text
stringlengths 991
34.9k
|
|---|
I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with a brain disorder: schizophrenia. And as a sister and later, as a scientist, I wanted to understand, why is it that I can take my dreams, I can connect them to my reality, and I can make my dreams come true? What is it about my brother's brain and his schizophrenia that he cannot connect his dreams to a common and shared reality, so they instead become delusion?
So I dedicated my career to research into the severe mental illnesses. And I moved from my home state of Indiana to Boston, where I was working in the lab of Dr. Francine Benes, in the Harvard Department of Psychiatry. And in the lab, we were asking the question, "What are the biological differences between the brains of individuals who would be diagnosed as normal control, as compared with the brains of individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, schizoaffective or bipolar disorder?"
So we were essentially mapping the microcircuitry of the brain: which cells are communicating with which cells, with which chemicals, and then in what quantities of those chemicals? So there was a lot of meaning in my life because I was performing this type of research during the day. But then in the evenings and on the weekends, I traveled as an advocate for NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness. But on the morning of December 10, 1996, I woke up to discover that I had a brain disorder of my own. A blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain. And in the course of four hours, I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the morning of the hemorrhage, I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life. I essentially became an infant in a woman's body.
If you've ever seen a human brain, it's obvious that the two hemispheres are completely separate from one another. And I have brought for you a real human brain. So this is a real human brain.
This is the front of the brain, the back of brain with the spinal cord hanging down, and this is how it would be positioned inside of my head. And when you look at the brain, it's obvious that the two cerebral cortices are completely separate from one another. For those of you who understand computers, our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. The two hemispheres do communicate with one another through the corpus collosum, which is made up of some 300 million axonal fibers. But other than that, the two hemispheres are completely separate. Because they process information differently, each of our hemispheres think about different things, they care about different things, and, dare I say, they have very different personalities.
Excuse me. Thank you. It's been a joy. Assistant: It has been.
Our right human hemisphere is all about this present moment. It's all about "right here, right now." Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information, in the form of energy, streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like. I am an energy-being connected to the energy all around me through the consciousness of my right hemisphere. We are energy-beings connected to one another through the consciousness of our right hemispheres as one human family. And right here, right now, we are brothers and sisters on this planet, here to make the world a better place. And in this moment we are perfect, we are whole and we are beautiful.
My left hemisphere -- our left hemisphere -- is a very different place. Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past and it's all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking out details, details and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information, associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned, and projects into the future all of our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language. It's that ongoing brain chatter that connects me and my internal world to my external world. It's that little voice that says to me, "Hey, you gotta remember to pick up bananas on your way home. I need them in the morning."
It's that calculating intelligence that reminds me when I have to do my laundry. But perhaps most important, it's that little voice that says to me, "I am. I am." And as soon as my left hemisphere says to me "I am," I become separate. I become a single solid individual, separate from the energy flow around me and separate from you. And this was the portion of my brain that I lost on the morning of my stroke.
On the morning of the stroke, I woke up to a pounding pain behind my left eye. And it was the kind of pain -- caustic pain -- that you get when you bite into ice cream. And it just gripped me -- and then it released me. And then it just gripped me -- and then it released me. And it was very unusual for me to ever experience any kind of pain, so I thought, "OK, I'll just start my normal routine."
So I got up and I jumped onto my cardio glider, which is a full-body, full-exercise machine. And I'm jamming away on this thing, and I'm realizing that my hands look like primitive claws grasping onto the bar. And I thought, "That's very peculiar." And I looked down at my body and I thought, "Whoa, I'm a weird-looking thing." And it was as though my consciousness had shifted away from my normal perception of reality, where I'm the person on the machine having the experience, to some esoteric space where I'm witnessing myself having this experience.
And it was all very peculiar, and my headache was just getting worse. So I get off the machine, and I'm walking across my living room floor, and I realize that everything inside of my body has slowed way down. And every step is very rigid and very deliberate. There's no fluidity to my pace, and there's this constriction in my area of perceptions, so I'm just focused on internal systems. And I'm standing in my bathroom getting ready to step into the shower, and I could actually hear the dialogue inside of my body. I heard a little voice saying, "OK. You muscles, you gotta contract. You muscles, you relax."
And then I lost my balance, and I'm propped up against the wall. And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end, because the atoms and the molecules of my arm blended with the atoms and molecules of the wall. And all I could detect was this energy -- energy.
And I'm asking myself, "What is wrong with me? What is going on?" And in that moment, my brain chatter -- my left hemisphere brain chatter -- went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. And because I could no longer identify the boundaries of my body, I felt enormous and expansive. I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there.
Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online, and it says to me, "Hey! We got a problem! We got a problem! We gotta get some help." And I'm going, "Ahh! I got a problem. I got a problem." So it's like, "OK. OK. I got a problem."
But then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness -- and I affectionately refer to this space as La La Land. But it was beautiful there. Imagine what it would be like to be totally disconnected from your brain chatter that connects you to the external world.
So here I am in this space, and my job -- and any stress related to my job -- it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and any stressors related to any of those -- they were gone. And I felt this sense of peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage! (Laughter) Oh! I felt euphoria -- euphoria. It was beautiful.
And then, again, my left hemisphere comes online and it says, "Hey! You've got to pay attention. We've got to get help." And I'm thinking, "I got to get help. I gotta focus." So I get out of the shower and I mechanically dress and I'm walking around my apartment, and I'm thinking, "I gotta get to work. I gotta get to work. Can I drive? Can I drive?"
And in that moment my right arm went totally paralyzed by my side. Then I realized, "Oh my gosh! I'm having a stroke! I'm having a stroke!"
And the next thing my brain says to me is, "Wow! This is so cool." (Laughter) "This is so cool! How many brain scientists have the opportunity to study their own brain from the inside out?" (Laughter)
And then it crosses my mind, "But I'm a very busy woman!" (Laughter) "I don't have time for a stroke!"
So I'm like, "OK, I can't stop the stroke from happening, so I'll do this for a week or two, and then I'll get back to my routine. OK. So I gotta call help. I gotta call work." I couldn't remember the number at work, so I remembered, in my office I had a business card with my number on it. So I go into my business room, I pull out a three-inch stack of business cards. And I'm looking at the card on top and even though I could see clearly in my mind's eye what my business card looked like, I couldn't tell if this was my card or not, because all I could see were pixels. And the pixels of the words blended with the pixels of the background and the pixels of the symbols, and I just couldn't tell. And then I would wait for what I call a wave of clarity. And in that moment, I would be able to reattach to normal reality and I could tell that's not the card ... that's not the card ... that's not the card. It took me 45 minutes to get one inch down inside of that stack of cards. In the meantime, for 45 minutes, the hemorrhage is getting bigger in my left hemisphere. I do not understand numbers, I do not understand the telephone, but it's the only plan I have. So I take the phone pad and I put it right here. I take the business card, I put it right here, and I'm matching the shape of the squiggles on the card to the shape of the squiggles on the phone pad. But then I would drift back out into La La Land, and not remember when I came back if I'd already dialed those numbers. So I had to wield my paralyzed arm like a stump and cover the numbers as I went along and pushed them, so that as I would come back to normal reality, I'd be able to tell, "Yes, I've already dialed that number."
Eventually, the whole number gets dialed and I'm listening to the phone, and my colleague picks up the phone and he says to me, "Woo woo woo woo." (Laughter) And I think to myself, "Oh my gosh, he sounds like a Golden Retriever!"
And so I say to him -- clear in my mind, I say to him: "This is Jill! I need help!" And what comes out of my voice is, "Woo woo woo woo woo." I'm thinking, "Oh my gosh, I sound like a Golden Retriever." So I couldn't know -- I didn't know that I couldn't speak or understand language until I tried. So he recognizes that I need help and he gets me help.
And a little while later, I am riding in an ambulance from one hospital across Boston to [Massachusetts] General Hospital. And I curl up into a little fetal ball. And just like a balloon with the last bit of air, just, just right out of the balloon, I just felt my energy lift and just -- I felt my spirit surrender.
And in that moment, I knew that I was no longer the choreographer of my life. And either the doctors rescue my body and give me a second chance at life, or this was perhaps my moment of transition.
When I woke later that afternoon, I was shocked to discover that I was still alive. When I felt my spirit surrender, I said goodbye to my life. And my mind was now suspended between two very opposite planes of reality. Stimulation coming in through my sensory systems felt like pure pain. Light burned my brain like wildfire, and sounds were so loud and chaotic that I could not pick a voice out from the background noise, and I just wanted to escape. Because I could not identify the position of my body in space, I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free, like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Nirvana. I found Nirvana. And I remember thinking, there's no way I would ever be able to squeeze the enormousness of myself back inside this tiny little body.
But then I realized, "But I'm still alive! I'm still alive, and I have found Nirvana. And if I have found Nirvana and I'm still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana." And I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover.
Two and a half weeks after the hemorrhage, the surgeons went in and they removed a blood clot the size of a golf ball that was pushing on my language centers. Here I am with my mama, who is a true angel in my life. It took me eight years to completely recover.
So who are we? We are the life-force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere, where we are. I am the life-force power of the universe. I am the life-force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form, at one with all that is. Or, I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere, where I become a single individual, a solid. Separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the "we" inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be.
And I thought that was an idea worth spreading. |
Our face is hugely important because it's the external, visual part that everybody else sees. Let's not forget it's a functional entity. We have strong skull bones that protect the most important organ in our body: the brain. It's where our senses are located, our special senses -- our vision, our speech, our hearing, our smell, our taste. And this bone is peppered, as you can see, with the light shining through the skull with cavities, the sinuses, which warm and moisten the air we breathe. But also imagine if they were filled with solid bone -- our head would be dead weight, we wouldn't be able to hold it erect, we wouldn't be able to look at the world around us. This woman is slowly dying because the benign tumors in her facial bones have completely obliterated her mouth and her nose so she can't breathe and eat.
Attached to the facial bones that define our face's structure are the muscles that deliver our facial expression, our universal language of expression, our social-signaling system. And overlying this is the skin drape, which is a hugely complex three-dimensional structure -- taking right-angled bends here and there, having thin areas like the eyelids, thick areas like the cheek, different colors. And then we have the sensual factor of the face. Where do we like to kiss people? On the lips. Nibble the ears maybe. It's the face where we're attracted to with that.
But let's not forget the hair. You're looking at the image on your left-hand side -- that's my son with his eyebrows present. Look how odd he looks with the eyebrows missing. There's a definite difference. And imagine if he had hair sprouting from the middle of his nose, he'd look even odder still.
Dysmorphophobia is an extreme version of the fact that we don't see ourselves as others see us. It's a shocking truth that we only see mirror images of ourselves, and we only see ourselves in freeze-frame photographic images that capture a mere fraction of the time that we live. Dysmorphophobia is a perversion of this where people who may be very good looking regard themselves as hideously ugly and are constantly seeking surgery to correct their facial appearance. They don't need this. They need psychiatric help. Max has kindly donated his photograph to me. He doesn't have dysmorphophobia, but I'm using his photograph to illustrate the fact that he looks exactly like a dysmorphophobic. In other words, he looks entirely normal.
Age is another thing when our attitude toward our appearance changes. So children judge themselves, learn to judge themselves, by the behavior of adults around them. Here's a classic example: Rebecca has a benign blood vessel tumor that's growing out through her skull, has obliterated her nose, and she's having difficulty seeing. As you can see, it's blocking her vision. She's also in danger, when she damages this, of bleeding profusely. Our research has shown that the parents and close loved ones of these children adore them. They've grown used to their face; they think they're special. Actually, sometimes the parents argue about whether these children should have the lesion removed. And occasionally they suffer intense grief reactions because the child they've grown to love has changed so dramatically and they don't recognize them. But other adults say incredibly painful things. They say, "How dare you take this child out of the house and terrify other people. Shouldn't you be doing something about this? Why haven't you had it removed?" And other children in curiosity come up and poke the lesion, because -- a natural curiosity. And that obviously alerts the child to their unusual nature. After surgery, everything normalizes. The adults behave more naturally, and the children play more readily with other children.
As teenagers -- just think back to your teenage years -- we're going through a dramatic and often disproportionate change in our facial appearance. We're trying to struggle to find our identity. We crave the approval of our peers. So our facial appearance is vital to us as we're trying to project ourselves to the world. Just remember that single acne spot that crippled you for several days. How long did you spend looking in the mirror every day, practicing your sardonic look, practicing your serious look, trying to look like Sean Connery, as I did, trying to raise one eyebrow? It's a crippling time.
I've chosen to show this profile view of Sue because what it shows is her lower jaw jutting forward and her lower lip jutting forward. I'd like you all in the audience now to push your lower jaw forward. Turn to the person next to you, push your lower jaws forward. Turn to the person next to you and look at them -- they look miserable. That's exactly what people used to say to Sue. She wasn't miserable at all. But people used to say to her, "Why are you so miserable?" People were making misjudgments all the time on her mood. Teachers and peers were underestimating her; she was teased at school. So she chose to have facial surgery. After the facial surgery, she said, "My face now reflects my personality. People know now that I'm enthusiastic, that I'm a happy person." And that's the change that can be achieved for teenagers.
Is this change, though, a real change, or is it a figment of the imagination of the patient themselves? Well we studied teenagers' attitudes to photographs of patients having this corrective facial surgery. And what we found was -- we jumbled up the photographs so they couldn't recognize the before and after -- what we found was that the patients were regarded as being more attractive after the surgery. Well that's not surprising, but we also asked them to judge them on honesty, intelligence, friendliness, violence. They were all perceived as being less than normal in all those characteristics -- more violent, etc. -- before the surgery. After the surgery, they were perceived as being more intelligent, more friendly, more honest, less violent -- and yet we hadn't operated on their intellect or their character.
When people get older, they don't necessarily choose to follow this kind of surgery. Their presence in the consultation suite is a result of the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. What happens to them is that they may have suffered cancer or trauma. So this is a photograph of Henry, two weeks after he had a malignant cancer removed from the left side of his face -- his cheekbone, his upper jaw, his eye-socket. He looks pretty good at this stage. But over the course of the next 15 years he had 14 more operations, as the disease ravaged his face and destroyed my reconstruction regularly. I learned a huge amount from Henry. Henry taught me that you can carry on working. He worked as an advocate. He continued to play cricket. He enjoyed life to the full, and this was probably because he had a successful, fulfilling job and a caring family and was able to participate socially. He maintained a calm insouciance. I don't say he overcame this; he didn't overcome it. This was something more than that. He ignored it. He ignored the disfigurement that was happening in his life and carried on oblivious to it. And that's what these people can do.
Henriapi illustrates this phenomenon as well. This is a man in his 20s whose first visit out of Nigeria was with this malignant cancer that he came to the United Kingdom to have operated on. It was my longest operation. It took 23 hours. I did it with my neurosurgeon. We removed all the bones at the right side of his face -- his eye, his nose, the skull bones, the facial skin -- and reconstructed him with tissue from the back. He continued to work as a psychiatric nurse. He got married. He had a son called Jeremiah. And again, he said, "This painting of me with my son Jeremiah shows me as the successful man that I feel that I am." His facial disfigurement did not affect him because he had the support of a family; he had a successful, fulfilling job.
So we've seen that we can change people's faces. But when we change people's faces, are we changing their identity -- for better or for worse? For instance, there are two different types of facial surgery. We can categorize it like that. We can say there are patients who choose to have facial surgery -- like Sue. When they have facial surgery, they feel their lives have changed because other people perceive them as better people. They don't feel different. They feel that they've actually gained what they never had, that their face now reflects their personality. And actually that's probably the difference between cosmetic surgery and this kind of surgery. Because you might say, "Well, this type of surgery might be regarded as cosmetic." If you do cosmetic surgery, patients are often less happy. They're trying to achieve difference in their lives. Sue wasn't trying to achieve difference in her life. She was just trying to achieve the face that matched her personality.
But then we have other people who don't choose to have facial surgery. They're people who have their face shot off. I'll move it off, and we'll have a blank slide for those who are squeamish amongst you. They have it forced upon them. And again, as I told you, if they have a caring family and good work life, then they can lead normal and fulfilled lives. Their identity doesn't change.
Is this business about appearance and preoccupation with it a Western phenomenon? Muzetta's family give the lie to this. This is a little Bangladeshi girl from the east end of London who's got a huge malignant tumor on the right side of her face, which has already made her blind and which is rapidly growing and is going to kill her shortly. After she had surgery to remove the tumor, her parents dressed her in this beautiful green velvet dress, a pink ribbon in her hair, and they wanted the painting to be shown around the world, despite the fact that they were orthodox Muslims and the mother wore a full burqa. So it's not simply a Western phenomenon.
We make judgments on people's faces all the time. It's been going on since we can think of Lombroso and the way he would define criminal faces. He said you could see criminal faces, judging them just on the photographs that were showed. Good-looking people are always judged as being more friendly. We look at O.J. -- he's a good-looking guy. We'd like to spend time with him. He looks friendly. Now we know that he's a convicted wife-batterer, and actually he's not the good guy. And beauty doesn't equate to goodness, and certainly doesn't equate to contentment.
So we've talked about the static face and judging the static face, but actually, we're more comfortable with judging the moving face. We think we can judge people on their expressions. U.K. jurors in the U.K. justice system like to see a live witness to see whether they can pick up the telltale signs of mendacity -- the blink, the hesitation. And so they want to see live witnesses. Todorov tells us that, in a tenth of a second, we can make a judgment on somebody's face. Are we uncomfortable with this image? Yes, we are. Would we be happy if our doctor's face, our lawyer's face, our financial adviser's face was covered? We'd be pretty uncomfortable. But are we good at making the judgments on facial appearance and movement? The truth is that there's a five-minute rule, not the tenth-of-a-second rule like Todorov, but a five-minute rule. If you spend five minutes with somebody, you start looking beyond their facial appearance, and the people who you're initially attracted to may seem boring and you lose interest in them, and the people who you didn't immediately seek out, because you didn't find them particularly attractive, become attractive people because of their personality.
So we've talked a lot about facial appearance. I now want to share a little bit of the surgery that we do -- where we're at and where we're going. This is an image of Ann who's had her right jaw removed and the base of her skull removed. And you can see in the images afterward, we've managed to reconstruct her successfully. But that's not good enough. This is what Ann wants. She wants to be out kayaking, she wants to be out climbing mountains. And that's what she achieved, and that's what we have to get to.
This is a horrific image, so I'm putting my hand up now. This is a photograph of Adi, a Nigerian bank manager who had his face shot off in an armed robbery. And he lost his lower jaw, his lip, his chin and his upper jaw and teeth. This is the bar that he set for us. "I want to look like this. This is how I looked before." So with modern technology, we used computers to make models. We made a model of the jaw without bone in it. We then bent a plate up to it. We put it in place so we knew it was an accurate position. We then put bone and tissue from the back. Here you can see the plate holding it, and you can see the implants being put in -- so that in one operation we achieve this and this. So the patient's life is restored. That's the good news. However, his chin skin doesn't look the same as it did before. It's skin from his back. It's thicker, it's darker, it's coarser, it doesn't have the contours. And that's where we're failing, and that's where we need the face transplant.
The face transplant has a role probably in burns patients to replace the skin. We can replace the underlying skeletal structure, but we're still not good at replacing the facial skin. So it's very valuable to have that tool in our armamentarium. But the patients are going to have to take drugs that suppress their immune system for the rest of their lives. What does that mean? They have an increased risk of infection, an increased risk of malignancy. This is not a life-saving transplant -- like a heart, or liver, or lung transplant -- it is a quality-of-life transplant, and as a result, are the patients going to say, if they get a malignant cancer 10 or 15 years on, "I wish I'd had conventional reconstructive techniques rather than this because I'm now dying of a malignant cancer"? We don't know yet. We also don't know what they feel about recognition and identity. Bernard Devauchelle and Sylvie Testelin, who did the first operation, are studying that. Donors are going to be short on the ground, because how many people want to have their loved one's face removed at the point of death? So there are going to be problems with face transplantation.
So the better news is the future's almost here -- and the future is tissue engineering. Just imagine, I can make a biologically-degradable template. I can put it in place where it's meant to be. I can sprinkle a few cells, stem cells from the patient's own hip, a little bit of genetically engineered protein, and lo and behold, leave it for four months and the face is grown. This is a bit like a Julia Child recipe.
But we've still got problems. We've got mouth cancer to solve. We're still not curing enough patients -- it's the most disfiguring cancer. We're still not reconstructing them well enough. In the U.K. we have an epidemic of facial injuries among young people. We still can't get rid of scars. We need to do research. And the best news of all is that surgeons know that we need to do research. And we've set up charities that will help us fund the clinical research to determine the best treatment practice now and better treatment into the future, so we don't just sit on our laurels and say, "Okay, we're doing okay. Let's leave it as it is."
Thank you very much indeed.
(Applause) |
My name is Arvind Gupta, and I'm a toymaker. I've been making toys for the last 30 years. The early '70s, I was in college. It was a very revolutionary time. It was a political ferment, so to say -- students out in the streets of Paris, revolting against authority. America was jolted by the anti-Vietnam movement, the Civil Rights movement. In India, we had the Naxalite movement, the [unclear] movement. But you know, when there is a political churning of society, it unleashes a lot of energy. The National Movement of India was testimony to that. Lots of people resigned from well-paid jobs and jumped into the National Movement. Now in the early '70s, one of the great programs in India was to revitalize primary science in village schools.
There was a person, Anil Sadgopal, did a Ph.D. from Caltech and returned back as a molecular biologist in India's cutting-edge research institute, the TIFR. At 31, he was not able to relate the kind of [unclear] research, which he was doing with the lives of the ordinary people. So he designed and went and started a village science program. Many people were inspired by this. The slogan of the early '70s was "Go to the people. Live with them; love them. Start from what they know. Build on what they have." This was kind of the defining slogan.
Well I took one year. I joined Telco, made TATA trucks, pretty close to Pune. I worked there for two years, and I realized that I was not born to make trucks. Often one doesn't know what one wants to do, but it's good enough to know what you don't want to do. So I took one year off, and I went to this village science program. And it was a turning point. It was a very small village -- a weekly bazaar where people, just once in a week, they put in all the vats. So I said, "I'm going to spend a year over here." So I just bought one specimen of everything which was sold on the roadside. And one thing which I found was this black rubber.
This is called a cycle valve tube. When you pump in air in a bicycle, you use a bit of this. And some of these models -- so you take a bit of this cycle valve tube, you can put two matchsticks inside this, and you make a flexible joint. It's a joint of tubes. You start by teaching angles -- an acute angle, a right angle, an obtuse angle, a straight angle. It's like its own little coupling. If you have three of them, and you loop them together, well you make a triangle. With four, you make a square, you make a pentagon, you make a hexagon, you make all these kind of polygons. And they have some wonderful properties. If you look at the hexagon, for instance, it's like an amoeba, which is constantly changing its own profile. You can just pull this out, this becomes a rectangle. You give it a push, this becomes a parallelogram. But this is very shaky. Look at the pentagon, for instance, pull this out -- it becomes a boat shape trapezium. Push it and it becomes house shaped. This becomes an isosceles triangle -- again, very shaky. This square might look very square and prim. Give it a little push -- this becomes a rhombus. It becomes kite-shaped. But give a child a triangle, he can't do a thing to it.
Why use triangles? Because triangles are the only rigid structures. We can't make a bridge with squares because the train would come, it would start doing a jig. Ordinary people know about this because if you go to a village in India, they might not have gone to engineering college, but no one makes a roof placed like this. Because if they put tiles on top, it's just going to crash. They always make a triangular roof. Now this is people science.
And if you were to just poke a hole over here and put a third matchstick, you'll get a T joint. And if I were to poke all the three legs of this in the three vertices of this triangle, I would make a tetrahedron. So you make all these 3D shapes. You make a tetrahedron like this. And once you make these, you make a little house. Put this on top. You can make a joint of four. You can make a joint of six. You just need a ton. Now this was -- you make a joint of six, you make an icosahedron. You can play around with it. This makes an igloo. Now this is in 1978. I was a 24-year-old young engineer. And I thought this was so much better than making trucks. (Applause) If you, as a matter of fact, put four marbles inside, you simulate the molecular structure of methane, CH4. Four atoms of hydrogen, the four points of the tetrahedron, which means the little carbon atom.
Well since then, I just thought that I've been really privileged to go to over 2,000 schools in my country -- village schools, government schools, municipal schools, Ivy League schools -- I've been invited by most of them. And every time I go to a school, I see a gleam in the eyes of the children. I see hope. I see happiness in their faces. Children want to make things. Children want to do things.
Now this, we make lots and lots of pumps. Now this is a little pump with which you could inflate a balloon. It's a real pump. You could actually pop the balloon. And we have a slogan that the best thing a child can do with a toy is to break it. So all you do is -- it's a very kind of provocative statement -- this old bicycle tube and this old plastic [unclear] This filling cap will go very snugly into an old bicycle tube. And this is how you make a valve. You put a little sticky tape. This is one-way traffic. Well we make lots and lots of pumps. And this is the other one -- that you just take a straw, and you just put a stick inside and you make two half-cuts. Now this is what you do, is you bend both these legs into a triangle, and you just wrap some tape around. And this is the pump. And now, if you have this pump, it's like a great, great sprinkler. It's like a centrifuge. If you spin something, it tends to fly out.
(Applause)
Well in terms of -- if you were in Andhra Pradesh, you would make this with the palmyra leaf. Many of our folk toys have great science principles. If you spin-top something, it tends to fly out. If I do it with both hands, you can see this fun Mr. Flying Man. Right. This is a toy which is made from paper. It's amazing. There are four pictures. You see insects, you see frogs, snakes, eagles, butterflies, frogs, snakes, eagles. Here's a paper which you could [unclear] -- designed by a mathematician at Harvard in 1928, Arthur Stone, documented by Martin Gardner in many of his many books. But this is great fun for children. They all study about the food chain. The insects are eaten by the frogs; the frogs are eaten by the snakes; the snakes are eaten by the eagles. And this can be, if you had a whole photocopy paper -- A4 size paper -- you could be in a municipal school, you could be in a government school -- a paper, a scale and a pencil -- no glue, no scissors. In three minutes, you just fold this up. And what you could use it for is just limited by your imagination. If you take a smaller paper, you make a smaller flexagon. With a bigger one, you make a bigger one.
Now this is a pencil with a few slots over here. And you put a little fan here. And this is a hundred-year-old toy. There have been six major research papers on this. There's some grooves over here, you can see. And if I take a reed -- if I rub this, something very amazing happens. Six major research papers on this. As a matter of fact, Feynman, as a child, was very fascinated by this. He wrote a paper on this. And you don't need the three billion-dollar Hadron Collider for doing this. (Laughter) (Applause) This is there for every child, and every child can enjoy this. If you want to put a colored disk, well all these seven colors coalesce. And this is what Newton talked about 400 years back, that white light's made of seven colors, just by spinning this around.
This is a straw. What we've done, we've just sealed both the ends with tape, nipped the right corner and the bottom left corner, so there's holes in the opposite corners, there's a little hole over here. This is a kind of a blowing straw. I just put this inside this. There's a hole here, and I shut this. And this costs very little money to make -- great fun for children to do.
What we do is make a very simple electric motor. Now this is the simplest motor on Earth. The most expensive thing is the battery inside this. If you have a battery, it costs five cents to make it. This is an old bicycle tube, which gives you a broad rubber band, two safety pins. This is a permanent magnet. Whenever current flows through the coil, this becomes an electromagnet. It's the interaction of both these magnets which makes this motor spin. We made 30,000.
Teachers who have been teaching science for donkey years, they just muck up the definition and they spit it out. When teachers make it, children make it. You can see a gleam in their eye. They get a thrill of what science is all about. And this science is not a rich man's game. In a democratic country, science must reach to our most oppressed, to the most marginalized children. This program started with 16 schools and spread to 1,500 government schools. Over 100,000 children learn science this way. And we're just trying to see possibilities.
Look, this is the tetrapak -- awful materials from the point of view of the environment. There are six layers -- three layers of plastic, aluminum -- which are are sealed together. They are fused together, so you can't separate them. Now you can just make a little network like this and fold them and stick them together and make an icosahedron. So something which is trash, which is choking all the seabirds, you could just recycle this into a very, very joyous -- all the platonic solids can be made with things like this.
This is a little straw, and what you do is you just nip two corners here, and this becomes like a baby crocodile's mouth. You put this in your mouth, and you blow. (Honk) It's children's delight, a teacher's envy, as they say. You're not able to see how the sound is produced, because the thing which is vibrating goes inside my mouth. I'm going to keep this outside, to blow out. I'm going to suck in air. (Honk) So no one actually needs to muck up the production of sound with wire vibrations. The other is that you keep blowing at it, keep making the sound, and you keep cutting it. And something very, very nice happens. (Honk) (Applause) And when you get a very small one -- (Honk) This is what the kids teach you. You can also do this.
Well before I go any further, this is something worth sharing. This is a touching slate meant for blind children. This is strips of Velcro, this is my drawing slate, and this is my drawing pen, which is basically a film box. It's basically like a fisherman's line, a fishing line. And this is wool over here. If I crank the handle, all the wool goes inside. And what a blind child can do is to just draw this. Wool sticks on Velcro. There are 12 million blind children in our country -- (Applause) who live in a world of darkness. And this has come as a great boon to them. There's a factory out there making our children blind, not able to provide them with food, not able to provide them with vitamin A. But this has come as a great boon for them. There are no patents. Anyone can make it.
This is very, very simple. You can see, this is the generator. It's a crank generator. These are two magnets. This is a large pulley made by sandwiching rubber between two old CDs. Small pulley and two strong magnets. And this fiber turns a wire attached to an LED. If I spin this pulley, the small one's going to spin much faster. There will be a spinning magnetic field. Lines, of course, would be cut, the force will be generated. And you can see, this LED is going to glow. So this is a small crank generator.
Well, this is, again, it's just a ring, a steel ring with steel nuts. And what you can do is just, if you give it a twirl, well they just keep going on. And imagine a bunch of kids standing in a circle and just waiting for the steel ring to be passed on. And they'd be absolutely joyous playing with this.
Well in the end, what we can also do: we use a lot of old newspapers to make caps. This is worthy of Sachin Tendulkar. It's a great cricket cap. (Laughter) (Applause) When first you see Nehru and Gandhi, this is the Nehru cap -- just half a newspaper. We make lots of toys with newspapers, and this is one of them. And this is -- you can see -- this is a flapping bird. All of our old newspapers, we cut them into little squares. And if you have one of these birds -- children in Japan have been making this bird for many, many years. And you can see, this is a little fantail bird.
Well in the end, I'll just end with a story. This is called "The Captain's Hat Story." The captain was a captain of a sea-going ship. It goes very slowly. And there were lots of passengers on the ship, and they were getting bored, so the captain invited them on the deck. "Wear all your colorful clothes and sing and dance, and I'll provide you with good food and drinks." And the captain would wear a cap everyday and join in the regalia. The first day, it was a huge umbrella cap, like a captain's cap. That night, when the passengers would be sleeping, he would give it one more fold, and the second day, he would be wearing a fireman's cap -- with a little shoot just like a designer cap, because it protects the spinal cord. And the second night, he would take the same cap and give it another fold. And the third day, it would be a Shikari cap -- just like an adventurer's cap. And the third night, he would give it two more folds -- and this is a very, very famous cap. If you've seen any of our Bollywood films, this is what the policeman wears, it's called a zapalu cap. It's been catapulted to international glory.
And we must not forget that he was the captain of the ship. So that's a ship. And now the end: everyone was enjoying the journey very much. They were singing and dancing. Suddenly there was a storm and huge waves. And all the ship can do is to dance and pitch along with the waves. A huge wave comes and slaps the front and knocks it down. And another one comes and slaps the aft and knocks it down. And there's a third one over here. This swallows the bridge and knocks it down. And the ship sinks, and the captain has lost everything, but for a life jacket.
Thank you so much.
(Applause) |
Salaam. Namaskar. Good morning. Given my TED profile, you might be expecting that I'm going to speak to you about the latest philanthropic trends -- the one that's currently got Wall Street and the World Bank buzzing -- how to invest in women, how to empower them, how to save them.
Not me. I am interested in how women are saving us. They're saving us by redefining and re-imagining a future that defies and blurs accepted polarities, polarities we've taken for granted for a long time, like the ones between modernity and tradition, First World and Third World, oppression and opportunity. In the midst of the daunting challenges we face as a global community, there's something about this third way raga that is making my heart sing. What intrigues me most is how women are doing this, despite a set of paradoxes that are both frustrating and fascinating.
Why is it that women are, on the one hand, viciously oppressed by cultural practices, and yet at the same time, are the preservers of cultures in most societies? Is the hijab or the headscarf a symbol of submission or resistance? When so many women and girls are beaten, raped, maimed on a daily basis in the name of all kinds of causes -- honor, religion, nationality -- what allows women to replant trees, to rebuild societies, to lead radical, non-violent movements for social change? Is it different women who are doing the preserving and the radicalizing? Or are they one and the same? Are we guilty, as Chimamanda Adichie reminded us at the TED conference in Oxford, of assuming that there is a single story of women's struggles for their rights while there are, in fact, many? And what, if anything, do men have to do with it?
Much of my life has been a quest to get some answers to these questions. It's taken me across the globe and introduced me to some amazing people. In the process, I've gathered a few fragments that help me shed some light on this puzzle. Among those who've helped open my eyes to a third way are: a devout Muslim in Afghanistan, a group of harmonizing lesbians in Croatia and a taboo breaker in Liberia. I'm indebted to them, as I am to my parents, who for some set of misdemeanors in their last life, were blessed with three daughters in this one. And for reasons equally unclear to me, seem to be inordinately proud of the three of us.
I was born and raised here in India, and I learned from an early age to be deeply suspicious of the aunties and uncles who would bend down, pat us on the head and then say to my parents with no problem at all, "Poor things. You only have three daughters. But you're young, you could still try again." My sense of outrage about women's rights was brought to a boil when I was about 11. My aunt, an incredibly articulate and brilliant woman, was widowed early. A flock of relatives descended on her. They took off her colorful sari. They made her wear a white one. They wiped her bindi off her forehead. They broke her bangles. Her daughter, Rani, a few years older than me, sat in her lap bewildered, not knowing what had happened to the confident woman she once knew as her mother. Late that night, I heard my mother begging my father, "Please do something Ramu. Can't you intervene?" And my father, in a low voice, muttering, "I'm just the youngest brother, there's nothing I can do. This is tradition." That's the night I learned the rules about what it means to be female in this world. Women don't make those rules, but they define us, and they define our opportunities and our chances. And men are affected by those rules too. My father, who had fought in three wars, could not save his own sister from this suffering.
By 18, under the excellent tutelage of my mother, I was therefore, as you might expect, defiantly feminist. On the streets chanting, "[Hindi] [Hindi] We are the women of India. We are not flowers, we are sparks of change." By the time I got to Beijing in 1995, it was clear to me, the only way to achieve gender equality was to overturn centuries of oppressive tradition. Soon after I returned from Beijing, I leapt at the chance to work for this wonderful organization, founded by women, to support women's rights organizations around the globe. But barely six months into my new job, I met a woman who forced me to challenge all my assumptions. Her name is Sakena Yacoobi.
She walked into my office at a time when no one knew where Afghanistan was in the United States. She said to me, "It is not about the burka." She was the most determined advocate for women's rights I had ever heard. She told me women were running underground schools in her communities inside Afghanistan, and that her organization, the Afghan Institute of Learning, had started a school in Pakistan. She said, "The first thing anyone who is a Muslim knows is that the Koran requires and strongly supports literacy. The prophet wanted every believer to be able to read the Koran for themselves." Had I heard right? Was a women's rights advocate invoking religion? But Sakena defies labels. She always wears a headscarf, but I've walked alongside with her on a beach with her long hair flying in the breeze. She starts every lecture with a prayer, but she's a single, feisty, financially independent woman in a country where girls are married off at the age of 12.
She is also immensely pragmatic. "This headscarf and these clothes," she says, "give me the freedom to do what I need to do to speak to those whose support and assistance are critical for this work. When I had to open the school in the refugee camp, I went to see the imam. I told him, 'I'm a believer, and women and children in these terrible conditions need their faith to survive.'" She smiles slyly. "He was flattered. He began to come twice a week to my center because women could not go to the mosque. And after he would leave, women and girls would stay behind. We began with a small literacy class to read the Koran, then a math class, then an English class, then computer classes. In a few weeks, everyone in the refugee camp was in our classes." Sakena is a teacher at a time when to educate women is a dangerous business in Afghanistan.
She is on the Taliban's hit list. I worry about her every time she travels across that country. She shrugs when I ask her about safety. "Kavita jaan, we cannot allow ourselves to be afraid. Look at those young girls who go back to school when acid is thrown in their face." And I smile, and I nod, realizing I'm watching women and girls using their own religious traditions and practices, turning them into instruments of opposition and opportunity. Their path is their own and it looks towards an Afghanistan that will be different.
Being different is something the women of Lesbor in Zagreb, Croatia know all too well. To be a lesbian, a dyke, a homosexual in most parts of the world, including right here in our country, India, is to occupy a place of immense discomfort and extreme prejudice. In post-conflict societies like Croatia, where a hyper-nationalism and religiosity have created an environment unbearable for anyone who might be considered a social outcast. So enter a group of out dykes, young women who love the old music that once spread across that region from Macedonia to Bosnia, from Serbia to Slovenia. These folk singers met at college at a gender studies program. Many are in their 20s, some are mothers. Many have struggled to come out to their communities, in families whose religious beliefs make it hard to accept that their daughters are not sick, just queer. As Leah, one of the founders of the group, says, "I like traditional music very much. I also like rock and roll. So Lesbor, we blend the two. I see traditional music like a kind of rebellion, in which people can really speak their voice, especially traditional songs from other parts of the former Yugoslav Republic. After the war, lots of these songs were lost, but they are a part of our childhood and our history, and we should not forget them."
Improbably, this LGBT singing choir has demonstrated how women are investing in tradition to create change, like alchemists turning discord into harmony. Their repertoire includes the Croatian national anthem, a Bosnian love song and Serbian duets. And, Leah adds with a grin, "Kavita, we especially are proud of our Christmas music, because it shows we are open to religious practices even though Catholic Church hates us LGBT." Their concerts draw from their own communities, yes, but also from an older generation: a generation that might be suspicious of homosexuality, but is nostalgic for its own music and the past it represents. One father, who had initially balked at his daughter coming out in such a choir, now writes songs for them. In the Middle Ages, troubadours would travel across the land singing their tales and sharing their verses: Lesbor travels through the Balkans like this, singing, connecting people divided by religion, nationality and language. Bosnians, Croats and Serbs find a rare shared space of pride in their history, and Lesbor reminds them that the songs one group often claims as theirs alone really belong to them all.
(Singing)
Yesterday, Mallika Sarabhai showed us that music can create a world more accepting of difference than the one we have been given. The world Leymah Gbowee was given was a world at war. Liberia had been torn apart by civil strife for decades. Leymah was not an activist, she was a mother of three. But she was sick with worry: She worried her son would be abducted and taken off to be a child soldier, she worried her daughters would be raped, she worried for their lives. One night, she had a dream. She dreamt she and thousands of other women ended the bloodshed. The next morning at church, she asked others how they felt. They were all tired of the fighting. We need peace, and we need our leaders to know we will not rest until there is peace. Among Leymah's friends was a policewoman who was Muslim. She promised to raise the issue with her community.
At the next Friday sermon, the women who were sitting in the side room of the mosque began to share their distress at the state of affairs. "What does it matter?" they said, "A bullet doesn't distinguish between a Muslim and a Christian." This small group of women, determined to bring an end to the war, and they chose to use their traditions to make a point: Liberian women usually wear lots of jewelry and colorful clothing. But no, for the protest, they dressed all in white, no makeup. As Leymah said, "We wore the white saying we were out for peace." They stood on the side of the road on which Charles Taylor's motorcade passed every day. They stood for weeks -- first just 10, then 20, then 50, then hundreds of women -- wearing white, singing, dancing, saying they were out for peace.
Eventually, opposing forces in Liberia were pushed to hold peace talks in Ghana. The peace talks dragged on and on and on. Leymah and her sisters had had enough. With their remaining funds, they took a small group of women down to the venue of the peace talks and they surrounded the building. In a now famous CNN clip, you can see them sitting on the ground, their arms linked. We know this in India. It's called a [Hindi]. Then things get tense. The police are called in to physically remove the women. As the senior officer approaches with a baton, Leymah stands up with deliberation, reaches her arms up over her head, and begins, very slowly, to untie her headdress that covers her hair. You can see the policeman's face. He looks embarrassed. He backs away. And the next thing you know, the police have disappeared. Leymah said to me later, "It's a taboo, you know, in West Africa. If an older woman undresses in front of a man because she wants to, the man's family is cursed." (Laughter) (Applause) She said, "I don't know if he did it because he believed, but he knew we were not going to leave. We were not going to leave until the peace accord was signed."
And the peace accord was signed. And the women of Liberia then mobilized in support of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a woman who broke a few taboos herself becoming the first elected woman head of state in Africa in years. When she made her presidential address, she acknowledged these brave women of Liberia who allowed her to win against a football star -- that's soccer for you Americans -- no less.
Women like Sakena and Leah and Leymah have humbled me and changed me and made me realize that I should not be so quick to jump to assumptions of any kind. They've also saved me from my righteous anger by offering insights into this third way. A Filipina activist once said to me, "How do you cook a rice cake? With heat from the bottom and heat from the top." The protests, the marches, the uncompromising position that women's rights are human rights, full stop. That's the heat from the bottom. That's Malcolm X and the suffragists and gay pride parades. But we also need the heat from the top. And in most parts of the world, that top is still controlled by men.
So to paraphrase Marx: Women make change, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. They have to negotiate. They have to subvert tradition that once silenced them in order to give voice to new aspirations. And they need allies from their communities. Allies like the imam, allies like the father who now writes songs for a lesbian group in Croatia, allies like the policeman who honored a taboo and backed away, allies like my father, who couldn't help his sister but has helped three daughters pursue their dreams. Maybe this is because feminism, unlike almost every other social movement, is not a struggle against a distinct oppressor -- it's not the ruling class or the occupiers or the colonizers -- it's against a deeply held set of beliefs and assumptions that we women, far too often, hold ourselves.
And perhaps this is the ultimate gift of feminism, that the personal is in fact the political. So that, as Eleanor Roosevelt said once of human rights, the same is true of gender equality: that it starts in small places, close to home. On the streets, yes, but also in negotiations at the kitchen table and in the marital bed and in relationships between lovers and parents and sisters and friends. And then you realize that by integrating aspects of tradition and community into their struggles, women like Sakena and Leah and Leymah -- but also women like Sonia Gandhi here in India and Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Shirin Ebadi in Iran -- are doing something else. They're challenging the very notion of Western models of development. They are saying, we don't have to be like you to make change. We can wear a sari or a hijab or pants or a boubou, and we can be party leaders and presidents and human rights lawyers. We can use our tradition to navigate change. We can demilitarize societies and pour resources, instead, into reservoirs of genuine security.
It is in these little stories, these individual stories, that I see a radical epic being written by women around the world. It is in these threads that are being woven into a resilient fabric that will sustain communities, that I find hope. And if my heart is singing, it's because in these little fragments, every now and again, you catch a glimpse of a whole, of a whole new world. And she is definitely on her way.
Thank you.
(Applause) |
Salaam. Namaskar. Good morning. Given my TED profile, you might be expecting that I'm going to speak to you about the latest philanthropic trends -- the one that's currently got Wall Street and the World Bank buzzing -- how to invest in women, how to empower them, how to save them.
Not me. I am interested in how women are saving us. They're saving us by redefining and re-imagining a future that defies and blurs accepted polarities, polarities we've taken for granted for a long time, like the ones between modernity and tradition, First World and Third World, oppression and opportunity. In the midst of the daunting challenges we face as a global community, there's something about this third way raga that is making my heart sing. What intrigues me most is how women are doing this, despite a set of paradoxes that are both frustrating and fascinating.
Why is it that women are, on the one hand, viciously oppressed by cultural practices, and yet at the same time, are the preservers of cultures in most societies? Is the hijab or the headscarf a symbol of submission or resistance? When so many women and girls are beaten, raped, maimed on a daily basis in the name of all kinds of causes -- honor, religion, nationality -- what allows women to replant trees, to rebuild societies, to lead radical, non-violent movements for social change? Is it different women who are doing the preserving and the radicalizing? Or are they one and the same? Are we guilty, as Chimamanda Adichie reminded us at the TED conference in Oxford, of assuming that there is a single story of women's struggles for their rights while there are, in fact, many? And what, if anything, do men have to do with it?
Much of my life has been a quest to get some answers to these questions. It's taken me across the globe and introduced me to some amazing people. In the process, I've gathered a few fragments that help me shed some light on this puzzle. Among those who've helped open my eyes to a third way are: a devout Muslim in Afghanistan, a group of harmonizing lesbians in Croatia and a taboo breaker in Liberia. I'm indebted to them, as I am to my parents, who for some set of misdemeanors in their last life, were blessed with three daughters in this one. And for reasons equally unclear to me, seem to be inordinately proud of the three of us.
I was born and raised here in India, and I learned from an early age to be deeply suspicious of the aunties and uncles who would bend down, pat us on the head and then say to my parents with no problem at all, "Poor things. You only have three daughters. But you're young, you could still try again." My sense of outrage about women's rights was brought to a boil when I was about 11. My aunt, an incredibly articulate and brilliant woman, was widowed early. A flock of relatives descended on her. They took off her colorful sari. They made her wear a white one. They wiped her bindi off her forehead. They broke her bangles. Her daughter, Rani, a few years older than me, sat in her lap bewildered, not knowing what had happened to the confident woman she once knew as her mother. Late that night, I heard my mother begging my father, "Please do something Ramu. Can't you intervene?" And my father, in a low voice, muttering, "I'm just the youngest brother, there's nothing I can do. This is tradition." That's the night I learned the rules about what it means to be female in this world. Women don't make those rules, but they define us, and they define our opportunities and our chances. And men are affected by those rules too. My father, who had fought in three wars, could not save his own sister from this suffering.
By 18, under the excellent tutelage of my mother, I was therefore, as you might expect, defiantly feminist. On the streets chanting, "[Hindi] [Hindi] We are the women of India. We are not flowers, we are sparks of change." By the time I got to Beijing in 1995, it was clear to me, the only way to achieve gender equality was to overturn centuries of oppressive tradition. Soon after I returned from Beijing, I leapt at the chance to work for this wonderful organization, founded by women, to support women's rights organizations around the globe. But barely six months into my new job, I met a woman who forced me to challenge all my assumptions. Her name is Sakena Yacoobi.
She walked into my office at a time when no one knew where Afghanistan was in the United States. She said to me, "It is not about the burka." She was the most determined advocate for women's rights I had ever heard. She told me women were running underground schools in her communities inside Afghanistan, and that her organization, the Afghan Institute of Learning, had started a school in Pakistan. She said, "The first thing anyone who is a Muslim knows is that the Koran requires and strongly supports literacy. The prophet wanted every believer to be able to read the Koran for themselves." Had I heard right? Was a women's rights advocate invoking religion? But Sakena defies labels. She always wears a headscarf, but I've walked alongside with her on a beach with her long hair flying in the breeze. She starts every lecture with a prayer, but she's a single, feisty, financially independent woman in a country where girls are married off at the age of 12.
She is also immensely pragmatic. "This headscarf and these clothes," she says, "give me the freedom to do what I need to do to speak to those whose support and assistance are critical for this work. When I had to open the school in the refugee camp, I went to see the imam. I told him, 'I'm a believer, and women and children in these terrible conditions need their faith to survive.'" She smiles slyly. "He was flattered. He began to come twice a week to my center because women could not go to the mosque. And after he would leave, women and girls would stay behind. We began with a small literacy class to read the Koran, then a math class, then an English class, then computer classes. In a few weeks, everyone in the refugee camp was in our classes." Sakena is a teacher at a time when to educate women is a dangerous business in Afghanistan.
She is on the Taliban's hit list. I worry about her every time she travels across that country. She shrugs when I ask her about safety. "Kavita jaan, we cannot allow ourselves to be afraid. Look at those young girls who go back to school when acid is thrown in their face." And I smile, and I nod, realizing I'm watching women and girls using their own religious traditions and practices, turning them into instruments of opposition and opportunity. Their path is their own and it looks towards an Afghanistan that will be different.
Being different is something the women of Lesbor in Zagreb, Croatia know all too well. To be a lesbian, a dyke, a homosexual in most parts of the world, including right here in our country, India, is to occupy a place of immense discomfort and extreme prejudice. In post-conflict societies like Croatia, where a hyper-nationalism and religiosity have created an environment unbearable for anyone who might be considered a social outcast. So enter a group of out dykes, young women who love the old music that once spread across that region from Macedonia to Bosnia, from Serbia to Slovenia. These folk singers met at college at a gender studies program. Many are in their 20s, some are mothers. Many have struggled to come out to their communities, in families whose religious beliefs make it hard to accept that their daughters are not sick, just queer. As Leah, one of the founders of the group, says, "I like traditional music very much. I also like rock and roll. So Lesbor, we blend the two. I see traditional music like a kind of rebellion, in which people can really speak their voice, especially traditional songs from other parts of the former Yugoslav Republic. After the war, lots of these songs were lost, but they are a part of our childhood and our history, and we should not forget them."
Improbably, this LGBT singing choir has demonstrated how women are investing in tradition to create change, like alchemists turning discord into harmony. Their repertoire includes the Croatian national anthem, a Bosnian love song and Serbian duets. And, Leah adds with a grin, "Kavita, we especially are proud of our Christmas music, because it shows we are open to religious practices even though Catholic Church hates us LGBT." Their concerts draw from their own communities, yes, but also from an older generation: a generation that might be suspicious of homosexuality, but is nostalgic for its own music and the past it represents. One father, who had initially balked at his daughter coming out in such a choir, now writes songs for them. In the Middle Ages, troubadours would travel across the land singing their tales and sharing their verses: Lesbor travels through the Balkans like this, singing, connecting people divided by religion, nationality and language. Bosnians, Croats and Serbs find a rare shared space of pride in their history, and Lesbor reminds them that the songs one group often claims as theirs alone really belong to them all.
(Singing)
Yesterday, Mallika Sarabhai showed us that music can create a world more accepting of difference than the one we have been given. The world Layma Bowie was given was a world at war. Liberia had been torn apart by civil strife for decades. Layma was not an activist, she was a mother of three. But she was sick with worry: She worried her son would be abducted and taken off to be a child soldier, she worried her daughters would be raped, she worried for their lives. One night, she had a dream. She dreamt she and thousands of other women ended the bloodshed. The next morning at church, she asked others how they felt. They were all tired of the fighting. We need peace, and we need our leaders to know we will not rest until there is peace. Among Layma's friends was a policewoman who was Muslim. She promised to raise the issue with her community.
At the next Friday sermon, the women who were sitting in the side room of the mosque began to share their distress at the state of affairs. "What does it matter?" they said, "A bullet doesn't distinguish between a Muslim and a Christian." This small group of women, determined to bring an end to the war, and they chose to use their traditions to make a point: Liberian women usually wear lots of jewelry and colorful clothing. But no, for the protest, they dressed all in white, no makeup. As Layma said, "We wore the white saying we were out for peace." They stood on the side of the road on which Charles Taylor's motorcade passed every day. They stood for weeks -- first just 10, then 20, then 50, then hundreds of women -- wearing white, singing, dancing, saying they were out for peace.
Eventually, opposing forces in Liberia were pushed to hold peace talks in Ghana. The peace talks dragged on and on and on. Layma and her sisters had had enough. With their remaining funds, they took a small group of women down to the venue of the peace talks and they surrounded the building. In a now famous CNN clip, you can see them sitting on the ground, their arms linked. We know this in India. It's called a [Hindi]. Then things get tense. The police are called in to physically remove the women. As the senior officer approaches with a baton, Layma stands up with deliberation, reaches her arms up over her head, and begins, very slowly, to untie her headdress that covers her hair. You can see the policeman's face. He looks embarrassed. He backs away. And the next thing you know, the police have disappeared. Layma said to me later, "It's a taboo, you know, in West Africa. If an older woman undresses in front of a man because she wants to, the man's family is cursed." (Laughter) (Applause) She said, "I don't know if he did it because he believed, but he knew we were not going to leave. We were not going to leave until the peace accord was signed."
And the peace accord was signed. And the women of Liberia then mobilized in support of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a woman who broke a few taboos herself becoming the first elected woman head of state in Africa in years. When she made her presidential address, she acknowledged these brave women of Liberia who allowed her to win against a football star -- that's soccer for you Americans -- no less.
Women like Sakena and Leah and Layma have humbled me and changed me and made me realize that I should not be so quick to jump to assumptions of any kind. They've also saved me from my righteous anger by offering insights into this third way. A Filipina activist once said to me, "How do you cook a rice cake? With heat from the bottom and heat from the top." The protests, the marches, the uncompromising position that women's rights are human rights, full stop. That's the heat from the bottom. That's Malcolm X and the suffragists and gay pride parades. But we also need the heat from the top. And in most parts of the world, that top is still controlled by men.
So to paraphrase Marx: Women make change, but not in circumstances of their own choosing. They have to negotiate. They have to subvert tradition that once silenced them in order to give voice to new aspirations. And they need allies from their communities. Allies like the imam, allies like the father who now writes songs for a lesbian group in Croatia, allies like the policeman who honored a taboo and backed away, allies like my father, who couldn't help his sister but has helped three daughters pursue their dreams. Maybe this is because feminism, unlike almost every other social movement, is not a struggle against a distinct oppressor -- it's not the ruling class or the occupiers or the colonizers -- it's against a deeply held set of beliefs and assumptions that we women, far too often, hold ourselves.
And perhaps this is the ultimate gift of feminism, that the personal is in fact the political. So that, as Eleanor Roosevelt said once of human rights, the same is true of gender equality: that it starts in small places, close to home. On the streets, yes, but also in negotiations at the kitchen table and in the marital bed and in relationships between lovers and parents and sisters and friends. And then you realize that by integrating aspects of tradition and community into their struggles, women like Sakena and Leah and Layma -- but also women like Sonia Gandhi here in India and Michelle Bachelet in Chile and Shirin Ebadi in Iran -- are doing something else. They're challenging the very notion of Western models of development. They are saying, we don't have to be like you to make change. We can wear a sari or a hijab or pants or a boubou, and we can be party leaders and presidents and human rights lawyers. We can use our tradition to navigate change. We can demilitarize societies and pour resources, instead, into reservoirs of genuine security.
It is in these little stories, these individual stories, that I see a radical epic being written by women around the world. It is in these threads that are being woven into a resilient fabric that will sustain communities, that I find hope. And if my heart is singing, it's because in these little fragments, every now and again, you catch a glimpse of a whole, of a whole new world. And she is definitely on her way.
Thank you.
(Applause) |
So that's Johnny Depp, of course. And that's Johnny Depp's shoulder. And that's Johnny Depp's famous shoulder tattoo. Some of you might know that, in 1990, Depp got engaged to Winona Ryder, and he had tattooed on his right shoulder "Winona forever." And then three years later -- which in fairness, kind of is forever by Hollywood standards -- they broke up, and Johnny went and got a little bit of repair work done. And now his shoulder says, "Wino forever."
(Laughter)
So like Johnny Depp, and like 25 percent of Americans between the ages of 16 and 50, I have a tattoo. I first started thinking about getting it in my mid-20s, but I deliberately waited a really long time. Because we all know people who have gotten tattoos when they were 17 or 19 or 23 and regretted it by the time they were 30. That didn't happen to me. I got my tattoo when I was 29, and I regretted it instantly. And by "regretted it," I mean that I stepped outside of the tattoo place -- this is just a couple miles from here down on the Lower East Side -- and I had a massive emotional meltdown in broad daylight on the corner of East Broadway and Canal Street. (Laughter) Which is a great place to do it because nobody cares. (Laughter) And then I went home that night, and I had an even larger emotional meltdown, which I'll say more about in a minute.
And this was all actually quite shocking to me, because prior to this moment, I had prided myself on having absolutely no regrets. I made a lot of mistakes and dumb decisions, of course. I do that hourly. But I had always felt like, look, you know, I made the best choice I could make given who I was then, given the information I had on hand. I learned a lesson from it. It somehow got me to where I am in life right now. And okay, I wouldn't change it. In other words, I had drunk our great cultural Kool-Aid about regret, which is that lamenting things that occurred in the past is an absolute waste of time, that we should always look forward and not backward, and that one of the noblest and best things we can do is strive to live a life free of regrets.
This idea is nicely captured by this quote: "Things without all remedy should be without regard; what's done is done." And it seems like kind of an admirable philosophy at first -- something we might all agree to sign onto ... until I tell you who said it. Right, so this is Lady MacBeth basically telling her husband to stop being such a wuss for feeling bad about murdering people. And as it happens, Shakespeare was onto something here, as he generally was. Because the inability to experience regret is actually one of the diagnostic characteristics of sociopaths. It's also, by the way, a characteristic of certain kinds of brain damage. So people who have damage to their orbital frontal cortex seem to be unable to feel regret in the face of even obviously very poor decisions. So if, in fact, you want to live a life free of regret, there is an option open to you. It's called a lobotomy. But if you want to be fully functional and fully human and fully humane, I think you need to learn to live, not without regret, but with it.
So let's start off by defining some terms. What is regret? Regret is the emotion we experience when we think that our present situation could be better or happier if we had done something different in the past. So in other words, regret requires two things. It requires, first of all, agency -- we had to make a decision in the first place. And second of all, it requires imagination. We need to be able to imagine going back and making a different choice, and then we need to be able to kind of spool this imaginary record forward and imagine how things would be playing out in our present. And in fact, the more we have of either of these things -- the more agency and the more imagination with respect to a given regret, the more acute that regret will be.
So let's say for instance that you're on your way to your best friend's wedding and you're trying to get to the airport and you're stuck in terrible traffic, and you finally arrive at your gate and you've missed your flight. You're going to experience more regret in that situation if you missed your flight by three minutes than if you missed it by 20. Why? Well because, if you miss your flight by three minutes, it is painfully easy to imagine that you could have made different decisions that would have led to a better outcome. "I should have taken the bridge and not the tunnel. I should have gone through that yellow light." These are the classic conditions that create regret. We feel regret when we think we are responsible for a decision that came out badly, but almost came out well.
Now within that framework, we can obviously experience regret about a lot of different things. This session today is about behavioral economics. And most of what we know about regret comes to us out of that domain. We have a vast body of literature on consumer and financial decisions and the regrets associated with them -- buyer's remorse, basically. But then finally, it occurred to some researchers to step back and say, well okay, but overall, what do we regret most in life? Here's what the answers turn out to look like.
So top six regrets -- the things we regret most in life: Number one by far, education. 33 percent of all of our regrets pertain to decisions we made about education. We wish we'd gotten more of it. We wish we'd taken better advantage of the education that we did have. We wish we'd chosen to study a different topic. Others very high on our list of regrets include career, romance, parenting, various decisions and choices about our sense of self and how we spend our leisure time -- or actually more specifically, how we fail to spend our leisure time. The remaining regrets pertain to these things: finance, family issues unrelated to romance or parenting, health, friends, spirituality and community.
So in other words, we know most of what we know about regret by the study of finance. But it turns out, when you look overall at what people regret in life, you know what, our financial decisions don't even rank. They account for less than three percent of our total regrets. So if you're sitting there stressing about large cap versus small cap, or company A versus company B, or should you buy the Subaru or the Prius, you know what, let it go. Odds are, you're not going to care in five years.
But for these things that we actually do really care about and do experience profound regret around, what does that experience feel like? We all know the short answer. It feels terrible. Regret feels awful. But it turns out that regret feels awful in four very specific and consistent ways. So the first consistent component of regret is basically denial. When I went home that night after getting my tattoo, I basically stayed up all night. And for the first several hours, there was exactly one thought in my head. And the thought was, "Make it go away!" This is an unbelievably primitive emotional response. I mean, it's right up there with, "I want my mommy!" We're not trying to solve the problem. We're not trying to understand how the problem came about. We just want it to vanish.
The second characteristic component of regret is a sense of bewilderment. So the other thing I thought about there in my bedroom that night was, "How could I have done that? What was I thinking?" This real sense of alienation from the part of us that made a decision we regret. We can't identify with that part. We don't understand that part. And we certainly don't have any empathy for that part -- which explains the third consistent component of regret, which is an intense desire to punish ourselves. That's why, in the face of our regret, the thing we consistently say is, "I could have kicked myself." The fourth component here is that regret is what psychologists call perseverative. To perseverate means to focus obsessively and repeatedly on the exact same thing. Now the effect of perseveration is to basically take these first three components of regret and put them on an infinite loop. So it's not that I sat there in my bedroom that night, thinking, "Make it go away." It's that I sat there and I thought, "Make it go away. Make it go away. Make it go away. Make it go away." So if you look at the psychological literature, these are the four consistent defining components of regret.
