this epic romance, passionate film." 
Secretly, what I wanted to do was I wanted to dive to the real wreck of "Titanic." 
And that's why I made the movie. 
(Applause) And that's the truth. Now, the studio didn't know that. 
But I convinced them. I said, "We're going to dive to the wreck. We're going to film it for real. 
We'll be using it in the opening of the film. 
It will be really important. It will be a great marketing hook." 
And I talked them into funding an expedition. 
(Laughter) Sounds crazy. But this goes back to that theme about your imagination creating a reality. 
Because we actually created a reality where six months later, I find myself in a Russian submersible two and a half miles down in the north Atlantic, looking at the real Titanic through a view port. 
Not a movie, not HD -- for real. 
(Applause) Now, that blew my mind. 
And it took a lot of preparation, we had to build cameras and lights and all kinds of things. 
But, it struck me how much this dive, these deep dives, was like a space mission. 
You know, where it was highly technical, and it required enormous planning. 
You get in this capsule, you go down to this dark hostile environment where there is no hope of rescue if you can't get back by yourself. 
And I thought like, "Wow. I'm like, living in a science fiction movie. 
This is really cool." 
And so, I really got bitten by the bug of deep-ocean exploration. 
Of course, the curiosity, the science component of it -- it was everything. It was adventure, it was curiosity, it was imagination. 
And it was an experience that Hollywood couldn't give me. 
Because, you know, I could imagine a creature and we could create a visual effect for it. But I couldn't imagine what I was seeing out that window. 
As we did some of our subsequent expeditions, I was seeing creatures at hydrothermal vents and sometimes things that I had never seen before, sometimes things that no one had seen before, that actually were not described by science at the time that we saw them and imaged them. 
So, I was completely smitten by this, and had to do more. 
And so, I actually made a kind of curious decision. 
After the success of "Titanic," I said, "OK, I'm going to park my day job as a Hollywood movie maker, and I'm going to go be a full-time explorer for a while." 
And so, we started planning these expeditions. 
And we wound up going to the Bismark, and exploring it with robotic vehicles. 
We went back to the Titanic wreck. 
We took little bots that we had created that spooled a fiber optic. 
And the idea was to go in and do an interior survey of that ship, which had never been done. 
Nobody had ever looked inside the wreck. They didn't have the means to do it, so we created technology to do it. 
So, you know, here I am now, on the deck of Titanic, sitting in a submersible, and looking out at planks that look much like this, where I knew that the band had played. 
And I'm flying a little robotic vehicle through the corridor of the ship. 
When I say, "I'm operating it," but my mind is in the vehicle. 
I felt like I was physically present inside the shipwreck of Titanic. 
And it was the most surreal kind of deja vu experience I've ever had, because I would know before I turned a corner what was going to be there before the lights of the vehicle actually revealed it, because I had walked the set for months when we were making the movie. 
And the set was based as an exact replica on the blueprints of the ship. 
So, it was this absolutely remarkable experience. 
And it really made me realize that the telepresence experience -- that you actually can have these robotic avatars, then your consciousness is injected into the vehicle, into this other form of existence. 
It was really, really quite profound. 
And it may be a little bit of a glimpse as to what might be happening some decades out as we start to have cyborg bodies for exploration or for other means in many sort of post-human futures that I can imagine, as a science fiction fan. 
So, having done these expeditions, and really beginning to appreciate what was down there, such as at the deep ocean vents where we had these amazing, amazing animals -- they're basically aliens right here on Earth. 
They live in an environment of chemosynthesis. 
They don't survive on sunlight-based system the way we do. 
And so, you're seeing animals that are living next to a 500-degree-Centigrade water plumes. 
You think they can't possibly exist. 
At the same time I was getting very interested in space science as well -- again, it's the science fiction influence, as a kid. 
And I wound up getting involved with the space community, really involved with NASA, sitting on the NASA advisory board, planning actual space missions, going to Russia, going through the pre-cosmonaut biomedical protocols, and all these sorts of things, to actually go and fly to the international space station with our 3D camera systems. 
And this was fascinating. 
But what I wound up doing was bringing space scientists with us into the deep. 
And taking them down so that they had access -- astrobiologists, planetary scientists, people who were interested in these extreme environments -- taking them down to the vents, and letting them see, and take samples and test instruments, and so on. 
So, here we were making documentary films, but actually doing science, and actually doing space science. 
I'd completely closed the loop between being the science fiction fan, you know, as a kid, and doing this stuff for real. 
And you know, along the way in this journey of discovery, I learned a lot. 
I learned a lot about science. But I also learned a lot about leadership. 
Now you think director has got to be a leader, leader of, captain of the ship, and all that sort of thing. 
I didn't really learn about leadership until I did these expeditions. 
Because I had to, at a certain point, say, "What am I doing out here? 
Why am I doing this? What do I get out of it?" 
We don't make money at these damn shows. 
We barely break even. There is no fame in it. 
People sort of think I went away between "Titanic" and "Avatar" and was buffing my nails someplace, sitting at the beach. 
Made all these films, made all these documentary films for a very limited audience. 
No fame, no glory, no money. What are you doing? 
You're doing it for the task itself, for the challenge -- and the ocean is the most challenging environment there is -- for the thrill of discovery, and for that strange bond that happens when a small group of people form a tightly knit team. 
Because we would do these things with 10, 12 people, working for years at a time, sometimes at sea for two, three months at a time. 
And in that bond, you realize that the most important thing is the respect that you have for them and that they have for you, that you've done a task that you can't explain to someone else. 
When you come back to the shore and you say, "We had to do this, and the fiber optic, and the attentuation, and the this and the that, all the technology of it, and the difficulty, the human-performance aspects of working at sea," you can't explain it to people. It's that thing that maybe cops have, or people in combat that have gone through something together and they know they can never explain it. 
Creates a bond, creates a bond of respect. 
So, when I came back to make my next movie, which was "Avatar," I tried to apply that same principle of leadership, which is that you respect your team, and you earn their respect in return. 
And it really changed the dynamic. 
So, here I was again with a small team, in uncharted territory, doing "Avatar," coming up with new technology that didn't exist before. 
Tremendously exciting. 
Tremendously challenging. 
And we became a family, over a four-and-half year period. 
And it completely changed how I do movies. 
So, people have commented on how, "Well, you know, you brought back the ocean organisms and put them on the planet of Pandora." 
To me, it was more of a fundamental way of doing business, the process itself, that changed as a result of that. 
So, what can we synthesize out of all this? 
You know, what are the lessons learned? 
Well, I think number one is curiosity. 
It's the most powerful thing you own. 
Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. 
And the respect of your team is more important than all the laurels in the world. 
I have young filmmakers come up to me and say, "Give me some advice for doing this." 
And I say, "Don't put limitations on yourself. 
Other people will do that for you -- don't do it to yourself, don't bet against yourself, and take risks." 
NASA has this phrase that they like: "Failure is not an option." 
But failure has to be an option in art and in exploration, because it's a leap of faith. 
And no important endeavor that required innovation was done without risk. 
You have to be willing to take those risks. 
So, that's the thought I would leave you with, is that in whatever you're doing, failure is an option, but fear is not. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I'm going to speak today about the relationship between science and human values. 
Now, it's generally understood that questions of morality -- questions of good and evil and right and wrong -- are questions about which science officially has no opinion. 
It's thought that science can help us get what we value, but it can never tell us what we ought to value. 
And, consequently, most people -- I think most people probably here -- think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life: questions like, "What is worth living for?" 
"What is worth dying for?" 
"What constitutes a good life?" 
So, I'm going to argue that this is an illusion -- that the separation between science and human values is an illusion -- and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history. 
Now, it's often said that science cannot give us a foundation for morality and human values, because science deals with facts, and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres. 
It's often thought that there's no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be. 
But I think this is quite clearly untrue. 
Values are a certain kind of fact. 
They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures. 
Why is it that we don't have ethical obligations toward rocks? 
Why don't we feel compassion for rocks? 
It's because we don't think rocks can suffer. And if we're more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects, as indeed we are, it's because we think they're exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering. 
Now, the crucial thing to notice here is that this is a factual claim: This is something that we could be right or wrong about. And if we have misconstrued the relationship between biological complexity and the possibilities of experience well then we could be wrong about the inner lives of insects. 
And there's no notion, no version of human morality and human values that I've ever come across that is not at some point reducible to a concern about conscious experience and its possible changes. 
Even if you get your values from religion, even if you think that good and evil ultimately relate to conditions after death -- either to an eternity of happiness with God or an eternity of suffering in hell -- you are still concerned about consciousness and its changes. 
And to say that such changes can persist after death is itself a factual claim, which, of course, may or may not be true. 
Now, to speak about the conditions of well-being in this life, for human beings, we know that there is a continuum of such facts. 
We know that it's possible to live in a failed state, where everything that can go wrong does go wrong -- where mothers cannot feed their children, where strangers cannot find the basis for peaceful collaboration, where people are murdered indiscriminately. 
And we know that it's possible to move along this continuum towards something quite a bit more idyllic, to a place where a conference like this is even conceivable. 
And we know -- we know -- that there are right and wrong answers to how to move in this space. 
Would adding cholera to the water be a good idea? 
Probably not. 
Would it be a good idea for everyone to believe in the evil eye, so that when bad things happened to them they immediately blame their neighbors? Probably not. 
There are truths to be known about how human communities flourish, whether or not we understand these truths. 
And morality relates to these truths. 
So, in talking about values we are talking about facts. 
Now, of course our situation in the world can be understood at many levels -- from the level of the genome on up to the level of economic systems and political arrangements. 
But if we're going to talk about human well-being we are, of necessity, talking about the human brain. 
Because we know that our experience of the world and of ourselves within it is realized in the brain -- whatever happens after death. 
Even if the suicide bomber does get 72 virgins in the afterlife, in this life, his personality -- his rather unfortunate personality -- is the product of his brain. 
So the contributions of culture -- if culture changes us, as indeed it does, it changes us by changing our brains. 
And so therefore whatever cultural variation there is in how human beings flourish can, at least in principle, be understood in the context of a maturing science of the mind -- neuroscience, psychology, etc. 
So, what I'm arguing is that value's reduced to facts -- to facts about the conscious experience of conscious beings. 
And we can therefore visualize a space of possible changes in the experience of these beings. 
And I think of this as kind of a moral landscape, with peaks and valleys that correspond to differences in the well-being of conscious creatures, both personal and collective. 
And one thing to notice is that perhaps there are states of human well-being that we rarely access, that few people access. 
And these await our discovery. 
Perhaps some of these states can be appropriately called mystical or spiritual. 
Perhaps there are other states that we can't access because of how our minds are structured but other minds possibly could access them. 
Now, let me be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that science is guaranteed to map this space, or that we will have scientific answers to every conceivable moral question. 
I don't think, for instance, that you will one day consult a supercomputer to learn whether you should have a second child, or whether we should bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, or whether you can deduct the full cost of TED as a business expense. 
(Laughter) But if questions affect human well-being then they do have answers, whether or not we can find them. 
And just admitting this -- just admitting that there are right and wrong answers to the question of how humans flourish -- will change the way we talk about morality, and will change our expectations of human cooperation in the future. 
For instance, there are 21 states in our country where corporal punishment in the classroom is legal, where it is legal for a teacher to beat a child with a wooden board, hard, and raising large bruises and blisters and even breaking the skin. 
And hundreds of thousands of children, incidentally, are subjected to this every year. 
The locations of these enlightened districts, I think, will fail to surprise you. 
We're not talking about Connecticut. 
And the rationale for this behavior is explicitly religious. 
The creator of the universe himself has told us not to spare the rod, lest we spoil the child -- this is in Proverbs 13 and 20, and I believe, 23. 
But we can ask the obvious question: Is it a good idea, generally speaking, to subject children to pain and violence and public humiliation as a way of encouraging healthy emotional development and good behavior? 
(Laughter) Is there any doubt that this question has an answer, and that it matters? 
Now, many of you might worry that the notion of well-being is truly undefined, and seemingly perpetually open to be re-construed. 
And so, how therefore can there be an objective notion of well-being? 
Well, consider by analogy, the concept of physical health. 
The concept of physical health is undefined. 
As we just heard from Michael Specter, it has changed over the years. 
When this statue was carved the average life expectancy was probably 30. 
It's now around 80 in the developed world. 
There may come a time when we meddle with our genomes in such a way that not being able to run a marathon at age 200 will be considered a profound disability. 
People will send you donations when you're in that condition. 
(Laughter) Notice that the fact that the concept of health is open, genuinely open for revision, does not make it vacuous. 
The distinction between a healthy person and a dead one is about as clear and consequential as any we make in science. 
Another thing to notice is there may be many peaks on the moral landscape: There may be equivalent ways to thrive; there may be equivalent ways to organize a human society so as to maximize human flourishing. 
Now, why wouldn't this undermine an objective morality? 
Well think of how we talk about food: I would never be tempted to argue to you that there must be one right food to eat. 
There is clearly a range of materials that constitute healthy food. 
But there's nevertheless a clear distinction between food and poison. 
The fact that there are many right answers to the question, "What is food?" 
does not tempt us to say that there are no truths to be known about human nutrition. 
Many people worry that a universal morality would require moral precepts that admit of no exceptions. 
So, for instance, if it's really wrong to lie, it must always be wrong to lie, and if you can find an exception, well then there's no such thing as moral truth. 
Why would we think this? 
Consider, by analogy, the game of chess. 
Now, if you're going to play good chess, a principle like, "Don't lose your Queen," is very good to follow. 
But it clearly admits some exceptions. 
There are moments when losing your Queen is a brilliant thing to do. 
There are moments when it is the only good thing you can do. 
And yet, chess is a domain of perfect objectivity. 
The fact that there are exceptions here does not change that at all. 
Now, this brings us to the sorts of moves that people are apt to make in the moral sphere. 
Consider the great problem of women's bodies: What to do about them? 
Well this is one thing you can do about them: You can cover them up. 
Now, it is the position, generally speaking, of our intellectual community that while we may not like this, we might think of this as "wrong" in Boston or Palo Alto, who are we to say that the proud denizens of an ancient culture are wrong to force their wives and daughters to live in cloth bags? 
And who are we to say, even, that they're wrong to beat them with lengths of steel cable, or throw battery acid in their faces if they decline the privilege of being smothered in this way? 
Well, who are we not to say this? 
Who are we to pretend that we know so little about human well-being that we have to be non-judgmental about a practice like this? 
I'm not talking about voluntary wearing of a veil -- women should be able to wear whatever they want, as far as I'm concerned. 
But what does voluntary mean in a community where, when a girl gets raped, her father's first impulse, rather often, is to murder her out of shame? 
Just let that fact detonate in your brain for a minute: Your daughter gets raped, and what you want to do is kill her. 
What are the chances that represents a peak of human flourishing? 
Now, to say this is not to say that we have got the perfect solution in our own society. 
For instance, this is what it's like to go to a newsstand almost anywhere in the civilized world. 
Now, granted, for many men it may require a degree in philosophy to see something wrong with these images. 
(Laughter) But if we are in a reflective mood, we can ask, "Is this the perfect expression of psychological balance with respect to variables like youth and beauty and women's bodies?" 
I mean, is this the optimal environment in which to raise our children? 
Probably not. OK, so perhaps there's some place on the spectrum between these two extremes that represents a place of better balance. 
(Applause) Perhaps there are many such places -- again, given other changes in human culture there may be many peaks on the moral landscape. 
But the thing to notice is that there will be many more ways not to be on a peak. 
Now the irony, from my perspective, is that the only people who seem to generally agree with me and who think that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions are religious demagogues of one form or another. 
And of course they think they have right answers to moral questions because they got these answers from a voice in a whirlwind, not because they made an intelligent analysis of the causes and condition of human and animal well-being. 
In fact, the endurance of religion as a lens through which most people view moral questions has separated most moral talk from real questions of human and animal suffering. 
This is why we spend our time talking about things like gay marriage and not about genocide or nuclear proliferation or poverty or any other hugely consequential issue. 
But the demagogues are right about one thing: We need a universal conception of human values. 
Now, what stands in the way of this? 
Well, one thing to notice is that we do something different when talking about morality -- especially secular, academic, scientist types. 
When talking about morality we value differences of opinion in a way that we don't in any other area of our lives. 
So, for instance the Dalai Lama gets up every morning meditating on compassion, and he thinks that helping other human beings is an integral component of human happiness. 
On the other hand, we have someone like Ted Bundy; Ted Bundy was very fond of abducting and raping and torturing and killing young women. 
So, we appear to have a genuine difference of opinion about how to profitably use one's time. 
(Laughter) Most Western intellectuals look at this situation and say, "Well, there's nothing for the Dalai Lama to be really right about -- really right about -- or for Ted Bundy to be really wrong about that admits of a real argument that potentially falls within the purview of science. 
He likes chocolate, he likes vanilla. 
There's nothing that one should be able to say to the other that should persuade the other." 
Notice that we don't do this in science. 
On the left you have Edward Witten. 
He's a string theorist. 
If you ask the smartest physicists around who is the smartest physicist around, in my experience half of them will say Ed Witten. 
The other half will tell you they don't like the question. 
(Laughter) So, what would happen if I showed up at a physics conference and said,"String theory is bogus. 
It doesn't resonate with me. It's not how I chose to view the universe at a small scale. 
I'm not a fan." 
(Laughter) Well, nothing would happen because I'm not a physicist; I don't understand string theory. 
I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory. 
(Laughter) I wouldn't want to belong to any string theory club that would have me as a member. 
But this is just the point. 
Whenever we are talking about facts certain opinions must be excluded. 
That is what it is to have a domain of expertise. 
That is what it is for knowledge to count. 
How have we convinced ourselves that in the moral sphere there is no such thing as moral expertise, or moral talent, or moral genius even? 
How have we convinced ourselves that every opinion has to count? 
How have we convinced ourselves that every culture has a point of view on these subjects worth considering? 
Does the Taliban have a point of view on physics that is worth considering? No. 
(Laughter) How is their ignorance any less obvious on the subject of human well-being? 
(Applause) So, this, I think, is what the world needs now. 
It needs people like ourselves to admit that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human flourishing, and morality relates to that domain of facts. 
It is possible for individuals, and even for whole cultures, to care about the wrong things, which is to say that it's possible for them to have beliefs and desires that reliably lead to needless human suffering. 
Just admitting this will transform our discourse about morality. 
We live in a world in which the boundaries between nations mean less and less, and they will one day mean nothing. 
We live in a world filled with destructive technology, and this technology cannot be uninvented; it will always be easier to break things than to fix them. 
It seems to me, therefore, patently obvious that we can no more respect and tolerate vast differences in notions of human well-being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notions about how disease spreads, or in the safety standards of buildings and airplanes. 
We simply must converge on the answers we give to the most important questions in human life. 
And to do that, we have to admit that these questions have answers. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) Chris Anderson: So, some combustible material there. 
Whether in this audience or people elsewhere in the world, hearing some of this, may well be doing the screaming-with-rage thing, after as well, some of them. 
Language seems to be really important here. 
When you're talking about the veil, you're talking about women dressed in cloth bags. 
I've lived in the Muslim world, spoken with a lot of Muslim women. 
And some of them would say something else. They would say, "No, you know, this is a celebration of female specialness, it helps build that and it's a result of the fact that" -- and this is arguably a sophisticated psychological view -- "that male lust is not to be trusted." 
I mean, can you engage in a conversation with that kind of woman without seeming kind of cultural imperialist? 
Sam Harris: Yeah, well I think I tried to broach this in a sentence, watching the clock ticking, but the question is: What is voluntary in a context where men have certain expectations, and you're guaranteed to be treated in a certain way if you don't veil yourself? 
And so, if anyone in this room wanted to wear a veil, or a very funny hat, or tattoo their face -- I think we should be free to voluntarily do whatever we want, but we have to be honest about the constraints that these women are placed under. 
And so I think we shouldn't be so eager to always take their word for it, especially when it's 120 degrees out and you're wearing a full burqa. 
CA: A lot of people want to believe in this concept of moral progress. 
But can you reconcile that? 
I think I understood you to say that you could reconcile that with a world that doesn't become one dimensional, where we all have to think the same. 
Paint your picture of what rolling the clock 50 years forward, 100 years forward, how you would like to think of the world, balancing moral progress with richness. 
SH: Well, I think once you admit that we are on the path toward understanding our minds at the level of the brain in some important detail, then you have to admit that we are going to understand all of the positive and negative qualities of ourselves in much greater detail. 
So, we're going to understand positive social emotion like empathy and compassion, and we're going to understand the factors that encourage it -- whether they're genetic, whether they're how people talk to one another, whether they're economic systems, and insofar as we begin to shine light on that we are inevitably going to converge on that fact space. 
So, everything is not going to be up for grabs. 
It's not going to be like veiling my daughter from birth is just as good as teaching her to be confident and well-educated in the context of men who do desire women. 
I mean I don't think we need an NSF grant to know that compulsory veiling is a bad idea -- but at a certain point we're going to be able to scan the brains of everyone involved and actually interrogate them. 
Do people love their daughters just as much in these systems? 
And I think there are clearly right answers to that. 
CA: And if the results come out that actually they do, are you prepared to shift your instinctive current judgment on some of these issues? 
SH: Well yeah, modulo one obvious fact, that you can love someone in the context of a truly delusional belief system. 
So, you can say like, "Because I knew my gay son was going to go to hell if he found a boyfriend, I chopped his head off. And that was the most compassionate thing I could do." 
If you get all those parts aligned, yes I think you could probably be feeling the emotion of love. 
But again, then we have to talk about well-being in a larger context. 
It's all of us in this together, not one man feeling ecstasy and then blowing himself up on a bus. 
CA: Sam, this is a conversation I would actually love to continue for hours. 
We don't have that, but maybe another time. Thank you for coming to TED. 
SH: Really an honor. Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

