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+AimeeMullins_2009P-0001782-0002881 i'd like to share with you a discovery that i made a few months ago while writing an article for italian wired i always keep my thesaurus handy whenever i'm writing anything but
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0002881-0004026 i'd already finished editing the piece and i realized that i had never once in my life looked up the word disabled to see what i'd find let me read you the entry
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0004141-0004834 disabled adjective crippled helpless useless wrecked
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0004933-0005639 stalled maimed wounded mangled lame mutilated
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0005639-0006581 rundown worn out weakened impotent castrated paralyzed handicapped
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0006581-0007519 senile decrepit laid up done up done for done in cracked up counted out
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0007622-0008535 see also hurt useless and weak antonyms healthy strong capable
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0008632-0009505 i was reading this list out loud to a friend and at first was laughing it was so ludicrous but i just gotten past mangled
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0009505-0010405 and my voice broke and i had to stop and collect myself from the emotional shock
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0010430-0010973 uh and and impact that the assault from these words unleashed
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0010973-0012123 you know hum of course this is my raggedy old thesaurus i'm thinking this must be an ancient print date right but in fact the print date was the early nineteen eighties
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0012123-0013544 when i would have been starting primary school and forming an understanding of myself outside the family unit and as related to the other kids and the world around me and needless to say thank god i wasn't using a thesaurus back then
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0013544-0014951 i mean from this entry it would seem that i was born into a world that perceived someone like me to have nothing positive whatsoever going for them when in fact today
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0014951-0015866 i'm celebrated for uh the opportunities and adventures my life has procured so uh i immediately
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0015866-0016844 went to look up the two thousand and nine uh online edition expecting to find a revision worth noting here's the updated version of this entry
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0016844-0018066 unfortunately it's not much better i find the the last two words under near antonyms particularly unsettling whole and wholesome
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0018227-0018484 so it's not just about the words
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0018484-0019618 it's what we believe about people when we name them with these words it's about the values behind the words and how we construct those values our language affects our thinking
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0019618-0020658 and how we view the world and how we view other people in fact many ancient societies including the greeks and the romans believed that to utter a curse
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0020658-0021408 verbally was so powerful because to say the thing out loud brought it into existence
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0021558-0022537 so what reality do we want to call into existence a person who is limited or a person who's empowered
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0022596-0023219 by casually doing something as simple as naming a person a child
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0023219-0024260 we might be putting lids and casting shadows on their power wouldn't we want to open doors for them instead
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0024260-0025318 one such person who opened doors for me was my childhood doctor at the a i dupont institute in wilmington delaware his name is doctor pizzutillo
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0025318-0026172 hum it's an italian american whose name apparently was too difficult for most americans to pronounce so he went by doctor p and doctor p
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0026172-0026922 always wore really colorful bow ties and hum had the very perfect disposition to work with children
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0026922-0027863 i loved almost everything about my time spent at this hospital with the exception of my physical therapy sessions
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0027863-0028948 i had to do what seemed like innumerable repetitions of exercises with these thick elastic bands uh different colors you know
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0028948-0029689 to help build up my leg muscles and i hated these bands more than anything i hated them had names for them i hated them and
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0029689-0030481 you know i was already bargaining as a five year old child with doctor p to try to get out of doing these exercises unsuccessfully of course
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0030481-0031277 and one day he came in to my session hum exhaustive and unforgiving
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0031277-0032020 these sessions and he said to me wow aimee you are such a strong powerful little girl
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0032020-0032956 i think you're going to break one of those bands when you do break it i'm going to give you a hundred bucks now of course this this was a simple ploy
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0032956-0033802 on doctor p's part to get me to do the exercises i didn't want to do before the prospect of being the richest five year old in the second floor ward
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0033802-0034947 but what he effectively did for me was reshape an awful daily occurrence into a new and promising experience for me
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0034947-0035686 and i have to wonder today to what extent his vision and his declaration of me
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0035686-0036783 as a strong and powerful little girl shaped my own view of myself as an inherently strong powerful and athletic person well into the future
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0036783-0037485 this is an example of how adults in positions of power can ignite the power of a child
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0037485-0038551 but in the previous instances of those thesaurus entries our language isn't allowing us to evolve into the reality that we would all want
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0038551-0039101 the possibility of an individual to see themselves as capable
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0039227-0040235 our language hasn't caught up with the changes in our society many of which have been brought about by technology certainly from a medical standpoint
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0040235-0041940 my legs hum you know laser surgery for vision impairment uh titanium knee and hip replacements for aging bodies that are allowing people to more fully engage with their abilities and move beyond the limits that nature has imposed on them
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0041940-0043192 not to mention social networking platforms allow people to self identify to claim their own descriptions of themselves so they can go align with global groups of their own choosing
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0043323-0044675 so perhaps technology is revealing more clearly to us now what has always been a truth that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer our society
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0044776-0045808 and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset the human ability to adapt it's an interesting thing because people
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0045808-0046227 have continually wanted to talk to me about overcoming adversity
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0046227-0047443 and i'm going to make an admission this phrase never sat right with me and i always felt uneasy trying to answer people's questions about it and i think i'm starting to figure out why
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0047443-0048316 implicit in this phrase of overcoming adversity is the idea that success or happiness
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0048316-0049171 is about emerging on the other side of a challenging experience unscathed or unmarked by the experience
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0049171-0050267 as if my successes in life have come about from an ability to sidestep or circumnavigate the presumed pitfalls of a life with prosthetics or what other people perceive as my disability
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0050267-0051512 but in fact we are changed we are marked of course by a challenge whether physically emotionally or both and i am going to suggest that this is a good thing
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0051512-0052435 adversity isn't an obstacle that we need to get around in order to resume living our life it's part of our life
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0052435-0053316 and i tend to think of it like my shadow sometimes i see a lot of it sometimes there's very little but it's always with me
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0053316-0054135 and certainly i'm not trying to diminish the impact the weight of a person's struggle there is
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0054135-0055215 adversity and challenge in life and it's all very real and relative to every single person but the question isn't whether or not you're going to meet adversity but how you're going to meet it
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0055215-0056279 so our responsibility is not simply shielding those we care for from adversity but preparing them to meet it well
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0056279-0057375 and we do a disservice to our kids when we make them feel that they're not equipped to adapt
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0057375-0058754 there's an important difference and distinction between the objective medical fact of my being an amputee and the subjective societal opinion of whether or not i'm disabled
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0058754-0059916 and truthfully the only real and consistent disability i've had to confront is the world ever thinking that i could be described by those definitions
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0059916-0060664 in our desire to protect those we care about by giving them the cold hard truth about their medical prognosis
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0060664-0061624 or indeed a prognosis on the expected quality of their life we have to make sure that we don't put the first brick in a wall that will actually
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0061624-0062591 disable someone perhaps the existing model of only looking at what is broken in you and how do we fix it
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0062591-0063563 serves to be more disabling to the individual than the pathology itself by not treating the wholeness of a person
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0063563-0064440 by not acknowledging their potency we are creating another ill on top of whatever natural struggle they might have
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0064440-0065937 we are effectively grading someone's worth to our community so we need to see through the pathology and into the range of human capability
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0065937-0066929 and most importantly there's a partnership between those perceived deficiencies and our greatest creative ability
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0066929-0068108 so it's not about devaluing or negating these more trying times as something we want to avoid or sweep under the rug but instead to find those opportunities
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0068108-0069370 wrapped in the adversity so maybe the idea i want to put out there is not so much overcoming adversity as it is opening ourselves up to it
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0069586-0070401 embracing it grappling with it to use a wrestling term maybe even dancing with it
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0070569-0071687 and perhaps if we see adversity as natural consistent and useful we're less burdened by the presence of it
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0071687-0072903 this year we celebrate the two hundreth birthday of charles darwin and it was one hundred and fifty years ago when writing about evolution that darwin illustrated i think a truth about the human character
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0072903-0074110 to paraphrase it's not the strongest of the species that survives nor is it the most intelligent that survives it is the one that is most adaptable to change
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0074110-0075391 conflict is the genesis of creation from darwin's work amongst others we can recognize that the human ability to survive and flourish
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0075391-0076587 is driven by the the struggle of the human spirit through conflict into transformation so again transformation adaptation is our greatest
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0076587-0077977 human skill and perhaps you know until we're tested we don't know what we're made of maybe that's what adversity gives us a sense of self a sense of our own power
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0077977-0079016 so we can give ourselves a gift we can re imagine adversity as something more than just tough times
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0079016-0079872 maybe we can see it as change adversity is just change that we haven't adapted ourselves to yet
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0079872-0080438 i think the greatest adversity that we've created for ourselves is this idea of normalcy
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0080438-0081166 now who's normal there's no normal there's common there's typical
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0081166-0082197 there's no normal and would you want to meet that poor beige person if they existed i don't think so if we can change this paradigm from one of
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0082197-0083509 achieving normalcy to one of possibility or potency to be even a little bit more dangerous we can release the power of so many more children and invite them to engage
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0083509-0084925 their rare and valuable abilities with the community anthropologists tell us that the one thing we as humans have always required of our community members is to be of use to be able to contribute
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0084925-0085968 there's evidence that neanderthals sixty thousand years ago carried their elderly and those with serious physical injury
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0085968-0086886 and perhaps it's because the life experience of survival of these people proved of value to the community
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0086886-0087684 they didn't view these people as broken and useless they were seen as rare and valuable
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0087684-0088306 few years ago i was in a food market in the town where i grew up in that red zone in northeastern pennsylvania
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0088306-0089205 and i was standing over a bushel of tomatoes it was summer time i had shorts on i hear this guy his voice behind me say well if it isn't aimee mullins
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0089205-0089905 and i turn around and it's this older man i have no idea who he is and i said i'm sorry sir i don't
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0089905-0090720 have we met i i don't remember meeting you he said well you wouldn't remember meeting me i mean when we met i was delivering you from your mother's womb
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0090720-0091363 oh that guy and but of course actually
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0091363-0092262 it did click this man was doctor kean a man i had only known about through my mother's stories of that day because of course
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0092262-0093565 typical fashion i arrived late for my birthday by two weeks an so my mother's prenatal physician had gone on vacation so the man who delivered me was a complete stranger to my parents
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0093565-0094478 and because i was born without the fibula bones and had feet turned in and a few toes in this foot and a few toes in that he had to be the bearer this stranger
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0094478-0095339 had to be the bearer of bad news he said to me i had to give this prognosis to your parents that you would never walk
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0095339-0096121 and you would never have the kind of mobility that other kids have or any kind of life of independence and you've been making liar out of me ever since
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0096939-0097577 the extraordinary thing is that he said he had saved newspaper clipping throughout my whole childhood
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0097577-0098593 whether winning a second grade spelling bee marching with the girl scouts you know the halloween parade winning my college scholarship or any of my sports victories
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0098593-0099417 and he was using it and integrating it into teaching uh resident students med students from hahnemann
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0099417-0100299 medical school and hershey medical school and he called this part of the course the x factor the potential of the human will
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0100299-0101128 no prognosis can account for how powerful this could be and a as a determinant in the quality of someone's life
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0101128-0102204 and doctor kean went on to tell me that he said in my experience unless repeatedly told otherwise
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0102204-0103166 and even if given a modicum of support if left to their own devices a child will achieve
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0103166-0104197 see doctor kean made that shift in thinking he understood that there's a difference between the medical condition and what someone might do with it
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0104197-0105578 and there's been a shift in my thinking over time in that if you'd asked me at fifteen years old if i would have traded prosthetics for flesh and bone legs i wouldn't have hesitated for a second
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0105578-0106539 i aspired to that kind of normalcy back then if you ask me today i'm not so sure
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0106539-0107571 and it's because of the experiences i've had with them not in spite of the experiences i've had with them
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0107571-0109070 and perhaps this shift in me has happened because i've been exposed to more people who have opened doors for me than those who have put lids and cast shadows on me
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0109070-0110170 see all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your own power and you're off if you can hand somebody the key
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0110170-0111240 to their own power the human spirit is so receptive if you can do that and open a door for someone at a crucial moment you are educating them in the best sense
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0111240-0112174 you're teaching them to open doors for themselves in fact the the exact meaning of the word educate
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0112174-0113360 comes from the root word educe it means to bring forth what is within to bring out potential so again which potential do we want to bring out
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0113542-0114566 there was a case study done in nineteen sixties in britain when they were moving from grammar schools to comprehensive schools it's called the streaming trials we call it tracking
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0114566-0115107 here in the states it's separating students from a b c d and so on
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0115107-0116565 and you know the a students get the tougher curriculum the best teachers etc well they took over a three month period d level students gave them a's told them they were a's told them they were bright and at the end of this three month period
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0116565-0117492 they were performing at a level and of course the heartbreaking flip side of this study is that they took the a students
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0117492-0118408 and told them they were d's and that's what happened at the end of that three month period those who were still around in school besides the people who had dropped out
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0118639-0119483 this is a crucial part of this case study was that the teachers were duped too
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0119483-0120361 the teachers didn't know a switch had been made they were simply told these are the a students these are the d students and that's how they went about teaching them
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0120361-0120998 and treating them so i think
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0120998-0121273 that the only true disability
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0121273-0122382 is a crushed spirit a spirit that's been crushed doesn't have hope it doesn't see beauty
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0122382-0123096 it no longer has our natural childlike curiosity and our innate ability to imagine
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0123285-0124111 if instead we can bolster a human spirit to keep hope to see beauty in themselves and others
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0124111-0124794 to be curious and imaginative then we are truly using our power well
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0124794-0125680 when a spirit has those qualities we are able to create new realities and new ways of being
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0125680-0126334 i'd like to leave you with a poem by a fourteenth century persian poet named hafiz