But I want to suggest that there's also a fifth one. And I think of this as a kind of existential wake-up call. That night in my apartment, after I got done kicking myself and so forth, I lay in bed for a long time, and I thought about skin grafts. And then I thought about how, much as travel insurance doesn't cover acts of God, probably my health insurance did not cover acts of idiocy. In point of fact, no insurance covers acts of idiocy. The whole point of acts of idiocy is that they leave you totally uninsured; they leave you exposed to the world and exposed to your own vulnerability and fallibility in face of, frankly, a fairly indifferent universe.
This is obviously an incredibly painful experience. And I think it's particularly painful for us now in the West in the grips of what I sometimes think of as a Control-Z culture -- Control-Z like the computer command, undo. We're incredibly used to not having to face life's hard realities, in a certain sense. We think we can throw money at the problem or throw technology at the problem -- we can undo and unfriend and unfollow. And the problem is that there are certain things that happen in life that we desperately want to change and we cannot. Sometimes instead of Control-Z, we actually have zero control. And for those of us who are control freaks and perfectionists -- and I know where of I speak -- this is really hard, because we want to do everything ourselves and we want to do it right.
Now there is a case to be made that control freaks and perfectionists should not get tattoos, and I'm going to return to that point in a few minutes. But first I want to say that the intensity and persistence with which we experience these emotional components of regret is obviously going to vary depending on the specific thing that we're feeling regretful about. So for instance, here's one of my favorite automatic generators of regret in modern life. (Laughter) Text: Relpy to all. And the amazing thing about this really insidious technological innovation is that even just with this one thing, we can experience a huge range of regret. You can accidentally hit "reply all" to an email and torpedo a relationship. Or you can just have an incredibly embarrassing day at work. Or you can have your last day at work.
And this doesn't even touch on the really profound regrets of a life. Because of course, sometimes we do make decisions that have irrevocable and terrible consequences, either for our own or for other people's health and happiness and livelihoods, and in the very worst case scenario, even their lives. Now obviously, those kinds of regrets are incredibly piercing and enduring. I mean, even the stupid "reply all" regrets can leave us in a fit of excruciating agony for days.
So how are we supposed to live with this? I want to suggest that there's three things that help us to make our peace with regret. And the first of these is to take some comfort in its universality. If you Google regret and tattoo, you will get 11.5 million hits. (Laughter) The FDA estimates that of all the Americans who have tattoos, 17 percent of us regret getting them. That is Johnny Depp and me and our seven million friends. And that's just regret about tattoos. We are all in this together.
The second way that we can help make our peace with regret is to laugh at ourselves. Now in my case, this really wasn't a problem, because it's actually very easy to laugh at yourself when you're 29 years old and you want your mommy because you don't like your new tattoo. But it might seem like a kind of cruel or glib suggestion when it comes to these more profound regrets. I don't think that's the case though. All of us who've experienced regret that contains real pain and real grief understand that humor and even black humor plays a crucial role in helping us survive. It connects the poles of our lives back together, the positive and the negative, and it sends a little current of life back into us.
The third way that I think we can help make our peace with regret is through the passage of time, which, as we know, heals all wounds -- except for tattoos, which are permanent. So it's been several years since I got my own tattoo. And do you guys just want to see it? All right. Actually, you know what, I should warn you, you're going to be disappointed. Because it's actually not that hideous. I didn't tattoo Marilyn Manson's face on some indiscreet part of myself or something. When other people see my tattoo, for the most part they like how it looks. It's just that I don't like how it looks. And as I said earlier, I'm a perfectionist. But I'll let you see it anyway.
This is my tattoo. I can guess what some of you are thinking. So let me reassure you about something. Some of your own regrets are also not as ugly as you think they are. I got this tattoo because I spent most of my 20s living outside the country and traveling. And when I came and settled in New York afterward, I was worried that I would forget some of the most important lessons that I learned during that time. Specifically the two things I learned about myself that I most didn't want to forget was how important it felt to keep exploring and, simultaneously, how important it is to somehow keep an eye on your own true north. And what I loved about this image of the compass was that I felt like it encapsulated both of these ideas in one simple image. And I thought it might serve as a kind of permanent mnemonic device.
Well it did. But it turns out, it doesn't remind me of the thing I thought it would; it reminds me constantly of something else instead. It actually reminds me of the most important lesson regret can teach us, which is also one of the most important lessons life teaches us. And ironically, I think it's probably the single most important thing I possibly could have tattooed onto my body -- partly as a writer, but also just as a human being. Here's the thing, if we have goals and dreams, and we want to do our best, and if we love people and we don't want to hurt them or lose them, we should feel pain when things go wrong. The point isn't to live without any regrets. The point is to not hate ourselves for having them.
The lesson that I ultimately learned from my tattoo and that I want to leave you with today is this: We need to learn to love the flawed, imperfect things that we create and to forgive ourselves for creating them. Regret doesn't remind us that we did badly. It reminds us that we know we can do better.
Thank you.
(Applause) |
Clearly, we're living in a moment of crisis. Arguably the financial markets have failed us and the aid system is failing us, and yet I stand firmly with the optimists who believe that there has probably never been a more exciting moment to be alive. Because of some of technologies we've been talking about. Because of the resources, the skills, and certainly the surge of talent we're seeing all around the world, with the mindset to create change. And we've got a president who sees himself as a global citizen, who recognizes that no longer is there a single superpower, but that we've got to engage in a different way with the world.
And by definition, every one of you who is in this room must consider yourself a global soul, a global citizen. You work on the front lines. And you've seen the best and the worst that human beings can do for one another and to one another. And no matter what country you live or work in, you've also seen the extraordinary things that individuals are capable of, even in their most ordinariness.
Today there is a raging debate as to how best we lift people out of poverty, how best we release their energies. On the one hand, we have people that say the aid system is so broken we need to throw it out. And on the other we have people who say the problem is that we need more aid. And what I want to talk about is something that compliments both systems. We call it patient capital.
The critics point to the 500 billion dollars spent in Africa since 1970 and say, and what do we have but environmental degradation and incredible levels of poverty, rampant corruption? They use Mobutu as metaphor. And their policy prescription is to make government more accountable, focus on the capital markets, invest, don't give anything away.
On the other side, as I said, there are those who say the problem is that we need more money. That when it comes to the rich, we'll bail out and we'll hand a lot of aid, but when it comes to our poor brethren, we want little to do with it. They point to the successes of aid: the eradication of smallpox, and the distribution of tens of millions of malaria bed nets and antiretrovirals. Both sides are right. And the problem is that neither side is listening to the other. Even more problematic, they're not listening to poor people themselves.
After 25 years of working on issues of poverty and innovation, it's true that there are probably no more market-oriented individuals on the planet than low-income people. They must navigate markets daily, making micro-decisions, dozens and dozens, to move their way through society, and yet if a single catastrophic health problem impacts their family, they could be put back into poverty, sometimes for generations. And so we need both the market and we need aid.
Patient capital works between, and tries to take the best of both. It's money that's invested in entrepreneurs who know their communities and are building solutions to healthcare, water, housing, alternative energy, thinking of low income people not as passive recipients of charity, but as individual customers, consumers, clients, people who want to make decisions in their own lives.
Patient capital requires that we have incredible tolerance for risk, a long time horizon in terms of allowing those entrepreneurs time to experiment, to use the market as the best listening device that we have, and the expectation of below-market returns, but outsized social impact. It recognizes that the market has its limitation, and so patient capital also works with smart subsidy to extend the benefits of a global economy to include all people.
Now, entrepreneurs need patient capital for three reasons. First, they tend to work in markets where people make one, two, three dollars a day and they are making all of their decisions within that income level. Second, the geographies in which they work have terrible infrastructure -- no roads to speak of, sporadic electricity and high levels of corruption. Third, they are often creating markets.
Even if you're bringing clean water for the first time into rural villages, it is something new. And so many low-income people have seen so many failed promises broken and seen so many quacks and sporadic medicines offered to them that building trust takes a lot of time, takes a lot of patience. It also requires being connected to a lot of management assistance. Not only to build the systems, the business models that allow us to reach low income people in a sustainable way, but to connect those business to other markets, to governments, to corporations -- real partnerships if we want to get to scale.
I want to share one story about an innovation called drip irrigation. In 2002 I met this incredible entrepreneur named Amitabha Sadangi from India, who'd been working for 20 years with some of the poorest farmers on the planet. And he was expressing his frustration that the aid market had bypassed low-income farmers altogether, despite the fact that 200 million farmers alone in India make under a dollar a day. They were creating subsidies either for large farms, or they were giving inputs to the farmers that they thought they should use, rather than that the farmers wanted to use.
At the same time Amitabha was obsessed with this drip irrigation technology that had been invented in Israel. It was a way of bringing small amounts of water directly to the stalk of the plant. And it could transform swaths of desert land into fields of emerald green. But the market also had bypassed low income farmers, because these systems were both too expensive, and they were constructed for fields that were too large. The average small village farmer works on two acres or less.
And so, Amitabha decided that he would take that innovation and he would redesign it from the perspective of the poor farmers themselves, because he spent so many years listening to what they needed not what he thought that they should have. And he used three fundamental principles.
The first one was miniaturization. The drip irrigation system had to be small enough that a farmer only had to risk a quarter acre, even if he had two, because it was too frightening, given all that he had at stake. Second, it had to be extremely affordable. In other words, that risk on the quarter acre needed to be repaid in a single harvest, or else they wouldn't take the risk. And third, it had to be what Amitabha calls infinitely expandable. What I mean is with the profits from the first quarter acre, the farmers could buy a second and a third and a fourth.
As of today, IDE India, Amitabha's organization, has sold over 300,000 farmers these systems and has seen their yields and incomes double or triple on average, but this didn't happen overnight. In fact, when you go back to the beginning, there were no private investors who would be willing to take a risk on building a new technology for a market class that made under a dollar a day, that were known to be some of the most risk-averse people on the planet and that were working in one of the riskiest sectors, agriculture.
And so we needed grants. And he used significant grants to research, to experiment, to fail, to innovate and try again. And when he had a prototype and had a better understanding of how to market to farmers, that's when patient capital could come in. And we helped him build a company, for profit, that would build on IDE's knowledge, and start looking at sales and exports, and be able to tap into other kinds of capital.
Secondarily, we wanted to see if we could export this drip irrigation and bring it into other countries. And so we met Dr. Sono Khangharani in Pakistan. And while, again, you needed patience to move a technology for the poor in India into Pakistan, just to get the permits, over time we were able to start a company with Dr. Sono, who runs a large community development organization in the Thar Desert, which is one of the remote and poorest areas of the country. And though that company has just started, our assumption is that there too we'll see the impact on millions.
But drip irrigation isn't the only innovation. We're starting to see these happening all around the world. In Arusha, Tanzania, A to Z Textile Manufacturing has worked in partnership with us, with UNICEF, with the Global Fund, to create a factory that now employs 7,000 people, mostly women. And they produce 20 million lifesaving bednets for Africans around the world.
Lifespring Hospital is a joint venture between Acumen and the government of India to bring quality, affordable maternal health care to low-income women, and it's been so successful that it's currently building a new hospital every 35 days.
And 1298 Ambulances decided that it was going to reinvent a completely broken industry, building an ambulance service in Bombay that would use the technology of Google Earth, a sliding scale pricing system so that all people could have access, and a severe and public decision not to engage in any form of corruption. So that in the terrorist attacks of November they were the first responder, and are now beginning to scale, because of partnership. They've just won four government contracts to build off their 100 ambulances, and are one of the largest and most effective ambulance companies in India.
This idea of scale is critical. Because we're starting to see these enterprises reach hundreds of thousands of people. All of the ones I discussed have reached at least a quarter million people. But that's obviously not enough. And it's where the idea of partnership becomes so important. Whether it's by finding those innovations that can access the capital markets, government itself, or partner with major corporations, there is unbelievable opportunity for innovation.
President Obama understands that. He recently authorized the creation of a Social Innovation Fund to focus on what works in this country, and look at how we can scale it. And I would submit that it's time to consider a global innovation fund that would find these entrepreneurs around the world who really have innovations, not only for their country, but ones that we can use in the developed world as well. Invest financial assistance, but also management assistance. And then measure the returns, both from a financial perspective and from a social impact perspective.
When we think about new approaches to aid, it's impossible not to talk about Pakistan. We've had a rocky relationship with that country and, in all fairness, the United States has not always been a very reliable partner. But again I would say that this is our moment for extraordinary things to happen. And if we take that notion of a global innovation fund, we could use this time to invest not directly in government, though we would have government's blessing, nor in international experts, but in the many existing entrepreneurs and civil society leaders who already are building wonderful innovations that are reaching people all across the country.
People like Rashani Zafar, who created one of the largest microfinance banks in the country, and is a real role model for women inside and outside the country. And Tasneem Siddiqui, who developed a way called incremental housing, where he has moved 40,000 slum dwellers into safe, affordable community housing. Educational initiatives like DIL and The Citizen Foundation that are building schools across the country. It's not hyperbole to say that these civil society institutions and these social entrepreneurs are building real alternatives to the Taliban.
I've invested in Pakistan for over seven years now, and those of you who've also worked there can attest that Pakistanis are an incredibly hard working population, and there is a fierce upward mobility in their very nature.
President Kennedy said that those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. I would say that the converse is true. That these social leaders who really are looking at innovation and extending opportunity to the 70 percent of Pakistanis who make less than two dollars a day, provide real pathways to hope. And as we think about how we construct aid for Pakistan, while we need to strengthen the judiciary, build greater stability, we also need to think about lifting those leaders who can be role models for the rest of the world.
On one of my last visits to Pakistan, I asked Dr. Sono if he would take me to see some of the drip irrigation in the Thar Desert. And we left Karachi one morning before dawn. It was about 115 degrees. And we drove for eight hours along this moonscape-like landscape with very little color, lots of heat, very little discussion, because we were exhausted.
And finally, at the end of the journey, I could see this thin little yellow line across the horizon. And as we got closer, its significance became apparent. That there in the desert was a field of sunflowers growing seven feet tall. Because one of the poorest farmers on Earth had gotten access to a technology that had allowed him to change his own life. His name was Raja, and he had kind, twinkly hazel eyes and warm expressive hands that reminded me of my father.
And he said it was the first dry season in his entire life that he hadn't taken his 12 children and 50 grandchildren on a two day journey across the desert to work as day laborers at a commercial farm for about 50 cents a day. Because he was building these crops. And with the money he earned he could stay this year. And for the first time ever in three generations, his children would go to school.
We asked him if he would send his daughters as well as his sons. And he said, "Of course I will. Because I don't want them discriminated against anymore." When we think about solutions to poverty, we cannot deny individuals their fundamental dignity. Because at the end of the day, dignity is more important to the human spirit than wealth. And what's exciting is to see so many entrepreneurs across sectors who are building innovations that recognize that what people want is freedom and choice and opportunity. Because that is where dignity really starts.
Martin Luther King said that love without power is anemic and sentimental, and that power without love is reckless and abusive. Our generation has seen both approaches tried, and often fail. But I think our generation also might be the first to have the courage to embrace both love and power. For that is what we'll need, as we move forward to dream and imagine what it will really take to build a global economy that includes all of us, and to finally extend that fundamental proposition that all men are created equal to every human being on the planet.
The time for us to begin innovating and looking for new solutions, a cross sector, is now. I can only talk from my own experience, but in eight years of running Acumen fund, I've seen the power of patient capital. Not only to inspire innovation and risk taking, but to truly build systems that have created more than 25,000 jobs and delivered tens of millions of services and products to some of the poorest people on the planet. I know it works. But I know that many other kinds of innovation also work.
And so I urge you, in whatever sector you work, in whatever job you do, to start thinking about how we might build solutions that start from the perspective of those we're trying to help. Rather than what we think that they might need. It will take embracing the world with both arms. And it will take living with the spirit of generosity and accountability, with a sense of integrity and perseverance. And yet these are the very qualities for which men and women have been honored throughout the generations. And there is so much good that we can do. Just think of all those sunflowers in the desert. Thank you. (Applause) |
Cities are the crucible of civilization. They have been expanding, urbanization has been expanding, at an exponential rate in the last 200 years so that by the second part of this century, the planet will be completely dominated by cities. Cities are the origins of global warming, impact on the environment, health, pollution, disease, finance, economies, energy -- they're all problems that are confronted by having cities. That's where all these problems come from. And the tsunami of problems that we feel we're facing in terms of sustainability questions are actually a reflection of the exponential increase in urbanization across the planet.
Here's some numbers. Two hundred years ago, the United States was less than a few percent urbanized. It's now more than 82 percent. The planet has crossed the halfway mark a few years ago. China's building 300 new cities in the next 20 years. Now listen to this: Every week for the foreseeable future, until 2050, every week more than a million people are being added to our cities. This is going to affect everything. Everybody in this room, if you stay alive, is going to be affected by what's happening in cities in this extraordinary phenomenon. However, cities, despite having this negative aspect to them, are also the solution. Because cities are the vacuum cleaners and the magnets that have sucked up creative people, creating ideas, innovation, wealth and so on. So we have this kind of dual nature. And so there's an urgent need for a scientific theory of cities.
Now these are my comrades in arms. This work has been done with an extraordinary group of people, and they've done all the work, and I'm the great bullshitter that tries to bring it all together.
(Laughter)
So here's the problem: This is what we all want. The 10 billion people on the planet in 2050 want to live in places like this, having things like this, doing things like this, with economies that are growing like this, not realizing that entropy produces things like this, this, this and this. And the question is: Is that what Edinburgh and London and New York are going to look like in 2050, or is it going to be this? That's the question. I must say, many of the indicators look like this is what it's going to look like, but let's talk about it.
So my provocative statement is that we desperately need a serious scientific theory of cities. And scientific theory means quantifiable -- relying on underlying generic principles that can be made into a predictive framework. That's the quest. Is that conceivable? Are there universal laws? So here's two questions that I have in my head when I think about this problem. The first is: Are cities part of biology? Is London a great big whale? Is Edinburgh a horse? Is Microsoft a great big anthill? What do we learn from that? We use them metaphorically -- the DNA of a company, the metabolism of a city, and so on -- is that just bullshit, metaphorical bullshit, or is there serious substance to it? And if that is the case, how come that it's very hard to kill a city? You could drop an atom bomb on a city, and 30 years later it's surviving. Very few cities fail. All companies die, all companies. And if you have a serious theory, you should be able to predict when Google is going to go bust.
So is that just another version of this? Well we understand this very well. That is, you ask any generic question about this -- how many trees of a given size, how many branches of a given size does a tree have, how many leaves, what is the energy flowing through each branch, what is the size of the canopy, what is its growth, what is its mortality? We have a mathematical framework based on generic universal principles that can answer those questions. And the idea is can we do the same for this? So the route in is recognizing one of the most extraordinary things about life, is that it is scalable, it works over an extraordinary range. This is just a tiny range actually: It's us mammals; we're one of these. The same principles, the same dynamics, the same organization is at work in all of these, including us, and it can scale over a range of 100 million in size. And that is one of the main reasons life is so resilient and robust -- scalability. We're going to discuss that in a moment more.
But you know, at a local level, you scale; everybody in this room is scaled. That's called growth. Here's how you grew. Rat, that's a rat -- could have been you. We're all pretty much the same. And you see, you're very familiar with this. You grow very quickly and then you stop. And that line there is a prediction from the same theory, based on the same principles, that describes that forest. And here it is for the growth of a rat, and those points on there are data points. This is just the weight versus the age. And you see, it stops growing. Very, very good for biology -- also one of the reasons for its great resilience. Very, very bad for economies and companies and cities in our present paradigm. This is what we believe. This is what our whole economy is thrusting upon us, particularly illustrated in that left-hand corner: hockey sticks. This is a bunch of software companies -- and what it is is their revenue versus their age -- all zooming away, and everybody making millions and billions of dollars.
Okay, so how do we understand this? So let's first talk about biology. This is explicitly showing you how things scale, and this is a truly remarkable graph. What is plotted here is metabolic rate -- how much energy you need per day to stay alive -- versus your weight, your mass, for all of us bunch of organisms. And it's plotted in this funny way by going up by factors of 10, otherwise you couldn't get everything on the graph. And what you see if you plot it in this slightly curious way is that everybody lies on the same line. Despite the fact that this is the most complex and diverse system in the universe, there's an extraordinary simplicity being expressed by this. It's particularly astonishing because each one of these organisms, each subsystem, each cell type, each gene, has evolved in its own unique environmental niche with its own unique history. And yet, despite all of that Darwinian evolution and natural selection, they've been constrained to lie on a line.
Something else is going on. Before I talk about that, I've written down at the bottom there the slope of this curve, this straight line. It's three-quarters, roughly, which is less than one -- and we call that sublinear. And here's the point of that. It says that, if it were linear, the steepest slope, then doubling the size you would require double the amount of energy. But it's sublinear, and what that translates into is that, if you double the size of the organism, you actually only need 75 percent more energy. So a wonderful thing about all of biology is that it expresses an extraordinary economy of scale. The bigger you are systematically, according to very well-defined rules, less energy per capita. Now any physiological variable you can think of, any life history event you can think of, if you plot it this way, looks like this. There is an extraordinary regularity. So you tell me the size of a mammal, I can tell you at the 90 percent level everything about it in terms of its physiology, life history, etc.
And the reason for this is because of networks. All of life is controlled by networks -- from the intracellular through the multicellular through the ecosystem level. And you're very familiar with these networks. That's a little thing that lives inside an elephant. And here's the summary of what I'm saying. If you take those networks, this idea of networks, and you apply universal principles, mathematizable, universal principles, all of these scalings and all of these constraints follow, including the description of the forest, the description of your circulatory system, the description within cells. One of the things I did not stress in that introduction was that, systematically, the pace of life decreases as you get bigger. Heart rates are slower; you live longer; diffusion of oxygen and resources across membranes is slower, etc.
The question is: Is any of this true for cities and companies? So is London a scaled up Birmingham, which is a scaled up Brighton, etc., etc.? Is New York a scaled up San Francisco, which is a scaled up Santa Fe? Don't know. We will discuss that. But they are networks, and the most important network of cities is you. Cities are just a physical manifestation of your interactions, our interactions, and the clustering and grouping of individuals. Here's just a symbolic picture of that. And here's scaling of cities. This shows that in this very simple example, which happens to be a mundane example of number of petrol stations as a function of size -- plotted in the same way as the biology -- you see exactly the same kind of thing.
There is a scaling. That is that the number of petrol stations in the city is now given to you when you tell me its size. The slope of that is less than linear. There is an economy of scale. Less petrol stations per capita the bigger you are -- not surprising. But here's what's surprising. It scales in the same way everywhere. This is just European countries, but you do it in Japan or China or Colombia, always the same with the same kind of economy of scale to the same degree. And any infrastructure you look at -- whether it's the length of roads, length of electrical lines -- anything you look at has the same economy of scale scaling in the same way. It's an integrated system that has evolved despite all the planning and so on. But even more surprising is if you look at socio-economic quantities, quantities that have no analog in biology, that have evolved when we started forming communities eight to 10,000 years ago. The top one is wages as a function of size plotted in the same way. And the bottom one is you lot -- super-creatives plotted in the same way. And what you see is a scaling phenomenon. But most important in this, the exponent, the analog to that three-quarters for the metabolic rate, is bigger than one -- it's about 1.15 to 1.2. Here it is, which says that the bigger you are the more you have per capita, unlike biology -- higher wages, more super-creative people per capita as you get bigger, more patents per capita, more crime per capita.
And we've looked at everything: more AIDS cases, flu, etc. And here, they're all plotted together. Just to show you what we plotted, here is income, GDP -- GDP of the city -- crime and patents all on one graph. And you can see, they all follow the same line. And here's the statement. If you double the size of a city from 100,000 to 200,000, from a million to two million, 10 to 20 million, it doesn't matter, then systematically you get a 15 percent increase in wages, wealth, number of AIDS cases, number of police, anything you can think of. It goes up by 15 percent, and you have a 15 percent savings on the infrastructure. This, no doubt, is the reason why a million people a week are gathering in cities. Because they think that all those wonderful things -- like creative people, wealth, income -- is what attracts them, forgetting about the ugly and the bad.
What is the reason for this? Well I don't have time to tell you about all the mathematics, but underlying this is the social networks, because this is a universal phenomenon. This 15 percent rule is true no matter where you are on the planet -- Japan, Chile, Portugal, Scotland, doesn't matter. Always, all the data shows it's the same, despite the fact that these cities have evolved independently. Something universal is going on. The universality, to repeat, is us -- that we are the city. And it is our interactions and the clustering of those interactions. So there it is, I've said it again. So if it is those networks and their mathematical structure, unlike biology, which had sublinear scaling, economies of scale, you had the slowing of the pace of life as you get bigger. If it's social networks with super-linear scaling -- more per capita -- then the theory says that you increase the pace of life. The bigger you are, life gets faster. On the left is the heart rate showing biology. On the right is the speed of walking in a bunch of European cities, showing that increase.
Lastly, I want to talk about growth. This is what we had in biology, just to repeat. Economies of scale gave rise to this sigmoidal behavior. You grow fast and then stop -- part of our resilience. That would be bad for economies and cities. And indeed, one of the wonderful things about the theory is that if you have super-linear scaling from wealth creation and innovation, then indeed you get, from the same theory, a beautiful rising exponential curve -- lovely. And in fact, if you compare it to data, it fits very well with the development of cities and economies. But it has a terrible catch, and the catch is that this system is destined to collapse. And it's destined to collapse for many reasons -- kind of Malthusian reasons -- that you run out of resources. And how do you avoid that? Well we've done it before.
What we do is, as we grow and we approach the collapse, a major innovation takes place and we start over again, and we start over again as we approach the next one, and so on. So there's this continuous cycle of innovation that is necessary in order to sustain growth and avoid collapse. The catch, however, to this is that you have to innovate faster and faster and faster. So the image is that we're not only on a treadmill that's going faster, but we have to change the treadmill faster and faster. We have to accelerate on a continuous basis. And the question is: Can we, as socio-economic beings, avoid a heart attack?
So lastly, I'm going to finish up in this last minute or two asking about companies. See companies, they scale. The top one, in fact, is Walmart on the right. It's the same plot. This happens to be income and assets versus the size of the company as denoted by its number of employees. We could use sales, anything you like. There it is: after some little fluctuations at the beginning, when companies are innovating, they scale beautifully. And we've looked at 23,000 companies in the United States, may I say. And I'm only showing you a little bit of this.
What is astonishing about companies is that they scale sublinearly like biology, indicating that they're dominated, not by super-linear innovation and ideas; they become dominated by economies of scale. In that interpretation, by bureaucracy and administration, and they do it beautifully, may I say. So if you tell me the size of some company, some small company, I could have predicted the size of Walmart. If it has this sublinear scaling, the theory says we should have sigmoidal growth. There's Walmart. Doesn't look very sigmoidal. That's what we like, hockey sticks. But you notice, I've cheated, because I've only gone up to '94. Let's go up to 2008. That red line is from the theory. So if I'd have done this in 1994, I could have predicted what Walmart would be now. And then this is repeated across the entire spectrum of companies. There they are. That's 23,000 companies. They all start looking like hockey sticks, they all bend over, and they all die like you and me.
Thank you.
(Applause) |
We've been told to go out on a limb and say something surprising. So I'll try and do that, but I want to start with two things that everyone already knows. And the first one, in fact, is something that has been known for most of recorded history. And that is that the planet Earth, or the solar system, or our environment or whatever, is uniquely suited to sustain our evolution -- or creation, as it used to be thought -- and our present existence, and most important, our future survival.
Nowadays this idea has a dramatic name: Spaceship Earth. And the idea there is that outside the spaceship, the universe is implacably hostile, and inside is all we have, all we depend on. And we only get the one chance: if we mess up our spaceship, we've got nowhere else to go. Now, the second thing that everyone already knows is that contrary to what was believed for most of human history, human beings are not, in fact, the hub of existence. As Stephen Hawking famously said, we're just a chemical scum on the surface of a typical planet that's in orbit around a typical star, which is on the outskirts of a typical galaxy, and so on.
Now the first of those two things that everyone knows is kind of saying that we're at a very un-typical place, uniquely suited and so on, and the second one is saying that we're at a typical place. And especially if you regard these two as deep truths to live by and to inform your life decisions, then they seem a little bit to conflict with each other. But that doesn't prevent them from both being completely false. (Laughter) And they are. So let me start with the second one: Typical. Well -- is this a typical place? Well, let's look around, you know, and look in a random direction, and we see a wall, and chemical scum -- (Laughter) -- and that's not typical of the universe at all. All you've got to do is go a few hundred miles in that same direction and look back, and you won't see any walls or chemical scum at all -- all you see is a blue planet. And if you go further than that, you'll see the sun, the solar system, and the stars and so on. But that's still not typical of the universe, because stars come in galaxies. And most places in the universe, a typical place in the universe, is nowhere near any galaxies.
So let's go out further, till we're outside the galaxy, and look back, and yeah, there's the huge galaxy with spiral arms laid out in front of us. And at this point we've come 100,000 light years from here. But we're still nowhere near a typical place in the universe. To get to a typical place, you've got to go 1,000 times as far as that into intergalactic space. And so what does that look like? Typical. What does a typical place in the universe look like? Well, at enormous expense, TED has arranged a high-resolution immersion virtual reality rendering of intergalactic space -- the view from intergalactic space. So can we have the lights off, please, so we can see it?
Well, not quite, not quite perfect -- you see, in intergalactic space -- intergalactic space is completely dark, pitch dark. It's so dark that if you were to be looking at the nearest star to you, and that star were to explode as a supernova, and you were to be staring directly at it at the moment when its light reached you, you still wouldn't be able to see even a glimmer. That's how big and how dark the universe is. And that's despite the fact that a supernova is so bright, so brilliant an event, that it would kill you stone dead at a range of several light years. (Laughter) And yet from intergalactic space, it's so far away you wouldn't even see it. It's also very cold out there -- less than three degrees above absolute zero. And it's very empty. The vacuum there is one million times less dense than the highest vacuum that our best technology on Earth can currently create. So that's how different a typical place is from this place. And that is how un-typical this place is. So can we have the lights back on please? Thank you.
Now how do we know about an environment that's so far away, and so different, and so alien, from anything we're used to? Well, the Earth -- our environment, in the form of us -- is creating knowledge. Well, what does that mean? Well, look out even further than we've just been -- I mean from here, with a telescope -- and you'll see things that look like stars. They're called "quasars." Quasars originally meant quasi-stellar object. Which means things that look a bit like stars. (Laughter) But they're not stars. And we know what they are. Billions of years ago, and billions of light years away, the material at the center of a galaxy collapsed towards a super-massive black hole. And then intense magnetic fields directed some of the energy of that gravitational collapse. And some of the matter, back out in the form of tremendous jets which illuminated lobes with the brilliance of -- I think it's a trillion suns.
Now, the physics of the human brain could hardly be more unlike the physics of such a jet. We couldn't survive for an instant in it. Language breaks down when trying to describe what it would be like in one of those jets. It would be a bit like experiencing a supernova explosion, but at point-blank range and for millions of years at a time. (Laughter) And yet, that jet happened in precisely such a way that billions of years later, on the other side of the universe, some bit of chemical scum could accurately describe, and model, and predict, and explain, above all -- there's your reference -- what was happening there, in reality. The one physical system, the brain, contains an accurate working model of the other -- the quasar. Not just a superficial image of it, though it contains that as well, but an explanatory model, embodying the same mathematical relationships and the same causal structure.
Now that is knowledge. And if that weren't amazing enough, the faithfulness with which the one structure resembles the other is increasing with time. That is the growth of knowledge. So, the laws of physics have this special property. That physical objects, as unlike each other as they could possibly be, can nevertheless embody the same mathematical and causal structure and to do it more and more so over time.
So we are a chemical scum that is different. This chemical scum has universality. Its structure contains, with ever-increasing precision, the structure of everything. This place, and not other places in the universe, is a hub which contains within itself the structural and causal essence of the whole of the rest of physical reality. And so, far from being insignificant, the fact that the laws of physics allow this, or even mandate that this can happen, is one of the most important things about the physical world.
Now how does the solar system -- and our environment, in the form of us -- acquire this special relationship with the rest of the universe? Well, one thing that's true about Stephen Hawking's remark -- I mean, it is true, but it's the wrong emphasis. (Laughter) One thing that's true about it is that it doesn't do it with any special physics. There's no special dispensation, no miracles involved. It does it simply with three things that we have here in abundance. One of them is matter, because the growth of knowledge is a form of information processing. Information processing is computation, computation requires a computer -- there's no known way of making a computer without matter. We also need energy to make the computer, and most important, to make the media in effect onto which we record the knowledge that we discover.
And then thirdly, less tangible, but just as essential for the open-ended creation of knowledge, of explanations, is evidence. Now, our environment is inundated with evidence. We happen to get round to testing, let's say, Newton's Law of Gravity about 300 years ago. But the evidence that we used to do that was falling down on every square meter of the Earth for billions of years before that, and will continue to fall on for billions of years afterwards. And the same is true for all the other sciences. As far as we know, evidence to discover the most fundamental truths of all the sciences is here just for the taking on our planet.
Our location is saturated with evidence, and also with matter and energy. Out in intergalactic space, those three prerequisites for the open-ended creation of knowledge are at their lowest possible supply. As I said, it's empty; it's cold; and it's dark out there. Or is it? Now actually, that's just another parochial misconception. (Laughter) Because imagine a cube out there in intergalactic space, the same size as our home, the solar system. Now that cube is very empty by human standards, but that still means that it contains over a million tons of matter. And a million tons is enough to make, say, a self-contained space station, on which there's a colony of scientists that are devoted to creating an open-ended stream of knowledge, and so on.
Now, it's way beyond present technology to even gather the hydrogen from intergalactic space and form it into other elements and so on. But the thing is, in a comprehensible universe, if something isn't forbidden by the laws of physics, then what could possibly prevent us from doing it, other than knowing how? In other words, it's a matter of knowledge, not resources. And the same -- well, if we could do that we'd automatically have an energy supply, because the transmutation would be a fusion reactor -- and evidence? Well, again, it's dark out there to human senses. But all you've got to do is take a telescope, even one of present-day design, look out and you'll see the same galaxies as we do from here. And with a more powerful telescope, you'll be able to see stars, and planets. In those galaxies, you'll be able to do astrophysics, and learn the laws of physics. And locally there you could build particle accelerators, and learn elementary particle physics, and chemistry, and so on. Probably the hardest science to do would be biology field trips -- (Laughter) -- because it would take several hundred million years to get to the nearest life-bearing planet and back. But I have to tell you -- and sorry, Richard -- but I never did like biology field trips much, and I think we can just about make do with one every few hundred million years. (Laughter)
So in fact, intergalactic space does contain all the prerequisites for the open-ended creation of knowledge. Any such cube, anywhere in the universe, could become the same kind of hub that we are, if the knowledge of how to do so were present there. So we're not in a uniquely hospitable place. If intergalactic space is capable of creating an open-ended stream of explanations, then so is almost every other environment. So is the Earth. So is a polluted Earth. And the limiting factor, there and here, is not resources, because they're plentiful, but knowledge, which is scarce.
Now this cosmic knowledge-based view may -- and I think ought to -- make us feel very special. But it should also make us feel vulnerable, because it means that without the specific knowledge that's needed to survive the ongoing challenges of the universe, we won't survive them. All it takes is for a supernova to go off a few light years away, and we'll all be dead! Martin Rees has recently written a book about our vulnerability to all sorts of things, from astrophysics, to scientific experiments gone wrong, and most importantly to terrorism with weapons of mass destruction. And he thinks that civilization has only a 50 percent chance of surviving this century. I think he's going to talk about that later in the conference.
Now I don't think that probability is the right category to discuss this issue in. But I do agree with him about this. We can survive, and we can fail to survive. But it depends not on chance, but on whether we create the relevant knowledge in time. The danger is not at all unprecedented. Species go extinct all the time. Civilizations end. The overwhelming majority of all species and all civilizations that have ever existed are now history. And if we want to be the exception to that, then logically our only hope is to make use of the one feature that distinguishes our species, and our civilization, from all the others -- namely, our special relationship with the laws of physics, our ability to create new explanations, new knowledge -- to be a hub of existence.
So let me now apply this to a current controversy, not because I want to advocate any particular solution, but just to illustrate the kind of thing I mean. And the controversy is global warming. Now, I'm a physicist, but I'm not the right kind of physicist. In regard to global warming, I'm just a layman. And the rational thing for a layman to do is to take seriously the prevailing scientific theory. And according to that theory, it's already too late to avoid a disaster. Because if it's true that our best option at the moment is to prevent CO2 emissions with something like the Kyoto Protocol, with its constraints on economic activity and its enormous cost of hundreds of billions of dollars or whatever it is, then that is already a disaster by any reasonable measure. And the actions that are advocated are not even purported to solve the problem, merely to postpone it by a little. So it's already too late to avoid it, and it probably has been too late to avoid it ever since before anyone realized the danger. It was probably already too late in the 1970s, when the best available scientific theory was telling us that industrial emissions were about to precipitate a new ice age in which billions would die.
Now the lesson of that seems clear to me, and I don't know why it isn't informing public debate. It is that we can't always know. When we know of an impending disaster, and how to solve it at a cost less than the cost of the disaster itself, then there's not going to be much argument, really. But no precautions, and no precautionary principle, can avoid problems that we do not yet foresee. Hence, we need a stance of problem-fixing, not just problem-avoidance. And it's true that an ounce of prevention equals a pound of cure, but that's only if we know what to prevent. If you've been punched on the nose, then the science of medicine does not consist of teaching you how to avoid punches. (Laughter) If medical science stopped seeking cures and concentrated on prevention only, then it would achieve very little of either.
The world is buzzing at the moment with plans to force reductions in gas emissions at all costs. It ought to be buzzing with plans to reduce the temperature, and with plans to live at the higher temperature -- and not at all costs, but efficiently and cheaply. And some such plans exist, things like swarms of mirrors in space to deflect the sunlight away, and encouraging aquatic organisms to eat more carbon dioxide. At the moment, these things are fringe research. They're not central to the human effort to face this problem, or problems in general. And with problems that we are not aware of yet, the ability to put right -- not the sheer good luck of avoiding indefinitely -- is our only hope, not just of solving problems, but of survival. So take two stone tablets, and carve on them. On one of them, carve: "Problems are soluble." And on the other one carve: "Problems are inevitable." Thank you. (Applause) |
Penelope Jagessar Chaffer: I was going to ask if there's a doctor in the house. No, I'm just joking. It's interesting, because it was six years ago when I was pregnant with my first child that I discovered that the most commonly used preservative in baby care products mimics estrogen when it gets into the human body. Now it's very easy actually to get a chemical compound from products into the human body through the skin. And these preservatives had been found in breast cancer tumors.
That was the start of my journey to make this film, "Toxic Baby." And it doesn't take much time to discover some really astonishing statistics with this issue. One is that you and I all have between 30 to 50,000 chemicals in our bodies that our grandparents didn't have. And many of these chemicals are now linked to the skyrocketing incidents of chronic childhood disease that we're seeing across industrialized nations. I'll show you some statistics. So for example, in the United Kingdom, the incidence of childhood leukemia has risen by 20 percent just in a generation. Very similar statistic for childhood cancer in the U.S. In Canada, we're now looking at one in 10 Canadian children with asthma. That's a four-fold increase.
Again, similar story around the world. In the United States, probably the most astonishing statistic is a 600 percent increase in autism and autistic spectrum disorders and other learning disabilities. Again, we're seeing that trend across Europe, across North America. And in Europe, there's certain parts of Europe, where we're seeing a four-fold increase in certain genital birth defects. Interestingly, one of those birth defects has seen a 200 percent increase in the U.S. So a real skyrocketing of chronic childhood disease that includes other things like obesity and juvenile diabetes, premature puberty.
So it's interesting for me, when I'm looking for someone who can really talk to me and talk to an audience about these things, that probably one of the most important people in the world who can discuss toxicity in babies is expert in frogs.
(Laughter)
Tyrone Hayes: It was a surprise to me as well that I would be talking about pesticides, that I'd be talking about public health, because, in fact, I never thought I would do anything useful. (Laughter) Frogs. In fact, my involvement in the whole pesticide issue was sort of a surprise as well when I was approached by the largest chemical company in the world and they asked me if I would evaluate how atrazine affected amphibians, or my frogs. It turns out, atrazine is the largest selling product for the largest chemical company in the world. It's the number one contaminant of groundwater, drinking water, rain water. In 2003, after my studies, it was banned in the European Union, but in that same year, the United States EPA re-registered the compound.
We were a bit surprised when we found out that when we exposed frogs to very low levels of atrazine -- 0.1 parts per billion -- that it produced animals that look like this. These are the dissected gonads of an animal that has two testes, two ovaries, another large testis, more ovaries, which is not normal ... (Laughter) even for amphibians. In some cases, another species like the North American Leopard Frog showed that males exposed to atrazine grew eggs in their testes. And you can see these large, yolked-up eggs bursting through the surface of this male's testes. Now my wife tells me, and I'm sure Penelope can as well, that there's nothing more painful than childbirth -- which that I'll never experience, I can't really argue that -- but I would guess that a dozen chicken eggs in my testicle would probably be somewhere in the top five.
(Laughter)
In recent studies that we've published, we've shown that some of these animals when they're exposed to atrazine, some of the males grow up and completely become females. So these are actually two brothers consummating a relationship. And not only do these genetic males mate with other males, they actually have the capacity to lay eggs even though they're genetic males. What we proposed, and what we've now generated support for, is that what atrazine is doing is wreaking havoc causing a hormone imbalance. Normally the testes should make testosterone, the male hormone. But what atrazine does is it turns on an enzyme, the machinery if you will, aromatase, that converts testosterone into estrogen. And as a result, these exposed males lose their testosterone, they're chemically castrated, and they're subsequently feminized because now they're making the female hormone.
Now this is what brought me to the human-related issues. Because it turns out that the number one cancer in women, breast cancer, is regulated by estrogen and by this enzyme aromatase. So when you develop a cancerous cell in your breast, aromatase converts androgens into estrogens, and that estrogen turns on or promotes the growth of that cancer so that it turns into a tumor and spreads. In fact, this aromatase is so important in breast cancer that the latest treatment for breast cancer is a chemical called letrozole, which blocks aromatase, blocks estrogen, so that if you developed a mutated cell, it doesn't grow into a tumor.
Now what's interesting is, of course, that we're still using 80 million pounds of atrazine, the number one contaminant in drinking water, that does the opposite -- turns on aromatase, increases estrogen and promotes tumors in rats and is associated with tumors, breast cancer, in humans. What's interesting is, in fact, the same company that sold us 80 million pounds of atrazine, the breast cancer promoter, now sells us the blocker -- the exact same company. And so I find it interesting that instead of treating this disease by preventing exposure to the chemicals that promote it, we simply respond by putting more chemicals into the environment.
PJC: So speaking of estrogen, one of the other compounds that Tyrone talks about in the film is something called bisphenol A, BPA, which has been in the news recently. It's a plasticizer. It's a compound that's found in polycarbonate plastic, which is what baby bottles are made out of. And what's interesting about BPA is that it's such a potent estrogen that it was actually once considered for use as a synthetic estrogen in hormone placement therapy. And there have been many, many, many studies that have shown that BPA leaches from babies' bottles into the formula, into the milk, and therefore into the babies. So we're dosing our babies, our newborns, our infants, with a synthetic estrogen.
Now two weeks ago or so, the European Union passed a law banning the use of BPA in babies' bottles and sippy cups. And for those of you who are not parents, sippy cups are those little plastic things that your child graduates to after using bottles. But just two weeks before that, the U.S. Senate refused to even debate the banning of BPA in babies' bottles and sippy cups. So it really makes you realize the onus on parents to have to look at this and regulate this and police this in their own lives and how astonishing that is.
(Video) PJC: With many plastic baby bottles now proven to leak the chemical bisphenol A, it really shows how sometimes it is only a parent's awareness that stands between chemicals and our children. The baby bottle scenario proves that we can prevent unnecessary exposure. However, if we parents are unaware, we are leaving our children to fend for themselves.
TH: And what Penelope says here is even more true. For those of you who don't know, we're in the middle of the sixth mass extinction. Scientists agree now. We are losing species from the Earth faster than the dinosaurs disappeared, and leading that loss are amphibians. 80 percent of all amphibians are threatened and in come decline. And I believe, many scientists believe that pesticides are an important part of that decline. In part, amphibians are good indicators and more sensitive because they don't have protection from contaminants in the water -- no eggshells, no membranes and no placenta. In fact, our invention -- by "our" I mean we mammals -- one of our big inventions was the placenta. But we also start out as aquatic organisms.
But it turns out that this ancient structure that separates us from other animals, the placenta, cannot evolve or adapt fast enough because of the rate that we're generating new chemicals that it's never seen before. The evidence of that is that studies in rats, again with atrazine, show that the hormone imbalance atrazine generates causes abortion. Because maintaining a pregnancy is dependent on hormones.
Of those rats that don't abort, atrazine causes prostate disease in the pups so the sons are born with an old man's disease. Of those that don't abort, atrazine causes impaired mammary, or breast, development in the exposed daughters in utero, so that their breast don't develop properly. And as a result, when those rats grow up, their pups experience retarded growth and development because they can't make enough milk to nourish their pups.
So the pup you see on the bottom is affected by atrazine that its grandmother was exposed to. And given the life of many of these chemicals, generations, years, dozens of years, that means that we right now are affecting the health of our grandchildren's grandchildren by things that we're putting into the environment today.
And this is not just philosophical, it's already known, that chemicals like diethylstilbestrol and estrogen, PCBs, DDT cross the placenta and effectively determine the likelihood of developing breast cancer and obesity and diabetes already when the baby's in the womb. In addition to that, after the baby's born, our other unique invention as mammals is that we nourish our offspring after they're born. We already know that chemicals like DDT and DES and atrazine can also pass over into milk, again, affecting our babies even after their born.
PJC: So when Tyrone tells me that the placenta is an ancient organ, I'm thinking, how do I demonstrate that? How do you show that? And it's interesting when you make a film like this, because you're stuck trying to visualize science that there's no visualization for. And I have to take a little bit of artistic license.
(Video) (Ringing) Old man: Placenta control. What is it? Oh what? (Snoring) (Honk) Puffuffuff, what? Perflourooctanoic acid. Blimey. Never heard of it. PJC: And neither had I actually before I started making this film. And so when you realize that chemicals can pass the placenta and go into your unborn child, it made me start to think, what would my fetus say to me? What would our unborn children say to us when they have an exposure that's happening everyday, day after day?
(Music)
(Video) Child: Today, I had some octyphenols, some artificial musks and some bisphenol A. Help me.
PJC: It's a very profound notion to know that we as women are at the vanguard of this. This is our issue, because we collect these compounds our entire life and then we end up dumping it and dumping them into our unborn children. We are in effect polluting our children. And this was something that was really brought home to me a year ago when I found out I was pregnant and the first scan revealed that my baby had a birth defect associated with exposure to estrogenic chemicals in the womb and the second scan revealed no heartbeat.
So my child's death, my baby's death, really brought home the resonance of what I was trying to make in this film. And it's sometimes a weird place when the communicator becomes part of the story, which is not what you originally intend. And so when Tyrone talks about the fetus being trapped in a contaminated environment, this is my contaminated environment. This is my toxic baby. And that's something that's just profound and sad, but astonishing because so many of us don't actually know this.
TH: One of this things that's exciting and appropriate for me to be here at TEDWomen is that, well, I think it was summed up best last night at dinner when someone said, "Turn to the man at your table and tell them, 'When the revolution starts, we've got your back.'" The truth is, women, you've had our back on this issue for a very long time, starting with Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" to Theo Colborn's "Our Stolen Future" to Sandra Steingraber's books "Living Downstream" and "Having Faith." And perhaps it's the connection to our next generation -- like my wife and my beautiful daughter here about 13 years ago -- perhaps it's that connection that makes women activists in this particular area.
But for the men here, I want to say it's not just women and children that are at risk. And the frogs that are exposed to atrazine, the testes are full of holes and spaces, because the hormone imbalance, instead of allowing sperm to be generated, such as in the testis here, the testicular tubules end up empty and fertility goes down by as much as 50 percent. It's not just my work in amphibians, but similar work has been shown in fish in Europe, holes in the testes and absence of sperm in reptiles in a group from South America and in rats, an absence of sperm in the testicular tubules as well. And of course, we don't do these experiments in humans, but just by coincidence, my colleague has shown that men who have low sperm count, low semen quality have significantly more atrazine in their urine.
These are just men who live in an agricultural community. Men who actually work in agriculture have much higher levels of atrazine. And the men who actually apply atrazine have even more atrazine in their urine, up to levels that are 24,000 times what we know to be active are present in the urine of these men. Of course, most of them, 90 percent are Mexican, Mexican-American. And it's not just atrazine they're exposed to. They're exposed to chemicals like chloropicrin, which was originally used as a nerve gas. And many of these workers have life expectancies of only 50.
It shouldn't come to any surprise that the things that happen in wildlife are also a warning to us, just like Rachel Carson and others have warned. As evident in this slide from Lake Nabugabo in Uganda, the agricultural runoff from this crop, which goes into these buckets, is the sole source of drinking, cooking and bathing water for this village. Now if I told the men in this village that the frogs have pour immune function and eggs developing in their testes, the connection between environmental health and public health would be clear. You would not drink water that you knew was having this kind of impact on the wildlife that lived in it. The problem is, in my village, Oakland, in most of our villages, we don't see that connection. We turn on the faucet, the water comes out, we assume it's safe, and we assume that we are masters of our environment, rather than being part of it.
PJC: So it doesn't take much to realize that actually this is an environmental issue. And I kept thinking over and over again this question. We know so much about global warming and climate change, and yet, we have no concept of what I've been calling internal environmentalism. We know what we're putting out there, we have a sense of those repercussions, but we are so ignorant of this sense of what happens when we put things, or things are put into our bodies.
And it's my feeling and it's my urging being here to know that, as we women move forward as the communicators of this, but also as the ones who carry that burden of carrying the children, bearing the children, we hold most of the buying power in the household, is that it's going to be us moving forward to carry the work of Tyrone and other scientists around the world. And my urging is that when we think about environmental issues that we remember that it's not just about melting glaciers and ice caps, but it's also about our children as well.
Thank you.
(Applause) |
The moment I say "school," so many memories come back to me. It's like after every exam, when I walk out, the teacher would say, "Hey, come. How did you do?" I would say with a great smile, "I will definitely pass." And I didn't understand why, in one hand they say, "Speak the truth," in the other hand, when you say the truth, they hated you. So it went on like that, and I didn't know where else to find myself. So I remember those nights I used to go to sleep with asking help from [the] Unknown because, for some reason, I couldn't believe what my father and mother hanged in the Puja room as a god, because my friend's family had something else as a god. So I thought, "I guess I'll pray to [the] Unknown and ask help," and started getting help from everywhere, each and every corner of my life at that time. My brothers started giving me a few tips about drawing and painting.
Then, when I was in eighth standard around 13 years old, I started working in a part-time job in one of the signboard artists called Putu. And then school also started supporting me. "Oh, he's bad at studies, but let him send to the drawing competitions." So it was good to survive with that little tool that I found to find my own place in school. And one of those competitions, I just won a small, little transistor Philips radio. And I didn't have the patience to wait until I reached home. So I just switched on in the train, loudly. If you travel in Indian trains, you can see people listening to radio and, you know, even from their mobiles.
So at that time -- and I was 13 -- and I was listening to just radio, and someone happened to sit next to me, like these three people are sitting here. You know, like just adjacent to me. He just started asking, "Where did you buy the radio? How much is it?" I said, "It's a prize from [an] art competition." And he said, "Oh, I teach at a college of arts. I think you should study in a school of art. You just quit school and come there." So, why I'm telling you this, you know, maybe, you know, whoever is sitting next to you can change your whole life -- it's possible. It is that we need we need to be open and fine-tuned. So that's what made me enter [the] college of arts after three attempts and just continue to inquire what I really want to do with art work, or art and finally I'm here in front of you.
When I look back, you know, on what happened between that time and now here -- the last 10/15 years -- I can see that most of the works revolve around three subjects, but it was not intentional. And I just start out with a trace because I was thinking, "What really makes us?" -- you know, it's actually [the] past, what makes a person. So I was thinking, but when you look at the past, the way to understand the past is only by the traces available, because we cannot go back [to] the past. It can be ruins, or it can be music, or it can be painting or drawing or writing, whatever it is. But it is just a kind of trace of that time. And that fascinated me, to explore that territory. So I was working on the line, but instead of working about traces, I started capturing traces.
So here are some of the works I would like to show you. So this is called "Self In Progress." It's just a trace of being in this body. So here, what happened then, you know -- what I really enjoyed the most is that this sculpture is nothing but a trace of myself. It's almost like a 3D photograph. So there is an element of performance, and there is an element of sculpture, and there is an element of feeling one's self, so close to one's self. So it's almost like fossils for the future. And then moved slowly to explore the other possibilities of capturing traces. So this is what I was talking about, while molding, it's such a great experience, because we have freedom of like walking, or moving my hand or, moving around in the space, but the moment this becomes solid, when you cannot move even an inch, because this is plaster of Paris, so the moment you pour it it's like liquid; but after 20 minutes, it's almost like a hard stone.
So this is capturing the trace of a thumbprint because, knowingly or unknowingly, whatever we do, you know, we leave our traces here. So I just thought, "I'm going to capture thumbprint, footprint, or whatever traces we leave as humans." This is the trace of fire, this is the trace of sun. Because when I was capturing traces, you know, this thought comes to me always: is it, only when the object touches the thing and it leaves the trace, or is there other ways to capture it?" So this work is nothing but like -- because of the focal length of the lens, it just shows what is on the other side. So I just put the paper on the focal length, which was an etching print, then I got the portrait of [the] sun from sunlight. This is called "Dawn to Dawn." What I did here, I just put like 10 feet [of] paper then put a coconut rope, and just burnt it. So it took about 24 hours to get this line. So wherever the fire is eating the paper, that's what becomes the work -- detail.
Even though we have traces when we try to understand them, the perception and context play a major role to understand it. So do we really understand what it is, or are we trying to get what we think it is? Then move towards questioning the perception because, even though there are traces, when you try to understand them, you know you play a major role. So like let's say even a simple act. How many of you saw a cow crossing in India while you were coming from Bangalore to Mysore? Can you just raise the hand?
If you just ask an opinion of how, everyone can interpret it. Like, let's say, if a schoolteacher says, she'll simply say, "To get to the other side." Why the cow was crossing the road, you know. The answer can be so different if Potter said it. He would say, "For the greater good." Martin Luther King would say, "I imagine a world where all cows will be free to cross the road, without having their motives called into question." (Laughter) Imagine Moses comes now, and he sees the same cow walking around the street. He would definitely say, "God came down from heaven, and he said unto the cow, 'Thou shalt cross the road.' And cow crossed the road, and there was much rejoicing as a holy cow." (Laughter) Freud would say, "The fact that you're at all concerned reveals your underlying sexual insecurity." (Laughter) If we ask Einstein, he would say, "Whether the cow crossed the road, or the road moved underneath the cow, depends on your frame of reference." (Laughter) Or Buddha -- if he saw the same cow, he would say, "Asking this question denies your own nature [as a] cow."
(Laughter)
So, what we see is just what we think often, and most of the time, we don't see what it is. It just all depends on one's perception. And context, what is really context? You know, I could just show you this little piece of paper. Because I always think meaning doesn't really exist. The meaning of what we create in this world doesn't exist. It's just created by the mind. If you look at this piece of paper, this is the breadth and this is called length. This is how we've been taught in school. But if you tear it in the middle -- now, I didn't touch this breadth, but still, the meaning of this changes. So what we conceive as a meaning is always not there; it's on the other side, even when we say dark, light, good, bad, tall, short -- all meaning it doesn't exist in reality. It's just that being a human, the way we train to perceive the reality creates this meaning.
So this work from this period is mostly like -- you know, this is a work called "Light Makes Dark." It's just captured through from the lamp. So the lamp is not just giving a light, it's also giving a darkness. So this is a work of art, which is just trying to explore that. This is called "Limit Out." This shows how limited our eye or hearing sense or touch -- do we really see? This is an exact negative. It's about six inches deep in the wall, but it just appears like it's coming out of the wall. You know the wall is almost like -- this is the first skin, and this is the second, and there's a third, and each creates a meaning. And we're just pulling the wall off the gallery. Again, "Inward Out." It's a full-figure cast from myself. It's about eight inches deep.
When I was doing that, I always wondered since I've worked with creators -- and now you know, I've moved to questioning the perception -- whenever I see the bird flying in the sky, it just makes me feel like: is there anything behind, are there any traces up there, which as a human, we don't see them? Is there any way to capture the thought into visual art? I couldn't find it. But a solution arrived after being quiet and not working for about six, seven months, in the restroom, when I was changing the air freshener that goes from solid substance to vapor. It's called Odonil. This is the work I made out of that material. The process to get to make the sculpture was interesting, because I wrote to Balsara, who produces that air freshener called Odonil, saying, "Dear Sir, I am an artist. This is my catalogue. Will you help me to make this sculpture?" They never wrote back to me. Then I thought, "I will go to the Small Scale Industries Facilitating Unit and ask help." So I told them, "I'd like to start an air freshener company." They said, "Of course. This is the fee for the project report, and we will give you all the details," and they gave. Finally, I went back to them and said, "It's not for starting the company, it's just to make my own work. Please come for the show." And they did. And this work is in the Devi Art Foundation in Delhi.
In India, nobody really talks about works of art; they always talk about the appreciation of art. You buy this for 3,000 rupees, it'll become 30,000 in two months. This is the craft that was going on, but there are a few collectors who also collect art which can depreciate. And this was collected by Anupam -- which is like, finally in the end, he will not have anything, because it will evaporate. So this is after a few weeks, this is after a few months. It's just all about questioning the preconceptions. So if someone says, "Oh, I see the portrait," it may not be the portrait after a few months. And if they say it's solid, it will not be solid, it will evaporate. And if they say they don't get it, that's also not true, because it's in the air. It's in the same gallery or in the same museum. So they inhaled it, but they are not aware of it.
While I was doing that work, my mom and my dad, they were looking at it and they said, "Why do you deal with negative subjects all the time?" And I was like, "What do you mean?" "Light makes dark and now evaporating self. Don't you think it remained something about death," they said. "Of course not. For me," I'm thinking, "this is tucked in some small solid, but the moment it evaporates, it's merged with the whole." But she said, "No. Still, I don't like it. Can you make something from nothing as a sculptor?" I said, "No, mom. It can't be. Because we can create a sculpture by gathering dust together, or we can break the sculpture and get the dust, but there is nowhere that we can bring dust into the universe."
So, I did this work for her. It's called "Emerging Angel." This is the first day -- it just gives the appearance that one is becoming the other. So, the same sculpture after a few days. This is after 15/20 days. Through that small little slit between the glass box and the wood, the air goes underneath the sculpture and creates the other one. This gave me a greater faith. That evaporating sculpture gave me a greater faith that maybe there is many more possibilities to capture [the] invisible.
So what you see now is called "Shadow Foreshadow." And what I'd like to tell you is we don't see shadow, and we don't see light too; we see the source of the light. We see where it's bouncing, but we don't see [them] as they exist. You know, that's why the night sky, we see the sky as dark, but it's filled with light all the time. When it's bounced on the moon, we see it. The same thing in the darkroom. The little dust particle will again, reflect the light, and we realize the existence of light. So we don't see dark, we don't see light, we don't see gravity, we don't see electricity. So, I just started doing this work to inquire further about how to sculpt the space between this object and there. Because, as a visual artist, if I'm seeing this and I'm seeing that -- but how to sculpt this, you know? If we sculpt this, this has two reference points. The skin of this is also representing this. And skin at the other end also represents the floor. I did this as an experiment of casting the shadow. So this is a corrugated box and its shadow. Then the second one -- the moment you bring any invisible into the visible world it will have all the characteristics of the visible existence. So that produced a shadow. Then I thought, okay, let me sculpt that. Then, again, that becomes an object. Again, throwing light, then the third one. So what you see is nothing but shadow of a shadow of a shadow. And then again, at that point, there is no shadow. I thought, "Oh, good. Work is finished." You can see the detail.
This is called "Gravity." It's called "Breath." It's just two holes on the gallery wall. It's a false wall, which contains like 110 cubic feet. So that hole actually makes the air come out and go in. So where it's happening, we can see, but what is happening will remain invisible only. This is from the show called "Invisible," at Talwar Gallery. This is called "Kaayam." Detail.
And what I'd like to tell you, our senses are so limited -- we cannot hear everything, we cannot see everything. We don't feel, "I am touching the air," but if the breeze is a little more faster, then I can feel it. So all of our construction of reality is through these limited senses. So my request was like, is there any way to use all this as just a symbol or a sign? And to really get to the point, we should move beyond, you know, go to the other side of the wall, like illogic, like are invisible. Because when we see someone walks, we see the footprint. But if we're just cutting that footprint from the whole thing and trying to analyze it, you will miss the point because the actual journey happens between those footprints, and the footprints are nothing but passing time.
Thank you.