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

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

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

I want to tell you about someone. 
I'm going to call him Ravi Nanda. 
I'm changing his name to protect his safety. 
Ravi's from a community of herdspeople in Gujarat on the western coast of India, same place my own family comes from. 
When he was 10 years old, his entire community was forced to move because a multinational corporation constructed a manufacturing facility on the land where they lived. 
Then, 20 years later, the same company built a cement factory 100 meters from where they live now. 
India has got strong environmental regulations on paper, but this company has violated many of them. 
Dust from that factory covers Ravi's mustache and everything he wears. 
I spent just two days in his place, and I coughed for a week. 
Ravi says that if people or animals eat anything that grows in his village or drink the water, they get sick. 
He says children now walk long distances with cattle and buffalo to find uncontaminated grazing land. 
He says many of those kids have dropped out of school, including three of his own. 
Ravi has appealed to the company for years. 
He said, "I've written so many letters my family could cremate me with them. 
They wouldn't need to buy any wood." 
(Laughter) He said the company ignored every one of those letters, and so in 2013, Ravi Nanda decided to use the last means of protest he thought he had left. 
He walked to the gates of that factory with a bucket of petrol in his hands, intending to set himself on fire. 
Ravi is not alone in his desperation. 
The UN estimates that worldwide, four billion people live without basic access to justice. 
These people face grave threats to their safety, their livelihoods, their dignity. 
There are almost always laws on the books that would protect these people, but they've often never heard of those laws, and the systems that are supposed to enforce those laws are corrupt or broken or both. 
We are living with a global epidemic of injustice, but we've been choosing to ignore it. 
Right now, in Sierra Leone, in Cambodia, in Ethiopia, farmers are being cajoled into putting their thumbprints on 50-year lease agreements, signing away all the land they've ever known for a pittance without anybody even explaining the terms. 
Governments seem to think that's OK. 
Right now, in the United States, in India, in Slovenia, people like Ravi are raising their children in the shadow of factories or mines that are poisoning their air and their water. 
There are environmental laws that would protect these people, but many have never seen those laws, let alone having a shot at enforcing them. 
And the world seems to have decided that's OK. 
What would it take to change that? 
Law is supposed to be the language we use to translate our dreams about justice into living institutions that hold us together. 
Law is supposed to be the difference between a society ruled by the most powerful and one that honors the dignity of everyone, strong or weak. 
That's why I told my grandmother 20 years ago that I wanted to go to law school. 
Grandma didn't pause. She didn't skip a beat. 
She said to me, "Lawyer is liar." 
(Laughter) That was discouraging. 
(Laughter) But grandma's right, in a way. 
Something about law and lawyers has gone wrong. 
We lawyers are usually expensive, first of all, and we tend to focus on formal court channels that are impractical for many of the problems people face. 
Worse, our profession has shrouded law in a cloak of complexity. 
Law is like riot gear on a police officer. 
It's intimidating and impenetrable, and it's hard to tell there's something human underneath. 
If we're going to make justice a reality for everyone, we need to turn law from an abstraction or a threat into something that every single person can understand, use and shape. 
Lawyers are crucial in that fight, no doubt, but we can't leave it to lawyers alone. 
In health care, for example, we don't just rely on doctors to serve patients. 
We have nurses and midwives and community health workers. 
The same should be true of justice. 
Community legal workers, sometimes we call them community paralegals, or barefoot lawyers, can be a bridge. 
These paralegals are from the communities they serve. 
They demystify law, break it down into simple terms, and then they help people look for a solution. 
They don't focus on the courts alone. 
They look everywhere: ministry departments, local government, an ombudsman's office. 
Lawyers sometimes say to their clients, "I'll handle it for you. I've got you." 
Paralegals have a different message, not "I'm going to solve it for you," but "We're going to solve it together, and in the process, we're both going to grow." 
Community paralegals saved my own relationship to law. 
After about a year in law school, I almost dropped out. 
I was thinking maybe I should have listened to my grandmother. 
It was when I started working with paralegals in Sierra Leone, in 2003, that I began feeling hopeful about the law again, and I have been obsessed ever since. 
Let me come back to Ravi. 
2013, he did reach the gates of that factory with the bucket of petrol in his hands, but he was arrested before he could follow through. 
He didn't have to spend long in jail, but he felt completely defeated. 
Then, two years later, he met someone. 
I'm going to call him Kush. 
Kush is part of a team of community paralegals that works for environmental justice on the Gujarat coast. 
Kush explained to Ravi that there was law on his side. 
Kush translated into Gujarati something Ravi had never seen. 
It's called the "consent to operate." 
It's issued by the state government, and it allows the factory to run only if it complies with specific conditions. 
So together, they compared the legal requirements with reality, they collected evidence, and they drafted an application -- not to the courts, but to two administrative institutions, the Pollution Control Board and the district administration. 
Those applications started turning the creaky wheels of enforcement. 
A pollution officer came for a site inspection, and after that, the company started running an air filtration system it was supposed to have been using all along. 
It also started covering the 100 trucks that come and go from that plant every day. 
Those two measures reduced the air pollution considerably. 
The case is far from over, but learning and using law gave Ravi hope. 
There are people like Kush walking alongside people like Ravi in many places. 
Today, I work with a group called Namati. 
Namati helps convene a global network dedicated to legal empowerment. 
All together, we are over a thousand organizations in 120 countries. 
Collectively, we deploy tens of thousands of community paralegals. 
Let me give you another example. 
This is Khadija Hamsa. 
She is one of five million people in Kenya who faces a discriminatory vetting process when trying to obtain a national ID card. 
It is like the Jim Crow South in the United States. 
If you are from a certain set of tribes, most of them Muslim, you get sent to a different line. 
Without an ID, you can't apply for a job. 
You can't get a bank loan. 
You can't enroll in university. 
You are excluded from society. 
Khadija tried off and on to get an ID for eight years, without success. 
Then she met a paralegal working in her community named Hassan Kassim. 
Hassan explained to Khadija how vetting works, he helped her gather the documents she needed, helped prep her to go before the vetting committee. 
Finally, she was able to get an ID with Hassan's help. 
First thing she did with it was use it to apply for birth certificates for her children, which they need in order to go to school. 
In the United States, among many other problems, we have a housing crisis. 
In many cities, 90 percent of the landlords in housing court have attorneys, while 90 percent of the tenants do not. 
In New York, a new crew of paralegals -- they're called Access to Justice Navigators -- helps people to understand housing law and to advocate for themselves. 
Normally in New York, one out of nine tenants brought to housing court gets evicted. 
Researchers took a look at 150 cases in which people had help from these paralegals, and they found no evictions at all, not one. 
A little bit of legal empowerment can go a long way. 
I see the beginnings of a real movement, but we're nowhere near what's necessary. 
Not yet. 
In most countries around the world, governments do not provide a single dollar of support to paralegals like Hassan and Kush. 
Most governments don't even recognize the role paralegals play, or protect paralegals from harm. 
I also don't want to give you the impression that paralegals and their clients win every time. 
Not at all. 
That cement factory behind Ravi's village, it's been turning off the filtration system at night, when it's least likely that the company would get caught. 
Running that filter costs money. 
Ravi WhatsApps photos of the polluted night sky. 
This is one he sent to Kush in May. 
Ravi says the air is still unbreathable. 
At one point this year, Ravi went on hunger strike. 
Kush was frustrated. 
He said, "We can win if we use the law." 
Ravi said, "I believe in the law, I do, but it's not getting us far enough." 
Whether it's India, Kenya, the United States or anywhere else, trying to squeeze justice out of broken systems is like Ravi's case. 
Hope and despair are neck and neck. 
And so not only do we urgently need to support and protect the work of barefoot lawyers around the world, we need to change the systems themselves. 
Every case a paralegal takes on is a story about how a system is working in practice. 
When you put those stories together, it gives you a detailed portrait of the system as a whole. 
People can use that information to demand improvements to laws and policies. 
In India, paralegals and clients have drawn on their case experience to propose smarter regulations for the handling of minerals. 
In Kenya, paralegals and clients are using data from thousands of cases to argue that vetting is unconstitutional. 
This is a different way of approaching reform. 
This is not a consultant flying into Myanmar with a template he's going to cut and paste from Macedonia, and this is not an angry tweet. 
This is about growing reforms from the experience of ordinary people trying to make the rules and systems work. 
This transformation in the relationship between people and law is the right thing to do. 
It's also essential for overcoming all of the other great challenges of our times. 
We are not going to avert environmental collapse if the people most affected by pollution don't have a say in what happens to the land and the water, and we won't succeed in reducing poverty or expanding opportunity if poor people can't exercise their basic rights. 
And I believe we won't overcome the despair that authoritarian politicians prey upon if our systems stay rigged. 
I called Ravi before coming here to ask permission to share his story. 
I asked if there was any message he wanted to give people. 
He said, "[Gujarati]." 
Wake up. 
"[Gujarati]." 
Don't be afraid. 
"[Gujarati]." 
Fight with paper. 
By that I think he means fight using law rather than guns. 
"[Gujarati]." 
Maybe not today, maybe not this year, maybe not in five years, but find justice. 
If this guy, whose entire community is being poisoned every single day, who was ready to take his own life -- if he's not giving up on seeking justice, then the world can't give up either. 
Ultimately, what Ravi calls "fighting with paper" is about forging a deeper version of democracy in which we the people, we don't just cast ballots every few years, we take part daily in the rules and institutions that hold us together, in which everyone, even the least powerful, can know law, use law and shape law. 
Making that happen, winning that fight, requires all of us. 
Thank you guys. Thank you. 
(Applause) Kelo Kubu: Thanks, Vivek. 
So I'm going to make a few assumptions that people in this room know what the Sustainable Development Goals are and how the process works, but I want us to talk a little bit about Goal 16: Peace, justice and strong institutions. 
Vivek Maru: Yeah. Anybody remember the Millennium Development Goals? 
They were adopted in 2000 by the UN and governments around the world, and they were for essential, laudable things. 
It was reduce child mortality by two thirds, cut hunger in half, crucial things. 
But there was no mention of justice or fairness or accountability or corruption, and we have made progress during the 15 years when those goals were in effect, but we are way behind what justice demands, and we're not going to get there unless we take justice into account. 
And so when the debate started about the next development framework, the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, our community came together around the world to argue that access to justice and legal empowerment should be a part of that new framework. 
And there was a lot of resistance. 
Those things are more political, more contentious than the other ones, so we didn't know until the night before whether it was going to come through. 
We squeaked by. 
The 16th out of 17 goals commits to access to justice for all, which is a big deal. 
It's a big deal, yes. Let's clap for justice. 
(Applause) Here's the scandal, though. 
The day the goals were adopted, most of them were accompanied by big commitments: a billion dollars from the Gates Foundation and the British government for nutrition; 25 billion in public-private financing for health care for women and children. 
On access to justice, we had the words on the paper, but nobody pledged a penny, and so that is the opportunity and the challenge that we face right now. 
The world recognizes more than ever before that you can't have development without justice, that people can't improve their lives if they can't exercise their rights, and what we need to do now is turn that rhetoric, turn that principle, into reality. 
(Applause) KK: How can we help? What can people in this room do? 
VM: Great question. Thank you for asking. 
I would say three things. 
One is invest. 
If you have 10 dollars, or a hundred dollars, a million dollars, consider putting some of it towards grassroots legal empowerment. 
It's important in its own right and it's crucial for just about everything else we care about. 
Number two, push your politicians and your governments to make this a public priority. 
Just like health or education, access to justice should be one of the things that a government owes its people, and we're nowhere close to that, neither in rich countries or poor countries. 
Number three is: be a paralegal in your own life. 
Find an injustice or a problem where you live. 
It's not hard to find, if you look. 
Is the river being contaminated, the one that passes through the city where you live? 
Are there workers getting paid less than minimum wage or who are working without safety gear? 
Get to know the people most affected, find out what the rules say, see if you can use those rules to get a solution. 
If it doesn't work, see if you can come together to improve those rules. 
Because if we all start knowing law, using law and shaping law, then we will be building that deeper version of democracy that I believe our world desperately needs. 
(Applause) KK: Thanks so much, Vivek. VM: Thank you. 