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0126334-0127291 that my friend jacques dembois told me about and the poem is called the god who only knows four words every child
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0127291-0128332 has known god not the god of names not the god of don'ts but the god who only knows four words
+AimeeMullins_2009P-0128332-0129658 and keeps repeating them saying come dance with me come dance with me thank you
+BillGates_2010-0001586-0001998 i'm going to talk today about energy and climate
+BillGates_2010-0001998-0003489 and that might seem a bit surprising because my full time work at the foundation is mostly about vaccines and seeds about the things that we need to invent and deliver to help the poorest two billion live better lives
+BillGates_2010-0003489-0004472 but energy and climate are extremely important to these people in fact more important than to anyone else on the planet
+BillGates_2010-0004472-0005330 the climate getting worse means that many years their crops won't grow there will be too much rain not enough rain
+BillGates_2010-0005372-0006727 things will change in ways that their fragile environment simply can't support and that leads to starvation it leads to uncertainty it leads to unrest so the the climate changes will be terrible for them
+BillGates_2010-0006727-0008183 also the price of energy is very important to them in fact if you could pick just one thing to lower the price of to reduce poverty by far you would pick energy now the price of energy has come down over time
+BillGates_2010-0008183-0009134 uh really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy the coal revolution fueled
+BillGates_2010-0009134-0010503 the industrial revolution and even in the nineteen hundreds we've seen a very rapid decline in the price of electricity and that's why we have refrigerators air conditioning we can make uh modern materials and do so many things
+BillGates_2010-0010503-0011167 and so we're in a wonderful situation with uh electricity in the rich world
+BillGates_2010-0011223-0012163 but as we make it cheaper and let's say let's go for making it twice as cheap we need to meet a new constraint
+BillGates_2010-0012163-0012879 and that constraint has to do with co two co two is warming the planet
+BillGates_2010-0012879-0013841 and the equation on co two is actually a very straightforward one if you sum up the co two that gets emitted
+BillGates_2010-0013841-0014663 that leads to a temperature increase and that temperature increase leads to some very negative effects the effects on the weather
+BillGates_2010-0014663-0015625 and perhaps worse the indirect effects in that the natural ecosystems can't adjust to these rapid changes and so you get ecosystem collapses
+BillGates_2010-0015625-0016181 now the exact amount of how you map from a a certain increase of co two
+BillGates_2010-0016181-0017345 to what temperature will be and where the positive feedbacks are there's some uncertainty there but not very much and there's certainly uncertainty about how bad those effects will be but they will be extremely bad
+BillGates_2010-0017345-0018588 i asked the top scientists on this several times do we really have to get down to near zero can't we just you know cut it in half or a quarter and the answer is that until we get near to zero
+BillGates_2010-0018588-0020192 the temperature will continue to rise and so that's that's a big challenge it's very different than saying you know we're a twelve feet high truck trying to get under a ten feet bridge and we can just sort of squeeze under this is something that has to get to zero
+BillGates_2010-0020272-0021013 now we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year over twenty six billion tons for each american
+BillGates_2010-0021013-0022431 it's about twenty tons uh for people in poor countries it's less than one ton it's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet and somehow we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero
+BillGates_2010-0022431-0023917 it's been constantly going up it's only various economic changes that have even flattened it at all so we have to go from rapidly rising to falling and falling all the way to zero this equation has four factors
+BillGates_2010-0023917-0024799 a little bit of multiplication so you've got a thing on the left co two that you want to get to zero and that's going to be based on the number of people
+BillGates_2010-0024799-0025683 the services each person's using on average the energy on average for each service and the co two being put out
+BillGates_2010-0025683-0026806 per unit of energy so let's look at each one of these and see how we can get this down to zero uh probably one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty near to zero now
+BillGates_2010-0026806-0027504 and that's back from high school algebra but let's let's take a look first we've got population
+BillGates_2010-0027504-0028543 now the world today has six point eight billion people that's headed up to about nine billion now if we do a really great job on new vaccines health care
+BillGates_2010-0028543-0029430 reproductive health services we could lower that by perhaps ten or fifteen percent but there we see an increase of about one point three
+BillGates_2010-0029430-0030042 the second factor is the services we use this encompasses everything the food we eat
+BillGates_2010-0030042-0031329 clothing tv heating these are very good things and getting rid of poverty means providing these services to almost everyone on the planet and it's a great thing
+BillGates_2010-0031329-0032116 for this number to go up in the rich world perhaps the top one billion we probably could cut back and use less but every year
+BillGates_2010-0032116-0032991 this number on average is going to go up and so over all that will more than double the services delivered per person
+BillGates_2010-0032991-0034092 here we have a very basic service do you have lighting in your house to be able to read your homework and in fact these kids don't so they're going out and reading their school work under the street lamps
+BillGates_2010-0034238-0035302 now efficiency e the energy for each service here finally we have some good news we have something that's not going up through various inventions and new ways of doing lighting
+BillGates_2010-0035302-0036488 through different types of cars different ways of building buildings there are a lot of services where you can bring the energy for that service down quite substantially
+BillGates_2010-0036488-0037676 some individual services even bring it down by ninety percent there are other services like how we make fertilizer or how we do air transport where the rooms for improvement are far far less
+BillGates_2010-0037676-0038654 and so overall here if we're optimistic we may get a reduction of a a factor of three to even perhaps a factor of six
+BillGates_2010-0038654-0039968 but for these first three factors now we've gone from twenty six billion to at best maybe thirteen billion tons and that just won't cut it so let's look at this fourth factor this is going to be a key one
+BillGates_2010-0039968-0041160 and this is the amount of co two put out per each unit of energy and so the question is can you actually get that to zero if you burn coal
+BillGates_2010-0041160-0042626 no if you burn natural gas no almost every way we make electricity today except for the emerging renewables and nuclear puts out co two and so what we're going to have to do at a global scale
+BillGates_2010-0042626-0043500 is create a new system and so we need energy miracles now when i use the term miracle i don't mean something that's impossible
+BillGates_2010-0043596-0044976 the microprocessor is a miracle the personal computer is a miracle the internet and its services are a miracle so the people here have participated in the creation of many miracles usually we don't have a deadline
+BillGates_2010-0044976-0046458 where you have to get the miracle by a certain date usually you just kind of stand by and some come along some don't this is a case where we actually have to drive it full speed and get a miracle in a a pretty tight time line
+BillGates_2010-0046458-0047510 now i thought how could i really capture this is there some kind of natural illustration some demonstration that would grab people's imagination here
+BillGates_2010-0047510-0048185 i thought back to a year ago when i brought mosquitos and somehow people enjoyed that
+BillGates_2010-0048307-0049689 it it really got them involved in the idea of you know there are people who live with mosquitos so with energy all i could come up with is this i decided that releasing fireflies
+BillGates_2010-0049689-0050893 would be my contribution to the environment here this year so here we have some natural fireflies i'm told they don't bite in fact they might not even not even leave that jar
+BillGates_2010-0051081-0052222 now there's all sorts gimmicky solutions like that one but they don't really add up too much we need solutions either one or several that have
+BillGates_2010-0052222-0053287 unbelievable scale and unbelievable reliability and although there's many directions of people seeking i really only see five that
+BillGates_2010-0053287-0054552 can achieve the big numbers i've left out tide geothermal fusion biofuels those may make some contribution and if they can do better than i expect so much the better but my key point here
+BillGates_2010-0054552-0055462 is that we're going to have to work on each of these five and we can't give up any of them because they they look daunting because they all
+BillGates_2010-0055462-0056432 have significant challenges let's look first at the burning fossil fuels either burning coal or burning natural gas what you need to do there
+BillGates_2010-0056493-0057694 seems like it might be simple but it's not and that's to take all the co two after you've burned it going out the flue pressurize it create a liquid put it somewhere and hope it stays there
+BillGates_2010-0057694-0059039 now we have some pilot things that do this at the sixty to eighty percent level but getting up to that full percentage that will be very tricky and agreeing on where these co two quantities should be put
+BillGates_2010-0059039-0059716 will be hard but the toughest one here is this long term issue who's going to be sure who's going to guarantee
+BillGates_2010-0059716-0060724 something that is literally billions of times larger than any type of waste you think of in in terms of nuclear or other things this is a lot of volume
+BillGates_2010-0060724-0061801 so that's a tough one next would be nuclear it also has three big problems cost particularly in highly regulated countries is high
+BillGates_2010-0061801-0062663 the issue of the safety really feeling good about nothing could go wrong that even though you have these human operators that the fuel
+BillGates_2010-0062663-0064182 doesn't get used for weapons and then what do you do with the waste and although it's not very large there are a lot of concerns about that people need to feel good about it so three very tough problems that might be solvable and so should be worked on
+BillGates_2010-0064182-0065029 the last three of the five i've grouped together these are what people often refer to as the renewable sources and they actually
+BillGates_2010-0065029-0065802 although it's great they don't require fuel they have some disadvantages one is that the density
+BillGates_2010-0065802-0066489 of energy gathered in these technologies is dramatically less than a power plant this is energy farming
+BillGates_2010-0066489-0067666 so you're talking about many square miles thousands of time more area than than you think of as a normal energy plant also these are intermittent sources the sun doesn't shine
+BillGates_2010-0067666-0068350 all day it doesn't shine every day and likewise the wind doesn't blow all the time and so if you depend on these sources
+BillGates_2010-0068350-0069211 you have to have some way of getting the energy during those time periods that it's not available so we've got big cost challenges here
+BillGates_2010-0069211-0070665 we have transmission challenges for example say this energy source is outside your country you not only need the technology but you have to deal with the risk of the energy coming from elsewhere and finally this storage problem
+BillGates_2010-0070665-0071808 and to dimensionalize this i went through and looked at all the types of batteries that get made for cars for computers for phones for flashlights for everything and compared that
+BillGates_2010-0071808-0072717 to the amount of electrical energy the world uses and what i found is that all the batteries we make now could store less than ten minutes
+BillGates_2010-0072717-0073409 of all the energy and so in fact we need a big breakthrough here something that's going to be
+BillGates_2010-0073409-0074885 a factor of a hundred better than the approaches we have now it's not it's not impossible but it's not a very easy thing now this shows up when you try to get the the intermittent source to be above say twenty to thirty percent
+BillGates_2010-0074885-0075717 of what you're using if you're counting on it for a hundred percent you need a an incredible miracle battery
+BillGates_2010-0075717-0076673 now how we're going to go forward on this what's what's the right approach is it a manhattan project what's the the thing that can get us there well we need lots
+BillGates_2010-0076673-0077744 of companies working on this hundreds in each of these five paths we need at least a hundred people and a lot of them you'll look at and say they're crazy that's good
+BillGates_2010-0077744-0078466 and i think here in the ted group we have many people who are already pursuing this
+BillGates_2010-0078466-0080389 bill gross has several companies including one called esolar that has some great solar thermal technologies vinod khosla's investing in dozens of companies that are doing great things and have interesting possibilities and i'm i'm trying to help back that nathan myhrvold and i actually are backing a company
+BillGates_2010-0080389-0081193 that perhaps surprisingly is actually taking the nuclear approach there are some innovations in nuclear modular liquid
+BillGates_2010-0081193-0082339 and innovation really stopped in this industry quite some time ago so the idea that there's some good ideas laying around is not all that surprising the idea of terrapower
+BillGates_2010-0082339-0083304 is that instead of burning a part of uranium the one percent which is the u two thirty five we decided let's burn the ninety nine percent
+BillGates_2010-0083304-0084018 the u two thirty eight it is kind of a crazy idea in fact people had talked about it for a long time
+BillGates_2010-0084018-0085031 but they could never simulate properly whether it would work or not and so it's through the advent of modern supercomputers that now you can simulate and see that yes with the right
+BillGates_2010-0085031-0085894 material's approach this looks like it would work and because you're burning that ninety nine percent you have
+BillGates_2010-0085894-0087360 greatly improved cost profile you actually burn up the waste and you can actually use as fuel all the leftover waste from today's reactors so instead of worrying about them you just take that it's a great thing
+BillGates_2010-0087360-0088384 it breathes this uranium as it goes along so it's kind of like a candle you can see it's it's a log there often referred to as a traveling wave reactor in terms of fuel
+BillGates_2010-0088384-0089691 this really solves the problem i've got a picture here of a place in kentucky this is the left over the ninety nine percent where they've taken out the part they burn now so it's called depleted uranium that would power the u s
+BillGates_2010-0089691-0090681 for hundreds of years and simply by filtering sea water in an inexpensive process you'd have enough fuel for the entire lifetime of the rest of the planet so
+BillGates_2010-0090681-0091781 you know it's got lots lots of challenges ahead but it is an example of the many hundreds and hundreds of ideas that we need to move forward
+BillGates_2010-0091781-0093270 so let's think how should we measure ourselves what should our report card look like well let's go out to where we really need to get and and then look at the intermediate for twenty fifty you've heard many people talk about
+BillGates_2010-0093270-0094056 this eighty percent reduction that really is very important that we get there and that twenty percent will be used up by
+BillGates_2010-0094056-0095342 things going on in poor countries still some agriculture hopefully we will have cleaned up forestry cement so to get to that eighty percent the developed countries
+BillGates_2010-0095342-0096309 including countries like china will have had to switch their electric electricity generation altogether so the other grade is are we deploying
+BillGates_2010-0096309-0097289 this zero emission technology have we deployed it in all the developed countries and we're in the process of of getting it elsewhere that's super important
+BillGates_2010-0097289-0098146 that's a key element of making that report card so backing up from there what should the twenty twenty report card look like
+BillGates_2010-0098146-0099642 well it again it should have the two elements we should go through these efficiency measures to start getting reductions the less we emit the less that sum will be of co two and therefore the less the temperature but in some ways the grade we get there
+BillGates_2010-0099642-0100725 doing things that don't get us all the way to the big reductions is only equally or maybe even slightly less important than the other which is the piece of innovation
+BillGates_2010-0100725-0101719 on these breakthroughs these breakthroughs we need to move those at full speed and we can measure that in terms of companies pilot projects regulatory things that have been changed
+BillGates_2010-0101719-0103401 there's a lot of great books that have been written about this the al gore book our choice and the david mckay book sustainable energy without the hot air they really go through it and i think create a framework that this can be discussed broadly because we need broad backing for this
+BillGates_2010-0103401-0104035 there's a lot that has to come together so this is a wish it's a very concrete wish that
+BillGates_2010-0104035-0104905 we invent this technology if you gave me only one wish for the next fifty years i could pick who's president i could pick a vaccine
+BillGates_2010-0104905-0105571 which is something i love or i could pick that this thing that's half the cost with no co two gets invented
+BillGates_2010-0105571-0106601 this is the wish i would pick this is the one with the greatest impact if we don't get this wish the division between the people who think short term and long term will be terrible
+BillGates_2010-0106601-0107999 between u s and china between poor countries and rich and most of all the lives of those two billion will be far worse so what do we have to do what am i appealing to you to step forward and
+BillGates_2010-0107999-0108733 and drive we need to go for more research funding when countries get together in places like copenhagen they shouldn't
+BillGates_2010-0108733-0109597 just discuss the co two they should discuss this innovation agenda and you'd be stunned at the ridiculously low levels of spending
+BillGates_2010-0109597-0110464 on these innovative approaches we do need the market incentives co two tax cap and trade something that gets that price signal out there
+BillGates_2010-0110464-0111838 we need to get the message out we need to have this dialogue be a more rational more understandable dialogue including the steps that the government takes this is an important wish but it is one i think we can achieve thank you
+BillGates_2010-0113236-0113383 thank you thank you
+BillGates_2010-0113940-0114550 thank you just so i understand more about about terrapower right
+BillGates_2010-0114550-0115006 i mean first of all what can you give a sense of what scale of investment this is
+BillGates_2010-0115006-0116124 to to actually do the software buy the supercomputer hire all the great scientists which we've done that's only tens of millions and even once we test our materials out
+BillGates_2010-0116124-0117033 in a russian reactor to make sure that our materials work properly then you'll only be up in the hundreds of millions the tough thing is building the pilot reactor
+BillGates_2010-0117033-0117995 finding the several billion finding the regulator the location that will actually build the first one of these once you get the first one built
+BillGates_2010-0117995-0118832 if it works as advertised then it's just clear as day because the economics the energy density are so different than nuclear as we know it
+BillGates_2010-0118832-0120110 and so to understand it right this involves building deep into the ground almost like a vertical kind of column of nuclear fuel of this sort of spent uranium and then and then and then the process starts at the top and kind of works down
+BillGates_2010-0120110-0121078 that's right today you're always refueling the reactor so you have lots of people and lots of controls that can go wrong that thing where you're opening it up and moving things in and out that's
+BillGates_2010-0121078-0121893 that's not good so if you have very very cheap fuel that you can put sixty years in just think of it as a log
+BillGates_2010-0121893-0122743 put it down and not have those same complexities and it just sits there and burns for the sixty years and and then it's done
+BillGates_2010-0122743-0123156 it's a it's a nuclear power plant that is its own waste disposal solution
+BillGates_2010-0123156-0124289 yeah well what happens with the waste you can you can let it sit there there's a lot less waste under this approach then you can actually take that and put it into another one and burn that
+BillGates_2010-0124289-0125283 and and we start off actually by taking the waste that exists today that's sitting in these cooling pools or dry casking by reactors that's our fuel
+BillGates_2010-0125283-0126334 to begin with so the thing that's been a problem from those reactors is actually what gets fed into ours and you're reducing the volume of the waste quite dramatically as you're going through this process
+BillGates_2010-0126334-0127077 but in your talking to different people around the world about the possibilities here where where is there most interest in actually doing something with this
+BillGates_2010-0127077-0127994 well we haven't uh picked a particular place uh and there's all these interesting disclosure rules about anything that's called nuclear
+BillGates_2010-0128098-0129028 so we we we've got a lot of interest that people from the company have been in russia india china i've been back seeing the secretary of energy here talking about how this
+BillGates_2010-0129028-0130155 fits into the the energy agenda so i'm optimistic you know the french and japanese have done some work this is a a variant on something that has been done it's an important
+BillGates_2010-0130155-0131091 advance but it's like a fast reactor and a lot of countries have built them so anybody who's done a fast reactor is a candidate to to be where the first one gets built
+BillGates_2010-0131091-0131937 so in in your mind timescale and likelihood of actually taking something like this live
+BillGates_2010-0131937-0132214 well we need for one of these
+BillGates_2010-0132214-0133186 high scale electro electro generation things that's very cheap we have twenty years to invent and then twenty years to deploy that's sort of the deadline
+BillGates_2010-0133186-0134086 that the environment models environmental models have have have shown us that we have to meet and you know terrapower if things go well