(Applause) |
I'm delighted to be here. I'm honored by the invitation, and thanks. I would love to talk about stuff that I'm interested in, but unfortunately, I suspect that what I'm interested in won't interest many other people. First off, my badge says I'm an astronomer. I would love to talk about my astronomy, but I suspect that the number of people who are interested in radiative transfer in non-gray atmospheres and polarization of light in Jupiter's upper atmosphere are the number of people who'd fit in a bus shelter. So I'm not going to talk about that. (Laughter)
It would be just as much fun to talk about some stuff that happened in 1986 and 1987, when a computer hacker is breaking into our systems over at Lawrence Berkeley Labs. And I caught the guys, and they turned out to be working for what was then the Soviet KGB, and stealing information and selling it. And I'd love to talk about that -- and it'd be fun -- but, 20 years later ... I find computer security, frankly, to be kind of boring. It's tedious. I'm --
The first time you do something, it's science. The second time, it's engineering. A third time, it's just being a technician. I'm a scientist. Once I do something, I do something else. So, I'm not going to talk about that. Nor am I going to talk about what I think are obvious statements from my first book, "Silicon Snake Oil," or my second book, nor am I going to talk about why I believe computers don't belong in schools.
I feel that there's a massive and bizarre idea going around that we have to bring more computers into schools. My idea is: no! No! Get them out of schools, and keep them out of schools. And I'd love to talk about this, but I think the argument is so obvious to anyone who's hung around a fourth grade classroom that it doesn't need much talking about -- but I guess I may be very wrong about that, and everything else that I've said. So don't go back and read my dissertation. It probably has lies in it as well.
Having said that, I outlined my talk about five minutes ago. (Laughter) And if you look at it over here, the main thing I wrote on my thumb was the future. I'm supposed to talk about the future, yes? Oh, right. And my feeling is, asking me to talk about the future is bizarre, because I've got gray hair, and so, it's kind of silly for me to talk about the future. In fact, I think that if you really want to know what the future's going to be, if you really want to know about the future, don't ask a technologist, a scientist, a physicist. No! Don't ask somebody who's writing code.
No, if you want to know what society's going to be like in 20 years, ask a kindergarten teacher. They know. In fact, don't ask just any kindergarten teacher, ask an experienced one. They're the ones who know what society is going to be like in another generation. I don't. Nor, I suspect, do many other people who are talking about what the future will bring. Certainly, all of us can imagine these cool new things that are going to be there. But to me, things aren't the future. What I ask myself is, what's society is going to be like, when the kids today are phenomenally good at text messaging and spend a huge amount of on-screen time, but have never gone bowling together?
Change is happening, and the change that is happening is not one that is in software. But that's not what I'm going to talk about. I'd love to talk about it, it'd be fun, but I want to talk about what I'm doing now. What am I doing now? Oh -- the other thing that I think I'd like to talk about is right over here. Right over here. Is that visible? What I'd like to talk about is one-sided things. I would dearly love to talk about things that have one side. Because I love Mobius loops. I not only love Mobius loops, but I'm one of the very few people, if not the only person in the world, that makes Klein bottles. Right away, I hope that all of your eyes glaze over. This is a Klein bottle. For those of you in the audience who know, you roll your eyes and say, yup, I know all about it. It's one sided. It's a bottle whose inside is its outside. It has zero volume. And it's non-orientable. It has wonderful properties. If you take two Mobius loops and sew their common edge together, you get one of these, and I make them out of glass. And I'd love to talk to you about this, but I don't have much in the way of ... things to say because -- (Laughter)
(Chris Anderson: I've got a cold.)
However, the "D" in TED of course stands for design. Just two weeks ago I made -- you know, I've been making small, medium and big Klein bottles for the trade. But what I've just made -- and I'm delighted to show you, first time in public here. This is a Klein bottle wine bottle, which, although in four dimensions it shouldn't be able to hold any fluid at all, it's perfectly capable of doing so because our universe has only three spatial dimensions. And because our universe is only three spatial dimensions, it can hold fluids. So it's highly -- that one's the cool one. That was a month of my life. But although I would love to talk about topology with you, I'm not going to. (Laughter)
Instead, I'm going to mention my mom, who passed away last summer. Had collected photographs of me, as mothers will do. Could somebody put this guy up? And I looked over her album and she had collected a picture of me, standing -- well, sitting -- in 1969, in front of a bunch of dials. And I looked at it, and said, oh my god, that was me, when I was working at the electronic music studio! As a technician, repairing and maintaining the electronic music studio at SUNY Buffalo. And wow! Way back machine. And I said to myself, oh yeah! And it sent me back.
Soon after that, I found in another picture that she had, a picture of me. This guy over here of course is me. This man is Robert Moog, the inventor of the Moog synthesizer, who passed away this past August. Robert Moog was a generous, kind person, extraordinarily competent engineer. A musician who took time from his life to teach me, a sophomore, a freshman at SUNY Buffalo. He'd come up from Trumansburg to teach me not just about the Moog synthesizer, but we'd be sitting there -- I'm studying physics at the time. This is 1969, 70, 71. We're studying physics, I'm studying physics, and he's saying, "That's a good thing to do. Don't get caught up in electronic music if you're doing physics." Mentoring me. He'd come up and spend hours and hours with me. He wrote a letter of recommendation for me to get into graduate school. In the background, my bicycle. I realize that this picture was taken at a friend's living room. Bob Moog came by and hauled a whole pile of equipment to show Greg Flint and I things about this. We sat around talking about Fourier transforms, Bessel functions, modulation transfer functions, stuff like this. Bob's passing this past summer has been a loss to all of us. Anyone who's a musician has been profoundly influenced by Robert Moog. (Applause) And I'll just say what I'm about to do. What I'm about to do -- I hope you can recognize that there's a distorted sine wave, almost a triangular wave upon this Hewlett-Packard oscilloscope.
Oh, cool. I can get to this place over here, right? Kids. Kids is what I'm going to talk about -- is that okay? It says kids over here, that's what I'd like to talk about. I've decided that, for me at least, I don't have a big enough head. So I think locally and I act locally. I feel that the best way I can help out anything is to help out very, very locally. So Ph.D. this, and degree there, and the yadda yadda. I was talking about this stuff to some schoolteachers about a year ago. And one of them, several of them would come up to me and say, "Well, how come you ain't teaching?" And I said, "Well, I've taught graduate -- I've had graduate students, I've taught undergraduate classes." No, they said, "If you're so into kids and all this stuff, how come you ain't over here on the front lines? Put your money where you mouth is."
Is true. Is true. I teach eighth-grade science four days a week. Not just showing up every now and then. No, no, no, no, no. I take attendance. I take lunch hour. (Applause) This is not -- no, no, no, this is not claps. I strongly suggest that this is a good thing for each of you to do. Not just show up to class every now and then. Teach a solid week. Okay, I'm teaching three-quarters time, but good enough. One of the things that I've done for my science students is to tell them, "Look, I'm going to teach you college-level physics. No calculus, I'll cut out that. You won't need to know trig. But you will need to know eighth-grade algebra, and we're going to do serious experiments. None of this open-to-chapter-seven-and-do-all-the-odd-problem-sets. We're going to be doing genuine physics." And that's one of the things I thought I'd do right now. (High-pitched tone)
Oh, before I even turn that on, one of the things that we did about three weeks ago in my class -- this is through the lens, and one of the things we used a lens for was to measure the speed of light. My students in El Cerrito -- with my help, of course, and with the help of a very beat up oscilloscope -- measured the speed of light. We were off by 25 percent. How many eighth graders do you know of who have measured the speed of light? In addition to that, we've measured the speed of sound. I'd love to measure the speed of light here. I was all set to do it and I was thinking, "Aw man," I was just going to impose upon the powers that be, and measure the speed of light. And I'm all set to do it. I'm all set to do it, but then it turns out that to set up here, you have like 10 minutes to set up! And there's no time to do it. So, next time, maybe, I'll measure the speed of light!
But meanwhile, let's measure the speed of sound! Well, the obvious way to measure the speed of sound is to bounce sound off something and look at the echo. But, probably -- one of my students, Ariel [unclear], said, "Could we measure the speed of light using the wave equation?" And all of you know the wave equation is the frequency times the wavelength of any wave ... is a constant. When the frequency goes up, the wavelength comes down. Wavelength goes up, frequency goes down. So, if we have a wave here -- over here, that's what's interesting -- as the pitch goes up, things get closer, pitch goes down, things stretch out. Right? This is simple physics. All of you know this from eighth grade, remember? What they didn't tell you in physics -- in eighth-grade physics -- but they should have, and I wish they had, was that if you multiply the frequency times the wavelength of sound or light, you get a constant. And that constant is the speed of sound. So, in order to measure the speed of sound, all I've got to do is know its frequency. Well, that's easy. I've got a frequency counter right here. Set it up to around A, above A, above A. There's an A, more or less. Now, so I know the frequency. It's 1.76 kilohertz. I measure its wavelength. All I need now is to flip on another beam, and the bottom beam is me talking, right? So anytime I talk, you'd see it on the screen. I'll put it over here, and as I move this away from the source, you'll notice the spiral. The slinky moves. We're going through different nodes of the wave, coming out this way. Those of you who are physicists, I hear you rolling your eyes, but bear with me. (Laughter)
To measure the wavelength, all I need to do is measure the distance from here -- one full wave -- over to here. From here to here is the wavelength of sound. So, I'll put a measuring tape here, measuring tape here, move it back over to here. I've moved the microphone 20 centimeters. 0.2 meters from here, back to here, 20 centimeters. OK, let's go back to Mr. Elmo. And we'll say the frequency is 1.76 kilohertz, or 1760. The wavelength was 0.2 meters. Let's figure out what this is. (Laughter) (Applause) 1.76 times 0.2 over here is 352 meters per second. If you look it up in the book, it's really 343. But, here with kludgy material, and lousy drink -- we've been able to measure the speed of sound to -- not bad. Pretty good.
All of which comes to what I wanted to say. Go back to this picture of me a million years ago. It was 1971, the Vietnam War was going on, and I'm like, "Oh my God!" I'm studying physics: Landau, Lipschitz, Resnick and Halliday. I'm going home for a midterm. A riot's going on on campus. There's a riot! Hey, Elmo's done: off. There's a riot going on on campus, and the police are chasing me, right? I'm walking across campus. Cop comes and looks at me and says, "You! You're a student." Pulls out a gun. Goes boom! And a tear gas canister the size of a Pepsi can goes by my head. Whoosh! I get a breath of tear gas and I can't breathe. This cop comes after me with a rifle. He wants to clunk me over the head! I'm saying, "I got to clear out of here!" I go running across campus quick as I can. I duck into Hayes Hall. It's one of these bell-tower buildings. The cop's chasing me. Chasing me up the first floor, second floor, third floor. Chases me into this room. The entranceway to the bell tower. I slam the door behind me, climb up, go past this place where I see a pendulum ticking. And I'm thinking, "Oh yeah, the square root of the length is proportional to its period." (Laughter)
I keep climbing up, go back. I go to a place where a dowel splits off. There's a clock, clock, clock, clock. The time's going backwards because I'm inside of it. I'm thinking of Lorenz contractions and Einsteinian relativity. I climb up, and there's this place, way in the back, that you climb up this wooden ladder. I pop up the top, and there's a cupola. A dome, one of these ten-foot domes. I'm looking out and I'm seeing the cops bashing students' heads, shooting tear gas, and watching students throwing bricks. And I'm asking, "What am I doing here? Why am I here?" Then I remember what my English teacher in high school said. Namely, that when they cast bells, they write inscriptions on them. So, I wipe the pigeon manure off one of the bells, and I look at it. I'm asking myself, "Why am I here?"
So, at this time, I'd like to tell you the words inscribed upon the Hayes Hall tower bells: "All truth is one. In this light, may science and religion endeavor here for the steady evolution of mankind, from darkness to light, from narrowness to broad-mindedness, from prejudice to tolerance. It is the voice of life, which calls us to come and learn." Thank you very much. |
I have a confession to make. I'm a business professor whose ambition has been to help people learn to lead. But recently, I've discovered that what many of us think of as great leadership does not work when it comes to leading innovation.
I'm an ethnographer. I use the methods of anthropology to understand the questions in which I'm interested. So along with three co-conspirators, I spent nearly a decade observing up close and personal exceptional leaders of innovation. We studied 16 men and women, located in seven countries across the globe, working in 12 different industries. In total, we spent hundreds of hours on the ground, on-site, watching these leaders in action. We ended up with pages and pages and pages of field notes that we analyzed and looked for patterns in what our leaders did. The bottom line? If we want to build organizations that can innovate time and again, we must unlearn our conventional notions of leadership.
Leading innovation is not about creating a vision, and inspiring others to execute it. But what do we mean by innovation? An innovation is anything that is both new and useful. It can be a product or service. It can be a process or a way of organizing. It can be incremental, or it can be breakthrough. We have a pretty inclusive definition.
How many of you recognize this man? Put your hands up. Keep your hands up, if you know who this is. How about these familiar faces? (Laughter) From your show of hands, it looks like many of you have seen a Pixar movie, but very few of you recognized Ed Catmull, the founder and CEO of Pixar -- one of the companies I had the privilege of studying.
My first visit to Pixar was in 2005, when they were working on "Ratatouille," that provocative movie about a rat becoming a master chef. Computer-generated movies are really mainstream today, but it took Ed and his colleagues nearly 20 years to create the first full-length C.G. movie. In the 20 years hence, they've produced 14 movies. I was recently at Pixar, and I'm here to tell you that number 15 is sure to be a winner.
When many of us think about innovation, though, we think about an Einstein having an 'Aha!' moment. But we all know that's a myth. Innovation is not about solo genius, it's about collective genius. Let's think for a minute about what it takes to make a Pixar movie: No solo genius, no flash of inspiration produces one of those movies. On the contrary, it takes about 250 people four to five years, to make one of those movies.
To help us understand the process, an individual in the studio drew a version of this picture. He did so reluctantly, because it suggested that the process was a neat series of steps done by discrete groups. Even with all those arrows, he thought it failed to really tell you just how iterative, interrelated and, frankly, messy their process was.
Throughout the making of a movie at Pixar, the story evolves. So think about it. Some shots go through quickly. They don't all go through in order. It depends on how vexing the challenges are that they come up with when they are working on a particular scene. So if you think about that scene in "Up" where the boy hands the piece of chocolate to the bird, that 10 seconds took one animator almost six months to perfect.
The other thing about a Pixar movie is that no part of the movie is considered finished until the entire movie wraps. Partway through one production, an animator drew a character with an arched eyebrow that suggested a mischievous side. When the director saw that drawing, he thought it was great. It was beautiful, but he said, "You've got to lose it; it doesn't fit the character." Two weeks later, the director came back and said, "Let's put in those few seconds of film." Because that animator was allowed to share what we referred to as his slice of genius, he was able to help that director reconceive the character in a subtle but important way that really improved the story.
What we know is, at the heart of innovation is a paradox. You have to unleash the talents and passions of many people and you have to harness them into a work that is actually useful. Innovation is a journey. It's a type of collaborative problem solving, usually among people who have different expertise and different points of view.
Innovations rarely get created full-blown. As many of you know, they're the result, usually, of trial and error. Lots of false starts, missteps and mistakes. Innovative work can be very exhilarating, but it also can be really downright scary. So when we look at why it is that Pixar is able to do what it does, we have to ask ourselves, what's going on here?
For sure, history and certainly Hollywood, is full of star-studded teams that have failed. Most of those failures are attributed to too many stars or too many cooks, if you will, in the kitchen. So why is it that Pixar, with all of its cooks, is able to be so successful time and time again? When we studied an Islamic Bank in Dubai, or a luxury brand in Korea, or a social enterprise in Africa, we found that innovative organizations are communities that have three capabilities: creative abrasion, creative agility and creative resolution. Creative abrasion is about being able to create a marketplace of ideas through debate and discourse. In innovative organizations, they amplify differences, they don't minimize them. Creative abrasion is not about brainstorming, where people suspend their judgment. No, they know how to have very heated but constructive arguments to create a portfolio of alternatives.
Individuals in innovative organizations learn how to inquire, they learn how to actively listen, but guess what? They also learn how to advocate for their point of view. They understand that innovation rarely happens unless you have both diversity and conflict. Creative agility is about being able to test and refine that portfolio of ideas through quick pursuit, reflection and adjustment. It's about discovery-driven learning where you act, as opposed to plan, your way to the future. It's about design thinking where you have that interesting combination of the scientific method and the artistic process. It's about running a series of experiments, and not a series of pilots.
Experiments are usually about learning. When you get a negative outcome, you're still really learning something that you need to know. Pilots are often about being right. When they don't work, someone or something is to blame. The final capability is creative resolution. This is about doing decision making in a way that you can actually combine even opposing ideas to reconfigure them in new combinations to produce a solution that is new and useful. When you look at innovative organizations, they never go along to get along. They don't compromise. They don't let one group or one individual dominate, even if it's the boss, even if it's the expert. Instead, they have developed a rather patient and more inclusive decision making process that allows for both/and solutions to arise and not simply either/or solutions. These three capabilities are why we see that Pixar is able to do what it does.
Let me give you another example, and that example is the infrastructure group of Google. The infrastructure group of Google is the group that has to keep the website up and running 24/7. So when Google was about to introduce Gmail and YouTube, they knew that their data storage system wasn't adequate. The head of the engineering group and the infrastructure group at that time was a man named Bill Coughran. Bill and his leadership team, who he referred to as his brain trust, had to figure out what to do about this situation. They thought about it for a while. Instead of creating a group to tackle this task, they decided to allow groups to emerge spontaneously around different alternatives.
Two groups coalesced. One became known as Big Table, the other became known as Build It From Scratch. Big Table proposed that they build on the current system. Build It From Scratch proposed that it was time for a whole new system. Separately, these two teams were allowed to work full-time on their particular approach. In engineering reviews, Bill described his role as, "Injecting honesty into the process by driving debate."
Early on, the teams were encouraged to build prototypes so that they could "bump them up against reality and discover for themselves the strengths and weaknesses of their particular approach." When Build It From Scratch shared their prototype with the group whose beepers would have to go off in the middle of the night if something went wrong with the website, they heard loud and clear about the limitations of their particular design. As the need for a solution became more urgent and as the data, or the evidence, began to come in, it became pretty clear that the Big Table solution was the right one for the moment. So they selected that one.
But to make sure that they did not lose the learning of the Build it From Scratch team, Bill asked two members of that team to join a new team that was emerging to work on the next-generation system. This whole process took nearly two years, but I was told that they were all working at breakneck speed.
Early in that process, one of the engineers had gone to Bill and said, "We're all too busy for this inefficient system of running parallel experiments." But as the process unfolded, he began to understand the wisdom of allowing talented people to play out their passions. He admitted, "If you had forced us to all be on one team, we might have focused on proving who was right, and winning, and not on learning and discovering what was the best answer for Google."
Why is it that Pixar and Google are able to innovate time and again? It's because they've mastered the capabilities required for that. They know how to do collaborative problem solving, they know how to do discovery-driven learning and they know how to do integrated decision making.
Some of you may be sitting there and saying to yourselves right now, "We don't know how to do those things in my organization. So why do they know how to do those things at Pixar, and why do they know how to do those things at Google?" When many of the people that worked for Bill told us, in their opinion, that Bill was one of the finest leaders in Silicon Valley, we completely agreed; the man is a genius.
Leadership is the secret sauce. But it's a different kind of leadership, not the kind many of us think about when we think about great leadership. One of the leaders I met with early on said to me, "Linda, I don't read books on leadership. All they do is make me feel bad." (Laughter) "In the first chapter they say I'm supposed to create a vision. But if I'm trying to do something that's truly new, I have no answers. I don't know what direction we're going in and I'm not even sure I know how to figure out how to get there." For sure, there are times when visionary leadership is exactly what is needed.
But if we want to build organizations that can innovate time and again, we must recast our understanding of what leadership is about. Leading innovation is about creating the space where people are willing and able to do the hard work of innovative problem solving.
At this point, some of you may be wondering, "What does that leadership really look like?" At Pixar, they understand that innovation takes a village. The leaders focus on building a sense of community and building those three capabilities. How do they define leadership? They say leadership is about creating a world to which people want to belong. What kind of world do people want to belong in at Pixar? A world where you're living at the frontier. What do they focus their time on? Not on creating a vision. Instead they spend their time thinking about, "How do we design a studio that has the sensibility of a public square so that people will interact? Let's put in a policy that anyone, no matter what their level or role, is allowed to give notes to the director about how they feel about a particular film. What can we do to make sure that all the disruptors, all the minority voices in this organization, speak up and are heard? And, finally, let's bestow credit in a very generous way." I don't know if you've ever looked at the credits of a Pixar movie, but the babies born during a production are listed there. (Laughter)
How did Bill think about what his role was? Bill said, "I lead a volunteer organization. Talented people don't want to follow me anywhere. They want to cocreate with me the future. My job is to nurture the bottom-up and not let it degenerate into chaos." How did he see his role? "I'm a role model, I'm a human glue, I'm a connector, I'm an aggregator of viewpoints. I'm never a dictator of viewpoints." Advice about how you exercise the role? Hire people who argue with you. And, guess what? Sometimes it's best to be deliberately fuzzy and vague.
Some of you may be wondering now, what are these people thinking? They're thinking, "I'm not the visionary, I'm the social architect. I'm creating the space where people are willing and able to share and combine their talents and passions." If some of you are worrying now that you don't work at a Pixar, or you don't work at a Google, I want to tell you there's still hope. We've studied many organizations that were really not organizations you'd think of as ones where a lot of innovation happens.
We studied a general counsel in a pharmaceutical company who had to figure out how to get the outside lawyers, 19 competitors, to collaborate and innovate. We studied the head of marketing at a German automaker where, fundamentally, they believed that it was the design engineers, not the marketeers, who were allowed to be innovative. We also studied Vineet Nayar at HCL Technologies, an Indian outsourcing company. When we met Vineet, his company was about, in his words, to become irrelevant. We watched as he turned that company into a global dynamo of I.T. innovation. At HCL technologies, like at many companies, the leaders had learned to see their role as setting direction and making sure that no one deviated from it. What he did is tell them it was time for them to think about rethinking what they were supposed to do. Because what was happening is that everybody was looking up and you weren't seeing the kind of bottom-up innovation we saw at Pixar or Google. So they began to work on that.
They stopped giving answers, they stopped trying to provide solutions. Instead, what they did is they began to see the people at the bottom of the pyramid, the young sparks, the people who were closest to the customers, as the source of innovation. They began to transfer the organization's growth to that level. In Vineet's language, this was about inverting the pyramid so that you could unleash the power of the many by loosening the stranglehold of the few, and increase the quality and the speed of innovation that was happening every day.
For sure, Vineet and all the other leaders that we studied were in fact visionaries. For sure, they understood that that was not their role. So I don't think it is accidental that many of you did not recognize Ed. Because Ed, like Vineet, understands that our role as leaders is to set the stage, not perform on it. If we want to invent a better future, and I suspect that's why many of us are here, then we need to reimagine our task. Our task is to create the space where everybody's slices of genius can be unleashed and harnessed, and turned into works of collective genius.
Thank you.
(Applause) |
Thank you very much.
I moved to America 12 years ago with my wife Terry and our two kids. Actually, truthfully, we moved to Los Angeles --
(Laughter)
thinking we were moving to America, but anyway --
(Laughter)
It's a short plane ride from Los Angeles to America.
(Laughter)
I got here 12 years ago, and when I got here, I was told various things, like, "Americans don't get irony."
(Laughter)
Have you come across this idea? It's not true. I've traveled the whole length and breadth of this country. I have found no evidence that Americans don't get irony. It's one of those cultural myths, like, "The British are reserved."
(Laughter)
I don't know why people think this. We've invaded every country we've encountered.
(Laughter)
But it's not true Americans don't get irony, but I just want you to know that that's what people are saying about you behind your back. You know, so when you leave living rooms in Europe, people say, thankfully, nobody was ironic in your presence.
(Laughter)
But I knew that Americans get irony when I came across that legislation, "No Child Left Behind."
(Laughter)
Because whoever thought of that title gets irony.
(Laughter)
Don't they?
(Applause)
Because it's leaving millions of children behind. Now I can see that's not a very attractive name for legislation: "Millions of Children Left Behind." I can see that. What's the plan? We propose to leave millions of children behind, and here's how it's going to work.
And it's working beautifully.
(Laughter)
In some parts of the country, 60 percent of kids drop out of high school. In the Native American communities, it's 80 percent of kids. If we halved that number, one estimate is it would create a net gain to the U.S. economy over 10 years, of nearly a trillion dollars. From an economic point of view, this is good math, isn't it, that we should do this? It actually costs an enormous amount to mop up the damage from the dropout crisis.
But the dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it.
And the reason is not that we're not spending enough money. America spends more money on education than most other countries. Class sizes are smaller than in many countries. And there are hundreds of initiatives every year to try and improve education. The trouble is, it's all going in the wrong direction. There are three principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most teachers have to labor and most students have to endure.
The first is this, that human beings are naturally different and diverse. Can I ask you, how many of you have got children of your own? Okay. Or grandchildren. How about two children or more? Right. And the rest of you have seen such children.
(Laughter)
Small people wandering about.
(Laughter)
I will make you a bet, and I am confident that I will win the bet. If you've got two children or more, I bet you they are completely different from each other. Aren't they?
(Applause)
You would never confuse them, would you? Like, "Which one are you? Remind me."
(Laughter)
"Your mother and I need some color-coding system so we don't get confused."
Education under "No Child Left Behind" is based on not diversity but conformity. What schools are encouraged to do is to find out what kids can do across a very narrow spectrum of achievement. One of the effects of "No Child Left Behind" has been to narrow the focus onto the so-called STEM disciplines. They're very important. I'm not here to argue against science and math. On the contrary, they're necessary but they're not sufficient. A real education has to give equal weight to the arts, the humanities, to physical education. An awful lot of kids, sorry, thank you --
(Applause)
One estimate in America currently is that something like 10 percent of kids, getting on that way, are being diagnosed with various conditions under the broad title of attention deficit disorder. ADHD. I'm not saying there's no such thing. I just don't believe it's an epidemic like this. If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget, you know?
(Laughter)
(Applause)
Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition. They're suffering from childhood.
(Laughter)
And I know this because I spent my early life as a child. I went through the whole thing. Kids prosper best with a broad curriculum that celebrates their various talents, not just a small range of them. And by the way, the arts aren't just important because they improve math scores. They're important because they speak to parts of children's being which are otherwise untouched.
The second, thank you --
(Applause)
The second principle that drives human life flourishing is curiosity. If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance, very often. Children are natural learners. It's a real achievement to put that particular ability out, or to stifle it. Curiosity is the engine of achievement. Now the reason I say this is because one of the effects of the current culture here, if I can say so, has been to de-professionalize teachers. There is no system in the world or any school in the country that is better than its teachers. Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools. But teaching is a creative profession. Teaching, properly conceived, is not a delivery system. You know, you're not there just to pass on received information. Great teachers do that, but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage. You see, in the end, education is about learning. If there's no learning going on, there's no education going on. And people can spend an awful lot of time discussing education without ever discussing learning. The whole point of education is to get people to learn.
An old friend of mine -- actually very old, he's dead.
(Laughter)
That's as old as it gets, I'm afraid.
(Laughter)
But a wonderful guy he was, wonderful philosopher. He used to talk about the difference between the task and achievement senses of verbs. You can be engaged in the activity of something, but not really be achieving it, like dieting.
(Laughter)
It's a very good example. There he is. He's dieting. Is he losing any weight? Not really.
(Laughter)
Teaching is a word like that. You can say, "There's Deborah, she's in room 34, she's teaching." But if nobody's learning anything, she may be engaged in the task of teaching but not actually fulfilling it.
The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. That's it. And part of the problem is, I think, that the dominant culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and learning, but testing. Now, testing is important. Standardized tests have a place. But they should not be the dominant culture of education. They should be diagnostic. They should help.
(Applause)
If I go for a medical examination, I want some standardized tests. I do. I want to know what my cholesterol level is compared to everybody else's on a standard scale. I don't want to be told on some scale my doctor invented in the car.
(Laughter)
"Your cholesterol is what I call Level Orange."
"Really?"
(Laughter)
"Is that good?" "We don't know."
(Laughter)
But all that should support learning. It shouldn't obstruct it, which of course it often does. So in place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance. Our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite that power of imagination and curiosity. And the third principle is this: that human life is inherently creative. It's why we all have different résumés. We create our lives, and we can recreate them as we go through them. It's the common currency of being a human being. It's why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic. I mean, other animals may well have imaginations and creativity, but it's not so much in evidence, is it, as ours? I mean, you may have a dog. And your dog may get depressed. You know, but it doesn't listen to Radiohead, does it?
(Laughter)
And sit staring out the window with a bottle of Jack Daniels.
(Laughter)
"Would you like to come for a walk?" "No, I'm fine."
(Laughter)
"You go. I'll wait. But take pictures."
(Laughter)
We all create our own lives through this restless process of imagining alternatives and possibilities, and one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity. Instead, what we have is a culture of standardization.
Now, it doesn't have to be that way. It really doesn't. Finland regularly comes out on top in math, science and reading. Now, we only know that's what they do well at, because that's all that's being tested. That's one of the problems of the test. They don't look for other things that matter just as much. The thing about work in Finland is this: they don't obsess about those disciplines. They have a very broad approach to education, which includes humanities, physical education, the arts.
Second, there is no standardized testing in Finland. I mean, there's a bit, but it's not what gets people up in the morning, what keeps them at their desks.
The third thing -- and I was at a meeting recently with some people from Finland, actual Finnish people, and somebody from the American system was saying to the people in Finland, "What do you do about the drop-out rate in Finland?"
And they all looked a bit bemused, and said, "Well, we don't have one. Why would you drop out? If people are in trouble, we get to them quite quickly and we help and support them."
Now people always say, "Well, you know, you can't compare Finland to America." No. I think there's a population of around five million in Finland. But you can compare it to a state in America. Many states in America have fewer people in them than that. I mean, I've been to some states in America and I was the only person there.
(Laughter)
Really. Really. I was asked to lock up when I left.
(Laughter)
But what all the high-performing systems in the world do is currently what is not evident, sadly, across the systems in America -- I mean, as a whole. One is this: they individualize teaching and learning. They recognize that it's students who are learning and the system has to engage them, their curiosity, their individuality, and their creativity. That's how you get them to learn.
The second is that they attribute a very high status to the teaching profession. They recognize that you can't improve education if you don't pick great people to teach and keep giving them constant support and professional development. Investing in professional development is not a cost. It's an investment, and every other country that's succeeding well knows that, whether it's Australia, Canada, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai. They know that to be the case.
And the third is, they devolve responsibility to the school level for getting the job done. You see, there's a big difference here between going into a mode of command and control in education -- That's what happens in some systems. Central or state governments decide, they know best and they're going to tell you what to do. The trouble is that education doesn't go on in the committee rooms of our legislative buildings. It happens in classrooms and schools, and the people who do it are the teachers and the students, and if you remove their discretion, it stops working. You have to put it back to the people.
(Applause)
There is wonderful work happening in this country. But I have to say it's happening in spite of the dominant culture of education, not because of it. It's like people are sailing into a headwind all the time. And the reason I think is this: that many of the current policies are based on mechanistic conceptions of education. It's like education is an industrial process that can be improved just by having better data, and somewhere in the back of the mind of some policy makers is this idea that if we fine-tune it well enough, if we just get it right, it will all hum along perfectly into the future. It won't, and it never did.
The point is that education is not a mechanical system. It's a human system. It's about people, people who either do want to learn or don't want to learn. Every student who drops out of school has a reason for it which is rooted in their own biography. They may find it boring. They may find it irrelevant. They may find that it's at odds with the life they're living outside of school. There are trends, but the stories are always unique. I was at a meeting recently in Los Angeles of -- they're called alternative education programs. These are programs designed to get kids back into education. They have certain common features. They're very personalized. They have strong support for the teachers, close links with the community and a broad and diverse curriculum, and often programs which involve students outside school as well as inside school. And they work. What's interesting to me is, these are called "alternative education."
(Laughter)
You know? And all the evidence from around the world is, if we all did that, there'd be no need for the alternative.
(Applause)
(Applause ends)
So I think we have to embrace a different metaphor. We have to recognize that it's a human system, and there are conditions under which people thrive, and conditions under which they don't. We are after all organic creatures, and the culture of the school is absolutely essential. Culture is an organic term, isn't it?
Not far from where I live is a place called Death Valley. Death Valley is the hottest, driest place in America, and nothing grows there. Nothing grows there because it doesn't rain. Hence, Death Valley. In the winter of 2004, it rained in Death Valley. Seven inches of rain fell over a very short period. And in the spring of 2005, there was a phenomenon. The whole floor of Death Valley was carpeted in flowers for a while. What it proved is this: that Death Valley isn't dead. It's dormant. Right beneath the surface are these seeds of possibility waiting for the right conditions to come about, and with organic systems, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable. It happens all the time. You take an area, a school, a district, you change the conditions, give people a different sense of possibility, a different set of expectations, a broader range of opportunities, you cherish and value the relationships between teachers and learners, you offer people the discretion to be creative and to innovate in what they do, and schools that were once bereft spring to life.
Great leaders know that. The real role of leadership in education -- and I think it's true at the national level, the state level, at the school level -- is not and should not be command and control. The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility. And if you do that, people will rise to it and achieve things that you completely did not anticipate and couldn't have expected.
There's a wonderful quote from Benjamin Franklin. "There are three sorts of people in the world: Those who are immovable, people who don't get it, or don't want to do anything about it; there are people who are movable, people who see the need for change and are prepared to listen to it; and there are people who move, people who make things happen." And if we can encourage more people, that will be a movement. And if the movement is strong enough, that's, in the best sense of the word, a revolution. And that's what we need.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Thank you very much.
(Applause) |
So for any of us in this room today, let's start out by admitting we're lucky. We don't live in the world our mothers lived in, our grandmothers lived in, where career choices for women were so limited. And if you're in this room today, most of us grew up in a world where we had basic civil rights, and amazingly, we still live in a world where some women don't have them. But all that aside, we still have a problem, and it's a real problem. And the problem is this: Women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. The numbers tell the story quite clearly. 190 heads of state -- nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, women at the top, C-level jobs, board seats -- tops out at 15, 16 percent. The numbers have not moved since 2002 and are going in the wrong direction. And even in the non-profit world, a world we sometimes think of as being led by more women, women at the top: 20 percent.
We also have another problem, which is that women face harder choices between professional success and personal fulfillment. A recent study in the U.S. showed that, of married senior managers, two-thirds of the married men had children and only one-third of the married women had children. A couple of years ago, I was in New York, and I was pitching a deal, and I was in one of those fancy New York private equity offices you can picture. And I'm in the meeting -- it's about a three-hour meeting -- and two hours in, there kind of needs to be that bio break, and everyone stands up, and the partner running the meeting starts looking really embarrassed. And I realized he doesn't know where the women's room is in his office. So I start looking around for moving boxes, figuring they just moved in, but I don't see any. And so I said, "Did you just move into this office?" And he said, "No, we've been here about a year." And I said, "Are you telling me that I am the only woman to have pitched a deal in this office in a year?" And he looked at me, and he said, "Yeah. Or maybe you're the only one who had to go to the bathroom."
(Laughter)
So the question is, how are we going to fix this? How do we change these numbers at the top? How do we make this different? I want to start out by saying, I talk about this -- about keeping women in the workforce -- because I really think that's the answer. In the high-income part of our workforce, in the people who end up at the top -- Fortune 500 CEO jobs, or the equivalent in other industries -- the problem, I am convinced, is that women are dropping out. Now people talk about this a lot, and they talk about things like flextime and mentoring and programs companies should have to train women. I want to talk about none of that today, even though that's all really important. Today I want to focus on what we can do as individuals. What are the messages we need to tell ourselves? What are the messages we tell the women who work with and for us? What are the messages we tell our daughters?
Now, at the outset, I want to be very clear that this speech comes with no judgments. I don't have the right answer. I don't even have it for myself. I left San Francisco, where I live, on Monday, and I was getting on the plane for this conference. And my daughter, who's three, when I dropped her off at preschool, did that whole hugging-the-leg, crying, "Mommy, don't get on the plane" thing. This is hard. I feel guilty sometimes. I know no women, whether they're at home or whether they're in the workforce, who don't feel that sometimes. So I'm not saying that staying in the workforce is the right thing for everyone.
My talk today is about what the messages are if you do want to stay in the workforce, and I think there are three. One, sit at the table. Two, make your partner a real partner. And three, don't leave before you leave. Number one: sit at the table. Just a couple weeks ago at Facebook, we hosted a very senior government official, and he came in to meet with senior execs from around Silicon Valley. And everyone kind of sat at the table. And then he had these two women who were traveling with him who were pretty senior in his department, and I kind of said to them, "Sit at the table. Come on, sit at the table," and they sat on the side of the room. When I was in college my senior year, I took a course called European Intellectual History. Don't you love that kind of thing from college? I wish I could do that now. And I took it with my roommate, Carrie, who was then a brilliant literary student -- and went on to be a brilliant literary scholar -- and my brother -- smart guy, but a water-polo-playing pre-med, who was a sophomore.
The three of us take this class together. And then Carrie reads all the books in the original Greek and Latin, goes to all the lectures. I read all the books in English and go to most of the lectures. My brother is kind of busy. He reads one book of 12 and goes to a couple of lectures, marches himself up to our room a couple days before the exam to get himself tutored. The three of us go to the exam together, and we sit down. And we sit there for three hours -- and our little blue notebooks -- yes, I'm that old. And we walk out, and we look at each other, and we say, "How did you do?" And Carrie says, "Boy, I feel like I didn't really draw out the main point on the Hegelian dialectic." And I say, "God, I really wish I had really connected John Locke's theory of property with the philosophers who follow." And my brother says, "I got the top grade in the class." "You got the top grade in the class? You don't know anything."
The problem with these stories is that they show what the data shows: women systematically underestimate their own abilities. If you test men and women, and you ask them questions on totally objective criteria like GPAs, men get it wrong slightly high, and women get it wrong slightly low. Women do not negotiate for themselves in the workforce. A study in the last two years of people entering the workforce out of college showed that 57 percent of boys entering, or men, I guess, are negotiating their first salary, and only seven percent of women. And most importantly, men attribute their success to themselves, and women attribute it to other external factors. If you ask men why they did a good job, they'll say, "I'm awesome. Obviously. Why are you even asking?" If you ask women why they did a good job, what they'll say is someone helped them, they got lucky, they worked really hard. Why does this matter? Boy, it matters a lot because no one gets to the corner office by sitting on the side, not at the table, and no one gets the promotion if they don't think they deserve their success, or they don't even understand their own success.
I wish the answer were easy. I wish I could just go tell all the young women I work for, all these fabulous women, "Believe in yourself and negotiate for yourself. Own your own success." I wish I could tell that to my daughter. But it's not that simple. Because what the data shows, above all else, is one thing, which is that success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women. And everyone's nodding, because we all know this to be true.
There's a really good study that shows this really well. There's a famous Harvard Business School study on a woman named Heidi Roizen. And she's an operator in a company in Silicon Valley, and she uses her contacts to become a very successful venture capitalist. In 2002 -- not so long ago -- a professor who was then at Columbia University took that case and made it Howard Roizen. And he gave the case out, both of them, to two groups of students. He changed exactly one word: "Heidi" to "Howard." But that one word made a really big difference. He then surveyed the students, and the good news was the students, both men and women, thought Heidi and Howard were equally competent, and that's good. The bad news was that everyone liked Howard. He's a great guy. You want to work for him. You want to spend the day fishing with him. But Heidi? Not so sure. She's a little out for herself. She's a little political. You're not sure you'd want to work for her. This is the complication. We have to tell our daughters and our colleagues, we have to tell ourselves to believe we got the A, to reach for the promotion, to sit at the table, and we have to do it in a world where, for them, there are sacrifices they will make for that, even though for their brothers, there are not.
The saddest thing about all of this is that it's really hard to remember this. And I'm about to tell a story which is truly embarrassing for me, but I think important. I gave this talk at Facebook not so long ago to about 100 employees, and a couple hours later, there was a young woman who works there sitting outside my little desk, and she wanted to talk to me. I said, okay, and she sat down, and we talked. And she said, "I learned something today. I learned that I need to keep my hand up." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "Well, you're giving this talk, and you said you were going to take two more questions. And I had my hand up with lots of other people, and you took two more questions. And I put my hand down, and I noticed all the women put their hand down, and then you took more questions, only from the men." And I thought to myself, wow, if it's me -- who cares about this, obviously -- giving this talk -- and during this talk, I can't even notice that the men's hands are still raised, and the women's hands are still raised, how good are we as managers of our companies and our organizations at seeing that the men are reaching for opportunities more than women? We've got to get women to sit at the table.
(Applause)
Message number two: make your partner a real partner. I've become convinced that we've made more progress in the workforce than we have in the home. The data shows this very clearly. If a woman and a man work full-time and have a child, the woman does twice the amount of housework the man does, and the woman does three times the amount of childcare the man does. So she's got three jobs or two jobs, and he's got one. Who do you think drops out when someone needs to be home more? The causes of this are really complicated, and I don't have time to go into them. And I don't think Sunday football-watching and general laziness is the cause.
I think the cause is more complicated. I think, as a society, we put more pressure on our boys to succeed than we do on our girls. I know men that stay home and work in the home to support wives with careers, and it's hard. When I go to the Mommy-and-Me stuff and I see the father there, I notice that the other mommies don't play with him. And that's a problem, because we have to make it as important a job, because it's the hardest job in the world to work inside the home, for people of both genders, if we're going to even things out and let women stay in the workforce. (Applause) Studies show that households with equal earning and equal responsibility also have half the divorce rate. And if that wasn't good enough motivation for everyone out there, they also have more -- how shall I say this on this stage? -- they know each other more in the biblical sense as well.
(Cheers)
Message number three: don't leave before you leave. I think there's a really deep irony to the fact that actions women are taking -- and I see this all the time -- with the objective of staying in the workforce actually lead to their eventually leaving. Here's what happens: We're all busy. Everyone's busy. A woman's busy. And she starts thinking about having a child, and from the moment she starts thinking about having a child, she starts thinking about making room for that child. "How am I going to fit this into everything else I'm doing?" And literally from that moment, she doesn't raise her hand anymore, she doesn't look for a promotion, she doesn't take on the new project, she doesn't say, "Me. I want to do that." She starts leaning back. The problem is that -- let's say she got pregnant that day, that day -- nine months of pregnancy, three months of maternity leave, six months to catch your breath -- fast-forward two years, more often -- and as I've seen it -- women start thinking about this way earlier -- when they get engaged, when they get married, when they start thinking about trying to have a child, which can take a long time. One woman came to see me about this, and I kind of looked at her -- she looked a little young. And I said, "So are you and your husband thinking about having a baby?" And she said, "Oh no, I'm not married." She didn't even have a boyfriend. I said, "You're thinking about this just way too early."
But the point is that what happens once you start kind of quietly leaning back? Everyone who's been through this -- and I'm here to tell you, once you have a child at home, your job better be really good to go back, because it's hard to leave that kid at home -- your job needs to be challenging. It needs to be rewarding. You need to feel like you're making a difference. And if two years ago you didn't take a promotion and some guy next to you did, if three years ago you stopped looking for new opportunities, you're going to be bored because you should have kept your foot on the gas pedal. Don't leave before you leave. Stay in. Keep your foot on the gas pedal, until the very day you need to leave to take a break for a child -- and then make your decisions. Don't make decisions too far in advance, particularly ones you're not even conscious you're making.
My generation really, sadly, is not going to change the numbers at the top. They're just not moving. We are not going to get to where 50 percent of the population -- in my generation, there will not be 50 percent of [women] at the top of any industry. But I'm hopeful that future generations can. I think a world that was run where half of our countries and half of our companies were run by women, would be a better world. And it's not just because people would know where the women's bathrooms are, even though that would be very helpful. I think it would be a better world. I have two children. I have a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter. I want my son to have a choice to contribute fully in the workforce or at home, and I want my daughter to have the choice to not just succeed, but to be liked for her accomplishments.
Thank you.
(Applause) |
The moment I say "school," so many memories come back to me. It's like after every exam, when I walk out, the teacher would say, "Hey, come. How did you do?" I would say with a great smile, "I will definitely pass." And I didn't understand why, in one hand they say, "Speak the truth," in the other hand, when you say the truth, they hated you. So it went on like that, and I didn't know where else to find myself. So I remember those nights I used to go to sleep with asking help from [the] Unknown because, for some reason, I couldn't believe what my father and mother hanged in the Puja room as a god, because my friend's family had something else as a god. So I thought, "I guess I'll pray to [the] Unknown and ask help," and started getting help from everywhere, each and every corner of my life at that time. My brothers started giving me a few tips about drawing and painting.
Then, when I was in eighth standard around 13 years old, I started working in a part-time job in one of the signboard artists called Putu. And then school also started supporting me. "Oh, he's bad at studies, but let him send to the drawing competitions." So it was good to survive with that little tool that I found to find my own place in school. And one of those competitions, I just won a small, little transistor Philips radio. And I didn't have the patience to wait until I reached home. So I just switched on in the train, loudly. If you travel in Indian trains, you can see people listening to radio and, you know, even from their mobiles.
So at that time -- and I was 13 -- and I was listening to just radio, and someone happened to sit next to me, like these three people are sitting here. You know, like just adjacent to me. He just started asking, "Where did you buy the radio? How much is it?" I said, "It's a prize from [an] art competition." And he said, "Oh, I teach at a college of arts. I think you should study in a school of art. You just quit school and come there." So, why I'm telling you this, you know, maybe, you know, whoever is sitting next to you can change your whole life -- it's possible. It is that we need we need to be open and fine-tuned. So that's what made me enter [the] college of arts after three attempts and just continue to inquire what I really want to do with art work, or art and finally I'm here in front of you.
When I look back, you know, on what happened between that time and now here -- the last 10/15 years -- I can see that most of the works revolve around three subjects, but it was not intentional. And I just start out with a trace because I was thinking, "What really makes us?" -- you know, it's actually [the] past, what makes a person. So I was thinking, but when you look at the past, the way to understand the past is only by the traces available, because we cannot go back [to] the past. It can be ruins, or it can be music, or it can be painting or drawing or writing, whatever it is. But it is just a kind of trace of that time. And that fascinated me, to explore that territory. So I was working on the line, but instead of working about traces, I started capturing traces.
So here are some of the works I would like to show you. So this is called "Self In Progress." It's just a trace of being in this body. So here, what happened then, you know -- what I really enjoyed the most is that this sculpture is nothing but a trace of myself. It's almost like a 3D photograph. So there is an element of performance, and there is an element of sculpture, and there is an element of feeling one's self, so close to one's self. So it's almost like fossils for the future. And then moved slowly to explore the other possibilities of capturing traces. So this is what I was talking about, while molding, it's such a great experience, because we have freedom of like walking, or moving my hand or, moving around in the space, but the moment this becomes solid, when you cannot move even an inch, because this is plaster of Paris, so the moment you pour it it's like liquid; but after 20 minutes, it's almost like a hard stone.
So this is capturing the trace of a thumbprint because, knowingly or unknowingly, whatever we do, you know, we leave our traces here. So I just thought, "I'm going to capture thumbprint, footprint, or whatever traces we leave as humans." This is the trace of fire, this is the trace of sun. Because when I was capturing traces, you know, this thought comes to me always: is it, only when the object touches the thing and it leaves the trace, or is there other ways to capture it?" So this work is nothing but like -- because of the focal length of the lens, it just shows what is on the other side. So I just put the paper on the focal length, which was an etching print, then I got the portrait of [the] sun from sunlight. This is called "Dawn to Dawn." What I did here, I just put like 10 feet [of] paper then put a coconut rope, and just burnt it. So it took about 24 hours to get this line. So wherever the fire is eating the paper, that's what becomes the work -- detail.
Even though we have traces when we try to understand them, the perception and context play a major role to understand it. So do we really understand what it is, or are we trying to get what we think it is? Then move towards questioning the perception because, even though there are traces, when you try to understand them, you know you play a major role. So like let's say even a simple act. How many of you saw a cow crossing in India while you were coming from Bangalore to Mysore? Can you just raise the hand?
If you just ask an opinion of how, everyone can interpret it. Like, let's say, if a schoolteacher says, she'll simply say, "To get to the other side." Why the cow was crossing the road, you know. The answer can be so different if Potter said it. He would say, "For the greater good." Martin Luther King would say, "I imagine a world where all cows will be free to cross the road, without having their motives called into question." (Laughter) Imagine Moses comes now, and he sees the same cow walking around the street. He would definitely say, "God came down from heaven, and he said unto the cow, 'Thou shalt cross the road.' And cow crossed the road, and there was much rejoicing as a holy cow." (Laughter) Freud would say, "The fact that you're at all concerned reveals your underlying sexual insecurity." (Laughter) If we ask Einstein, he would say, "Whether the cow crossed the road, or the road moved underneath the cow, depends on your frame of reference." (Laughter) Or Buddha -- if he saw the same cow, he would say, "Asking this question denies your own nature [as a] cow."
(Laughter)
So, what we see is just what we think often, and most of the time, we don't see what it is. It just all depends on one's perception. And context, what is really context? You know, I could just show you this little piece of paper. Because I always think meaning doesn't really exist. The meaning of what we create in this world doesn't exist. It's just created by the mind. If you look at this piece of paper, this is the breadth and this is called length. This is how we've been taught in school. But if you tear it in the middle -- now, I didn't touch this breadth, but still, the meaning of this changes. So what we conceive as a meaning is always not there; it's on the other side, even when we say dark, light, good, bad, tall, short -- all meaning it doesn't exist in reality. It's just that being a human, the way we train to perceive the reality creates this meaning.
So this work from this period is mostly like -- you know, this is a work called "Light Makes Dark." It's just captured through from the lamp. So the lamp is not just giving a light, it's also giving a darkness. So this is a work of art, which is just trying to explore that. This is called "Limit Out." This shows how limited our eye or hearing sense or touch -- do we really see? This is an exact negative. It's about six inches deep in the wall, but it just appears like it's coming out of the wall. You know the wall is almost like -- this is the first skin, and this is the second, and there's a third, and each creates a meaning. And we're just pulling the wall off the gallery. Again, "Inward Out." It's a full-figure cast from myself. It's about eight inches deep.
When I was doing that, I always wondered since I've worked with creators -- and now you know, I've moved to questioning the perception -- whenever I see the bird flying in the sky, it just makes me feel like: is there anything behind, are there any traces up there, which as a human, we don't see them? Is there any way to capture the thought into visual art? I couldn't find it. But a solution arrived after being quiet and not working for about six, seven months, in the restroom, when I was changing the air freshener that goes from solid substance to vapor. It's called Odonil. This is the work I made out of that material. The process to get to make the sculpture was interesting, because I wrote to Balsara, who produces that air freshener called Odonil, saying, "Dear Sir, I am an artist. This is my catalogue. Will you help me to make this sculpture?" They never wrote back to me. Then I thought, "I will go to the Small Scale Industries Facilitating Unit and ask help." So I told them, "I'd like to start an air freshener company." They said, "Of course. This is the fee for the project report, and we will give you all the details," and they gave. Finally, I went back to them and said, "It's not for starting the company, it's just to make my own work. Please come for the show." And they did. And this work is in the Devi Art Foundation in Delhi.
In India, nobody really talks about works of art; they always talk about the appreciation of art. You buy this for 3,000 rupees, it'll become 30,000 in two months. This is the craft that was going on, but there are a few collectors who also collect art which can depreciate. And this was collected by Anapum -- which is like, finally in the end, he will not have anything, because it will evaporate. So this is after a few weeks, this is after a few months. It's just all about questioning the preconceptions. So if someone says, "Oh, I see the portrait," it may not be the portrait after a few months. And if they say it's solid, it will not be solid, it will evaporate. And if they say they don't get it, that's also not true, because it's in the air. It's in the same gallery or in the same museum. So they inhaled it, but they are not aware of it.
While I was doing that work, my mom and my dad, they were looking at it and they said, "Why do you deal with negative subjects all the time?" And I was like, "What do you mean?" "Light makes dark and now evaporating self. Don't you think it remained something about death," they said. "Of course not. For me," I'm thinking, "this is tucked in some small solid, but the moment it evaporates, it's merged with the whole." But she said, "No. Still, I don't like it. Can you make something from nothing as a sculptor?" I said, "No, mom. It can't be. Because we can create a sculpture by gathering dust together, or we can break the sculpture and get the dust, but there is nowhere that we can bring dust into the universe."
So, I did this work for her. It's called "Emerging Angel." This is the first day -- it just gives the appearance that one is becoming the other. So, the same sculpture after a few days. This is after 15/20 days. Through that small little slit between the glass box and the wood, the air goes underneath the sculpture and creates the other one. This gave me a greater faith. That evaporating sculpture gave me a greater faith that maybe there is many more possibilities to capture [the] invisible.
So what you see now is called "Shadow Foreshadow." And what I'd like to tell you is we don't see shadow, and we don't see light too; we see the source of the light. We see where it's bouncing, but we don't see [them] as they exist. You know, that's why the night sky, we see the sky as dark, but it's filled with light all the time. When it's bounced on the moon, we see it. The same thing in the darkroom. The little dust particle will again, reflect the light, and we realize the existence of light. So we don't see dark, we don't see light, we don't see gravity, we don't see electricity. So, I just started doing this work to inquire further about how to sculpt the space between this object and there. Because, as a visual artist, if I'm seeing this and I'm seeing that -- but how to sculpt this, you know? If we sculpt this, this has two reference points. The skin of this is also representing this. And skin at the other end also represents the floor. I did this as an experiment of casting the shadow. So this is a corrugated box and its shadow. Then the second one -- the moment you bring any invisible into the visible world it will have all the characteristics of the visible existence. So that produced a shadow. Then I thought, okay, let me sculpt that. Then, again, that becomes an object. Again, throwing light, then the third one. So what you see is nothing but shadow of a shadow of a shadow. And then again, at that point, there is no shadow. I thought, "Oh, good. Work is finished." You can see the detail.
This is called "Gravity." It's called "Breath." It's just two holes on the gallery wall. It's a false wall, which contains like 110 cubic feet. So that hole actually makes the air come out and go in. So where it's happening, we can see, but what is happening will remain invisible only. This is from the show called "Invisible," at Talwar Gallery. This is called "Kaayam." Detail.
And what I'd like to tell you, our senses are so limited -- we cannot hear everything, we cannot see everything. We don't feel, "I am touching the air," but if the breeze is a little more faster, then I can feel it. So all of our construction of reality is through these limited senses. So my recourse was like, is there any way to use all this as just a symbol or a sign? And to really get to the point, we should move beyond, you know, go to the other side of the wall, like in logic, like are invisible. Because when we see someone walks, we see the footprint. But if we're just cutting that footprint from the whole thing and trying to analyze it, you will miss the point because the actual journey happens between those footprints, and the footprints are nothing but passing time.
Thank you.
(Applause) |
We are going to take a quick voyage over the cognitive history of the 20th century, because during that century, our minds have altered dramatically. As you all know, the cars that people drove in 1900 have altered because the roads are better and because of technology. And our minds have altered, too. We've gone from people who confronted a concrete world and analyzed that world primarily in terms of how much it would benefit them to people who confront a very complex world, and it's a world where we've had to develop new mental habits, new habits of mind. And these include things like clothing that concrete world with classification, introducing abstractions that we try to make logically consistent, and also taking the hypothetical seriously, that is, wondering about what might have been rather than what is.
Now, this dramatic change was drawn to my attention through massive I.Q. gains over time, and these have been truly massive. That is, we don't just get a few more questions right on I.Q. tests. We get far more questions right on I.Q. tests than each succeeding generation back to the time that they were invented. Indeed, if you score the people a century ago against modern norms, they would have an average I.Q. of 70. If you score us against their norms, we would have an average I.Q. of 130. Now this has raised all sorts of questions. Were our immediate ancestors on the verge of mental retardation? Because 70 is normally the score for mental retardation. Or are we on the verge of all being gifted? Because 130 is the cutting line for giftedness.
Now I'm going to try and argue for a third alternative that's much more illuminating than either of those, and to put this into perspective, let's imagine that a Martian came down to Earth and found a ruined civilization. And this Martian was an archaeologist, and they found scores, target scores, that people had used for shooting. And first they looked at 1865, and they found that in a minute, people had only put one bullet in the bullseye. And then they found, in 1898, that they'd put about five bullets in the bullseye in a minute. And then about 1918 they put a hundred bullets in the bullseye. And initially, that archaeologist would be baffled. They would say, look, these tests were designed to find out how much people were steady of hand, how keen their eyesight was, whether they had control of their weapon. How could these performances have escalated to this enormous degree? Well we now know, of course, the answer. If that Martian looked at battlefields, they would find that people had only muskets at the time of the Civil War and that they had repeating rifles at the time of the Spanish-American War, and then they had machine guns by the time of World War I. And, in other words, it was the equipment that was in the hands of the average soldier that was responsible, not greater keenness of eye or steadiness of hand.
Now what we have to imagine is the mental artillery that we have picked up over those hundred years, and I think again that another thinker will help us here, and that's Luria. Luria looked at people just before they entered the scientific age, and he found that these people were resistant to classifying the concrete world. They wanted to break it up into little bits that they could use. He found that they were resistant to deducing the hypothetical, to speculating about what might be, and he found finally that they didn't deal well with abstractions or using logic on those abstractions.
Now let me give you a sample of some of his interviews. He talked to the head man of a person in rural Russia. They'd only had, as people had in 1900, about four years of schooling. And he asked that particular person, what do crows and fish have in common? And the fellow said, "Absolutely nothing. You know, I can eat a fish. I can't eat a crow. A crow can peck at a fish. A fish can't do anything to a crow." And Luria said, "But aren't they both animals?" And he said, "Of course not. One's a fish. The other is a bird." And he was interested, effectively, in what he could do with those concrete objects.
And then Luria went to another person, and he said to them, "There are no camels in Germany. Hamburg is a city in Germany. Are there camels in Hamburg?" And the fellow said, "Well, if it's large enough, there ought to be camels there." And Luria said, "But what do my words imply?" And he said, "Well, maybe it's a small village, and there's no room for camels." In other words, he was unwilling to treat this as anything but a concrete problem, and he was used to camels being in villages, and he was quite unable to use the hypothetical, to ask himself what if there were no camels in Germany.
A third interview was conducted with someone about the North Pole. And Luria said, "At the North Pole, there is always snow. Wherever there is always snow, the bears are white. What color are the bears at the North Pole?" And the response was, "Such a thing is to be settled by testimony. If a wise person came from the North Pole and told me the bears were white, I might believe him, but every bear that I have seen is a brown bear." Now you see again, this person has rejected going beyond the concrete world and analyzing it through everyday experience, and it was important to that person what color bears were -- that is, they had to hunt bears. They weren't willing to engage in this. One of them said to Luria, "How can we solve things that aren't real problems? None of these problems are real. How can we address them?"
Now, these three categories -- classification, using logic on abstractions, taking the hypothetical seriously -- how much difference do they make in the real world beyond the testing room? And let me give you a few illustrations.
First, almost all of us today get a high school diploma. That is, we've gone from four to eight years of education to 12 years of formal education, and 52 percent of Americans have actually experienced some type of tertiary education. Now, not only do we have much more education, and much of that education is scientific, and you can't do science without classifying the world. You can't do science without proposing hypotheses. You can't do science without making it logically consistent. And even down in grade school, things have changed. In 1910, they looked at the examinations that the state of Ohio gave to 14-year-olds, and they found that they were all for socially valued concrete information. They were things like, what are the capitals of the 44 or 45 states that existed at that time? When they looked at the exams that the state of Ohio gave in 1990, they were all about abstractions. They were things like, why is the largest city of a state rarely the capital? And you were supposed to think, well, the state legislature was rural-controlled, and they hated the big city, so rather than putting the capital in a big city, they put it in a county seat. They put it in Albany rather than New York. They put it in Harrisburg rather than Philadelphia. And so forth. So the tenor of education has changed. We are educating people to take the hypothetical seriously, to use abstractions, and to link them logically.
What about employment? Well, in 1900, three percent of Americans practiced professions that were cognitively demanding. Only three percent were lawyers or doctors or teachers. Today, 35 percent of Americans practice cognitively demanding professions, not only to the professions proper like lawyer or doctor or scientist or lecturer, but many, many sub-professions having to do with being a technician, a computer programmer. A whole range of professions now make cognitive demands. And we can only meet the terms of employment in the modern world by being cognitively far more flexible. And it's not just that we have many more people in cognitively demanding professions. The professions have been upgraded. Compare the doctor in 1900, who really had only a few tricks up his sleeve, with the modern general practitioner or specialist, with years of scientific training. Compare the banker in 1900, who really just needed a good accountant and to know who was trustworthy in the local community for paying back their mortgage. Well, the merchant bankers who brought the world to their knees may have been morally remiss, but they were cognitively very agile. They went far beyond that 1900 banker. They had to look at computer projections for the housing market. They had to get complicated CDO-squared in order to bundle debt together and make debt look as if it were actually a profitable asset. They had to prepare a case to get rating agencies to give it a AAA, though in many cases, they had virtually bribed the rating agencies. And they also, of course, had to get people to accept these so-called assets and pay money for them even though they were highly vulnerable. Or take a farmer today. I take the farm manager of today as very different from the farmer of 1900. So it hasn't just been the spread of cognitively demanding professions. It's also been the upgrading of tasks like lawyer and doctor and what have you that have made demands on our cognitive faculties.