The creative process -- you know this -- from the first idea to the final product, is a long process. 
It's super-iterative, lots of refinement, blood, sweat, tears and years. 
And we're not saying you're going to go out for a walk and come back with the Sistine Chapel in your left hand. 
So what frame of the creative process did we focus on? 
Just this first part. 
Just brainstorming, coming up with a new idea. 
We actually ran four studies with a variety of people. 
You were either walking indoors or outdoors. 
And all of these studies found the same conclusion. 
I'm only going to tell you about one of them today. 
One of the tests we used for creativity was alternate uses. 
In this test, you have four minutes. 
Your job is to come up with as many other ways to use common everyday objects as you can think of. 
So, for example, what else would you do with a key, other than to use it for opening up a lock? 
Clearly, you could use it as a third eyeball for a giraffe, right? 
Maybe. That's sort of interesting, kind of new. But is it creative? 
So people came up with as many ideas as they could, and we had to decide: Is this creative or not? 
The definition of creativity that a lot of people go with is "appropriate novelty." 
For something to be appropriate, it has to be realistic, so unfortunately, you can't use a key as an eyeball. 
But "novel," the second thing, is that nobody had to have said it. 
So for us, it had to be appropriate first, and then for novelty, nobody else in the entire population that we surveyed could have said it. 
So you might think you could use a key to scratch somebody's car, but if somebody else said that, you didn't get credit for it. 
Neither of you did. 
However, only one person said this: "If you were dying and it were a murder mystery, and you had to carve the name of the murderer into the ground with your dying words." 
(Laughter) And it's a creative idea, because it's appropriate and it's novel. 
You either did this test and came up with ideas while you were seated or while you were walking on a treadmill. 
(Laughter) They did the test twice, with different objects. 
Three groups: the first group sat first and then sat again for the second test. 
The second group sat first and then did the second test while walking on a treadmill. 
The third group -- and this is interesting -- they walked on the treadmill first, and then they sat. 
OK, so the two groups that sat together for the first test, they looked pretty similar to each other, and they averaged about 20 creative ideas per person. 
The group that was walking on the treadmill did almost twice as well. 
Remember, they took the test twice. 
The people who sat twice for that second test didn't get any better; practice didn't help. 
But these same people who were sitting and then went on the treadmill got a boost from walking. 
Here's the interesting thing. 
The people who were walking on the treadmill still had a residue effect of the walking, and they were still creative afterwards. 
So the implication of this is that you should go for a walk before your next big meeting and just start brainstorming right away. 
We have five tips for you that will help make this the best effect possible. 
First, you want to pick a problem or a topic to brainstorm. 
So, this is not the shower effect, when you're in the shower and all of a sudden, a new idea pops out of the shampoo bottle. 
This is something you're thinking about ahead of time. 
They're intentionally thinking about brainstorming a different perspective on the walk. 
Secondly -- I get asked this a lot: Is this OK while running? 
Well, the answer for me is that if I were running, the only new idea I would have would be to stop running, so ... 
(Laughter) But if running for you is a comfortable pace, good. 
It turns out, whatever physical activity is not taking a lot of attention. 
So just walking at a comfortable pace is a good choice. 
Also, you want to come up with as many ideas as you can. 
One key of creativity is to not lock on that first idea. 
Keep going. 
Keep coming up with new ones, until you pick one or two to pursue. 
You might worry that you don't want to write them down, because what if you forget them? 
So the idea here is to speak them. 
Everybody was speaking their new ideas. 
So you can put your headphones on and record through your phone and then just pretend you're having a creative conversation, right? 
Because the act of writing your idea down is already a filter. 
You're going to be like, "Is this good enough to write down?" 
And then you write it down. 
And finally: don't do this forever. Right? 
If you're on the walk and that idea's not coming to you, come back to it later at another time. 
I think we're coming up on a break right now, so I have an idea: Why don't you grab a leash and take your thoughts for a walk? 
Thank you. 

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

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

Azim Khamisa: We humans have many defining moments in our lives. 
Sometimes these moments are joyous, and sometimes they are heartbreaking, tragic. 
But at these defining moments, if we are able to make the right choice, we literally manifest a miracle in us and others. 
My only son Tariq, a university student, kind, generous, a good writer, a good photographer, had aspirations to work for National Geographic, engaged to a beautiful lady, worked as a pizza deliveryman on Fridays and Saturdays. 
He was lured to a bogus address by a youth gang. 
And in a gang initiation, a 14-year-old shot and killed him. 
The sudden, senseless death of an innocent, unarmed human being; the overwhelming grief of a family; the total confusion as you try to absorb a new, hideous reality. 
Needless to say it brought my life to a crashing halt. 
One of the hardest things I've ever had to do was to call his mother, who lived in a different city. 
How do you tell a mother she's never going to see her son again, or hear him laugh, or give him a hug? 
I practice as a Sufi Muslim. 
I meditate two hours a day. 
And sometimes, in deep trauma and deep tragedy, there is a spark of clarity. 
So what I downloaded in my meditation is that there were victims at both ends of the gun. 
It's easy to see that my son was a victim of the 14-year-old, a little bit complicated to see that he was a victim of American society. 
And that begs the question, well, who is American society? 
Well, it's you and me, because I don't believe that society is just happenstance. 
I think we are all responsible for the society we've created. 
And children killing children is not a mark of a civil society. 
So nine months after Tariq died, I started the Tariq Khamisa Foundation and our mandate at the Tariq Khamisa Foundation is to stop kids from killing kids by breaking the cycle of youth violence. 
And essentially we have three mandates. 
Our first and foremost is to save lives of children. 
It's important to do. We lose so many on a daily basis. 
Our second mandate is to empower the right choices so kids don't fall through the cracks and choose lives of gangs and crime and drugs and alcohol and weapons. 
And our third mandate is to teach the principles of nonviolence, of empathy, of compassion, of forgiveness. 
And I started with a very simple premise that violence is a learned behavior. 
No child was born violent. 
If you accept that as a truism, nonviolence can also be a learned behavior, but you have to teach it, because kids are not going to learn that through osmosis. 
Soon after that, I reached out to my brother here, with the attitude that we had both lost a son. 
My son died. 
He lost his grandson to the adult prison system. 
And I asked him to join me. 
As you see, 22 years later, we are still here together, because I can't bring Tariq back from the dead, you can't take Tony out of prison, but the one thing we can do is make sure no other young people in our community end up dead or end up in prison. 
With the grace of God, the Tariq Khamisa Foundation has been successful. 
We have a safe school model which has four different programs. 
The first one is a live assembly with Ples and me. 
We are introduced, this man's grandson killed this man's son, and here they are together. 
We have in-classroom curriculum. 
We have an after school mentoring program, and we create a peace club. 
And I'm happy to share with you that besides teaching these principles of nonviolence, we are able to cut suspensions and expulsions by 70 percent, which is huge. 
(Applause) Which is huge. 
Five years after Tariq died, and for me to complete my journey of forgiveness, I went to see the young man who killed my son. 
He was 19 years old. 
And I remember that meeting because we were -- he's 37, still in prison -- but at that first meeting, we locked eyeballs. 
I'm looking in his eyes, he's looking in my eyes, and I'm looking in his eyes trying to find a murderer, and I didn't. 
I was able to climb through his eyes and touch his humanity that I got that the spark in him was no different than the spark in me or anybody else here. 
So I wasn't expecting that. He was remorseful. 
He was articulate. He was well-mannered. 
And I could tell that my hand of forgiveness had changed him. 
So with that, please welcome my brother, Ples. 
(Applause) Ples Felix: Tony is my one and only daughter's one and only child. 
Tony was born to my daughter, who was 15 when she gave birth to Tony. 
Mothering is the toughest job on the planet. 
There is no tougher job on the planet than raising another human being and making sure they're safe, secure and well-positioned to be successful in life. 
Tony experienced a lot of violence in his life as a young kid. 
He saw one of his favorite cousins be murdered in a hail of automatic weapon fire and gang involvement in Los Angeles. 
He was very traumatized in so many different ways. 
Tony came to live with me. 
I wanted to make sure he had everything a kid needed to be successful. 
But on this particular evening, after years of being with me and struggling mightily to try to be successful and to live up to my expectations of being a successful person, on this one particular day, Tony ran away from home that evening, he went to be with people he thought were his friends, he was given drugs and alcohol and he took them because he thought they would make him feel carefree. 
But all it did was to make his anxiety go higher and to create a more ... 
more deadly thinking on his part. 
He was invited to a robbery, he was given a 9mm handgun. 
And at the presence of an 18-year-old who commanded him and two 14-year-old boys he thought were his friends, he shot and killed Tariq Khamisa, this man's son. 
There are no words, there are no words that can express the loss of a child. 
At my understanding that my grandson was responsible for the murder of this human being, I went to the prayer closet, like I was taught by my old folks, and began to pray and meditate. 
The one thing that Mr. Khamisa and I have in common, and we didn't know this, besides being wonderful human beings, is that we both meditate. 
(Laughter) It was very helpful for me because it offered me an opportunity to seek guidance and clarity about how I wanted to be of support of this man and his family in this loss. 
And sure enough, my prayers were answered, because I was invited to a meeting at this man's house, met his mother, his father, his wife, his brother, met their family and had a chance to be in the presence of God-spirited people led by this man, who in the spirit of forgiveness, made way, made an opportunity for me to be of value and to share with him and to share with children the importance of understanding the need to be with a responsible adult, focus on your anger in a way that's healthy, learn to meditate. 
The programs that we have in the Tariq Khamisa Foundation provide so many tools for the kids to put in their toolkit so they could carry them throughout their lives. 
It's important that our children understand that loving, caring adults care for them and support them, but it's also important that our children learn to meditate, learn to be peaceful, learn to be centered and learn to interact with the other children in a kind, empathetic and wonderfully loving way. 
We need more love in our society and that's why we are here to share the love with children, because our children will lead the way for us, because all of us will depend on our children. 
As we grow older and retire, they will take over this world for us, so as much love as we teach them, they will give it back to us. 
Blessings. Thank you. 
(Applause) AK: So I was born in Kenya, I was educated in England, and my brother here is a Baptist. 
I practice as a Sufi Muslim. 
He's African American, but I always tell him, I'm the African American in the group. 
I was born in Africa. You were not. 
(Laughter) And I naturalized as a citizen. 
I'm a first-generation citizen. 
And I felt that, as an American citizen, I must take my share of the responsibility for the murder of my son. 
Why? Because it was fired by an American child. 
You could take the position, he killed my one and only son, he should be hung from the highest pole. 
How does that improve society? 
And I know you are probably wondering what happened to that young man. 
He's still in prison. He just turned 37 on September 22, but I have some good news. 
We've been trying to get him out for 12 years. 
He finally will join us a year from now. 
(Applause) And I'm very excited to have him join us, because I know we've saved him, but he will save tens of thousands of students when he shares his testimony in schools that we are present at on a regular basis. 
When he says to the kids, "When I was 11, I joined a gang. 
When I was 14, I murdered Mr. Khamisa's son. 
I've spent the last umpteen years in prison. 
I'm here to tell you: it's not worth it," do you think the kids will listen to that voice? 
Yes, because his intonations will be of a person that pulled the trigger. 
And I know that he wants to turn the clock back. 
Of course, that's not possible. 
I wish it was. I would have my son back. 
My brother would have his grandson back. 
So I think that demonstrates the power of forgiveness. 
So what's the big takeaway here? 
So I want to end our session with this quote, which is the basis of my fourth book, which incidentally, the foreword for that book was written by Tony. 
So it goes like this: sustained goodwill creates friendship. 
You don't make friends by bombing them, right? 
You make friends by extending goodwill. 
That ought to be obvious. 
So sustained goodwill creates friendship, sustained friendship creates trust, sustained trust creates empathy, sustained empathy creates compassion, and sustained compassion creates peace. 
I call this my peace formula. 
It starts with goodwill, friendship, trust, empathy, compassion and peace. 
But people ask me, how do you extend goodwill to the person who murdered your child? 
I tell them, you do that through forgiveness. 
As it's evident it worked for me. 
It worked for my family. 
What's a miracle is it worked for Tony, it worked for his family, it can work for you and your family, for Israel and Palestine, North and South Korea, for Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and Syria. 
It can work for the United States of America. 
So let me leave you with this, my sisters, and a couple of brothers -- (Laughter) that peace is possible. 
How do I know that? 
Because I am at peace. 
Thank you very much. Namaste. 
(Applause) 