+BillGates_2010-0134086-0134899 which is wishing for a lot could easily meet that and there are fortunately now dozens of companies we need it to be hundreds
+BillGates_2010-0134899-0136283 who likewise if their science goes well if the funding for their pilot pilot plants goes well that they they can compete for this and it's best if multiple succeed because then you could use a mix a mix of these things we certainly need one to succeed
+BillGates_2010-0136283-0136854 in terms of big scale possible game changes is this the biggest that you're aware of out there
+BillGates_2010-0136854-0137835 an energy breakthrough is the the most important thing it would have been even without the environmental constraint but the environmental constraint just makes it so much
+BillGates_2010-0137924-0138694 so much greater in the nuclear space there are other innovators you know we don't know their work as well as we know this one but
+BillGates_2010-0138694-0139478 the modular people that's a different approach there's a liquid type reactor which seems a little hard but maybe they say that about us
+BillGates_2010-0139591-0140511 and so there there are different ones but the beauty of this is a molecule of uranium has a million times as much energy as a molecule of say coal
+BillGates_2010-0140590-0141946 and so if you can deal with the negatives which are essentially the radiation the footprint and cost the potential in terms of effect on land and various things is almost in a class of its own
+BillGates_2010-0142125-0142221 if this doesn't work
+BillGates_2010-0142431-0143126 then what do we have to start taking emergency measures to try and keep the temperature of the earth stable
+BillGates_2010-0143126-0143382 yeah if you get into that situation it's like
+BillGates_2010-0143382-0143552 if you've
+BillGates_2010-0143552-0144645 you've been over eating and you're about to have a heart attack you know then then then where do you go you may need heart surgery or something there is a line of research on what's called geoengineering
+BillGates_2010-0144645-0145274 which are various techniques that would delay the heating to buy us twenty or thirty years to get our act together
+BillGates_2010-0145274-0146011 now you hope that's just an insurance policy you hope you don't need to do that some people say you shouldn't even work on the insurance policy because it might make you
+BillGates_2010-0146011-0146793 lazy that you'll keep eating because you know heart surgery will be there to save you i'm not sure that's wise given the importance of the problem but
+BillGates_2010-0146793-0147878 there's now the the geoengineering discussion about should that be in the back pocket in case things happen faster or this innovation goes a lot slower than we expect
+BillGates_2010-0148076-0148937 climate skeptics if you had a a sentence or two to say to them how how might you persuade them that they're wrong
+BillGates_2010-0149082-0149822 well unfortunately the skeptics come in different camps i mean the ones who make scientific arguments are very few
+BillGates_2010-0149822-0151120 you know are they saying there's negative feedback effects that have to do with clouds that offset things there are very very few things that they can even say you know there's a chance in a million of those things the main problem we have here
+BillGates_2010-0151120-0152199 is kind of like aids you make the mistake now and you pay for it a lot later and so when you have all sorts of urgent problems the idea of taking pain now
+BillGates_2010-0152199-0152909 that has to do with a gain later and a somewhat uncertain pain thing in fact the ipcc report you know that
+BillGates_2010-0152909-0154068 that's not necessarily the worst case and there are people in the rich world who look at ipcc and say okay you know that that isn't that big of a deal the fact is it's that uncertain part
+BillGates_2010-0154068-0154933 that should move us towards this but my dream here is that if you can make it economic and meet the co two constraints then the skeptics say okay
+BillGates_2010-0154933-0155499 i don't care that it doesn't put out co two i kind of wish it did put out co two but i guess i'll accept it because it's cheaper
+BillGates_2010-0155499-0155689 than what's come before
+BillGates_2010-0156073-0156113 so
+BillGates_2010-0156202-0157959 is that would be your response to the the the bjorn lomborg argument that basically if you if you spend all this energy trying to solve the co two problem it's going to take away all your other goals of trying to rid the world of poverty and malaria and so forth it's it's it's a stupid waste of the earth's resources to put money towards that when there are better things we can do
+BillGates_2010-0157959-0159250 yeah well the actual spending on the r and d piece you know say the u s should spend ten billion a year more than it is right now it's not that dramatic it shouldn't take away from other things the thing you get into big money on
+BillGates_2010-0159250-0160746 and this reasonable people can disagree is when you have something that's non economic and you're trying to fund that that to me mostly is a waste unless you're very close and you're just funding the learning curve and it's going to get very cheap i believe we should try you know more
+BillGates_2010-0160746-0161453 things that have a potential to be far less expensive if the trade off you get into is let's make energy super super
+BillGates_2010-0161453-0162265 expensive then the rich can afford that i mean all of us here could pay five times as much for our energy and not change our lifestyle
+BillGates_2010-0162265-0163051 the disaster is for that two billion and even lomborg has changed his shtick now is why isn't the r and d
+BillGates_2010-0163051-0163992 getting more discussed he he's still because of his earlier stuff further associated with the skeptic camp but he's realized that's that's a pretty lonely camp and so
+BillGates_2010-0163992-0164978 he's making the r and d point and and so there is a a a thread of something that i i think is appropriate the r and d piece it's crazy how little it's funded
+BillGates_2010-0165073-0165653 well bill i suspect i i speak on the behalf of most people here to say i really hope your wish comes true thank you so much
+BillGates_2010-0165653-0165694 thank you
+DanBarber_2010-0001609-0001940 so i've known a lot of fish in my life
+DanBarber_2010-0001940-0002299 i've loved only two
+DanBarber_2010-0002299-0002550 that first one was a
+DanBarber_2010-0002550-0002820 it was more like a passionate affair
+DanBarber_2010-0002820-0003039 it was a beautiful fish
+DanBarber_2010-0003039-0003239 flavorful textured
+DanBarber_2010-0003239-0003710 meaty a best seller on the menu what a fish
+DanBarber_2010-0004038-0004727 even better it was farm raised to the supposed highest standards of sustainability
+DanBarber_2010-0004814-0005006 so you could feel good about selling it
+DanBarber_2010-0005206-0005552 i was in a relationship with this beauty for several months
+DanBarber_2010-0005797-0006227 one day the head of the company called and asked if i'd speak at an event
+DanBarber_2010-0006324-0006587 about the farm's sustainability absolutely i said
+DanBarber_2010-0006691-0006870 here was a company trying to solve
+DanBarber_2010-0006870-0007215 what's become this unimaginable problem for our chefs
+DanBarber_2010-0007350-0007517 how do we keep fish on our menus
+DanBarber_2010-0007745-0008217 for the past fifty years we've been fishing the seas
+DanBarber_2010-0008217-0008417 like we clear cut forests
+DanBarber_2010-0008579-0009094 it's hard to overstate the destruction
+DanBarber_2010-0009094-0009999 ninety percent of large fish the ones we love the tunas the halibuts the salmons swordfish they've collapsed there was nothing left
+DanBarber_2010-0010201-0010739 so for better or for worse aquaculture fish farming is going to be a part of our future
+DanBarber_2010-0010739-0010954 a lot of arguments against it
+DanBarber_2010-0010954-0011128 fish farms pollute
+DanBarber_2010-0011128-0011552 most of them do anyway and they're inefficient take tuna a major drawback
+DanBarber_2010-0011699-0012587 it's got a feed conversion ratio of fifteen to one that means it takes fifteen pounds of wild fish to get you one pound of farm tuna
+DanBarber_2010-0012587-0013031 not very sustainable doesn't taste very good either
+DanBarber_2010-0013088-0013250 so here finally
+DanBarber_2010-0013316-0013686 was a company trying to do it right i wanted to support them
+DanBarber_2010-0013860-0014336 the day before the event i called the head of pr for the company
+DanBarber_2010-0014336-0014709 let's call him don
+DanBarber_2010-0014709-0015644 don i said just to get the facts straight you guys are famous for for farming so far out to sea you you don't pollute that's right he said we're so far out
+DanBarber_2010-0015644-0015899 the waste from our fish gets distributed
+DanBarber_2010-0015899-0016300 not concentrated and then he added
+DanBarber_2010-0016300-0016543 we're basically a world unto ourselves
+DanBarber_2010-0016717-0017160 that feed conversion ratio two point five to one he said best in the business
+DanBarber_2010-0017279-0017796 two point five to one great two point five to one what what are you feeding sustainable proteins he said
+DanBarber_2010-0017956-0018189 great i said got off the phone
+DanBarber_2010-0018247-0018486 and that night i was lying in bed and i thought
+DanBarber_2010-0018550-0018760 what the hell is a sustainable protein
+DanBarber_2010-0019208-0019964 so the next day just before the event i called don i said don what are some examples of sustainable proteins he said he didn't know
+DanBarber_2010-0020081-0020553 he would ask around well i got on the phone with a few people in the company no one could give me a straight answer
+DanBarber_2010-0020609-0021045 until finally i got on the phone with the head biologist
+DanBarber_2010-0021161-0021314 let's call him don too
+DanBarber_2010-0021780-0022172 don i said what are some examples of sustainable proteins
+DanBarber_2010-0022238-0022409 well he mentioned some algaes
+DanBarber_2010-0022409-0022752 and some fish meals and then he said chicken pellets
+DanBarber_2010-0022868-0023195 i said chicken pellets he said yeah feathers skin
+DanBarber_2010-0023257-0023719 bone meal scraps dried and processed into feed
+DanBarber_2010-0023719-0024036 i said what percentage
+DanBarber_2010-0024036-0024264 of your feed is chicken
+DanBarber_2010-0024358-0024521 thinking you know two percent
+DanBarber_2010-0024579-0024763 well it's about thirty percent he said
+DanBarber_2010-0024870-0024977 i said don
+DanBarber_2010-0024977-0025350 what's sustainable about feeding chicken to fish
+DanBarber_2010-0025818-0026033 there there was a long pause on the line
+DanBarber_2010-0026257-0026489 and he said there's just too much chicken in the world
+DanBarber_2010-0027095-0027275 i fell out of love with this fish
+DanBarber_2010-0027462-0027931 no not because i'm some self righteous goody two shoes foodie
+DanBarber_2010-0028064-0028141 i actually am
+DanBarber_2010-0028303-0028822 no i fell out of love with this fish because i swear to god after that conversation the fish tasted like chicken
+DanBarber_2010-0029852-0030019 this second fish
+DanBarber_2010-0030157-0030333 it's a different kind of love story
+DanBarber_2010-0030423-0030577 it's the romantic kind
+DanBarber_2010-0030831-0031156 the kind where the more you get to know your fish you love the fish
+DanBarber_2010-0031383-0031663 i first ate it at a restaurant in southern spain
+DanBarber_2010-0031717-0032026 a journalist friend had been talking about this fish for a long time
+DanBarber_2010-0032026-0032164 she kind of set us up
+DanBarber_2010-0032464-0032720 ok it came to the table a bright
+DanBarber_2010-0032720-0032947 almost shimmering white color
+DanBarber_2010-0033138-0034030 the chef had overcooked it like twice over ok amazingly it was still delicious
+DanBarber_2010-0034125-0034338 who can make a fish taste good
+DanBarber_2010-0034415-0034575 after it's been overcooked
+DanBarber_2010-0034575-0035085 i can't but this guy can
+DanBarber_2010-0035085-0035349 let's call him miguel actually his name is miguel
+DanBarber_2010-0035708-0036258 and no he didn't cook the fish and he's not a chef at least in the way that you and i understand it
+DanBarber_2010-0036258-0036554 he's a biologist
+DanBarber_2010-0036554-0037056 at veta la palma it's a fish farm in the southwestern corner of spain
+DanBarber_2010-0037084-0037319 it's at the tip of the guadalquivir river
+DanBarber_2010-0037382-0037790 until the nineteen eighties the farm was in the hands of the argentinians
+DanBarber_2010-0037838-0038179 they raised beef cattle on what was essentially wetlands
+DanBarber_2010-0038339-0038754 they did it by draining the land they built this intricate series of canals
+DanBarber_2010-0038787-0039097 and they pushed water off the land and out into the river
+DanBarber_2010-0039295-0039614 well they couldn't make it work not economically
+DanBarber_2010-0039614-0039852 and ecologically it was a disaster
+DanBarber_2010-0039932-0040313 killed like ninety percent of the birds which for this place is a lot of birds
+DanBarber_2010-0040440-0040616 and so in nineteen eighty two
+DanBarber_2010-0040674-0041125 a spanish company with an environmental conscience purchased the land what did they do
+DanBarber_2010-0041220-0041545 they reversed the flow of water they literally flipped the switch
+DanBarber_2010-0041623-0041804 instead of pushing water out
+DanBarber_2010-0041804-0042183 they used the channels to pull water back in they flooded the canals
+DanBarber_2010-0042267-0042601 they created a twenty seven thousand acre fish farm
+DanBarber_2010-0042601-0043112 bass mullet shrimp eel
+DanBarber_2010-0043112-0043398 and in the process miguel and this company
+DanBarber_2010-0043398-0043727 completely reversed the ecological destruction
+DanBarber_2010-0043903-0044345 the farm's incredible i mean you've never seen anything like this
+DanBarber_2010-0044468-0045341 you stare out at a horizon that is a million miles away and all you see are flooded canals and this thick rich marshland
+DanBarber_2010-0045554-0045760 i was there not long ago with miguel
+DanBarber_2010-0045858-0046008 he's an amazing guy
+DanBarber_2010-0046098-0046477 like three parts charles darwin and one part crocodile dundee
+DanBarber_2010-0046573-0046691 okay
+DanBarber_2010-0046691-0046942 there we are slogging through the wetlands
+DanBarber_2010-0047035-0047543 and i'm panting and sweating got mud up to my knees and miguel's calmly conducting a biology lecture
+DanBarber_2010-0047590-0047868 here he's pointing out a rare black shouldered kite
+DanBarber_2010-0047868-0048071 now he's mentioning
+DanBarber_2010-0048071-0048332 the mineral needs of phytoplankton
+DanBarber_2010-0048332-0048959 and here here he sees a grouping pattern that reminds him of the tanzanian giraffe
+DanBarber_2010-0049142-0049684 it turns out miguel spent the better part of his career in the mikumi national park in africa
+DanBarber_2010-0049783-0050205 i asked him how he became such an expert on fish he said fish
+DanBarber_2010-0050239-0050400 i didn't know anything about fish
+DanBarber_2010-0050400-0050628 i'm an expert in relationships
+DanBarber_2010-0050628-0050855 and then he's off
+DanBarber_2010-0050855-0052013 launching into more talk about rare birds and algaes and strange aquatic plants and don't get me wrong that was really fascinating you know the biotic community unplugged kind of thing you know it's great
+DanBarber_2010-0052013-0052333 but i was in love and my head
+DanBarber_2010-0052333-0053176 was swooning over that overcooked piece of delicious fish i had the night before so i interrupted him i said miguel what makes your fish taste so good
+DanBarber_2010-0053176-0053428 he pointed at the algae
+DanBarber_2010-0053428-0053978 i know dude the algae the phytoplankton the relationships it's amazing
+DanBarber_2010-0054009-0054391 but what are your fish eating what's the feed conversion ratio
+DanBarber_2010-0054594-0054763 well he goes on to tell me
+DanBarber_2010-0054898-0055086 it's such a rich system
+DanBarber_2010-0055124-0055379 that the fish are eating what they'd be eating in the wild
+DanBarber_2010-0055529-0056342 the plant biomass the phytoplankton the zooplankton it's what feeds the fish the system is so healthy it's totally self renewing there
+DanBarber_2010-0056342-0056618 there is no feed
+DanBarber_2010-0056618-0056973 ever heard of a farm that doesn't feed its animals
+DanBarber_2010-0057302-0057857 later that day i was driving around this property with miguel and i asked him i said for a place that seems so natural
+DanBarber_2010-0057947-0058308 unlike like any fish any farm i'd ever been at
+DanBarber_2010-0058372-0058570 how do you measure success
+DanBarber_2010-0058774-0059879 at that moment it was as if a film director called for a set change and we rounded the corner and saw the most amazing sight thousands and thousands of pink flamingos
+DanBarber_2010-0059986-0060305 a literal pink carpet for as far as you could see
+DanBarber_2010-0060362-0060514 that's success he said
+DanBarber_2010-0060658-0060935 look at their bellies pink they're feasting
+DanBarber_2010-0061087-0061497 feasting i was totally confused i said miguel aren't they feasting on your fish
+DanBarber_2010-0061614-0061754 yes he said
+DanBarber_2010-0062456-0062917 we lose twenty percent of our fish and fish eggs to birds
+DanBarber_2010-0063035-0063400 well the last year this property had six hundred thousand birds on it
+DanBarber_2010-0063475-0063924 more than two hundred and fifty different species it's become today the largest
+DanBarber_2010-0063978-0064130 and one of the most important
+DanBarber_2010-0064279-0064536 private bird sanctuaries in all of europe
+DanBarber_2010-0064673-0065174 i said miguel isn't a thriving bird population like the last thing you want on a fish farm
+DanBarber_2010-0065392-0065547 he shook his head no he said
+DanBarber_2010-0065547-0065792 we farm extensively
+DanBarber_2010-0065838-0066012 not intensively
+DanBarber_2010-0066153-0066351 this is an ecological network
+DanBarber_2010-0066493-0067137 the flamingos eat the shrimp the shrimp eat the phytoplankton so the pinker the belly the better the system
+DanBarber_2010-0067378-0067682 okay so let's review a farm that doesn't feed its animals
+DanBarber_2010-0067776-0068025 and a farm that measures its success
+DanBarber_2010-0068100-0068290 on the health of its predators
+DanBarber_2010-0068363-0068633 a fish farm but also a bird sanctuary
+DanBarber_2010-0068712-0069048 oh and by the way those flamingos they shouldn't even be there in the first place
+DanBarber_2010-0069101-0069722 they brood in a town a hundred and fifty miles away where the soil conditions are better for building nests
+DanBarber_2010-0069830-0070251 every morning they fly one hundred and fifty miles into the farm
+DanBarber_2010-0070394-0070703 and every evening they fly one hundred and fifty miles back
+DanBarber_2010-0071423-0072113 they do that because they're able to follow the broken white line of highway a ninety two
+DanBarber_2010-0072303-0072400 no kidding
+DanBarber_2010-0072576-0073068 you know i was imagining a march of the penguins thing you know so i looked at miguel i said
+DanBarber_2010-0073068-0073446 miguel do they fly one hundred and fifty miles to the farm
+DanBarber_2010-0073446-0073788 and then do they fly one hundred and fifty miles back at night
+DanBarber_2010-0073847-0074042 do they do that for the children
+DanBarber_2010-0074165-0074436 he looked at me like i had just quoted a whitney houston song
+DanBarber_2010-0074809-0075061 he said no they do it because the food's better
+DanBarber_2010-0075404-0075917 you know i didn't mention the skin of my beloved fish
+DanBarber_2010-0076114-0076646 which was delicious and i don't like fish skin i don't like it seared i don't like it crispy
+DanBarber_2010-0076701-0076927 it's that acrid tar like flavor
+DanBarber_2010-0076927-0077319 i almost never cook with it
+DanBarber_2010-0077319-0077893 yet when i tasted it at that restaurant in southern spain it tasted not at all like fish skin
+DanBarber_2010-0078008-0078185 it tasted sweet and clean
+DanBarber_2010-0078271-0078514 like you were taking a bite of the ocean
+DanBarber_2010-0078574-0079349 i mentioned that to miguel and he nodded he said the skin acts like a sponge it's the last defense before anything enters the body it evolved
+DanBarber_2010-0079349-0079613 to soak up impurities and then he added
+DanBarber_2010-0079673-0079983 but our water has no impurities
+DanBarber_2010-0080207-0080499 okay a farm that doesn't feed its fish
+DanBarber_2010-0080634-0080923 a farm that measures its success
+DanBarber_2010-0080923-0081110 by the success of its predators
+DanBarber_2010-0081181-0081391 and then i realized when he says
+DanBarber_2010-0081391-0082273 a farm that has no impurities he made a big understatement because the water that flows through that farm comes in from the guadalquivir river
+DanBarber_2010-0082334-0082802 it's a river that carries with it all the things that rivers tend to carry these days
+DanBarber_2010-0082865-0083146 chemical contaminants pesticide runoff
+DanBarber_2010-0083197-0083423 and when it works its way through the system
+DanBarber_2010-0083562-0083908 and leaves the water is cleaner than when it entered
+DanBarber_2010-0083980-0084238 the system is so healthy it purifies the water
+DanBarber_2010-0084369-0084757 so not just a farm that doesn't feed its animals not just a farm that measures its health
+DanBarber_2010-0084820-0085015 health success by the health of its predators
+DanBarber_2010-0085085-0085415 but a farm that's literally a water purification plant
+DanBarber_2010-0085611-0085796 and not just for those fish
+DanBarber_2010-0085982-0086400 but for you and me as well because when that water leaves it dumps out into the atlantic
+DanBarber_2010-0086695-0087071 a drop in the ocean i know but i'll take it and so should you
+DanBarber_2010-0087177-0087373 because this love story
+DanBarber_2010-0087550-0087899 however romantic is also instructive
+DanBarber_2010-0087899-0088282 you might say it's a recipe for the future of good food
+DanBarber_2010-0088389-0088673 whether we're talking about bass or beef cattle
+DanBarber_2010-0088805-0089444 what we need now is a radically new conception of agriculture one in which the food actually tastes good
+DanBarber_2010-0090255-0090408 but for a lot people
+DanBarber_2010-0090408-0090654 that's a bit too radical
+DanBarber_2010-0090654-0090948 we're not realists us foodies
+DanBarber_2010-0090948-0091156 we're lovers
+DanBarber_2010-0091156-0091613 we love farmers markets we love small family farms
+DanBarber_2010-0091613-0091938 we talk about local food we eat organic
+DanBarber_2010-0092147-0092542 and when you suggest these are the things that will insure
+DanBarber_2010-0092542-0093049 the future of good food someone somewhere stands up and says hey guy
+DanBarber_2010-0093122-0093510 i love pink flamingos but how are you going to feed the world how are you going to feed the world
+DanBarber_2010-0093687-0094235 how are you going to feed the world can i be honest i don't love that question
+DanBarber_2010-0094404-0094856 no not because we already produce enough calories to more than feed the world
+DanBarber_2010-0094946-0095109 one billion people
+DanBarber_2010-0095173-0095522 will go hungry today one billion that's more than ever before
+DanBarber_2010-0095621-0096023 because of gross inequalities in distribution not tonnage
+DanBarber_2010-0096217-0096719 no i don't love this question because it's determined the logic of our food system for the last fifty years
+DanBarber_2010-0096799-0096948 feed grain to herbivores