But I've talked about education and employment. Some of the habits of mind that we have developed over the 20th century have paid off in unexpected areas. I'm primarily a moral philosopher. I merely have a holiday in psychology, and what interests me in general is moral debate. Now over the last century, in developed nations like America, moral debate has escalated because we take the hypothetical seriously, and we also take universals seriously and look for logical connections. When I came home in 1955 from university at the time of Martin Luther King, a lot of people came home at that time and started having arguments with their parents and grandparents. My father was born in 1885, and he was mildly racially biased. As an Irishman, he hated the English so much he didn't have much emotion for anyone else. (Laughter) But he did have a sense that black people were inferior. And when we said to our parents and grandparents, "How would you feel if tomorrow morning you woke up black?" they said that is the dumbest thing you've ever said. Who have you ever known who woke up in the morning -- (Laughter) -- that turned black?
In other words, they were fixed in the concrete mores and attitudes they had inherited. They would not take the hypothetical seriously, and without the hypothetical, it's very difficult to get moral argument off the ground. You have to say, imagine you were in Iran, and imagine that your relatives all suffered from collateral damage even though they had done no wrong. How would you feel about that? And if someone of the older generation says, well, our government takes care of us, and it's up to their government to take care of them, they're just not willing to take the hypothetical seriously. Or take an Islamic father whose daughter has been raped, and he feels he's honor-bound to kill her. Well, he's treating his mores as if they were sticks and stones and rocks that he had inherited, and they're unmovable in any way by logic. They're just inherited mores. Today we would say something like, well, imagine you were knocked unconscious and sodomized. Would you deserve to be killed? And he would say, well that's not in the Koran. That's not one of the principles I've got. Well you, today, universalize your principles. You state them as abstractions and you use logic on them. If you have a principle such as, people shouldn't suffer unless they're guilty of something, then to exclude black people you've got to make exceptions, don't you? You have to say, well, blackness of skin, you couldn't suffer just for that. It must be that blacks are somehow tainted. And then we can bring empirical evidence to bear, can't we, and say, well how can you consider all blacks tainted when St. Augustine was black and Thomas Sowell is black. And you can get moral argument off the ground, then, because you're not treating moral principles as concrete entities. You're treating them as universals, to be rendered consistent by logic.
Now how did all of this arise out of I.Q. tests? That's what initially got me going on cognitive history. If you look at the I.Q. test, you find the gains have been greatest in certain areas. The similarities subtest of the Wechsler is about classification, and we have made enormous gains on that classification subtest. There are other parts of the I.Q. test battery that are about using logic on abstractions. Some of you may have taken Raven's Progressive Matrices, and it's all about analogies. And in 1900, people could do simple analogies. That is, if you said to them, cats are like wildcats. What are dogs like? They would say wolves. But by 1960, people could attack Raven's on a much more sophisticated level. If you said, we've got two squares followed by a triangle, what follows two circles? They could say a semicircle. Just as a triangle is half of a square, a semicircle is half of a circle. By 2010, college graduates, if you said two circles followed by a semicircle, two sixteens followed by what, they would say eight, because eight is half of 16. That is, they had moved so far from the concrete world that they could even ignore the appearance of the symbols that were involved in the question.
Now, I should say one thing that's very disheartening. We haven't made progress on all fronts. One of the ways in which we would like to deal with the sophistication of the modern world is through politics, and sadly you can have humane moral principles, you can classify, you can use logic on abstractions, and if you're ignorant of history and of other countries, you can't do politics. We've noticed, in a trend among young Americans, that they read less history and less literature and less material about foreign lands, and they're essentially ahistorical. They live in the bubble of the present. They don't know the Korean War from the war in Vietnam. They don't know who was an ally of America in World War II. Think how different America would be if every American knew that this is the fifth time Western armies have gone to Afghanistan to put its house in order, and if they had some idea of exactly what had happened on those four previous occasions. (Laughter) And that is, they had barely left, and there wasn't a trace in the sand. Or imagine how different things would be if most Americans knew that we had been lied into four of our last six wars. You know, the Spanish didn't sink the battleship Maine, the Lusitania was not an innocent vessel but was loaded with munitions, the North Vietnamese did not attack the Seventh Fleet, and, of course, Saddam Hussein hated al Qaeda and had nothing to do with it, and yet the administration convinced 45 percent of the people that they were brothers in arms, when he would hang one from the nearest lamppost.
But I don't want to end on a pessimistic note. The 20th century has shown enormous cognitive reserves in ordinary people that we have now realized, and the aristocracy was convinced that the average person couldn't make it, that they could never share their mindset or their cognitive abilities. Lord Curzon once said he saw people bathing in the North Sea, and he said, "Why did no one tell me what white bodies the lower orders have?" As if they were a reptile. Well, Dickens was right and he was wrong. [Correction: Rudyard Kipling] [Kipling] said, "The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters underneath the skin."
(Applause) |
So I'll be talking about the success of my campus, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, UMBC, in educating students of all types, across the arts and humanities and the science and engineering areas. What makes our story especially important is that we have learned so much from a group of students who are typically not at the top of the academic ladder -- students of color, students underrepresented in selected areas. And what makes the story especially unique is that we have learned how to help African-American students, Latino students, students from low-income backgrounds, to become some of the best in the world in science and engineering.
And so I begin with a story about my childhood. We all are products of our childhood experiences. It's hard for me to believe that it's been 50 years since I had the experience of being a ninth grade kid in Birmingham, Alabama, a kid who loved getting A's, a kid who loved math, who loved to read, a kid who would say to the teacher -- when the teacher said, "Here are 10 problems," to the class, this little fat kid would say, "Give us 10 more." And the whole class would say, "Shut up, Freeman." And there was a designated kicker every day. And so I was always asking this question: "Well how could we get more kids to really love to learn?"
And amazingly, one week in church, when I really didn't want to be there and I was in the back of the room being placated by doing math problems, I heard this man say this: "If we can get the children to participate in this peaceful demonstration here in Birmingham, we can show America that even children know the difference between right and wrong and that children really do want to get the best possible education." And I looked up and said, "Who is that man?" And they said his name was Dr. Martin Luther King. And I said to my parents, "I've got to go. I want to go. I want to be a part of this." And they said, "Absolutely not."
(Laughter)
And we had a rough go of it. And at that time, quite frankly, you really did not talk back to your parents. And somehow I said, "You know, you guys are hypocrites. You make me go to this. You make me listen. The man wants me to go, and now you say no." And they thought about it all night. And they came into my room the next morning. They had not slept. They had been literally crying and praying and thinking, "Will we let our 12-year-old participate in this march and probably have to go to jail?" And they decided to do it. And when they came in to tell me, I was at first elated. And then all of a sudden I began thinking about the dogs and the fire hoses, and I got really scared, I really did. And one of the points I make to people all the time is that sometimes when people do things that are courageous, it doesn't really mean that they're that courageous. It simply means that they believe it's important to do it.
I wanted a better education. I did not want to have to have hand-me-down books. I wanted to know that the school I attended not only had good teachers, but the resources we needed. And as a result of that experience, in the middle of the week, while I was there in jail, Dr. King came and said with our parents, "What you children do this day will have an impact on children who have not been born."
I recently realized that two-thirds of Americans today had not been born at the time of 1963. And so for them, when they hear about the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, in many ways, if they see it on TV, it's like our looking at the 1863 "Lincoln" movie: It's history. And the real question is, what lessons did we learn? Well amazingly, the most important for me was this: That children can be empowered to take ownership of their education. They can be taught to be passionate about wanting to learn and to love the idea of asking questions.
And so it is especially significant that the university I now lead, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, UMBC, was founded the very year I went to jail with Dr. King, in 1963. And what made that institutional founding especially important is that Maryland is the South, as you know, and, quite frankly, it was the first university in our state founded at a time when students of all races could go there. And so we had black and white students and others who began to attend. And it has been for 50 years an experiment. The experiment is this: Is it possible to have institutions in our country, universities, where people from all backgrounds can come and learn and learn to work together and learn to become leaders and to support each other in that experience?
Now what is especially important about that experience for me is this: We found that we could do a lot in the arts and humanities and social sciences. And so we began to work on that, for years in the '60s. And we produced a number of people in law, all the way to the humanities. We produced great artists. Beckett is our muse. A lot of our students get into theater. It's great work. The problem that we faced was the same problem America continues to face -- that students in the sciences and engineering, black students were not succeeding. But when I looked at the data, what I found was that, quite frankly, students in general, large numbers were not making it. And as a result of that, we decided to do something that would help, first of all, the group at the bottom, African-American students, and then Hispanic students.
And Robert and Jane Meyerhoff, philanthropists, said, "We'd like to help." Robert Meyerhoff said, "Why is it that everything I see on TV about black boys, if it's not about basketball, is not positive? I'd like to make a difference, to do something that's positive." We married those ideas, and we created this Meyerhoff Scholars program. And what is significant about the program is that we learned a number of things. And the question is this: How is it that now we lead the country in producing African-Americans who go on to complete Ph.D.'s in science and engineering and M.D./Ph.D.'s? That's a big deal. Give me a hand for that. That's a big deal. That's a big deal. It really is.
(Applause)
You see, most people don't realize that it's not just minorities who don't do well in science and engineering. Quite frankly, you're talking about Americans. If you don't know it, while 20 percent of blacks and Hispanics who begin with a major in science and engineering will actually graduate in science and engineering, only 32 percent of whites who begin with majors in those areas actually succeed and graduate in those areas, and only 42 percent of Asian-Americans.
And so, the real question is, what is the challenge? Well a part of it, of course, is K-12. We need to strengthen K-12. But the other part has to do with the culture of science and engineering on our campuses. Whether you know it or not, large numbers of students with high SAT's and large numbers of A.P. credits who go to the most prestigious universities in our country begin in pre-med or pre-engineering and engineering, and they end up changing their majors. And the number one reason, we find, quite frankly, is they did not do well in first year science courses. In fact, we call first year science and engineering, typically around America, weed-out courses or barrier courses.
How many of you in this audience know somebody who started off in pre-med or engineering and changed their major within a year or two? It's an American challenge. Half of you in the room. I know. I know. I know. And what is interesting about that is that so many students are smart and can do it. We need to find ways of making it happen.
So what are the four things we did to help minority students that now are helping students in general? Number one: high expectations. It takes an understanding of the academic preparation of students -- their grades, the rigor of the course work, their test-taking skills, their attitude, the fire in their belly, the passion for the work, to make it. And so doing things to help students prepare to be in that position, very important. But equally important, it takes an understanding that it's hard work that makes the difference. I don't care how smart you are or how smart you think you are. Smart simply means you're ready to learn. You're excited about learning and you want to ask good questions.
I. I. Rabi, a Nobel laureate, said that when he was growing up in New York, all of his friends' parents would ask them "What did you learn in school?" at the end of a day. And he said, in contrast, his Jewish mother would say, "Izzy, did you ask a good question today?" And so high expectations have to do with curiosity and encouraging young people to be curious. And as a result of those high expectations, we began to find students we wanted to work with to see what could we do to help them, not simply to survive in science and engineering, but to become the very best, to excel.
Interestingly enough, an example: One young man who earned a C in the first course and wanted to go on to med school, we said, "We need to have you retake the course, because you need a strong foundation if you're going to move to the next level." Every foundation makes the difference in the next level. He retook the course. That young man went on to graduate from UMBC, to become the first black to get the M.D./Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He now works at Harvard. Nice story. Give him a hand for that too.
(Applause)
Secondly, it's not about test scores only. Test scores are important, but they're not the most important thing. One young woman had great grades, but test scores were not as high. But she had a factor that was very important. She never missed a day of school, K-12. There was fire in that belly. That young woman went on, and she is today with an M.D./Ph.D. from Hopkins. She's on the faculty, tenure track in psychiatry, Ph.D. in neuroscience. She and her adviser have a patent on a second use of Viagra for diabetes patients. Big hand for her. Big hand for her. (Applause) And so high expectations, very important.
Secondly, the idea of building community among the students. You all know that so often in science and engineering we tend to think cutthroat. Students are not taught to work in groups. And that's what we work to do with that group to get them to understand each other, to build trust among them, to support each other, to learn how to ask good questions, but also to learn how to explain concepts with clarity. As you know, it's one thing to earn an A yourself, it's another thing to help someone else do well. And so to feel that sense of responsibility makes all the difference in the world. So building community among those students, very important.
Third, the idea of, it takes researchers to produce researchers. Whether you're talking about artists producing artists or you're talking about people getting into the social sciences, whatever the discipline -- and especially in science and engineering, as in art, for example -- you need scientists to pull the students into the work. And so our students are working in labs regularly.
And one great example that you'll appreciate: During a snowstorm in Baltimore several years ago, the guy on our campus with this Howard Hughes Medical Institute grant literally came back to work in his lab after several days, and all these students had refused to leave the lab. They had food they had packed out. They were in the lab working, and they saw the work, not as schoolwork, but as their lives. They knew they were working on AIDS research. They were looking at this amazing protein design. And what was interesting was each one of them focused on that work. And he said, "It doesn't get any better than that."
And then finally, if you've got the community and you've got the high expectations and you've got researchers producing researchers, you have to have people who are willing as faculty to get involved with those students, even in the classroom. I'll never forget a faculty member calling the staff and saying, "I've got this young man in class, a young black guy, and he seems like he's just not excited about the work. He's not taking notes. We need to talk to him." What was significant was that the faculty member was observing every student to understand who was really involved and who was not and was saying, "Let me see how I can work with them. Let me get the staff to help me out." It was that connecting. That young man today is actually a faculty member M.D./Ph.D. in neuroengineering at Duke. Give him a big hand for that.
(Applause)
And so the significance is that we have now developed this model that is helping us, not only finally with evaluation, assessing what works. And what we learned was that we needed to think about redesigning courses. And so we redesigned chemistry, we redesigned physics. But now we are looking at redesigning the humanities and social sciences. Because so many students are bored in class. Do you know that? Many students, K-12 and in universities, don't want to just sit there and listen to somebody talk. They need to be engaged.
And so we have done -- if you look at our website at the Chemistry Discovery Center, you'll see people coming from all over the country to look at how we are redesigning courses, having an emphasis on collaboration, use of technology, using problems out of our biotech companies on our campus, and not giving students the theories, but having them struggle with those theories. And it's working so well that throughout our university system in Maryland, more and more courses are being redesigned.
It's called academic innovation.
And what does all of that mean? It means that now, not just in science and engineering, we now have programs in the arts, in the humanities, in the social sciences, in teacher education, even particularly for women in I.T. If you don't know it, there's been a 79-percent decline in the number of women majoring in computer science just since 2000. And what I'm saying is that what will make the difference will be building community among students, telling young women, young minority students and students in general, you can do this work. And most important, giving them a chance to build that community with faculty pulling them into the work and our assessing what works and what does not work. Most important, if a student has a sense of self, it is amazing how the dreams and the values can make all the difference in the world.
When I was a 12-year-old child in the jail in Birmingham, I kept thinking, "I wonder what my future could be." I had no idea that it was possible for this little black boy in Birmingham to one day be president of a university that has students from 150 countries, where students are not there just to survive, where they love learning, where they enjoy being the best, where they will one day change the world.
Aristotle said, "Excellence is never an accident. It is the result of high intention, sincere effort and intelligent execution. It represents the wisest option among many alternatives." And then he said something that gives me goosebumps. He said, "Choice, not chance, determines your destiny." Choice, not chance, determines your destiny, dreams and values.
Thank you all very much.
(Applause) |
I have, like, a thing about sleeping. I don't sleep that much, and I've come to this thing about, like, not sleeping much as being a great virtue, after years of kind of battling it as being a terrible detriment, or something. And now I really like sort of sitting up, you know. But for years I've been sitting up and I think that, like, my creativity is greatly motivated by this kind of insomnia. I lie awake. I think thoughts. I walk aimlessly. Sometimes I used to walk more at night. I walk during the day and I follow people who I think look interesting. (Laughter)
And sometimes -- actually, once it was on Page Six in the Post, that I was cruising this guy, like, sort of, whatever, but I was actually just following because he had these really great shoes on. And so I was following this guy. And I took a picture of his shoes, and we thanked each other and just went on our way. But I do that all the time. As a matter of fact, I think a lot of my design ideas come from mistakes and tricks of the eye. Because I feel like, you know, there are so many images out there, so many clothes out there. And the only ones that look interesting to me are the ones that look slightly mistaken, of course, or very, very surprising. And often, I'm driving in a taxi and I see a hole in a shirt, or something that looks very interesting or pretty or functional in some way that I'd never seen happen before. And so I'd make the car stop, and I'd get out of the car and walk, and see that in fact there wasn't a hole, but it was a trick of my eye, it was a shadow, you know. Or if there was a hole I'd think like, oh damn, there was actually someone thought of that thought already. Someone made that mistake already so I can't do it anymore.
I don't know where inspiration comes from. It does not come for me from research. I don't get necessarily inspired by research. As a matter of fact, one of the most fun things I've ever, ever done in my whole life, was this Christmas season at the Guggenheim in New York. I read "Peter and the Wolf" with this beautiful band from Juilliard. And I did like, you know, the narrator, and I read it. And I saw this really smart critic who I love. This woman, Joan Acocella, who's a friend of mine, and she came backstage and she said, oh, you know, Isaac, did you know that, talking about Stalinism and talking about, you know, like the '30s in Russia. And I said, how do I know about Stalinism? I know about a wolf and a bird and, you know, he ate the bird, and then in the end you hear, you know, you hear the bird squeaking, or something, you know?
So I don't really know that. I don't really -- actually I do my own kind of research, you know. If I'm commissioned to do the costumes for an 18th-century opera, or something like that, I will do a lot of research, because it's interesting, not because it's what I'm supposed to do. I'm very, very, very inspired by movies. The color of movies and the way light makes the colors, light from behind the projection, or light from the projection, makes the colors look so impossible. And anyway, roll this little clip, I'll just show you. I sit up at night and I watch movies and I watch women in movies a lot. And I think about, you know, their roles, and about how you have to, like, watch what your daughters look at. Because I look at the way women are portrayed all the time. Whether they're kind of glorified in this way, or whether they're kind of, you know, ironically glorified, or whether they're, you know, sort of denigrated, or ironically denigrated.
I go back to color all the time. Color is something that motivates me a lot. It's rarely color that I find in nature, although, you know, juxtaposed next to artificial color, natural color is so beautiful. So that's what I do. I study color a lot. But for the most part, I think, like, how can I ever make anything that is as beautiful as that image of Natalie Wood? How can I ever make anything as beautiful as Greta Garbo? I mean, that's just not possible, you know. And so that's what makes me lie awake at night, I guess, you know. I want to show you -- I'm also like a big -- I go to astrologers and tarot card readers often, and that's another thing that motivates me a lot. People say, oh, do that. An astrologer tells me to do something. So I do it. (Laughter)
When I was about 21, an astrologer told me that I was going to meet the man of my dreams, and that his name was going to be Eric, right? So, you know, for years I would go to bars and, sort of, anyone I met whose name was Eric I was humping immediately, or something. (Laughter) And there were times when I was actually so desperate I would just, you know, walk into a room and just go like, "Eric!" And anybody who would turn around I would, sort of, make a beeline for. (Laughter) And I had this really interesting tarot reading a long time ago. The last card he pulled, which was representing my destiny was this guy on like a straw boater with a cane and you know, sort of spats and this, you know, a minstrel singer, right? I want to show you this clip because I do this kind of crazy thing where I do a cabaret act. So actually, check this out. Very embarrassing. (Video): Thank you. We can do anything you ask.
The name of the show is based on this story that I have to tell you about my mother. It's sort of an excerpt from a quote of hers. I was dating this guy, right? And this has to do with being happy, I swear. I was dating this guy and it was going on for about a year, right. And we were getting serious, so we decided to invite them all to dinner, our parents. And we, you know, sort of introduced them to each other. My mother was, sort of, very sensitive to his mother, who it seemed was a little bit skeptical about the whole alternative lifestyle thing. You know, homosexuality, right? So my mother was a little offended. She turned to her and she said, "Are you kidding? They have the greatest life together. They eat out, they see shows." They eat out, they see shows. (Laughter) That's the name of the show, they eat out, they -- that's on my tombstone when I die. "He ate out, he saw shows," right?
So in editing these clips, I didn't have the audacity to edit a clip of me singing at Joe's Pub. So you'll have to, like, go check it out and come see me or something. Because it's mortifying, and yet it feels ... I don't know how to put this. I feel as little comfort as possible is a good thing, you know. And at least, you know, in my case, because if I just do one thing all the time, I don't know, I get very, very bored. I bore very easily. And you know, I don't say that I do everything well, I just say that I do a lot of things, that's all. And I kind of try not to look back, you know. Except, I guess, that's what staying up every night is about. Like, looking back and thinking, what a fool you made of yourself, you know. But I guess that's okay. Right? Because if you do many things you get to feel lousy about everything, and not just one, you know. You don't master feeling lousy about one thing. Yeah, exactly.
I will show you this next thing, speaking of costumes for operas. I do work with different choreographers. I work with Twyla Tharp a lot, and I work with Mark Morris a lot, who is one of my best friends. And I designed three operas with him, and the most recent one, "King Arthur." I'd been very ingrained in the dance world since I was a teenager. I went to performing arts high school, where I was an actor. And many of my friends were ballet dancers. Again, I don't know where inspiration comes from. I don't know where it comes from. I started making puppets when I was a kid. Maybe that's where the whole inspiration thing started from, puppets, right. And then performing arts high school. There I was in high school, meeting dancers and acting.
And somehow, from there, I got interested in design. I went to Parsons School of Design and then I began my career as a designer. I don't really think of myself as a designer, I don't really think of myself necessarily as a fashion designer. And frankly, I don't really know what to call myself. I think of myself as a ... I don't know what I think of myself as. It's just that. (Laughter) But I must say, this whole thing about being slightly bored all the time, that is what -- I think that is a very important thing for a fashion designer. You always have to be slightly bored with everything. And if you're not, you have to pretend to be slightly bored with everything. (Laughter)
But I am really a little bored with everything. I always say to my partner, Marisa Gardini, who books everything -- she books everything and she makes everything happen. And she makes all the deals. And I always tell her that I find myself with a lot of time on the computer bridge program. Too much time on computer bridge, which is, you know, like that's so ... somehow, like, about ten years ago I thought that the most unboring place in the world would be like a T.V. studio, like for a day show. Some kind of day talk show. Because it's all of these things that I love all kind of in one place. And if you ever get bored you can look at another thing, and do another thing and talk about it, right?
And so I had this T.V. show. And that was a very, very, very big part of my process. Actually, could you roll the clip, please? This is one of my favorite clips of Rosie.
(Video) Isaac Mizrahi: We're back on the set. Hi there.
Rosie O'Donnell: Hello, Ben.
IM: Look how cute she looks with this, just a slick back.
Man: Her grandmother says, "Delish!"
IM: Ah, wow, delish. All right. So now where should I position myself? I want to stay out of the way. I don't want to be -- okay. Here we go. Do you get nervous, Ashleigh?
Ashleigh: Doing what? ROD: Cutting hair.
A: Cutting hair? Never, never. I don't think there was ever a day where I cut hair I was nervous. IM: You look so cute already, by the way. ROD: You like it? All right. IM: Do you have a problem with looking cute? You want to look cute.
ROD: Of course I want to look cute. IM: Just checking, because some people want to look, you know, aggressively ugly.
ROD: No, not me, no.
IM: You read about all these people who have a lot of money and they have kids and the kids always end up somehow, like, really messed up, you know what I mean? And there's got to be some way to do that, Rosie. Because just because if you're fabulously rich, and fabulously famous, does that mean you shouldn't have kids, because you know they're going to end up getting messed up?
ROD: No, but it means that your priority has to be their well-being first, I think. But you have to make the decision for yourself. My kids are seven, who the hell knows. They're going to be like 14 and in rehab. And they're going to be playing this clip: "I'm such a good mother." My God, this is the shortest I've ever had.
IM: It looks good, yeah?
A: I was going to ask you, has your hair ever been --
ROD: No! It's all right -- go crazy.
IM: I feel like it needs to be a little closer down here.
A: Oh no, we're just staging,
ROD: We're just staging it.
IM: Are you freaking out? You look so cute.
ROD: No, I love it. It's the new me.
IM: Oh, it's so fabulous!
ROD: Flock of Rosie. Wooo!
IM: So by the way. Of all the most unboring things in the world, right. I mean, like making someone who's already cute look terrible like that. That is not boring. That is nothing if it's not boring. Actually, I read this great quote the other day, which was, "Style makes you feel great because it takes your mind off the fact that you're going to die." Right? And then I realized, that was on my website, and then it said, like, you know, the quote was attributed to me and I thought, oh, I said something, you know, in an interview. I forgot that I said that. But it's really true.
I want to show you this last clip because it's going to be my last goodbye. I'll tell you that I cook a lot also. I love to cook. And I often look at things as though they're food. Like I say, oh, you know, would you serve a rotten chicken? Then how could you serve, you know, a beat up old dress or something. How could you show a beat up old dress? I always relate things to kitchen-ry. And so I think that's what it all boils down to. Everything boils down to that.
So check this out. This is what I've been doing because I think it's the most fun thing in the world. It's, like, this website. It's got a lot of different things on it. It's a polymathematical website. We actually shoot segments like T.V. show segments. And it's kind of my favorite thing in the world. And it just began like in the beginning of February. So who knows? And again, I don't say it's good, I just think it's not boring, right? And here is the last bit.
(Video) IM: I have to tell you, I make buttermilk pancakes or buttermilk waffles all the time.
Chef: Do you?
IM: Yeah, but I can never find buttermilk, ever.
Chef: Oh.
IM: You can't find buttermilk at Citarella; you can't find buttermilk.
Chef: You can't? IM: It's always low-fat buttermilk.
Chef: No, but that's all it is. IM: Is that all it is?
Chef: Oh, you don't know? Let me tell you something. Let me tell you something interesting.
IM: You know what? Stop laughing. It's not funny. Just because I don't know that whole -- that there's no such thing as whole buttermilk. Sorry, what?
Chef: Well, here's the deal. Let me tell you the deal. In the old days when they used to make butter, you know how you make butter?
IM: Churns?
Chef: For cream?
IM: Yeah, exactly.
Chef: So you take heavy, high-fat milk, which is cream, and you churn it until it separates into these curds and water. The liquid is actually that clear liquid. If you've ever overbeaten your whipped cream, it's actually buttermilk. And that's what it was in the early days. And that's what people used for baking and all sorts of things. Now, the buttermilk that you get is actually low-fat or skim milk.
IM: Excuse me, I didn't know. All right?
Chef: The reason he thought that is because buttermilk is so wonderfully thick and delicious.
IM: Yeah, it is, exactly. So who would think that it was low-fat?
Well, that's it. Thank you very much. Happy TED. It's so wonderful here. I love it. I love it. I love it. Thanks. Bye. |
You all know this story. In the summer of 1950, Enrico Fermi, the Italian-American physicist and atomic-pile builder, went to lunch at Los Alamos National Laboratory and joined some colleagues there, and asked them a question: "Where is everybody?" This confused his colleagues, obviously, because they were sitting right there with him. And then he had to clarify that he wasn't talking about them. He was talking about the space aliens.
You see, this was only a few years after the supposed flying saucer crash at Roswell, New Mexico. And even though that turned out to be nothing, nothing at all -- (Laughter) -- merely a downed weather balloon piloted by small hairless men with slits for mouths ... Still, America had gone saucer-mad, even famous scientists who were eating lunch. Fermi's reasoning, if I may paraphrase badly, is that the universe is so vast that it stands to reason, there should be other intelligent life out there. And the universe is so old that unless we were the very first civilization ever to evolve, we should have some evidence of their existence by now. And yet, to the best of our knowledge, we are alone.
"Where is everybody?" asked Fermi, and his colleagues had no answer. Fermi then went on with the same blunt logic to disprove fairies, Sasquatch, God, the possibility of love -- and thereafter, as you know, Enrico Fermi ate alone. (Laughter) Now, I am not a scientist. I have never built an atomic pile. Although, I might argue that, technically, every pile is atomic.
(Laughter)
However, with respect, I might point out two possibilities that Enrico Fermi perhaps did not consider. One is that the aliens might be very far away. Perhaps, I dare say, even on other planets. The other possibility -- (Laughter) -- is, perhaps, Enrico Fermi himself was an alien.
(Laughter)
Think about it. Isn't it a little convenient that in the midst of the World War, out of nowhere, suddenly an Italian scientist showed up with an amazing new technology that would transform everything in the world and darken the history of the human species forever after? And isn't it a little strange that he required no payment for this? That he asked for only one thing -- a gift of two healthy sperm whales? That's -- that's not true. But it is strange.
(Laughter)
And if Enrico Fermi were indeed a space alien, wouldn't he be the first to have tried to convince his fellow scientists that the space aliens are not already here? For it is given in certain UFO-ology or UFOlogy circles, that the aliens are already here and have been for millennia; that they have walked among us in disguise, observing us, guiding our evolution from ape to man -- if you believe in that sort of thing -- and, occasionally, kidnapping us in their flying saucers and taking us away to have sex with us in pyramids.
(Laughter)
It's a difficult theory to discount, I think you'll agree.
(Laughter)
For even in my own life, there are memories I have that are difficult to explain -- happenings that are so odd and unaccountably weird, that it is difficult to imagine they were not the result of prolonged and frequent contact with aliens throughout my life. For how else will you explain the amazing and absolutely true close encounters that I had and will describe to you now? Encounter one: Ocean City, New Jersey, 1980. This was the summer when the special edition of "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" was released. And I went on vacation with my parents to the Jersey shore. Within 12 hours, I was horribly sunburned, just like Richard Dreyfuss in the movie.
(Laughter)
And so I spent the rest of the vacation largely sitting outside our little rental house at night, the sidewalk still warm from the sun, watching the skies for UFOs. What did I see? Stars, satellites, blinking airplanes -- typical sky junk. Occasionally, kids would come and join me and watch, but their necks soon got sore, and they would go off to the boardwalk to play video games and mingle with humans. I was pretty good at the video games. I was not very good at the other part, so I stayed alone with the cosmos.
And that's when it happened. An elderly couple came walking down the street. I would say they were in their late seventies, and I would say that they were on a date, because he was wearing a very neat little suit with a yellow tie -- a brown suit. And she was wearing a cardigan, because it was now fully night and a chill was coming in off the ocean. I remember, for some reason, that they were exactly the same height. And then they stopped, and the man turned to me and said, "What are you looking for, flying saucers?"
(Laughter)
You have to admit, that's a pretty boss piece of detective work for an old man on a date. But what was stranger still -- and even I realized it at the time, as a nine-year-old child -- was that they stopped at all. That this old man would interrupt his moonlight stroll with his sweetheart with the precise reason of making fun of a child. "Oh," he said, "little green men." And then his girlfriend joined in, too. "There's no such thing as space men," she said. "There's no such thing." And then they both laughed. "Ha, ha, ha." I looked around. The street was entirely empty. I had stopped hearing the sound of the ocean. It was as though time had stopped. I did not know why they were teasing me. I looked into their strangely angry faces, and I remember wondering, are they wearing rubber masks?
(Laughter)
And what would be behind those rubber masks, if they were? Giant, almond-shaped, unblinking eyes? Slits for mouths? The old man crooked his finger as though he were firing a gun, and then he made laser sounds. "Kew, kew, kew -- watch out." And they turned at once and walked away. The old man reached out his knobbly claw for the woman's hand, and found it, and left me alone. Now, you could describe this as a simple misunderstanding -- a strange encounter among humans. Maybe it was swamp gas, but -- (Laughter) -- I know what I saw.
Close encounter two: Brookline, Massachusetts, 1984. I went to see the movie "Dune," and a girl talked to me. Now, on its face -- (Laughter) -- this is impossible on its face, I realize -- but it is absolutely true. It was opening night, naturally. I went with my friend Tim McGonigal, who sat on my left. On my right was the girl in question. She had long, curly black hair, a blue jean jacket. I remember, she had some sort of injury to her ankle, an Ace bandage, and she had crutches. She was very tall, I would say. I was starting high school at the time. I would say she was a junior, but I had never seen her before. She didn't go to my school. I didn't know her name, and I never will. She was sitting with someone who I presume was her mother, and they were talking about the novel, "Dune." They were both big fans, mother and daughter -- very unusual. They were talking about how their favorite characters were the giant sandworms. And then it got stranger. That's when she turned to me and said, "Are you looking forward to seeing the movie?"
(Laughter)
First of all, I was embarrassed because I had not read the novel "Dune" at that time. I was merely a connoisseur of movies featuring desert planets, as I still am.
(Laughter) But it was also the tone of how she asked the question: apropos of nothing, like she didn't even care about the answer, as though she just wanted to talk to me. I did not know what to say. I said, "Yes." I did not even turn my head. The movie began. I need not remind you that this was David Lynch's version of "Dune," in which all of the characters were sexy and deformed at the same time.
(Laughter)
There was a character called the Third-Stage Guild Navigator, which was a kind of giant, floating fetus-creature that lived in a giant tank with this orange mist of psychedelic spice swirling around him, allowing him to bend space and time. He could never leave the tank or interact with the outside world. He had become, in his isolation, so deformed and so sexy, that he had to talk through a kind of old-timey radio to the outside world, and could never touch them. I mean, I liked him a lot better than the sandworms. The sandworms were fine, but your favorite character? Please.
When the movie ended, everyone seemed very happy to get up and get out of the theatre as soon as possible. Except for the girl. As I walked out, her pace slowed. Perhaps it was the crutches, but it seemed -- (Laughter) -- it seemed as though she might want to talk to me again. When I say it out loud, it sounds so ridiculous, but I can only come to the conclusion that it was what, in the alien abductee community, they call a "screen memory": a ridiculous false recollection designed by their brain to cover up some trauma -- say, of being kidnapped and flown off to a sex pyramid.
(Laughter)
And so I sure am glad I did not slow down to talk to her. I sure am glad I never saw her again.
Close encounter three: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1989. In the mid-to-late '80s, the novelist Whitley Strieber wrote a book called "Communion," in which he described his own lifelong experiences being abducted by aliens. And he also described the phenomenon known in this community as "lost time," where Whitley Strieber would suddenly become aware that he could not remember the previous ten minutes, or the previous ten hours, or the previous ten days. And would come to the conclusion that that was when the aliens were taking him and giving him rectal probes.
(Laughter)
This book became, naturally, an enormous best-seller. This image by Ted Joseph was from that book, and was his, sort of, police sketch of what the creatures looked like that Whitley Strieber had described to him. And it was so successful that they made it into a movie. And in 1989, the way I remember it, I was in Philadelphia visiting my girlfriend, and we decided, apropos of nothing, to go see this movie. And the way I remember it, the movie featured these details. One: Whitley Strieber was played by Christopher Walken. Two: the alien was played by a rubber puppet.
(Laughter)
Three: there was a surprisingly long sequence of the film in which the rubber puppet gives Christopher Walken a rectal probe. Four: this was being shown in a regular movie theater in Center City, Philadelphia. Five: all of which is to say, they made a movie out of the book, "Communion," and it starred Christopher Walken. Does something seem strange about this to you? Something odd? Something off? Something wrong with this picture? Think about it. Yes. The answer is: I had a girlfriend. What?
(Laughter)
How did this happen? When did this happen? I remember walking out of the theater and becoming suddenly aware of this fact, as we walked hand in hand, and pondering these very same questions. And to this day, I have no answer for you. Close encounter four: the Algarve, Portugal, 1991. Some years later, I and this woman -- we'll call her "Catherine Fletcher" -- (Laughter) -- went traveling through the south of Portugal together. We stayed in old, crumbling, walled cities, in tiny little hotels, and we would climb up to the roof and drink Vinho Verde and watch the sun set and play checkers. What? Did we do this? Really? Does anyone do this? We went to some topless beaches. Excuse me? No, not in my life. For what it's worth, we went to Sagres, which was considered, at the time, to be the end of the world. And there I was chased by a pack of feral dogs on the dock, and the lead dog bit me on the ass, requiring me to go to a strange Portuguese clinic and receive an ass shot. Make of that what you will.
(Laughter)
Our last day in Portugal, we were in the district capital of Faro, and Catherine decided that she wanted to go to the beach one last time. Now, Faro is a bustling little city, and to get to the beach, she explained, you would have to take a bus and then a boat. And did I want to come with? But I was exhausted and dog-bitten, and so I said, "No." I remember what she looked like before she left. The freckles had grown and multiplied on her face and shoulders, clustering into a kind of a tan. A tan, we were both tan -- is this true? Her eyes were extra bright and extra blue, as a result. She was smiling. She was a single woman about to go alone into a country, not even speaking the language, to travel alone by bus and boat to go to a beach she did not know or had never seen. I loved her, and then she went out into that strange, alien land.
It took me some time to come to my senses. I had my own "lost time" moment, where I woke up and suddenly realized it was very late in the day, almost dinnertime, and she had not come back. Nervous, I went down to the street to look for her. Now, I did not speak Portuguese. I did not know where the beach was. I could not call her on a cell phone because this was 1991, and the aliens had not given us that technology yet.
(Laughter)
I realized that the day would only have two possible outcomes: either Catherine would come back to the hotel, or she would never come back to the hotel. And so I sat down to wait. I did not watch the skies, but the very end of the street where the buses and cars and pedestrians and little scooters were moving along. And I watched those constellations shift, hoping that they would part and I would see her face. It was at that moment, in that very small town of 30,000 or so, that I truly appreciated the vastness of the universe and the searching we might do in it. And that's when the Liberians came along. Five young men -- all laughing, happy, traveling together, coming back to this hotel where they were staying.
One of them was named Joseph, and he asked me what was I doing, and I explained. And he said, "Don't worry." He was sure that Catherine would be safe. But he did not seem so very sure, for he sat down to wait with me. And for the next two hours, they all waited with me: taking turns, going up to their room, coming back, telling me jokes, distracting me. Two hours, they gave me a message. We are not alone.
And then, in the middle of a sentence, at the very birth of twilight, I turned and looked down the street. The stars aligned, and she came back. She was smiling. She did not understand why I was so worried. Neither did the Liberians, although there was a huge amount of relief in their laughter as they clapped us on the back, and went back up to their room and left us alone in the street, holding hands. An event like this leaves a scar on the memory, much like a piece of alien technology that has been inserted into your buttocks by a "Portuguese doctor."
(Laughter)
And even now, a decade and a half later, even now that we are married, I look for her still, whenever she is not in the room. And even though, I think you'll agree, it is probable that during the time she was away, she was kidnapped and replaced by an alien clone, I love her and wait for her still.
Thank you for your kind attention.
(Applause) |
Well, I learned a lot of things about ballooning, especially at the end of these balloon flights around the world I did with Brian Jones. When I took this picture, the window was frozen because of the moisture of the night. And on the other side there was a rising sun. So, you see that on the other side of ice you have the unknown, you have the non-obvious, you have the non-seen, for the people who don't dare to go through the ice.
There are so many people who prefer to suffer in the ice they know instead of taking the risk of going through the ice to see what there is on the other side. And I think that's one of the main problems of our society. We learn, maybe not the famous TED audience, but so many other people learn, that the unknown, the doubts, the question marks are dangerous. And we have to resist to the changes. We have to keep everything under control. Well, the unknown is part of life.
And in that sense, ballooning is a beautiful metaphor. Because in the balloon, like in life, we go very well in unforeseen directions. We want to go in a direction, but the winds push us in another direction, like in life. And as long as we fight horizontally, against life, against the winds, against what's happening to us, life is a nightmare.
How do we steer a balloon? By understanding that the atmosphere is made out of several different layers of wind which all have different direction. So, then, we understand that if we want to change our trajectory, in life, or in the balloon, we have to change altitude. Changing altitude, in life, that means raising to another psychological, philosophical, spiritual level. But how do we do that?
In ballooning, or in life, how do we change altitude? How do we go from the metaphor to something more practical that we can really use every day? Well, in a balloon it's easy, we have ballast. And when we drop the ballast overboard we climb. Sand, water, all the equipment we don't need anymore. And I think in life it should be exactly like this.
You know, when people speak about pioneering spirit, very often they believe that pioneers are the ones who have new ideas. It's not true. The pioneers are not the ones who have new ideas, because new ideas are so easy to have. We just close our eyes for a minute we all come back with a lot of new ideas. No, the pioneer is the one who allows himself to throw overboard a lot of ballast. Habits, certainties, convictions, exclamation marks, paradigms, dogmas. And when we are able to do that, what happens? Life is not anymore just one line going in one direction in one dimension. No. Life is going to be made out of all the possible lines that go in all the possible directions in three dimensions.
And pioneering spirit will be each time we allow ourselves to explore this vertical axis. Of course not just like the atmosphere in the balloon, but in life itself. Explore this vertical axis, that means explore all the different ways to do, all the different ways to behave, all the different ways to think, before we find the one that goes in the direction we wish. This is very practical. This can be in politics. This can be in spirituality. This can be in environment, in finance, in education of children.
I deeply believe that life is a much greater adventure if we manage to do politics without the trench between the left and the right wing. Because we will throw away these political dogmas. I deeply believe that we can make much more protection of the environment if we get rid -- if we throw overboard this fundamentalism that some of the greens have showed in the past. And that we can aim for much higher spirituality if we get rid of the religious dogmas. Throwing overboard, as ballast, to change our direction.
Well, these basically are things I believed in such a long time. But actually I had to go around the world in a balloon to be invited to talk about it. (Laughter) (Applause) It's clear that it's not easy to know which ballast to drop and which altitude to take. Sometime we need friends, family members or a psychiatrist. Well, in balloons we need weather men, the one who calculate the direction of each layer of wind, at which altitude, in order to help the balloonist. But sometimes it's very paradoxical.
When Brian Jones and I were flying around the world, the weather man asked us, one day, to fly quite low, and very slow. And when we calculated we thought we're never going to make it around the world at that speed. So, we disobeyed. We flew much higher, and double the speed.
And I was so proud to have found that jetstream that I called the weather man, and I told him, "Hey, guy, don't you think we're good pilots up there? We fly twice the speed you predicted." And he told me, "Don't do that. Go down immediately in order to slow down." And I started to argue. I said, "I'm not going to do that. We don't have enough gas to fly so slow." And he told me, "Yes, but with the low pressure you have on your left if you fly too fast, in a couple of hours you will turn left and end up at the North Pole. (Laughter) And then he asked me -- and this is something I will never forget in my life -- he just asked me, "You're the good pilot up there. What do you really want? You want to go very fast in the wrong direction, or slowly in the good direction? (Laughter) (Applause)
And this is why you need weathermen. This is why you need people with long-term vision. And this is precisely what fails in the political visions we have now, in the political governments. We are burning, as you heard, so much energy, not understanding that such an unsustainable way of life cannot last for long. So, we went down actually. We slowed down. And we went through moments of fears because we had no idea how the little amount of gas we had in the balloon could allow us to travel 45,000 kilometers. But we were expected to have doubts; we're expected to have fears. And actually this is where the adventure really started.
When we were flying over the Sahara and India it was nice holidays. We could land anytime and fly back home with an airplane. In the middle of the Pacific, when you don't have the good winds, you cannot land, you cannot go back. That's a crisis. That's the moment when you have to wake up from the automatic way of thinking. That's the moment when you have to motivate your inner potential, your creativity. That's when you throw out all the ballast, all the certainties, in order to adapt to the new situation.
And actually, we changed completely our flight plan. We changed completely our strategy. And after 20 days we landed successfully in Egypt. But if I show you this picture it's not to tell you how happy we were. It's to show you how much gas was left in the last bottles. We took off with 3.7 tons of liquid propane. We landed with 40 kilos.
When I saw that, I made a promise to myself. I made a promise that the next time I would fly around the world, it would be with no fuel, independent from fossil energies, in order to be safe, not to be threatened by the fuel gauge. I had no idea how it was possible. I just thought it's a dream and I want to do it.
And when the capsule of my balloon was introduced officially in the Air and Space Museum in Washington, together with the airplane of Charles Lindbergh, with Apollo 11, with the Wright Brothers' Flyer, with Chuck Yeager's 61, I had really a thought then. I thought, well, the 20th century, that was brilliant. It allowed to do all those things there. But it will not be possible in the future any more. It takes too much energy. It will cost too much. It will be prohibited because we'll have to save our natural resources in a few decades from now.
So how can we perpetuate this pioneering spirit with something that will be independent from fossil energy? And this is when the project Solar Impulse really started to turn in my head. And I think it's a nice metaphor also for the 21st century. Pioneering spirit should continue, but on another level. Not to conquer the planet or space, not anymore, it has been done, but rather to improve the quality of life. How can we go through the ice of certainty in order to make the most incredible a possible thing? What is today completely impossible -- get rid of our dependency on fossil energy.
If you tell to people, we want to be independent from fossil energy in our world, people will laugh at you, except here, where crazy people are invited to speak. (Laughter) So, the idea is that if we fly around the world in a solar powered airplane, using absolutely no fuel, nobody ever could say in the future that it's impossible to do it for cars, for heating systems, for computers, and so on and so on.
Well, solar power airplanes are not new. They have flown in the past, but without saving capabilities, without batteries. Which means that they have more proven the limits of renewable energies than the potential of it. If we want to show the potential, we have to fly day and night. That means to load the batteries during the flight, in order to spend the night on the batteries, and fly the next day again. It has been made, already, on remote controlled little airplane models, without pilots.
But it stays an anecdote because the public couldn't identify to it. I think you need a pilot in the plane that can talk to the universities, that can talk to students, talk to politicians during the flight, and really make it a human adventure. For that, unfortunately, four meters wingspan is not enough. You need 64 meter wingspan. 64 meter wingspan to carry one pilot, the batteries, flies slowly enough with the aerodynamic efficiency. Why that? Because fuel is not easy to replace. That's for sure. And with 200 square meters of solar power on our plane, we can produce the same energy than 200 little lightbulbs. That means a Christmas tree, a big Christmas tree.
So the question is, how can you carry a pilot around the world with an airplane that uses the same amount of energy as a big Christmas tree? People will tell you it's impossible, and that's exactly why we try to do it. We launched the project with my colleague Andre Borschberg six years ago. We have now 70 people in the team working on it. We have gone through the stages of simulation, design, computing, preparing the construction of the first prototype. That has been achieved after two years of work. Cockpit, propeller, engine. Just the fuselage here, it's so light. It's not designed by an artist, but it could be. 50 kilos for the entire fuselage. Couple of kilos more for the wing spars.
This is the complete structure of the airplane. And one month ago we have unveiled it. You cannot imagine how it is for a team who has been working six years on it to show that it's not only a dream and a vision, it's a real airplane. A real airplane that we could finally present.
And what's the goal now? The goal is to take off, end of this year for the first test, but mainly next year, spring or summer, take off, on our own power, without additional help, without being towed, climb to 9,000 meters altitude. The same time we load the batteries, we run the engines, and when we get at the maximum height, we arrive at the beginning of the night. And there, there will be just one goal, just one: reach the next sunrise before the batteries are empty. (Laughter)
And this is exactly the symbol of our world. If our airplane is too heavy, if the pilot wastes energy, we'll never make it through the night. And in our world, if we keep on spoiling, wasting our energy resources, if we keep on building things that consume so much energy that most of the companies now go bankrupt, it's clear that we'll never give the planet to the next generation without a major problem.
So, you see that this airplane is more a symbol. I don't think it will transport 200 people in the next years. But when Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, the payload was also just sufficient for one person and some fuel. And 20 years later there were 200 people in every airplane crossing the Atlantic.
So, we have to start, and show the example. A little bit like on this picture here. This is a painting from Magritte, in the museum in Holland that I love so much. It's a pipe, and it's written, "This is not a pipe." This is not an airplane. This is a symbol of what we can achieve when we believe in the impossible, when we have a team, when we have pioneering spirit, and especially when we understand that all the certainties we have should be thrown overboard.
What pleases me very much is that in the beginning I thought that we would have to fly around the world with no fuel in order to have our message been understood. And more and more, we're invited around the world with Andre to talk about that project, to talk about the symbol of it, invited by politicians, invited in energy forums, in order to show that it's not anymore completely stupid to think about getting rid of the dependency on fossil energies.
So, through speeches like this one today, through interviews, through meetings, our goal is to get as many people possible on the team. The success will not come if we "just," quote, unquote, fly around the world in a solar-powered airplane. No, the success will come if enough people are motivated to do exactly the same in their daily life, save energy, go to renewables. And this is possible. You know, with the technologies we have today, we can save between 30 and 50 percent of the energy of a country in Europe, and we can solve half of the rest with renewables. It leaves 25 or 30 percent for oil, gas, coal, nuclear, or whatever. This is acceptable.
This is why all the people who believe in this type of spirit are welcome to be on that team. You can just go on SolarImpulse.com, subscribe to just be informed of what we're doing. But much more, to get advices, to give your comments, to spread the word that if it's possible in the air, of course it's possible in the ground.
And each time we have some ice in the future, we have to know that life will be great, and the success will be brilliant if we dare to overcome our fear of the ice, to go through the obstacle, to go through the problem, in order to see what there is on the other side. So, you see, this is what we're doing on our side. Everyone has his goal, has his dreams, has his visions.
The question I leave you with now is which is the ballast you would like to throw overboard? Which will be the altitude at which you would like to fly in your life, to get to the success that you wish to have, to get to the point that really belongs to you, with the potential you have, and the one you can really fulfill? Because the most renewable energy we have is our own potential, and our own passion. So, let's go for it, and I wish you an excellent adventure in the wings of the future. Thank you. (Applause) |
I just heard the best joke about Bond Emeruwa. I was having lunch with him just a few minutes ago, and a Nigerian journalist comes -- and this will only make sense if you've ever watched a James Bond movie -- and a Nigerian journalist comes up to him and goes, "Aha, we meet again, Mr. Bond!" (Laughter) It was great.
So, I've got a little sheet of paper here, mostly because I'm Nigerian and if you leave me alone, I'll talk for like two hours.
I just want to say good afternoon, good evening. It's been an incredible few days. It's downhill from now on. I wanted to thank Emeka and Chris. But also, most importantly, all the invisible people behind TED that you just see flitting around the whole place that have made sort of this space for such a diverse and robust conversation. It's really amazing. I've been in the audience. I'm a writer, and I've been watching people with the slide shows and scientists and bankers, and I've been feeling a bit like a gangsta rapper at a bar mitzvah. (Laughter) Like, what have I got to say about all this? And I was watching Jane [Goodall] yesterday, and I thought it was really great, and I was watching those incredible slides of the chimpanzees, and I thought, "Wow. What if a chimpanzee could talk, you know? What would it say?" My first thought was, "Well, you know, there's George Bush." But then I thought, "Why be rude to chimpanzees?" I guess there goes my green card. (Laughter)
There's been a lot of talk about narrative in Africa. And what's become increasingly clear to me is that we're talking about news stories about Africa; we're not really talking about African narratives. And it's important to make a distinction, because if the news is anything to go by, 40 percent of Americans can't -- either can't afford health insurance or have the most inadequate health insurance, and have a president who, despite the protest of millions of his citizens -- even his own Congress -- continues to prosecute a senseless war. So if news is anything to go by, the U.S. is right there with Zimbabwe, right? Which it isn't really, is it? And talking about war, my girlfriend has this great t-shirt that says, "Bombing for peace is like fucking for virginity." It's amazing, isn't it?
The truth is, everything we know about America, everything Americans come to know about being American, isn't from the news. I live there. We don't go home at the end of the day and think, "Well, I really know who I am now because the Wall Street Journal says that the Stock Exchange closed at this many points." What we know about how to be who we are comes from stories. It comes from the novels, the movies, the fashion magazines. It comes from popular culture.
In other words, it's the agents of our imagination who really shape who we are. And this is important to remember, because in Africa the complicated questions we want to ask about what all of this means has been asked from the rock paintings of the San people, through the Sundiata epics of Mali, to modern contemporary literature. If you want to know about Africa, read our literature -- and not just "Things Fall Apart," because that would be like saying, "I've read 'Gone with the Wind' and so I know everything about America." That's very important. There's a poem by Jack Gilbert called "The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart." He says, "When the Sumerian tablets were first translated, they were thought to be business records. But what if they were poems and psalms? My love is like twelve Ethiopian goats standing still in the morning light. Shiploads of thuja are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark." This is important.
It's important because misreading is really the chance for complication and opportunity. The first Igbo Bible was translated from English in about the 1800s by Bishop Crowther, who was a Yoruba. And it's important to know Igbo is a tonal language, and so they'll say the word "igwe" and "igwe": same spelling, one means "sky" or "heaven," and one means "bicycle" or "iron." So "God is in heaven surrounded by His angels" was translated as -- [Igbo]. And for some reason, in Cameroon, when they tried to translate the Bible into Cameroonian patois, they chose the Igbo version. And I'm not going to give you the patois translation; I'm going to make it standard English. Basically, it ends up as "God is on a bicycle with his angels." This is good, because language complicates things.
You know, we often think that language mirrors the world in which we live, and I find that's not true. The language actually makes the world in which we live. Language is not -- I mean, things don't have any mutable value by themselves; we ascribe them a value. And language can't be understood in its abstraction. It can only be understood in the context of story, and everything, all of this is story. And it's important to remember that, because if we don't, then we become ahistorical. We've had a lot of -- a parade of amazing ideas here. But these are not new to Africa. Nigeria got its independence in 1960. The first time the possibility for independence was discussed was in 1922, following the Aba women's market riots. In 1967, in the middle of the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War, Dr. Njoku-Obi invented the Cholera vaccine. So, you know, the thing is to remember that because otherwise, 10 years from now, we'll be back here trying to tell this story again.
So, what it says to me then is that it's not really -- the problem isn't really the stories that are being told or which stories are being told, the problem really is the terms of humanity that we're willing to bring to complicate every story, and that's really what it's all about. Let me tell you a Nigerian joke. Well, it's just a joke, anyway. So there's Tom, Dick and Harry and they're working construction. And Tom opens up his lunch box and there's rice in it, and he goes on this rant about, "Twenty years, my wife has been packing rice for lunch. If she does it again tomorrow, I'm going to throw myself off this building and kill myself." And Dick and Harry repeat this. The next day, Tom opens his lunchbox, there's rice, so he throws himself off and kills himself, and Tom, Dick and Harry follow. And now the inquest -- you know, Tom's wife and Dick's wife are distraught. They wished they'd not packed rice. But Harry's wife is confused, because she said, "You know, Harry had been packing his own lunch for 20 years." (Laughter)
This seemingly innocent joke, when I heard it as a child in Nigeria, was told about Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa, with the Hausa being Harry. So what seems like an eccentric if tragic joke about Harry becomes a way to spread ethnic hatred. My father was educated in Cork, in the University of Cork, in the '50s. In fact, every time I read in Ireland, people get me all mistaken and they say, "Oh, this is Chris O'Barney from Cork." But he was also in Oxford in the '50s, and yet growing up as a child in Nigeria, my father used to say to me, "You must never eat or drink in a Yoruba person's house because they will poison you." It makes sense now when I think about it, because if you'd known my father, you would've wanted to poison him too. (Laughter)
So I was born in 1966, at the beginning of the Biafran-Nigerian Civil War, and the war ended after three years. And I was growing up in school and the federal government didn't want us taught about the history of the war, because they thought it probably would make us generate a new generation of rebels. So I had a very inventive teacher, a Pakistani Muslim, who wanted to teach us about this. So what he did was to teach us Jewish Holocaust history, and so huddled around books with photographs of people in Auschwitz, I learned the melancholic history of my people through the melancholic history of another people. I mean, picture this -- really picture this. A Pakistani Muslim teaching Jewish Holocaust history to young Igbo children.
Story is powerful. Story is fluid and it belongs to nobody. And it should come as no surprise that my first novel at 16 was about Neo-Nazis taking over Nigeria to institute the Fourth Reich. It makes perfect sense. And they were to blow up strategic targets and take over the country, and they were foiled by a Nigerian James Bond called Coyote Williams, and a Jewish Nazi hunter. And it happened over four continents. And when the book came out, I was heralded as Africa's answer to Frederick Forsyth, which is a dubious honor at best. But also, the book was launched in time for me to be accused of constructing the blueprint for a foiled coup attempt. So at 18, I was bonded off to prison in Nigeria.
I grew up very privileged, and it's important to talk about privilege, because we don't talk about it here. A lot of us are very privileged. I grew up -- servants, cars, televisions, all that stuff. My story of Nigeria growing up was very different from the story I encountered in prison, and I had no language for it. I was completely terrified, completely broken, and kept trying to find a new language, a new way to make sense of all of this. Six months after that, with no explanation, they let me go. Now for those of you who have seen me at the buffet tables know that it was because it was costing them too much to feed me. (Laughter) But I mean, I grew up with this incredible privilege, and not just me -- millions of Nigerians grew up with books and libraries. In fact, we were talking last night about how all of the steamy novels of Harold Robbins had done more for sex education of horny teenage boys in Africa than any sex education programs ever had. All of those are gone.
We are squandering the most valuable resource we have on this continent: the valuable resource of the imagination. In the film, "Sometimes in April" by Raoul Peck, Idris Elba is poised in a scene with his machete raised, and he's being forced by a crowd to chop up his best friend -- fellow Rwandan Army officer, albeit a Tutsi -- played by Fraser James. And Fraser's on his knees, arms tied behind his back, and he's crying. He's sniveling. It's a pitiful sight. And as we watch it, we are ashamed. And we want to say to Idris, "Chop him up. Shut him up." And as Idris moves, Fraser screams, "Stop! Please stop!" Idris pauses, then he moves again, and Fraser says, "Please! Please stop!" And it's not the look of horror and terror on Fraser's face that stops Idris or us; it's the look in Fraser's eyes. It's one that says, "Don't do this. And I'm not saying this to save myself, although this would be nice. I'm doing it to save you, because if you do this, you will be lost." To be so afraid that you're standing in the face of a death you can't escape and that you're soiling yourself and crying, but to say in that moment, as Fraser says to Idris, "Tell my girlfriend I love her." In that moment, Fraser says, "I am lost already, but not you ... not you." This is a redemption we can all aspire to.
African narratives in the West, they proliferate. I really don't care anymore. I'm more interested in the stories we tell about ourselves -- how as a writer, I find that African writers have always been the curators of our humanity on this continent. The question is, how do I balance narratives that are wonderful with narratives of wounds and self-loathing? And this is the difficulty that I face. I am trying to move beyond political rhetoric to a place of ethical questioning. I am asking us to balance the idea of our complete vulnerability with the complete notion of transformation of what is possible.
As a young middle-class Nigerian activist, I launched myself along with a whole generation of us into the campaign to stop the government. And I asked millions of people, without questioning my right to do so, to go up against the government. And I watched them being locked up in prison and tear gassed. I justified it, and I said, "This is the cost of revolution. Have I not myself been imprisoned? Have I not myself been beaten?" It wasn't until later, when I was imprisoned again, that I understood the real meaning of torture, and how easy your humanity can be taken from you, for the time I was engaged in war, righteous, righteous war. Excuse me.
Sometimes I can stand before the world -- and when I say this, transformation is a difficult and slow process -- sometimes I can stand before the world and say, "My name is Chris Abani. I have been human six days, but only sometimes." But this is a good thing. It's never going to be easy. There are no answers. As I was telling Rachel from Google Earth, that I had challenged my students in America -- I said, "You don't know anything about Africa, you're all idiots." And so they said, "Tell me about Africa, Professor Abani." So I went to Google Earth and learned about Africa. And the truth be told, this is it, isn't it? There are no essential Africans, and most of us are as completely ignorant as everyone else about the continent we come from, and yet we want to make profound statements about it. And I think if we can just admit that we're all trying to approximate the truth of our own communities, it will make for a much more nuanced and a much more interesting conversation. I want to believe that we can be agnostic about this, that we can rise above all of this.
When I was 10, I read James Baldwin's "Another Country," and that book broke me. Not because I was encountering homosexual sex and love for the first time, but because the way James wrote about it made it impossible for me to attach otherness to it. "Here," Jimmy said. "Here is love, all of it." The fact that it happens in "Another Country" takes you quite by surprise. My friend Ronald Gottesman says there are three kinds of people in the world: those who can count, and those who can't. (Laughter) He also says that the cause of all our trouble is the belief in an essential, pure identity: religious, ethnic, historical, ideological.