A few years ago, all the developed countries in the world -- the wealthier ones -- and all of the charities together donated about 200 billion dollars to developing countries in the world -- the ones that bear most of the burden, the heaviest burden of the world's biggest problems: poverty, hunger, climate change and inequality. 
That same year, businesses invested in those same countries 3.7 trillion dollars. 
Now, I get to travel a lot in my work and I'm privileged to see the amazing things that NGOs and some governments are doing with some of that 200 billion dollars: helping malnourished children or families that don't have access to clean water, children who wouldn't be educated otherwise. 
But it's not enough because the biggest problems in our world need trillions not just billions. 
So if we're going to make lasting and significant progress in the big challenges in our world, we need business, both the companies and the investors, to drive the solutions. 
So let's talk about what business should do. 
And when I say that, you probably think that I'm going to talk about corporate philanthropy or corporate social responsibility. 
CSR is the norm today, and it's very useful. 
It provides a route for corporate generosity and that generosity is important to many corporations' employees and customers. 
But you know what? 
It's just not big enough, or strong enough, or durable enough to drive solutions to the biggest problems in our world today because it's incremental cost. 
Even when business is booming, CSR just isn't designed to scale. 
And then of course in a downturn, it's one of the first programs to be cut. 
So no, CSR -- corporate social responsibility -- isn't the answer, but TSI -- total societal impact, is. 
TSI is the sum of all of the ways business can affect society by doing the real work: thinking about their supply chains, working on their product design and manufacturing processes and their distribution. 
The real work of business, when done with innovation, can actually create core business benefits for the company and it can solve the meaningful problems in our world today. 
So what does TSI look like? 
Focusing on TSI means incorporating social and environmental considerations. 
And you know what? 
It's something that isn't completely new. 
It's been thought about for a while. 
But the hard part is that corporations almost exclusively still think about something called TSR: total shareholder returns. 
But TSI -- total societal impact -- needs to stand alongside TSR as an important and valid driver of corporate strategy and corporate decision-making. 
And we've got the data to show you why and how. 
Some companies are already making this happen. 
They're beginning to make it happen. 
So let me tell you the story about Mars. 
Mars is the sixth-largest private company in the United States. 
If you're like me, they make some important products, like coffee and chocolate. 
So not surprisingly, one of their most important ingredients is cocoa. 
And some of their competitors are actually really worried about the sustainability and the availability of cocoa supplies. 
But not Mars. 
They're confident in the stable supply of that crop for the long term. 
And why is that? 
It's because they partner with NGOs around the world that are working with small shareholder farmers. 
And those certification agency's NGOs are working to help farmers improve crop yields, they're making sure that they get a fair, premium, livable wage and they're helping them address any human rights potential issues in supply chains, and they're helping minimize the effects on the environment, like deforestation. 
Mars is on a path to 100 percent certified cocoa, so this is a good program for farming communities, it's a good program for the environment, and it's a good program for Mars, who has solved a significant risk in their supply chain. 
But now let's get to the data, because it's actually really awesome. 
And let me explain exactly what the data points I'm going to talk about are. 
When analysts and financial people look at companies, they think about a lot of different statistics. 
I want to talk about two of the most important ones. 
I'm going to talk about the overall value of a company -- its valuation -- and I'm going to talk about its margin. 
Basically the difference between all of its earnings and all of its costs. 
So in our study, we looked at oil and gas companies, and the oil and gas companies that are performing most strongly on TSI -- total societal impact -- see a 19 percent premium on their valuation. 
19 percent. 
When they do really well on things like minimizing the impact of their company on the environment and water, and when they have very strong occupational health and safety programs. 
And when they also add in strong employee training programs, they get a 3.4 percentage point premium on their margins. 
But what about other industries? 
Biopharmaceutical companies that are the strongest performers on TSI see a 12 percent premium on their valuation. 
And then if they're best at expanded access to medicines -- making medicines available for the people who need them -- they see a 6.7 percentage point premium on their gross margins. 
For the retail banks that are strongest on TSI, they see a three percentage point premium on their valuation, and then for those that differentially provide financial inclusion -- access to financial products for people who need it -- they see a 0.5 percentage point premium in their net income margin. 
Now, these numbers for banks may not seem very big, but in highly competitive industries, even really small differences in margin matter a lot. 
Now, what about those consumer goods companies -- the ones who make those products we love like coffee and chocolate? 
Consumer goods companies that perform best on total societal impact see an 11 percent valuation premium. 
And then if they do those smart things with their supply chain -- inclusive and responsibly sourcing their product -- they see a 4.8 percentage point premium on their gross margins. 
These numbers are significant. 
We've long known that things like fundamental financials, growth rates and financial risks are key drivers of valuation, but this rigorous analysis shows that social and environmental factors -- total societal impact measures -- are also linked to valuations and margins. 
Wow. 
All else equal -- we didn't confuse the analysis with anything. 
All else being equal, companies that perform strongly on social and environmental areas achieve higher margins and higher valuations. 
Now, I do understand that companies are under a lot of short-term earnings pressures. 
But fortunately, the investors who create some of this pressure are actually more and more themselves starting to think longer-term and starting to think with this TSI lens. 
In our conversations and surveys with investors, 75 percent of them say they expect to see improved revenues and improved operating efficiency for companies that are thinking with a TSI lens. 
And they're actually starting to incorporate this in their own investing behavior. 
Last year, 23 trillion in global assets were in the category of socially responsible investing. 
Now, that's five billion over just the last two years. 
And it represents a quarter of the total global assets managed in the world. 
I know that some of you may be cringing a little bit right now. 
Because in my decades of strategy consulting with businesses and NGOs and governments around the world, I find that many businesspeople are hesitant to talk or even sometimes think about the business benefits of doing good. 
They somehow think it's going to negate the value of the benefits they're creating for society. 
Or that they'll be perceived as heartless or even mercenary. 
But we really do need to think differently. 
We need to think differently because the only way we're going to make substantial progress on the challenging problems of our time is for business to drive the solutions. 
The job of business is to meet customer needs and to do so profitably. 
They need to to survive. 
So one of the best ways for businesses to help ensure their own growth, their own longevity, is to meet some of the hardest challenges in our society and to do so profitably. 
And when they do that innovatively, when they do that ethically, responsibly, incredibly, they should be proud. 
But if you still aren't sure about this, let's talk about a few more examples. 
What if you're a technology company and you're trying to grow your platform and you're trying to grow your customers? 
Like, Airbnb. 
Airbnb has a portfolio of total societal impact activities. 
They're all spot-on their core business. 
In one initiative, they're helping enable their community to provide housing for free to those in disaster: crisis survivors and relief workers. 
In another effort on their part, they're actually helping and working with NGOs to ensure that people can provide housing for free for refugees. 
Now, what I love about this program is that I don't think most people would've figured out how to express their generosity and open their homes for those in such dire need -- certainly not so quickly or so easily or efficiently -- without this innovation by Airbnb. 
But at the same time, this is core to their corporate strategy and core to their growth because they grow by increasing the number of hosts and guests using their platform. 
But if they'd only been thinking exclusively about the return side of things, I'm not sure they would have ever figured out this route to growth, because they're not charging transaction fees. 
So it's a pretty exciting way, when they were thinking about how to bring their capabilities to a need in society and at the same time drive their own growth. 
But what if you're trying to find new customer segments? 
Let's move to South Africa, and let's talk about Standard Bank. 
In South Africa, the government has a regulation that requires all banks to donate 0.2 percent of their profits to small and medium black-owned enterprises. 
And many banks just donate this to the entrepreneurs, but Standard Bank thought creatively. 
And what they did is they took those funds and they invested them in an independent trust, and they used that trust to fund loans to these black entrepreneurs. 
This is a highly leveraged model. 
They can support a lot more entrepreneurs with capital, and because their success is completely intertwined with the success of the entrepreneurs, they're actually also using the fund to provide technical assistance. 
More entrepreneurs supported, more people and communities being lifted out of poverty. 
And it's successful for Standard Bank. 
So successful that they're actually working on expanding this program to other areas in their portfolio. 
It's not like we haven't been trying to solve the problems in our world for a long time. 
We have, and they're still here. 
We're making progress, but it's not far enough, or fast enough, or universal enough. 
We need to flip our thinking. 
We need to have business -- both companies and investors -- bring creative, innovative corporate strategy and capital to solving the biggest problems in our world. 
And when they do that innovatively, and when they do that with all of their thinking and all of their strategy and all of their capital, and they're creating both total shareholder returns and total societal impact, we know that we will solve those problems, both profitably and generously. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