+DanBarber_2010-0097006-0097397 pesticides to monocultures chemicals to soil chicken to fish
+DanBarber_2010-0097591-0097931 and all along agribusiness has simply asked
+DanBarber_2010-0098108-0098433 if we're feeding more people more cheaply how terrible could that be
+DanBarber_2010-0098694-0099142 that's been the motivation it's been the justification it's been the business plan
+DanBarber_2010-0099236-0099501 of american agriculture we should call it what it is
+DanBarber_2010-0099642-0099776 a business in liquidation
+DanBarber_2010-0099927-0100561 a business that's quickly eroding ecological capital that makes that very production possible
+DanBarber_2010-0100561-0100966 that's not a business and it isn't agriculture
+DanBarber_2010-0100966-0101686 our bread basket is threatened today not because of diminishing supply but because of diminishing resources
+DanBarber_2010-0101782-0102205 not by the latest combine and tractor invention but by fertile land
+DanBarber_2010-0102297-0102513 not by pumps but by fresh water
+DanBarber_2010-0102586-0103251 not by chainsaws but by forests and not by fishing boats and nets but by fish in the sea want to feed the world
+DanBarber_2010-0103309-0103591 let's start by asking how are we going to feed ourselves
+DanBarber_2010-0103782-0104310 or better how can we create conditions that enable every community
+DanBarber_2010-0104310-0104526 to feed itself
+DanBarber_2010-0105226-0105525 to do that don't look
+DanBarber_2010-0105525-0106301 at the agribusiness model for the future it's really old and it's tired it's high on capital chemistry and machines
+DanBarber_2010-0106359-0106607 and it's never produced anything really good to eat
+DanBarber_2010-0106849-0107177 instead let's look to the ecological model
+DanBarber_2010-0107239-0107513 that's the one that relies on two billion years
+DanBarber_2010-0107584-0107816 of on the job experience
+DanBarber_2010-0108213-0108469 farms that aren't worlds unto themselves
+DanBarber_2010-0108469-0108835 farms that
+DanBarber_2010-0108835-0109434 restore instead of deplete farms that farm extensively instead of just intensively
+DanBarber_2010-0109494-0109931 farmers that are not just producers but experts in relationships
+DanBarber_2010-0109931-0110106 because they're the ones
+DanBarber_2010-0110106-0110282 that are experts in flavor too
+DanBarber_2010-0110402-0110600 and if i'm going to be really honest
+DanBarber_2010-0110661-0110851 they're a better chef than i'll ever be
+DanBarber_2010-0110851-0111204 you know i'm okay with that
+DanBarber_2010-0111204-0111624 because if that's the future of good food it's going to be delicious thank you
+DanielKahneman_2010-0001580-0001832 everybody talks about happiness these days
+DanielKahneman_2010-0001946-0002528 i had somebody count the number of books with happiness in the title published in the last five years
+DanielKahneman_2010-0002528-0002975 and they gave up after about forty and there were many more
+DanielKahneman_2010-0002975-0003857 there is a huge wave of interest in happiness among researchers there is a lot of happiness coaching everybody would like to make people happier
+DanielKahneman_2010-0004006-0004852 but in spite of all this flood of work there are several cognitive traps that sort of make it almost impossible to think straight about happiness
+DanielKahneman_2010-0004852-0006211 and my talk today will be mostly about these cognitive traps this applies to laypeople thinking about their own happiness and it applies to scholars thinking about happiness because it turns out we're just as messed up as anybody else is
+DanielKahneman_2010-0006342-0007634 the first of these trap is a reluctance to admit complexity it turns out that the word happiness is just not a useful word anymore because we apply it to too many different things
+DanielKahneman_2010-0007634-0008899 i think there is one particular meaning for to which we might restrict it but by and large this is something that we'll have to give up and we'll have to adopt the more complicated view of what well being is
+DanielKahneman_2010-0008899-0010499 the second trap is a confusion between experience and memory basically it's between being happy in your life and being happy about your life or happy with your life and those are two very different concepts and they're both lumped in the notion of happiness
+DanielKahneman_2010-0010499-0011979 and the third is it's the focusing illusion and it's the unfortunate fact that we can't think about any circumstance that affects well being without distorting its importance i mean this is a real cognitive trap there's just no way of getting it right
+DanielKahneman_2010-0012127-0012679 now i'd like to start with an example of somebody
+DanielKahneman_2010-0012679-0013063 who had a question and answer session after one of my lectures
+DanielKahneman_2010-0013063-0013647 reported a story and that was the story he said he'd been listening to the symphony
+DanielKahneman_2010-0013647-0014677 and it was absolutely glorious music and at the very end of the recording there was a dreadful screeching sound and then he added really quite emotionally
+DanielKahneman_2010-0014677-0014982 it ruined the whole experience
+DanielKahneman_2010-0014982-0015251 but it hadn't
+DanielKahneman_2010-0015251-0016819 what it had ruined were the memory of the experience he had had the experience he had had twenty minutes of glorious music they counted for nothing because he was left with a memory the memory was ruined and the memory was all that he had gotten to keep
+DanielKahneman_2010-0016819-0017863 what this is telling us really is that we might be thinking of ourselves and of other people in terms of two selves there is an experiencing self
+DanielKahneman_2010-0017863-0018198 who lives in the present
+DanielKahneman_2010-0018198-0019632 and knows the present is capable of re living the past but basically it has only the present it's the experiencing self that the doctor approaches you know when the doctor asks does it hurt now when i touch you here
+DanielKahneman_2010-0019632-0019893 and then there is a remembering self
+DanielKahneman_2010-0019893-0020282 and the remembering self is the one that keeps score
+DanielKahneman_2010-0020282-0020793 and maintains the story of our life and it's the one that the doctor
+DanielKahneman_2010-0020793-0021056 approaches in asking the question
+DanielKahneman_2010-0021249-0022118 how have you been feeling lately or how was your trip to albania or something like that those are two very different entities the experiencing self
+DanielKahneman_2010-0022118-0022829 and the and the remembering self and getting confused between them is part of the mess of the notion of happiness
+DanielKahneman_2010-0022960-0023341 now the remembering self
+DanielKahneman_2010-0023341-0023780 is a storyteller and that really starts with a basic
+DanielKahneman_2010-0023780-0025112 response of our memory it starts immediately we don't only tell stories when we set out to tell stories our memory tells us stories that is what we get to keep from our experiences is a story
+DanielKahneman_2010-0025112-0025498 and let me begin with one example
+DanielKahneman_2010-0025498-0026823 this is an old study those are actual patients undergoing a painful procedure i won't go into detail it's no longer painful these days but it was painful when this when this study was run in the nineteen nineties
+DanielKahneman_2010-0026823-0027700 they were asked to report on their pain every sixty seconds and here are two patients those are their recordings and you are asked
+DanielKahneman_2010-0027700-0028636 who of them suffered more and it's a very easy question i mean clearly patient b suffered more his colonoscopy was longer and every
+DanielKahneman_2010-0028636-0029316 minute of pain that patient a had patient b had and more but now there is another question
+DanielKahneman_2010-0029316-0029631 how much did these patients think they suffered
+DanielKahneman_2010-0029698-0029858 and here is a surprise
+DanielKahneman_2010-0029858-0030915 and the surprise is that patient a had a much worse memory of the colonoscopy than patient b the stories of the colonoscopies were different
+DanielKahneman_2010-0030915-0031511 and because a very critical part of the story is how it ends
+DanielKahneman_2010-0031511-0033046 and neither of these stories is very inspiring or great but but one of them is distinct but one of them is distinctly worse than the other and the one that is worse is the one where pain was at its peak at the very end
+DanielKahneman_2010-0033046-0034448 it's a bad story how do we know that because we asked these people after their colonoscopy and much later too how bad was the whole thing in total and it was much worse for a than for b in memory
+DanielKahneman_2010-0034448-0035446 now this is a direct conflict between the experiencing self and the remembering self from the point of view of the experiencing self clearly b had a worse time
+DanielKahneman_2010-0035446-0037132 now what you could do with patient a and we actually ran clinical experiments and it has been done and it does work you could actually extend the colonoscopy of patient a by just keeping the tube in without jiggling it too much that will
+DanielKahneman_2010-0037132-0038478 cause the patient to suffer but just a little and much less than before and if you do that for a couple of minutes you have made the experiencing self of patient a worse off
+DanielKahneman_2010-0038478-0039174 and you have the remembering self of patient a and lot better off because now you have endowed patient a
+DanielKahneman_2010-0039174-0039589 with a better story about his experience
+DanielKahneman_2010-0039685-0039958 what defines a story
+DanielKahneman_2010-0039958-0041769 and that is true of the stories that memory delivers for us and it's also true of the stories that we make up what defines a story are changes significant moments and endings endings are very very important and in this case you know the ending dominated
+DanielKahneman_2010-0041914-0042339 now the experiencing self lives its life
+DanielKahneman_2010-0042339-0043310 continuously it has moments of experience one after the other and you can ask what happens to these moments and the answer is really straightforward
+DanielKahneman_2010-0043310-0044806 they are lost forever i mean most of the moments of our life and i calculated you know the psychological present is said to be about three seconds long which means that you know in in a life there are about six hundred million of them in a month there are about six hundred thousand
+DanielKahneman_2010-0044917-0045610 most of them don't leave a trace most of them are completely ignored by the remembering self
+DanielKahneman_2010-0045610-0046008 and yet somehow you get the sense that they should count
+DanielKahneman_2010-0046008-0046496 that what happens during these moments of experience is our life
+DanielKahneman_2010-0046496-0046973 it's the finite resource that we're spending while we're on this earth
+DanielKahneman_2010-0046973-0047905 and how to spend it would seem to be relevant but that is not the story that the remembering self keeps for us so we have the
+DanielKahneman_2010-0047905-0048733 remembering self and the experiencing self and they're really quite distinct the biggest difference between them is in the handling of time
+DanielKahneman_2010-0048859-0049741 from the point of view of the experiencing self if you have a vacation and the second week is just as good as the first then
+DanielKahneman_2010-0049741-0050858 the two week vacation is twice as good as the one week vacation that's not the way it works at all for the remembering self for the remembering self a two week vacation is barely better
+DanielKahneman_2010-0050858-0051468 than the one week vacation because there are no new memories added you have not changed the story
+DanielKahneman_2010-0051468-0052833 and in this way time is actually the critical variable that distinguishes a remembering self from an experiencing self time has very little impact on this story
+DanielKahneman_2010-0052995-0053809 now the remembering self does more than remember and tell stories it is actually the one that makes decisions
+DanielKahneman_2010-0053809-0054789 because if you have a patient who has had say two colonoscopies with two different surgeons and is deciding which of them to choose then
+DanielKahneman_2010-0054789-0055575 the one that chooses is the one that has you know the memory that is less bad and that's the the surgeon that will be chosen
+DanielKahneman_2010-0055575-0056897 the experiencing self has no voice in this choice we actually don't choose between experiences we choose between memories of experiences and even when we think about the future
+DanielKahneman_2010-0056897-0057703 we don't think of our future normally as experiences we think of our future as anticipated memories
+DanielKahneman_2010-0057703-0058236 and basically you can look at this you know as a tyranny of the remembering self
+DanielKahneman_2010-0058236-0059058 and you can think of the remembering self sort of dragging the experiencing self through experiences that the experiencing self doesn't need
+DanielKahneman_2010-0059058-0059728 i have that sense that when we go on vacations this is very frequently the case that is that it's
+DanielKahneman_2010-0059728-0060310 we we go on vacations to a very large extent in the service of our remembering self
+DanielKahneman_2010-0060408-0060748 and this is a bit hard to justify i think i mean i
+DanielKahneman_2010-0060748-0061566 how much do we consume our memories that is one of the explanations that is given for the dominance of the remembering self and
+DanielKahneman_2010-0061566-0062483 when i think about that i think about a vacation we had in antarctica a few years ago which was clearly the best vacation i've ever had and i think of it relatively often
+DanielKahneman_2010-0062483-0062883 relative to how much i think of other vacations and
+DanielKahneman_2010-0062883-0064420 i probably have consumed my memories of that three week trip i would say for about twenty five minutes in the last four years now you know if if i had ever opened the folder with the six hundred pictures in it i would have spent another hour
+DanielKahneman_2010-0064420-0064847 now that is three weeks and that is at most an hour and a half
+DanielKahneman_2010-0064847-0065787 there seems to be a discrepancy now i may be a bit extreme you know in how little appetite i have for consuming memories but even if you do more of this
+DanielKahneman_2010-0065787-0066105 there is a genuine question
+DanielKahneman_2010-0066105-0067307 why do we put so much weight on memory relative to the weight that we put on experiences so i want you to think about a thought experiment
+DanielKahneman_2010-0067307-0068102 imagine that for your next vacation you know that at the end of the the vacation all your pictures will be destroyed
+DanielKahneman_2010-0068102-0068883 and you'll get an amnesic drug so that you won't remember anything now would you choose the same vacation
+DanielKahneman_2010-0068883-0069413 and and if and if you would choose a different vacation
+DanielKahneman_2010-0069413-0070484 there is a conflict between your two selves and you need to think about how to adjudicate that conflict and it's actually not at all obvious because if you think in terms of time
+DanielKahneman_2010-0070484-0071310 then you get one answer and if you think in terms of memories you might get another answer
+DanielKahneman_2010-0071310-0072107 why do we pick them the vacations we do is a problem that confronts us you know with a choice between the two selves
+DanielKahneman_2010-0072107-0073167 now the two selves bring up two notions of happiness there are really two concepts of happiness that we can apply one per self
+DanielKahneman_2010-0073167-0074077 and so you can ask how happy is the experiencing self and then you would ask how happy are the moments in the experiencing self's life
+DanielKahneman_2010-0074077-0075091 and they're all happiness for moments is a fairly complicated process what are the emotions that can be measured and by the way now we are capable of
+DanielKahneman_2010-0075091-0075676 getting a pretty good idea of the happiness of the experiencing self over time
+DanielKahneman_2010-0075859-0077361 if you ask for the happiness of the remembering self it's a completely different thing this is not about how happily a person lives it is about how satisfied or pleased the person is when that person thinks about her life
+DanielKahneman_2010-0077361-0078381 very different notions anyone who doesn't distinguish those notions is going to mess up the study of happiness and i belong to a crowd of students of well being
+DanielKahneman_2010-0078381-0079856 who've been messing up the study of happiness for a long time in precisely this way the the distinction between the happiness of the experiencing self and the satisfaction of the remembering self has been recognized in recent years
+DanielKahneman_2010-0079856-0081150 and there are now efforts to measure the two separately the gallup organization has a world poll with more that half a million people have been asked questions about what they think of their life and about
+DanielKahneman_2010-0081150-0082087 their experiences and there there have been other efforts along those lines so in recent years we have begun to learn about the happiness of the two selves
+DanielKahneman_2010-0082087-0082668 and the main lesson i think that we have learned is they are really different
+DanielKahneman_2010-0082668-0083634 you can know how satisfied somebody is with their life and that really doesn't teach you much about how happily they're living their life
+DanielKahneman_2010-0083634-0084866 and vice versa you know just to give you a sense of the correlation the correlation is about point five what that means is if you met somebody and you were told oh his father is six feet tall
+DanielKahneman_2010-0084866-0085895 would how much would you know about his height well you would know something about his height but there's a lot of uncertainty you have that much uncertainty if i tell you that somebody
+DanielKahneman_2010-0085895-0086702 ranked their life eight on a scale of ten you have a lot of uncertainty about how happy they are with their experiencing self
+DanielKahneman_2010-0086702-0088235 so the correlation is low we know something about what controls satisfaction of the happiness self we know that money is very important goals are very important we know that happiness is mainly
+DanielKahneman_2010-0088235-0088560 being satisfied with people that we like
+DanielKahneman_2010-0088560-0089669 spending time with people that we like there are other pleasures but this is dominant so if you want to maximize the happiness of the two selves you are going to end up doing very different things
+DanielKahneman_2010-0089669-0090768 the bottom line of what i've said here is that we really should not think of happiness as a substitute for well being it is a completely different notion
+DanielKahneman_2010-0090899-0091716 now very quickly another reason we cannot think straight about happiness is that
+DanielKahneman_2010-0091927-0093025 we do not attend the same to the same things when we think about life and we actually live so if you ask the simple question of how happy people are in california
+DanielKahneman_2010-0093025-0094224 you are not going to get to the correct answer when you ask that question you think people must be happier in california if if say you live in ohio
+DanielKahneman_2010-0094224-0095275 and what happens is when you think about living in california you are thinking of the contrast between california and other places
+DanielKahneman_2010-0095275-0096588 and that contrast say is in climate well it turns out that climate is not very important to the experiencing self and is not even very important to the reflective self that decides how happy people are
+DanielKahneman_2010-0096588-0097057 but now because the reflective self is in charge
+DanielKahneman_2010-0097057-0098070 you may end up some people may end up moving to california and it's sort of interesting to trace what is going to happen to people who move to california in the hope of getting happier
+DanielKahneman_2010-0098070-0098558 well their experiencing self is not going to get happier we know that
+DanielKahneman_2010-0098714-0099039 but one thing will happen they will think they are happier
+DanielKahneman_2010-0099039-0099822 because when they think about it they'll be reminded of how horrible the weather was in ohio
+DanielKahneman_2010-0099822-0100627 and they will feel they made the right decision it is very difficult to think straight about well being and
+DanielKahneman_2010-0100627-0101099 i hope i have given you a sense of how difficult it is thank you
+DanielKahneman_2010-0101553-0101804 thank you i've got a question for you
+DanielKahneman_2010-0102006-0102484 thank thank you so much now when we were on the phone a few weeks ago
+DanielKahneman_2010-0102484-0103049 you mentioned to me that there was quite an interesting result came out of that gallup survey
+DanielKahneman_2010-0103049-0103421 is that is that something you can share since you do have a few moments left now sure
+DanielKahneman_2010-0103421-0104644 sure i think the most interesting result that we found in the gallup survey is a number which we absolutely did not expect to find we found that with respect to the happiness of the experiencing self
+DanielKahneman_2010-0104806-0105419 when you know we looked at how at how feelings vary with income
+DanielKahneman_2010-0105419-0106844 and it turns out that below an income of sixty thousand dollars a year for americans and that's a very large sample of americans like six hundred thousand so it's a large representative sample below an income of six hundred thousand dollars a year
+DanielKahneman_2010-0106844-0106939 six sixty thousand
+DanielKahneman_2010-0106939-0107048 sixty thousand
+DanielKahneman_2010-0107272-0108616 sixty thousand sixty thousand dollars a year people are unhappy and they get progressively unhappier the poorer they get above that we get an absolutely flat line i mean i've rarely seen lines so flat
+DanielKahneman_2010-0108616-0109448 clearly what is happening is money does not buy you experiential happiness but lack of money certainly buys you misery
+DanielKahneman_2010-0109448-0109936 and we can measure that misery very very clearly in terms of
+DanielKahneman_2010-0109936-0110809 the other self the remembering self you get a different story the more money you earn the more satisfied you are that does not hold for emotions
+DanielKahneman_2010-0110809-0111390 but danny the the whole american endeavor is about you know life liberty the pursuit of happiness
+DanielKahneman_2010-0111501-0112274 if people took seriously that finding i mean it seems to turn upside down everything we believe about
+DanielKahneman_2010-0112274-0113273 you know for example taxation policy and so forth is is there any chance that politicians that the country generally would take a finding like that seriously and run public policy based on it
+DanielKahneman_2010-0113273-0114682 you know i think that there is recognition of the role of happiness research in public policy the recognition is going to be slow in the united states no question about that but in the uk it is happening and in other countries it is happening
+DanielKahneman_2010-0114682-0115296 people are recognizing that they ought to be thinking of policy of happiness when they think of public policy
+DanielKahneman_2010-0115368-0116755 it's going to take a while and it's not going to and people are going to debate whether they want to study experience happiness or whether they want to study life evaluation so we need to have that debate fairly soon how to enhance happiness