I want to leave you with a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa that speaks to transformation. It's called "Ode to the Drum," and I'll try and read it the way Yusef would be proud to hear it read. "Gazelle, I killed you for your skin's exquisite touch, for how easy it is to be nailed to a board weathered raw as white butcher paper. Last night I heard my daughter praying for the meat here at my feet. You know it wasn't anger that made me stop my heart till the hammer fell. Weeks ago, you broke me as a woman once shattered me into a song beneath her weight, before you slouched into that grassy hush. And now I'm tightening lashes, shaped in hide as if around a ribcage, shaped like five bowstrings. Ghosts cannot slip back inside the body's drum. You've been seasoned by wind, dusk and sunlight. Pressure can make everything whole again. Brass nails tacked into the ebony wood, your face has been carved five times. I have to drive trouble in the hills. Trouble in the valley, and trouble by the river too. There is no palm wine, fish, salt, or calabash. Kadoom. Kadoom. Kadoom. Ka-doooom. Now I have beaten a song back into you. Rise and walk away like a panther." Thank you. (Applause) |
Is there anything unique about human beings? There is. We're the only creatures with fully developed moral sentiments. We're obsessed with morality as social creatures. We need to know why people are doing what they're doing. And I personally am obsessed with morality. It was all due to this woman, Sister Mary Marastela, also known as my mom. As an altar boy, I breathed in a lot of incense, and I learned to say phrases in Latin, but I also had time to think about whether my mother's top-down morality applied to everybody. I saw that people who were religious and non-religious were equally obsessed with morality. I thought, maybe there's some earthly basis for moral decisions. But I wanted to go further than to say our brains make us moral. I want to know if there's a chemistry of morality. I want to know if there was a moral molecule.
After 10 years of experiments, I found it. Would you like to see it? I brought some with me. This little syringe contains the moral molecule. (Laughter) It's called oxytocin. So oxytocin is a simple and ancient molecule found only in mammals. In rodents, it was known to make mothers care for their offspring, and in some creatures, allowed for toleration of burrowmates. But in humans, it was only known to facilitate birth and breastfeeding in women, and is released by both sexes during sex.
So I had this idea that oxytocin might be the moral molecule. I did what most of us do -- I tried it on some colleagues. One of them told me, "Paul, that is the world's stupidist idea. It is," he said, "only a female molecule. It can't be that important." But I countered, "Well men's brains make this too. There must be a reason why." But he was right, it was a stupid idea. But it was testably stupid. In other words, I thought I could design an experiment to see if oxytocin made people moral.
Turns out it wasn't so easy. First of all, oxytocin is a shy molecule. Baseline levels are near zero, without some stimulus to cause its release. And when it's produced, it has a three-minute half-life, and degrades rapidly at room temperature. So this experiment would have to cause a surge of oxytocin, have to grab it fast and keep it cold. I think I can do that. Now luckily, oxytocin is produced both in the brain and in the blood, so I could do this experiment without learning neurosurgery. Then I had to measure morality.
So taking on Morality with a capital M is a huge project. So I started smaller. I studied one single virtue: trustworthiness. Why? I had shown in the early 2000s that countries with a higher proportion of trustworthy people are more prosperous. So in these countries, more economic transactions occur and more wealth is created, alleviating poverty. So poor countries are by and large low trust countries. So if I understood the chemistry of trustworthiness, I might help alleviate poverty.
But I'm also a skeptic. I don't want to just ask people, "Are you trustworthy?" So instead I use the Jerry Maguire approach to research. If you're so virtuous, show me the money. So what we do in my lab is we tempt people with virtue and vice by using money. Let me show you how we do that. So we recruit some people for an experiment. They all get $10 if they agree to show up. We give them lots of instruction, and we never ever deceive them. Then we match them in pairs by computer. And in that pair, one person gets a message saying, "Do you want to give up some of your $10 you earned for being here and ship it to someone else in the lab?" The trick is you can't see them, you can't talk to them. You only do it one time. Now whatever you give up gets tripled in the other person's account. You're going to make them a lot wealthier. And they get a message by computer saying person one sent you this amount of money. Do you want to keep it all, or do you want to send some amount back?
So think about this experiment for minute. You're going to sit on these hard chairs for an hour and a half. Some mad scientist is going to jab your arm with a needle and take four tubes of blood. And now you want me to give up this money and ship it to a stranger? So this was the birth of vampire economics. Make a decision and give me some blood.
So in fact, experimental economists had run this test around the world, and for much higher stakes, and the consensus view was that the measure from the first person to the second was a measure of trust, and the transfer from the second person back to the first measured trustworthiness. But in fact, economists were flummoxed on why the second person would ever return any money. They assumed money is good, why not keep it all?
That's not what we found. We found 90 percent of the first decision-makers sent money, and of those who received money, 95 percent returned some of it. But why? Well by measuring oxytocin we found that the more money the second person received, the more their brain produced oxytocin, and the more oxytocin on board, the more money they returned. So we have a biology of trustworthiness.
But wait. What's wrong with this experiment? Two things. One is that nothing in the body happens in isolation. So we measured nine other molecules that interact with oxytocin, but they didn't have any effect. But the second is that I still only had this indirect relationship between oxytocin and trustworthiness. I didn't know for sure oxytocin caused trustworthiness. So to make the experiment, I knew I'd have to go into the brain and manipulate oxytocin directly. I used everything short of a drill to get oxytocin into my own brain. And I found I could do it with a nasal inhaler. So along with colleagues in Zurich, we put 200 men on oxytocin or placebo, had that same trust test with money, and we found that those on oxytocin not only showed more trust, we can more than double the number of people who sent all their money to a stranger -- all without altering mood or cognition.
So oxytocin is the trust molecule, but is it the moral molecule? Using the oxytocin inhaler, we ran more studies. We showed that oxytocin infusion increases generosity in unilateral monetary transfers by 80 percent. We showed it increases donations to charity by 50 percent. We've also investigated non-pharmacologic ways to raise oxytocin. These include massage, dancing and praying. Yes, my mom was happy about that last one. And whenever we raise oxytocin, people willingly open up their wallets and share money with strangers.
But why do they do this? What does it feel like when your brain is flooded with oxytocin? To investigate this question, we ran an experiment where we had people watch a video of a father and his four year-old son, and his son has terminal brain cancer. After they watched the video, we had them rate their feelings and took blood before and after to measure oxytocin. The change in oxytocin predicted their feelings of empathy. So it's empathy that makes us connect to other people. It's empathy that makes us help other people. It's empathy that makes us moral.
Now this idea is not new. A then unknown philosopher named Adam Smith wrote a book in 1759 called "The Theory of Moral Sentiments." In this book, Smith argued that we are moral creatures, not because of a top-down reason, but for a bottom-up reason. He said we're social creatures, so we share the emotions of others. So if I do something that hurts you, I feel that pain. So I tend to avoid that. If I do something that makes you happy, I get to share your joy. So I tend to do those things. Now this is the same Adam Smith who, 17 years later, would write a little book called "The Wealth of Nations" -- the founding document of economics. But he was, in fact, a moral philosopher, and he was right on why we're moral. I just found the molecule behind it. But knowing that molecule is valuable, because it tells us how to turn up this behavior and what turns it off. In particular, it tells us why we see immorality.
So to investigate immorality, let me bring you back now to 1980. I'm working at a gas station on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, California. You sit in a gas station all day, you see lots of morality and immorality, let me tell you. So one Sunday afternoon, a man walks into my cashier's booth with this beautiful jewelry box. Opens it up and there's a pearl necklace inside. And he said, "Hey, I was in the men's room. I just found this. What do you think we should do with it?" "I don't know, put it in the lost and found." "Well this is very valuable. We have to find the owner for this." I said, "Yea."
So we're trying to decide what to do with this, and the phone rings. And a man says very excitedly, "I was in your gas station a while ago, and I bought this jewelry for my wife, and I can't find it." I said, "Pearl necklace?" "Yeah." "Hey, a guy just found it." "Oh, you're saving my life. Here's my phone number. Tell that guy to wait half an hour. I'll be there and I'll give him a $200 reward." Great, so I tell the guy, "Look, relax. Get yourself a fat reward. Life's good." He said, "I can't do it. I have this job interview in Galena in 15 minutes, and I need this job, I've got to go." Again he asked me, "What do you think we should do?" I'm in high school. I have no idea. So I said, "I'll hold it for you." He said, "You know, you've been so nice, let's split the reward." I'll give you the jewelry, you give me a hundred dollars, and when the guy comes ... "
You see it. I was conned. So this is a classic con called the pigeon drop, and I was the pigeon. So the way many cons work is not that the conman gets the victim to trust him, it's that he shows he trusts the victim. Now we know what happens. The victim's brain releases oxytocin, and you're opening up your wallet or purse, giving away the money.
So who are these people who manipulate our oxytocin systems? We found, testing thousands of individuals, that five percent of the population don't release oxytocin on stimulus. So if you trust them, their brains don't release oxytocin. If there's money on the table, they keep it all. So there's a technical word for these people in my lab. We call them bastards. (Laughter) These are not people you want to have a beer with. They have many of the attributes of psychopaths.
Now there are other ways the system can be inhibited. One is through improper nurturing. So we've studied sexually abused women, and about half those don't release oxytocin on stimulus. You need enough nurturing for this system to develop properly. Also, high stress inhibits oxytocin. So we all know this, when we're really stressed out, we're not acting our best.
There's another way oxytocin is inhibited, which is interesting -- through the action of testosterone. So we, in experiments, have administered testosterone to men. And instead of sharing money, they become selfish. But interestingly, high testosterone males are also more likely to use their own money to punish others for being selfish. (Laughter) Now think about this. It means, within our own biology, we have the yin and yang of morality. We have oxytocin that connects us to others, makes us feel what they feel. And we have testosterone. And men have 10 times the testosterone as women, so men do this more than women -- we have testosterone that makes us want to punish people who behave immorally. We don't need God or government telling us what to do. It's all inside of us.
So you may be wondering: these are beautiful laboratory experiments, do they really apply to real life? Yeah, I've been worrying about that too. So I've gone out of the lab to see if this really holds in our daily lives. So last summer, I attended a wedding in Southern England. 200 people in this beautiful Victorian mansion. I didn't know a single person. And I drove up in my rented Vauxhall. And I took out a centrifuge and dry ice and needles and tubes. And I took blood from the bride and the groom and the wedding party and the family and the friends before and immediately after the vows.
(Laughter)
And guess what? Weddings cause a release of oxytocin, but they do so in a very particular way. Who is the center of the wedding solar system? The bride. She had the biggest increase in oxytocin. Who loves the wedding almost as much as the bride? Her mother, that's right. Her mother was number two. Then the groom's father, then the groom, then the family, then the friends -- arrayed around the bride like planets around the Sun. So I think it tells us that we've designed this ritual to connect us to this new couple, connect us emotionally. Why? Because we need them to be successful at reproducing to perpetuate the species.
I also worried that my trust experiments with small amounts of money didn't really capture how often we actually trust our lives to strangers. So even though I have a fear of heights, I recently strapped myself to another human being and stepped out of an airplane at 12,000 ft. I took my blood before and after, and I had a huge spike of oxytocin. And there are so many ways we can connect to people. For example, through social media. Many people are Tweeting right now. So we investigated the role of social media and found the using social media produced a solid double-digit increase in oxytocin.
So I ran this experiment recently for the Korean Broadcasting System. And they had the reporters and their producers participate. And one of these guys, he must have been 22, he had 150 percent spike in oxytocin. I mean, astounding; no one has this. So he was using social media in private. When I wrote my report to the Koreans, I said, "Look, I don't know what this guy was doing," but my guess was interacting with his mother or his girlfriend. They checked. He was interacting on his girlfriend's Facebook page. There you go. That's connection. So there's tons of ways that we can connect to other people, and it seems to be universal.
Two weeks ago, I just got back from Papua New Guinea where I went up to the highlands -- very isolated tribes of subsistence farmers living as they have lived for millenia. There are 800 different languages in the highlands. These are the most primitive people in the world. And they indeed also release oxytocin.
So oxytocin connects us to other people. Oxytocin makes us feel what other people feel. And it's so easy to cause people's brains to release oxytocin. I know how to do it, and my favorite way to do it is, in fact, the easiest. Let me show it to you. Come here. Give me a hug. (Laughter) There you go.
(Applause)
So my penchant for hugging other people has earned me the nickname Dr. Love. I'm happy to share a little more love in the world, it's great, but here's your prescription from Dr. Love: eight hugs a day. We have found that people who release more oxytocin are happier. And they're happier because they have better relationships of all types. Dr. Love says eight hugs a day. Eight hugs a day -- you'll be happier and the world will be a better place. Of course, if you don't like to touch people, I can always shove this up your nose.
(Laughter)
Thank you.
(Applause) |
It's the Second World War. A German prison camp. And this man, Archie Cochrane, is a prisoner of war and a doctor, and he has a problem. The problem is that the men under his care are suffering from an excruciating and debilitating condition that Archie doesn't really understand. The symptoms are this horrible swelling up of fluids under the skin. But he doesn't know whether it's an infection, whether it's to do with malnutrition. He doesn't know how to cure it. And he's operating in a hostile environment. And people do terrible things in wars. The German camp guards, they've got bored. They've taken to just firing into the prison camp at random for fun. On one particular occasion, one of the guards threw a grenade into the prisoners' lavatory while it was full of prisoners. He said he heard suspicious laughter. And Archie Cochrane, as the camp doctor, was one of the first men in to clear up the mess. And one more thing: Archie was suffering from this illness himself.
So the situation seemed pretty desperate. But Archie Cochrane was a resourceful person. He'd already smuggled vitamin C into the camp, and now he managed to get hold of supplies of marmite on the black market. Now some of you will be wondering what marmite is. Marmite is a breakfast spread beloved of the British. It looks like crude oil. It tastes ... zesty. And importantly, it's a rich source of vitamin B12. So Archie splits the men under his care as best he can into two equal groups. He gives half of them vitamin C. He gives half of them vitamin B12. He very carefully and meticulously notes his results in an exercise book. And after just a few days, it becomes clear that whatever is causing this illness, marmite is the cure.
So Cochrane then goes to the Germans who are running the prison camp. Now you've got to imagine at the moment -- forget this photo, imagine this guy with this long ginger beard and this shock of red hair. He hasn't been able to shave -- a sort of Billy Connolly figure. Cochrane, he starts ranting at these Germans in this Scottish accent -- in fluent German, by the way, but in a Scottish accent -- and explains to them how German culture was the culture that gave Schiller and Goethe to the world. And he can't understand how this barbarism can be tolerated, and he vents his frustrations. And then he goes back to his quarters, breaks down and weeps because he's convinced that the situation is hopeless. But a young German doctor picks up Archie Cochrane's exercise book and says to his colleagues, "This evidence is incontrovertible. If we don't supply vitamins to the prisoners, it's a war crime." And the next morning, supplies of vitamin B12 are delivered to the camp, and the prisoners begin to recover.
Now I'm not telling you this story because I think Archie Cochrane is a dude, although Archie Cochrane is a dude. I'm not even telling you the story because I think we should be running more carefully controlled randomized trials in all aspects of public policy, although I think that would also be completely awesome. I'm telling you this story because Archie Cochrane, all his life, fought against a terrible affliction, and he realized it was debilitating to individuals and it was corrosive to societies. And he had a name for it. He called it the God complex. Now I can describe the symptoms of the God complex very, very easily. So the symptoms of the complex are, no matter how complicated the problem, you have an absolutely overwhelming belief that you are infallibly right in your solution.
Now Archie was a doctor, so he hung around with doctors a lot. And doctors suffer from the God complex a lot. Now I'm an economist, I'm not a doctor, but I see the God complex around me all the time in my fellow economists. I see it in our business leaders. I see it in the politicians we vote for -- people who, in the face of an incredibly complicated world, are nevertheless absolutely convinced that they understand the way that the world works. And you know, with the future billions that we've been hearing about, the world is simply far too complex to understand in that way.
Well let me give you an example. Imagine for a moment that, instead of Tim Harford in front of you, there was Hans Rosling presenting his graphs. You know Hans: the Mick Jagger of TED. (Laughter) And he'd be showing you these amazing statistics, these amazing animations. And they are brilliant; it's wonderful work. But a typical Hans Rosling graph: think for a moment, not what it shows, but think instead about what it leaves out. So it'll show you GDP per capita, population, longevity, that's about it. So three pieces of data for each country -- three pieces of data. Three pieces of data is nothing. I mean, have a look at this graph.
This is produced by the physicist Cesar Hidalgo. He's at MIT. Now you won't be able to understand a word of it, but this is what it looks like. Cesar has trolled the database of over 5,000 different products, and he's used techniques of network analysis to interrogate this database and to graph relationships between the different products. And it's wonderful, wonderful work. You show all these interconnections, all these interrelations. And I think it'll be profoundly useful in understanding how it is that economies grow. Brilliant work. Cesar and I tried to write a piece for The New York Times Magazine explaining how this works. And what we learned is Cesar's work is far too good to explain in The New York Times Magazine.
Five thousand products -- that's still nothing. Five thousand products -- imagine counting every product category in Cesar Hidalgo's data. Imagine you had one second per product category. In about the length of this session, you would have counted all 5,000. Now imagine doing the same thing for every different type of product on sale in Walmart. There are 100,000 there. It would take you all day. Now imagine trying to count every different specific product and service on sale in a major economy such as Tokyo, London or New York. It's even more difficult in Edinburgh because you have to count all the whisky and the tartan. If you wanted to count every product and service on offer in New York -- there are 10 billion of them -- it would take you 317 years. This is how complex the economy we've created is. And I'm just counting toasters here. I'm not trying to solve the Middle East problem. The complexity here is unbelievable. And just a piece of context -- the societies in which our brains evolved had about 300 products and services. You could count them in five minutes.
So this is the complexity of the world that surrounds us. This perhaps is why we find the God complex so tempting. We tend to retreat and say, "We can draw a picture, we can post some graphs, we get it, we understand how this works." And we don't. We never do. Now I'm not trying to deliver a nihilistic message here. I'm not trying to say we can't solve complicated problems in a complicated world. We clearly can. But the way we solve them is with humility -- to abandon the God complex and to actually use a problem-solving technique that works. And we have a problem-solving technique that works. Now you show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error.
Here's an example. This baby was produced through trial and error. I realize that's an ambiguous statement. Maybe I should clarify it. This baby is a human body: it evolved. What is evolution? Over millions of years, variation and selection, variation and selection -- trial and error, trial and error. And it's not just biological systems that produce miracles through trial and error. You could use it in an industrial context.
So let's say you wanted to make detergent. Let's say you're Unilever and you want to make detergent in a factory near Liverpool. How do you do it? Well you have this great big tank full of liquid detergent. You pump it at a high pressure through a nozzle. You create a spray of detergent. Then the spray dries. It turns into powder. It falls to the floor. You scoop it up. You put it in cardboard boxes. You sell it at a supermarket. You make lots of money. How do you design that nozzle? It turns out to be very important. Now if you ascribe to the God complex, what you do is you find yourself a little God. You find yourself a mathematician; you find yourself a physicist -- somebody who understands the dynamics of this fluid. And he will, or she will, calculate the optimal design of the nozzle. Now Unilever did this and it didn't work -- too complicated. Even this problem, too complicated.
But the geneticist Professor Steve Jones describes how Unilever actually did solve this problem -- trial and error, variation and selection. You take a nozzle and you create 10 random variations on the nozzle. You try out all 10; you keep the one that works best. You create 10 variations on that one. You try out all 10. You keep the one that works best. You try out 10 variations on that one. You see how this works, right? And after 45 generations, you have this incredible nozzle. It looks a bit like a chess piece -- functions absolutely brilliantly. We have no idea why it works, no idea at all. And the moment you step back from the God complex -- let's just try to have a bunch of stuff; let's have a systematic way of determining what's working and what's not -- you can solve your problem.
Now this process of trial and error is actually far more common in successful institutions than we care to recognize. And we've heard a lot about how economies function. The U.S. economy is still the world's greatest economy. How did it become the world's greatest economy? I could give you all kinds of facts and figures about the U.S. economy, but I think the most salient one is this: ten percent of American businesses disappear every year. That is a huge failure rate. It's far higher than the failure rate of, say, Americans. Ten percent of Americans don't disappear every year. Which leads us to conclude American businesses fail faster than Americans, and therefore American businesses are evolving faster than Americans. And eventually, they'll have evolved to such a high peak of perfection that they will make us all their pets -- (Laughter) if, of course, they haven't already done so. I sometimes wonder. But it's this process of trial and error that explains this great divergence, this incredible performance of Western economies. It didn't come because you put some incredibly smart person in charge. It's come through trial and error.
Now I've been sort of banging on about this for the last couple of months, and people sometimes say to me, "Well Tim, it's kind of obvious. Obviously trial and error is very important. Obviously experimentation is very important. Now why are you just wandering around saying this obvious thing?"
So I say, okay, fine. You think it's obvious? I will admit it's obvious when schools start teaching children that there are some problems that don't have a correct answer. Stop giving them lists of questions every single one of which has an answer. And there's an authority figure in the corner behind the teacher's desk who knows all the answers. And if you can't find the answers, you must be lazy or stupid. When schools stop doing that all the time, I will admit that, yes, it's obvious that trial and error is a good thing. When a politician stands up campaigning for elected office and says, "I want to fix our health system. I want to fix our education system. I have no idea how to do it. I have half a dozen ideas. We're going to test them out. They'll probably all fail. Then we'll test some other ideas out. We'll find some that work. We'll build on those. We'll get rid of the ones that don't." -- when a politician campaigns on that platform, and more importantly, when voters like you and me are willing to vote for that kind of politician, then I will admit that it is obvious that trial and error works, and that -- thank you.
(Applause)
Until then, until then I'm going to keep banging on about trial and error and why we should abandon the God complex. Because it's so hard to admit our own fallibility. It's so uncomfortable. And Archie Cochrane understood this as well as anybody. There's this one trial he ran many years after World War II. He wanted to test out the question of, where is it that patients should recover from heart attacks? Should they recover in a specialized cardiac unit in hospital, or should they recover at home? All the cardiac doctors tried to shut him down. They had the God complex in spades. They knew that their hospitals were the right place for patients, and they knew it was very unethical to run any kind of trial or experiment.
Nevertheless, Archie managed to get permission to do this. He ran his trial. And after the trial had been running for a little while, he gathered together all his colleagues around his table, and he said, "Well, gentlemen, we have some preliminary results. They're not statistically significant. But we have something. And it turns out that you're right and I'm wrong. It is dangerous for patients to recover from heart attacks at home. They should be in hospital." And there's this uproar, and all the doctors start pounding the table and saying, "We always said you were unethical, Archie. You're killing people with your clinical trials. You need to shut it down now. Shut it down at once." And there's this huge hubbub. Archie lets it die down. And then he says, "Well that's very interesting, gentlemen, because when I gave you the table of results, I swapped the two columns around. It turns out your hospitals are killing people, and they should be at home. Would you like to close down the trial now, or should we wait until we have robust results?" Tumbleweed rolls through the meeting room.
But Cochrane would do that kind of thing. And the reason he would do that kind of thing is because he understood it feels so much better to stand there and say, "Here in my own little world, I am a god, I understand everything. I do not want to have my opinions challenged. I do not want to have my conclusions tested." It feels so much more comfortable simply to lay down the law. Cochrane understood that uncertainty, that fallibility, that being challenged, they hurt. And you sometimes need to be shocked out of that. Now I'm not going to pretend that this is easy. It isn't easy. It's incredibly painful.
And since I started talking about this subject and researching this subject, I've been really haunted by something a Japanese mathematician said on the subject. So shortly after the war, this young man, Yutaka Taniyama, developed this amazing conjecture called the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture. It turned out to be absolutely instrumental many decades later in proving Fermat's Last Theorem. In fact, it turns out it's equivalent to proving Fermat's Last Theorem. You prove one, you prove the other. But it was always a conjecture. Taniyama tried and tried and tried and he could never prove that it was true. And shortly before his 30th birthday in 1958, Yutaka Taniyama killed himself. His friend, Goro Shimura -- who worked on the mathematics with him -- many decades later, reflected on Taniyama's life. He said, "He was not a very careful person as a mathematician. He made a lot of mistakes. But he made mistakes in a good direction. I tried to emulate him, but I realized it is very difficult to make good mistakes."
Thank you.
(Applause) |
So what's image got do with it? And I must say, I think Emeka is trying to send a lot of subliminal messages, because I'm going to keep harping on some of the issues that have come up. But I'm going to try and do something different, and try and just close the loop with some of my personal stories, and try and put a face to a lot of the issues that we've been talking about. So, Africa is a complex continent full of contradictions, as you can see. We're not the only ones.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
And you know, it's amazing. I mean, we need a whole conference just devoted to telling the good stories about the continent. Just think about that, you know? And this is typically what we've been talking about, the role that the media plays in focusing just on the negative stuff. Now, why is that a problem? A typical disaster story: disease, corruption, poverty. And some of you might be standing here thinking, saying, "OK, you know, Ory, you're Harvard-educated, and all you privileged people come here, saying, 'Forget the poor people. Let's focus on business and the markets, and whatever.' " And they're all, "There's the 80 percent of Africans who really need help."
And I want to tell you that this is my story, OK? And it's the story of many of the Africans who are here. We start with poverty. I didn't grow up in the slums or anything that dire, but I know what it is to grow up without having money, or being able to support family. Euvin was talking about bellwether signs. The bellwether for whether our family was broke or not was breakfast. You know, when things were good, we had eggs and sausages. When things were bad, we had porridge. And like many African families, my parents could never save because they supported siblings, cousins, you know, their parents, and things were always dicey. Now, when I was born, they realized they had a pretty smart kid, and they didn't want me to go to the neighborhood school, which was free.
And they adopted a very interesting approach to education, which was they were going to take me to a school that they can barely afford. So they took me to a private, Catholic, elementary school, which set the foundation for what ended up being my career. And what happened was, because they could afford it sometimes, sometimes not, I got kicked out pretty much every term. You know, someone would come in with a list of the people who haven't paid school fees, and when they started getting pretty strict, you had to leave, until your school fees could be paid. And I remember thinking, I mean, why don't these guys just take me to a cheap school? Because you know, as a kid you're embarrassed and you're sensitive, and everyone knows you guys don't have money. But they kept at it, and I now understand why they did what they did.
They talk about corruption. In Kenya, we have an entrance exam to go into high school. And there's national schools, which are like the best schools, and provincial schools. My dream school at that time was Kenya High School, a national school. I missed the cutoff by one point. And I was so disappointed, and I was like, "Oh my God, you know, what am I going to do?" And my father said, "OK, listen. Let's go and try and talk to the headmistress. You know, it's just one point. I mean, maybe she'll let you in if that slot's still there." So we went to the school, and because we were nobodies, and because we didn't have privilege, and because my father didn't have the right last name, he was treated like dirt. And I sat and listened to the headmistress talk to him, saying, you know, who do you think you are? And, you know, you must be joking if you think you can get a slot. And I had gone to school with other girls, who were kids of politicians, and who had done much, much worse than I did, and they had slots there. And there's nothing worse than seeing your parent being humiliated in front of you, you know? And we left, and I swore to myself, and I was like, "I'm never, ever going to have to beg for anything in my life." They called me two weeks later, they're like, oh, yeah, you can come now. And I told them to stuff it.
(Laughter) (Applause)
Final story, and I sort of have to speak quickly. Disease. My father, who I've been talking about, died of AIDS in 1999. He never told anyone that he had AIDS, his fear of the stigma was so strong. And I'm pretty much the one who figured it out, because I was a nerd. And I was in the States at the time, and they called me. He was very sick, the first time he got sick. And he had Cryptococcal meningitis. And so I went on to Google, Cryptococcal meningitis, you know. Because of doctor-patient privilege, they couldn't really tell us what was going on. But they were like, you know, this is a long-term thing. And when I went online and looked at the infectious -- read about the disease, I pretty much realized what was going on.
The first time he got sick, he recovered. But what happened was that he had to be on medication that, at that time -- Diflucan, which in the States is used for yeast infections -- cost 30 dollars a pill. He had to be on that pill for the rest of his life. You know, so money ran out. He got sick again. And up until that time, he had a friend who used to travel to India, and he used to import, bring him, could get him a generic version of it. And that kept him going. But the money ran out. He got sick again. He got sick on a Friday. At that time, there was only one bank that had ATMs in Kenya, and we could not get cash. The family couldn't get cash for him to start the treatment until Monday. The hospital put him on a water drip for three days. And finally, we figured, well, OK, we'd better just try and take him to a public hospital. At least he'll get treated while we try to figure out the money situation. And he died when the ambulance was coming to the hospital to take him.
And, you know, now, imagine if -- and I could go on and on -- imagine if this is all you know about me. How would you look at me? With pity, you know. Sadness. And this is how you look at Africa. This is the damage it causes. You don't see the other side of me. You don't see the blogger, you don't see the Harvard-educated lawyer, the vibrant person, you know? And I just wanted to personalize that. Because we talk about it in big terms, and you wonder, you know, so what? But it's damaging. And I'm not unique, right? Imagine if all you knew about William was the fact that he grew up in a poor village. And you didn't know about the windmill, you know? And I was just moved. I was actually crying during his presentation. He was like, I try and I make. I was like Nike should hire him, you know, "Just do it!"
(Laughter)
And this is, again, the point I'm trying to make. When you focus just on the disasters -- (Laughter) (Applause) -- we're ignoring the potential. So, what is to be done? First of all, Africans, we need to get better at telling our stories. We heard about that yesterday. We had some of them this morning. And this is an example, you know, blogging is one way of doing that. Afrigator is an aggregator of African blogs that was developed in South Africa. So we need to start getting better. If no one else will tell our stories, let's do it. And going back to the point I was trying to make, this is the Swahili Wikipedia. Swahili is spoken by about 50 million people in East Africa. It only has five contributors. Four of them are white males -- non-native speakers. The other person is -- Ndesanjo, if you're here, stand up -- is a Tanzanian, [the] first Swahili blogger. He's the only African who's contributing to this.
People, please. We can't whine and complain the West is doing this. What are we doing? Where are the rest of the Swahili speakers? Why are we not generating our own content? You know, it's not enough to complain. We need to act. Reuters now integrates African blogs into their coverage of Africa. So, that's a start, and we've heard of all their other initiatives. The cheetah generation. The aid approach, you know, is flawed. And after all the hoopla of Live 8, we're still not anywhere in the picture. No, you're not.
(Laughter)
But the point I'm trying to make, though, is that it's not enough for us to criticize. And for those of you in the diaspora who are struggling with where should I be, should I move back, should I stay? You know, just jump. The continent needs you. And I can't emphasize that enough, you know. I walked away from a job with one of the top firms in D.C., Covington and Burling, six figures. With two paychecks, or three paychecks, I could solve a lot of my family's problems. But I walked away from that, because my passion was here, and because I wanted to do things that were fulfilling. And because I'm needed here, you know? I probably can win a prize for the most ways to use a Harvard Law School degree because of all the things I'm doing.
One is because I'm pretty aggressive, and I try and find, you know, opportunities. But there is such a need, you know? I'm a corporate lawyer most of the time for an organization called Enablis that supports entrepreneurs in South Africa. We're now moving into East Africa. And we give them business development services, as well as financing loan and equity. I've also set up a project in Kenya, and what we do is we track the performance of Kenyan MPs. My partner, M, who's a tech guru, hacked WordPress. It costs us, like, 20 dollars a month just for hosting. Everything else on there is a labor of love. We've manually entered all the data there. And you can get profiles of each MP, questions they've asked in parliament. We have a comment function, where people can ask their MPs questions. There are some MPs who participate, and come back and ask.
And basically, we started this because we were tired of complaining about our politicians. You know, I believe that accountability stems from demand. You're not just going to be accountable out of the goodness of your heart. And we as Africans need to start challenging our leaders. What are they doing? You know, they're not going to change just out of nowhere. So we need new policies, we need -- where's that coming from, you know? Another thing is that these leaders are a reflection of our society. We talk about African governments like they've been dropped from Mars, you know? They come from us. And what is it about our society that is generating leaders that we don't like? And how can we change that? So Mzalendo was one small way we thought we could start inspiring people to start holding their leaders accountable. Where do we go from here? I believe in the power of ideas. I believe in the power of sharing knowledge.
And I'd ask all of you, when you leave here, please just share, and keep the ideas that you've gotten out of here going, because it can make a difference. The other thing I want to urge you to do is take an interest in the individual. I've had lots of conversations about things I think need to be happening in Africa. People are like, "OK, if you don't do aid, I'm a bleeding heart liberal, what can I do?" And when I talk about my ideas, they're like, "BBut it's not scalable, you know. Give me something I can do with Paypal." It's not that easy, you know? And sometimes just taking an interest in the individual, in the fellows you've met, and the businesspeople you've met, it can make a huge difference, especially in Africa, because usually the individual in Africa carries a lot of people behind them. Practically. I mean, when I was a first-year student in law school, my mom's business had collapsed, so I was supporting her. My sister was struggling to get through undergrad. I was helping her pay her tuition. My cousin ran out of school fees, and she's really smart. I was paying her school fees.
A cousin of mine died of AIDS, left an orphan, so we said, well, what are we going to do with her? You know, she's now my baby sister. And because of the opportunities that were afforded to me, I am able to lift all those people. So, don't underestimate that. An example. This man changed my life. He's a professor. He's now at Vanderbilt. He's an undergrad professor, Mitchell Seligson. And because of him, I got into Harvard Law School, because he took an interest. I was taking a class of his, and he was just like, this is an overeager student, which we don't normally get in the United States, because everyone else is cynical and jaded. He called me to his office and said, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" I said, "I want to be a lawyer." And he was like, "Why? You know, we don't need another lawyer in the United States." And he tried to talk me out of it, but it was like, "OK, I know nothing about applying to law school, I'm poli-sci Ph.D. But, you know, let's figure out what I need you to do, what I need to do to help you out."
It was like, "Where do you want to go?" And to me at that time university -- I was at University of Pitts for undergrad, and that was like heaven, OK, because compared to what could have been in Kenya. So I'm like, "Yeah, I'm just applying to Pitt for law school." He was like, "Why? You know, you're smart, you have all these things going for you." And I'm like, "Because I'm here and it's cheap, and you know, I kind of like Pittsburgh." Like, that's the dumbest reason I've ever heard for applying to law school. And, you know, so he took me under his wing, and he encouraged me. And he said, "Look, you can get into Harvard, you're that good, OK? And if they don't admit you, they're the ones who are messed up." And he built me up, you know? And this is just an illustration.
You can meet other individuals here. We just need a push. That's all I needed was a push to go to the next level. Basically, I want to end with my vision for Africa, you know? A gentleman spoke yesterday about the indignity of us having to leave the continent so that we can fulfill our potential. You know, my vision is that my daughter, and any other African child being born today, can be whoever they want to be here, without having to leave. And they can have the possibility of transcending the circumstances under which they were born. That's one thing you Americans take for granted, you know? That you can grow up, you know, not so good circumstances, and you can move. Just because you are born in rural Arkansas, whatever, that doesn't define who you are. For most Africans today, where you live, or where you were born, and the circumstances under which you were born, determine the rest of your life. I would like to see that change, and the change starts with us. And as Africans, we need to take responsibility for our continent. Thank you.
(Applause) |
I thought I would start with a very brief history of cities. Settlements typically began with people clustered around a well, and the size of that settlement was roughly the distance you could walk with a pot of water on your head. In fact, if you fly over Germany, for example, and you look down and you see these hundreds of little villages, they're all about a mile apart. You needed easy access to the fields. And for hundreds, even thousands of years, the home was really the center of life. Life was very small for most people. It was a center of entertainment, of energy production, of work, a center of health care. That's where babies were born and people died.
Then, with industrialization, everything started to become centralized. You had dirty factories that were moved to the outskirts of cities. Production was centralized in assembly plants. You had centralized energy production. Learning took place in schools. Health care took place in hospitals. And then you had networks that developed. You had water, sewer networks that allowed for this kind of unchecked expansion. You had separated functions, increasingly. You had rail networks that connected residential, industrial, commercial areas. You had auto networks. In fact, the model was really, give everybody a car, build roads to everything, and give people a place to park when they get there. It was not a very functional model. And we still live in that world, and this is what we end up with.
So you have the sprawl of LA, the sprawl of Mexico City. You have these unbelievable new cities in China, which you might call tower sprawl. They're all building cities on the model that we invented in the '50s and '60s, which is really obsolete, I would argue, and there are hundreds and hundreds of new cities that are being planned all over the world. In China alone, 300 million people, some say 400 million people, will move to the city over the next 15 years. That means building the equivalent of the entire built infrastructure of the US in 15 years. Imagine that.
And we should all care about this whether you live in cities or not. Cities will account for 90 percent of the population growth, 80 percent of the global CO2, 75 percent of energy use, but at the same time it's where people want to be, increasingly. More than half the people now in the world live in cities, and that will just continue to escalate.
Cities are places of celebration, personal expression. You have the flash mobs of pillow fights that -- I've been to a couple. They're quite fun. You have --
(Laughter)
Cities are where most of the wealth is created, and particularly in the developing world, it's where women find opportunities. That's a lot of the reason why cities are growing very quickly.
Now there's some trends that will impact cities. First of all, work is becoming distributed and mobile. The office building is basically obsolete for doing private work. The home, once again, because of distributed computation -- Communication is becoming a center of life, so it's a center of production and learning and shopping and health care and all of these things that we used to think of as taking place outside of the home.
And increasingly, everything that people buy, every consumer product, in one way or another, can be personalized. And that's a very important trend to think about.
So this is my image of the city of the future.
(Laughter)
In that it's a place for people, you know. Maybe not the way people dress, but -- You know, the question now is, how can we have all the good things that we identify with cities without all the bad things?
This is Bangalore. It took me a couple of hours to get a few miles in Bangalore last year. So with cities, you also have congestion and pollution and disease and all these negative things. How can we have the good stuff without the bad?
So we went back and started looking at the great cities that evolved before the cars. Paris was a series of these little villages that came together, and you still see that structure today. The 20 arrondissements of Paris are these little neighborhoods. Most of what people need in life can be within a five- or 10-minute walk. And if you look at the data, when you have that kind of a structure, you get a very even distribution of the shops and the physicians and the pharmacies and the cafes in Paris. And then you look at cities that evolved after the automobile, and it's not that kind of a pattern. There's very little that's within a five-minute walk of most areas of places like Pittsburgh. Not to pick on Pittsburgh, but most American cities really have evolved this way.
So we said, well, let's look at new cities, and we're involved in a couple of new city projects in China. So we said, let's start with that neighborhood cell. We think of it as a compact urban cell. So provide most of what most people want within that 20-minute walk. This can also be a resilient electrical microgrid, community heating, power, communication networks, etc. can be concentrated there. Stewart Brand would put a micronuclear reactor right in the center, probably. And he might be right. And then we can form, in effect, a mesh network. It's something of an Internet typology pattern, so you can have a series of these neighborhoods. You can dial up the density -- about 20,000 people per cell, if it's Cambridge. Go up to 50,000 if it's Manhattan density. You connect everything with mass transit and you provide most of what most people need within that neighborhood. You can begin to develop a whole typology of streetscapes and the vehicles that can go on them. I won't go through all of them. I'll just show one.
This is Boulder. It's a great example of kind of a mobility parkway, a superhighway for joggers and bicyclists, where you can go from one end of the city to the other without crossing the street, and they also have bike-sharing, which I'll get into in a minute.
This is even a more interesting solution in Seoul, Korea. They took the elevated highway, they got rid of it, they reclaimed the street, the river down below, below the street, and you can go from one end of Seoul to the other without crossing a pathway for cars.
The High Line in Manhattan is very similar. You have these rapidly emerging bike lanes all over the world. I lived in Manhattan for 15 years. I went back a couple of weekends ago, took this photograph of these fabulous new bike lanes that they have installed. They're still not to where Copenhagen is, where something like 42 percent of the trips within the city are by bicycle. It's mostly just because they have fantastic infrastructure there.
We actually did exactly the wrong thing in Boston. The Big Dig --
(Laughter)
So we got rid of the highway but we created a traffic island, and it's certainly not a mobility pathway for anything other than cars.
Mobility on demand is something we've been thinking about, so we think we need an ecosystem of these shared-use vehicles connected to mass transit. These are some of the vehicles that we've been working on. But shared use is really key. If you share a vehicle, you can have at least four people use one vehicle, as opposed to one. We have Hubway here in Boston, the Vélib' system in Paris.
We've been developing, at the Media Lab, this little city car that is optimized for shared use in cities. We got rid of all the useless things like engines and transmissions. We moved everything to the wheels, so you have the drive motor, the steering motor, the breaking -- all in the wheel. That left the chassis unencumbered, so you can do things like fold, so you can fold this little vehicle up to occupy a tiny little footprint.
This was a video that was on European television last week showing the Spanish Minister of Industry driving this little vehicle, and when it's folded, it can spin. You don't need reverse. You don't need parallel parking. You just spin and go directly in.
(Laughter)
So we've been working with a company to commercialize this. My PhD student Ryan Chin presented these early ideas two years ago at a TEDx conference.
So what's interesting is, then if you begin to add new things to it, like autonomy, you get out of the car, you park at your destination, you pat it on the butt, it goes and it parks itself, it charges itself, and you can get something like seven times as many vehicles in a given area as conventional cars, and we think this is the future. Actually, we could do this today. It's not really a problem. We can combine shared use and folding and autonomy and we get something like 28 times the land utilization with that kind of strategy.
One of our graduate students then says, well, how does a driverless car communicate with pedestrians? You have nobody to make eye contact with. You don't know if it's going to run you over. So he's developing strategies so the vehicle can communicate with pedestrians, so --
(Laughter)
So the headlights are eyeballs, the pupils can dilate, we have directional audio, we can throw sound directly at people. What I love about this project is he solved a problem that doesn't exist yet, so --
(Laughter)
We also think that we can democratize access to bike lanes. You know, bike lanes are mostly used by young guys in stretchy pants. So --
(Laughter)
We think we can develop a vehicle that operates on bike lanes, accessible to elderly and disabled, women in skirts, businesspeople, and address the issues of energy congestion, mobility, aging and obesity simultaneously. That's our challenge.
This is an early design for this little three-wheel. It's an electronic bike. You have to pedal to operate it in a bike lane, but if you're an older person, that's a switch. If you're a healthy person, you might have to work really hard to go fast. You can dial in 40 calories going into work and 500 going home, when you can take a shower. We hope to have that built this fall.
Housing is another area where we can really improve. Mayor Menino in Boston says lack of affordable housing for young people is one of the biggest problems the city faces. Developers say, OK, we'll build little teeny apartments. People say, we don't really want to live in a little teeny conventional apartment. So we're saying, let's build a standardized chassis, much like our car. Let's bring advanced technology into the apartment, technology-enabled infill, give people the tools within this open-loft chassis to go through a process of defining what their needs and values and activities are, and then a matching algorithm will match a unique assembly of integrated infill components, furniture, and cabinetry, that are personalized to that individual, and they give them the tools to go through the process and to refine it, and it's something like working with an architect, where the dialogue starts when you give an alternative to a person to react to.
Now, the most interesting implementation of that for us is when you can begin to have robotic walls, so your space can convert from exercise to a workplace, if you run a virtual company. You have guests over, you have two guest rooms that are developed. You have a conventional one-bedroom arrangement when you need it. Maybe that's most of the time. You have a dinner party. The table folds out to fit 16 people in otherwise a conventional one-bedroom, or maybe you want a dance studio. I mean, architects have been thinking about these ideas for a long time. What we need to do now, develop things that can scale to those 300 million Chinese people that would like to live in the city, and very comfortably. We think we can make a very small apartment that functions as if it's twice as big by utilizing these strategies. I don't believe in smart homes. That's sort of a bogus concept. I think you have to build dumb homes and put smart stuff in it.
(Laughter)
And so we've been working on a chassis of the wall itself. You know, standardized platform with the motors and the battery when it operates, little solenoids that will lock it in place and get low-voltage power. We think this can all be standardized, and then people can personalize the stuff that goes into that wall, and like the car, we can integrate all kinds of sensing to be aware of human activity, so if there's a baby or a puppy in the way, you won't have a problem.
(Laughter)
So the developers say, well, this is great. OK, so if we have a conventional building, we have a fixed envelope, maybe we can put in 14 units. If they function as if they're twice as big, we can get 28 units in. That means twice as much parking, though. Parking's really expensive. It's about 70,000 dollars per space to build a conventional parking spot inside a building. So if you can have folding and autonomy, you can do that in one-seventh of the space. That goes down to 10,000 dollars per car, just for the cost of the parking. You add shared use, and you can even go further.
We can also integrate all kinds of advanced technology through this process. There's a path to market for innovative companies to bring technology into the home. In this case, a project we're doing with Siemens. We have sensors on all the furniture, all the infill, that understands where people are and what they're doing. Blue light is very efficient, so we have these tunable 24-bit LED lighting fixtures. It recognizes where the person is, what they're doing, fills out the light when necessary to full spectrum white light, and saves maybe 30, 40 percent in energy consumption, we think, over even conventional state-of-the-art lighting systems. This just shows you the data that comes from the sensors that are embedded in the furniture. We don't really believe in cameras to do things in homes. We think these little wireless sensors are more effective.
We think we can also personalize sunlight. That's sort of the ultimate personalization in some ways. So we've looked at articulating mirrors of the facade that can throw shafts of sunlight anywhere into the space, therefore allowing you to shade most of the glass on a hot day like today. In this case, she picks up her phone, she can map food preparation at the kitchen island to a particular location of sunlight. An algorithm will keep it in that location as long as she's engaged in that activity. This can be combined with LED lighting as well.
We think workplaces should be shared. I mean, this is really the workplace of the future, I think. This is Starbucks, you know. Maybe a third -- And you see everybody has their back to the wall and they have food and coffee down the way and they're in their own little personal bubble. We need shared spaces for interaction and collaboration. We're not doing a very good job with that. At the Cambridge Innovation Center, you can have shared desks. I've spent a lot of time in Finland at the design factory of Aalto University, where the they have a shared shop and shared fab lab, shared quiet spaces, electronics spaces, recreation places.
We think ultimately, all of this stuff can come together, a new model for mobility, a new model for housing, a new model for how we live and work, a path to market for advanced technologies. But in the end, the main thing we need to focus on are people. Cities are all about people. They're places for people. There's no reason why we can't dramatically improve the livability and creativity of cities like they've done in Melbourne with the laneways while at the same time dramatically reducing CO2 and energy. It's a global imperative. We have to get this right.
Thank you.
(Applause) |
My talk is "Flapping Birds and Space Telescopes." And you would think that should have nothing to do with one another, but I hope by the end of these 18 minutes, you'll see a little bit of a relation. It ties to origami. So let me start. What is origami? Most people think they know what origami is. It's this: flapping birds, toys, cootie catchers, that sort of thing. And that is what origami used to be. But it's become something else. It's become an art form, a form of sculpture.
The common theme -- what makes it origami -- is folding is how we create the form. You know, it's very old. This is a plate from 1797. It shows these women playing with these toys. If you look close, it's this shape, called a crane. Every Japanese kid learns how to fold that crane. So this art has been around for hundreds of years, and you would think something that's been around that long -- so restrictive, folding only -- everything that could be done has been done a long time ago. And that might have been the case.
But in the twentieth century, a Japanese folder named Yoshizawa came along, and he created tens of thousands of new designs. But even more importantly, he created a language, a way we could communicate, a code of dots, dashes and arrows. Harkening back to Susan Blackmore's talk, we now have a means of transmitting information with heredity and selection, and we know where that leads. And where it has led in origami is to things like this. This is an origami figure -- one sheet, no cuts, folding only, hundreds of folds. This, too, is origami, and this shows where we've gone in the modern world. Naturalism. Detail. You can get horns, antlers -- even, if you look close, cloven hooves.
And it raises a question: what changed? And what changed is something you might not have expected in an art, which is math. That is, people applied mathematical principles to the art, to discover the underlying laws. And that leads to a very powerful tool. The secret to productivity in so many fields -- and in origami -- is letting dead people do your work for you.
(Laughter)
Because what you can do is take your problem, and turn it into a problem that someone else has solved, and use their solutions. And I want to tell you how we did that in origami. Origami revolves around crease patterns. The crease pattern shown here is the underlying blueprint for an origami figure. And you can't just draw them arbitrarily. They have to obey four simple laws. And they're very simple, easy to understand. The first law is two-colorability. You can color any crease pattern with just two colors without ever having the same color meeting. The directions of the folds at any vertex -- the number of mountain folds, the number of valley folds -- always differs by two. Two more or two less. Nothing else. If you look at the angles around the fold, you find that if you number the angles in a circle, all the even-numbered angles add up to a straight line, all the odd-numbered angles add up to a straight line. And if you look at how the layers stack, you'll find that no matter how you stack folds and sheets, a sheet can never penetrate a fold. So that's four simple laws. That's all you need in origami. All of origami comes from that.
And you'd think, "Can four simple laws give rise to that kind of complexity?" But indeed, the laws of quantum mechanics can be written down on a napkin, and yet they govern all of chemistry, all of life, all of history. If we obey these laws, we can do amazing things. So in origami, to obey these laws, we can take simple patterns -- like this repeating pattern of folds, called textures -- and by itself it's nothing. But if we follow the laws of origami, we can put these patterns into another fold that itself might be something very, very simple, but when we put it together, we get something a little different. This fish, 400 scales -- again, it is one uncut square, only folding. And if you don't want to fold 400 scales, you can back off and just do a few things, and add plates to the back of a turtle, or toes. Or you can ramp up and go up to 50 stars on a flag, with 13 stripes. And if you want to go really crazy, 1,000 scales on a rattlesnake. And this guy's on display downstairs, so take a look if you get a chance.
The most powerful tools in origami have related to how we get parts of creatures. And I can put it in this simple equation. We take an idea, combine it with a square, and you get an origami figure.
(Laughter)
What matters is what we mean by those symbols. And you might say, "Can you really be that specific? I mean, a stag beetle -- it's got two points for jaws, it's got antennae. Can you be that specific in the detail?" And yeah, you really can. So how do we do that? Well, we break it down into a few smaller steps. So let me stretch out that equation. I start with my idea. I abstract it. What's the most abstract form? It's a stick figure. And from that stick figure, I somehow have to get to a folded shape that has a part for every bit of the subject, a flap for every leg. And then once I have that folded shape that we call the base, you can make the legs narrower, you can bend them, you can turn it into the finished shape.
Now the first step, pretty easy. Take an idea, draw a stick figure. The last step is not so hard, but that middle step -- going from the abstract description to the folded shape -- that's hard. But that's the place where the mathematical ideas can get us over the hump. And I'm going to show you all how to do that so you can go out of here and fold something. But we're going to start small. This base has a lot of flaps in it. We're going to learn how to make one flap. How would you make a single flap? Take a square. Fold it in half, fold it in half, fold it again, until it gets long and narrow, and then we'll say at the end of that, that's a flap. I could use that for a leg, an arm, anything like that.
What paper went into that flap? Well, if I unfold it and go back to the crease pattern, you can see that the upper left corner of that shape is the paper that went into the flap. So that's the flap, and all the rest of the paper's left over. I can use it for something else. Well, there are other ways of making a flap. There are other dimensions for flaps. If I make the flaps skinnier, I can use a bit less paper. If I make the flap as skinny as possible, I get to the limit of the minimum amount of paper needed. And you can see there, it needs a quarter-circle of paper to make a flap. There's other ways of making flaps. If I put the flap on the edge, it uses a half circle of paper. And if I make the flap from the middle, it uses a full circle. So, no matter how I make a flap, it needs some part of a circular region of paper. So now we're ready to scale up. What if I want to make something that has a lot of flaps? What do I need? I need a lot of circles.
And in the 1990s, origami artists discovered these principles and realized we could make arbitrarily complicated figures just by packing circles. And here's where the dead people start to help us out, because lots of people have studied the problem of packing circles. I can rely on that vast history of mathematicians and artists looking at disc packings and arrangements. And I can use those patterns now to create origami shapes. So we figured out these rules whereby you pack circles, you decorate the patterns of circles with lines according to more rules. That gives you the folds. Those folds fold into a base. You shape the base. You get a folded shape -- in this case, a cockroach. And it's so simple.
(Laughter)
It's so simple that a computer could do it. And you say, "Well, you know, how simple is that?" But computers -- you need to be able to describe things in very basic terms, and with this, we could. So I wrote a computer program a bunch of years ago called TreeMaker, and you can download it from my website. It's free. It runs on all the major platforms -- even Windows.
(Laughter)
And you just draw a stick figure, and it calculates the crease pattern. It does the circle packing, calculates the crease pattern, and if you use that stick figure that I just showed -- which you can kind of tell, it's a deer, it's got antlers -- you'll get this crease pattern. And if you take this crease pattern, you fold on the dotted lines, you'll get a base that you can then shape into a deer, with exactly the crease pattern that you wanted. And if you want a different deer, not a white-tailed deer, but you want a mule deer, or an elk, you change the packing, and you can do an elk. Or you could do a moose. Or, really, any other kind of deer. These techniques revolutionized this art. We found we could do insects, spiders, which are close, things with legs, things with legs and wings, things with legs and antennae. And if folding a single praying mantis from a single uncut square wasn't interesting enough, then you could do two praying mantises from a single uncut square. She's eating him. I call it "Snack Time."
And you can do more than just insects. This -- you can put details, toes and claws. A grizzly bear has claws. This tree frog has toes. Actually, lots of people in origami now put toes into their models. Toes have become an origami meme, because everyone's doing it. You can make multiple subjects. So these are a couple of instrumentalists. The guitar player from a single square, the bass player from a single square. And if you say, "Well, but the guitar, bass -- that's not so hot. Do a little more complicated instrument." Well, then you could do an organ.
(Laughter)
And what this has allowed is the creation of origami-on-demand. So now people can say, "I want exactly this and this and this," and you can go out and fold it. And sometimes you create high art, and sometimes you pay the bills by doing some commercial work. But I want to show you some examples. Everything you'll see here, except the car, is origami.
(Video)
(Applause)
Just to show you, this really was folded paper. Computers made things move, but these were all real, folded objects that we made. And we can use this not just for visuals, but it turns out to be useful even in the real world. Surprisingly, origami and the structures that we've developed in origami turn out to have applications in medicine, in science, in space, in the body, consumer electronics and more.
And I want to show you some of these examples. One of the earliest was this pattern, this folded pattern, studied by Koryo Miura, a Japanese engineer. He studied a folding pattern, and realized this could fold down into an extremely compact package that had a very simple opening and closing structure. And he used it to design this solar array. It's an artist's rendition, but it flew in a Japanese telescope in 1995. Now, there is actually a little origami in the James Webb Space Telescope, but it's very simple. The telescope, going up in space, it unfolds in two places. It folds in thirds. It's a very simple pattern -- you wouldn't even call that origami. They certainly didn't need to talk to origami artists.
But if you want to go higher and go larger than this, then you might need some origami. Engineers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab had an idea for a telescope much larger. They called it the Eyeglass. The design called for geosynchronous orbit 25,000 miles up, 100-meter diameter lens. So, imagine a lens the size of a football field. There were two groups of people who were interested in this: planetary scientists, who want to look up, and then other people, who wanted to look down. Whether you look up or look down, how do you get it up in space? You've got to get it up there in a rocket. And rockets are small. So you have to make it smaller. How do you make a large sheet of glass smaller? Well, about the only way is to fold it up somehow. So you have to do something like this. This was a small model.
Folded lens, you divide up the panels, you add flexures. But this pattern's not going to work to get something 100 meters down to a few meters. So the Livermore engineers, wanting to make use of the work of dead people, or perhaps live origamists, said, "Let's see if someone else is doing this sort of thing." So they looked into the origami community, we got in touch with them, and I started working with them. And we developed a pattern together that scales to arbitrarily large size, but that allows any flat ring or disc to fold down into a very neat, compact cylinder. And they adopted that for their first generation, which was not 100 meters -- it was a five-meter. But this is a five-meter telescope -- has about a quarter-mile focal length. And it works perfectly on its test range, and it indeed folds up into a neat little bundle.
Now, there is other origami in space. Japan Aerospace [Exploration] Agency flew a solar sail, and you can see here that the sail expands out, and you can still see the fold lines. The problem that's being solved here is something that needs to be big and sheet-like at its destination, but needs to be small for the journey. And that works whether you're going into space, or whether you're just going into a body. And this example is the latter. This is a heart stent developed by Zhong You at Oxford University. It holds open a blocked artery when it gets to its destination, but it needs to be much smaller for the trip there, through your blood vessels. And this stent folds down using an origami pattern, based on a model called the water bomb base.
Airbag designers also have the problem of getting flat sheets into a small space. And they want to do their design by simulation. So they need to figure out how, in a computer, to flatten an airbag. And the algorithms that we developed to do insects turned out to be the solution for airbags to do their simulation. And so they can do a simulation like this. Those are the origami creases forming, and now you can see the airbag inflate and find out, does it work? And that leads to a really interesting idea.
You know, where did these things come from? Well, the heart stent came from that little blow-up box that you might have learned in elementary school. It's the same pattern, called the water bomb base. The airbag-flattening algorithm came from all the developments of circle packing and the mathematical theory that was really developed just to create insects -- things with legs. The thing is, that this often happens in math and science. When you get math involved, problems that you solve for aesthetic value only, or to create something beautiful, turn around and turn out to have an application in the real world. And as weird and surprising as it may sound, origami may someday even save a life. Thanks.
(Applause) |
So in 1781, an English composer, technologist and astronomer called William Herschel noticed an object on the sky that didn't quite move the way the rest of the stars did. And Herschel's recognition that something was different, that something wasn't quite right, was the discovery of a planet, the planet Uranus, a name that has entertained countless generations of children, but a planet that overnight doubled the size of our known solar system. Just last month, NASA announced the discovery of 517 new planets in orbit around nearby stars, almost doubling overnight the number of planets we know about within our galaxy. So astronomy is constantly being transformed by this capacity to collect data, and with data almost doubling every year, within the next two decades, me may even reach the point for the first time in history where we've discovered the majority of the galaxies within the universe.
But as we enter this era of big data, what we're beginning to find is there's a difference between more data being just better and more data being different, capable of changing the questions we want to ask, and this difference is not about how much data we collect, it's whether those data open new windows into our universe, whether they change the way we view the sky. So what is the next window into our universe? What is the next chapter for astronomy? Well, I'm going to show you some of the tools and the technologies that we're going to develop over the next decade, and how these technologies, together with the smart use of data, may once again transform astronomy by opening up a window into our universe, the window of time.
Why time? Well, time is about origins, and it's about evolution. The origins of our solar system, how our solar system came into being, is it unusual or special in any way? About the evolution of our universe. Why our universe is continuing to expand, and what is this mysterious dark energy that drives that expansion?
But first, I want to show you how technology is going to change the way we view the sky. So imagine if you were sitting in the mountains of northern Chile looking out to the west towards the Pacific Ocean a few hours before sunrise. This is the view of the night sky that you would see, and it's a beautiful view, with the Milky Way just peeking out over the horizon. but it's also a static view, and in many ways, this is the way we think of our universe: eternal and unchanging. But the universe is anything but static. It constantly changes on timescales of seconds to billions of years. Galaxies merge, they collide at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. Stars are born, they die, they explode in these extravagant displays. In fact, if we could go back to our tranquil skies above Chile, and we allow time to move forward to see how the sky might change over the next year, the pulsations that you see are supernovae, the final remnants of a dying star exploding, brightening and then fading from view, each one of these supernovae five billion times the brightness of our sun, so we can see them to great distances but only for a short amount of time. Ten supernova per second explode somewhere in our universe. If we could hear it, it would be popping like a bag of popcorn. Now, if we fade out the supernovae, it's not just brightness that changes. Our sky is in constant motion. This swarm of objects you see streaming across the sky are asteroids as they orbit our sun, and it's these changes and the motion and it's the dynamics of the system that allow us to build our models for our universe, to predict its future and to explain its past.
But the telescopes we've used over the last decade are not designed to capture the data at this scale. The Hubble Space Telescope: for the last 25 years it's been producing some of the most detailed views of our distant universe, but if you tried to use the Hubble to create an image of the sky, it would take 13 million individual images, about 120 years to do this just once.
So this is driving us to new technologies and new telescopes, telescopes that can go faint to look at the distant universe but also telescopes that can go wide to capture the sky as rapidly as possible, telescopes like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or the LSST, possibly the most boring name ever for one of the most fascinating experiments in the history of astronomy, in fact proof, if you should need it, that you should never allow a scientist or an engineer to name anything, not even your children. (Laughter) We're building the LSST. We expect it to start taking data by the end of this decade. I'm going to show you how we think it's going to transform our views of the universe, because one image from the LSST is equivalent to 3,000 images from the Hubble Space Telescope, each image three and a half degrees on the sky, seven times the width of the full moon. Well, how do you capture an image at this scale? Well, you build the largest digital camera in history, using the same technology you find in the cameras in your cell phone or in the digital cameras you can buy in the High Street, but now at a scale that is five and a half feet across, about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, where one image is three billion pixels. So if you wanted to look at an image in its full resolution, just a single LSST image, it would take about 1,500 high-definition TV screens. And this camera will image the sky, taking a new picture every 20 seconds, constantly scanning the sky so every three nights, we'll get a completely new view of the skies above Chile. Over the mission lifetime of this telescope, it will detect 40 billion stars and galaxies, and that will be for the first time we'll have detected more objects in our universe than people on the Earth. Now, we can talk about this in terms of terabytes and petabytes and billions of objects, but a way to get a sense of the amount of data that will come off this camera is that it's like playing every TED Talk ever recorded simultaneously, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for 10 years. And to process this data means searching through all of those talks for every new idea and every new concept, looking at each part of the video to see how one frame may have changed from the next. And this is changing the way that we do science, changing the way that we do astronomy, to a place where software and algorithms have to mine through this data, where the software is as critical to the science as the telescopes and the cameras that we've built.