I would be willing to bet I'm the dumbest guy in the room, because I couldn't get through school; I struggled with school. 
But I knew at a very early age that I loved money, I loved business and I loved this entrepreneurial thing. 
I was raised to be an entrepreneur. 
What I've been really passionate about ever since -- and I've never spoken about this ever, until now -- so this is the first time anyone's heard it, except my wife, three days ago. 
I told her that I think we miss an opportunity to find these kids who have the entrepreneurial traits, and to groom them or show them that being an entrepreneur is actually a cool thing. 
It's not something that is a bad thing and is vilified, which is what happens in a lot of society. 
Kids, when we grow up, have dreams, and we have passions, and we have visions, and somehow we get those things crushed. 
We get told that we need to study harder or be more focused or get a tutor. 
My parents got me a tutor in French, and I still suck in French. 
Two years ago, I was the highest-rated lecturer at MIT's Entrepreneurial Master's Program. 
It was a speaking event in front of groups of entrepreneurs from around the world. 
When I was in grade two, I won a citywide speaking competition, but nobody had ever said, "Hey, this kid's a good speaker. 
He can't focus, but he loves walking around and getting people energized." 
No one said, "Get him a coach in speaking." 
They said, get me a tutor in what I suck at. 
So as kids show these traits -- and we need to start looking for them -- I think we should be raising kids to be entrepreneurs instead of lawyers. 
Unfortunately, the school system is grooming this world to say, "Let's be a lawyer," or, "Let's be a doctor." 
We're missing that opportunity, because no one ever says, "Hey, be an entrepreneur." 
Entrepreneurs are people -- we have a lot of them in this room -- who have ideas and passions or see these needs in the world and decide to stand up and do it. 
And we put everything on the line to make that stuff happen. 
We have the ability to get the groups of people around us that want to build that dream with us. 
And I think if we could get kids to embrace the idea at a young age, of being entrepreneurial, we could change everything in the world that's a problem today. 
Every problem out there, somebody has the idea for. 
And as a young kid, nobody can say it can't happen, because you're too dumb to realize that you couldn't figure it out. 
I think we have an obligation as parents and a society to start teaching our kids to fish instead of giving them the fish -- the old parable: "Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. 
If we can teach our kids to be entrepreneurial, the ones that show the traits to be, like we teach the ones who have science gifts to go on in science, what if we saw the ones with entrepreneurial traits and taught them to be entrepreneurs? 
We could have these kids spreading businesses instead of waiting for government handouts. 
What we do is teach our kids the things they shouldn't do: don't hit; don't bite; don't swear. 
Right now we teach our kids to go after really good jobs; the school system teaches them to go after things like being a doctor and being a lawyer and being an accountant and a dentist and a teacher and a pilot. 
And the media says it's really cool if we could go out and be a model or a singer or a sports hero like Luongo or Crosby. 
Our MBA programs do not teach kids to be entrepreneurs. 
The reason I avoided an MBA program, other than that I didn't get into any, since I had a 61 percent average out of high school, then a 61 percent average at the only school in Canada that accepted me, Carlton, is that our MBA programs don't teach kids to be entrepreneurs. 
They teach them to work in corporations. 
So who's starting these companies? It's these random few people. 
Even in popular literature, the only book I've ever found -- and this should be on all your reading lists -- the only book I've ever found that makes the entrepreneur a hero is "Atlas Shrugged." 
Everything else in the world looks at entrepreneurs and says we're bad people. 
Both my grandfathers and my dad were entrepreneurs. 
My brother, sister and I, all three of us own companies as well. 
We all decided to start these things because it's the only place we fit. 
We didn't fit in normal work; we couldn't work for somebody else, we're stubborn and we have all these other traits. 
But kids could be entrepreneurs as well. 
I'm a big part of a couple organizations called the Entrepreneurs' Organization and the Young Presidents' Organization. 
I just came back from speaking in Barcelona at the YPO global conference. 
And everyone I met over there who's an entrepreneur struggled with school. 
I have 18 out of the 19 signs of attention deficit disorder diagnosed. 
So this thing right here is freaking me out. 
(Laughter) It's probably why I'm a bit panicked, other than all the caffeine I've had and the sugar. 
But this is really creepy for an entrepreneur. 
Attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder. 
Do you know that bipolar disorder is nicknamed the CEO disease? 
Ted Turner's got it. Steve Jobs has it. 
All three of the founders of Netscape had it. 
I could go on and on. 
Kids -- you can see these signs in kids. 
And we're giving them Ritalin and saying, "Don't be an entrepreneurial type. 
Fit into this other system and try to become a student." 
Sorry, entrepreneurs aren't students. 
I stole essays. I cheated on exams. 
I hired kids to do my accounting assignments in university for 13 consecutive assignments. 
But as an entrepreneur, you don't do accounting, you hire accountants. 
So I just figured that out earlier. 
(Laughter) (Applause) At least I can admit I cheated in university; most of you won't. 
I'm also quoted -- and I told the person who wrote the textbook -- I'm now quoted in that exact same university textbook in every Canadian university and college studies -- in managerial accounting, I'm chapter eight. 
I open up chapter eight, talking about budgeting. 
I told the author, after they did my interview, that I cheated in that same course. 
But kids, you can see these signs in them. 
The definition of entrepreneur is "a person who organizes, operates and assumes the risk of a business venture." 
That doesn't mean you have to go to an MBA program, or that you have to get through school. 
We've heard, "Is it nurture or is it nature?" Right? 
Is it thing one or thing two? What is it? 
Well, I don't think it's either. I think it can be both. 
I was groomed as an entrepreneur. 
When I was growing up as a young kid, I had no choice, because I was taught at a very early age, when my dad realized I didn't fit into everything else that was being taught to me in school, that he could teach me to figure out business at an early age. 
He groomed us, the three of us, to hate the thought of having a job and to love the fact of creating companies where we could employ other people. 
I was in my bedroom with one of those long extension cords, calling all the dry cleaners in Winnipeg to find out how much they'd pay me for coat hangers. 
And my mom came into the room and said, "Where are you going to get the hangers to sell to the dry cleaners?" 
And I said, "Let's go look in the basement." 
We went down to the basement, and I opened up this cupboard. 
There was about 1,000 hangers that I'd collected, because, when I told her I was going out to play, I was going door to door in the neighborhood to collect hangers to put in the basement, because I saw her a few weeks before that -- you could get paid, they used to pay two cents per coat hanger. 
So I was like, well, there's all kinds of hangers, so I'll just go get them. 
And I learned that you could actually negotiate with people. 
This one guy offered me three cents and I got him up to three and a half. 
I even knew at seven years old that I could get a fractional percent of a cent, and people would pay it, because it multiplied up. 
At seven years old I figured it out. 
I got three and a half cents for 1,000 hangers. 
I sold license plate protectors door to door. 
My dad actually made me go find someone who would sell me them at wholesale. 
At nine years old, I walked around in the city of Sudbury selling license-plate protectors door to door. 
And I remember this one customer so vividly -- I also did some other stuff with these clients, I sold newspapers, and he wouldn't buy a newspaper from me, ever. 
But I was convinced I was going to get him to buy a license-plate protector. 
And he's like, "We don't need one." 
Remember, I'm nine years old. 
I'm like, "You have two cars and they don't have license-plate protectors. 
And this car has one license plate that's all crumpled up." 
He said, "That's my wife's car." 
I said, "Why don't we test one on her car and see if it lasts longer?" 
So I knew there were two cars with two license plates on each. 
If I couldn't sell all four, I could at least get one. 
I learned that at a young age. 
When I was about 10 years old, I sold comic books out of our cottage on Georgian Bay. 
I would go biking up to the end of the beach, buy all the comics from the poor kids, then go back to the other end of the beach to sell them to the rich kids. 
It was obvious to me: buy low, sell high. 
You've got this demand over here that has money. 
The rich people do. Obvious, right? 
It's like a recession. 
So there's a recession. 
Go get some of that. I learned that at a young age. 
I also learned, don't reveal your source: I got beat up after four weeks of this, because one of the rich kids found out where I was buying my comics, and didn't like that he was paying more. 
I was forced to get a paper route at 10 years old. 
I didn't want a paper route, but my dad said, "That's your next business." 
Not only did he get me one, but I had to get two. 
He wanted me to hire someone to deliver half the papers, which I did. 
Then I realized: collecting tips is how you made all the money. 
So I'd collect tips and get payment. 
I would collect for the papers -- he could just deliver them. 
Because then I realized I could make money. 
By this point, I was definitely not going to be an employee. 
(Laughter) My dad owned an automotive and industrial repair shop. 
He had all these old automotive parts lying around. 
They had this old brass and copper. 
I asked what he did with it, and he said he just throws it out. 
I said, "Wouldn't somebody pay for that?" And he goes, "Maybe." 
Remember: at 10 years old, 34 years ago, I saw opportunity in this stuff, I saw there was money in garbage. 
And I collected it from the automotive shops in the area on my bicycle. 
Then my dad would drive me on Saturdays to a scrap metal recycler where I got paid. 
And I thought that was kind of cool. 
Strangely enough, 30 years later, we're building 1-800-GOT-JUNK? 
and making money off that, too. 
We made these pincushions for our moms for Mother's Day out of wooden clothespins -- when we used to hang clothes on clotheslines outside. 
And you'd make these chairs. 
And I had these little pillows that I would sew up. 
And you could stuff pins in them. 
Because people used to sew and they needed a pincushion. 
But I realized you had to have options, so I spray-painted a whole bunch of them brown, so when I went to the door, it wasn't, "Do you want to buy one?" 
It was, "Which color would you like?" 
I'm 10 years old; you're not going to say no, especially if you have two options, the brown one or the clear one. 
So I learned that lesson at a young age. 
Right, like cutting lawns is brutal. 
But because I had to cut lawns all summer for all of our neighbors and get paid to do that, I realized that recurring revenue from one client is amazing, that if I land this client once, and every week I get paid by that person, that's way better than trying to sell one clothespin thing to one person, because you can't sell them more. 
So I love that recurring revenue model I started to learn at a young age. 
Remember, I was being groomed to do this. I was not allowed to have jobs. 
I would go to the golf course and caddy for people, but I realized there was this one hill on our golf course, the 13th hole, that had this huge hill, and people could never get their bags up it. 
So I'd sit there in a lawn chair and carry for all the people who didn't have caddies. 
I'd carry their golf bags to the top; they'd pay me a dollar, while my friends worked for hours hauling some guy's bag around for 10 bucks. 
That doesn't make sense. Figure out a way to make more money faster. 
Every week, I'd go to the corner store and buy all these pops, Then I'd deliver them to these 70-year-old women playing bridge. 
They'd give me their orders for the following week. 
I'd deliver pop and charge twice. 
You didn't need contracts, you just needed to have a supply and demand and this audience who bought into you. 
These women weren't going to go to anybody else because they liked me, and I kind of figured it out. 
But everybody else was looking in the bush and looking in the ditches for golf balls. 
I'm like, screw that. They're in the pond. And nobody's going into the pond. 
So I'd go into the ponds and crawl around and pick them up with my toes, just pick them up with both feet. 
You can't do it onstage. 
You get the golf balls, throw them in your bathing suit trunks and when you're done, you've got a couple hundred of them. 
But the problem is, people didn't want all the golf balls. 
So I just packaged them. I'm like 12, right? 
I had the Pinnacles, DDHs and the really cool ones. 
Those sold for two dollars each. 
Then I had the good ones that didn't look crappy: 50 cents each. 
And then I'd sell 50 at a time of all the crappy ones. 
And they could use those for practice balls. 
I sold sunglasses when I was in school, to all the kids in high school. 
This is what really kind of gets everybody hating you, because you're trying to extract money from all your friends all the time. 
But it paid the bills. 
So I sold lots and lots of sunglasses. 
Then when the school shut me down -- they called me into the office and told me I couldn't do it -- I went to the gas stations and sold lots of them to the gas stations and had the gas stations sell them to their customers. 
That was cool because then, I had retail outlets. 
I think I was 14. 
Then I paid my entire way through first year of university at Carlton by selling wineskins door to door. 
You know you can hold a 40-ounce bottle of rum and two bottles of coke in a wineskin? 
So what, right? But you know what? 
Stuff that down your shorts when you go to a football game, you can get booze in for free. 
Everybody bought them. 
I also branded it, so I sold them for five times the normal cost. 
It had our university logo on it. 
You know, we teach our kids and we buy them games, but why don't we get them games, if they're entrepreneurial kids, that nurture the traits you need to be entrepreneurs? 
Why don't you teach them not to waste money? 
I remember being told to walk out into the middle of a street in Banff, Alberta. 
I'd thrown a penny out in the street, and my dad said, "Go pick it up. 
I work too damn hard for my money. I'm not going to see you waste a penny." 
I remember that lesson to this day. 
Allowances teach kids the wrong habits. 
Allowances, by nature, are teaching kids to think about a job. 
An entrepreneur doesn't expect a regular paycheck. 
Allowance is breeding kids at a young age to expect a regular paycheck. 
That's wrong, for me, if you want to raise entrepreneurs. 
What I do with my kids, nine and seven, is teach them to walk around the house and the yard, looking for stuff that needs to get done. 
Come and tell me what it is. 
And then, you know what we do? We negotiate. 
They go around looking for what it is, then we negotiate what they'll get paid. 
They don't have a regular check, but they have opportunities to find more stuff, and learn the skill of negotiating and of finding opportunities. 
You breed that kind of stuff. 
Each of my kids has two piggy banks. 
Fifty percent of all the money they earn goes in their house account, 50 percent goes in their toy account. 
The toy account, they spend on whatever they want. 
The 50 percent in their house account, every six months, goes to the bank. 
they walk up with me. 
Every year, all the money in the bank goes to their broker. 
I'm teaching them to force that savings habit. 
It drives me crazy that 30-year-olds are saying, "Maybe I'll start contributing to my RSP now." 
Shit, you've missed 25 years. 
You can teach those habits to young kids, when they don't even feel the pain yet. 
Don't read bedtime stories every night -- maybe four nights of the week, and three nights, have them tell stories. 
Why don't you sit down with kids and give them four items, a red shirt, a blue tie, a kangaroo and a laptop, and have them tell a story about those four things? 
It teaches them to sell, teaches them creativity, teaches them to think on their feet. 
Do that kind of stuff, have fun with it. 
Get kids to stand up in front of groups and talk, even if it's just in front of their friends, and do plays and have speeches. 
Those are entrepreneurial traits you want to be nurturing. 
Show them grumpy employees. 
When you see grumpy customer service, point it out. 
Say, "By the way, that guy is a crappy employee." 
(Laughter) If you go into a restaurant and have bad customer service, show them what bad customer service looks like. 
(Laughter) We have all these lessons in front of us, but we don't take those opportunities; we teach kids to get a tutor. 
Imagine if you actually took all the kids' junk in the house right now, all the toys they outgrew two years ago and said, "Why don't we sell some of this on Craigslist and Kijiji?" 
And they actually sell it and learn how to find scammers when offers come in. 
They can come into your account or a sub account or whatever. 
But teach them how to fix the price, guess the price, pull up the photos. 
Teach them how to do that kind of stuff and make money. 
Then 50 percent goes in their house account, 50 percent in their toy account. 
Some of the entrepreneurial traits you've got to nurture in kids: attainment, tenacity, leadership, introspection, interdependence, values. 
All these traits, you can find in young kids, and you can help nurture them. 
Look for that kind of stuff. 
There's two traits I want you to also look out for that we don't get out of their system. 
Don't medicate kids for attention deficit disorder unless it is really, really freaking bad. 
(Applause) The same with the whole things on mania and stress and depression, unless it is so clinically brutal, man. 
Bipolar disorder is nicknamed "the CEO disease." 
When Steve Jurvetson, Jim Clark and Jim Barksdale have all got it, and they built Netscape -- imagine if they were given Ritalin. 
Al Gore really would have had to invented the Internet. 
(Laughter) These are the skills we should be teaching in the classroom, as well as everything else. 
I'm not saying don't get kids to want to be lawyers. 
But how about getting entrepreneurship to be ranked right up there with the rest of them? 
Because there's huge opportunities in that. 
I want to close with a quick video that was done by one of the companies I mentor. 
These guys, Grasshopper. 
It's about kids. 
Hopefully, this inspires you to take what you've heard from me and do something with it to change the world. 
[Kid... "And you thought you could do anything?"] [You still can.] [Because a lot of what we consider impossible] [is easy to overcome] [Because in case you haven't noticed, we live in a place where] [one individual can make a difference] [Want proof?] [Just look at the people who built our country:] [Our parents, grandparents, our aunts, uncles] [They were immigrants, newcomers ready to make their mark] [Maybe they came with very little] [or perhaps they didn't own anything except for] [a single brilliant idea] [These people were thinkers, doers] [innovators] [until they came up with the name] [entrepreneurs] [They change the way we think about what is possible.] [They have a clear vision of how life can be better] [for all of us, even when times are tough.] [Right now, it's hard to see] [when our view is cluttered with obstacles.] [But turbulence creates opportunities] [for success, achievement, and pushes us] [to discover new ways of doing things] [So what opportunities will you go after and why?] [If you're an entrepreneur] [you know that risk isn't the reward.] [No. The rewards are driving innovation] [changing people's lives. Creating jobs.] [Fueling growth.] [And making a better world.] [Entrepreneurs are everywhere.] [They run small businesses that support our economy,] [design tools to help you] [stay connected with friends, family and colleagues] [And they're finding new ways of helping to solve society's oldest problems.] [Do you know an entrepreneur?] [Entrepreneurs can be anyone Even... you] [So seize the opportunity to create the job you always wanted] [Help heal the economy] [Make a difference.] [Take your business to new heights,] [but most importantly,] [remember when you were a kid] [when everything was within your reach,] [and then say to yourself quietly, but with determination:] [it still is.] Thank you very much for having me. 

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

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

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

Nina Dølvik Brochmann: We grew up believing that the hymen is a proof of virginity. 
But it turns out, we were wrong. 
What we discovered is that the popular story we're told about female virginity is based on two anatomical myths. 
The truth has been known in medical communities for over 100 years, yet somehow these two myths continue to make life difficult for women around the world. 
Ellen Støkken Dahl: The first myth is about blood. 
It tells us that the hymen breaks and bleeds the first time a woman has vaginal sex. 
In other words, if there is no blood on the sheets afterwards, then the woman was simply not a virgin. 
The second myth is a logical consequence of the first. 
Since the hymen is thought to break and bleed, people also believe that it actually disappears or is in some way radically altered during a woman's first intercourse. 
If that were true, one would easily be able to determine if a woman is a virgin or not by examining her genitals, by doing a virginity check. 
NDB: So that's our two myths: virgins bleed, and hymens are lost forever. 
Now, this may sound like a minor issue to you. 
Why should you care about an obscure little skin fold on the female body? 
But the truth is, this is about so much more than an anatomical misunderstanding. 
The myths about the hymen have lived on for centuries because they have cultural significance. 
They have been used as a powerful tool in the effort to control women's sexuality in about every culture, religion and historical decade. 
Women are still mistrusted, shamed, harmed and, in the worst cases, subjected to honor killings if they don't bleed on their wedding night. 
Other women are forced through degrading virginity checks, simply to obtain a job, to save their reputation or to get married. 
ESD: Like in Indonesia, where women are systematically examined to enter military service. 
After the Egyptian uprisings in 2011, a group of female protesters were forced to undergo virginity checks by their military. 
In Oslo, doctors are examining the hymens of young girls to reassure parents that their children are not ruined. 
And sadly, the list goes on. 
Women are so afraid not to live up to the myths about the hymen that they choose to use different virginity quick fixes to assure a bleeding. 
That could be plastic surgery, known as "revirgination," it could be vials of blood poured on the sheets after sex or fake hymens bought online, complete with theater blood and a promise to "kiss your deep, dark secret goodbye." 
NDB: By telling girls that no deed can be kept secret, that their bodies will reveal them no matter what, we have endowed them with fear. 
Girls are afraid of ruining themselves, either through sport, play, tampon use or a sexual activity. 
We have curtailed their opportunities and their freedoms. 
It's time we put an end to the virginity fraud. 
It's time we break the myths about the hymen once and for all. 
ESD: We are medical students, sexual health workers and the authors of "The Wonder Down Under." 
(Laughter) That's a popular science book about the female genitals. 
And in our experience, people seem to believe that the hymen is some kind of a seal covering the vaginal opening. 
In Norwegian, it is even called "the virgin membrane." 
And with this, we picture something fragile, something easily destructible, something you can rip through, perhaps like a sheet of plastic wrapping. 
You may have wondered why we brought a hula hoop onstage today. 
We'll show you. 
(Laughter) Now, it is very hard to hide that something has happened to this hoop, right? 
It is different before and after I punched it. 
The seal is broken, and unless we change the plastic, it won't get back to its intact state. 
So if we wanted to do a virginity check on this hoop right here, right now, that would be very easy. 
It's easy to say that this hoop is not a virgin anymore. 
(Laughter) NDB: But the hymen is nothing like a piece of plastic you can wrap around your food, or a seal. 
In fact ... 
it's more like this -- a scrunchie or a rubber band. 
The hymen is a rim of tissue at the outer opening of the vagina. 
And usually, it has a doughnut or a half-moon shape with a large, central hole. 
But this varies a lot, and sometimes hymens can have fringes, it can have several holes, or it can consist of lobes. 
In other words, hymens naturally vary a lot in looks, and that is what makes it so hard to do a virginity check. 
ESD: Now that we know a bit more about the hymen's anatomy, it's time to get back to our two myths: virgins bleed, hymens are lost forever. 
But the hymen doesn't have to break at all. 
The hymen is like a scrunchie in function as well as in looks. 
And you can stretch a scrunchie, right? 
(Laughter) You can stretch a hymen, too. 
In fact, it's very elastic. 
And for a lot of women, the hymen will be elastic enough to handle a vaginal intercourse without sustaining any damage. 
For other women, the hymen may tear a bit to make room for the penis, but that won't make it disappear. 
But it may look a bit different from before. 
It naturally follows that you can't examine the hymen to check for virginity status. 
This was noted over 100 years ago in 1906 by the Norwegian doctor Marie Jeancet. 
She examined a middle-aged sex worker and concluded that her genitalia were reminiscent of a teenage virgin. 
But that makes sense, right? 
Because if her hymen was never damaged during sex, then what were we expecting to see? 
ESD: Since hymens come in every shape and form, it is difficult to know if a dent or a fold in it is there because of previous damage or if it's just a normal anatomical variant. 
The absurdity of virgin testing is illustrated in a study done on 36 pregnant teenagers. 
When doctors examined their hymens, they could only find clear signs of penetration in two out of the 36 girls. 
So unless you believe in 34 cases of virgin births -- (Laughter) we must all agree that also our second myth has taken a vital blow. 
You simply cannot look a woman between her legs and read her sexual story. 
NDB: Like most myths, the myths about the hymen are untrue. 
There is no virgin seal that magically disappears after sex, and half of virgins can easily have sex without bleeding. 
We wish we could say that by removing these myths, everything would be OK, that shame, harm and honor killings would all just disappear. 
But of course, it's not that simple. 
Sexual oppression of women comes from something much deeper than a simple anatomical misunderstanding about the properties of the hymen. 
It's a question of cultural and religious control of women's sexuality. 
And that is much harder to change. 
But we must try. 
ESD: As medical professionals, this is our contribution. 
We want every girl, parent and [future] husband to know what the hymen is and how it works. 
We want them to know that the hymen can't be used as a proof of virginity. 
And that way, we can remove one of the most powerful tools used to control young women today. 
After telling you this, you may wonder what the alternative is, for if we cannot use the hymen as a proof of virginity for women, then what should we use? 
We opt for using nothing. 
(Cheering) If you -- (Applause) If you really want to know if a woman is a virgin or not, ask her. 
(Laughter) But how she answers that question is her choice. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) 