+DanielKahneman_2010-0116755-0118016 goes very different ways depending on how you think and whether you think of the remembering self or you think of the experiencing self this is going to influence policy i think in years to come in the united states efforts are being made
+DanielKahneman_2010-0118016-0118829 to measure the experience happiness of the population this is going to be i think within the next decade or two part of national statistics
+DanielKahneman_2010-0118829-0119225 well it seems to me this issue will or at least should be
+DanielKahneman_2010-0119225-0119831 the most interesting policy discussion to track over the next few years thank you so much for inventing behavioral economics
+DanielKahneman_2010-0119831-0119944 thank you danny kahneman
+EricMead_2009P-0001843-0003166 for some time i have been interested in the placebo effect which might seem like an odd thing for a magician to be interested in unless you think of it in the terms that i do which is something fake
+EricMead_2009P-0003166-0004567 is believed in enough by somebody that it becomes something real in other words sugar pills have a measurable effect in certain kinds of studies the placebo effect just because the person thinks
+EricMead_2009P-0004567-0006338 that what's happening to them is a pharmaceutical or some sort of a for pain management for example if they believe it enough there is a measurable effect in the body called the placebo effect something fake becomes something real because of someone's perception of it
+EricMead_2009P-0006338-0008004 in order for us to understand each other i want to start by showing you a rudimentary very simple magic trick and i'm going to show you how it works this is a trick that's been in every children's magic book since at least the nineteen fifties i learned it myself from cub scout magic in the nineteen seventies
+EricMead_2009P-0008004-0008997 i'll do it for you and then i'll explain it and then i'll explain why i explained it ok so here is what happens the knife which you can examine my hand which you could examine
+EricMead_2009P-0008997-0009949 i'm just going to hold the knife in my fist like this i'll get my sleeve back and to make sure nothing goes up or down my sleeve i'm just going to squeeze my wrist right here right
+EricMead_2009P-0009949-0010780 that way you can see that at no time can anything travel as long as i'm squeezing there nothing can go up or down my sleeve and the object of this is quite simple
+EricMead_2009P-0010870-0011388 i'm going to open my hand and hopefully if all is well
+EricMead_2009P-0011408-0012109 my pure animal magnetism will hold the knife in fact it's held so tightly in place that i can shake it
+EricMead_2009P-0012109-0013091 and the knife does not come off nothing goes up or down my sleeve no trickery and you can examine everything ta da
+EricMead_2009P-0013346-0014883 so this is a trick that i often teach to young children that are interested in magic because you can learn a great deal about deception by studying this very even though it's a very simple trick methodologically probably many of you in the room know this trick what happens is this i hold the knife in my hand
+EricMead_2009P-0014883-0015996 i say i'm going to grab hold of my wrist to make sure nothing goes up or down my sleeve that is a lie the reason i'm holding onto my wrist is because that's actually the secret
+EricMead_2009P-0015996-0017009 of the illusion in a moment when my hand moves from facing you to being away from you this finger right here my index finger is just going to shift from where it is to a position
+EricMead_2009P-0017009-0017267 pointing out like this
+EricMead_2009P-0017267-0017433 nice one
+EricMead_2009P-0017433-0017708 someone who didn't have a childhood is out there
+EricMead_2009P-0017876-0020001 so it goes like this from here right and as i move around my finger shifts so we could talk about why this is deceptive why you don't notice there are only three fingers down here because the mind and the way it processes information it doesn't count one two three it groups them but that's not really what this is about right and then i open my hand up obviously it's clinging there not by animal magnetism but by
+EricMead_2009P-0020001-0020775 chicanery my index finger being there and then when i close my finger same thing as i move back
+EricMead_2009P-0020775-0021668 this motion kind of covers the moving back of my finger i take this hand away you give the knife out there is a trick you can do for your friends and neighbors thanks now
+EricMead_2009P-0021744-0022069 what does that have to do with the placebo effect well
+EricMead_2009P-0022286-0023119 i read a study a year or so ago that really blew my mind wide open i'm not a doctor or a researcher so this to me was an astonishing thing
+EricMead_2009P-0023119-0025228 turns out that if you administer a placebo in the form of a white pill that's like aspirin shaped it's just a round white pill it has some certain measurable effect but if you change the form that you give the placebo in like you make a smaller pill and color it blue and stamp a letter into it it is actually measurably more effective
+EricMead_2009P-0025228-0026154 even though neither one of these things has any pharmaceutical they're sugar pills but a white pill is not as good as a blue pill what
+EricMead_2009P-0026202-0026914 that really flipped me out turns out though that that's not even where it stops if you have capsules
+EricMead_2009P-0026914-0028352 they are more effective than tablets in any form a colored capsule that's yellow on one end and red on the other is better than a white capsule dosage has something to do with this you know one pill twice a day is not as good at three pills
+EricMead_2009P-0028352-0028677 i don't remember the statistic now sorry but the point is
+EricMead_2009P-0028883-0029617 these dosages have something to do with it and the form has something and if you want the ultimate in placebo you've go to the needle
+EricMead_2009P-0029617-0031316 right a syringe with some inert a couple ccs of some inert something and you inject this into a patient well this is such a powerful image in their mind it it's so much stronger than the white pill it's a really this graph well i'll show it to you some other time when we have slides the point is
+EricMead_2009P-0031463-0032676 the white pill is not as good as the blue pill is not as good as the capsule is not as good as the needle and none of it has any real pharmaceutical quality it's only your belief that makes it real
+EricMead_2009P-0032676-0034050 in your body and makes a stronger effect i wanted to see if i could take that idea and apply it to a magic trick and take something that is obviously a fake trick and make it seem real
+EricMead_2009P-0034369-0035504 and we know from that study that when you want reality you go to the needle this is a seven inch hat pin it's very very sharp
+EricMead_2009P-0035504-0036061 and i'm going to just sterilize it a tiny bit ok
+EricMead_2009P-0036061-0037489 this is really my flesh this is not damian's special grown flesh that's my skin right there this is not a hollywood special effect i'm going to pierce my skin and run this needle through to the other side
+EricMead_2009P-0037489-0039466 if you're queasy if you if you faint easily i was doing this for some friends in the hotel room last night and some people that i didn't know and one woman almost passed out so i suggest if you if you get queasy easy that you look away for about the next thirty in fact you know what i'll do the first bad part behind it you'll get to see you can look away too if you'd like to
+EricMead_2009P-0039466-0040275 so here is what happens right here the beginning of my flesh at the lower part of my arm i just make a little pierce
+EricMead_2009P-0040275-0041208 i'm sorry man am i freaking you out ok and then just through my skin a tiny bit and out the other side like this
+EricMead_2009P-0041397-0041759 now essentially we're in the same position we were in with the knife trick
+EricMead_2009P-0042253-0042396 sort of
+EricMead_2009P-0042396-0043267 but you can't count my fingers right now can you so let me show them to you that's one two three four five yes
+EricMead_2009P-0043514-0044266 i know what people think when they see this they go well he's certainly not dumb enough to stab himself through the skin to entertain us for a few minutes
+EricMead_2009P-0044329-0044521 so let me give you a little peek
+EricMead_2009P-0044613-0044815 how's that look out there pretty good
+EricMead_2009P-0045043-0045125 yeah i know
+EricMead_2009P-0045303-0046443 and the people in the back go okay i didn't really see that people in the satellite room are like starting to move in now let me give you good close look at this that really is my skin that is not a hollywood special effect that's my flesh
+EricMead_2009P-0046443-0047040 and i can twist that around i'm sorry if you're getting queasy look away don't look at the thing
+EricMead_2009P-0047040-0047574 people in the back or people on video years from now watching this will go well yeah that looks kind of neat in
+EricMead_2009P-0047574-0048181 some sort of effect there but if it were real he would be see there's a hole there and a hole there if it were real he would be bleeding
+EricMead_2009P-0048181-0048374 let me work up some blood for you
+EricMead_2009P-0048831-0049097 yes there it is
+EricMead_2009P-0051216-0052077 normally now i would take the needle out i would clean off my arm and i would show you that there are no wounds but i think in this context and with the idea of
+EricMead_2009P-0052077-0052750 taking something fake and making it into something real i'm just going to leave it there and walk off the stage
+EricMead_2009P-0053024-0053644 i will be seeing you several times over the next few days i hope you're looking forward to that thank you very much
+GaryFlake_2010-0001605-0002712 if i can leave you with one big idea today it's that the whole of the data in which we consume is greater that the sum of the parts and instead of thinking about information overload
+GaryFlake_2010-0002712-0004072 what i'd like you to think about is how we can use information so that patterns pop and we can see trends that would otherwise be invisible so what we're looking at right here is a typical mortality chart organized by age this
+GaryFlake_2010-0004072-0005245 tool that i'm using here is a little experiment it's called pivot and with pivot what i can do is i can choose to filter in one particular cause of deaths say accidents and right away i see there's a different pattern that emerges
+GaryFlake_2010-0005245-0006253 this is because in the mid area here people are at their most active and over here they're at their most frail we can step back out again and then reorganize the data by cause of death
+GaryFlake_2010-0006253-0007070 seeing that circulatory diseases and cancer are the usual suspects but not for everyone if we go ahead and we filter
+GaryFlake_2010-0007070-0007797 by age say forty years or less we see that accidents are actually the greatest cause that people have to be worried about
+GaryFlake_2010-0007797-0008762 and if you drill into that it's especially the case for men so you get the idea that viewing information viewing data in this way is a lot like
+GaryFlake_2010-0008762-0009589 swimming in an living information info graphic and if we can do this for raw data why not do it for content as well
+GaryFlake_2010-0009589-0010306 so what we have right here is the cover of every single sports illustrated ever produced
+GaryFlake_2010-0010306-0011591 it's all here it's all on the web you can go back to your rooms and try this after my talk with pivot you can drill into a decade you can drill into a particular year you can jump right into a specific issue
+GaryFlake_2010-0011591-0012755 so i'm looking at this i see the athletes that have appeared in this issue the sports i'm a lance armstrong fan so i'll go ahead and i'll click on that which reveals for me all the issues in which lance armstrong's been a part of
+GaryFlake_2010-0013068-0014141 now if i want to just kind of take a peek at these i might think well what about taking a look at all of cycling so i can step back and expand on that and i see greg lemond now
+GaryFlake_2010-0014141-0015469 and so you get the idea that when you navigate over information this way going narrower broader backing in backing out you're not searching you're not browsing you're doing something that's actually a little bit different it's in between and
+GaryFlake_2010-0015469-0018126 we think it changes the way information can be used so i want to extrapolate on this idea a bit with something that's a little bit crazy what we're done here is we've taken every single wikipedia page and we've reduced it down to a little summary so the summary consisted of just little synopsis and an icon to indicate the topical area that it comes from i'm only showing the top five hundred most popular wikipedia pages right here but even in this limited view
+GaryFlake_2010-0018126-0018976 we can do a lot of things right away we get a sense of what are the topical domains that are most popular on wikipedia i'm going to go ahead and select government
+GaryFlake_2010-0018976-0019895 now having selected government i can now see that the wikipedia categories that most frequently correspond to that are time magazine people of the year
+GaryFlake_2010-0019895-0021557 so this is really important because this is an insight that was not contained within any one wikipedia page it's only possible to see that insight when you step back and look at all of them looking at one of these particular summaries i can then drill into the concept of
+GaryFlake_2010-0021557-0022461 time magazine person of the year bringing up all of them so looking at these people i can see that the majority come from government
+GaryFlake_2010-0022461-0022945 some have come from natural sciences
+GaryFlake_2010-0022945-0023252 some fewer still have come from business
+GaryFlake_2010-0023317-0023585 there's my boss and
+GaryFlake_2010-0023711-0023977 one has come from music
+GaryFlake_2010-0024060-0024501 and interestingly enough bono is also a ted prize winner
+GaryFlake_2010-0024501-0025648 so we can go jump and take a look at all the ted prize winners so you see we're navigating the web for the first time as if it's actually a web not page to page but at a higher level of abstraction
+GaryFlake_2010-0025648-0026888 and so i want to show you one other thing that may catch you a little bit by surprise i'm just showing the new york times website here so pivot this application i don't want to call it a browser it's really not a browser
+GaryFlake_2010-0026888-0027889 but you can view web pages with it and we bring that zoomable technology to every single web page like this so i can step back
+GaryFlake_2010-0027889-0029249 pop right back in to a specific section now the reason why this is important is because by virtue of just viewing web pages in this way i can look at my entire browsing history in the exact same way so i can drill in to what i've done
+GaryFlake_2010-0029249-0030180 over specific time frames here in fact is the state of all the demo that i just gave and i can sort of replay some stuff that i was looking at earlier today
+GaryFlake_2010-0030180-0030858 and if i want to step back and look at everything i can slice and dice my history perhaps by my search history
+GaryFlake_2010-0030858-0031869 here i was doing some nepotistic searching looking for bing over here for live labs pivot and from these i can drill into the web page and just launch them again it's one metaphor
+GaryFlake_2010-0031869-0032556 repurposed multiple times and in each case it makes the whole greater than the sum of the parts with the data so
+GaryFlake_2010-0032556-0033425 right now in this world we think about data as being this curse we talk about the curse of information overload we talk about
+GaryFlake_2010-0033425-0033991 drowning in data what if we can actually turn that upside down and turn the web upside down
+GaryFlake_2010-0033991-0035282 so that instead of navigating from one thing to the next we get used to the habit of being able to go from many things to many things and then being able to see the patterns that were otherwise hidden if we can do that then instead
+GaryFlake_2010-0035282-0036714 of being trapped in data we might actually extract information and instead of dealing just with information we can tease out knowledge and if we get the knowledge then maybe even there's wisdom to be found so with that i thank you
+JamesCameron_2010-0001675-0002796 i grew up on a steady diet of science fiction in high school i i took a bus to school an hour each way every day and i was always absorbed in a book
+JamesCameron_2010-0002796-0004181 science fiction book which took my mind to other worlds and satisfied this in in a in a narrative form this insatiable sense of curiosity that i had and and
+JamesCameron_2010-0004181-0004572 you know that curiosity also manifested itself in in
+JamesCameron_2010-0004572-0005155 the fact that whenever i wasn't in school i was i was out in the woods hiking and taking
+JamesCameron_2010-0005155-0006248 samples frogs and snakes and bugs and pond water and bringing it back looking at it under the microscope i was you know i was a real science geek but it was all about trying to understand
+JamesCameron_2010-0006248-0007081 understand the world understand the the limits of of possibility and my you know love of of science fiction
+JamesCameron_2010-0007081-0007718 actually seemed to be mirrored in the world around me because what was happening this is in the late sixties
+JamesCameron_2010-0007718-0009147 you know we were 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 you know a wondrous world that we could never really have
+JamesCameron_2010-0009147-0009668 previously imagined so that seemed to resonate with the whole science fiction part of it
+JamesCameron_2010-0009668-0011129 and i was a an artist i could draw i could paint and and i i found that because there weren't you know video games and this saturation of cg movies and and all of this imagery in the media landscape
+JamesCameron_2010-0011129-0012357 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 on the screen the movie screen in our heads and so my
+JamesCameron_2010-0012357-0013647 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 you know doodling behind the behind the textbook and
+JamesCameron_2010-0013647-0014515 that was the creativity had to had to find its outlet somehow and an interesting thing happened the the jacques cousteau
+JamesCameron_2010-0014515-0015778 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 that seemed pretty pretty darn unlikely
+JamesCameron_2010-0015778-0016681 but i could that was a world i could really go to right here on earth that was as as rich and exotic as anything that i had imagined from reading these books
+JamesCameron_2010-0016681-0017803 so i decided i was going to become a scuba diver at the age of fifteen and the only problem with that was that i lived in a little village in canada six hundred miles from the nearest ocean
+JamesCameron_2010-0017803-0018791 but i didn't let that daunt me i pestered my father until he finally found a a scuba class in in buffalo new york right across the border from where we live
+JamesCameron_2010-0018791-0019437 and i actually got certified in a pool in a ymca in the dead of winter in buffalo new york and
+JamesCameron_2010-0019437-0020430 i didn't see the ocean a a real ocean for another two years until we until we moved to california you know since then you know in in the in the intervening
+JamesCameron_2010-0020430-0021481 forty years i've i've spent about three thousand hours underwater and five hundred hours of that was in submersibles and i've learned that
+JamesCameron_2010-0021481-0022229 that that deep ocean environment and even the shallow oceans are so rich with with amazing life
+JamesCameron_2010-0022229-0022873 that really is beyond beyond our imagination you know nature's imagination is so
+JamesCameron_2010-0022873-0024014 so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination i still to this day stand in absolute awe of what i what i see when i make these dives and my love affair with the ocean is
+JamesCameron_2010-0024014-0024754 is ongoing and and just as strong as it ever was but when i when i chose a career as an adult
+JamesCameron_2010-0024754-0025256 it was film making and that seemed to be the best way to reconcile
+JamesCameron_2010-0025256-0026705 this urge i had to tell stories with my my urges to create images and i was as a kid constantly drawing comic books and so on so film making was the way to put put pictures and stories together and that made sense and of course the stories that
+JamesCameron_2010-0026705-0027848 i chose to tell were science fiction stories terminator aliens and the abyss and with the abyss i i was putting together my love of underwater and diving with film making so you know
+JamesCameron_2010-0027848-0028533 merging the two passions something interesting came out of the abyss which was
+JamesCameron_2010-0028533-0029382 that to solve a specific narrative problem on that film which was to create this kind of liquid water creature
+JamesCameron_2010-0029382-0030136 we actually embraced computer generated animation cg and
+JamesCameron_2010-0030136-0031025 this this resulted in the first soft surface character cg animation that was ever in a in a movie
+JamesCameron_2010-0031025-0032997 and even though the film didn't make any money barely broke even i should say i witnessed something amazing which is that the 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0032997-0034378 and so that that that got me very excited and i thought wow this is this is something that needs to be embraced into the cinematic art so with terminator two which was my next film we took that much farther working with with ilm we created the liquid metal
+JamesCameron_2010-0034378-0035683 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0035683-0036761 you know drawing a line through those those two two dots of of experience came to this this is going to be a whole new world this was a whole new world of creativity for
+JamesCameron_2010-0036761-0037793 for film artists so i i started a company with stan winston my good friend stan winston who is the the the premier make up and and creature designer
+JamesCameron_2010-0037793-0039422 at that time and it was called digital domain and the concept of the company was that we would leap frog past the kind of analog processes of 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0039422-0040288 but we found ourselves lagging in the in the mid nineties in the creature and character design stuff that we had actually founded the company to do
+JamesCameron_2010-0040288-0040961 so i wrote this piece called avatar which was meant to absolutely push the envelope
+JamesCameron_2010-0040961-0042394 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0042394-0043693 you know 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0043766-0044544 and you know i i went and pitched it to the studio as romeo and juliet on a ship it's going to be this epic romance passionate
+JamesCameron_2010-0044544-0045285 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0045701-0047036 and that's the truth now the studio didn't know that but i convinced them i said 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0047209-0048197 sounds crazy but this goes back to that theme about you know your imagination creating a reality because we actually created a reality where six months later i find myself in a russian submersible
+JamesCameron_2010-0048197-0048951 two and a half miles down in the north atlantic looking at the real titanic through through a view port not a movie not hd for real