Now, thousands of discoveries will come from this project, but I'm just going to tell you about two of the ideas about origins and evolution that may be transformed by our access to data at this scale.
In the last five years, NASA has discovered over 1,000 planetary systems around nearby stars, but the systems we're finding aren't much like our own solar system, and one of the questions we face is is it just that we haven't been looking hard enough or is there something special or unusual about how our solar system formed? And if we want to answer that question, we have to know and understand the history of our solar system in detail, and it's the details that are crucial. So now, if we look back at the sky, at our asteroids that were streaming across the sky, these asteroids are like the debris of our solar system. The positions of the asteroids are like a fingerprint of an earlier time when the orbits of Neptune and Jupiter were much closer to the sun, and as these giant planets migrated through our solar system, they were scattering the asteroids in their wake. So studying the asteroids is like performing forensics, performing forensics on our solar system, but to do this, we need distance, and we get the distance from the motion, and we get the motion because of our access to time.
So what does this tell us? Well, if you look at the little yellow asteroids flitting across the screen, these are the asteroids that are moving fastest, because they're closest to us, closest to Earth. These are the asteroids we may one day send spacecraft to, to mine them for minerals, but they're also the asteroids that may one day impact the Earth, like happened 60 million years ago with the extinction of the dinosaurs, or just at the beginning of the last century, when an asteroid wiped out almost 1,000 square miles of Siberian forest, or even just last year, as one burnt up over Russia, releasing the energy of a small nuclear bomb. So studying the forensics of our solar system doesn't just tell us about the past, it can also predict the future, including our future.
Now when we get distance, we get to see the asteroids in their natural habitat, in orbit around the sun. So every point in this visualization that you can see is a real asteroid. Its orbit has been calculated from its motion across the sky. The colors reflect the composition of these asteroids, dry and stony in the center, water-rich and primitive towards the edge, water-rich asteroids which may have seeded the oceans and the seas that we find on our planet when they bombarded the Earth at an earlier time. Because the LSST will be able to go faint and not just wide, we will be able to see these asteroids far beyond the inner part of our solar system, to asteroids beyond the orbits of Neptune and Mars, to comets and asteroids that may exist almost a light year from our sun. And as we increase the detail of this picture, increasing the detail by factors of 10 to 100, we will be able to answer questions such as, is there evidence for planets outside the orbit of Neptune, to find Earth-impacting asteroids long before they're a danger, and to find out whether, maybe, our sun formed on its own or in a cluster of stars, and maybe it's this sun's stellar siblings that influenced the formation of our solar system, and maybe that's one of the reasons why solar systems like ours seem to be so rare.
Now, distance and changes in our universe — distance equates to time, as well as changes on the sky. Every foot of distance you look away, or every foot of distance an object is away, you're looking back about a billionth of a second in time, and this idea or this notion of looking back in time has revolutionized our ideas about the universe, not once but multiple times.
The first time was in 1929, when an astronomer called Edwin Hubble showed that the universe was expanding, leading to the ideas of the Big Bang. And the observations were simple: just 24 galaxies and a hand-drawn picture. But just the idea that the more distant a galaxy, the faster it was receding, was enough to give rise to modern cosmology.
A second revolution happened 70 years later, when two groups of astronomers showed that the universe wasn't just expanding, it was accelerating, a surprise like throwing up a ball into the sky and finding out the higher that it gets, the faster it moves away. And they showed this by measuring the brightness of supernovae, and how the brightness of the supernovae got fainter with distance. And these observations were more complex. They required new technologies and new telescopes, because the supernovae were in galaxies that were 2,000 times more distant than the ones used by Hubble. And it took three years to find just 42 supernovae, because a supernova only explodes once every hundred years within a galaxy. Three years to find 42 supernovae by searching through tens of thousands of galaxies. And once they'd collected their data, this is what they found. Now, this may not look impressive, but this is what a revolution in physics looks like: a line predicting the brightness of a supernova 11 billion light years away, and a handful of points that don't quite fit that line.
Small changes give rise to big consequences. Small changes allow us to make discoveries, like the planet found by Herschel. Small changes turn our understanding of the universe on its head. So 42 supernovae, slightly too faint, meaning slightly further away, requiring that a universe must not just be expanding, but this expansion must be accelerating, revealing a component of our universe which we now call dark energy, a component that drives this expansion and makes up 68 percent of the energy budget of our universe today.
So what is the next revolution likely to be? Well, what is dark energy and why does it exist? Each of these lines shows a different model for what dark energy might be, showing the properties of dark energy. They all are consistent with the 42 points, but the ideas behind these lines are dramatically different. Some people think about a dark energy that changes with time, or whether the properties of the dark energy are different depending on where you look on the sky. Others make differences and changes to the physics at the sub-atomic level. Or, they look at large scales and change how gravity and general relativity work, or they say our universe is just one of many, part of this mysterious multiverse, but all of these ideas, all of these theories, amazing and admittedly some of them a little crazy, but all of them consistent with our 42 points.
So how can we hope to make sense of this over the next decade? Well, imagine if I gave you a pair of dice, and I said you wanted to see whether those dice were loaded or fair. One roll of the dice would tell you very little, but the more times you rolled them, the more data you collected, the more confident you would become, not just whether they're loaded or fair, but by how much, and in what way. It took three years to find just 42 supernovae because the telescopes that we built could only survey a small part of the sky. With the LSST, we get a completely new view of the skies above Chile every three nights. In its first night of operation, it will find 10 times the number of supernovae used in the discovery of dark energy. This will increase by 1,000 within the first four months: 1.5 million supernovae by the end of its survey, each supernova a roll of the dice, each supernova testing which theories of dark energy are consistent, and which ones are not. And so, by combining these supernova data with other measures of cosmology, we'll progressively rule out the different ideas and theories of dark energy until hopefully at the end of this survey around 2030, we would expect to hopefully see a theory for our universe, a fundamental theory for the physics of our universe, to gradually emerge.
Now, in many ways, the questions that I posed are in reality the simplest of questions. We may not know the answers, but we at least know how to ask the questions. But if looking through tens of thousands of galaxies revealed 42 supernovae that turned our understanding of the universe on its head, when we're working with billions of galaxies, how many more times are we going to find 42 points that don't quite match what we expect? Like the planet found by Herschel or dark energy or quantum mechanics or general relativity, all ideas that came because the data didn't quite match what we expected. What's so exciting about the next decade of data in astronomy is, we don't even know how many answers are out there waiting, answers about our origins and our evolution. How many answers are out there that we don't even know the questions that we want to ask?
Thank you.
(Applause) |
I have had the distinct pleasure of living inside two biospheres. Of course we all here in this room live in Biosphere 1. I've also lived in Biosphere 2. And the wonderful thing about that is that I get to compare biospheres. And hopefully from that I get to learn something.
So what did I learn? Well, here I am inside Biosphere 2, making a pizza. So I am harvesting the wheat, in order to make the dough. And then of course I have to milk the goats and feed the goats in order to make the cheese. It took me four months in Biosphere 2 to make a pizza. Here in Biosphere 1, well it takes me about two minutes, because I pick up the phone and I call and say, "Hey, can you deliver the pizza?"
So Biosphere 2 was essentially a three-acre, entirely sealed, miniature world that I lived in for two years and 20 minutes. (Laughter) Over the top it was sealed with steel and glass, underneath it was sealed with a pan of steel -- essentially entirely sealed. So we had our own miniature rainforest, a private beach with a coral reef. We had a savanna, a marsh, a desert. We had our own half-acre farm that we had to grow everything. And of course we had our human habitat, where we lived.
Back in the mid-'80s when we were designing Biosphere 2, we had to ask ourselves some pretty basic questions. I mean, what is a biosphere? Back then, yes, I guess we all know now that it is essentially the sphere of life around the Earth, right? Well, you have to get a little more specific than that if you're going to build one. And so we decided that what it really is is that it is entirely materially closed -- that is, nothing goes in or out at all, no material -- and energetically open, which is essentially what planet Earth is.
This is a chamber that was 1/400th the size of Biosphere 2 that we called our Test Module. And the very first day that this fellow, John Allen, walked in, to spend a couple of days in there with all the plants and animals and bacteria that we'd put in there to hopefully keep him alive, the doctors were incredibly concerned that he was going to succumb to some dreadful toxin, or that his lungs were going to get choked with bacteria or something, fungus. But of course none of that happened.
And over the ensuing few years, there were great sagas about designing Biosphere 2. But by 1991 we finally had this thing built. And it was time for us to go in and give it a go. We needed to know, is life this malleable? Can you take this biosphere, that has evolved on a planetary scale, and jam it into a little bottle, and will it survive? Big questions. And we wanted to know this both for being able to go somewhere else in the universe -- if we were going to go to Mars, for instance, would we take a biosphere with us, to live in it? We also wanted to know so we can understand more about the Earth that we all live in. Well, in 1991 it was finally time for us to go in and try out this baby. Let's take it on a maiden voyage. Will it work? Or will something happen that we can't understand and we can't fix, thereby negating the concept of man-made biospheres?
So eight of us went in: four men and four women. More on that later. (Laughter) And this is the world that we lived in. So, on the top, we had these beautiful rainforests and an ocean, and underneath we had all this technosphere, we called it, which is where all the pumps and the valves and the water tanks and the air handlers, and all of that. One of the Biospherians called it "garden of Eden on top of an aircraft carrier." And then also we had the human habitat of course, with the laboratories, and all of that. This is the agriculture. It was essentially an organic farm.
The day I walked into Biosphere 2, I was, for the first time, breathing a completely different atmosphere than everybody else in the world, except seven other people. At that moment I became part of that biosphere. And I don't mean that in an abstract sense; I mean it rather literally. When I breathed out, my CO2 fed the sweet potatoes that I was growing. And we ate an awful lot of the sweet potatoes. (Laughter) And those sweet potatoes became part of me. In fact, we ate so many sweet potatoes I became orange with sweet potato. I literally was eating the same carbon over and over again. I was eating myself in some strange sort of bizarre way.
When it came to our atmosphere, however, it wasn't that much of a joke over the long term, because it turned out that we were losing oxygen, quite a lot of oxygen. And we knew that we were losing CO2. And so we were working to sequester carbon. Good lord -- we know that term now. We were growing plants like crazy. We were taking their biomass, storing them in the basement, growing plants, going around, around, around, trying to take all of that carbon out of the atmosphere. We were trying to stop carbon from going into the atmosphere. We stopped irrigating our soil, as much as we could. We stopped tilling, so that we could prevent greenhouse gasses from going into the air. But our oxygen was going down faster than our CO2 was going up, which was quite unexpected, because we had seen them going in tandem in the test module. And it was like playing atomic hide-and-seek. We had lost seven tons of oxygen. And we had no clue where it was.
And I tell you, when you lose a lot of oxygen -- and our oxygen went down quite far; it went from 21 percent down to 14.2 percent -- my goodness, do you feel dreadful. I mean we were dragging ourselves around the Biosphere. And we had sleep apnea at night. So you'd wake up gasping with breath, because your blood chemistry has changed. And that you literally do that. You stop breathing and then you -- (Gasps) -- take a breath and it wakes you up. And it's very irritating. And everybody outside thought we were dying. I mean, the media was making it sound like were were dying. And I had to call up my mother every other day saying, "No, Mum, it's fine, fine. We're not dead. We're fine. We're fine." And the doctor was, in fact, checking us to make sure we were, in fact, fine. But in fact he was the person who was most susceptible to the oxygen. And one day he couldn't add up a line of figures. And it was time for us to put oxygen in. And you might think, well, "Boy, your life support system was failing you. Wasn't that dreadful?" Yes. In a sense it was terrifying. Except that I knew I could walk out the airlock door at any time, if it really got bad, though who was going to say, "I can't take it anymore!"? Not me, that was for sure.
But on the other hand, it was the scientific gold of the project, because we could really crank this baby up, as a scientific tool, and see if we could, in fact, find where those seven tons of oxygen had gone. And we did indeed find it. And we found it in the concrete. Essentially it had done something very simple. We had put too much carbon in the soil in the form of compost. It broke down; it took oxygen out of the air; it put CO2 into the air; and it went into the concrete. Pretty straightforward really.
So at the end of the two years when we came out, we were elated, because, in fact, although you might say we had discovered something that was quite "uhh," when your oxygen is going down, stopped working, essentially, in your life support system, that's a very bad failure. Except that we knew what it was. And we knew how to fix it. And nothing else emerged that really was as serious as that. And we proved the concept, more or less. People, on the other hand, was a different subject. We were -- yeah I don't know that we were fixable. We all went quite nuts, I will say.
And the day I came out of Biosphere 2, I was thrilled I was going to see all my family and my friends. For two years I'd been seeing people through the glass. And everybody ran up to me. And I recoiled. They stank! People stink! We stink of hairspray and underarm deodorant, and all kinds of stuff. Now we had stuff inside Biosphere to keep ourselves clean, but nothing with perfume. And boy do we stink out here. Not only that, but I lost touch of where my food came from. I had been growing all my own food. I had no idea what was in my food, where it came from. I didn't even recognize half the names in most of the food that I was eating. In fact, I would stand for hours in the aisles of shops, reading all the names on all of the things. People must have thought I was nuts. It was really quite astonishing. And I slowly lost track of where I was in this big biosphere, in this big biosphere that we all live in. In Biosphere 2 I totally understood that I had a huge impact on my biosphere, everyday, and it had an impact on me, very viscerally, very literally.
So I went about my business: Paragon Space Development Corporation, a little firm I started with people while I was in the Biosphere, because I had nothing else to do. And one of the things we did was try to figure out: how small can you make these biospheres, and what can you do with them? And so we sent one onto the Mir Space Station. We had one on the shuttle and one on the International Space Station, for 16 months, where we managed to produce the first organisms to go through complete multiple life cycles in space -- really pushing the envelope of understanding how malleable our life systems are.
And I'm also proud to announce that you're getting a sneak preview -- on Friday we're going to announce that we're actually forming a team to develop a system to grow plants on the Moon, which is going to be pretty fun. And the legacy of that is a system that we were designing: an entirely sealed system to grow plants to grow on Mars. And part of that is that we had to model very rapid circulation of CO2 and oxygen and water through this plant system.
As a result of that modeling I ended up in all places, in Eritrea, in the Horn of Africa. Eritrea, formerly part of Ethiopia, is one of those places that is astonishingly beautiful, incredibly stark, and I have no understanding of how people eke out a living there. It is so dry. This is what I saw. But this is also what I saw. I saw a company that had taken seawater and sand, and they were growing a kind of crop that will grow on pure salt water without having to treat it. And it will produce a food crop. In this case it was oilseed. It was astonishing. They were also producing mangroves in a plantation. And the mangroves were providing wood and honey and leaves for the animals, so that they could produce milk and whatnot, like we had in the Biosphere.
And all of it was coming from this: shrimp farms. Shrimp farms are a scourge on the earth, frankly, from an environmental point of view. They pour huge amounts of pollutants into the ocean. They also pollute their next-door neighbors. So they're all shitting each other's ponds, quite literally. And what this project was doing was taking the effluent of these, and turning them into all of this food. They were literally turning pollution into abundance for a desert people. They had created an industrial ecosystem, of a sense.
I was there because I was actually modeling the mangrove portion for a carbon credit program, under the U.N. Kyoto Protocol system. And as I was modeling this mangrove swamp, I was thinking to myself, "How do you put a box around this?" When I'm modeling a plant in a box, literally, I know where to draw the boundary. In a mangrove forest like this I have no idea. Well, of course you have to draw the boundary around the whole of the Earth. And understand its interactions with the entire Earth. And put your project in that context.
Around the world today we're seeing an incredible transformation, from what I would call a biocidal species, one that -- whether we intentionally or unintentionally -- have designed our systems to kill life, a lot of the time. This is in fact, this beautiful photograph, is in fact over the Amazon. And here the light green are areas of massive deforestation. And those beautiful wispy clouds are, in fact, fires, human-made fires. We're in the process of transforming from this, to what I would call a biophilic society, one where we learn to nurture society. Now it may not seem like it, but we are. It is happening all across the world, in every kind of walk of life, and every kind of career and industry that you can think of. And I think often times people get lost in that. They go, "But how can I possibly find my way in that? It's such a huge subject." And I would say that the small stuff counts. It really does.
This is the story of a rake in my backyard. This was my backyard, very early on, when I bought my property. And in Arizona, of course, everybody puts gravel down. And they like to keep everything beautifully raked. And they keep all the leaves away. And on Sunday morning the neighbors leaf blower comes out, and I want to throttle them. It's a certain type of aesthetic. We're very uncomfortable with untidiness. And I threw away my rake. And I let all of the leaves fall from the trees that I have on my property. And over time, essentially what have I been doing? I've been building topsoil. And so now all the birds come in. And I have hawks. And I have an oasis. This is what happens every spring. For six weeks, six to eight weeks, I have this flush of green oasis. This is actually in a riparian area. And all of Tucson could be like this if everybody would just revolt and throw away the rake. The small stuff counts.
The Industrial Revolution -- and Prometheus -- has given us this, the ability to light up the world. It has also given us this, the ability to look at the world from the outside. Now we may not all have another biosphere that we can run to, and compare it to this biosphere. But we can look at the world, and try to understand where we are in its context, and how we choose to interact with it.
And if you lose where you are in your biosphere, or are perhaps having a difficulty connecting with where you are in the biosphere, I would say to you, take a deep breath. The yogis had it right. Breath does, in fact, connect us all in a very literal way. Take a breath now. And as you breathe, think about what is in your breath. There perhaps is the CO2 from the person sitting next-door to you. Maybe there is a little bit of oxygen from some algae on the beach not far from here. It also connects us in time. There may be some carbon in your breath from the dinosaurs. There could also be carbon that you are exhaling now that will be in the breath of your great-great-great-grandchildren. Thank you. (Applause) |
There's a beautiful statement on the screen that says, "Light creates ambiance, light makes the feel of a space, and light is also the expression of structure." Well that was not by me. That was, of course, by Le Corbusier, the famous architect. And here you can see what he meant in one of his beautiful buildings -- the chapel Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp -- where he creates this light that he could only make because there's also dark. And I think that is the quintessence of this 18-minute talk -- that there is no good lighting that is healthy and for our well-being without proper darkness.
So this is how we normally would light our offices. We have codes and standards that tell us that the lights should be so much lux and of great uniformity. This is how we create uniform lighting from one wall to the other in a regular grid of lamps. And that is quite different from what I just showed you from Le Corbusier. If we would apply these codes and standards to the Pantheon in Rome, it would never have looked like this, because this beautiful light feature that goes around there all by itself can only appear because there is also darkness in that same building. And the same is more or less what Santiago Calatrava said when he said, "Light: I make it in my buildings for comfort." And he didn't mean the comfort of a five-course dinner as opposed to a one-course meal, but he really meant the comfort of the quality of the building for the people. He meant that you can see the sky and that you can experience the sun. And he created these gorgeous buildings where you can see the sky, and where you can experience the sun, that give us a better life in the built environment, just because of the relevance of light in its brightness and also in its shadows.
What it all boils down to is, of course, the sun. And this image of the sun may suggest that the sun is something evil and aggressive, but we should not forget that all energy on this planet actually comes from the sun, and light is only a manifestation of that energy. The sun is for dynamics, for color changes. The sun is for beauty in our environment, like in this building -- the High Museum in Atlanta, which has been created by Renzo Piano from Italy, together with Arup Lighting, a brilliant team of lighting designers, who created a very subtle modulation of light across the space, responding to what the sun does outside, just because of all these beautiful openings in the roof. So in an indirect way, you can see the sun. And what they did is they created an integral building element to improve the quality of the space that surrounds the visitors of the museum. They created this shade that you can see here, which actually covers the sun, but opens up to the good light from the sky. And here you can see how they really crafted a beautiful design process with physical models, with quantitative, as well as qualitative, methods to come to a final solution that is truly integrated and completely holistic with the architecture. They allowed themselves a few mistakes along the way. As you can see here, there's some direct light on the floor, but they could easily figure out where that comes from. And they allow people in that building to really enjoy the sun, the good part of the sun.
And enjoying the sun can be in many different ways, of course. It can be just like this, or maybe like this, which is rather peculiar, but this is in 1963 -- the viewing of a sun eclipse in the United States. And it's just a bit bright up there, so these people have found a very intriguing solution. This is, I think, a very illustrative image of what I try to say -- that the beautiful dynamics of sun, bringing these into the building, creates a quality of our built environment that truly enhances our lives. And this is all about darkness as much as it is about lightness, of course, because otherwise you don't see these dynamics.
As opposed to the first office that I showed you in the beginning of the talk, this is a well-known office, which is the White Group. They are in green energy consulting, or something like that. And they really practice what they preach because this office doesn't have any electric lighting at all. It has only on one side this big, big glass window that helps to let the sunlight enter deep into the space and create a beautiful quality there and a great dynamic range. So it can be very dim over there, and you do your work, and it can be very bright over there, and you do your work. But actually the human eye turns out to be remarkably adaptable to all these different light conditions that together create an environment that is never boring and that is never dull, and therefore helps us to enhance our lives.
I really owe a short introduction of this man to you. This is Richard Kelly who was born 100 years ago, which is the reason I bring him up now, because it's kind of an anniversary year. In the 1930s, Richard Kelly was the first person to really describe a methodology of modern lighting design. And he coined three terms, which are "focal glow," "ambient luminescence" and "play of the brilliants" -- three very distinctly different ideas about light in architecture that all together make up this beautiful experience.
So you begin with focal glow. He meant something like this -- where the light gives direction to the space and helps you to get around. Or something like this, which is the lighting design he did for General Motors, for the car showroom. And you enter that space, and you feel like, "Wow! This is so impressive," just because of this focal point, this huge light source in the middle. To me it is something from theatre, and I will get back to that a little bit later. It's the spotlight on the artist that helps you to focus. It could also be the sunlight that breaks through the clouds and lights up a patch of the land, highlighting it compared to the dim environment. Or it can be in today's retail, in the shopping environment -- lighting the merchandise and creating accents that help you to get around.
Ambient luminescence is something very different. Richard Kelly saw it as something infinite, something without any focus, something where all details actually dissolve in infinity. And I see it as a very comfortable kind of light that really helps us to relax and to contemplate. It could also be something like this: the National Museum of Science in London, where this blue is embracing all the exhibitions and galleries in one large gesture.
And then finally, Kelly's play of brilliants attitude, that really some play of the skyline of Hong Kong, or perhaps the chandelier in the opera house, or in the theater here, which is a decoration, the icing on the cake, something playful, something that is just an addition to the architectural environment, I would say. These three distinct elements, together, make a lighting environment that helps us to feel better. And we can only create these out of darkness. And I will explain that further. And I guess that is something that Richard Kelly, here on the left, was explaining to Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe. And behind them, you see that Seagram Building that later turned into an icon of modern lighting design.
Those times, there were some early attempts also for light therapy already. You can see here a photo from the United States Library of Medicine, where people are put in the sun to get better. It's a little bit of a different story, this health aspect of light, than what I'm telling you today. In today's modern medicine, there is a real understanding of light in an almost biochemical way. And there is the idea that, when we look at things, it is the yellow light that helps us the most, that we are the most sensitive for. But our circadian rhythms, which are the rhythms that help us to wake and sleep and be alert and relaxed and so forth and so on, they are much more triggered by blue light. And by modulating the amount of blue in our environment, we can help people to relax, or to be alert, to fall asleep, or to stay awake. And that is how, maybe in the near future, light can help hospitals to make people better sooner, recover them quicker. Maybe in the airplane, we can overcome jet lag like that. Perhaps in school, we can help children to learn better because they concentrate more on their work. And you can imagine a lot more applications. But I would like to talk further about the combination of light and darkness as a quality in our life.
So light is, of course, for social interaction also -- to create relationships with all the features around us. It is the place where we gather around when we have to say something to each other. And it is all about this planet. But when you look at this planet at night, it looks like this. And I think this is the most shocking image in my talk today. Because all this light here goes up to the sky. It never reaches the ground where it was meant for. It never is to the benefit of people. It only spoils the darkness. So at a global scale, it looks like this. And, I mean, that is quite amazing, what you see here -- how much light goes up into the sky and never reaches the ground. Because if we look at the Earth the way it should be, it would be something like this very inspiring image where darkness is for our imagination and for contemplation and to help us to relate to everything.
The world is changing though, and urbanization is a big driver of everything. I took this photo two weeks ago in Guangzhou, and I realized that 10 years ago, there was nothing like this, of these buildings. It was just a much smaller city, and the pace of urbanization is incredible and enormous. And we have to understand these main questions: How do people move through these new urban spaces? How do they share their culture? How do we tackle things like mobility? And how can light help there? Because the new technologies, they seem to be in a really interesting position to contribute to the solutions of urbanization and to provide us with better environments.
It's not that long ago that our lighting was just done with these kinds of lamps. And of course, we had the metal halide lamps and fluorescent lamps and things like that. Now we have LED, but here you see the latest one, and you see how incredibly small it is. And this is exactly what offers us a unique opportunity because this tiny, tiny size allows us to put the light wherever we really need it. And we can actually leave it out where it's not needed at all and where we can preserve darkness. So that is a really interesting proposition, I think, and a new way of lighting the architectural environment with our well-being in mind. The problem is though that I wanted to explain to you how this really works -- but I can have four of these on my finger, so you would not to be able to really see them. So I asked our laboratory to do something about it, and they said, "Well, we can do something." They created for me the biggest LED in the world especially for TEDx in Amsterdam.
So here it is. It's the same thing as you can see over there -- just 200 times bigger. And I will very quickly show you how it works. So just to explain. Now, every LED that is made these days gives blue light. Now this is not very pleasant and comfortable. And for that reason, we cover the LED with a phosphor cap. And the phosphor is excited by the blue and makes the light white and warm and pleasant. And then when you add the lens to that, you can bundle the light and send it to wherever you need it without any need to spill any light to the sky or anywhere else. So you can preserve the darkness and make the light. I just wanted to show that to you so you understand how this works. Thank you.
We can go further. So we have to rethink the way we light our cities. We have to think again about light as a default solution. Why are all these motorways permanently lit? Is it really needed? Can we maybe be much more selective and create better environments that also benefit from darkness? Can we be more gentle with light? Like here -- this is a very low light level actually. Can we engage people more in the lighting projects that we create, so they really want to connect with it, like here? Or can we create simply sculptures that are very inspiring to be in and to be around? And can we preserve the darkness? Because to find a place like this today on Earth is really very, very challenging. And to find a starry sky like this is even more difficult. Even in the oceans, we are creating a lot of light that we could actually ban also for animal life to have a much greater well-being. And it's known that migrating birds, for example, get very disoriented because of these offshore platforms. And we discovered that, when we make those lights green, the birds, they actually go the right way. They are not disturbed anymore. And it turns out once again that spectral sensitivity is very important here.
In all of these examples, I think, we should start making the light out of darkness, and use the darkness as a canvas -- like the visual artists do, like Edward Hopper in this painting. I think that there is a lot of suspense in this painting. I think, when I see it, I start to think, who are those people? Where have they come from? Where are they going? What just happened? What will be happening in the next five minutes? And it only embodies all these stories and all this suspense because of the darkness and the light. Edward Hopper was a real master in creating the narration by working with light and dark. And we can learn from that and create more interesting and inspiring architectural environments. We can do that in commercial spaces like this. And you can still also go outside and enjoy the greatest show in the universe, which is, of course, the universe itself. So I give you this wonderful, informative image of the sky, ranging from the inner city, where you may see one or two stars and nothing else, all the way to the rural environments, where you can enjoy this great and gorgeous and beautiful performance of the constellations and the stars.
In architecture, it works just the same. By appreciating the darkness when you design the light, you create much more interesting environments that truly enhance our lives. This is the most well-known example, Tadao Ando's Church of Light. But I also think of Peter Zumthor's spa in Vals, where light and dark, in very gentle combinations, alter each other to define the space. Or Richard McCormack's Southern tube station in London, where you can really see the sky, even though you are under the ground.
And finally I want to point out that a lot of this inspiration comes from theater. And I think it's fantastic that we are today experiencing TEDx in a theater for the first time because I think we really owe to the theater a big thanks. It wouldn't be such an inspiring scenography without this theater. And I think the theater is a place where we truly enhance life with light.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) |
(Music)
(Applause)
Thank you for being here. And I say "thank you for being here" because I was silent for 17 years. And the first words that I spoke were in Washington, D.C., on the 20th anniversary of Earth Day. And my family and friends had gathered there to hear me speak. And I said, "Thank you for being here." My mother, out in the audience, she jumped up, "Hallelujah, Johnny’s talking!"
(Laughter)
Imagine if you were quiet for 17 years and your mother was out in the audience, say. My dad said to me, "That’s one" -- I’ll explain that. But I turned around because I didn’t recognize where my voice was coming from. I hadn’t heard my voice in 17 years, so I turned around and I looked and I said, "God, who's saying what I’m thinking?" And then I realized it was me, you know, and I kind of laughed. And I could see my father: "Yeah, he really is crazy." Well, I want to take you on this journey. And the journey, I believe, is a metaphor for all of our journeys. Even though this one is kind of unusual, I want you to think about your own journey.
My journey began in 1971 when I witnessed two oil tankers collide beneath the Golden Gate, and a half a million gallons of oil spilled into the bay. It disturbed me so much that I decided that I was going to give up riding and driving in motorized vehicles. That’s a big thing in California. And it was a big thing in my little community of Point Reyes Station in Inverness, California, because there were only about 350 people there in the winter – this was back in '71 now. And so when I came in and I started walking around, people -- they just knew what was going on. And people would drive up next to me and say, "John, what are you doing?" And I’d say, "Well, I’m walking for the environment." And they said, "No, you’re walking to make us look bad, right? You’re walking to make us feel bad." And maybe there was some truth to that, because I thought that if I started walking, everyone would follow. Because of the oil, everybody talked about the polllution. And so I argued with people about that, I argued and I argued. I called my parents up. I said, "I’ve given up riding and driving in cars." My dad said, "Why didn’t you do that when you were 16?"
(Laughter)
I didn’t know about the environment then. They’re back in Philadelphia. And so I told my mother, "I’m happy though, I’m really happy." She said, "If you were happy, son, you wouldn’t have to say it." Mothers are like that.
And so, on my 27th birthday I decided, because I argued so much and I talk so much, that I was going to stop speaking for just one day -- one day -- to give it a rest. And so I did. I got up in the morning and I didn’t say a word. And I have to tell you, it was a very moving experience, because for the first time, I began listening -- in a long time. And what I heard, it kind of disturbed me. Because what I used to do, when I thought I was listening, was I would listen just enough to hear what people had to say and think that I could -- I knew what they were going to say, and so I stopped listening. And in my mind, I just kind of raced ahead and thought of what I was going to say back, while they were still finishing up. And then I would launch in. Well, that just ended communication.
So on this first day I actually listened. And it was very sad for me, because I realized that for those many years I had not been learning. I was 27. I thought I knew everything. I didn’t. And so I decided I’d better do this for another day, and another day, and another day until finally, I promised myself for a year I would keep quiet because I started learning more and more and I needed to learn more. So for a year I said I would keep quiet, and then on my birthday I would reassess what I had learned and maybe I would talk again. Well, that lasted 17 years.
Now during that time -- those 17 years -- I walked and I played the banjo and I painted and I wrote in my journal, and I tried to study the environment by reading books. And I decided that I was going to go to school. So I did. I walked up to Ashland, Oregon, where they were offering an environmental studies degree. It’s only 500 miles. And I went into the Registrar’s office and -- "What, what, what?" I had a newspaper clipping. "Oh, so you really want to go to school here? You don’t …? We have a special program for you." They did. And in those two years, I graduated with my first degree -- a bachelor’s degree. And my father came out, he was so proud. He said, "Listen, we’re really proud of you son, but what are you going to do with a bachelor’s degree? You don’t ride in cars, you don’t talk -- you’re going to have to do those things."
(Laughter)
I hunched my shoulder, I picked my backpack up again and I started walking. I walked all the way up to Port Townsend, Washington, where I built a wooden boat, rode it across Puget Sound and walked across Washington [to] Idaho and down to Missoula, Montana. I had written the University of Montana two years earlier and said I'd like to go to school there. I said I'd be there in about two years.
(Laughter)
And I was there. I showed up in two years and they -- I tell this story because they really helped me. There are two stories in Montana. The first story is I didn’t have any money -- that’s a sign I used a lot. And they said,"Don't worry about that." The director of the program said, "Come back tomorrow." He gave me 150 dollars, and he said, "Register for one credit. You’re going to go to South America, aren’t you?" And I said -- Rivers and lakes, the hydrological systems, South America. So I did that. He came back; he said to me, "OK John, now that you've registered for that one credit, you can have a key to an office, you can matriculate -- you’re matriculating, so you can use the library. And what we’re going to do is, we’re going to have all of the professors allow you to go to class. They’re going to save your grade, and when we figure out how to get you the rest of the money, then you can register for that class and they’ll give you the grade." Wow, they don’t do that in graduate schools, I don’t think. But I use that story because they really wanted to help me. They saw that I was really interested in the environment, and they really wanted to help me along the way.
And during that time, I actually taught classes without speaking. I had 13 students when I first walked into the class. I explained, with a friend who could interpret my sign language, that I was John Francis, I was walking around the world, I didn’t talk and this was the last time this person’s going to be here interpreting for me. All the students sat around and they went ...
(Laughter)
I could see they were looking for the schedule, to see when they could get out. They had to take that class with me. Two weeks later, everyone was trying to get into our class.
And I learned in that class -- because I would do things like this ... and they were all gathered around, going, "What's he trying to say?" "I don't know, I think he's talking about clear cutting." "Yeah, clear cutting." "No, no, no, that's not clear cutting, that’s -- he's using a handsaw." "Well, you can’t clearcut with a ..." "Yes, you can clear cut ..." "No, I think he’s talking about selective forestry." Now this was a discussion class and we were having a discussion. I just backed out of that, you know, and I just kind of kept the fists from flying. But what I learned was that sometimes I would make a sign and they said things that I absolutely did not mean, but I should have. And so what came to me is, if you were a teacher and you were teaching, if you weren’t learning you probably weren’t teaching very well. And so I went on.
My dad came out to see me graduate and, you know, I did the deal, and my father said, "We’re really proud of you son, but ... " You know what went on, he said, "You’ve got to start riding and driving and start talking. What are you going to do with a master’s degree?" I hunched my shoulder, I got my backpack and I went on to the University of Wisconsin.
I spent two years there writing on oil spills. No one was interested in oil spills. But something happened -- Exxon Valdez. And I was the only one in the United States writing on oil spills. My dad came out again. He said, "I don't know how you do this, son -- I mean, you don't ride in cars, you don’t talk. My sister said maybe I should leave you alone, because you seem to be doing a lot better when you’re not saying anything."
(Laughter)
Well, I put on my backpack again. I put my banjo on and I walked all the way to the East Coast, put my foot in the Atlantic Ocean -- it was seven years and one day it took me to walk across the United States.
And on Earth Day, 1990 -- the 20th anniversary of Earth Day -- that’s when I began to speak. And that’s why I said, "Thank you for being here." Because it's sort of like that tree in the forest falling; and if there's no one there to hear, does it really make a sound? And I’m thanking you, and I'm thanking my family because they had come to hear me speak. And that’s communication. And they also taught me about listening -- that they listened to me. And it’s one of those things that came out of the silence, the listening to each other. Really, very important -- we need to listen to each other. Well, my journey kept going on. My dad said, "That’s one," and I still didn’t let that go.
I worked for the Coastguard, was made a U.N. Goodwill Ambassador. I wrote regulations for the United States -- I mean, I wrote oil spill regulations. 20 years ago, if someone had said to me, "John, do you really want to make a difference?" "Yeah, I want to make a difference." He said, "You just start walking east; get out of your car and just start walking east." And as I walked off a little bit, they'd say, "Yeah, and shut up, too."
(Laughter)
"You’re going to make a difference, buddy." How could that be, how could that be? How could doing such a simple thing like walking and not talking make a difference?
Well, my time at the Coast Guard was a really good time. And after that -- I only worked one year -- I said, "That's enough. One year's enough for me to do that." I got on a sailboat and I sailed down to the Caribbean, and walked through all of the islands, and to Venezuela. And you know, I forgot the most important thing, which is why I started talking, which I have to tell you. I started talking because I had studied environment. I’d studied environment at this formal level, but there was this informal level. And the informal level -- I learned about people, and what we do and how we are. And environment changed from just being about trees and birds and endangered species to being about how we treated each other. Because if we are the environment, then all we need to do is look around us and see how we treat ourselves and how we treat each other. And so that’s the message that I had. And I said, "Well, I'm going to have to spread that message." And I got in my sailboat, sailed all the way through the Caribbean -- it wasn't really my sailboat, I kind of worked on that boat -- got to Venezuela and I started walking.
This is the last part of this story, because it’s how I got here, because I still didn't ride in motorized vehicles. I was walking through El Dorado -- it's a prison town, famous prison, or infamous prison -- in Venezuela, and I don’t know what possessed me, because this was not like me. There I am, walking past the guard gate and the guard stops and says, "Pasaporte, pasaporte," and with an M16 pointed at me. And I looked at him and I said, "Passport, huh? I don't need to show you my passport. It’s in the back of my pack. I'm Dr. Francis; I'm a U.N. Ambassador and I'm walking around the world." And I started walking off. What possessed me to say this thing? The road turned into the jungle. I didn’t get shot. And I got to -- I start saying, "Free at last -- thank God Almighty, I’m free at last." "What was that about," I’m saying. What was that about?
It took me 100 miles to figure out that, in my heart, in me, I had become a prisoner. I was a prisoner and I needed to escape. The prison that I was in was the fact that I did not drive or use motorized vehicles. Now how could that be? Because when I started, it seemed very appropriate to me not to use motorized vehicles. But the thing that was different was that every birthday, I asked myself about silence, but I never asked myself about my decision to just use my feet. I had no idea I was going to become a U.N. Ambassador. I had no idea I would have a Ph.D.
And so I realized that I had a responsibility to more than just me, and that I was going to have to change. You know, we can do it. I was going to have to change. And I was afraid to change, because I was so used to the guy who only just walked. I was so used to that person that I didn’t want to stop. I didn’t know who I would be if I changed. But I know I needed to. I know I needed to change, because it would be the only way that I could be here today. And I know that a lot of times we find ourselves in this wonderful place where we’ve gotten to, but there’s another place for us to go. And we kind of have to leave behind the security of who we’ve become, and go to the place of who we are becoming. And so, I want to encourage you to go to that next place, to let yourself out of any prison that you might find yourself in, as comfortable as it may be, because we have to do something now. We have to change now. As our former Vice President said, we have to become activists. So if my voice can touch you, if my actions can touch you, if my being here can touch you, please let it be. And I know that all of you have touched me while I’ve been here.
So, let’s go out into the world and take this caring, this love, this respect that we’ve shown each other right here at TED, and take this out into the world. Because we are the environment, and how we treat each other is really how we’re going to treat the environment. So I want to thank you for being here and I want to end this in five seconds of silence.
Thank you.
(Applause) |
I grew up watching Star Trek. I love Star Trek. Star Trek made me want to see alien creatures, creatures from a far-distant world. But basically, I figured out that I could find those alien creatures right on Earth.
And what I do is I study insects. I'm obsessed with insects, particularly insect flight. I think the evolution of insect flight is perhaps one of the most important events in the history of life. Without insects, there'd be no flowering plants. Without flowering plants, there would be no clever, fruit-eating primates giving TED Talks.
(Laughter)
Now, David and Hidehiko and Ketaki gave a very compelling story about the similarities between fruit flies and humans, and there are many similarities, and so you might think that if humans are similar to fruit flies, the favorite behavior of a fruit fly might be this, for example -- (Laughter) but in my talk, I don't want to emphasize on the similarities between humans and fruit flies, but rather the differences, and focus on the behaviors that I think fruit flies excel at doing.
And so I want to show you a high-speed video sequence of a fly shot at 7,000 frames per second in infrared lighting, and to the right, off-screen, is an electronic looming predator that is going to go at the fly. The fly is going to sense this predator. It is going to extend its legs out. It's going to sashay away to live to fly another day. Now I have carefully cropped this sequence to be exactly the duration of a human eye blink, so in the time that it would take you to blink your eye, the fly has seen this looming predator, estimated its position, initiated a motor pattern to fly it away, beating its wings at 220 times a second as it does so. I think this is a fascinating behavior that shows how fast the fly's brain can process information.
Now, flight -- what does it take to fly? Well, in order to fly, just as in a human aircraft, you need wings that can generate sufficient aerodynamic forces, you need an engine sufficient to generate the power required for flight, and you need a controller, and in the first human aircraft, the controller was basically the brain of Orville and Wilbur sitting in the cockpit.
Now, how does this compare to a fly? Well, I spent a lot of my early career trying to figure out how insect wings generate enough force to keep the flies in the air. And you might have heard how engineers proved that bumblebees couldn't fly. Well, the problem was in thinking that the insect wings function in the way that aircraft wings work. But they don't. And we tackle this problem by building giant, dynamically scaled model robot insects that would flap in giant pools of mineral oil where we could study the aerodynamic forces. And it turns out that the insects flap their wings in a very clever way, at a very high angle of attack that creates a structure at the leading edge of the wing, a little tornado-like structure called a leading edge vortex, and it's that vortex that actually enables the wings to make enough force for the animal to stay in the air. But the thing that's actually most -- so, what's fascinating is not so much that the wing has some interesting morphology. What's clever is the way the fly flaps it, which of course ultimately is controlled by the nervous system, and this is what enables flies to perform these remarkable aerial maneuvers.
Now, what about the engine? The engine of the fly is absolutely fascinating. They have two types of flight muscle: so-called power muscle, which is stretch-activated, which means that it activates itself and does not need to be controlled on a contraction-by-contraction basis by the nervous system. It's specialized to generate the enormous power required for flight, and it fills the middle portion of the fly, so when a fly hits your windshield, it's basically the power muscle that you're looking at. But attached to the base of the wing is a set of little, tiny control muscles that are not very powerful at all, but they're very fast, and they're able to reconfigure the hinge of the wing on a stroke-by-stroke basis, and this is what enables the fly to change its wing and generate the changes in aerodynamic forces which change its flight trajectory. And of course, the role of the nervous system is to control all this.
So let's look at the controller. Now flies excel in the sorts of sensors that they carry to this problem. They have antennae that sense odors and detect wind detection. They have a sophisticated eye which is the fastest visual system on the planet. They have another set of eyes on the top of their head. We have no idea what they do. They have sensors on their wing. Their wing is covered with sensors, including sensors that sense deformation of the wing. They can even taste with their wings. One of the most sophisticated sensors a fly has is a structure called the halteres. The halteres are actually gyroscopes. These devices beat back and forth about 200 hertz during flight, and the animal can use them to sense its body rotation and initiate very, very fast corrective maneuvers. But all of this sensory information has to be processed by a brain, and yes, indeed, flies have a brain, a brain of about 100,000 neurons.
Now several people at this conference have already suggested that fruit flies could serve neuroscience because they're a simple model of brain function. And the basic punchline of my talk is, I'd like to turn that over on its head. I don't think they're a simple model of anything. And I think that flies are a great model. They're a great model for flies. (Laughter)
And let's explore this notion of simplicity. So I think, unfortunately, a lot of neuroscientists, we're all somewhat narcissistic. When we think of brain, we of course imagine our own brain. But remember that this kind of brain, which is much, much smaller — instead of 100 billion neurons, it has 100,000 neurons — but this is the most common form of brain on the planet and has been for 400 million years. And is it fair to say that it's simple? Well, it's simple in the sense that it has fewer neurons, but is that a fair metric? And I would propose it's not a fair metric. So let's sort of think about this. I think we have to compare -- (Laughter) — we have to compare the size of the brain with what the brain can do. So I propose we have a Trump number, and the Trump number is the ratio of this man's behavioral repertoire to the number of neurons in his brain. We'll calculate the Trump number for the fruit fly. Now, how many people here think the Trump number is higher for the fruit fly?
(Applause)
It's a very smart, smart audience. Yes, the inequality goes in this direction, or I would posit it.
Now I realize that it is a little bit absurd to compare the behavioral repertoire of a human to a fly. But let's take another animal just as an example. Here's a mouse. A mouse has about 1,000 times as many neurons as a fly. I used to study mice. When I studied mice, I used to talk really slowly. And then something happened when I started to work on flies. (Laughter) And I think if you compare the natural history of flies and mice, it's really comparable. They have to forage for food. They have to engage in courtship. They have sex. They hide from predators. They do a lot of the similar things. But I would argue that flies do more. So for example, I'm going to show you a sequence, and I have to say, some of my funding comes from the military, so I'm showing this classified sequence and you cannot discuss it outside of this room. Okay? So I want you to look at the payload at the tail of the fruit fly. Watch it very closely, and you'll see why my six-year-old son now wants to be a neuroscientist. Wait for it. Pshhew. So at least you'll admit that if fruit flies are not as clever as mice, they're at least as clever as pigeons. (Laughter)
Now, I want to get across that it's not just a matter of numbers but also the challenge for a fly to compute everything its brain has to compute with such tiny neurons. So this is a beautiful image of a visual interneuron from a mouse that came from Jeff Lichtman's lab, and you can see the wonderful images of brains that he showed in his talk. But up in the corner, in the right corner, you'll see, at the same scale, a visual interneuron from a fly. And I'll expand this up. And it's a beautifully complex neuron. It's just very, very tiny, and there's lots of biophysical challenges with trying to compute information with tiny, tiny neurons.
How small can neurons get? Well, look at this interesting insect. It looks sort of like a fly. It has wings, it has eyes, it has antennae, its legs, complicated life history, it's a parasite, it has to fly around and find caterpillars to parasatize, but not only is its brain the size of a salt grain, which is comparable for a fruit fly, it is the size of a salt grain. So here's some other organisms at the similar scale. This animal is the size of a paramecium and an amoeba, and it has a brain of 7,000 neurons that's so small -- you know these things called cell bodies you've been hearing about, where the nucleus of the neuron is? This animal gets rid of them because they take up too much space. So this is a session on frontiers in neuroscience. I would posit that one frontier in neuroscience is to figure out how the brain of that thing works.
But let's think about this. How can you make a small number of neurons do a lot? And I think, from an engineering perspective, you think of multiplexing. You can take a hardware and have that hardware do different things at different times, or have different parts of the hardware doing different things. And these are the two concepts I'd like to explore. And they're not concepts that I've come up with, but concepts that have been proposed by others in the past.
And one idea comes from lessons from chewing crabs. And I don't mean chewing the crabs. I grew up in Baltimore, and I chew crabs very, very well. But I'm talking about the crabs actually doing the chewing. Crab chewing is actually really fascinating. Crabs have this complicated structure under their carapace called the gastric mill that grinds their food in a variety of different ways. And here's an endoscopic movie of this structure. The amazing thing about this is that it's controlled by a really tiny set of neurons, about two dozen neurons that can produce a vast variety of different motor patterns, and the reason it can do this is that this little tiny ganglion in the crab is actually inundated by many, many neuromodulators. You heard about neuromodulators earlier. There are more neuromodulators that alter, that innervate this structure than actually neurons in the structure, and they're able to generate a complicated set of patterns. And this is the work by Eve Marder and her many colleagues who've been studying this fascinating system that show how a smaller cluster of neurons can do many, many, many things because of neuromodulation that can take place on a moment-by-moment basis. So this is basically multiplexing in time. Imagine a network of neurons with one neuromodulator. You select one set of cells to perform one sort of behavior, another neuromodulator, another set of cells, a different pattern, and you can imagine you could extrapolate to a very, very complicated system.
Is there any evidence that flies do this? Well, for many years in my laboratory and other laboratories around the world, we've been studying fly behaviors in little flight simulators. You can tether a fly to a little stick. You can measure the aerodynamic forces it's creating. You can let the fly play a little video game by letting it fly around in a visual display. So let me show you a little tiny sequence of this. Here's a fly and a large infrared view of the fly in the flight simulator, and this is a game the flies love to play. You allow them to steer towards the little stripe, and they'll just steer towards that stripe forever. It's part of their visual guidance system. But very, very recently, it's been possible to modify these sorts of behavioral arenas for physiologies. So this is the preparation that one of my former post-docs, Gaby Maimon, who's now at Rockefeller, developed, and it's basically a flight simulator but under conditions where you actually can stick an electrode in the brain of the fly and record from a genetically identified neuron in the fly's brain. And this is what one of these experiments looks like. It was a sequence taken from another post-doc in the lab, Bettina Schnell. The green trace at the bottom is the membrane potential of a neuron in the fly's brain, and you'll see the fly start to fly, and the fly is actually controlling the rotation of that visual pattern itself by its own wing motion, and you can see this visual interneuron respond to the pattern of wing motion as the fly flies. So for the first time we've actually been able to record from neurons in the fly's brain while the fly is performing sophisticated behaviors such as flight. And one of the lessons we've been learning is that the physiology of cells that we've been studying for many years in quiescent flies is not the same as the physiology of those cells when the flies actually engage in active behaviors like flying and walking and so forth. And why is the physiology different? Well it turns out it's these neuromodulators, just like the neuromodulators in that little tiny ganglion in the crabs. So here's a picture of the octopamine system. Octopamine is a neuromodulator that seems to play an important role in flight and other behaviors. But this is just one of many neuromodulators that's in the fly's brain. So I really think that, as we learn more, it's going to turn out that the whole fly brain is just like a large version of this stomatogastric ganglion, and that's one of the reasons why it can do so much with so few neurons.
Now, another idea, another way of multiplexing is multiplexing in space, having different parts of a neuron do different things at the same time. So here's two sort of canonical neurons from a vertebrate and an invertebrate, a human pyramidal neuron from Ramon y Cajal, and another cell to the right, a non-spiking interneuron, and this is the work of Alan Watson and Malcolm Burrows many years ago, and Malcolm Burrows came up with a pretty interesting idea based on the fact that this neuron from a locust does not fire action potentials. It's a non-spiking cell. So a typical cell, like the neurons in our brain, has a region called the dendrites that receives input, and that input sums together and will produce action potentials that run down the axon and then activate all the output regions of the neuron. But non-spiking neurons are actually quite complicated because they can have input synapses and output synapses all interdigitated, and there's no single action potential that drives all the outputs at the same time. So there's a possibility that you have computational compartments that allow the different parts of the neuron to do different things at the same time.
So these basic concepts of multitasking in time and multitasking in space, I think these are things that are true in our brains as well, but I think the insects are the true masters of this. So I hope you think of insects a little bit differently next time, and as I say up here, please think before you swat.
(Applause) |
(Video) Announcer: 10 seconds. Five, four, three, two, one. Official top. Plus one, two, three, four, five six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Guillaume Néry, France. Constant weight, 123 meters, three minutes and 25 seconds. National record attempt. 70 meters. [123 meters]
(Applause)
(Video) Judge: White card. Guillaume Néry! National record!
Guillaume Néry: Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you very much, thanks for the warm welcome. That dive you just watched is a journey -- a journey between two breaths. A journey that takes place between two breaths -- the last one before diving into the water, and the first one, coming back to the surface. That dive is a journey to the very limits of human possibility, a journey into the unknown. But it's also, and above all, an inner journey, where a number of things happen, physiologically as well as mentally. And that's why I'm here today, to share my journey with you and to take you along with me.
So, we start with the last breath. (Breathing in) (Breathing out) As you noticed, that last breath in is slow, deep and intense. It ends with a special technique called the carp, which allows me to store one to two extra liters of air in my lungs by compressing it. When I leave the surface, I have about 10 liters of air in my lungs. As soon as I leave the surface the first mechanism kicks in: the diving reflex. The first thing the diving reflex does is make your heart rate drop. My heart beat will drop from about 60-70 per minute to about 30-40 beats per minute in a matter of seconds; almost immediately.
Next, the diving reflex causes peripheral vasoconstriction, which means that the blood flow will leave the body's extremities to feed the most important organs: the lungs, the heart and the brain. This mechanism is innate. I cannot control it. If you go underwater, even if you've never done it before, you'll experience the exact same effects. All human beings share this characteristic. And what's extraordinary is that we share this instinct with marine mammals -- all marine mammals: dolphins, whales, sea lions, etc. When they dive deep into the ocean, these mechanisms become activated, but to a greater extent. And, of course, it works much better for them. It's absolutely fascinating.
Right as I leave the surface, nature gives me a push in the right direction, allowing me to descend with confidence.
So as I dive deeper into the blue, the pressure slowly starts to squeeze my lungs. And since it's the amount of air in my lungs that makes me float, the farther down I go, the more pressure there is on my lungs, the less air they contain and the easier it is for my body to fall. And at one point, around 35 or 40 meters down, I don't even need to swim. My body is dense and heavy enough to fall into the depths by itself, and I enter what's called the free fall phase. The free fall phase is the best part of the dive. It's the reason I still dive. Because it feels like you're being pulled down and you don't need to do anything. I can go from 35 meters to 123 meters without making a single movement. I let myself be pulled by the depths, and it feels like I'm flying underwater. It's truly an amazing feeling -- an extraordinary feeling of freedom.
And so I slowly continue sliding to the bottom. 40 meters down, 50 meters down, and between 50 and 60 meters, a second physiological response kicks in. My lungs reach residual volume, below which they're not supposed to be compressed, in theory. And this second response is called blood shift, or "pulmonary erection" in French. I prefer "blood shift."
(Laughter)
So blood shift -- how does it work? The capillaries in the lungs become engorged with blood -- which is caused by the suction -- so the lungs can harden and protect the whole chest cavity from being crushed. It prevents the two walls of the lungs from collapsing, from sticking together and caving in. Thanks to this phenomenon, which we also share with marine mammals, I'm able to continue with my dive.
60, 70 meters down, I keep falling, faster and faster, because the pressure is crushing my body more and more. Below 80 meters, the pressure becomes a lot stronger, and I start to feel it physically. I really start to feel the suffocation. You can see what it looks like -- not pretty at all. The diaphragm is completely collapsed, the rib cage is squeezed in, and mentally, there is something going on as well.
You may be thinking, "This doesn't look enjoyable. How do you do it?" If I relied on my earthly reflexes -- what do we do above water when there's a problem? We resist, we go against it. We fight. Underwater, that doesn't work. If you try that underwater, you might tear your lungs, spit up blood, develop an edema and you'll have to stop diving for a good amount of time. So what you need to do, mentally, is to tell yourself that nature and the elements are stronger than you.
And so I let the water crush me. I accept the pressure and go with it. At this point, my body receives this information, and my lungs start relaxing. I relinquish all control, and relax completely. The pressure starts crushing me, and it doesn't feel bad at all. I even feel like I'm in a cocoon, protected.
And the dive continues. 80, 85 meters down, 90, 100. 100 meters -- the magic number. In every sport, it's a magic number. For swimmers and athletes and also for us, free divers, it's a number everyone dreams of. Everyone wishes one day to be able to get to 100 meters. And it's a symbolic number for us, because in the 1970s, doctors and physiologists did their math, and predicted that the human body would not be able to go below 100 meters. Below that, they said, the human body would implode. And then the Frenchman, Jacques Mayol -- you all know him as the hero in "The Big Blue" -- came along and dived down to 100 meters. He even reached 105 meters. At that time, he was doing "no limits." He'd use weights to descend faster and come back up with a balloon, just like in the movie. Today, we go down 200 meters in no limit free diving. I can do 123 meters by simply using muscle strength. And in a way, it's all thanks to him, because he challenged known facts, and with a sweep of his hand, got rid of the theoretical beliefs and all the mental limits that we like to impose on ourselves. He showed us that the human body has an infinite ability to adapt.
So I carry on with my dive. 105, 110, 115. The bottom is getting closer. 120, 123 meters. I'm at the bottom.
And now, I'd like to ask you to join me and put yourself in my place. Close your eyes. Imagine you get to 123 meters. The surface is far, far away. You're alone. There's hardly any light. It's cold -- freezing cold. The pressure is crushing you completely -- 13 times stronger than on the surface. And I know what you're thinking: "This is horrible. What the hell am I doing here? He's insane." But no. That's not what I think when I'm down there. When I'm at the bottom, I feel good. I get this extraordinary feeling of well-being. Maybe it's because I've completely released all tensions and let myself go. I feel great, without the need to breathe.
Although, you'd agree, I should be worried. I feel like a tiny dot, a little drop of water, floating in the middle of the ocean. And each time, I picture the same image. [The Pale Blue Dot] It's that small dot the arrow is pointing to. Do you know what it is? It's planet Earth. Planet Earth, photographed by the Voyager probe, from 4 billion kilometers away. And it shows that our home is that small dot over there, floating in the middle of nothing.
That's how I feel when I'm at the bottom, at 123 meters. I feel like a small dot, a speck of dust, stardust, floating in the middle of the cosmos, in the middle of nothing, in the immensity of space. It's a fascinating sensation, because when I look up, down, left, right, in front, behind, I see the same thing: the infinite deep blue. Nowhere else on Earth you can experience this -- looking all around you, and seeing the same thing. It's extraordinary. And at that moment, I still get that feeling each time, building up inside of me -- the feeling of humility.
Looking at this picture, I feel very humble -- just like when I'm all the way down at the bottom -- because I'm nothing, I'm a little speck of nothingness lost in all of time and space. And it still is absolutely fascinating. I decide to go back to the surface, because this is not where I belong. I belong up there, on the surface.
So I start heading back up. I get something of a shock at the very moment when I decide to go up. First, because it takes a huge effort to tear yourself away from the bottom. It pulled you down on the way in, and will do the same on the way up. You have to swim twice as hard. Then, I'm hit with another phenomenon known as narcosis. I don't know if you've heard of that. It's called nitrogen narcosis. It's something that happens to scuba divers, but it can happen to free divers. It's caused by nitrogen dissolving in the blood, which causes confusion between the conscious and unconscious mind. A flurry of thoughts goes spinning through your head. You can't control them, and you shouldn't try to -- you have to let it happen. The more you try to control it, the harder it is to manage. Then, a third thing happens: the desire to breathe. I'm not a fish, I'm a human being, and the desire to breathe reminds me of that fact. Around 60, 70 meters, you start to feel the need to breathe. And with everything else that's going on, you can very easily lose your ground and start to panic. When that happens, you think, "Where's the surface? I want to go up. I want to breathe now." You should not do that. Never look up to the surface -- not with your eyes, or your mind. You should never picture yourself up there. You have to stay in the present. I look at the rope right in front of me, leading me back to the surface. And I focus on that, on the present moment. Because if I think about the surface, I panic. And if I panic, it's over. Time goes faster this way.
And at 30 meters: deliverance. I'm not alone any more. The safety divers, my guardian angels, join me. They leave the surface, we meet at 30 meters, and they escort me for the final few meters, where potential problems could arise. Every time I see them, I think to myself, "It's thanks to you." It's thanks to them, my team, that I'm here. It brings back the sense of humility. Without my team, without all the people around me, the adventure into the deep would be impossible. A journey into the deep is above all a group effort.
So I'm happy to finish my journey with them, because I wouldn't be here if it weren't for them. 20 meters, 10 meters, my lungs slowly return to their normal volume. Buoyancy pushes me up to the surface. Five meters below the surface, I start to breathe out, so that as soon as I get to the surface all I do is breathe in. And so I arrive at the surface. (Breathing in) Air floods into my lungs. It's like being born again, a relief. It feels good. Though the journey was extraordinary, I do need to feel those small oxygen molecules fueling my body. It's an extraordinary sensation, but at the same time it's traumatizing. It's a shock to the system, as you can you imagine. I go from complete darkness to the light of day, from the near-silence of the depths to the commotion up top. In terms of touch, I go from the soft, velvety feeling of the water, to air rubbing across my face. In terms of smell, there is air rushing into my lungs.
And in return, my lungs open up. They were completely squashed just 90 seconds ago, and now, they've opened up again. So all of this affects quite a lot of things. I need a few seconds to come back, and to feel "all there" again. But that needs to happen quickly, because the judges are there to verify my performance; I need to show them I'm in perfect physical condition. You saw in the video, I was doing a so-called exit protocol. Once at the surface, I have 15 seconds to take off my nose clip, give this signal and say (English) "I am OK." Plus, you need to be bilingual.
(Laughter)
On top of everything -- that's not very nice. Once the protocol is completed, the judges show me a white card, and that's when the joy starts. I can finally celebrate what has just happened.
So, the journey I've just described to you is a more extreme version of free diving. Luckily, it's far from just that. For the past few years, I've been trying to show another side of free diving, because the media mainly talks about competitions and records. But free diving is more than just that. It's about being at ease in the water. It's extremely beautiful, very poetic and artistic.
So my wife and I decided to film it and try to show another side of it, mostly to make people want to go into the water. Let me show you some images to finish my story. It's a mix of beautiful underwater photos.
(Music)
I'd like you to know that if one day you try to stop breathing, you'll realize that when you stop breathing, you stop thinking, too. It calms your mind.