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

About 10 years ago, I took on the task to teach global development to Swedish undergraduate students. 
That was after having spent about 20 years, together with African institutions, studying hunger in Africa. 
So I was sort of expected to know a little about the world. 
And I started, in our medical university, Karolinska Institute, an undergraduate course called Global Health. 
But when you get that opportunity, you get a little nervous. 
I thought, these students coming to us actually have the highest grade you can get in the Swedish college system, so I thought, maybe they know everything I'm going to teach them about. 
And one of the questions from which I learned a lot was this one: "Which country has the highest child mortality of these five pairs?" 
And I put them together so that in each pair of countries, one has twice the child mortality of the other. 
And this means that it's much bigger, the difference, than the uncertainty of the data. 
I won't put you at a test here, but it's Turkey, which is highest there, Poland, Russia, Pakistan and South Africa. 
And these were the results of the Swedish students. 
I did it so I got the confidence interval, which is pretty narrow. 
And I got happy, of course -- a 1.8 right answer out of five possible. 
That means there was a place for a professor of international health and for my course. 
(Laughter) But one late night, when I was compiling the report, I really realized my discovery. 
I have shown that Swedish top students know, statistically, significantly less about the world than the chimpanzees. 
(Laughter) Because the chimpanzee would score half right if I gave them two bananas with Sri Lanka and Turkey. 
They would be right half of the cases. But the students are not there. 
The problem for me was not ignorance; it was preconceived ideas. 
I did also an unethical study of the professors of the Karolinska Institute, which hands out the Nobel Prize in Medicine, and they are on par with the chimpanzee there. 
(Laughter) This is where I realized that there was really a need to communicate, because the data of what's happening in the world and the child health of every country is very well aware. 
This country over here is China. 
This is India. 
Because my students, what they said when they looked upon the world, and I asked them, "What do you really think about the world?" 
(Laughter) And they said, "The world is still 'we' and 'them.' And 'we' is the Western world and 'them' is the Third World." 
"And what do you mean with 'Western world?'" I said. 
"Well, that's long life and small family. 
So this is what I could display here. 
I put fertility rate here -- number of children per woman: one, two, three, four, up to about eight children per woman. 
We have very good data since 1962, 1960, about, on the size of families in all countries. 
The error margin is narrow. 
Here, I put life expectancy at birth, from 30 years in some countries, up to about 70 years. 
And in 1962, there was really a group of countries here that were industrialized countries, and they had small families and long lives. 
And these were the developing countries. 
Now, what has happened since 1962? We want to see the change. 
Are the students right? It's still two types of countries? 
Or have these developing countries got smaller families and they live here? 
Or have they got longer lives and live up there? 
Let's see. We stopped the world then. 
This is all UN statistics that have been available. 
Here we go. Can you see there? 
All the green Latin American countries are moving towards smaller families. 
Your yellow ones here are the Arabic countries, and they get longer life, but not larger families. 
The Africans are the green here. They still remain here. 
This is India; Indonesia is moving on pretty fast. 
In the '80s here, you have Bangladesh still among the African countries. 
But now, Bangladesh -- it's a miracle that happens in the '80s -- the imams start to promote family planning, and they move up into that corner. 
And in the '90s, we have the terrible HIV epidemic that takes down the life expectancy of the African countries. 
And the rest of them all move up into the corner, where we have long lives and small family, and we have a completely new world. 
(Applause) (Applause ends) Let me make a comparison directly between the United States of America and Vietnam. 
1964: America had small families and long life; Vietnam had large families and short lives. 
And this is what happens. 
The data during the war indicate that even with all the death, there was an improvement of life expectancy. 
By the end of the year, family planning started in Vietnam, and they went for smaller families. 
And the United States up there is getting longer life, keeping family size. 
And in the '80s now, they give up Communist planning and they go for market economy, and it moves faster even than social life. 
And today, we have in Vietnam the same life expectancy and the same family size here in Vietnam, 2003, as in United States, 1974, by the end of the war. 
I think we all, if we don't look at the data, we underestimate the tremendous change in Asia, which was in social change before we saw the economic change. 
So let's move over to another way here in which we could display the distribution in the world of income. 
One dollar, 10 dollars or 100 dollars per day. 
There's no gap between rich and poor any longer. This is a myth. 
There's a little hump here. 
And if we look where the income ends up, this is 100 percent of the world's annual income. 
And the richest 20 percent, they take out of that about 74 percent. 
And the poorest 20 percent, they take about two percent. 
And this shows that the concept of developing countries is extremely doubtful. 
We think about aid, like these people here giving aid to these people here. 
But in the middle, we have most of the world population, and they have now 24 percent of the income. 
We heard it in other forms. 
And who are these? 
Where are the different countries? 
I can show you Africa. 
Ten percent of the world population, most in poverty. 
And they are over here on this side. Quite an overlap between Africa and OECD. 
And this is Latin America. 
It has everything on this earth, from the poorest to the richest in Latin America. 
And on top of that, we can put East Europe, we can put East Asia, and we put South Asia. 
And what did it look like if we go back in time, to about 1970? 
Then, there was more of a hump. 
And most who lived in absolute poverty were Asians. 
The problem in the world was the poverty in Asia. 
And if I now let the world move forward, you will see that while population increases, there are hundreds of millions in Asia getting out of poverty, and some others getting into poverty, and this is the pattern we have today. 
And the best projection from the World Bank is that this will happen, and we will not have a divided world. 
We'll have most people in the middle. 
Of course it's a logarithmic scale here, but our concept of economy is growth with percent. 
We look upon it as a possibility of percentile increase. 
If I change this and take GDP per capita instead of family income, and I turn these individual data into regional data of gross domestic product, and I take the regions down here, the size of the bubble is still the population. 
And you have the OECD there, and you have sub-Saharan Africa there, and we take off the Arab states there, coming both from Africa and from Asia, and we put them separately, and we can expand this axis, and I can give it a new dimension here, by adding the social values there, child survival. 
Now I have money on that axis, and I have the possibility of children to survive there. 
In some countries, 99.7% of children survive to five years of age; others, only 70. 
And here, it seems, there is a gap between OECD, Latin America, East Europe, East Asia, Arab states, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. 
The linearity is very strong between child survival and money. 
But let me split sub-Saharan Africa. 
I can go here, and I can split sub-Saharan Africa into its countries. 
And when it bursts, the size of each country bubble is the size of the population. 
Sierra Leone down there, Mauritius is up there. 
Mauritius was the first country to get away with trade barriers, and they could sell their sugar, they could sell their textiles, on equal terms as the people in Europe and North America. 
There's a huge difference [within] Africa. 
And Ghana is here in the middle. 
Here in Uganda, development aid. 
Here, time to invest; there, you can go for a holiday. 
There's tremendous variation within Africa, which we very often make that it's equal everything. 
I can split South Asia here. India's the big bubble in the middle. 
But there's a huge difference between Afghanistan and Sri Lanka. 
I can split Arab states. How are they? 
Same climate, same culture, same religion -- huge difference. 
Even between neighbors -- Yemen, civil war; United Arab Emirates, money, which was quite equally and well-used. 
Not as the myth is. 
And that includes all the children of the foreign workers who are in the country. 
There is an uncertainty margin, but we can see the difference here: Cambodia, Singapore. 
The differences are much bigger than the weakness of the data. 
East Europe: Soviet economy for a long time, but they come out after 10 years very, very differently. 
And there is Latin America. 
Today, we don't have to go to Cuba to find a healthy country in Latin America. 
Here, we have high-income countries in the OECD. 
And we get the whole pattern here of the world, which is more or less like this. 
And if we look at it, how the world looks, in 1960, it starts to move. 
This is Mao Zedong. He brought health to China. 
And then he died. 
And we have seen how countries move in different directions like this, so it's sort of difficult to get an example country which shows the pattern of the world. 
But I would like to bring you back to about here, at 1960. 
I would like to compare South Korea, which is this one, with Brazil, which is this one. 
And I would like to compare Uganda, which is there. 
I can run it forward, like this. 
And you can see how South Korea is making a very, very fast advancement, whereas Brazil is much slower. 
And if we move back again, here, and we put trails on them, like this, you can see again that the speed of development is very, very different, and the countries are moving more or less at the same rate as money and health, but it seems you can move much faster if you are healthy first than if you are wealthy first. 
And to show that, you can put on the way of United Arab Emirates. 
They came from here, a mineral country. 
They cached all the oil; they got all the money; but health cannot be bought at the supermarket. 
You have to train health staff. You have to educate the population. 
And Sheikh Zayed did that in a fairly good way. 
In spite of falling oil prices, he brought this country up here. 
So we've got a much more mainstream appearance of the world, where all countries tend to use their money better than they used it in the past. 
Now, this is, more or less, if you look at the average data of the countries -- they are like this. 
That's dangerous, to use average data, because there is such a lot of difference within countries. 
So if I go and look here, we can see that Uganda today is where South Korea was in 1960. 
If I split Uganda, there's quite a difference within Uganda. 
The richest 20 percent of Ugandans are there. 
The poorest are down there. 
And if I go down and look at Niger, where there was such a terrible famine [recently], it's like this. 
The 20 percent poorest of Niger is out here, and the 20 percent richest of South Africa is there, and yet we tend to discuss what solutions there should be in Africa. 
Everything in this world exists in Africa. 
And you can't discuss universal access to HIV [treatment] for that quintile up here with the same strategy as down here. 
The improvement of the world must be highly contextualized, and it's not relevant to have it on a regional level. 
We must be much more detailed. 
And even more, policy makers and the corporate sectors would like to see how the world is changing. 
Now, why doesn't this take place? 
Why are we not using the data we have? 
We have data in the United Nations, in the national statistical agencies and in universities and other nongovernmental organizations. 
Because the data is hidden down in the databases. 
And the public is there, and the internet is there, but we have still not used it effectively. 
All that information we saw changing in the world does not include publicly funded statistics. 
There are some web pages like this, you know, but they take some nourishment down from the databases, but people put prices on them, stupid passwords and boring statistics. 
(Laughter) And this won't work. 
(Applause) So what is needed? We have the databases. 
It's not a new database that you need. 
We have wonderful design tools and more and more are added up here. 
So we started a nonprofit venture linking data to design, we called "Gapminder," from the London Underground, where they warn you, "Mind the gap." 
So we thought Gapminder was appropriate. 
And it wasn't that difficult. 
You can take a data set and put it there. 
We are liberating UN data, some few UN organization. 
Some countries accept that their databases can go out on the world. 
But what we really need is, of course, a search function, a search function where we can copy the data up to a searchable format and get it out in the world. 
And what do we hear when we go around? 
Everyone says, "It's impossible. This can't be done. 
Our information is so peculiar in detail, so that cannot be searched as others can be searched. 
We cannot give the data free to the students, free to the entrepreneurs of the world." 
But this is what we would like to see, isn't it? 
And we would like flowers to grow out on the net. 
One of the crucial points is to make them searchable, and then people can use the different design tools to animate it there. 
And I have pretty good news for you. 
I have good news that the [current], new head of UN statistics doesn't say it's impossible. 
He only says, "We can't do it." 
(Laughter) And that's a quite clever guy, huh? 
(Laughter) So we can see a lot happening in data in the coming years. 
We will be able to look at income distributions in completely new ways. 
This is the income distribution of China, 1970. 
This is the income distribution of the United States, 1970. 
Almost no overlap. 
And what has happened? 
What has happened is this: that China is growing, it's not so equal any longer, and it's appearing here, overlooking the United States, almost like a ghost, isn't it? 
(Laughter) It's pretty scary. 
We need really to see it. 
And instead of looking at this, I would like to end up by showing the internet users per 1,000. 
In this software, we access about 500 variables from all the countries quite easily. 
It takes some time to change for this, but on the axes, you can quite easily get any variable you would like to have. 
And the thing would be to get up the databases free, to get them searchable, and with a second click, to get them into the graphic formats, where you can instantly understand them. 
Now, statisticians don't like it, because they say that this will not show the reality; we have to have statistical, analytical methods. 
I end now with the world. 
The number of internet users are going up like this. 
This is the GDP per capita. 
And it's a new technology coming in, but then amazingly, how well it fits to the economy of the countries. 
That's why the $100 computer will be so important. 
It's as if the world is flattening off, isn't it? 
These countries are lifting more than the economy, and it will be very interesting to follow this over the year, as I would like you to be able to do with all the publicly funded data. 
(Applause) 