+JamesCameron_2010-0049251-0050136 now that that blew my mind and you know 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0050136-0051700 dive these deep dives was like a like a space mission you know where it was 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0051700-0052297 and you know i i thought wow i'm i'm like living in a science fiction movie this is really cool
+JamesCameron_2010-0052297-0053526 and so i 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0053526-0054687 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0054687-0056291 i was seeing creatures at hydrothermal vents and and sometimes things that i had 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0056291-0057780 and had to do more and so i actually made a kind of curious decision after the success of titanic i said okay you know 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0057780-0059409 and so you know we started planning these these expeditions and we wound up going to the bismark and and exploring it with with robotic vehicles we went back to the titanic wreck we took little bots that we had created that spooled a fiber optic
+JamesCameron_2010-0059409-0060516 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0060516-0061650 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 that the band had played
+JamesCameron_2010-0061650-0062708 and i'm flying a little robotic vehicle through the through the corridor of the of the ship you know when i say you know i'm i'm i'm operating it but my mind is in the vehicle
+JamesCameron_2010-0062708-0063644 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 i've ever had because
+JamesCameron_2010-0063644-0064675 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0064675-0065602 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0065602-0066346 made me realize that the the telepresense experience that you actually can have these robotic avatars then your consciousness
+JamesCameron_2010-0066346-0067623 is is in injected into the into the vehicle into this this other form of existence it was really really quite profound and maybe a little bit of a glimpse to to what might be happening you know some decades out as
+JamesCameron_2010-0067623-0069120 as we start to have cyborg bodies for exploration or for other means in in many sort of post human futures that i that i can imagine as a science fiction fan so having done these these
+JamesCameron_2010-0069120-0070141 expeditions and and you know really beginning to appreciate what was down there such as at the at the the deep ocean vents where we had these
+JamesCameron_2010-0070141-0070987 amazing amazing animals they are basically aliens right here on earth they live in an environment of chemosynthesis they don't survive
+JamesCameron_2010-0070987-0072201 on sunlight based system the way we do and so you're seeing animals that are living next to a five hundred degree centigrade water plumes that you think they can't possibly exist at the same time
+JamesCameron_2010-0072254-0072878 i was getting very interested in space science as well again you know it's the science fiction influence as a kid
+JamesCameron_2010-0072878-0074496 and i wound up getting involved with the space community really involved with with nasa sitting on the nasa advisory board planning actual space missions going to russia going to the pre cosmonaut biomedical protocols and all these sorts of things
+JamesCameron_2010-0074496-0075594 to actually go and fly to the international space station with our three d camera systems and this was fascinating but what what i wound up doing was bringing space scientists with us into the deep
+JamesCameron_2010-0075594-0076495 and taking them down so that they had access astrobiologists planetary scientists people who were interested in these extremely fine environments
+JamesCameron_2010-0076495-0077585 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0077585-0078414 i'd completely closed the loop between being the science fiction fan you know as a kid and doing this stuff for real
+JamesCameron_2010-0078414-0079453 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0079453-0080336 leadership now you think directors got to be a leader leader of you know captain of the ship and all that sort of thing i didn't really learn about leadership until
+JamesCameron_2010-0080400-0081340 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0081340-0082831 we don't make money at these damn shows you know 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 you know sitting at the beach made all these films made all these documentary films you know for a very
+JamesCameron_2010-0082831-0083636 limited audience no fame no glory no money what are you doing you're doing it for the task itself for the challenge
+JamesCameron_2010-0083636-0084543 and the ocean is the most challenging environment there is for the thrill of discovery and for that strange bond that happens
+JamesCameron_2010-0084543-0085373 when a small group of people form a tightly knit team because we would do these things with ten twelve people working for years at a time
+JamesCameron_2010-0085373-0086199 sometimes at sea for for for two or three months at a time and in that bond you realize that the most important thing
+JamesCameron_2010-0086199-0086699 is the respect that you have for them and that they have for you that you've done a task
+JamesCameron_2010-0086699-0088026 that you can't explain to someone else when you come back to the shore and you say you know we had to do this and the fiber optic and the attentuation and the this and the that all the all the technology of it and the difficulty the human performance aspects of working at sea
+JamesCameron_2010-0088026-0089464 you can't explain it to people it's that thing that that maybe cops have or people in 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0089464-0090687 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0090687-0091838 in you know in uncharted territory doing avatar coming up with new technology that didn't exist before tremendously exciting tremendously challenging and we became a family
+JamesCameron_2010-0091838-0093533 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0093533-0094908 so what can we synthesize out of all this you know what's the what are the lessons learned well i think number one is curiosity it's the most powerful thing you own imagination
+JamesCameron_2010-0094908-0096211 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0096287-0096507 i have young film makers
+JamesCameron_2010-0096507-0096894 come up to me and say you know give me some advice for doing this
+JamesCameron_2010-0096894-0097074 and i say
+JamesCameron_2010-0097074-0098428 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 and take risks nasa has this has this phrase that they like failure is not an option
+JamesCameron_2010-0098428-0099454 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0099454-0100510 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
+JamesCameron_2010-0100510-0101065 is an option but fear is not thank
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0001547-0003185 i'm jane mcgonigal i'm a game designer i've been making games online now for ten years and my goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0003185-0003953 now i have a plan for this and it entails convincing more people including all of you to spend more time
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0003953-0004822 playing bigger and better games right now we spend three billion hours a week playing online games some of you might be thinking
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0004822-0006200 that's a lot of time to spend playing games maybe too much time considering how many urgent problems we have to solve in the real world but actually according to my research at the institute for the future it's actually the opposite is true
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0006200-0006901 three billion hours a week is not nearly enough game play to solve the world's most urgent problems in fact
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0006901-0008015 i believe that if we want to survive the next century on this planet we need to increase that total dramatically i've calculated the total we need at twenty one billion hours of game play every week
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0008015-0009135 so that's probably a bit of a counterintuitive idea so i'll just i'll say it again let it sink in if we want to solve problems like hunger poverty climate change global conflict obesity
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0009135-0009939 i believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least twenty one billion hours a week by the end of the next decade
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0009939-0010122 no i'm serious
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0010122-0011067 i am here is why this picture pretty much sums up why i think games are so essential to the future survival of the human species truly
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0011067-0012090 this is a portrait by a photographer named phil toledano he wanted to capture the emotion of gaming so he set up a camera in front of gamers while they were playing and this is a classic
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0012090-0012997 gaming emotion now if you're not a gamer you might miss some of the nuance in this photo you probably see the sense of urgency a little bit of
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0012997-0015153 fear but intense concentration deep deep focus on tackling a really difficult problem if you are a gamer you will notice a few nuances here the crinkle of the eyes up and around the mouth is a sign of optimism and the eyebrows up is surprise this is a gamer who is on the verge of something called an epic win now
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0015267-0016700 oh you've heard of that okay good so we have some gamers among us so an epic win is an outcome that is so extraordinarily positive you had no idea it was even possible until you achieved it it was almost beyond the threshold of imagination
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0016700-0017159 and when you get there you are shocked to discover what you are truly capable of that's an epic win
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0017159-0018374 this is a gamer on the verge of an epic win and this is the face that we need to see on millions of problem solvers all over the world as we try to tackle the obstacles of the next century the face of someone
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0018374-0019692 who against all odds is on the verge of an epic win now unfortunately this is more of the face that we see in everyday life now as we try to tackle urgent problems this is what i call the i'm not good at life face and this is actually me
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0019692-0022947 making it can you see yes good this is actually me making the i'm not good at life face this is a piece of graffiti in my old neighborhood in berkeley california where i did my phd on why we're better in games than we are in real life and this is a problem that a lot of gamers have we feel that we are not as good in reality as we are in games and i don't mean just good as in successful although that's part of it we do achieve more in game worlds but i also mean good as in motivated to do something that matters inspired to collaborate and to cooperate and when we're in game worlds
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0022947-0024137 i believe that many of us become the best version of ourselves the most likely to help at a moment's notice the most likely to stick with a problem as long at it takes to get up after failure and try again and in real life
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0024137-0025275 when we when we face failure when we confront obstacles we often don't feel that way we feel overcome we feel overwhelmed we feel anxious maybe depressed frustrated or cynical
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0025275-0026562 we never have those feelings when we're playing games they just don't exist in games so that's what i wanted to study when i was a graduate student what about games makes it impossible to feel that we can't achieve everything how can we
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0026562-0027737 take those feelings from games and apply them to real world work so i looked at games like world of warcraft which is really the ideal collaborative problem solving environment and i started to notice a few things that make
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0027737-0029044 epic wins so possible in online worlds so the first thing is whenever you show up in one of these online games especially in world of warcraft there are lots and lots of different characters who are willing to trust you with a world saving mission
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0029044-0030073 right away but not just any mission it's a mission that is perfectly matched with your current level in the game right so you can do it they never give you a challenge that you can't achieve
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0030073-0030993 but it is on the the verge of what you're capable of so you have to try hard but there is no unemployment in world of warcraft there is no sitting around wringing your hands there is always something specific
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0030993-0031600 and important to be done and there are also tons of collaborators everywhere you go hundreds of thousands of people
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0031600-0032864 ready to work with you to achieve your epic mission it's not something that we have in real life that easily this sense that at our fingertips are tons of collaborators and also there is this epic story this inspiring story of why we're there
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0032864-0034288 and what we're doing and then we get all this positive feedback you guys have heard of leveling up and plus one strength and plus one intelligence we don't get that kind of constant feedback in real life when i get off this stage i'm not going to have plus one speaking and plus one
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0034288-0035286 crazy idea plus twenty crazy idea i don't get that feedback in real life now the problem with collaborative online environments like world of warcraft
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0035286-0037175 is that it's so satisfying to be on the verge of an epic win all the time that we decide to spend all our time in these game worlds it's just better than reality so so far collectively all the world of warcraft gamers have spent five point nine three million years solving the virtual problems of azeroth now
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0037175-0037995 that's not necessarily a bad thing it might sound like it's a bad thing but to put that in context five point nine three million years ago was when
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0037995-0039167 our earliest primate human ancestors stood up that was the first upright primate okay so when we talk about how much time we're currently investing in playing games
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0039167-0040609 the only way it makes sense to even think about it is to talk about time at the magnitude of human evolution which is an extraordinary thing but it's also apt because it turns out that by spending all this time playing games we are actually changing
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0040609-0041625 what we are capable of as human beings we are evolving to be a more collaborative and hearty species this is true i believe this so consider this really interesting statistic
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0041625-0042427 it was recently published by a researcher at carnegie mellon university the average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0042427-0043461 will have spent ten thousand hours playing online games by the age of twenty one now ten thousand hours is a really interesting number for two reasons first of all
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0043461-0044623 for children in the united states ten thousand and eighty hours is the exact amount of time you will spend in school from fifth grade to high school graduation if you have perfect attendance
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0044623-0045642 so we have an entire parallel track of education going on where young people are learning as much about what it takes to be a good gamer as they are learning about everything else in school
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0045642-0046931 and some of you have probably read malcom gladwell's new book outliers so you would have heard of his theory of success the ten thousand hour theory of success it's based on this great cognitive science research that if we can master
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0046931-0048034 ten thousand hours at effortful study at anything by the age of twenty one we will be virtuosos at it we will be as good at whatever we do as the greatest people in the world and so
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0048034-0048891 now what we're looking at is an entire generation of young people who are virtuoso gamers so the big question is
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0048891-0049885 what exactly are gamers getting so good at because if we could figure that out we would have a virtually unprecedented human resource on our hands
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0049885-0051044 this is how many people we now have in the world who spend at least an hour a day playing online games these are our virtuoso gamers five hundred million people who are who are extraordinarily good at something
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0051044-0051590 and in the next decade we're going to have another billion gamers who are extraordinarily good
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0051590-0052984 at whatever that is if you don't know it already this is coming the game industry is developing consoles that are low energy and that work with the wireless phone networks instead of broadband internet so that gamers all over the world particularly in india
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0052984-0053672 china brazil can get online they expect one billion more gamers in the next decade it will bring us up to one point five billion gamers
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0053672-0054261 so i've started to think about what these games are making us virtuosos at here are the four things i came up with
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0054261-0055664 the first is urgent optimism okay think of this as extreme self motivation urgent optimism is the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0055664-0056373 gamers always believe that an epic win is possible and that it is always worth trying and trying now gamers don't sit around
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0056373-0057463 ok gamers are virtuosos at weaving a tight social fabric there is a lot of interesting research that shows that we like people better after we play a game with them even if they've beaten us badly
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0057463-0059425 and the reason is it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone we trust that they will spend their time with us that they will play by the same rules value the same goal they'll stay with the game until it's over and so playing a game together actually builds up bonds and trust and cooperation and and we actually build stronger social relationships as a result
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0059425-0060796 blissful productivity i love it you know there is a reason why the average world of warcraft gamer plays for twenty two hours a week kind of a half time job it's because we know when we're playing a game that we're actually happier working hard than we are
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0060796-0062073 relaxing or hanging out we know that we are optimized as human beings to do hard and meaningful work and gamers are willing to work hard all the time if they're given the right work finally epic meaning
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0062073-0063491 gamers love to be attached to awe inspiring missions to human planetary scale stories so just one bit of trivia that helps put that into perspective so you all know wikipedia
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0063491-0064212 biggest wiki in the world second biggest wiki in the world with nearly eighty thousand articles is the world of warcraft wiki
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0064212-0065979 five million people use it every month they have compiled more information about world of warcraft on the internet than any other topic covered on any other wiki in the world they are building an epic story they are building epic knowledge resource about the world of warcraft okay so these are four superpowers that add up
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0065979-0066602 to one thing gamers are super empowered hopeful individuals
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0066602-0067935 these are people who believe that they are individually capable of changing the world and the only problem is they believe that they are capable of changing virtual worlds and not the real world that's the problem that i'm trying to solve
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0067935-0068838 there is an economist named edward castronova his work is brilliant he looks at why people are investing so much time and energy and money in online worlds
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0068838-0069865 and he says we're witnessing what amounts to no less than a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments and he's an economist so he's rational and he says
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0070076-0070540 not like me i'm a game designer i'm exuberant but he says he says
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0070540-0071959 that this makes perfect sense because gamers can achieve more in online worlds than they can in real life they can have stronger social relationships in games than they can have in real life they get better feedback and feel more rewarded in games than they do in real life so he says
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0071959-0072539 for now it makes perfect sense for gamers to spend more time in virtual worlds than the real world now
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0072539-0073742 i also agree that that is rational for now but it is not by any means an optimal situation we have to start making the real world work more like a game so i take my inspiration from something that happened
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0073742-0075183 twenty five hundred years ago these are ancient dice made out of sheep's knuckles right before we had awesome game controlers we had sheep's knuckles and these represent the first game equipment designed by human beings
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0075183-0076051 and if you're familiar with the work of the ancient greek historian herodotus you might know this history which is the history of who invented games and why
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0076051-0077070 herodotus says that games particularly dice games were invented in the kingdom of lydia during a time of famine apparently there was such a severe famine