Today, in the 21st century, we're under so much pressure. Our minds are overworked, we think at a million miles an hour, we're always stressed. Being able to free dive lets you, just for a moment, relax your mind. Holding your breath underwater means giving yourself the chance to experience weightlessness. It means being underwater, floating, with your body completely relaxed, letting go of all your tensions. This is our plight in the 21st century: our backs hurt, our necks hurt, everything hurts, because we're stressed and tense all the time. But when you're in the water, you let yourself float, as if you were in space. You let yourself go completely. It's an extraordinary feeling. You can finally get in touch with your body, mind and spirit. Everything feels better, all at once.
Learning how to free dive is also about learning to breathe correctly. We breathe with our first breath at birth, up until our last one. Breathing gives rhythm to our lives. Learning how to breathe better is learning how to live better. Holding your breath in the sea, not necessarily at 100 meters, but maybe at two or three, putting on your goggles, a pair of flippers, means you can go see another world, another universe, completely magical. You can see little fish, seaweed, the flora and fauna, you can watch it all discreetly, sliding underwater, looking around, and coming back to the surface, leaving no trace. It's an amazing feeling to become one with nature like that.
And if I may say one more thing, holding your breath, being in the water, finding this underwater world -- it's all about connecting with yourself. You heard me talk a lot about the body's memory that dates back millions of years, to our marine origins. The day you get back into the water, when you hold your breath for a few seconds, you will reconnect with those origins. And I guarantee it's absolute magic. I encourage you to try it out.
Thank you.
(Applause) |
Thank you very much. I moved to America 12 years ago with my wife Terry and our two kids. Actually, truthfully, we moved to Los Angeles -- (Laughter) -- thinking we were moving to America, but anyway, it's a short plane ride from Los Angeles to America. I got here 12 years ago, and when I got here, I was told various things, like, "Americans don't get irony." Have you come across this idea? It's not true. I've traveled the whole length and breadth of this country. I have found no evidence that Americans don't get irony. It's one of those cultural myths, like, "The British are reserved." I don't know why people think this. We've invaded every country we've encountered. (Laughter) But it's not true Americans don't get irony, but I just want you to know that that's what people are saying about you behind your back. You know, so when you leave living rooms in Europe, people say, thankfully, nobody was ironic in your presence. But I knew that Americans get irony when I came across that legislation No Child Left Behind. Because whoever thought of that title gets irony, don't they, because -- (Laughter) (Applause) — because it's leaving millions of children behind. Now I can see that's not a very attractive name for legislation: Millions of Children Left Behind. I can see that. What's the plan? Well, we propose to leave millions of children behind, and here's how it's going to work. And it's working beautifully. In some parts of the country, 60 percent of kids drop out of high school. In the Native American communities, it's 80 percent of kids. If we halved that number, one estimate is it would create a net gain to the U.S. economy over 10 years of nearly a trillion dollars. From an economic point of view, this is good math, isn't it, that we should do this? It actually costs an enormous amount to mop up the damage from the dropout crisis. But the dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it. And the reason is not that we're not spending enough money. America spends more money on education than most other countries. Class sizes are smaller than in many countries. And there are hundreds of initiatives every year to try and improve education. The trouble is, it's all going in the wrong direction. There are three principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most teachers have to labor and most students have to endure. The first is this, that human beings are naturally different and diverse. Can I ask you, how many of you have got children of your own? Okay. Or grandchildren. How about two children or more? Right. And the rest of you have seen such children. (Laughter) Small people wandering about. I will make you a bet, and I am confident that I will win the bet. If you've got two children or more, I bet you they are completely different from each other. Aren't they? Aren't they? (Applause) You would never confuse them, would you? Like, "Which one are you? Remind me. Your mother and I are going to introduce some color-coding system, so we don't get confused." Education under No Child Left Behind is based on not diversity but conformity. What schools are encouraged to do is to find out what kids can do across a very narrow spectrum of achievement. One of the effects of No Child Left Behind has been to narrow the focus onto the so-called STEM disciplines. They're very important. I'm not here to argue against science and math. On the contrary, they're necessary but they're not sufficient. A real education has to give equal weight to the arts, the humanities, to physical education. An awful lot of kids, sorry, thank you — (Applause) — One estimate in America currently is that something like 10 percent of kids, getting on that way, are being diagnosed with various conditions under the broad title of attention deficit disorder. ADHD. I'm not saying there's no such thing. I just don't believe it's an epidemic like this. If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget, you know? (Laughter) (Applause) Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition. They're suffering from childhood. (Laughter) And I know this because I spent my early life as a child. I went through the whole thing. Kids prosper best with a broad curriculum that celebrates their various talents, not just a small range of them. And by the way, the arts aren't just important because they improve math scores. They're important because they speak to parts of children's being which are otherwise untouched. The second, thank you — (Applause) The second principle that drives human life flourishing is curiosity. If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance, very often. Children are natural learners. It's a real achievement to put that particular ability out, or to stifle it. Curiosity is the engine of achievement. Now the reason I say this is because one of the effects of the current culture here, if I can say so, has been to de-professionalize teachers. There is no system in the world or any school in the country that is better than its teachers. Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools. But teaching is a creative profession. Teaching, properly conceived, is not a delivery system. You know, you're not there just to pass on received information. Great teachers do that, but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage. You see, in the end, education is about learning. If there's no learning going on, there's no education going on. And people can spend an awful lot of time discussing education without ever discussing learning. The whole point of education is to get people to learn. A friend of mine, an old friend -- actually very old, he's dead. (Laughter) That's as old as it gets, I'm afraid. But a wonderful guy he was, wonderful philosopher. He used to talk about the difference between the task and achievement senses of verbs. You know, you can be engaged in the activity of something, but not really be achieving it, like dieting. It's a very good example, you know. There he is. He's dieting. Is he losing any weight? Not really. Teaching is a word like that. You can say, "There's Deborah, she's in room 34, she's teaching." But if nobody's learning anything, she may be engaged in the task of teaching but not actually fulfilling it. The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. That's it. And part of the problem is, I think, that the dominant culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and learning, but testing. Now, testing is important. Standardized tests have a place. But they should not be the dominant culture of education. They should be diagnostic. They should help. (Applause) If I go for a medical examination, I want some standardized tests. I do. You know, I want to know what my cholesterol level is compared to everybody else's on a standard scale. I don't want to be told on some scale my doctor invented in the car. "Your cholesterol is what I call Level Orange." "Really? Is that good?""We don't know." But all that should support learning. It shouldn't obstruct it, which of course it often does. So in place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance. Our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite that power of imagination and curiosity. And the third principle is this: that human life is inherently creative. It's why we all have different résumés. We create our lives, and we can recreate them as we go through them. It's the common currency of being a human being. It's why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic. I mean, other animals may well have imaginations and creativity, but it's not so much in evidence, is it, as ours? I mean, you may have a dog. And your dog may get depressed. You know, but it doesn't listen to Radiohead, does it? (Laughter) And sit staring out the window with a bottle of Jack Daniels. (Laughter) And you say, "Would you like to come for a walk?" He says, "No, I'm fine. You go. I'll wait. But take pictures." We all create our own lives through this restless process of imagining alternatives and possibilities, and what one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity. Instead, what we have is a culture of standardization. Now, it doesn't have to be that way. It really doesn't. Finland regularly comes out on top in math, science and reading. Now, we only know that's what they do well at because that's all that's being tested currently. That's one of the problems of the test. They don't look for other things that matter just as much. The thing about work in Finland is this: they don't obsess about those disciplines. They have a very broad approach to education which includes humanities, physical education, the arts. Second, there is no standardized testing in Finland. I mean, there's a bit, but it's not what gets people up in the morning. It's not what keeps them at their desks. And the third thing, and I was at a meeting recently with some people from Finland, actual Finnish people, and somebody from the American system was saying to the people in Finland, "What do you do about the dropout rate in Finland?" And they all looked a bit bemused, and said, "Well, we don't have one. Why would you drop out? If people are in trouble, we get to them quite quickly and help them and we support them." Now people always say, "Well, you know, you can't compare Finland to America." No. I think there's a population of around five million in Finland. But you can compare it to a state in America. Many states in America have fewer people in them than that. I mean, I've been to some states in America and I was the only person there. (Laughter) Really. Really. I was asked to lock up when I left. (Laughter) But what all the high-performing systems in the world do is currently what is not evident, sadly, across the systems in America -- I mean, as a whole. One is this: They individualize teaching and learning. They recognize that it's students who are learning and the system has to engage them, their curiosity, their individuality, and their creativity. That's how you get them to learn. The second is that they attribute a very high status to the teaching profession. They recognize that you can't improve education if you don't pick great people to teach and if you don't keep giving them constant support and professional development. Investing in professional development is not a cost. It's an investment, and every other country that's succeeding well knows that, whether it's Australia, Canada, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai. They know that to be the case. And the third is, they devolve responsibility to the school level for getting the job done. You see, there's a big difference here between going into a mode of command and control in education -- That's what happens in some systems. You know, central governments decide or state governments decide they know best and they're going to tell you what to do. The trouble is that education doesn't go on in the committee rooms of our legislative buildings. It happens in classrooms and schools, and the people who do it are the teachers and the students, and if you remove their discretion, it stops working. You have to put it back to the people. (Applause) There is wonderful work happening in this country. But I have to say it's happening in spite of the dominant culture of education, not because of it. It's like people are sailing into a headwind all the time. And the reason I think is this: that many of the current policies are based on mechanistic conceptions of education. It's like education is an industrial process that can be improved just by having better data, and somewhere in, I think, the back of the mind of some policy makers is this idea that if we fine-tune it well enough, if we just get it right, it will all hum along perfectly into the future. It won't, and it never did. The point is that education is not a mechanical system. It's a human system. It's about people, people who either do want to learn or don't want to learn. Every student who drops out of school has a reason for it which is rooted in their own biography. They may find it boring. They may find it irrelevant. They may find that it's at odds with the life they're living outside of school. There are trends, but the stories are always unique. I was at a meeting recently in Los Angeles of -- they're called alternative education programs. These are programs designed to get kids back into education. They have certain common features. They're very personalized. They have strong support for the teachers, close links with the community and a broad and diverse curriculum, and often programs which involve students outside school as well as inside school. And they work. What's interesting to me is, these are called "alternative education." You know? And all the evidence from around the world is, if we all did that, there'd be no need for the alternative. (Applause) So I think we have to embrace a different metaphor. We have to recognize that it's a human system, and there are conditions under which people thrive, and conditions under which they don't. We are after all organic creatures, and the culture of the school is absolutely essential. Culture is an organic term, isn't it? Not far from where I live is a place called Death Valley. Death Valley is the hottest, driest place in America, and nothing grows there. Nothing grows there because it doesn't rain. Hence, Death Valley. In the winter of 2004, it rained in Death Valley. Seven inches of rain fell over a very short period. And in the spring of 2005, there was a phenomenon. The whole floor of Death Valley was carpeted in flowers for a while. What it proved is this: that Death Valley isn't dead. It's dormant. Right beneath the surface are these seeds of possibility waiting for the right conditions to come about, and with organic systems, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable. It happens all the time. You take an area, a school, a district, you change the conditions, give people a different sense of possibility, a different set of expectations, a broader range of opportunities, you cherish and value the relationships between teachers and learners, you offer people the discretion to be creative and to innovate in what they do, and schools that were once bereft spring to life. Great leaders know that. The real role of leadership in education -- and I think it's true at the national level, the state level, at the school level -- is not and should not be command and control. The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility. And if you do that, people will rise to it and achieve things that you completely did not anticipate and couldn't have expected. There's a wonderful quote from Benjamin Franklin. "There are three sorts of people in the world: Those who are immovable, people who don't get, they don't want to get it, they're going to do anything about it. There are people who are movable, people who see the need for change and are prepared to listen to it. And there are people who move, people who make things happen." And if we can encourage more people, that will be a movement. And if the movement is strong enough, that's, in the best sense of the word, a revolution. And that's what we need. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) |
When I was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were playing on top of a bunk bed. I was two years older than my sister at the time -- I mean, I'm two years older than her now -- but at the time it meant she had to do everything that I wanted to do, and I wanted to play war. So we were up on top of our bunk beds. And on one side of the bunk bed, I had put out all of my G.I. Joe soldiers and weaponry. And on the other side were all my sister's My Little Ponies ready for a cavalry charge.
There are differing accounts of what actually happened that afternoon, but since my sister is not here with us today, let me tell you the true story -- (Laughter) -- which is my sister's a little bit on the clumsy side. Somehow, without any help or push from her older brother at all, suddenly Amy disappeared off of the top of the bunk bed and landed with this crash on the floor. Now I nervously peered over the side of the bed to see what had befallen my fallen sister and saw that she had landed painfully on her hands and knees on all fours on the ground.
I was nervous because my parents had charged me with making sure that my sister and I played as safely and as quietly as possible. And seeing as how I had accidentally broken Amy's arm just one week before ... (Laughter) ... heroically pushing her out of the way of an oncoming imaginary sniper bullet, (Laughter) for which I have yet to be thanked, I was trying as hard as I could -- she didn't even see it coming -- I was trying as hard as I could to be on my best behavior.
And I saw my sister's face, this wail of pain and suffering and surprise threatening to erupt from her mouth and threatening to wake my parents from the long winter's nap for which they had settled. So I did the only thing my little frantic seven year-old brain could think to do to avert this tragedy. And if you have children, you've seen this hundreds of times before. I said, "Amy, Amy, wait. Don't cry. Don't cry. Did you see how you landed? No human lands on all fours like that. Amy, I think this means you're a unicorn."
(Laughter)
Now that was cheating, because there was nothing in the world my sister would want more than not to be Amy the hurt five year-old little sister, but Amy the special unicorn. Of course, this was an option that was open to her brain at no point in the past. And you could see how my poor, manipulated sister faced conflict, as her little brain attempted to devote resources to feeling the pain and suffering and surprise she just experienced, or contemplating her new-found identity as a unicorn. And the latter won out. Instead of crying, instead of ceasing our play, instead of waking my parents, with all the negative consequences that would have ensued for me, instead a smile spread across her face and she scrambled right back up onto the bunk bed with all the grace of a baby unicorn ... (Laughter) ... with one broken leg.
What we stumbled across at this tender age of just five and seven -- we had no idea at the time -- was something that was going be at the vanguard of a scientific revolution occurring two decades later in the way that we look at the human brain. What we had stumbled across is something called positive psychology, which is the reason that I'm here today and the reason that I wake up every morning.
When I first started talking about this research outside of academia, out with companies and schools, the very first thing they said to never do is to start your talk with a graph. The very first thing I want to do is start my talk with a graph. This graph looks boring, but this graph is the reason I get excited and wake up every morning. And this graph doesn't even mean anything; it's fake data. What we found is --
(Laughter)
If I got this data back studying you here in the room, I would be thrilled, because there's very clearly a trend that's going on there, and that means that I can get published, which is all that really matters. The fact that there's one weird red dot that's up above the curve, there's one weirdo in the room -- I know who you are, I saw you earlier -- that's no problem. That's no problem, as most of you know, because I can just delete that dot. I can delete that dot because that's clearly a measurement error. And we know that's a measurement error because it's messing up my data.
So one of the very first things we teach people in economics and statistics and business and psychology courses is how, in a statistically valid way, do we eliminate the weirdos. How do we eliminate the outliers so we can find the line of best fit? Which is fantastic if I'm trying to find out how many Advil the average person should be taking -- two. But if I'm interested in potential, if I'm interested in your potential, or for happiness or productivity or energy or creativity, what we're doing is we're creating the cult of the average with science.
If I asked a question like, "How fast can a child learn how to read in a classroom?" scientists change the answer to "How fast does the average child learn how to read in that classroom?" and then we tailor the class right towards the average. Now if you fall below the average on this curve, then psychologists get thrilled, because that means you're either depressed or you have a disorder, or hopefully both. We're hoping for both because our business model is, if you come into a therapy session with one problem, we want to make sure you leave knowing you have 10, so you keep coming back over and over again. We'll go back into your childhood if necessary, but eventually what we want to do is make you normal again. But normal is merely average.
And what I posit and what positive psychology posits is that if we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average. Then instead of deleting those positive outliers, what I intentionally do is come into a population like this one and say, why? Why is it that some of you are so high above the curve in terms of your intellectual ability, athletic ability, musical ability, creativity, energy levels, your resiliency in the face of challenge, your sense of humor? Whatever it is, instead of deleting you, what I want to do is study you. Because maybe we can glean information -- not just how to move people up to the average, but how we can move the entire average up in our companies and schools worldwide.
The reason this graph is important to me is, when I turn on the news, it seems like the majority of the information is not positive, in fact it's negative. Most of it's about murder, corruption, diseases, natural disasters. And very quickly, my brain starts to think that's the accurate ratio of negative to positive in the world. What that's doing is creating something called the medical school syndrome -- which, if you know people who've been to medical school, during the first year of medical training, as you read through a list of all the symptoms and diseases that could happen, suddenly you realize you have all of them.
I have a brother in-law named Bobo -- which is a whole other story. Bobo married Amy the unicorn. Bobo called me on the phone from Yale Medical School, and Bobo said, "Shawn, I have leprosy." (Laughter) Which, even at Yale, is extraordinarily rare. But I had no idea how to console poor Bobo because he had just gotten over an entire week of menopause.
(Laughter)
See what we're finding is it's not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. And if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we can change every single educational and business outcome at the same time.
When I applied to Harvard, I applied on a dare. I didn't expect to get in, and my family had no money for college. When I got a military scholarship two weeks later, they allowed me to go. Suddenly, something that wasn't even a possibility became a reality. When I went there, I assumed everyone else would see it as a privilege as well, that they'd be excited to be there. Even if you're in a classroom full of people smarter than you, you'd be happy just to be in that classroom, which is what I felt. But what I found there is, while some people experience that, when I graduated after my four years and then spent the next eight years living in the dorms with the students -- Harvard asked me to; I wasn't that guy. (Laughter) I was an officer of Harvard to counsel students through the difficult four years. And what I found in my research and my teaching is that these students, no matter how happy they were with their original success of getting into the school, two weeks later their brains were focused, not on the privilege of being there, nor on their philosophy or their physics. Their brain was focused on the competition, the workload, the hassles, the stresses, the complaints.
When I first went in there, I walked into the freshmen dining hall, which is where my friends from Waco, Texas, which is where I grew up -- I know some of you have heard of it. When they'd come to visit me, they'd look around, they'd say, "This freshman dining hall looks like something out of Hogwart's from the movie "Harry Potter," which it does. This is Hogwart's from the movie "Harry Potter" and that's Harvard. And when they see this, they say, "Shawn, why do you waste your time studying happiness at Harvard? Seriously, what does a Harvard student possibly have to be unhappy about?"
Embedded within that question is the key to understanding the science of happiness. Because what that question assumes is that our external world is predictive of our happiness levels, when in reality, if I know everything about your external world, I can only predict 10 percent of your long-term happiness. 90 percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world. And if we change it, if we change our formula for happiness and success, what we can do is change the way that we can then affect reality. What we found is that only 25 percent of job successes are predicted by I.Q. 75 percent of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat.
I talked to a boarding school up in New England, probably the most prestigious boarding school, and they said, "We already know that. So every year, instead of just teaching our students, we also have a wellness week. And we're so excited. Monday night we have the world's leading expert coming in to speak about adolescent depression. Tuesday night it's school violence and bullying. Wednesday night is eating disorders. Thursday night is elicit drug use. And Friday night we're trying to decide between risky sex or happiness." (Laughter) I said, "That's most people's Friday nights." (Laughter) (Applause) Which I'm glad you liked, but they did not like that at all. Silence on the phone. And into the silence, I said, "I'd be happy to speak at your school, but just so you know, that's not a wellness week, that's a sickness week. What you've done is you've outlined all the negative things that can happen, but not talked about the positive."
The absence of disease is not health. Here's how we get to health: We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success. In the last three years, I've traveled to 45 different countries, working with schools and companies in the midst of an economic downturn. And what I found is that most companies and schools follow a formula for success, which is this: If I work harder, I'll be more successful. And if I'm more successful, then I'll be happier. That undergirds most of our parenting styles, our managing styles, the way that we motivate our behavior.
And the problem is it's scientifically broken and backwards for two reasons. First, every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a better school, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we're going to change your sales target. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. What we've done is we've pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society. And that's because we think we have to be successful, then we'll be happier.
But the real problem is our brains work in the opposite order. If you can raise somebody's level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than it does at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, what we've found is that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31 percent more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You're 37 percent better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed. Which means we can reverse the formula. If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we're able to work harder, faster and more intelligently.
What we need to be able to do is to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of. Because dopamine, which floods into your system when you're positive, has two functions. Not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way.
We've found that there are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive. In just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in a row, we can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully. We've done these things in research now in every single company that I've worked with, getting them to write down three new things that they're grateful for for 21 days in a row, three new things each day. And at the end of that, their brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world, not for the negative, but for the positive first.
Journaling about one positive experience you've had over the past 24 hours allows your brain to relive it. Exercise teaches your brain that your behavior matters. We find that meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural ADHD that we've been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows our brains to focus on the task at hand. And finally, random acts of kindness are conscious acts of kindness. We get people, when they open up their inbox, to write one positive email praising or thanking somebody in their social support network.
And by doing these activities and by training your brain just like we train our bodies, what we've found is we can reverse the formula for happiness and success, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but create a real revolution.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) |
There's a beautiful statement on the screen that says, "Light creates ambiance, light makes the feel of a space, and light is also the expression of structure." Well, that was not by me. That was, of course, by Le Corbusier, the famous architect. And here you can see what he meant in one of his beautiful buildings -- the chapel Notre Dame Du Haut De Ronchamp -- where he creates this light that he could only make because there's also dark. And I think that is the quintessence of this 18-minute talk -- that there is no good lighting that is healthy and for our well-being without proper darkness.
So this is how we normally would light our offices. We have codes and standards that tell us that the lights should be so much Lux and of great uniformity. This is how we create uniform lighting from one wall to the other in a regular grid of lamps. And that is quite different from what I just showed you from Le Corbusier. If we would apply these codes and standards to the Pantheon in Rome, it would never have looked like this, because this beautiful light feature that goes around there all by itself can only appear because there is also darkness in that same building. And the same is more or less what Santiago Calatrava said when he said, "Light: I make it in my buildings for comfort." And he didn't mean the comfort of a five-course dinner as opposed to a one-course meal, but he really meant the comfort of the quality of the building for the people. He meant that you can see the sky and that you can experience the sun. And he created these gorgeous buildings where you can see the sky, and where you can experience the sun, that give us a better life in the built environment, just because of the relevance of light in its brightness and also in its shadows.
And what it all boils down to is, of course, the sun. And this image of the Sun may suggest that the Sun is something evil and aggressive, but we should not forget that all energy on this planet actually comes from the Sun, and light is only a manifestation of that energy.
The sun is for dynamics, for color changes. The sun is for beauty in our environment, like in this building -- the High Museum in Atlanta, which has been created by Renzo Piano from Italy, together with Arup Lighting, a brilliant team of lighting designers, who created a very subtle modulation of light across the space, responding to what the sun does outside, just because of all these beautiful openings in the roof. So in an indirect way, you can see the sun. And what they did is they created an integral building element to improve the quality of the space that surrounds the visitors of the museum. They created this shade that you can see here, which actually covers the sun, but opens up to the good light from the sky. And here you can see how they really crafted a beautiful design process with physical models, with quantitative as well as qualitative methods, to come to a final solution that is truly integrated and completely holistic with the architecture. They allowed themselves a few mistakes along the way. As you can see here, there's some direct light on the floor, but they could easily figure out where that comes from. And they allow people in that building to really enjoy the sun, the good part of the sun.
And enjoying the sun can be in many different ways, of course. It can be just like this, or maybe like this, which is rather peculiar, but this is in 1963 -- the viewing of a sun eclipse in the United States. And it's just a bit bright up there, so these people have found a very intriguing solution. This is, I think, a very illustrative image of what I try to say -- that the beautiful dynamics of sun, bringing these into the building, creates a quality of our built environment that truly enhances our lives. And this is all about darkness as much as it is about lightness, of course, because otherwise you don't see these dynamics.
As opposed to the first office that I showed you in the beginning of the talk, this is a well-known office, which is the Weidt Group. They are in green energy consulting, or something like that. And they really practice what they preach because this office doesn't have any electric lighting at all. It has only, on one side, this big, big glass window that helps to let the sunlight enter deep into the space and create a beautiful quality there and a great dynamic range. So it can be very dim over there, and you do your work, and it can be very bright over there, and you do your work. But actually, the human eye turns out to be remarkably adaptable to all these different light conditions that together create an environment that is never boring and that is never dull, and therefore helps us to enhance our lives.
I really owe a short introduction of this man to you. This is Richard Kelly who was born 100 years ago, which is the reason I bring him up now, because it's kind of an anniversary year. In the 1930s, Richard Kelly was the first person to really describe a methodology of modern lighting design. And he coined three terms, which are "focal glow," "ambient luminescence" and "play of the brilliants" -- three very distinctly different ideas about light in architecture that all together make up this beautiful experience.
So to begin with, focal glow. He meant something like this -- where the light gives direction to the space and helps you to get around. Or something like this, which is the lighting design he did for General Motors, for the car showroom. And you enter that space, and you feel like, "Wow! This is so impressive," just because of this focal point, this huge light source in the middle. To me, it is something from theater, and I will get back to that a little bit later. It's the spotlight on the artist that helps you to focus. It could also be the sunlight that breaks through the clouds and lights up a patch of the land, highlighting it compared to the dim environment. Or it can be in today's retail, in the shopping environment -- lighting the merchandise and creating accents that help you to get around.
Ambient luminescence is something very different. Richard Kelly saw it as something infinite, something without any focus, something where all details actually dissolve in infinity. And I see it as a very comfortable kind of light that really helps us to relax and to contemplate. It could also be something like this: the National Museum of Science in London, where this blue is embracing all the exhibitions and galleries in one large gesture.
And then finally, Kelly's play of brilliants added to that really some play, I think, of the skyline of Hong Kong, or perhaps the chandelier in the opera house, or in the theater here, which is the decoration, the icing on the cake, something playful, something that is just an addition to the architectural environment, I would say. These three distinct elements, together, make a lighting environment that helps us to feel better. And we can only create these out of darkness. And I will explain that further. And I guess that is something that Richard Kelly, here on the left, was explaining to Ludwig Mies van Der Rohe. And behind them, you see that Seagram Building that later turned into an icon of modern lighting design.
Those times, there were some early attempts also for light therapy already. You can see here a photo from the United States Library of Medicine, where people are put in the sun to get better. It's a little bit of a different story, this health aspect of light, than what I'm telling you today. In today's modern medicine, there is a real understanding of light in an almost biochemical way. And there is the idea that, when we look at things, it is the yellow light that helps us the most, that we are the most sensitive for. But our circadian rhythms, which are the rhythms that help us to wake and sleep and be alert and relaxed and so forth and so on, they are much more triggered by blue light. And by modulating the amount of blue in our environment, we can help people to relax, or to be alert, to fall asleep, or to stay awake.
And that is how, maybe in the near future, light can help hospitals to make people better sooner, recover them quicker. Maybe in the airplane, we can overcome jet lag like that. Perhaps in school, we can help children to learn better because they concentrate more on their work. And you can imagine a lot more applications. But I would like to talk further about the combination of light and darkness as a quality in our life.
So light is, of course, for social interaction also -- to create relationships with all the features around us. It is the place where we gather around when we have to say something to each other. And it is all about this planet. But when you look at this planet at night, it looks like this. And I think this is the most shocking image in my talk today. Because all this light here goes up to the sky. It never reaches the ground where it was meant for. It never is to the benefit of people. It only spoils the darkness. So at a global scale, it looks like this. And, I mean, that is quite amazing, what you see here -- how much light goes up into the sky and never reaches the ground. Because if we look at the Earth the way it should be, it would be something like this very inspiring image where darkness is for our imagination and for contemplation and to help us to relate to everything.
The world is changing though, and urbanization is a big driver of everything. I took this photo two weeks ago in Guangzhou, and I realized that 10 years ago, there was nothing like this, of these buildings. It was just a much smaller city, and the pace of urbanization is incredible and enormous. And we have to understand these main questions: How do people move through these new urban spaces? How do they share their culture? How do we tackle things like mobility? And how can light help there? Because the new technologies, they seem to be in a really interesting position to contribute to the solutions of urbanization and to provide us with better environments.
It's not that long ago that our lighting was just done with these kinds of lamps. And of course, we had the metal-halide lamps and fluorescent lamps and things like that. Now we have LED, but here you see the latest one, and you see how incredibly small it is. And this is exactly what offers us a unique opportunity, because this tiny, tiny size allows us to put the light wherever we really need it. And we can actually leave it out where it's not needed at all and where we can preserve darkness. So that is a really interesting proposition, I think, and a new way of lighting the architectural environment with our well-being in mind. The problem is, though, that I wanted to explain to you how this really works -- but I can have four of these on my finger, so you would not be able to really see them. So I asked our laboratory to do something about it, and they said, "Well, we can do something." They created for me the biggest LED in the world especially for TEDx in Amsterdam.
So here it is. It's the same thing as you can see over there -- just 200 times bigger. And I will very quickly show you how it works. So just to explain. Now, every LED that is made these days gives blue light. Now, this is not very pleasant and comfortable. And for that reason, we cover the LED with a phosphor cap. And the phosphor is excited by the blue and makes the light white and warm and pleasant. And then when you add the lens to that, you can bundle the light and send it wherever you need it without any need to spill any light to the sky or anywhere else. So you can preserve the darkness and make the light. I just wanted to show that to you so you understand how this works.
(Applause)
Thank you.
(Applause)
We can go further. So we have to rethink the way we light our cities. We have to think again about light as a default solution. Why are all these motorways permanently lit? Is it really needed? Can we maybe be much more selective and create better environments that also benefit from darkness? Can we be much more gentle with light? Like here -- this is a very low light level actually. Can we engage people more in the lighting projects that we create, so they really want to connect with it, like here? Or can we create simply sculptures that are very inspiring to be in and to be around? And can we preserve the darkness? Because to find a place like this today on Earth is really very, very challenging. And to find a starry sky like this is even more difficult.
Even in the oceans, we are creating a lot of light that we could actually ban also for animal life to have a much greater well-being. And it's known that migrating birds, for example, get very disoriented because of these offshore platforms. And we discovered that when we make those lights green, the birds, they actually go the right way. They are not disturbed anymore. And it turns out once again that spectral sensitivity is very important here.
In all of these examples, I think, we should start making the light out of darkness, and use the darkness as a canvas -- like the visual artists do, like Edward Hopper in this painting. I think that there is a lot of suspense in this painting. I think, when I see it, I start to think, who are those people? Where have they come from? Where are they going? What just happened? What will be happening in the next five minutes? And it only embodies all these stories and all this suspense because of the darkness and the light.
Edward Hopper was a real master in creating the narration by working with light and dark. And we can learn from that and create more interesting and inspiring architectural environments. We can do that in commercial spaces like this. And you can still also go outside and enjoy the greatest show in the universe, which is, of course, the universe itself. So I give you this wonderful, informative image of the sky, ranging from the inner city, where you may see one or two stars and nothing else, all the way to the rural environments, where you can enjoy this great and gorgeous and beautiful performance of the constellations and the stars.
In architecture, it works just the same. By appreciating the darkness when you design the light, you create much more interesting environments that truly enhance our lives. This is the most well-known example, Tadao Ando's Church of the Light. But I also think of Peter Zumthor's spa in Vals, where light and dark, in very gentle combinations, alter each other to define the space. Or Richard MacCormac's Southwark tube station in London, where you can really see the sky, even though you are under the ground.
And finally, I want to point out that a lot of this inspiration comes from theater. And I think it's fantastic that we are today experiencing TEDx in a theater for the first time because I think we really owe to the theater a big thanks. It wouldn't be such an inspiring scenography without this theater. And I think the theater is a place where we truly enhance life with light.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) |
Thank you very much.
I moved to America 12 years ago with my wife Terry and our two kids. Actually, truthfully, we moved to Los Angeles -- (Laughter) -- thinking we were moving to America, but anyway, it's a short plane ride from Los Angeles to America.
I got here 12 years ago, and when I got here, I was told various things, like, "Americans don't get irony." Have you come across this idea? It's not true. I've traveled the whole length and breadth of this country. I have found no evidence that Americans don't get irony. It's one of those cultural myths, like, "The British are reserved." I don't know why people think this. We've invaded every country we've encountered. (Laughter) But it's not true Americans don't get irony, but I just want you to know that that's what people are saying about you behind your back. You know, so when you leave living rooms in Europe, people say, thankfully, nobody was ironic in your presence.
But I knew that Americans get irony when I came across that legislation No Child Left Behind. Because whoever thought of that title gets irony, don't they, because -- (Laughter) (Applause) — because it's leaving millions of children behind. Now I can see that's not a very attractive name for legislation: Millions of Children Left Behind. I can see that. What's the plan? Well, we propose to leave millions of children behind, and here's how it's going to work.
And it's working beautifully. In some parts of the country, 60 percent of kids drop out of high school. In the Native American communities, it's 80 percent of kids. If we halved that number, one estimate is it would create a net gain to the U.S. economy over 10 years of nearly a trillion dollars. From an economic point of view, this is good math, isn't it, that we should do this? It actually costs an enormous amount to mop up the damage from the dropout crisis.
But the dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it.
And the reason is not that we're not spending enough money. America spends more money on education than most other countries. Class sizes are smaller than in many countries. And there are hundreds of initiatives every year to try and improve education. The trouble is, it's all going in the wrong direction. There are three principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most teachers have to labor and most students have to endure.
The first is this, that human beings are naturally different and diverse.
Can I ask you, how many of you have got children of your own? Okay. Or grandchildren. How about two children or more? Right. And the rest of you have seen such children. (Laughter) Small people wandering about. I will make you a bet, and I am confident that I will win the bet. If you've got two children or more, I bet you they are completely different from each other. Aren't they? Aren't they? (Applause) You would never confuse them, would you? Like, "Which one are you? Remind me. Your mother and I are going to introduce some color-coding system, so we don't get confused."
Education under No Child Left Behind is based on not diversity but conformity. What schools are encouraged to do is to find out what kids can do across a very narrow spectrum of achievement. One of the effects of No Child Left Behind has been to narrow the focus onto the so-called STEM disciplines. They're very important. I'm not here to argue against science and math. On the contrary, they're necessary but they're not sufficient. A real education has to give equal weight to the arts, the humanities, to physical education. An awful lot of kids, sorry, thank you — (Applause) — One estimate in America currently is that something like 10 percent of kids, getting on that way, are being diagnosed with various conditions under the broad title of attention deficit disorder. ADHD. I'm not saying there's no such thing. I just don't believe it's an epidemic like this. If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget, you know? (Laughter) (Applause) Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition. They're suffering from childhood. (Laughter) And I know this because I spent my early life as a child. I went through the whole thing. Kids prosper best with a broad curriculum that celebrates their various talents, not just a small range of them. And by the way, the arts aren't just important because they improve math scores. They're important because they speak to parts of children's being which are otherwise untouched.
The second, thank you — (Applause)
The second principle that drives human life flourishing is curiosity. If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance, very often. Children are natural learners. It's a real achievement to put that particular ability out, or to stifle it. Curiosity is the engine of achievement. Now the reason I say this is because one of the effects of the current culture here, if I can say so, has been to de-professionalize teachers. There is no system in the world or any school in the country that is better than its teachers. Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools. But teaching is a creative profession. Teaching, properly conceived, is not a delivery system. You know, you're not there just to pass on received information. Great teachers do that, but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage. You see, in the end, education is about learning. If there's no learning going on, there's no education going on. And people can spend an awful lot of time discussing education without ever discussing learning. The whole point of education is to get people to learn.
A friend of mine, an old friend -- actually very old, he's dead. (Laughter) That's as old as it gets, I'm afraid. But a wonderful guy he was, wonderful philosopher. He used to talk about the difference between the task and achievement senses of verbs. You know, you can be engaged in the activity of something, but not really be achieving it, like dieting. It's a very good example, you know. There he is. He's dieting. Is he losing any weight? Not really. Teaching is a word like that. You can say, "There's Deborah, she's in room 34, she's teaching." But if nobody's learning anything, she may be engaged in the task of teaching but not actually fulfilling it.
The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. That's it. And part of the problem is, I think, that the dominant culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and learning, but testing. Now, testing is important. Standardized tests have a place. But they should not be the dominant culture of education. They should be diagnostic. They should help. (Applause) If I go for a medical examination, I want some standardized tests. I do. You know, I want to know what my cholesterol level is compared to everybody else's on a standard scale. I don't want to be told on some scale my doctor invented in the car.
"Your cholesterol is what I call Level Orange."
"Really? Is that good?""We don't know."
But all that should support learning. It shouldn't obstruct it, which of course it often does. So in place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance. Our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite that power of imagination and curiosity. And the third principle is this: that human life is inherently creative. It's why we all have different résumés. We create our lives, and we can recreate them as we go through them. It's the common currency of being a human being. It's why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic. I mean, other animals may well have imaginations and creativity, but it's not so much in evidence, is it, as ours? I mean, you may have a dog. And your dog may get depressed. You know, but it doesn't listen to Radiohead, does it? (Laughter) And sit staring out the window with a bottle of Jack Daniels. (Laughter)
And you say, "Would you like to come for a walk?"
He says, "No, I'm fine. You go. I'll wait. But take pictures."
We all create our own lives through this restless process of imagining alternatives and possibilities, and what one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity. Instead, what we have is a culture of standardization.
Now, it doesn't have to be that way. It really doesn't. Finland regularly comes out on top in math, science and reading. Now, we only know that's what they do well at because that's all that's being tested currently. That's one of the problems of the test. They don't look for other things that matter just as much. The thing about work in Finland is this: they don't obsess about those disciplines. They have a very broad approach to education which includes humanities, physical education, the arts.
Second, there is no standardized testing in Finland. I mean, there's a bit, but it's not what gets people up in the morning. It's not what keeps them at their desks.
And the third thing, and I was at a meeting recently with some people from Finland, actual Finnish people, and somebody from the American system was saying to the people in Finland, "What do you do about the dropout rate in Finland?"
And they all looked a bit bemused, and said, "Well, we don't have one. Why would you drop out? If people are in trouble, we get to them quite quickly and help them and we support them."
Now people always say, "Well, you know, you can't compare Finland to America."
No. I think there's a population of around five million in Finland. But you can compare it to a state in America. Many states in America have fewer people in them than that. I mean, I've been to some states in America and I was the only person there. (Laughter) Really. Really. I was asked to lock up when I left. (Laughter)
But what all the high-performing systems in the world do is currently what is not evident, sadly, across the systems in America -- I mean, as a whole. One is this: They individualize teaching and learning. They recognize that it's students who are learning and the system has to engage them, their curiosity, their individuality, and their creativity. That's how you get them to learn.
The second is that they attribute a very high status to the teaching profession. They recognize that you can't improve education if you don't pick great people to teach and if you don't keep giving them constant support and professional development. Investing in professional development is not a cost. It's an investment, and every other country that's succeeding well knows that, whether it's Australia, Canada, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai. They know that to be the case.
And the third is, they devolve responsibility to the school level for getting the job done. You see, there's a big difference here between going into a mode of command and control in education -- That's what happens in some systems. You know, central governments decide or state governments decide they know best and they're going to tell you what to do. The trouble is that education doesn't go on in the committee rooms of our legislative buildings. It happens in classrooms and schools, and the people who do it are the teachers and the students, and if you remove their discretion, it stops working. You have to put it back to the people. (Applause)
There is wonderful work happening in this country. But I have to say it's happening in spite of the dominant culture of education, not because of it. It's like people are sailing into a headwind all the time. And the reason I think is this: that many of the current policies are based on mechanistic conceptions of education. It's like education is an industrial process that can be improved just by having better data, and somewhere in, I think, the back of the mind of some policy makers is this idea that if we fine-tune it well enough, if we just get it right, it will all hum along perfectly into the future. It won't, and it never did.
The point is that education is not a mechanical system. It's a human system. It's about people, people who either do want to learn or don't want to learn. Every student who drops out of school has a reason for it which is rooted in their own biography. They may find it boring. They may find it irrelevant. They may find that it's at odds with the life they're living outside of school. There are trends, but the stories are always unique. I was at a meeting recently in Los Angeles of -- they're called alternative education programs. These are programs designed to get kids back into education. They have certain common features. They're very personalized. They have strong support for the teachers, close links with the community and a broad and diverse curriculum, and often programs which involve students outside school as well as inside school. And they work. What's interesting to me is, these are called "alternative education." You know? And all the evidence from around the world is, if we all did that, there'd be no need for the alternative. (Applause)
So I think we have to embrace a different metaphor. We have to recognize that it's a human system, and there are conditions under which people thrive, and conditions under which they don't. We are after all organic creatures, and the culture of the school is absolutely essential. Culture is an organic term, isn't it?
Not far from where I live is a place called Death Valley. Death Valley is the hottest, driest place in America, and nothing grows there. Nothing grows there because it doesn't rain. Hence, Death Valley. In the winter of 2004, it rained in Death Valley. Seven inches of rain fell over a very short period. And in the spring of 2005, there was a phenomenon. The whole floor of Death Valley was carpeted in flowers for a while. What it proved is this: that Death Valley isn't dead. It's dormant. Right beneath the surface are these seeds of possibility waiting for the right conditions to come about, and with organic systems, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable. It happens all the time. You take an area, a school, a district, you change the conditions, give people a different sense of possibility, a different set of expectations, a broader range of opportunities, you cherish and value the relationships between teachers and learners, you offer people the discretion to be creative and to innovate in what they do, and schools that were once bereft spring to life.
Great leaders know that. The real role of leadership in education -- and I think it's true at the national level, the state level, at the school level -- is not and should not be command and control. The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility. And if you do that, people will rise to it and achieve things that you completely did not anticipate and couldn't have expected.
There's a wonderful quote from Benjamin Franklin. "There are three sorts of people in the world: Those who are immovable, people who don't get it, they don't want to get it, they're not going to do anything about it; there are people who are movable, people who see the need for change and are prepared to listen to it; and there are people who move, people who make things happen." And if we can encourage more people, that will be a movement. And if the movement is strong enough, that's, in the best sense of the word, a revolution. And that's what we need.
Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause) |
I thought I would start with a very brief history of cities. Settlements typically began with people clustered around a well, and the size of that settlement was roughly the distance you could walk with a pot of water on your head. In fact, if you fly over Germany, for example, and you look down and you see these hundreds of little villages, they're all about a mile apart. You needed easy access to the fields. And for hundreds, even thousands of years, the home was really the center of life. Life was very small for most people. It was the center of entertainment, of energy production, of work, the center of health care. That's where babies were born and people died.
Then, with industrialization, everything started to become centralized. You had dirty factories that were moved to the outskirts of cities. Production was centralized in assembly plants. You had centralized energy production. Learning took place in schools. Health care took place in hospitals. And then you had networks that developed. You had water, sewer networks that allowed for this kind of unchecked expansion. You had separated functions, increasingly. You had rail networks that connected residential, industrial, commercial areas. You had auto networks. In fact, the model was really, give everybody a car, build roads to everything, and give people a place to park when they get there. It was not a very functional model. And we still live in that world, and this is what we end up with.
So you have the sprawl of LA, the sprawl of Mexico City. You have these unbelievable new cities in China which you might call tower sprawl. They're all building cities on the model that we invented in the '50s and '60s, which is really obsolete, I would argue, and there are hundreds and hundreds of new cities that are being planned all over the world. In China alone, 300 million people, some say 400 million people, will move to the city over the next 15 years. That means building the entire, the equivalent of the entire built infrastructure of the U.S. in 15 years. Imagine that.
And we should all care about this whether you live in cities or not. Cities will account for 90 percent of the population growth, 80 percent of the global CO2, 75 percent of energy use, but at the same time it's where people want to be, increasingly. More than half the people now in the world live in cities, and that will just continue to escalate.
Cities are places of celebration, personal expression. You have the flash mobs of pillow fights that — I've been to a couple. They're quite fun. (Laughter) You have — (Laughs) Cities are where most of the wealth is created, and particularly in the developing world, it's where women find opportunities. That's a lot of the reason why cities are growing very quickly.
Now there's some trends that will impact cities. First of all, work is becoming distributed and mobile. The office building is basically obsolete for doing private work. The home, once again, because of distributed computation -- communication, is becoming a center of life, so it's a center of production and learning and shopping and health care and all of these things that we used to think of as taking place outside of the home.
And increasingly, everything that people buy, every consumer product, in one way or another, can be personalized. And that's a very important trend to think about.
So this is my image of the city of the future. (Laughter) In that it's a place for people, you know. Maybe not the way people dress, but -- You know, the question now is, how can we have all the good things that we identify with cities without all the bad things?
This is Bangalore. It took me a couple of hours to get a few miles in Bangalore last year. So with cities, you also have congestion and pollution and disease and all these negative things. How can we have the good stuff without the bad?
So we went back and started looking at the great cities that evolved before the cars. Paris was a series of these little villages that came together, and you still see that structure today. The 20 arrondissements of Paris are these little neighborhoods. Most of what people need in life can be within a five- or 10-minute walk. And if you look at the data, when you have that kind of a structure, you get a very even distribution of the shops and the physicians and the pharmacies and the cafes in Paris. And then you look at cities that evolved after the automobile, and it's not that kind of a pattern. There's very little that's within a five minute walk of most areas of places like Pittsburgh. Not to pick on Pittsburgh, but most American cities really have evolved this way.
So we said, we'll, let's look at new cities, and we're involved in a couple of new city projects in China. So we said, let's start with that neighborhood cell. We think of it as a compact urban cell. So provide most of what most people want within that 20-minute walk. This can also be a resilient electrical microgrid, community heating, power, communication networks, etc., can be concentrated there. Stewart Brand would put a micro-nuclear reactor right in the center, probably. (Laughter) And he might be right. And then we can form, in effect, a mesh network. It's something of an Internet typology pattern, so you can have a series of these neighborhoods. You can dial up the density -- about 20,000 people per cell if it's Cambridge. Go up to 50,000 if it's Manhattan density. You connect everything with mass transit and you provide most of what most people need within that neighborhood. You can begin to develop a whole typology of streetscapes and the vehicles that can go on them. I won't go through all of them. I'll just show one.
This is Boulder. It's a great example of kind of a mobility parkway, a superhighway for joggers and bicyclists where you can go from one end of the city to the other without crossing the street, and they also have bike-sharing, which I'll get into in a minute.
This is even a more interesting solution in Seoul, Korea. They took the elevated highway, they got rid of it, they reclaimed the street, the river down below, below the street, and you can go from one end of Seoul to the other without crossing a pathway for cars.
The Highline in Manhattan is very similar. You have these rapidly emerging bike lanes all over the world. I lived in Manhattan for 15 years. I went back a couple of weekends ago, took this photograph of these fabulous new bike lanes that they have installed. They're still not to where Copenhagen is, where something like 42 percent of the trips within the city are by bicycle. It's mostly just because they have fantastic infrastructure there.
We actually did exactly the wrong thing in Boston. We -- the Big Dig -- (Laughter) So we got rid of the highway but we created a traffic island and it's certainly not a mobility pathway for anything other than cars.
Mobility on demand is something we've been thinking about, so we think we need an ecosystem of these shared-use vehicles connected to mass transit. These are some of the vehicles that we've been working on. But shared use is really key. If you share a vehicle, you can have at least four people use one vehicle, as opposed to one. We have Hubway here in Boston, the Vélib' system in Paris.
We've been developing at the Media Lab this little city car that is optimized for shared use in cities. We got rid of all the useless things like engines and transmissions. We moved everything to the wheels, so you have the drive motor, the steering motor, the breaking all in the wheel. That left the chassis unencumbered, so you can do things like fold, so you can fold this little vehicle up to occupy a tiny little footprint.
This was a video that was on European television last week showing the Spanish Minister of Industry driving this little vehicle, and when it's folded, it can spin. You don't need reverse. You don't need parallel parking. You just spin and go directly in. (Laughter) So we've been working with a company to commercialize this. My PhD student Ryan Chin presented these early ideas two years ago at a TEDx conference.
So what's interesting is, then if you begin to add new things to it, like autonomy, you get out of the car, you park at your destination, you pat it on the butt, it goes and it parks itself, it charges itself, and you can get something like seven times as many vehicles in a given area as conventional cars, and we think this is the future. Actually we could do this today. It's not really a problem. We can combine shared use and folding and autonomy and we get something like 28 times the land utilization with that kind of strategy.
One of our graduate students then says, well, how does a driverless car communicate with pedestrians? You have nobody to make eye contact with. You don't know if it's going to run you over. So he's developing strategies so the vehicle can communicate with pedestrians, so -- (Laughter) So the headlights are eyeballs, the pupils can dilate, we have directional audio, we can throw sound directly at people. What I love about this project is he solved a problem that hasn't, that doesn't exist yet, so -- (Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause)
We also think that we can democratize access to bike lanes. You know, bike lanes are mostly used by young guys in stretchy pants, you know. So -- (Laughter) We think we can develop a vehicle that operates on bike lanes, accessible to elderly and disabled, women in skirts, businesspeople, and address the issues of energy congestion, mobility, aging and obesity simultaneously. That's our challenge.
This is an early design for this little three-wheel, it's an electronic bike. You have to pedal to operate it in a bike lane, but if you're an older person, that's a switch. If you're a healthy person, you might have to work really hard to go fast. You can dial in 40 calories going into work and 500 going home, when you can take a shower. We hope to have that built this fall.
Housing is another area where we can really improve. Mayor Menino in Boston says lack of affordable housing for young people is one of the biggest problems the city faces. Developers say, okay, we'll build little teeny apartments. People say, we don't really want to live in a little teeny conventional apartment. So we're saying let's build a standardized chassis, much like our car. Let's bring advanced technology into the apartment, technology-enabled infill, give people the tools within this open-loft chassis to go through a process of defining what their needs and values and activities are, and then a matching algorithm will match a unique assembly of integrated infill components, furniture, and cabinetry, that are personalized to that individual, and they give them the tools to go through the process and to refine it, and it's something like working with an architect, where the dialogue starts when you give an alternative to a person to react to.
Now, the most interesting implementation of that for us is when you can begin to have robotic walls, so your space can convert from exercise to a workplace, if you run a virtual company. You have guests over, you have two guestrooms that are developed. You have a conventional one-bedroom arrangement when you need it. Maybe that's most of the time. You have a dinner party. The table folds out to fit 16 people in otherwise a conventional one-bedroom, or maybe you want a dance studio. I mean, architects have been thinking about these ideas for a long time. What we need to do now, develop things that can scale to those 300 million Chinese people that would like to live in the city, and very comfortably. We think we can make a very small apartment that functions as if it's twice as big by utilizing these strategies. I don't believe in smart homes. That's sort of a bogus concept. I think you have to build dumb homes and put smart stuff in it. (Laughter)
And so we've been working on a chassis of the wall itself. You know, standardized platform with the motors and the battery when it operates, little solenoids that will lock it in place and get low-voltage power. We think this can all be standardized, and then people can personalize the stuff that goes into that wall, and like the car, we can integrate all kinds of sensing to be aware of human activity, so if there's a baby or a puppy in the way, you won't have a problem. (Laughter)
So the developers say, well this is great. Okay, so if we have a conventional building, we have a fixed envelope, maybe we can put in 14 units. If they function as if they're twice as big, we can get 28 units in. That means twice as much parking, though. Parking's really expensive. It's about 70,000 dollars per space to build a conventional parking spot inside a building. So if you can have folding and autonomy, you can do that in one seventh of the space. That goes down to 10,000 dollars per car, just for the cost of the parking. You add shared use, and you can even go further.
We can also integrate all kinds of advanced technology through this process. There's a path to market for innovative companies to bring technology into the home. In this case, a project we're doing with Siemens, we have sensors on all the furniture, all the infill, that understands where people are and what they're doing. Blue light is very efficient, so we have these tunable 24-bit LED lighting fixtures. It recognizes where the person is, what they're doing, fills out the light when necessary to full spectrum white light, and saves maybe 30, 40 percent in energy consumption, we think, over even conventional state-of-the-art lighting systems. This just shows you the data that comes from the sensors that are embedded in the furniture. We don't really believe in cameras to do things in homes. We think these little wireless sensors are more effective.
We think we can also personalize sunlight. That's sort of the ultimate personalization in some ways. So we, we've looked at articulating mirrors of the facade that can throw shafts of sunlight anywhere into the space, therefore allowing you to shade most of the glass on a hot day like today. In this case, she picks up her phone, she can map food preparation at the kitchen island to a particular location of sunlight. An algorithm will keep it in that location as long as she's engaged in that activity. This can be combined with LED lighting as well.
We think workplaces should be shared. I mean, this is really the workplace of the future, I think. This is Starbucks, you know. (Laughter) Maybe a third — And you see everybody has their back to the wall and they have food and coffee down the way and they're in their own little personal bubble. We need shared spaces for interaction and collaboration. We're not doing a very good job with that. At the Cambridge Innovation Center, you can have shared desks. I've spent a lot of time in Finland at the design factory of Aalto University, where the they have a shared shop and shared Fablab, shared quiet spaces, electronics spaces, recreation places.
We think ultimately all of this stuff can come together, a new model for mobility, a new model for housing, a new model for how we live and work, a path to market for advanced technologies, but in the end the main thing we need to focus on are people. Cities are all about people. They're places for people. There's no reason why we can't dramatically improve the livability and creativity of cities like they've done in Melbourne with the laneways while at the same time dramatically reducing CO2 and energy. It's a global imperative. We have to get this right. Thank you. (Applause) |
I am known best for human-powered flight, but that was just one thing that got me going in the sort of things that I'm working in now. As a youngster, I was very interested in model airplanes, ornithopters, autogyros, helicopters, gliders, power planes, indoor models, outdoor models, everything, which I just thought was a lot of fun, and wondered why most other people didn't share my same enthusiasm with them. And then, navy pilot training, and, after college, I got into sailplane flying, power plane flying, and considered the sailplanes as a sort of hobby and fun, but got tangled up with some great professor types, who convinced me and everybody else in the field that this was a good way to get into really deep science.
While this was all going on, I was in the field of weather modification, although getting a Ph.D. in aeronautics. The weather modification subject was getting started, and as a graduate student, I could go around to the various talks that were being given, on a hitchhiker ride to the East Coast, and so on. And everybody would talk to me, but all the professionals in the field hated each other, and they wouldn't communicate. And as a result, I got the absolutely unique background in that field, and started a company, which did more research in weather modification than anybody, and there are a lot of things that I just can't go into. But then, 1971 started AeroVironment, with no employees -- then one or two, three, and sort of fumbled along on trying to get interesting projects. We had AirDynamisis, who, like I, did not want to work for aerospace companies on some big, many year project, and so we did our small projects, and the company slowly grew.
The thing that is exciting was, in 1976, I suddenly got interested in the human-powered airplane because I'd made a made a loan to a friend of 100,000 dollars, or I guaranteed the money at the bank. He needed them -- he needed the money for starting a company. The company did not succeed, and he couldn't pay the money back, and I was the guarantor of the note. So, I had a $100,000 debt, and I noticed that the Kramer prize for human-powered flight, which had then been around for -- (Laughter) -- 17 years at the time, was 50,000 pounds, which, at the exchange rate, was just about 100,000 dollars.
So suddenly, I was interested in human-powered flight -- (Laughter) -- and did not -- the way I approached it, first, thinking about ways to make the planes, was just like they'd been doing in England, and not succeeding, and I gave it up. I figured, nah, there isn't any simple, easy way. But then, got off on a vacation trip, and was studying bird flight, just for the fun of it, and you can watch a bird soaring around in circles, and measure the time, and estimate the bank angle, and immediately, figure out its speed, and the turning radius, and so on, which I could do in the car, as we're driving along on a vacation trip -- (Laughter) -- with my three sons, young sons, helping me, but ridiculing the whole thing very much.
But that began thinking about how birds went around, and then how airplanes would, how hang gliders would fly, and then other planes, and the idea of the Gossamer-Condor-type airplane quickly emerged, was so logical, one should have thought of it in the first place, but one didn't. And it was just, keep the weight down -- 70 pounds was all it weighed -- but let the size swell up, like a hang glider, but three times the span, three times the cord. You're down to a third of the speed, a third of the power, and a good bicyclist can put out that power, and that worked, and we won the prize a year later.
We didn't -- a lot of flying, a lot of experiments, a lot of things that didn't work, and ones that did work, and the plane kept getting a little better, a little better. Got a good pilot, Brian Allen, to operate it, and finally, succeeded. But unfortunately, about 65,000 dollars was spent on the project.
(Laughter)
And there was only about 30 to help retire the debt. But fortunately, Henry Kramer, who put up the prize for -- that was a one-mile flight -- put up a new prize for flying the English Channel, 21 miles. And he thought it would take another 18 years for somebody to win that. We realized that if you just cleaned up our Gossamer Condor a little bit, the power to fly would be decreased a little bit, and if you decrease the power required a little, the pilot can fly a much longer period of time. And Brian Allen was able, in a miraculous flight, to get the Gossamer Albatross across the English Channel, and we won the 100,000-pound, 200,000-dollar prize for that. And when all expenses were paid, the debt was handled, and everything was fine. It turned out that giving the planes to the museum was worth much more than the debt, so for five years, six years, I only had to pay one third income tax. So, there were good economic reasons for the project, but -- (Laughter) --
that's not, well, the project was done entirely for economic reasons, and we have not been involved in any human-powered flight since then -- (Laughter) -- because the prizes are all over. (Laughter) But that sure started me thinking about various things, and immediately, we began making a solar-powered plane because we felt solar power was going to be so important for the country and the world, we didn't want the small funding in the government to be decreased, which is what the government was trying to do with it. And we thought a solar-powered plane wouldn't really make sense, but you could do it and it would get a lot of publicity for solar power and maybe help that field. And that project continued, did succeed, and we then got into other projects in aviation and mechanical things and ground devices.
But while this was going on, in 1982, I got a prize from the Lindbergh Foundation -- their annual prize -- and I had to prepare a paper on it, which collected all my varied thoughts and varied interests over the years. This was the one chance that I had to focus on what I, really, was after, and what was important. And to my surprise, I realized the importance of environmental issues, which Charles Lindbergh devoted the last third of his life to, and preparing that paper did me a lot of good. I thought back about if I was a space traveler, and came and visited Earth every 5,000 years. And for a few thousand visits, I would see the same thing every time, the little differences in the Earth.
But this last time, just coming round, right now, suddenly, there'd be huge changes in the environment, in the concentration of people, and it was just unbelievable, the amount of -- all the change in it. I wanted to -- well, one of the biggest changes is, 200 years ago, we began using coal from underground, which has a lot of pollution, and 100 years ago, began getting gasoline from underground, with a lot of pollution. And gasoline consumption, or production, will reach its limit in about ten years, and then go down, and we wonder what's going to happen with transportation.
I wanted to show the slide -- this slide, I think, is the most important one any of you will see, ever, because -- (Laughter) (Applause) -- it shows nature versus humans, and goes from 1850 to 2050. And so, the year 2000, you see there. And this is the weight of all air and land vertebrates. Humans and muskrats and giraffes and birds and so on, are -- the red line goes up. That's the humans and livestock and pets portion. The green line goes down. That's the wild nature portion. Humans, livestock and pets are, now, 98 percent of the total world's mass of vertebrates on land and air. And you don't know what the future will hold, but it's not going to get a lower percentage. Ten thousand years ago, the humans and livestock and pets were not even one tenth of one percent and wouldn't even have been visible on such a curve. Now they are 98 percent, and it, I think, shows human domination of the Earth.
I give a talk to some remarkable high school students each summer, and ask them, after they've asked me questions, and I give them a talk and so on. Then I ask them questions. What's the population of the Earth? What's the population of the Earth going to be when you're the age of your parents? Which I'd never, really -- they had never, really, thought about but, now, they think about it. And then, what population of the Earth would be an equilibrium that could continue on, and be for 2050, 2100, 2150? And they form little groups, all fighting with each other, and when I leave, two hours later, most of them are saying about 2 billion people, and they don't have any clue about how to get down to 2 billion, nor do I, but I think they're right and this is a serious problem.
Rachel Carson was thinking of these, and came out with "Silent Spring," way back. "Solar Manifesto" by Hermann Scheer, in Germany, claims all energy on Earth can be derived, for every country, from solar energy and water, and so on. You don't need to dig down for these chemicals, and we can do things much more efficiently. Let's have the next slide. So this just summarizes it. "Over billions of years, on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life -- complex and probable, wonderful and fragile.
Suddenly, we humans, a recently arrived species, no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature, have grown in population, technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power. We, now, wield the paintbrush." We're in charge. It's frightening. And I do a painting every 20 or 25 years. This is the last one. (Laughter) And [it] shows the Earth in a time flag: on the right, in trilobites and dinosaurs and so on; and over the triangle, we now get to civilization and TV and traffic jams and so on. I have no idea of what comes next, so I just used robotic and natural cockroaches as the future, as a little warning. And two weeks after this drawing was done, we actually had our first project contract, at AeroVironment, on robotic cockroaches, which was very frightening to me.