My name is Stuart Duncan, but I'm actually probably better known online as "AutismFather." 
That's me on the internet. 
I know the resemblance is uncanny. 
(Laughter) But I'm going to talk a little bit today about Minecraft. 
That's my Minecraft character. 
If you don't know the game very well, don't worry too much about it. 
It's just the medium that I used at the time to fill a need. 
And what I want to talk about applies to pretty much every situation. 
So about four years ago, I started a Minecraft server for children with autism and their families, and I called it "Autcraft." 
And since then, we've been in the news all around the world, on television and radio and magazines. 
Buzzfeed called us "one of the best places on the internet." 
We're also the subject of an award-winning research paper called "Appropriating Minecraft as an Assistive Technology for Youth with Autism." 
It's a bit of a mouthful. 
But you get the idea, I think. 
So I want to talk a little bit about that research paper and what it's about, but first I have to give you a little bit of history on how the server came to be. 
Back in 2013, everybody was playing Minecraft, kids and adults alike, with and without autism, of course. 
But it was the big thing. 
But I saw parents on social media reaching out to other parents, asking if their autistic children could play together. 
And the reason is that when they tried to play on public servers, they kept running into bullies and trolls. 
When you have autism, you behave a little differently sometimes, sometimes a lot differently. 
And we all know a little bit of difference is all you really need for a bully to make you their next target. 
So these terrible, terrible people online, they would destroy everything that they tried to make, they would steal all their stuff, and they would kill them over and over again, making the game virtually unplayable. 
But the worst part, the part that really hurt the most, was what these bullies would say to these kids. 
They'd call them rejects and defects and retards. 
And they would tell these kids, some as young as six years old, that society doesn't want them, and their own parents never wanted a broken child, so they should just kill themselves. 
And of course, these kids, you understand, they would sign off from these servers angry and hurt. 
They would break their keyboards, they'd quite literally hate themselves, and their parents felt powerless to do anything. 
So I decided I had to try and help. 
I have autism, my oldest son has autism, and both my kids and I love Minecraft, so I have to do something. 
So I got myself a Minecraft server, and I spent some time, built a little village with some roads and a big welcome sign and this guy and a lodge up on a mountaintop, and tried to make it inviting. 
The idea was pretty simple. 
I had a white list, so only people that I approved could join, and I would just monitor the server as much as I could, just to make sure that nothing went wrong. 
And that was it, that was the whole promise: to keep the kids safe so they could play. 
When it was done, I went to Facebook and posted a pretty simple message to my friends list, not publicly. 
I wanted to see if there was any interest in this, and if it really could help. 
Turns out that I greatly underestimated just how much this was needed, because within 48 hours, I got 750 emails. 
I don't have that many Facebook friends. 
(Laughter) Within eight days, I had to upgrade the hosting package eight times, from the bottom package to the most expensive package they had, and now, almost four years later, I have 8,000 names on the white list from all around the world. 
But the reason I'm up here today to talk to you isn't just because I gave kids a safe place to play. 
It's what happened while they played. 
I started hearing from parents who said their children were learning to read and write by playing on the server. 
At first they spelled things by sound, like most kids do, but because they were part of a community, they saw other people spelling the same words properly and just picked it up. 
I started hearing from parents who said that their nonverbal children were starting to speak. 
They only talked about Minecraft, but they were talking. 
(Laughter) Some kids made friends at school for the first time ever. 
Some started to share, even give things to other people. 
It was amazing. 
And every single parent came to me and said it was because of Autcraft, because of what you're doing. 
But why, though? 
How could all of this be just from a video game server? 
Well, it goes back to that research paper I was talking about. 
In it, she covers some of the guidelines I used when I created the server, guidelines that I think help encourage people to be their very best. 
I hope. 
For example, communication. 
It can be tough for kids with autism. 
It could be tough for grown-ups without autism. 
But I think that kids should not be punished, they should be talked to. 
Nine times out of ten, when the kids on the server act out, it's because of something that's happened in the day at school or home. 
Maybe a pet died. 
Sometimes it's just a miscommunication between two kids. 
One doesn't say what they're about to do. 
And so we just offer to help. 
We always tell the children on the server that we're not mad, and they're not in trouble; we only want to help. 
And it shows that not only do we care, but we respect them enough to listen to their point of view. 
Respect goes a long way. 
Plus, it shows them that they have everything they need to be able to resolve these problems on their own in the future and maybe even avoid them, because, you know, communication. 
On most servers, as video games are, children are rewarded, well, players are rewarded, for how well they do in a competition, right? 
The better you do, the better reward you get. 
That can be automated; the server does the work, the code is there. 
On Autcraft, we don't do that. 
We have things like "Player of the Week" and "CBAs," which is "Caught Being Awesome." 
(Laughter) We award players ranks on the servers based on the attributes they exhibit, such as the "Buddy" rank for people who are friendly towards others, and "Junior Helper" for people that are helpful towards others. 
We have "Senior Helper" for the adults. 
But they're obvious, right? 
Like, people know what to expect and how to earn these things because of how they're named. 
As soon as somebody signs onto the server, they know that they're going to be rewarded for who they are and not what they can do. 
Our top award, the AutismFather Sword, which is named after me because I'm the founder, is a very powerful sword that you can't get in the game any other way than to show that you completely put the community above yourself, and that compassion and kindness is at the core of who you are. 
We've given away quite a few of those swords, actually. 
I figure, if we're watching the server to make sure nothing bad happens, we should also watch for the good things that happen and reward people for them. 
We're always trying to show all the players that everybody is considered to be equal, even me. 
But we know we can't treat people equally to do that. 
Some of the players get angry very easily. 
Some of them have additional struggles on top of autism, such as OCD or Tourette's. 
So, I have this knack of remembering all of the players. 
I remember their first day, the conversations we've had, things we've talked about, things they've built. 
So when somebody comes to me with a problem, I handle that situation differently than I would with any other player, based on what I know about them. 
For the other admins and helpers, we document everything so that, whether it's good or bad or a concerning conversation, it's there, so everybody is aware. 
I want to give you one example of this one player. 
He was with us for a little while, but at some point he started spamming dashes in the chat, like a big long line of dashes all the way across the screen. 
A little while later, he'd do it again. 
The other players asked him not to do that, and he'd say, "OK." 
And then he'd do it again. 
It started to frustrate the other players. 
They asked me to mute him or to punish him for breaking the rules, but I knew there had to be something more to it. 
So I went to his aunt, who is the contact that I have for him. 
She explained that he had gone blind in one eye and was losing his vision in the other. 
So what he was doing was splitting up the chat into easier-to-see blocks of text, which is pretty smart. 
So that very same night, I talked to a friend of mine who writes code and we created a brand-new plug-in for the server that makes it so that any player on the server, including him, of course, could just enter a command and instantly have every single line separated by dashes. 
Plus, they can make it asterisks or blank lines or anything they want -- whatever works best for them. 
We even went a little bit extra and made it so it highlights your name, so that it's easier to see if somebody mentions you. 
It's just one example of how doing a little bit extra, a small modification, still helps everybody be on equal footing, even though you did a little extra just for that one player. 
The big one is to be not afraid. 
They are free to just be themselves, and it's because we support and encourage and celebrate each other. 
We all know what it feels like to be the outcast and to be hated simply for existing, and so when we're together on the server, we're not afraid anymore. 
For the first two years or so on the server, I talked to two children per week on average that were suicidal. 
But they came to me because I'm the one that made them feel safe. 
They felt like I was the only person in the world they could talk to. 
So I guess my message is: whether you have a charity or some other organization, or you're a teacher or a therapist or you're a parent who is just doing your very best, or you're an autistic, like I am, no matter who you are, you absolutely must help these children strip away those fears before you do anything else, because anything else is going to feel forced unless they're not afraid. 
It's why positive reinforcement will always do better than any form of punishment. 
They want to learn when they feel safe and happy. 
It just happens naturally; they don't even try to learn. 
These are words from the kids on the server to describe the server. 
The one thing I would hope that you could take away is that no matter what somebody else is going through in life right now, whether they're being bullied at school or at home, if they're questioning their sexuality or even their gender, which happens a lot in the autism community, if they're feeling alone or even suicidal, you have to live your life in such a way that that person feels like they can come to and tell you. 
They have to feel perfectly safe in talking to you about it. 
If you want to see a group of autistic children -- kids who society wrongly thinks are supposed to be antisocial and lacking in empathy -- if you want to see them come together and build the most compassionate and friendly and generous community you've ever seen, the kind of place that people would write about as one of the best places on the internet, they'll do that. 
I've seen it. 
I'm there every day. 
But they have some huge obstacles that they have to overcome to do that, and it would be really helpful to have somebody there who could help to show them that the only thing they really have to fear is self-doubt. 
So I guess I'm asking you to please be that person for them, because to them, those kids -- it means everything. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

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

Everyone, please think of your biggest personal goal. 
For real -- you can take a second. You've got to feel this to learn it. 
Take a few seconds and think of your personal biggest goal, okay? 
Imagine deciding right now that you're going to do it. 
Imagine telling someone that you meet today what you're going to do. 
Imagine their congratulations, and their high image of you. 
Doesn't it feel good to say it out loud? 
Don't you feel one step closer already, like it's already becoming part of your identity? 
Well, bad news: you should have kept your mouth shut, because that good feeling now will make you less likely to do it. 
The repeated psychology tests have proven that telling someone your goal makes it less likely to happen. 
Any time you have a goal, there are some steps that need to be done, some work that needs to be done in order to achieve it. 
Ideally you would not be satisfied until you'd actually done the work. 
But when you tell someone your goal and they acknowledge it, psychologists have found that it's called a "social reality." 
The mind is kind of tricked into feeling that it's already done. 
And then because you've felt that satisfaction, you're less motivated to do the actual hard work necessary. 
(Laughter) So this goes against conventional wisdom that we should tell our friends our goals, right? 
So they hold us to it. 
So, let's look at the proof. 
1926: Kurt Lewin, founder of social psychology, called this "substitution." 
1933: Wera Mahler found when it was acknowledged by others, it felt real in the mind. 
1982, Peter Gollwitzer wrote a whole book about this, and in 2009, he did some new tests that were published. 
It goes like this: 163 people across four separate tests. 
Everyone wrote down their personal goal. 
Then half of them announced their commitment to this goal to the room, and half didn't. 
Then everyone was given 45 minutes of work that would directly lead them towards their goal, but they were told that they could stop at any time. 
Now, those who kept their mouths shut worked the entire 45 minutes on average, and when asked afterward, said that they felt that they had a long way to go still to achieve their goal. 
But those who had announced it quit after only 33 minutes, on average, and when asked afterward, said that they felt much closer to achieving their goal. 
So if this is true, what can we do? 
Well, you could resist the temptation to announce your goal. 
You can delay the gratification that the social acknowledgment brings, and you can understand that your mind mistakes the talking for the doing. 
But if you do need to talk about something, you can state it in a way that gives you no satisfaction, such as, "I really want to run this marathon, so I need to train five times a week and kick my ass if I don't, okay?" 
So audience, next time you're tempted to tell someone your goal, what will you say? 
(Silence) Exactly! Well done. 
(Laughter) (Applause) 

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

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

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

(Sikh Prayer) Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh. 
There is a moment on the birthing table that feels like dying. 
The body in labor stretches to form an impossible circle. 
The contractions are less than a minute apart. 
Wave after wave, there is barely time to breathe. 
The medical term: "transition," because "feels like dying" is not scientific enough. 
(Laughter) I checked. 
During my transition, my husband was pressing down on my sacrum to keep my body from breaking. 
My father was waiting behind the hospital curtain ... 
more like hiding. 
But my mother was at my side. 
The midwife said she could see the baby's head, but all I could feel was a ring of fire. 
I turned to my mother and said, "I can't," but she was already pouring my grandfather's prayer in my ear. 
(Sikh Prayer) "Tati Vao Na Lagi, Par Brahm Sarnai." 
"The hot winds cannot touch you." 
"You are brave," she said. 
"You are brave." 
And suddenly I saw my grandmother standing behind my mother. 
And her mother behind her. 
And her mother behind her. 
A long line of women who had pushed through the fire before me. 
I took a breath; I pushed; my son was born. 
As I held him in my arms, shaking and sobbing from the rush of oxytocin that flooded my body, my mother was already preparing to feed me. 
Nursing her baby as I nursed mine. 
My mother had never stopped laboring for me, from my birth to my son's birth. 
She already knew what I was just beginning to name. 
That love is more than a rush of feeling that happens to us if we're lucky. 
Love is sweet labor. 
Fierce. 
Bloody. 
Imperfect. 
Life-giving. 
A choice we make over and over again. 
I am an American civil rights activist who has labored with communities of color since September 11, fighting unjust policies by the state and acts of hate in the street. 
And in our most painful moments, in the face of the fires of injustice, I have seen labors of love deliver us. 
My life on the frontlines of fighting hate in America has been a study in what I've come to call revolutionary love. 
Revolutionary love is the choice to enter into labor for others who do not look like us, for our opponents who hurt us and for ourselves. 
In this era of enormous rage, when the fires are burning all around us, I believe that revolutionary love is the call of our times. 
Now, if you cringe when people say, "Love is the answer ..." 
I do, too. 
(Laughter) I am a lawyer. 
(Laughter) So let me show you how I came to see love as a force for social justice through three lessons. 
My first encounter with hate was in the schoolyard. 
I was a little girl growing up in California, where my family has lived and farmed for a century. 
When I was told that I would go to hell because I was not Christian, called a "black dog" because I was not white, I ran to my grandfather's arms. 
Papa Ji dried my tears -- gave me the words of Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh faith. 
"I see no stranger," said Nanak. 
"I see no enemy." 
My grandfather taught me that I could choose to see all the faces I meet and wonder about them. 
And if I wonder about them, then I will listen to their stories even when it's hard. 
I will refuse to hate them even when they hate me. 
I will even vow to protect them when they are in harm's way. 
That's what it means to be a Sikh: S-i-k-h. 
To walk the path of a warrior saint. 
He told me the story of the first Sikh woman warrior, Mai Bhago. 
The story goes there were 40 soldiers who abandoned their post during a great battle against an empire. 
They returned to a village, and this village woman turned to them and said, "You will not abandon the fight. 
You will return to the fire, and I will lead you." 
She donned a turban. 
And with sword in her hand and fire in her eyes, she led them where no one else would. 
She became the one she was waiting for. 
"Don't abandon your posts, my dear." 
My grandfather saw me as a warrior. 
I was a little girl in two long braids, but I promised. 
Fast-forward, I'm 20 years old, watching the Twin Towers fall, the horror stuck in my throat, and then a face flashes on the screen: a brown man with a turban and beard, and I realize that our nation's new enemy looks like my grandfather. 
And these turbans meant to represent our commitment to serve cast us as terrorists. 
And Sikhs became targets of hate, alongside our Muslim brothers and sisters. 
The first person killed in a hate crime after September 11 was a Sikh man, standing in front of his gas station in Arizona. 
Balbir Singh Sodhi was a family friend I called "uncle," murdered by a man who called himself "patriot." 
He is the first of many to have been killed, but his story -- our stories barely made the evening news. 
I didn't know what to do, but I had a camera, I faced the fire. 
I went to his widow, Joginder Kaur. 
I wept with her, and I asked her, "What would you like to tell the people of America?" 
I was expecting blame. 
But she looked at me and said, "Tell them, 'Thank you.' 3,000 Americans came to my husband's memorial. 
They did not know me, but they wept with me. 
Tell them, 'Thank you.'" Thousands of people showed up, because unlike national news, the local media told Balbir Uncle's story. 
Stories can create the wonder that turns strangers into sisters and brothers. 
This was my first lesson in revolutionary love -- that stories can help us see no stranger. 
And so ... 
my camera became my sword. 
My law degree became my shield. 
(Laughter) I didn't expect that. 
And we became part of a generation of advocates working with communities facing their own fires. 
I worked inside of supermax prisons, on the shores of Guantanamo, at the sites of mass shootings when the blood was still fresh on the ground. 
And every time, for 15 years, with every film, with every lawsuit, with every campaign, I thought we were making the nation safer for the next generation. 
And then my son was born. 
In a time ... 
when hate crimes against our communities are at the highest they have been since 9/11. 
When right-wing nationalist movements are on the rise around the globe and have captured the presidency of the United States. 
When white supremacists march in our streets, torches high, hoods off. 
And I have to reckon with the fact that my son is growing up in a country more dangerous for him than the one I was given. 
And there will be moments when I cannot protect him when he is seen as a terrorist ... 
just as black people in America are still seen as criminal. 
Brown people, illegal. 
Queer and trans people, immoral. 
Indigenous people, savage. 
Women and girls as property. 
And when they fail to see our bodies as some mother's child, it becomes easier to ban us, detain us, deport us, imprison us, sacrifice us for the illusion of security. 
(Applause) I wanted to abandon my post. 
But I made a promise, so I returned to the gas station where Balbir Singh Sodhi was killed 15 years to the day. 
I set down a candle in the spot where he bled to death. 
His brother, Rana, turned to me and said, "Nothing has changed." 
And I asked, "Who have we not yet tried to love?" 
We decided to call the murderer in prison. 
The phone rings. 
My heart is beating in my ears. 
I hear the voice of Frank Roque, a man who once said ... 
"I'm going to go out and shoot some towel heads. 
We should kill their children, too." 
And every emotional impulse in me says, "I can't." 
It becomes an act of will to wonder. 
"Why?" I ask. 
"Why did you agree to speak with us?" 
Frank says, "I'm sorry for what happened, but I'm also sorry for all the people killed on 9/11." 
He fails to take responsibility. 
I become angry to protect Rana, but Rana is still wondering about Frank -- listening -- responds. 
"Frank, this is the first time I'm hearing you say that you feel sorry." 
And Frank -- Frank says, "Yes. 
I am sorry for what I did to your brother. 
One day when I go to heaven to be judged by God, I will ask to see your brother. 
And I will hug him. 
And I will ask him for forgiveness." 
And Rana says ... 
"We already forgave you." 
Forgiveness is not forgetting. 
Forgiveness is freedom from hate. 
Because when we are free from hate, we see the ones who hurt us not as monsters, but as people who themselves are wounded, who themselves feel threatened, who don't know what else to do with their insecurity but to hurt us, to pull the trigger, or cast the vote, or pass the policy aimed at us. 
But if some of us begin to wonder about them, listen even to their stories, we learn that participation in oppression comes at a cost. 
It cuts them off from their own capacity to love. 
This was my second lesson in revolutionary love. 
We love our opponents when we tend the wound in them. 
Tending to the wound is not healing them -- only they can do that. 
Just tending to it allows us to see our opponents: the terrorist, the fanatic, the demagogue. 
They've been radicalized by cultures and policies that we together can change. 
I looked back on all of our campaigns, and I realized that any time we fought bad actors, we didn't change very much. 
But when we chose to wield our swords and shields to battle bad systems, that's when we saw change. 
I have worked on campaigns that released hundreds of people out of solitary confinement, reformed a corrupt police department, changed federal hate crimes policy. 
The choice to love our opponents is moral and pragmatic, and it opens up the previously unimaginable possibility of reconciliation. 
But remember ... 
it took 15 years to make that phone call. 
I had to tend to my own rage and grief first. 
Loving our opponents requires us to love ourselves. 
Gandhi, King, Mandela -- they taught a lot about how to love others and opponents. 
They didn't talk a lot about loving ourselves. 
This is a feminist intervention. 
(Applause) Yes. 
(Applause) Because for too long have women and women of color been told to suppress their rage, suppress their grief in the name of love and forgiveness. 
But when we suppress our rage, that's when it hardens into hate directed outward, but usually directed inward. 
But mothering has taught me that all of our emotions are necessary. 
Joy is the gift of love. 
Grief is the price of love. 
Anger is the force that protects it. 
This was my third lesson in revolutionary love. 
We love ourselves when we breathe through the fire of pain and refuse to let it harden into hate. 
That's why I believe that love must be practiced in all three directions to be revolutionary. 
Loving just ourselves feels good, but it's narcissism. 
(Laughter) Loving only our opponents is self-loathing. 
Loving only others is ineffective. 
This is where a lot of our movements live right now. 
We need to practice all three forms of love. 
And so, how do we practice it? 
Ready? 
Number one ... 
in order to love others, see no stranger. 
We can train our eyes to look upon strangers on the street, on the subway, on the screen, and say in our minds, "Brother, sister, aunt, uncle." 
And when we say this, what we are saying is, "You are a part of me I do not yet know. 
I choose to wonder about you. 
I will listen for your stories and pick up a sword when you are in harm's way." 
And so, number two: in order to love our opponents, tend the wound. 
Can you see the wound in the ones who hurt you? 
Can you wonder even about them? 
And if this question sends panic through your body, then your most revolutionary act is to wonder, listen and respond to your own needs. 
Number three: in order to love ourselves, breathe and push. 
When we are pushing into the fires in our bodies or the fires in the world, we need to be breathing together in order to be pushing together. 
How are you breathing each day? 
Who are you breathing with? 
Because ... 
when executive orders and news of violence hits our bodies hard, sometimes less than a minute apart, it feels like dying. 
In those moments, my son places his hand on my cheek and says, "Dance time, mommy?" 
And we dance. 
In the darkness, we breathe and we dance. 
Our family becomes a pocket of revolutionary love. 
Our joy is an act of moral resistance. 
How are you protecting your joy each day? 
Because in joy we see even darkness with new eyes. 
And so the mother in me asks, what if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb? 
What if our future is not dead, but still waiting to be born? 
What if this is our great transition? 
Remember the wisdom of the midwife. 
"Breathe," she says. 
And then -- "push." 
Because if we don't push, we will die. 
If we don't breathe, we will die. 
Revolutionary love requires us to breathe and push through the fire with a warrior's heart and a saint's eyes so that one day ... 
one day you will see my son as your own and protect him when I am not there. 
You will tend to the wound in the ones who want to hurt him. 
You will teach him how to love himself because you love yourself. 
You will whisper in his ear, as I whisper in yours, "You are brave." 
You are brave. 
Thank you. 
(Applause) (Sikh Prayer) Waheguru Ji Ka Khalsa, Waheguru Ji Ki Fateh. 
(Applause) (Cheering) (Applause) 