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0077070-0077989 that the king of lydia decided that they had to do something crazy people were suffering people were fighting it was an extreme situation they needed an extreme solution
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0077989-0078605 so according to herodotus they invented dice games and they set up a kingdom wide policy
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0078605-0079841 on one day everybody would eat and on the next day everybody would play games and they would be so immersed in playing the dice games because games are so engaging and immerse us in such satisfying blissful productivity
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0079841-0080708 they would ignore the fact that they had no food to eat and then on the next day they would play games and on the next day they would eat and according to herodotus
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0080708-0081759 they passed eighteen years this way surviving through a famine by eating on one day and playing games on the next now this is exactly i think how we're using games today
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0081759-0082734 we're using games to escape real world suffering we're using games to get away from everything that's broken in the real environment everything that's not satisfying about real life
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0082734-0084216 and we're getting what we need from games but it doesn't have to end there this is really exciting according to herodotus after eighteen years the famine wasn't getting better so the king decided they would play one final dice game
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0084216-0084925 they divided the entire kingdom in half they played one dice game and the winners of that game got to go
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0084925-0085744 on an epic adventure they would leave lydia and they would go out in search of a new place to live leaving behind just enough people
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0085744-0086551 to survive on the resources that were available and hopefully to take the civilization somewhere else where they could thrive now this sounds crazy right
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0086551-0087544 but recently dna evidence has shown that the etruscans who lead to the roman empire actually share the same dna as the ancient lydians and so
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0087544-0089009 recently scientists have suggested that herodotus's crazy story is actually true and geologists have found evidence of a global cooling that lasted for nearly twenty years that could have explained the famine so this crazy story might be true they might have actually
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0089009-0090306 saved their culture by playing games escaping to games for eighteen years and then been so inspired and and knew so much about how to come together with games that they actually saved the entire civilization that way okay we can do that
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0090306-0091140 we've been playing warcraft since nineteen ninety four that was the first real time strategy game from the world of warcraft series that was sixteen years ago
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0091140-0091922 they played dice games for eighteen years we've been playing warcraft for sixteen years i say we are ready for our own epic game now
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0091922-0092673 they had half the civilization go off in search of a new world so that's where i get my twenty one billion hours a week of game play
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0092673-0093457 from let's get half of us to agree to spend an hour a day playing games until we solve real world problems now i know you're asking
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0093457-0094191 how are we going to solve real world problems in games well that's what i have devoted my work to over the past few years at the institute for the future
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0094191-0095296 we have this banner in our offices in palo alto and it expresses our view of how we should try to relate to the future we do not want to try to predict the future what we want to do is make the future
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0095296-0096393 we want to imagine the best case scenario outcome and then we want to empower people to make that outcome a reality we want to imagine epic wins and then give people the means to achieve the epic win
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0096393-0097142 i'm just going to very briefly show you three games that i've made that are an attempt to give people the means to create epic wins in their own futures
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0097142-0097947 so this is world without oil we made this game in two thousand and seven this is an online game in which you try to survive an oil shortage
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0097947-0099023 the oil shortage is fictional but we put enough online content out there for you to believe that it's real and to live your real life as if we've run out of oil so when you come to the game
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0099023-0101019 you sign up you tell us where you live and then we give you real time news videos data feeds that show you exactly how much oil costs what's not available how food supply is being affected how transportation is being affected if schools are closed if their is rioting and you have to figure out how you would live your real life as if this were true and then we ask you to blog about it
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0101019-0102377 to post videos to post photos we piloted this game with seventeen hundred players in two thousand and seven and we've tracked them for the three years since and i can tell you that this is a transformative experience nobody wants to change how they live just because
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0102377-0103018 it's good for the world or because we are supposed to but if you immerse them in an epic adventure and tell them
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0103018-0104047 we've run out of oil this is an amazing story and adventure for you to go on challenge yourself to see how you would survive most of our players have kept up the habits that they learned in this game
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0104047-0104974 so for the next world saving game we decided to aim higher bigger problem than just peak oil we did a game called superstruct at the institute for the future
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0104974-0106488 and the premise was a supercomputer has calculated that humans have only twenty three years left on the planet this supercomputer was called the global extinction awareness system of course we asked people to come online almost like a jerry bruckheimer movie
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0106488-0107224 you know jerry bruckheimer movies you form a dream team you've got the astronaut the scientist the ex convict and they all have something to do to save the world
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0107354-0107939 but in our game instead of just having five people on the dream team we said everybody is on the dream team and it's your job
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0107939-0108642 to invent the future of energy the future of food the future of health the future of security and the future of the social safety net
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0108642-0109460 we had eight thousand people play that game for eight weeks they came up with five hundred insanely creative solutions that you can go online if you google superstruct and see
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0109460-0110186 so finally the last game we're launching it march third this is a game done with the world bank institute if you complete the game you will be
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0110186-0111480 certified by the world bank institute as a social innovator class of two thousand ten working with universities all over sub saharan africa and we are inviting them to learn social innovation skills we've got a graphic novel
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0111480-0113438 we've got leveling up in skills like local insight knowledge networking sustainability vision and resourcefulness i would like to invite all of you to please share this game with young people anywhere in the world particularly in developing areas who might benefit from coming together to try to start to imagine their own social enterprises to save the world
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0113438-0114724 so i'm going to wrap up now i want to ask a question what do you think happens next we've got all these amazing gamers we've got these games that are kind of pilots of what we might do but none of them have saved the real world yet
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0114724-0115306 well i hope that you will agree with me that gamers are a human resource that we can use
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0115306-0116833 to do real world work that games are a powerful platform for change we have all these amazing superpowers blissful productivity the ability to weave a tight social fabric this feeling of urgent optimism and the desire for epic meaning i really hope that we can come together
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0116833-0117891 to play games that matter to survive on this planet for another century and that's my hope that you will join me in making and playing games like this when i look forward to the next decade i know two things for sure
+JaneMcGonigal_2010-0117891-0118760 that we can make any future we can imagine and we can play any games we want so i say let the world changing games begin thank you
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0001611-0002784 let's pretend right here we have a machine a big machine a cool ted ish machine and it's a time machine and everyone in this room has to get into it and you can go backwards you can go forwards you cannot stay where you are
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0002784-0003831 and i wonder what you'd choose because i've been asking my friends this question a lot lately and they all want to go back i don't know they want to go back before there were automobiles or twitter or american idol
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0003831-0004764 i don't know i'm i'm convinced that there's some sort of pull to nostalgia to wishful thinking and i understand that i'm not part of that crowd i have to say
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0004764-0005727 i don't want to go back and it's not because i'm adventurous it's because possibilities on this planet they don't go back they go forward so i want to get in the machine and i want to go forward
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0005727-0006388 this is the greatest time there's ever been on this planet by any measure you wish to choose health wealth
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0006388-0007156 mobility opportunity declining rates of disease there's never been a time like this my great grandparents
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0007156-0007970 died all of them by the time they were sixty my grandparents pushed that number to seventy my parents are closing in on eighty so i've
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0007970-0008733 there'd better be there'd better be a nine at the beginning of my death number but it's not even about people like us because
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0008733-0009533 this is a bigger deal than that a kid born in new delhi today can expect to live as long as the richest man in the world did one hundred years ago
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0009533-0009883 think about that it's an incredible fact and why is it true
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0009883-0010781 smallpox smallpox killed billions of people on this planet it reshaped the demography of the globe in a way that no war ever has it's gone
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0010781-0011224 it's vanished we vanquished it puff in the rich world
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0011224-0012241 diseases that threatened millions of us just a generation ago no longer exist hardly diphtheria rubella polio does anyone even know what those things are
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0012368-0013409 vaccines modern medicine our ability to feed billions of people those are triumphs of the scientific method and to my mind the scientific method trying stuff out
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0013475-0014135 seeing if it works changing it when it doesn't is one of the great accomplishments of humanity so that's the good news
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0014135-0014812 unfortunately that's all the good news because there's some other problems and they've been mentioned many times and one of them is that
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0014812-0015299 despite all our accomplishments a billion people go to bed hungry in this world
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0015299-0016055 every day that number's rising and it's rising really rapidly and it's disgraceful and not only that we've used our imagination
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0016055-0016786 to thoroughly trash this globe potable water arable land rainforest oil gas they're going away
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0016786-0017394 and they're going away soon and unless we innovate our way out of this mess we're going away too
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0017394-0018636 so the question is can we do that and i i think we can i think it's clear that we can make food that will feed billions of people without raping the land that they live on i think we can power this world with energy that doesn't also destroy it
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0018636-0019462 i really do believe that and no it ain't wishful thinking but here's the thing that keeps me up at night one of the things that keeps me up at night
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0019610-0020794 we've never needed progress in science more than we need it right now never and we've also never been in a position to deploy it properly in the way that we can today we're on the verge of amazing amazing events in many fields
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0020794-0022025 and yet i actually think we'd have to go back hundreds three hundred years before the enlightenment to find a time when we battled progress when we fought about these things more vigorously on on more fronts
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0022025-0022931 than we do now people wrap themselves in their beliefs and they do it so tightly that you can't set them free not even the truth will set them free and listen
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0022931-0024026 everyone's entitled to their opinion they're even entitled to their opinion about progress but you know what you're not entitled to you're not entitled to your own facts sorry you're not and this took me awhile to figure out
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0024026-0025184 about a decade ago i wrote a story about vaccines for the new yorker a little story and i was amazed to find opposition opposition to what is after all the most effective public health measure in human history
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0025288-0025933 i didn't know what to do so i just did what i do i wrote a story and i moved on and soon after that
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0026042-0026694 i wrote a story about genetically engineered food same thing only bigger people were going crazy so
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0026694-0028008 i wrote a story about that too and i couldn't understand why people thought this was frankenfoods why they thought moving molecules around in a specific rather than a haphazard way was trespassing on nature's ground
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0028008-0028425 but you know i do what i do i wrote the story i moved on i mean i'm a journalist
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0028425-0028679 we type we file we go to dinner it's fine
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0029090-0030230 but these stories bothered me and i couldn't figure out why and eventually i did and that's because those fanatics that were driving me crazy weren't actually fanatics at all they were thoughtful people educated people decent people
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0030230-0030618 they were exactly like the people in this room
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0030618-0031329 and it it just disturbed me so much but then i thought you know let's be honest we're at a point in this world
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0031329-0032240 where we don't have the same relationship to progress that we used to we talk about it ambivalently we talk about it in ironic terms with little quotes around it progress
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0032336-0033759 okay there are reasons for that and i think we know what those reasons are we've lost faith in institutions in authority and sometimes in science itself and there there's no reason we shouldn't have you can just say a few names and people will understand
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0033759-0034132 chernobyl bhopal the challenger
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0034132-0034586 vioxx weapons of mass destruction hanging chads
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0034586-0034914 i mean you know you can choose your list
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0034914-0035547 there are questions and problems with the people we used to believe were always right so be skeptical
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0035646-0036372 ask questions demand proof demand evidence don't take anything for granted but here's the thing when you get proof
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0036372-0036766 you need to accept the proof and we're not that good at doing that
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0036766-0037843 and the reason that i can say that is because we're now in an epidemic of fear like one i've never seen and hope never to see again about twelve years ago there was a story published a horrible story
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0037843-0038433 that linked the epidemic of autism to the measles mumps and rubella vaccine shot
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0038539-0039240 very scary tons of studies were done to see if this was true tons of studies should have been done it's a serious issue
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0039332-0040243 the data came back the data came back from the united states from england from sweden from canada and it was all the same no correlation no connection none at all
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0040243-0041029 it doesn't matter it doesn't matter because we believe anecdotes we believe what we see what we think we see what makes us feel real
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0041029-0041835 we don't believe a bunch of documents from a government official giving us data and i i do understand that i think we all do but you know what
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0041835-0042299 the result of that has been disastrous disastrous because here's a fact
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0042299-0042886 the united states is one of the only countries in the world where the vaccine rate for measles is going down
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0042886-0043352 that is disgraceful and we should be ashamed of ourselves it's horrible
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0043352-0043939 and what kind what kind of a thing happened that we could do that now
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0043939-0044612 i understand it i do understand it because does anyone have measles here has one person in this audience ever see someone die of measles
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0044612-0045535 doesn't happen very much doesn't happen in this country at all but it happened a hundred and sixty thousand times in the world last year that's a lot of death of measles twenty an hour
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0045653-0046113 but since it didn't happen here we can put it out of our minds and people like jenny mccarthy
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0046113-0046786 can go around preaching messages of fear and illiteracy from platforms like oprah and larry king live
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0046786-0048020 and they can do it because they don't link causation and correlation they don't understand that these things seem the same but they're almost never the same and it's something we need to learn and we need to learn it really soon
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0048120-0048992 this guy was a hero jonas salk he took one of the worst scourges of mankind away from us no fear no agony polio puff gone
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0048992-0049355 that guy in the middle not so much his name is paul offit
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0049355-0049941 he just developed a rotavirus vaccine with a bunch of other people it's save the lives of four hundred five hundred thousand
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0049941-0051408 kids in the developing world every year pretty good right well it's good except that paul goes around talking about vaccines and says how valuable they are and that people ought to just stop the whining and he actually says it that way so paul's a terrorist
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0051408-0052421 when paul speaks in a public hearing he can't testify without armed guards he gets called at home because people like to tell him that they remember where his kids go to school
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0052421-0053698 and why because paul made a vaccine i don't need to say this but vaccines are essential you take them away disease comes back horrible diseases and that's happening we have measles in this country now
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0053698-0054480 and it's getting worse and pretty soon kids are going to die again because it's just a numbers game and they're not just going to die of measles what about polio let's have that
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0054480-0055297 why not a college classmate of mine wrote me a couple weeks ago and said you know she thought i was a little strident no one's ever said that before
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0055297-0055892 she wasn't going to vaccinate her kid against polio no way fine