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

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

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

Automation anxiety has been spreading lately, a fear that in the future, many jobs will be performed by machines rather than human beings, given the remarkable advances that are unfolding in artificial intelligence and robotics. 
What's clear is that there will be significant change. 
What's less clear is what that change will look like. 
My research suggests that the future is both troubling and exciting. 
The threat of technological unemployment is real, and yet it's a good problem to have. 
And to explain how I came to that conclusion, I want to confront three myths that I think are currently obscuring our vision of this automated future. 
A picture that we see on our television screens, in books, in films, in everyday commentary is one where an army of robots descends on the workplace with one goal in mind: to displace human beings from their work. 
And I call this the Terminator myth. 
Yes, machines displace human beings from particular tasks, but they don't just substitute for human beings. 
They also complement them in other tasks, making that work more valuable and more important. 
Sometimes they complement human beings directly, making them more productive or more efficient at a particular task. 
So a taxi driver can use a satnav system to navigate on unfamiliar roads. 
An architect can use computer-assisted design software to design bigger, more complicated buildings. 
But technological progress doesn't just complement human beings directly. 
It also complements them indirectly, and it does this in two ways. 
The first is if we think of the economy as a pie, technological progress makes the pie bigger. 
As productivity increases, incomes rise and demand grows. 
The British pie, for instance, is more than a hundred times the size it was 300 years ago. 
And so people displaced from tasks in the old pie could find tasks to do in the new pie instead. 
But technological progress doesn't just make the pie bigger. 
It also changes the ingredients in the pie. 
As time passes, people spend their income in different ways, changing how they spread it across existing goods, and developing tastes for entirely new goods, too. 
New industries are created, new tasks have to be done and that means often new roles have to be filled. 
So again, the British pie: 300 years ago, most people worked on farms, 150 years ago, in factories, and today, most people work in offices. 
And once again, people displaced from tasks in the old bit of pie could tumble into tasks in the new bit of pie instead. 
Economists call these effects complementarities, but really that's just a fancy word to capture the different way that technological progress helps human beings. 
Resolving this Terminator myth shows us that there are two forces at play: one, machine substitution that harms workers, but also these complementarities that do the opposite. 
Now the second myth, what I call the intelligence myth. 
What do the tasks of driving a car, making a medical diagnosis and identifying a bird at a fleeting glimpse have in common? 
Well, these are all tasks that until very recently, leading economists thought couldn't readily be automated. 
And yet today, all of these tasks can be automated. 
You know, all major car manufacturers have driverless car programs. 
There's countless systems out there that can diagnose medical problems. 
And there's even an app that can identify a bird at a fleeting glimpse. 
Now, this wasn't simply a case of bad luck on the part of economists. 
They were wrong, and the reason why they were wrong is very important. 
They've fallen for the intelligence myth, the belief that machines have to copy the way that human beings think and reason in order to outperform them. 
When these economists were trying to figure out what tasks machines could not do, they imagined the only way to automate a task was to sit down with a human being, get them to explain to you how it was they performed a task, and then try and capture that explanation in a set of instructions for a machine to follow. 
This view was popular in artificial intelligence at one point, too. 
I know this because Richard Susskind, who is my dad and my coauthor, wrote his doctorate in the 1980s on artificial intelligence and the law at Oxford University, and he was part of the vanguard. 
And with a professor called Phillip Capper and a legal publisher called Butterworths, they produced the world's first commercially available artificial intelligence system in the law. 
This was the home screen design. 
He assures me this was a cool screen design at the time. 
(Laughter) I've never been entirely convinced. 
He published it in the form of two floppy disks, at a time where floppy disks genuinely were floppy, and his approach was the same as the economists': sit down with a lawyer, get her to explain to you how it was she solved a legal problem, and then try and capture that explanation in a set of rules for a machine to follow. 
In economics, if human beings could explain themselves in this way, the tasks are called routine, and they could be automated. 
But if human beings can't explain themselves, the tasks are called non-routine, and they're thought to be out reach. 
Today, that routine-nonroutine distinction is widespread. 
Think how often you hear people say to you machines can only perform tasks that are predictable or repetitive, rules-based or well-defined. 
Those are all just different words for routine. 
And go back to those three cases that I mentioned at the start. 
Those are all classic cases of nonroutine tasks. 
Ask a doctor, for instance, how she makes a medical diagnosis, and she might be able to give you a few rules of thumb, but ultimately she'd struggle. 
She'd say it requires things like creativity and judgment and intuition. 
And these things are very difficult to articulate, and so it was thought these tasks would be very hard to automate. 
If a human being can't explain themselves, where on earth do we begin in writing a set of instructions for a machine to follow? 
Thirty years ago, this view was right, but today it's looking shaky, and in the future it's simply going to be wrong. 
Advances in processing power, in data storage capability and in algorithm design mean that this routine-nonroutine distinction is diminishingly useful. 
To see this, go back to the case of making a medical diagnosis. 
Earlier in the year, a team of researchers at Stanford announced they'd developed a system which can tell you whether or not a freckle is cancerous as accurately as leading dermatologists. 
How does it work? 
It's not trying to copy the judgment or the intuition of a doctor. 
It knows or understands nothing about medicine at all. 
Instead, it's running a pattern recognition algorithm through 129,450 past cases, hunting for similarities between those cases and the particular lesion in question. 
It's performing these tasks in an unhuman way, based on the analysis of more possible cases than any doctor could hope to review in their lifetime. 
It didn't matter that that human being, that doctor, couldn't explain how she'd performed the task. 
Now, there are those who dwell upon that the fact that these machines aren't built in our image. 
As an example, take IBM's Watson, the supercomputer that went on the US quiz show "Jeopardy!" in 2011, and it beat the two human champions at "Jeopardy!" 
The day after it won, The Wall Street Journal ran a piece by the philosopher John Searle with the title "Watson Doesn't Know It Won on 'Jeopardy!'" Right, and it's brilliant, and it's true. 
You know, Watson didn't let out a cry of excitement. 
It didn't call up its parents to say what a good job it had done. 
It didn't go down to the pub for a drink. 
This system wasn't trying to copy the way that those human contestants played, but it didn't matter. 
It still outperformed them. 
Resolving the intelligence myth shows us that our limited understanding about human intelligence, about how we think and reason, is far less of a constraint on automation than it was in the past. 
What's more, as we've seen, when these machines perform tasks differently to human beings, there's no reason to think that what human beings are currently capable of doing represents any sort of summit in what these machines might be capable of doing in the future. 
Now the third myth, what I call the superiority myth. 
It's often said that those who forget about the helpful side of technological progress, those complementarities from before, are committing something known as the lump of labor fallacy. 
Now, the problem is the lump of labor fallacy is itself a fallacy, and I call this the lump of labor fallacy fallacy, or LOLFF, for short. 
Let me explain. 
The lump of labor fallacy is a very old idea. 
It was a British economist, David Schloss, who gave it this name in 1892. 
He was puzzled to come across a dock worker who had begun to use a machine to make washers, the small metal discs that fasten on the end of screws. 
And this dock worker felt guilty for being more productive. 
Now, most of the time, we expect the opposite, that people feel guilty for being unproductive, you know, a little too much time on Facebook or Twitter at work. 
But this worker felt guilty for being more productive, and asked why, he said, "I know I'm doing wrong. 
I'm taking away the work of another man." 
In his mind, there was some fixed lump of work to be divided up between him and his pals, so that if he used this machine to do more, there'd be less left for his pals to do. 
Schloss saw the mistake. 
The lump of work wasn't fixed. 
As this worker used the machine and became more productive, the price of washers would fall, demand for washers would rise, more washers would have to be made, and there'd be more work for his pals to do. 
The lump of work would get bigger. 
Schloss called this "the lump of labor fallacy." 
And today you hear people talk about the lump of labor fallacy to think about the future of all types of work. 
There's no fixed lump of work out there to be divided up between people and machines. 
Yes, machines substitute for human beings, making the original lump of work smaller, but they also complement human beings, and the lump of work gets bigger and changes. 
But LOLFF. 
Here's the mistake: it's right to think that technological progress makes the lump of work to be done bigger. 
Some tasks become more valuable. New tasks have to be done. 
But it's wrong to think that necessarily, human beings will be best placed to perform those tasks. 
And this is the superiority myth. 
Yes, the lump of work might get bigger and change, but as machines become more capable, it's likely that they'll take on the extra lump of work themselves. 
Technological progress, rather than complement human beings, complements machines instead. 
To see this, go back to the task of driving a car. 
Today, satnav systems directly complement human beings. 
They make some human beings better drivers. 
But in the future, software is going to displace human beings from the driving seat, and these satnav systems, rather than complement human beings, will simply make these driverless cars more efficient, helping the machines instead. 
Or go to those indirect complementarities that I mentioned as well. 
The economic pie may get larger, but as machines become more capable, it's possible that any new demand will fall on goods that machines, rather than human beings, are best placed to produce. 
The economic pie may change, but as machines become more capable, it's possible that they'll be best placed to do the new tasks that have to be done. 
In short, demand for tasks isn't demand for human labor. 
Human beings only stand to benefit if they retain the upper hand in all these complemented tasks, but as machines become more capable, that becomes less likely. 
So what do these three myths tell us then? 
Well, resolving the Terminator myth shows us that the future of work depends upon this balance between two forces: one, machine substitution that harms workers but also those complementarities that do the opposite. 
And until now, this balance has fallen in favor of human beings. 
But resolving the intelligence myth shows us that that first force, machine substitution, is gathering strength. 
Machines, of course, can't do everything, but they can do far more, encroaching ever deeper into the realm of tasks performed by human beings. 
What's more, there's no reason to think that what human beings are currently capable of represents any sort of finishing line, that machines are going to draw to a polite stop once they're as capable as us. 
Now, none of this matters so long as those helpful winds of complementarity blow firmly enough, but resolving the superiority myth shows us that that process of task encroachment not only strengthens the force of machine substitution, but it wears down those helpful complementarities too. 
Bring these three myths together and I think we can capture a glimpse of that troubling future. 
Machines continue to become more capable, encroaching ever deeper on tasks performed by human beings, strengthening the force of machine substitution, weakening the force of machine complementarity. 
And at some point, that balance falls in favor of machines rather than human beings. 
This is the path we're currently on. 
I say "path" deliberately, because I don't think we're there yet, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that this is our direction of travel. 
That's the troubling part. 
Let me say now why I think actually this is a good problem to have. 
For most of human history, one economic problem has dominated: how to make the economic pie large enough for everyone to live on. 
Go back to the turn of the first century AD, and if you took the global economic pie and divided it up into equal slices for everyone in the world, everyone would get a few hundred dollars. 
Almost everyone lived on or around the poverty line. 
And if you roll forward a thousand years, roughly the same is true. 
But in the last few hundred years, economic growth has taken off. 
Those economic pies have exploded in size. 
Global GDP per head, the value of those individual slices of the pie today, they're about 10,150 dollars. 
If economic growth continues at two percent, our children will be twice as rich as us. 
If it continues at a more measly one percent, our grandchildren will be twice as rich as us. 
By and large, we've solved that traditional economic problem. 
Now, technological unemployment, if it does happen, in a strange way will be a symptom of that success, will have solved one problem -- how to make the pie bigger -- but replaced it with another -- how to make sure that everyone gets a slice. 
As other economists have noted, solving this problem won't be easy. 
Today, for most people, their job is their seat at the economic dinner table, and in a world with less work or even without work, it won't be clear how they get their slice. 
There's a great deal of discussion, for instance, about various forms of universal basic income as one possible approach, and there's trials underway in the United States and in Finland and in Kenya. 
And this is the collective challenge that's right in front of us, to figure out how this material prosperity generated by our economic system can be enjoyed by everyone in a world in which our traditional mechanism for slicing up the pie, the work that people do, withers away and perhaps disappears. 
Solving this problem is going to require us to think in very different ways. 
There's going to be a lot of disagreement about what ought to be done, but it's important to remember that this is a far better problem to have than the one that haunted our ancestors for centuries: how to make that pie big enough in the first place. 
Thank you very much. 
(Applause) 

(Music) Sun shining up above down here it's 10 below I'm moving on to a place now where the streets are paved with gold There'll be two trains running -- running side by side Some trains are going out Two trains running -- running side by side I'm going to catch that fast express train to my reward in the sky Many rooms in my father's house now -- Oh Lord there's one for you and me Many rooms in my father's house now -- Oh there's one for you and me No blues and no trouble Oh my Lord sweet Jesus victory There's one glory from the moon -- Lord another, oh another from the sun Oh one glory from the moon and another from the sun Behind I'll leave this earthly body when my Lord king Jesus comes Thank you very much.