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0055892-0056985 why because we don't have polio and you know what we didn't have polio in this country yesterday today i don't know maybe a guy got on a plane in lagos this morning and he's flying to lax right now he's over ohio
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0056985-0058444 and he's going to land in a couple hours he's going to rent a car and he's going to come to long beach and he's going to attend one of these fabulous ted dinners tonight and he doesn't know that he's infected with a paralytic disease and we don't either because that's the way the world works that's the planet we live on
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0058444-0059154 don't pretend it isn't now we love to wrap ourselves in lies we love to do it everyone take their vitamins this morning
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0059154-0059526 echinacea echinacea a little antioxidant to get you going
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0059526-0060331 i know you did because half of americans do every day they take the stuff and they take alternative medicines and it doesn't matter how often we
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0060331-0061041 find out that they're useless the data says it all the time they darken your urine they almost never do more than that
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0061259-0061684 it's okay you want to pay twenty eight billion dollars for dark urine i'm totally with you
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0061833-0062032 dark urine dark
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0062267-0063165 why do we do that why do we do that well i think i understand we hate big pharma we hate big government we don't trust the man and we shouldn't our health care system sucks
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0063165-0063673 it's cruel to millions of people it's absolutely astonishingly cold
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0063673-0064450 and soul bending to those of us who can even afford it so we run away from it and where do we run we leap into the arms of big placebo
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0064771-0065032 that's fantastic i love big placebo
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0065458-0066407 but you know it's not it's it's it's really a serious thing because this stuff is crap and we spend billions of dollars on it and i have all sorts of little props here
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0066407-0066663 none of it ginkgo fraud
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0066663-0067315 echinacea fraud acai i don't even know what that is but we're spending billions of dollars on it it's fraud
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0067315-0068358 and you know what when i say this stuff people scream at me and they say what do you care let people do what they want to do it's it's it makes them feel good and you know what you're wrong because
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0068358-0068624 i don't care if it's the secretary of h h s
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0068624-0069500 who's saying hmm i'm not going to take the evidence of my experts on the mammograms or some cancer quack who wants to treat his patient
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0069500-0070348 with coffee enemas when you start down the road where belief and magic replace evidence and science you end up in a place you don't want to be
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0070348-0070985 you end up in thabo mbeki south africa he killed four hundred thousand of his people by insisting
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0070985-0072400 that beetroot garlic and lemon oil were much more effective than the antiretroviral drugs we know can slow the course of aids hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in a country that has been plagued worse than any other by this disease
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0072400-0073083 please don't tell me there are no consequences to these things there are there always are now
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0073083-0073545 the most mindless epidemic we're in the middle of right now is this absurd battle between
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0073545-0074497 proponents of genetically engineered food and the organic elite it's an idiotic debate it has to stop it's a debate about words about metaphors
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0074497-0074700 it's ideology it's not science
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0074700-0075729 every single thing we eat every grain of rice every sprig of parsley every brussel sprout has been modified by man you know there weren't tangerines in the garden of eden
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0075729-0075924 there wasn't any cantaloupe
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0075924-0076503 there weren't christmas trees we made it all we made it over the last eleven thousand years
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0076611-0077205 and some of it worked and some of it didn't we got rid of the stuff that didn't now we can do it in a more precise way and there are risks
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0077205-0078096 absolutely but we can put something like vitamin a into rice and that stuff can help millions of people millions of people prolong their lives
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0078219-0079380 you don't want to do that i i have to say i don't understand it we object to genetically engineered food why do we do that well the things i constantly hear are
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0079380-0079759 too many chemicals pesticides hormones
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0079759-0080165 monoculture we don't want giant fields of the same thing that's wrong
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0080165-0080839 we don't want companies patenting life we don't want companies owning seeds and you know what my response to all of that is yes
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0080839-0081453 you're right let's fix it it's true we've got a huge food problem but this isn't science
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0081453-0082255 this has nothing to do with science it's law it's morality it's patent stuff you know science isn't a company it's not a country
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0082255-0082582 it's not even an idea it's a process
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0082582-0083687 it's a process and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't but the idea that we should not allow science to do its job because we're afraid
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0083687-0084366 is really very deadening and it's preventing millions of people from prospering you know in the next
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0084366-0085731 fifty years we're going to have to grow seventy percent more food than we do right now seventy percent this is investment in africa over the last thirty years disgraceful disgraceful they need it and we're not giving it to them and why
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0085731-0087053 genetically engineered food we don't want to encourage people to eat that rotten stuff like cassava for instance cassava's something that half a billion people eat it's kind of like a potato it's just a bunch of calories it sucks
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0087053-0087622 it doesn't have nutrients it doesn't have protein and scientists are engineering all of that into it right now
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0087622-0088562 and then people would be able to eat it and they'd be able to not go blind they wouldn't starve and you know what that would be nice it wouldn't be chez panisse but it would be nice
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0088771-0089092 and all i can say about this is
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0089092-0089921 why are we fighting it why i mean let's ask ourselves why are we fighting it because we don't want to move genes around this is about moving genes around it's not about chemicals
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0089921-0090664 it's not about our ridiculous passion for hormones our insistence on having bigger food better food singular food
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0090664-0091588 this isn't about rice krispies this is about keeping people alive and it's about time we started to understand what that meant because you know something if we don't
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0091588-0092685 if we continue to act the way we're acting we're guilty of something that i don't think we want to be guilty of high tech colonialism there's no other way to describe what's going on here it's selfish
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0092685-0093129 it's ugly it's beneath us and we really have to stop it
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0093225-0093551 so after this amazingly fun conversation
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0093730-0094154 you might want to say so you still want to get in this ridiculous time machine and go forward
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0094154-0095334 and absolutely absolutely i do it's stuck in the present right now but we have an amazing opportunity we can set that time machine on anything we want we can move it where we want to move it
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0095334-0096148 and we're going to move it where we want to move it we have to have these conversations and we have to think but when we get in the time machine and we go ahead
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0096148-0096748 we're going to be happy we do i know that we can and as far as i'm concerned
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0096748-0097215 that's something the world needs right now thank you
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0097575-0097651 thank you
+MichaelSpecter_2010-0097860-0097931 thank you
+RobertGupta_2010U-0001680-0002348 one day los angeles times columnist steve lopez was walking along the streets of downtown los angeles when he heard
+RobertGupta_2010U-0002348-0002746 beautiful music and the source was a man
+RobertGupta_2010U-0002746-0003645 an african american man charming rugged homeless playing a violin that only had two strings
+RobertGupta_2010U-0003645-0004367 and i'm telling a story that many of you know because steve's columns became the basis for a book which was turned into a movie
+RobertGupta_2010U-0004367-0005402 with robert downey jr acting as steve lopez and jamie foxx as nathaniel anthony ayers the juilliard trained double bassist whose promising career was cut short
+RobertGupta_2010U-0005402-0005744 by a tragic affliction with paranoid schizophrenia
+RobertGupta_2010U-0005744-0007210 nathaniel dropped out of juilliard he suffered a complete breakdown and thirty years later he was living homeless on the streets of skid row in downtown los angeles i encourage all of you to read steve's book or to watch the movie to understand not only the beautiful bond
+RobertGupta_2010U-0007210-0008348 that formed between these two men but how music helped shape that bond and ultimately was instrumental if you'll pardon the pun in helping nathaniel get off the streets
+RobertGupta_2010U-0008348-0010750 i met mister ayers in two thousand eight two years ago at walt disney concert hall he had just heard a performance of beethoven's first and fourth symphonies and came backstage and introduced himself he was speaking in a very jovial and gregarious way about yo yo ma and hillary clinton and how the dodgers were never going to make the world series all because of the treacherous first violin passage work in the last movement in beethoven's fourth symphony
+RobertGupta_2010U-0010750-0011922 and we got talking about music and i got an email from steve a few days later saying that nathaniel was interested in a violin lesson with me now i should mention that nathaniel refuses treatment
+RobertGupta_2010U-0011922-0012796 because when he was treated it was with shock therapy and thorazine and handcuffs and that scar has stayed with him for his entire life
+RobertGupta_2010U-0012796-0013630 but as a result now he is prone to these schizophrenic episodes the worst of which can manifest themselves as him exploding
+RobertGupta_2010U-0013630-0014616 and then disappearing for days wandering the streets of skid row exposed to its horrors with the torment of his own mind unleashed upon him
+RobertGupta_2010U-0014616-0015730 and nathaniel was in such a state of agitation when we started our first lesson at walt disney concert hall he had a kind of manic glint in his eyes he was lost
+RobertGupta_2010U-0015730-0017463 and he was talking about invisible demons and smoke and how someone was poisoning him in his sleep and i was afraid not for myself but i was afraid that i was going to lose him that he was going to sink into one of his states
+RobertGupta_2010U-0017463-0018319 and that i would ruin his relationship with the violin if i started talking about scales and arpeggios and other exciting forms of didactic violin pedagogy
+RobertGupta_2010U-0018419-0018704 so i just started playing
+RobertGupta_2010U-0018704-0019867 and i played the first movement of the beethoven violin concerto and as i played i understood that there was a profound change occurring in nathaniel's eyes
+RobertGupta_2010U-0019867-0020541 it was as if he was in the grip of some invisible pharmaceutical a chemical reaction for which my playing the music
+RobertGupta_2010U-0020541-0021229 was its catalyst and nathaniel's manic rage
+RobertGupta_2010U-0021229-0022001 was transformed into understanding a quiet curiosity and grace
+RobertGupta_2010U-0022001-0023301 and in a miracle he lifted his own violin and he started playing by ear certain snippets of violin concertos which he then asked me to complete mendelssohn tchaikovsky sibelius
+RobertGupta_2010U-0023301-0024553 and we started talking about music from bach to beethoven and brahms bruckner all the b's from bartok all the way up to esa pekka salonen and i understood that he not only had an encyclopedic knowledge of music
+RobertGupta_2010U-0024553-0025550 but he related to this music at a personal level he spoke about it with the kind of passion and understanding that i share with my colleagues in the los angeles philharmonic
+RobertGupta_2010U-0025550-0026143 and through playing music and talking about music this man had transformed
+RobertGupta_2010U-0026143-0026945 from the paranoid disturbed man that had just come from walking the streets of downtown los angeles to the charming
+RobertGupta_2010U-0026945-0027836 erudite brilliant juilliard trained musician music is medicine
+RobertGupta_2010U-0027836-0029180 music changes us and for nathaniel music is sanity because music allows him to take his thoughts and delusions and shape them through his imagination and his creativity into reality
+RobertGupta_2010U-0029180-0029611 and that is an escape from his tormented state
+RobertGupta_2010U-0029611-0030712 and i understood that this was the very essence of art this was the very reason why we made music that we take something that exists within all of us at our very fundamental core our emotions
+RobertGupta_2010U-0030712-0031379 and through our artistic lens through our creativity we're able to shape those emotions into reality
+RobertGupta_2010U-0031379-0032294 and the reality of that expression reaches all of us and moves us inspires and unites us
+RobertGupta_2010U-0032294-0032808 and for nathaniel music brought him back into a fold of friends
+RobertGupta_2010U-0032808-0033863 the redemptive power of music brought him back into a family of musicians that understood him that recognized his talents and respected him
+RobertGupta_2010U-0033863-0035117 and i will always make music with nathaniel whether we're at walt disney concert hall or on skid row because he reminds me why i became a musician thank you
+RobertGupta_2010U-0035819-0036045 thank you thanks
+RobertGupta_2010U-0036123-0036220 robert gupta
+RobertGupta_2010U-0038266-0038703 i want to play something that i shamelessly stole from cellists so please forgive me
+TomWujec_2010U-0001626-0004156 several years ago here at ted peter skillman introduced a design challenge called the marshmallow challenge and the idea's pretty simple teams of four have to build the tallest free standing structure out of twenty sticks of spaghetti one yard of tape one yard of string and a marshmallow the marshmallow has to be on top and though it seems really simple it's actually pretty hard because it forces people to collaborate very quickly
+TomWujec_2010U-0004156-0004920 and so i thought that this was an interesting idea and i incorporated it into a design workshop and it was a huge success and since then i've
+TomWujec_2010U-0004920-0006666 conducted about seventy design workshops across the world with students and designers and architects even the ctos of the fortune fifty and there's something about this exercise that reveals very deep lessons about the nature of collaboration and i'd like to share some of them with you so
+TomWujec_2010U-0006666-0008700 normally most people begin by orienting themselves to the task they talk about it they figure out what it's going to look like they jockey for power then they spend some time planning organizing they sketch in they lay out spaghetti they spend the majority of their time assembling the sticks into ever growing structures and then
+TomWujec_2010U-0008700-0009587 finally just as they're running out of time someone takes out the marshmallow and then they gingerly put it on top and they stand back
+TomWujec_2010U-0009587-0009748 and ta da
+TomWujec_2010U-0009748-0010954 they admire their work but what really happens most of the time is that the ta da turns into an uh oh because the weight of the marshmallow causes the entire structure to buckle and to collapse so
+TomWujec_2010U-0010954-0011682 there are a number of people who have a lot more uh oh moments than others and among the worst are recent graduates of business school
+TomWujec_2010U-0011938-0013152 they lie they cheat they get distracted and they produce really lame structures and of course there are teams that have a lot more ta da structures and among the best are recent graduates of kindergarten
+TomWujec_2010U-0013299-0013334 and
+TomWujec_2010U-0013481-0014491 it's pretty amazing as peter tells us not only do do they produce the tallest structures but they're the most interesting structures of them all so the question you want to ask is how come
+TomWujec_2010U-0014491-0015269 why what is it about them and peter likes to say that none of this none of the kids spend any time trying to be ceo of spaghetti inc
+TomWujec_2010U-0015269-0016219 right they don't time spend time jockeying for power but there's another reason as well and the reason is that business students are trained to find the single right plan
+TomWujec_2010U-0016219-0016949 right and then they execute on it and then what happens is when they put the marshmallow on the top they run out of time and what happens it's a crisis
+TomWujec_2010U-0017131-0017995 sound familiar right ok what kindergarteners do differently is that they start with the marshmallow and they build prototypes successive prototypes
+TomWujec_2010U-0017995-0018863 always keeping the marshmallow on top so they have multiple times to to fix ill built prototypes along the way so designers recognize this type of collaboration
+TomWujec_2010U-0018863-0019612 as the essence of the iterative process and with each version kids get instant feedback about what works and what doesn't work
+TomWujec_2010U-0019612-0020200 so the capacity to play in prototype is is really essential but let's look at how different teams perform
+TomWujec_2010U-0020200-0021385 so the average for most people is around twenty inches business schools students about half of that lawyers a little better but not much better than that kindergarteners better than most adults who does the very best
+TomWujec_2010U-0021385-0021767 architects and engineers thankfully and
+TomWujec_2010U-0022235-0023455 thirty nine inches is the tallest structure i i've seen and why is it because they understand triangles and self re enforcing geometrical patterns are the key to building self reinforce stable structures
+TomWujec_2010U-0023455-0024381 so ceos a little bit better than average but here's where it gets interesting if you put in an executive admin on the team they get significantly better
+TomWujec_2010U-0024554-0024688 terrible you know
+TomWujec_2010U-0024688-0026094 you look around you go oh that team's going to win you can just tell beforehand and why is that because they have specials skills of facilitation they manage the process they understand the process and any team who manages and pays a close attention to to work
+TomWujec_2010U-0026094-0027044 will significantly improve the team's performance specialized skills and facilitation skills are the combination leads to to strong success
+TomWujec_2010U-0027044-0027776 if you have ten teams that typically perform you'll get maybe six or so that have standing structures and i i tried something interesting i thought let's
+TomWujec_2010U-0027776-0028693 up the ante once so i offered a ten thousand dollar prize of software to the winning team so what do you think happened to these design students what was the result
+TomWujec_2010U-0028693-0029055 here's what happened
+TomWujec_2010U-0029055-0031142 not one team had a standing structure not one had a a if anyone had built say a one inch structure they could have taken home the prize so isn't it interesting that high stakes have a strong impact we did the exercise again with the same students what do you think happened then so now they understand the value of prototyping
+TomWujec_2010U-0031142-0032519 so the same team went from being the very worst to being among the very best they produced the tallest structures in the least amount of time so there's deep lessons for us about the nature of incentives and success
+TomWujec_2010U-0032519-0033857 so you might ask why would anyone actually spend time writing a marshmallow challenge and the reason is i help create digital tools and processes to help teams build cars and video games and visual effects
+TomWujec_2010U-0033857-0034512 and what the marshmallow challenge does is it helps them identify the hidden assumptions because frankly
+TomWujec_2010U-0034512-0036927 every project has its own marshmallow doesn't it the challenge provides a shared experience a common language a common stance to build the right prototype and so this is the value of the experience of this so simple exercise and those of you who are interested may want to go to marshmallowchallenge dot com it's a blog that you can look at how to build the marshmallows there's step by step instructions on this there are
+TomWujec_2010U-0036927-0037543 crazy examples from around the world of how people tweak and adjust the system there's world records on this as well
+TomWujec_2010U-0037543-0040217 and the fundamental lesson i believe is that design truly is a contact sport it demands that we bring all of our senses to the task and that we apply the very best of our thinking our feeling and our doing to the challenge that we have at hand and sometimes a little prototype of this experience is all that it takes to turn us from an uh oh moment to a ta da moment and that can make a big difference thank you very much