(Laughter) (Paper rustling)
Well, that'll be all the slides. As time went on, we stopped our environmental programs. We focused more on the really serious energy problems of the future, and we produced products for the company. And we developed the impact car that General Motors made, the EV1, out of -- and got the Air Resources Board to have the regulations that stimulated the electric cars, but they've since come apart. And we've done a lot of things, small drone airplanes and so on. I have a Helios. We have the first video.
(Video) Narrator: With a wingspan of 247 feet, this makes her larger than a Boeing 747.
(Music)
Her designers' attention to detail and her construction gives Helios' structure the flexibility and strength to deal with the turbulence encountered in the atmosphere. This enables her to easily ride through the air currents as if she's sliding along on the ocean waves.
Paul MacCready: The wings could touch together on top and not break. We think.
(Laughter)
Narrator: And Helios now begins the process of turning her back to the sun, to maximize the power from her solar array.
(Music) As the sky gets darker, and the outside air temperatures drop below minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit, the most environmentally hostile segment of Helios's journey has gone by without notice, except for being recorded by specially designed data acquisition systems and their associated sensors. Approaching a peak radar altitude of 96,863 feet, at 4:12 p.m., Helios is standing on top of 98 percent of the Earth's atmosphere. This is more than 10,000 feet higher than the previous world's altitude record held by the SR-71 Blackbird.
(Applause)
PM: That plane has many purposes, but it's aimed for communications, and it can fly so slowly that it'll just stay up at 65,000 feet. Eventually, it will be able to have to stay up day, night, day, night, for six months at a time, acting like the synchronous satellite, but only ten miles above the Earth. Let's have the next video. This shows the other end of the spectrum.
(Video) Narrator: A tiny airplane, the AV Pointer serves for surveillance. In effect a pair of roving eyeglasses, a cutting-edge example of where miniaturization can lead if the operator is remote from the vehicle. It is convenient to carry, assemble, and launch by hand. Battery-powered, it is silent and rarely noticed. It sends high-resolution video pictures back to the operator. With on-board GPS, it can navigate autonomously, and it is rugged enough to self-land without damage.
PM: Okay, and let's have the next.
(Applause)
That plane is widely used by the military, now, in all their operations. Let's have the next video.
(Video) (Music)
Alan Alda: He's got it, he's got it, he's got it on his head.
(Music)
We're going to end our visit with Paul MacCready's flying circus by meeting his son, Tyler, who, with his two brothers, helped build the Gossamer Condor, 25 years ago.
Tyler MacCready: You can chase it, like this, for hours.
AA: When they got bored with their father's project, they invented an extraordinary little plane of their own.
TM: And I can control it by putting the lift on one side of the wing, or on the other.
AA: They called it their Walkalong Glider.
(Music)
I've never seen anything like that. How old were you when you invented that?
TM: Oh, 10, 11. (AA: Oh my God.)
TM: 12, something like that. (AA: That's amazing.)
PM: And Tyler's here to show you the Walkalong.
(Applause)
TM: All right. You all got a couple of these in your gift bags, and one of the first things, the production version seemed to dive a little bit, and so I would just suggest you bend the wing tips up a little bit before you try flying it. I'll give you a demonstration of how it works. The idea is that it soars on the lift over your body, like a seagull soaring on a cliff. As the wind comes up, it has to go over the cliff, so as you walk through the air, it goes around your body, some has to go over you. And so you just keep the glider positioned in that up current. The launch is the difficult part: you've got to hold it high up, over your head, and you start walking forward, and just let go of it, and you can control it like that.
(Laughter)
And then also, like it said in the video, you can turn it left or right just by putting the lift under one wing or another. So I can do it -- oops, that was going to be a right turn.
(Laughter)
Okay, this one will be a left turn. Here, but -- (Applause) -- anyway. (Applause) And that's it, so you can just control it, wherever you want, and it's just hours of fun. And these are no longer in production, so you have real collector's items.
(Laughter)
And this, we just wanted to show you -- if we can get the video running on this, yeah -- just an example of a little video surveillance.
(Laughter)
This was flying around in the party last night, and -- (Laughter) -- you can see how it just can fly around, and you can spy on anybody you want.
(Laughter)
And that's it. I was going to bring an airplane, but I was worried about hitting people in here, so I thought this would be a little bit more gentle. And that's it, yeah, just a few inventions. (Applause) All right. |
Imagine you're in Rome, and you've made your way to the Vatican Museums. And you've been shuffling down long corridors, past statues, frescoes, lots and lots of stuff. You're heading towards the Sistine Chapel. At last -- a long corridor, a stair and a door. You're at the threshold of the Sistine Chapel.
So what are you expecting? Soaring domes? Choirs of angels? We don't really have any of that there. Instead, you may ask yourself, what do we have?
Well, curtains up on the Sistine Chapel. And I mean literally, you're surrounded by painted curtains, the original decoration of this chapel. Churches used tapestries not just to keep out cold during long masses, but as a way to represent the great theater of life. The human drama in which each one of us plays a part is a great story, a story that encompasses the whole world and that came to unfold in the three stages of the painting in the Sistine Chapel.
Now, this building started out as a space for a small group of wealthy, educated Christian priests. They prayed there. They elected their pope there. Five hundred years ago, it was the ultimate ecclesiastical man cave. So, you may ask, how can it be that today it attracts and delights five million people a year, from all different backgrounds? Because in that compressed space, there was a creative explosion, ignited by the electric excitement of new geopolitical frontiers, which set on fire the ancient missionary tradition of the Church and produced one of the greatest works of art in history.
Now, this development took place as a great evolution, moving from the beginning of a few elite, and eventually able to speak to audiences of people that come from all over the world. This evolution took place in three stages, each one linked to a historical circumstance. The first one was rather limited in scope. It reflected the rather parochial perspective. The second one took place after worldviews were dramatically altered after Columbus's historical voyage; and the third, when the Age of Discovery was well under way and the Church rose to the challenge of going global.
The original decoration of this church reflected a smaller world. There were busy scenes that told the stories of the lives of Jesus and Moses, reflecting the development of the Jewish and Christian people. The man who commissioned this, Pope Sixtus IV, assembled a dream team of Florentine art, including men like Sandro Botticelli and the man who would become Michelangelo's future painting teacher, Ghirlandaio. These men, they blanketed the walls with a frieze of pure color, and in these stories you'll notice familiar landscapes, the artists using Roman monuments or a Tuscan landscape to render a faraway story, something much more familiar. With the addition of images of the Pope's friends and family, this was a perfect decoration for a small court limited to the European continent. But in 1492, the New World was discovered, horizons were expanding, and this little 133 by 46-foot microcosm had to expand as well. And it did, thanks to a creative genius, a visionary and an awesome story.
Now, the creative genius was Michelangelo Buonarroti, 33 years old when he was tapped to decorate 12,000 square feet of ceiling, and the deck was stacked against him -- he had trained in painting but had left to pursue sculpture. There were angry patrons in Florence because he had left a stack of incomplete commissions, lured to Rome by the prospect of a great sculptural project, and that project had fallen through. And he had been left with a commission to paint 12 apostles against a decorative background in the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which would look like every other ceiling in Italy.
But genius rose to the challenge. In an age when a man dared to sail across the Atlantic Ocean, Michelangelo dared to chart new artistic waters. He, too, would tell a story -- no Apostles -- but a story of great beginnings, the story of Genesis.
Not really an easy sell, stories on a ceiling. How would you be able to read a busy scene from 62 feet below? The painting technique that had been handed on for 200 years in Florentine studios was not equipped for this kind of a narrative.
But Michelangelo wasn't really a painter, and so he played to his strengths. Instead of being accustomed to filling space with busyness, he took a hammer and chisel and hacked away at a piece of marble to reveal the figure within. Michelangelo was an essentialist; he would tell his story in massive, dynamic bodies.
This plan was embraced by the larger-than-life Pope Julius II, a man who was unafraid of Michelangelo's brazen genius. He was nephew to Pope Sixtus IV, and he had been steeped in art for 30 years and he knew its power. And history has handed down the moniker of the Warrior Pope, but this man's legacy to the Vatican -- it wasn't fortresses and artillery, it was art. He left us the Raphael Rooms, the Sistine Chapel. He left St. Peter's Basilica as well as an extraordinary collection of Greco-Roman sculptures -- decidedly un-Christian works that would become the seedbed of the world's first modern museum, the Vatican Museums. Julius was a man who envisioned a Vatican that would be eternally relevant through grandeur and through beauty, and he was right. The encounter between these two giants, Michelangelo and Julius II, that's what gave us the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo was so committed to this project, that he succeeded in getting the job done in three and a half years, using a skeleton crew and spending most of the time, hours on end, reaching up above his head to paint the stories on the ceiling.
So let's look at this ceiling and see storytelling gone global. No more familiar artistic references to the world around you. There's just space and structure and energy; a monumental painted framework which opens onto nine panels, more driven by sculptural form than painterly color. And we stand in the far end by the entrance, far from the altar and from the gated enclosure intended for the clergy and we peer into the distance, looking for a beginning. And whether in scientific inquiry or in biblical tradition, we think in terms of a primal spark. Michelangelo gave us an initial energy when he gave us the separation of light and dark, a churning figure blurry in the distance, compressed into a tight space. The next figure looms larger, and you see a figure hurtling from one side to the next. He leaves in his wake the sun, the moon, vegetation. Michelangelo didn't focus on the stuff that was being created, unlike all the other artists. He focused on the act of creation.
And then the movement stops, like a caesura in poetry and the creator hovers. So what's he doing? Is he creating land? Is he creating sea? Or is he looking back over his handiwork, the universe and his treasures, just like Michelangelo must have, looking back over his work in the ceiling and proclaiming, "It is good."
So now the scene is set, and you get to the culmination of creation, which is man. Adam leaps to the eye, a light figure against a dark background. But looking closer, that leg is pretty languid on the ground, the arm is heavy on the knee. Adam lacks that interior spark that will impel him to greatness. That spark is about to be conferred by the creator in that finger, which is one millimeter from the hand of Adam. It puts us at the edge of our seats, because we're one moment from that contact, through which that man will discover his purpose, leap up and take his place at the pinnacle of creation.
And then Michelangelo threw a curveball. Who is in that other arm? Eve, first woman. No, she's not an afterthought. She's part of the plan. She's always been in his mind. Look at her, so intimate with God that her hand curls around his arm. And for me, an American art historian from the 21st century, this was the moment that the painting spoke to me. Because I realized that this representation of the human drama was always about men and women -- so much so, that the dead center, the heart of the ceiling, is the creation of woman, not Adam. And the fact is, that when you see them together in the Garden of Eden, they fall together and together their proud posture turns into folded shame.
You are at critical juncture now in the ceiling. You are exactly at the point where you and I can go no further into the church. The gated enclosure keeps us out of the inner sanctum, and we are cast out much like Adam and Eve. The remaining scenes in the ceiling, they mirror the crowded chaos of the world around us. You have Noah and his Ark and the flood. You have Noah. He's making a sacrifice and a covenant with God. Maybe he's the savior. Oh, but no, Noah is the one who grew grapes, invented wine, got drunk and passed out naked in his barn. It is a curious way to design the ceiling, now starting out with God creating life, ending up with some guy blind drunk in a barn. And so, compared with Adam, you might think Michelangelo is making fun of us.
But he's about to dispel the gloom by using those bright colors right underneath Noah: emerald, topaz, scarlet on the prophet Zechariah. Zechariah foresees a light coming from the east, and we are turned at this juncture to a new destination, with sibyls and prophets who will lead us on a parade. You have the heroes and heroines who make safe the way, and we follow the mothers and fathers. They are the motors of this great human engine, driving it forward.
And now we're at the keystone of the ceiling, the culmination of the whole thing, with a figure that looks like he's about to fall out of his space into our space, encroaching our space.
This is the most important juncture. Past meets present. This figure, Jonah, who spent three days in the belly of the whale, for the Christians, is the symbol of the renewal of humanity through Jesus' sacrifice, but for the multitudes of visitors to that museum from all faiths who visit there every day, he is the moment the distant past encounters and meets immediate reality.
All of this brings us to the yawning archway of the altar wall, where we see Michelangelo's Last Judgment, painted in 1534 after the world had changed again. The Reformation had splintered the Church, the Ottoman Empire had made Islam a household word and Magellan had found a route into the Pacific Ocean. How is a 59-year-old artist who has never been any further than Venice going to speak to this new world? Michelangelo chose to paint destiny, that universal desire, common to all of us, to leave a legacy of excellence. Told in terms of the Christian vision of the Last Judgment, the end of the world, Michelangelo gave you a series of figures who are wearing these strikingly beautiful bodies. They have no more covers, no more portraits except for a couple. It's a composition only out of bodies, 391, no two alike, unique like each and every one of us. They start in the lower corner, breaking away from the ground, struggling and trying to rise. Those who have risen reach back to help others, and in one amazing vignette, you have a black man and a white man pulled up together in an incredible vision of human unity in this new world. The lion's share of the space goes to the winner's circle. There you find men and women completely nude like athletes. They are the ones who have overcome adversity, and Michelangelo's vision of people who combat adversity, overcome obstacles -- they're just like athletes. So you have men and women flexing and posing in this extraordinary spotlight. Presiding over this assembly is Jesus, first a suffering man on the cross, now a glorious ruler in Heaven. And as Michelangelo proved in his painting, hardship, setbacks and obstacles, they don't limit excellence, they forge it.
Now, this does lead us to one odd thing. This is the Pope's private chapel, and the best way you can describe that is indeed a stew of nudes. But Michelangelo was trying to use only the best artistic language, the most universal artistic language he could think of: that of the human body. And so instead of the way of showing virtue such as fortitude or self-mastery, he borrowed from Julius II's wonderful collection of sculptures in order to show inner strength as external power.
Now, one contemporary did write that the chapel was too beautiful to not cause controversy. And so it did. Michelangelo soon found that thanks to the printing press, complaints about the nudity spread all over the place, and soon his masterpiece of human drama was labeled pornography, at which point he added two more portraits, one of the man who criticized him, a papal courtier, and the other one of himself as a dried up husk, no athlete, in the hands of a long-suffering martyr. The year he died he saw several of these figures covered over, a triumph for trivial distractions over his great exhortation to glory.
And so now we stand in the here and now. We are caught in that space between beginnings and endings, in the great, huge totality of the human experience. The Sistine Chapel forces us to look around as if it were a mirror. Who am I in this picture? Am I one of the crowd? Am I the drunk guy? Am I the athlete? And as we leave this haven of uplifting beauty, we are inspired to ask ourselves life's biggest questions: Who am I, and what role do I play in this great theater of life?
Thank you.
(Applause)
Bruno Giussani: Elizabeth Lev, thank you.
Elizabeth, you mentioned this whole issue of pornography, too many nudes and too many daily life scenes and improper things in the eyes of the time. But actually the story is bigger. It's not just touching up and covering up some of the figures. This work of art was almost destroyed because of that.
Elizabeth Lev: The effect of the Last Judgment was enormous. The printing press made sure that everybody saw it. And so, this wasn't something that happened within a couple of weeks. It was something that happened over the space of 20 years of editorials and complaints, saying to the Church, "You can't possibly tell us how to live our lives. Did you notice you have pornography in the Pope's chapel?" And so after complaints and insistence of trying to get this work destroyed, it was finally the year that Michelangelo died that the Church finally found a compromise, a way to save the painting, and that was in putting up these extra 30 covers, and that happens to be the origin of fig-leafing. That's where it all came about, and it came about from a church that was trying to save a work of art, not indeed deface or destroyed it.
BG: This, what you just gave us, is not the classic tour that people get today when they go to the Sistine Chapel.
(Laughter)
EL: I don't know, is that an ad?
(Laughter)
BG: No, no, no, not necessarily, it is a statement. The experience of art today is encountering problems. Too many people want to see this there, and the result is five million people going through that tiny door and experiencing it in a completely different way than we just did.
EL: Right. I agree. I think it's really nice to be able to pause and look. But also realize, even when you're in those days, with 28,000 people a day, even those days when you're in there with all those other people, look around you and think how amazing it is that some painted plaster from 500 years ago can still draw all those people standing side by side with you, looking upwards with their jaws dropped. It's a great statement about how beauty truly can speak to us all through time and through geographic space.
BG: Liz, grazie.
EL: Grazie a te.
BG: Thank you.
(Applause) |
I've been a journalist now since I was about 17, and it's an interesting industry to be in at the moment, because as you all know, there's a huge amount of upheaval going on in media, and most of you probably know this from the business angle, which is that the business model is pretty screwed, and as my grandfather would say, the profits have all been gobbled up by Google.
So it's a really interesting time to be a journalist, but the upheaval that I'm interested in is not on the output side. It's on the input side. It's concern with how we get information and how we gather the news. And that's changed, because we've had a huge shift in the balance of power from the news organizations to the audience. And the audience for such a long time was in a position where they didn't have any way of affecting news or making any change. They couldn't really connect. And that's changed irrevocably.
My first connection with the news media was in 1984, the BBC had a one-day strike. I wasn't happy. I was angry. I couldn't see my cartoons. So I wrote a letter. And it's a very effective way of ending your hate mail: "Love Markham, Aged 4." Still works. I'm not sure if I had any impact on the one-day strike, but what I do know is that it took them three weeks to get back to me. And that was the round journey. It took that long for anyone to have any impact and get some feedback. And that's changed now because, as journalists, we interact in real time. We're not in a position where the audience is reacting to news. We're reacting to the audience, and we're actually relying on them. They're helping us find the news. They're helping us figure out what is the best angle to take and what is the stuff that they want to hear. So it's a real-time thing. It's much quicker. It's happening on a constant basis, and the journalist is always playing catch up.
To give an example of how we rely on the audience, on the 5th of September in Costa Rica, an earthquake hit. It was a 7.6 magnitude. It was fairly big. And 60 seconds is the amount of time it took for it to travel 250 kilometers to Managua. So the ground shook in Managua 60 seconds after it hit the epicenter. Thirty seconds later, the first message went onto Twitter, and this was someone saying "temblor," which means earthquake. So 60 seconds was how long it took for the physical earthquake to travel. Thirty seconds later news of that earthquake had traveled all around the world, instantly. Everyone in the world, hypothetically, had the potential to know that an earthquake was happening in Managua. And that happened because this one person had a documentary instinct, which was to post a status update, which is what we all do now, so if something happens, we put our status update, or we post a photo, we post a video, and it all goes up into the cloud in a constant stream.
And what that means is just constant, huge volumes of data going up. It's actually staggering. When you look at the numbers, every minute there are 72 more hours of video on YouTube. So that's, every second, more than an hour of video gets uploaded. And in photos, Instagram, 58 photos are uploaded to Instagram a second. More than three and a half thousand photos go up onto Facebook. So by the time I'm finished talking here, there'll be 864 more hours of video on Youtube than there were when I started, and two and a half million more photos on Facebook and Instagram than when I started.
So it's an interesting position to be in as a journalist, because we should have access to everything. Any event that happens anywhere in the world, I should be able to know about it pretty much instantaneously, as it happens, for free. And that goes for every single person in this room.
The only problem is, when you have that much information, you have to find the good stuff, and that can be incredibly difficult when you're dealing with those volumes. And nowhere was this brought home more than during Hurricane Sandy. So what you had in Hurricane Sandy was a superstorm, the likes of which we hadn't seen for a long time, hitting the iPhone capital of the universe -- (Laughter) -- and you got volumes of media like we'd never seen before. And that meant that journalists had to deal with fakes, so we had to deal with old photos that were being reposted. We had to deal with composite images that were merging photos from previous storms. We had to deal with images from films like "The Day After Tomorrow." (Laughter) And we had to deal with images that were so realistic it was nearly difficult to tell if they were real at all. (Laughter)
But joking aside, there were images like this one from Instagram which was subjected to a grilling by journalists. They weren't really sure. It was filtered in Instagram. The lighting was questioned. Everything was questioned about it. And it turned out to be true. It was from Avenue C in downtown Manhattan, which was flooded. And the reason that they could tell that it was real was because they could get to the source, and in this case, these guys were New York food bloggers. They were well respected. They were known. So this one wasn't a debunk, it was actually something that they could prove. And that was the job of the journalist. It was filtering all this stuff. And you were, instead of going and finding the information and bringing it back to the reader, you were holding back the stuff that was potentially damaging.
And finding the source becomes more and more important -- finding the good source -- and Twitter is where most journalists now go. It's like the de facto real-time newswire, if you know how to use it, because there is so much on Twitter.
And a good example of how useful it can be but also how difficult was the Egyptian revolution in 2011. As a non-Arabic speaker, as someone who was looking from the outside, from Dublin, Twitter lists, and lists of good sources, people we could establish were credible, were really important. And how do you build a list like that from scratch? Well, it can be quite difficult, but you have to know what to look for. This visualization was done by an Italian academic. He's called André Pannison, and he basically took the Twitter conversation in Tahrir Square on the day that Hosni Mubarak would eventually resign, and the dots you can see are retweets, so when someone retweets a message, a connection is made between two dots, and the more times that message is retweeted by other people, the more you get to see these nodes, these connections being made. And it's an amazing way of visualizing the conversation, but what you get is hints at who is more interesting and who is worth investigating. And as the conversation grew and grew, it became more and more lively, and eventually you were left with this huge, big, rhythmic pointer of this conversation. You could find the nodes, though, and then you went, and you go, "Right, I've got to investigate these people. These are the ones that are obviously making sense. Let's see who they are."
Now in the deluge of information, this is where the real-time web gets really interesting for a journalist like myself, because we have more tools than ever to do that kind of investigation. And when you start digging into the sources, you can go further and further than you ever could before.
Sometimes you come across a piece of content that is so compelling, you want to use it, you're dying to use it, but you're not 100 percent sure if you can because you don't know if the source is credible. You don't know if it's a scrape. You don't know if it's a re-upload. And you have to do that investigative work. And this video, which I'm going to let run through, was one we discovered a couple of weeks ago.
Video: Getting real windy in just a second.
(Rain and wind sounds)
(Explosion) Oh, shit!
Markham Nolan: Okay, so now if you're a news producer, this is something you'd love to run with, because obviously, this is gold. You know? This is a fantastic reaction from someone, very genuine video that they've shot in their back garden. But how do you find if this person, if it's true, if it's faked, or if it's something that's old and that's been reposted?
So we set about going to work on this video, and the only thing that we had to go on was the username on the YouTube account. There was only one video posted to that account, and the username was Rita Krill. And we didn't know if Rita existed or if it was a fake name. But we started looking, and we used free Internet tools to do so. The first one was called Spokeo, which allowed us to look for Rita Krills. So we looked all over the U.S. We found them in New York, we found them in Pennsylvania, Nevada and Florida. So we went and we looked for a second free Internet tool called Wolfram Alpha, and we checked the weather reports for the day in which this video had been uploaded, and when we went through all those various cities, we found that in Florida, there were thunderstorms and rain on the day. So we went to the white pages, and we found, we looked through the Rita Krills in the phonebook, and we looked through a couple of different addresses, and that took us to Google Maps, where we found a house. And we found a house with a swimming pool that looked remarkably like Rita's. So we went back to the video, and we had to look for clues that we could cross-reference. So if you look in the video, there's the big umbrella, there's a white lilo in the pool, there are some unusually rounded edges in the swimming pool, and there's two trees in the background. And we went back to Google Maps, and we looked a little bit closer, and sure enough, there's the white lilo, there are the two trees, there's the umbrella. It's actually folded in this photo. Little bit of trickery. And there are the rounded edges on the swimming pool. So we were able to call Rita, clear the video, make sure that it had been shot, and then our clients were delighted because they were able to run it without being worried.
Sometimes the search for truth, though, is a little bit less flippant, and it has much greater consequences. Syria has been really interesting for us, because obviously a lot of the time you're trying to debunk stuff that can be potentially war crime evidence, so this is where YouTube actually becomes the most important repository of information about what's going on in the world.
So this video, I'm not going to show you the whole thing, because it's quite gruesome, but you'll hear some of the sounds. This is from Hama. Video: (Shouting) And what this video shows, when you watch the whole thing through, is bloody bodies being taken out of a pickup truck and thrown off a bridge. The allegations were that these guys were Muslim Brotherhood and they were throwing Syrian Army officers' bodies off the bridge, and they were cursing and using blasphemous language, and there were lots of counterclaims about who they were, and whether or not they were what the video said it was.
So we talked to some sources in Hama who we had been back and forth with on Twitter, and we asked them about this, and the bridge was interesting to us because it was something we could identify. Three different sources said three different things about the bridge. They said, one, the bridge doesn't exist. Another one said the bridge does exist, but it's not in Hama. It's somewhere else. And the third one said, "I think the bridge does exist, but the dam upstream of the bridge was closed, so the river should actually have been dry, so this doesn't make sense." So that was the only one that gave us a clue. We looked through the video for other clues. We saw the distinctive railings, which we could use. We looked at the curbs. The curbs were throwing shadows south, so we could tell the bridge was running east-west across the river. It had black-and-white curbs. As we looked at the river itself, you could see there's a concrete stone on the west side. There's a cloud of blood. That's blood in the river. So the river is flowing south to north. That's what that tells me. And also, as you look away from the bridge, there's a divot on the left-hand side of the bank, and the river narrows.
So onto Google Maps we go, and we start looking through literally every single bridge. We go to the dam that we talked about, we start just literally going through every time that road crosses the river, crossing off the bridges that don't match. We're looking for one that crosses east-west. And we get to Hama. We get all the way from the dam to Hama and there's no bridge. So we go a bit further. We switch to the satellite view, and we find another bridge, and everything starts to line up. The bridge looks like it's crossing the river east to west. So this could be our bridge. And we zoom right in. We start to see that it's got a median, so it's a two-lane bridge. And it's got the black-and-white curbs that we saw in the video, and as we click through it, you can see someone's uploaded photos to go with the map, which is very handy, so we click into the photos. And the photos start showing us more detail that we can cross-reference with the video. The first thing that we see is we see black-and-white curbing, which is handy because we've seen that before. We see the distinctive railing that we saw the guys throwing the bodies over. And we keep going through it until we're certain that this is our bridge.
So what does that tell me? I've got to go back now to my three sources and look at what they told me: the one who said the bridge didn't exist, the one who said the bridge wasn't in Hama, and the one guy who said, "Yes, the bridge does exist, but I'm not sure about the water levels." Number three is looking like the most truthful all of a sudden, and we've been able to find that out using some free Internet tools sitting in a cubicle in an office in Dublin in the space of 20 minutes. And that's part of the joy of this. Although the web is running like a torrent, there's so much information there that it's incredibly hard to sift and getting harder every day, if you use them intelligently, you can find out incredible information. Given a couple of clues, I could probably find out a lot of things about most of you in the audience that you might not like me finding out.
But what it tells me is that, at a time when there's more -- there's a greater abundance of information than there ever has been, it's harder to filter, we have greater tools. We have free Internet tools that allow us, help us do this kind of investigation. We have algorithms that are smarter than ever before, and computers that are quicker than ever before.
But here's the thing. Algorithms are rules. They're binary. They're yes or no, they're black or white. Truth is never binary. Truth is a value. Truth is emotional, it's fluid, and above all, it's human. No matter how quick we get with computers, no matter how much information we have, you'll never be able to remove the human from the truth-seeking exercise, because in the end, it is a uniquely human trait. Thanks very much. (Applause) |
As a student of adversity, I've been struck over the years by how some people with major challenges seem to draw strength from them, and I've heard the popular wisdom that that has to do with finding meaning. And for a long time, I thought the meaning was out there, some great truth waiting to be found.
But over time, I've come to feel that the truth is irrelevant. We call it finding meaning, but we might better call it forging meaning.
My last book was about how families manage to deal with various kinds of challenging or unusual offspring, and one of the mothers I interviewed, who had two children with multiple severe disabilities, said to me, "People always give us these little sayings like, 'God doesn't give you any more than you can handle,' but children like ours are not preordained as a gift. They're a gift because that's what we have chosen."
We make those choices all our lives. When I was in second grade, Bobby Finkel had a birthday party and invited everyone in our class but me. My mother assumed there had been some sort of error, and she called Mrs. Finkel, who said that Bobby didn't like me and didn't want me at his party. And that day, my mom took me to the zoo and out for a hot fudge sundae. When I was in seventh grade, one of the kids on my school bus nicknamed me "Percy" as a shorthand for my demeanor, and sometimes, he and his cohort would chant that provocation the entire school bus ride, 45 minutes up, 45 minutes back, "Percy! Percy! Percy! Percy!" When I was in eighth grade, our science teacher told us that all male homosexuals develop fecal incontinence because of the trauma to their anal sphincter. And I graduated high school without ever going to the cafeteria, where I would have sat with the girls and been laughed at for doing so, or sat with the boys and been laughed at for being a boy who should be sitting with the girls.
I survived that childhood through a mix of avoidance and endurance. What I didn't know then, and do know now, is that avoidance and endurance can be the entryway to forging meaning. After you've forged meaning, you need to incorporate that meaning into a new identity. You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt.
One of the other mothers I interviewed when I was working on my book had been raped as an adolescent, and had a child following that rape, which had thrown away her career plans and damaged all of her emotional relationships. But when I met her, she was 50, and I said to her, "Do you often think about the man who raped you?" And she said, "I used to think about him with anger, but now only with pity." And I thought she meant pity because he was so unevolved as to have done this terrible thing. And I said, "Pity?" And she said, "Yes, because he has a beautiful daughter and two beautiful grandchildren and he doesn't know that, and I do. So as it turns out, I'm the lucky one."
Some of our struggles are things we're born to: our gender, our sexuality, our race, our disability. And some are things that happen to us: being a political prisoner, being a rape victim, being a Katrina survivor. Identity involves entering a community to draw strength from that community, and to give strength there too. It involves substituting "and" for "but" -- not "I am here but I have cancer," but rather, "I have cancer and I am here."
When we're ashamed, we can't tell our stories, and stories are the foundation of identity. Forge meaning, build identity, forge meaning and build identity. That became my mantra. Forging meaning is about changing yourself. Building identity is about changing the world. All of us with stigmatized identities face this question daily: how much to accommodate society by constraining ourselves, and how much to break the limits of what constitutes a valid life? Forging meaning and building identity does not make what was wrong right. It only makes what was wrong precious.
In January of this year, I went to Myanmar to interview political prisoners, and I was surprised to find them less bitter than I'd anticipated. Most of them had knowingly committed the offenses that landed them in prison, and they had walked in with their heads held high, and they walked out with their heads still held high, many years later. Dr. Ma Thida, a leading human rights activist who had nearly died in prison and had spent many years in solitary confinement, told me she was grateful to her jailers for the time she had had to think, for the wisdom she had gained, for the chance to hone her meditation skills. She had sought meaning and made her travail into a crucial identity. But if the people I met were less bitter than I'd anticipated about being in prison, they were also less thrilled than I'd expected about the reform process going on in their country. Ma Thida said, "We Burmese are noted for our tremendous grace under pressure, but we also have grievance under glamour," she said, "and the fact that there have been these shifts and changes doesn't erase the continuing problems in our society that we learned to see so well while we were in prison."
And I understood her to be saying that concessions confer only a little humanity, where full humanity is due, that crumbs are not the same as a place at the table, which is to say you can forge meaning and build identity and still be mad as hell.
I've never been raped, and I've never been in anything remotely approaching a Burmese prison, but as a gay American, I've experienced prejudice and even hatred, and I've forged meaning and I've built identity, which is a move I learned from people who had experienced far worse privation than I've ever known. In my own adolescence, I went to extreme lengths to try to be straight. I enrolled myself in something called sexual surrogacy therapy, in which people I was encouraged to call doctors prescribed what I was encouraged to call exercises with women I was encouraged to call surrogates, who were not exactly prostitutes but who were also not exactly anything else. (Laughter) My particular favorite was a blonde woman from the Deep South who eventually admitted to me that she was really a necrophiliac and had taken this job after she got in trouble down at the morgue. (Laughter)
These experiences eventually allowed me to have some happy physical relationships with women, for which I'm grateful, but I was at war with myself, and I dug terrible wounds into my own psyche.
We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences. We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful. Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle. We could have been ourselves without our delights, but not without the misfortunes that drive our search for meaning. "Therefore, I take pleasure in infirmities," St. Paul wrote in Second Corinthians, "for when I am weak, then I am strong."
In 1988, I went to Moscow to interview artists of the Soviet underground, and I expected their work to be dissident and political. But the radicalism in their work actually lay in reinserting humanity into a society that was annihilating humanity itself, as, in some senses, Russian society is now doing again. One of the artists I met said to me, "We were in training to be not artists but angels."
In 1991, I went back to see the artists I'd been writing about, and I was with them during the putsch that ended the Soviet Union, and they were among the chief organizers of the resistance to that putsch. And on the third day of the putsch, one of them suggested we walk up to Smolenskaya. And we went there, and we arranged ourselves in front of one of the barricades, and a little while later, a column of tanks rolled up, and the soldier on the front tank said, "We have unconditional orders to destroy this barricade. If you get out of the way, we don't need to hurt you, but if you won't move, we'll have no choice but to run you down." And the artists I was with said, "Give us just a minute. Give us just a minute to tell you why we're here." And the soldier folded his arms, and the artist launched into a Jeffersonian panegyric to democracy such as those of us who live in a Jeffersonian democracy would be hard-pressed to present. And they went on and on, and the soldier watched, and then he sat there for a full minute after they were finished and looked at us so bedraggled in the rain, and said, "What you have said is true, and we must bow to the will of the people. If you'll clear enough space for us to turn around, we'll go back the way we came." And that's what they did. Sometimes, forging meaning can give you the vocabulary you need to fight for your ultimate freedom.
Russia awakened me to the lemonade notion that oppression breeds the power to oppose it, and I gradually understood that as the cornerstone of identity. It took identity to rescue me from sadness. The gay rights movement posits a world in which my aberrances are a victory. Identity politics always works on two fronts: to give pride to people who have a given condition or characteristic, and to cause the outside world to treat such people more gently and more kindly. Those are two totally separate enterprises, but progress in each sphere reverberates in the other. Identity politics can be narcissistic. People extol a difference only because it's theirs. People narrow the world and function in discrete groups without empathy for one another. But properly understood and wisely practiced, identity politics should expand our idea of what it is to be human. Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution.
I would have had an easier life if I were straight, but I would not be me, and I now like being myself better than the idea of being someone else, someone who, to be honest, I have neither the option of being nor the ability fully to imagine. But if you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes, and we become attached to the heroic strain in our own lives. I've sometimes wondered whether I could have ceased to hate that part of myself without gay pride's technicolor fiesta, of which this speech is one manifestation. I used to think I would know myself to be mature when I could simply be gay without emphasis, but the self-loathing of that period left a void, and celebration needs to fill and overflow it, and even if I repay my private debt of melancholy, there's still an outer world of homophobia that it will take decades to address. Someday, being gay will be a simple fact, free of party hats and blame, but not yet. A friend of mine who thought gay pride was getting very carried away with itself, once suggested that we organize Gay Humility Week. (Laughter) (Applause) It's a great idea, but its time has not yet come. (Laughter) And neutrality, which seems to lie halfway between despair and celebration, is actually the endgame.
In 29 states in the U.S., I could legally be fired or denied housing for being gay. In Russia, the anti-propaganda law has led to people being beaten in the streets. Twenty-seven African countries have passed laws against sodomy, and in Nigeria, gay people can legally be stoned to death, and lynchings have become common. In Saudi Arabia recently, two men who had been caught in carnal acts, were sentenced to 7,000 lashes each, and are now permanently disabled as a result. So who can forge meaning and build identity? Gay rights are not primarily marriage rights, and for the millions who live in unaccepting places with no resources, dignity remains elusive. I am lucky to have forged meaning and built identity, but that's still a rare privilege, and gay people deserve more collectively than the crumbs of justice.
And yet, every step forward is so sweet. In 2007, six years after we met, my partner and I decided to get married. Meeting John had been the discovery of great happiness and also the elimination of great unhappiness, and sometimes, I was so occupied with the disappearance of all that pain that I forgot about the joy, which was at first the less remarkable part of it to me. Marrying was a way to declare our love as more a presence than an absence.
Marriage soon led us to children, and that meant new meanings and new identities, ours and theirs. I want my children to be happy, and I love them most achingly when they are sad. As a gay father, I can teach them to own what is wrong in their lives, but I believe that if I succeed in sheltering them from adversity, I will have failed as a parent. A Buddhist scholar I know once explained to me that Westerners mistakenly think that nirvana is what arrives when all your woe is behind you and you have only bliss to look forward to. But he said that would not be nirvana, because your bliss in the present would always be shadowed by the joy from the past. Nirvana, he said, is what you arrive at when you have only bliss to look forward to and find in what looked like sorrows the seedlings of your joy. And I sometimes wonder whether I could have found such fulfillment in marriage and children if they'd come more readily, if I'd been straight in my youth or were young now, in either of which cases this might be easier. Perhaps I could. Perhaps all the complex imagining I've done could have been applied to other topics. But if seeking meaning matters more than finding meaning, the question is not whether I'd be happier for having been bullied, but whether assigning meaning to those experiences has made me a better father. I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys, because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me.
I know many heterosexuals who have equally happy marriages and families, but gay marriage is so breathtakingly fresh, and gay families so exhilaratingly new, and I found meaning in that surprise.
In October, it was my 50th birthday, and my family organized a party for me, and in the middle of it, my son said to my husband that he wanted to make a speech, and John said, "George, you can't make a speech. You're four." (Laughter) "Only Grandpa and Uncle David and I are going to make speeches tonight." But George insisted and insisted, and finally, John took him up to the microphone, and George said very loudly, "Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please." And everyone turned around, startled. And George said, "I'm glad it's Daddy's birthday. I'm glad we all get cake. And daddy, if you were little, I'd be your friend."
And I thought — Thank you. I thought that I was indebted even to Bobby Finkel, because all those earlier experiences were what had propelled me to this moment, and I was finally unconditionally grateful for a life I'd once have done anything to change.
The gay activist Harvey Milk was once asked by a younger gay man what he could do to help the movement, and Harvey Milk said, "Go out and tell someone." There's always somebody who wants to confiscate our humanity, and there are always stories that restore it. If we live out loud, we can trounce the hatred and expand everyone's lives.
Forge meaning. Build identity. Forge meaning. Build identity. And then invite the world to share your joy.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Thank you. (Applause)
Thank you. (Applause)
Thank you. (Applause) |
Democracy. In the West, we make a colossal mistake taking it for granted. We see democracy not as the most fragile of flowers that it really is, but we see it as part of our society's furniture. We tend to think of it as an intransigent given. We mistakenly believe that capitalism begets inevitably democracy. It doesn't.
Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew and his great imitators in Beijing have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that it is perfectly possible to have a flourishing capitalism, spectacular growth, while politics remain democracy free. Indeed, democracy is receding in our neck of the woods, here in Europe.
Earlier this year, while I was representing Greece -- the newly elected Greek government -- in the Eurogroup as its Finance Minister, I was told in no uncertain terms that our nation's democratic process -- our elections -- could not be allowed to interfere with economic policies that were being implemented in Greece. At that moment, I felt that there could be no greater vindication of Lee Kuan Yew, or the Chinese Communist Party, indeed of some recalcitrant friends of mine who kept telling me that democracy would be banned if it ever threatened to change anything.
Tonight, here, I want to present to you an economic case for an authentic democracy. I want to ask you to join me in believing again that Lee Kuan Yew, the Chinese Communist Party and indeed the Eurogroup are wrong in believing that we can dispense with democracy -- that we need an authentic, boisterous democracy. And without democracy, our societies will be nastier, our future bleak and our great, new technologies wasted.
Speaking of waste, allow me to point out an interesting paradox that is threatening our economies as we speak. I call it the twin peaks paradox. One peak you understand -- you know it, you recognize it -- is the mountain of debts that has been casting a long shadow over the United States, Europe, the whole world. We all recognize the mountain of debts. But few people discern its twin. A mountain of idle cash belonging to rich savers and to corporations, too terrified to invest it into the productive activities that can generate the incomes from which you can extinguish the mountain of debts and which can produce all those things that humanity desperately needs, like green energy.
Now let me give you two numbers. Over the last three months, in the United States, in Britain and in the Eurozone, we have invested, collectively, 3.4 trillion dollars on all the wealth-producing goods -- things like industrial plants, machinery, office blocks, schools, roads, railways, machinery, and so on and so forth. $3.4 trillion sounds like a lot of money until you compare it to the $5.1 trillion that has been slushing around in the same countries, in our financial institutions, doing absolutely nothing during the same period except inflating stock exchanges and bidding up house prices.
So a mountain of debt and a mountain of idle cash form twin peaks, failing to cancel each other out through the normal operation of the markets.
The result is stagnant wages, more than a quarter of 25- to 54-year-olds in America, in Japan and in Europe out of work. And consequently, low aggregate demand, which in a never-ending cycle, reinforces the pessimism of the investors, who, fearing low demand, reproduce it by not investing -- exactly like Oedipus' father, who, terrified by the prophecy of the oracle that his son would grow up to kill him, unwittingly engineered the conditions that insured that Oedipus, his son, would kill him.
This is my quarrel with capitalism. Its gross wastefulness, all this idle cash, should be energized to improve lives, to develop human talents, and indeed to finance all these technologies, green technologies, which are absolutely essential for saving planet Earth.
Am I right in believing that democracy might be the answer? I believe so, but before we move on, what do we mean by democracy? Aristotle defined democracy as the constitution in which the free and the poor, being in the majority, control government.
Now, of course Athenian democracy excluded too many. Women, migrants and, of course, the slaves. But it would be a mistake to dismiss the significance of ancient Athenian democracy on the basis of whom it excluded.
What was more pertinent, and continues to be so about ancient Athenian democracy, was the inclusion of the working poor, who not only acquired the right to free speech, but more importantly, crucially, they acquired the rights to political judgments that were afforded equal weight in the decision-making concerning matters of state. Now, of course, Athenian democracy didn't last long. Like a candle that burns brightly, it burned out quickly. And indeed, our liberal democracies today do not have their roots in ancient Athens. They have their roots in the Magna Carta, in the 1688 Glorious Revolution, indeed in the American constitution. Whereas Athenian democracy was focusing on the masterless citizen and empowering the working poor, our liberal democracies are founded on the Magna Carta tradition, which was, after all, a charter for masters. And indeed, liberal democracy only surfaced when it was possible to separate fully the political sphere from the economic sphere, so as to confine the democratic process fully in the political sphere, leaving the economic sphere -- the corporate world, if you want -- as a democracy-free zone.
Now, in our democracies today, this separation of the economic from the political sphere, the moment it started happening, it gave rise to an inexorable, epic struggle between the two, with the economic sphere colonizing the political sphere, eating into its power.
Have you wondered why politicians are not what they used to be? It's not because their DNA has degenerated.
(Laughter)
It is rather because one can be in government today and not in power, because power has migrated from the political to the economic sphere, which is separate.
Indeed, I spoke about my quarrel with capitalism. If you think about it, it is a little bit like a population of predators, that are so successful in decimating the prey that they must feed on, that in the end they starve.
Similarly, the economic sphere has been colonizing and cannibalizing the political sphere to such an extent that it is undermining itself, causing economic crisis. Corporate power is increasing, political goods are devaluing, inequality is rising, aggregate demand is falling and CEOs of corporations are too scared to invest the cash of their corporations.
So the more capitalism succeeds in taking the demos out of democracy, the taller the twin peaks and the greater the waste of human resources and humanity's wealth.
Clearly, if this is right, we must reunite the political and economic spheres and better do it with a demos being in control, like in ancient Athens except without the slaves or the exclusion of women and migrants.
Now, this is not an original idea. The Marxist left had that idea 100 years ago and it didn't go very well, did it?
The lesson that we learned from the Soviet debacle is that only by a miracle will the working poor be reempowered, as they were in ancient Athens, without creating new forms of brutality and waste.
But there is a solution: eliminate the working poor. Capitalism's doing it by replacing low-wage workers with automata, androids, robots. The problem is that as long as the economic and the political spheres are separate, automation makes the twin peaks taller, the waste loftier and the social conflicts deeper, including -- soon, I believe -- in places like China.
So we need to reconfigure, we need to reunite the economic and the political spheres, but we'd better do it by democratizing the reunified sphere, lest we end up with a surveillance-mad hyperautocracy that makes The Matrix, the movie, look like a documentary.
(Laughter)
So the question is not whether capitalism will survive the technological innovations it is spawning. The more interesting question is whether capitalism will be succeeded by something resembling a Matrix dystopia or something much closer to a Star Trek-like society, where machines serve the humans and the humans expend their energies exploring the universe and indulging in long debates about the meaning of life in some ancient, Athenian-like, high tech agora.
I think we can afford to be optimistic. But what would it take, what would it look like to have this Star Trek-like utopia, instead of the Matrix-like dystopia?
In practical terms, allow me to share just briefly, a couple of examples.
At the level of the enterprise, imagine a capital market, where you earn capital as you work, and where your capital follows you from one job to another, from one company to another, and the company -- whichever one you happen to work at at that time -- is solely owned by those who happen to work in it at that moment. Then all income stems from capital, from profits, and the very concept of wage labor becomes obsolete. No more separation between those who own but do not work in the company and those who work but do not own the company; no more tug-of-war between capital and labor; no great gap between investment and saving; indeed, no towering twin peaks.
At the level of the global political economy, imagine for a moment that our national currencies have a free-floating exchange rate, with a universal, global, digital currency, one that is issued by the International Monetary Fund, the G-20, on behalf of all humanity. And imagine further that all international trade is denominated in this currency -- let's call it "the cosmos," in units of cosmos -- with every government agreeing to be paying into a common fund a sum of cosmos units proportional to the country's trade deficit, or indeed to a country's trade surplus. And imagine that that fund is utilized to invest in green technologies, especially in parts of the world where investment funding is scarce.
This is not a new idea. It's what, effectively, John Maynard Keynes proposed in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference. The problem is that back then, they didn't have the technology to implement it. Now we do, especially in the context of a reunified political-economic sphere.
The world that I am describing to you is simultaneously libertarian, in that it prioritizes empowered individuals, Marxist, since it will have confined to the dustbin of history the division between capital and labor, and Keynesian, global Keynesian. But above all else, it is a world in which we will be able to imagine an authentic democracy.
Will such a world dawn? Or shall we descend into a Matrix-like dystopia? The answer lies in the political choice that we shall be making collectively. It is our choice, and we'd better make it democratically.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Bruno Giussani: Yanis ... It was you who described yourself in your bios as a libertarian Marxist. What is the relevance of Marx's analysis today?
Yanis Varoufakis: Well, if there was any relevance in what I just said, then Marx is relevant. Because the whole point of reunifying the political and economic is -- if we don't do it, then technological innovation is going to create such a massive fall in aggregate demand,
what Larry Summers refers to as secular stagnation. With this crisis migrating from one part of the world, as it is now, it will destabilize not only our democracies, but even the emerging world that is not that keen on liberal democracy. So if this analysis holds water, then Marx is absolutely relevant. But so is Hayek, that's why I'm a libertarian Marxist, and so is Keynes, so that's why I'm totally confused.
(Laughter)
BG: Indeed, and possibly we are too, now.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
YV: If you are not confused, you are not thinking, OK?
BG: That's a very, very Greek philosopher kind of thing to say --
YV: That was Einstein, actually --
BG: During your talk you mentioned Singapore and China, and last night at the speaker dinner, you expressed a pretty strong opinion about how the West looks at China. Would you like to share that?
YV: Well, there's a great degree of hypocrisy. In our liberal democracies, we have a semblance of democracy. It's because we have confined, as I was saying in my talk, democracy to the political sphere, while leaving the one sphere where all the action is -- the economic sphere -- a completely democracy-free zone.
In a sense, if I am allowed to be provocative, China today is closer to Britain in the 19th century. Because remember, we tend to associate liberalism with democracy -- that's a mistake, historically. Liberalism, liberal, it's like John Stuart Mill. John Stuart Mill was particularly skeptical about the democratic process. So what you are seeing now in China is a very similar process to the one that we had in Britain during the Industrial Revolution, especially the transition from the first to the second. And to be castigating China for doing that which the West did in the 19th century, smacks of hypocrisy.
BG: I am sure that many people here are wondering about your experience as the Finance Minister of Greece earlier this year.
YV: I knew this was coming.
BG: Yes.
BG: Six months after, how do you look back at the first half of the year?
YV: Extremely exciting, from a personal point of view, and very disappointing, because we had an opportunity to reboot the Eurozone. Not just Greece, the Eurozone. To move away from the complacency and the constant denial that there was a massive -- and there is a massive architectural fault line going through the Eurozone, which is threatening, massively, the whole of the European Union process.
We had an opportunity on the basis of the Greek program -- which by the way, was the first program to manifest that denial -- to put it right. And, unfortunately, the powers in the Eurozone, in the Eurogroup, chose to maintain denial.
But you know what happens. This is the experience of the Soviet Union. When you try to keep alive an economic system that architecturally cannot survive, through political will and through authoritarianism, you may succeed in prolonging it, but when change happens it happens very abruptly and catastrophically.
BG: What kind of change are you foreseeing?
YV: Well, there's no doubt that if we don't change the architecture of the Eurozone, the Eurozone has no future.
BG: Did you make any mistakes when you were Finance Minister?
YV: Every day.
BG: For example? YV: Anybody who looks back --
(Applause)
No, but seriously. If there's any Minister of Finance, or of anything else for that matter, who tells you after six months in a job, especially in such a stressful situation, that they have made no mistake, they're dangerous people. Of course I made mistakes.
The greatest mistake was to sign the application for the extension of a loan agreement in the end of February. I was imagining that there was a genuine interest on the side of the creditors to find common ground. And there wasn't. They were simply interested in crushing our government, just because they did not want to have to deal with the architectural fault lines that were running through the Eurozone. And because they didn't want to admit that for five years they were implementing a catastrophic program in Greece. We lost one-third of our nominal GDP. This is worse than the Great Depression. And no one has come clean from the troika of lenders that have been imposing this policy to say, "This was a colossal mistake."
BG: Despite all this, and despite the aggressiveness of the discussion, you seem to be remaining quite pro-European.
YV: Absolutely. Look, my criticism of the European Union and the Eurozone comes from a person who lives and breathes Europe. My greatest fear is that the Eurozone will not survive. Because if it doesn't, the centrifugal forces that will be unleashed will be demonic, and they will destroy the European Union. And that will be catastrophic not just for Europe but for the whole global economy.
We are probably the largest economy in the world. And if we allow ourselves to fall into a route of the postmodern 1930's, which seems to me to be what we are doing, then that will be detrimental to the future of Europeans and non-Europeans alike.
BG: We definitely hope you are wrong on that point. Yanis, thank you for coming to TED.
YV: Thank you.
(Applause) |
Well, this is such an honor. And it's wonderful to be in the presence of an organization that is really making a difference in the world. And I'm intensely grateful for the opportunity to speak to you today.
And I'm also rather surprised, because when I look back on my life the last thing I ever wanted to do was write, or be in any way involved in religion. After I left my convent, I'd finished with religion, frankly. I thought that was it. And for 13 years I kept clear of it. I wanted to be an English literature professor. And I certainly didn't even want to be a writer, particularly. But then I suffered a series of career catastrophes, one after the other, and finally found myself in television. (Laughter) I said that to Bill Moyers, and he said, "Oh, we take anybody." (Laughter)
And I was doing some rather controversial religious programs. This went down very well in the U.K., where religion is extremely unpopular. And so, for once, for the only time in my life, I was finally in the mainstream. But I got sent to Jerusalem to make a film about early Christianity. And there, for the first time, I encountered the other religious traditions: Judaism and Islam, the sister religions of Christianity. And while I found I knew nothing about these faiths at all -- despite my own intensely religious background, I'd seen Judaism only as a kind of prelude to Christianity, and I knew nothing about Islam at all.
But in that city, that tortured city, where you see the three faiths jostling so uneasily together, you also become aware of the profound connection between them. And it has been the study of other religious traditions that brought me back to a sense of what religion can be, and actually enabled me to look at my own faith in a different light.
And I found some astonishing things in the course of my study that had never occurred to me. Frankly, in the days when I thought I'd had it with religion, I just found the whole thing absolutely incredible. These doctrines seemed unproven, abstract. And to my astonishment, when I began seriously studying other traditions, I began to realize that belief -- which we make such a fuss about today -- is only a very recent religious enthusiasm that surfaced only in the West, in about the 17th century. The word "belief" itself originally meant to love, to prize, to hold dear. In the 17th century, it narrowed its focus, for reasons that I'm exploring in a book I'm writing at the moment, to include -- to mean an intellectual assent to a set of propositions, a credo. "I believe:" it did not mean, "I accept certain creedal articles of faith." It meant: "I commit myself. I engage myself." Indeed, some of the world traditions think very little of religious orthodoxy. In the Quran, religious opinion -- religious orthodoxy -- is dismissed as "zanna:" self-indulgent guesswork about matters that nobody can be certain of one way or the other, but which makes people quarrelsome and stupidly sectarian. (Laughter)
So if religion is not about believing things, what is it about? What I've found, across the board, is that religion is about behaving differently. Instead of deciding whether or not you believe in God, first you do something. You behave in a committed way, and then you begin to understand the truths of religion. And religious doctrines are meant to be summons to action; you only understand them when you put them into practice.
Now, pride of place in this practice is given to compassion. And it is an arresting fact that right across the board, in every single one of the major world faiths, compassion -- the ability to feel with the other in the way we've been thinking about this evening -- is not only the test of any true religiosity, it is also what will bring us into the presence of what Jews, Christians and Muslims call "God" or the "Divine." It is compassion, says the Buddha, which brings you to Nirvana. Why? Because in compassion, when we feel with the other, we dethrone ourselves from the center of our world and we put another person there. And once we get rid of ego, then we're ready to see the Divine.
And in particular, every single one of the major world traditions has highlighted -- has said -- and put at the core of their tradition what's become known as the Golden Rule. First propounded by Confucius five centuries before Christ: "Do not do to others what you would not like them to do to you." That, he said, was the central thread which ran through all his teaching and that his disciples should put into practice all day and every day. And it was -- the Golden Rule would bring them to the transcendent value that he called "ren," human-heartedness, which was a transcendent experience in itself.
And this is absolutely crucial to the monotheisms, too. There's a famous story about the great rabbi, Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus. A pagan came to him and offered to convert to Judaism if the rabbi could recite the whole of Jewish teaching while he stood on one leg. Hillel stood on one leg and said, "That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the Torah. The rest is commentary. Go and study it." (Laughter)
And "go and study it" was what he meant. He said, "In your exegesis, you must make it clear that every single verse of the Torah is a commentary, a gloss upon the Golden Rule." The great Rabbi Meir said that any interpretation of Scripture which led to hatred and disdain, or contempt of other people -- any people whatsoever -- was illegitimate.
Saint Augustine made exactly the same point. Scripture, he says, "teaches nothing but charity, and we must not leave an interpretation of Scripture until we have found a compassionate interpretation of it." And this struggle to find compassion in some of these rather rebarbative texts is a good dress rehearsal for doing the same in ordinary life. (Applause)
But now look at our world. And we are living in a world that is -- where religion has been hijacked. Where terrorists cite Quranic verses to justify their atrocities. Where instead of taking Jesus' words, "Love your enemies. Don't judge others," we have the spectacle of Christians endlessly judging other people, endlessly using Scripture as a way of arguing with other people, putting other people down. Throughout the ages, religion has been used to oppress others, and this is because of human ego, human greed. We have a talent as a species for messing up wonderful things.
So the traditions also insisted -- and this is an important point, I think -- that you could not and must not confine your compassion to your own group: your own nation, your own co-religionists, your own fellow countrymen. You must have what one of the Chinese sages called "jian ai": concern for everybody. Love your enemies. Honor the stranger. We formed you, says the Quran, into tribes and nations so that you may know one another.
And this, again -- this universal outreach -- is getting subdued in the strident use of religion -- abuse of religion -- for nefarious gains. Now, I've lost count of the number of taxi drivers who, when I say to them what I do for a living, inform me that religion has been the cause of all the major world wars in history. Wrong. The causes of our present woes are political.
But, make no mistake about it, religion is a kind of fault line, and when a conflict gets ingrained in a region, religion can get sucked in and become part of the problem. Our modernity has been exceedingly violent. Between 1914 and 1945, 70 million people died in Europe alone as a result of armed conflict. And so many of our institutions, even football, which used to be a pleasant pastime, now causes riots where people even die. And it's not surprising that religion, too, has been affected by this violent ethos.
There's also a great deal, I think, of religious illiteracy around. People seem to think, now equate religious faith with believing things. As though that -- we call religious people often believers, as though that were the main thing that they do. And very often, secondary goals get pushed into the first place, in place of compassion and the Golden Rule. Because the Golden Rule is difficult. I sometimes -- when I'm speaking to congregations about compassion, I sometimes see a mutinous expression crossing some of their faces because a lot of religious people prefer to be right, rather than compassionate. (Laughter)
Now -- but that's not the whole story. Since September the 11th, when my work on Islam suddenly propelled me into public life, in a way that I'd never imagined, I've been able to sort of go all over the world, and finding, everywhere I go, a yearning for change. I've just come back from Pakistan, where literally thousands of people came to my lectures, because they were yearning, first of all, to hear a friendly Western voice. And especially the young people were coming. And were asking me -- the young people were saying, "What can we do? What can we do to change things?" And my hosts in Pakistan said, "Look, don't be too polite to us. Tell us where we're going wrong. Let's talk together about where religion is failing."
Because it seems to me that with -- our current situation is so serious at the moment that any ideology that doesn't promote a sense of global understanding and global appreciation of each other is failing the test of the time. And religion, with its wide following ... Here in the United States, people may be being religious in a different way, as a report has just shown -- but they still want to be religious. It's only Western Europe that has retained its secularism, which is now beginning to look rather endearingly old-fashioned.
But people want to be religious, and religion should be made to be a force for harmony in the world, which it can and should be -- because of the Golden Rule. "Do not do to others what you would not have them do to you": an ethos that should now be applied globally. We should not treat other nations as we would not wish to be treated ourselves.
And these -- whatever our wretched beliefs -- is a religious matter, it's a spiritual matter. It's a profound moral matter that engages and should engage us all. And as I say, there is a hunger for change out there. Here in the United States, I think you see it in this election campaign: a longing for change. And people in churches all over and mosques all over this continent after September the 11th, coming together locally to create networks of understanding. With the mosque, with the synagogue, saying, "We must start to speak to one another." I think it's time that we moved beyond the idea of toleration and move toward appreciation of the other.
I'd -- there's one story I'd just like to mention. This comes from "The Iliad." But it tells you what this spirituality should be. You know the story of "The Iliad," the 10-year war between Greece and Troy. In one incident, Achilles, the famous warrior of Greece, takes his troops out of the war, and the whole war effort suffers. And in the course of the ensuing muddle, his beloved friend, Patroclus, is killed -- and killed in single combat by one of the Trojan princes, Hector. And Achilles goes mad with grief and rage and revenge, and he mutilates the body. He kills Hector, he mutilates his body and then he refuses to give the body back for burial to the family, which means that, in Greek ethos, Hector's soul will wander eternally, lost. And then one night, Priam, king of Troy, an old man, comes into the Greek camp incognito, makes his way to Achilles' tent to ask for the body of his son. And everybody is shocked when the old man takes off his head covering and shows himself. And Achilles looks at him and thinks of his father. And he starts to weep. And Priam looks at the man who has murdered so many of his sons, and he, too, starts to weep. And the sound of their weeping filled the house. The Greeks believed that weeping together created a bond between people. And then Achilles takes the body of Hector, he hands it very tenderly to the father, and the two men look at each other, and see each other as divine.
That is the ethos found, too, in all the religions. It's what is meant by overcoming the horror that we feel when we are under threat of our enemies, and beginning to appreciate the other. It's of great importance that the word for "holy" in Hebrew, applied to God, is "Kadosh": separate, other. And it is often, perhaps, the very otherness of our enemies which can give us intimations of that utterly mysterious transcendence which is God.
And now, here's my wish: I wish that you would help with the creation, launch and propagation of a Charter for Compassion, crafted by a group of inspirational thinkers from the three Abrahamic traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and based on the fundamental principle of the Golden Rule. We need to create a movement among all these people that I meet in my travels -- you probably meet, too -- who want to join up, in some way, and reclaim their faith, which they feel, as I say, has been hijacked. We need to empower people to remember the compassionate ethos, and to give guidelines. This Charter would not be a massive document. I'd like to see it -- to give guidelines as to how to interpret the Scriptures, these texts that are being abused. Remember what the rabbis and what Augustine said about how Scripture should be governed by the principle of charity. Let's get back to that. And the idea, too, of Jews, Christians and Muslims -- these traditions now so often at loggerheads -- working together to create a document which we hope will be signed by a thousand, at least, of major religious leaders from all the traditions of the world.
And you are the people. I'm just a solitary scholar. Despite the idea that I love a good time, which I was rather amazed to see coming up on me -- I actually spend a great deal of time alone, studying, and I'm not very -- you're the people with media knowledge to explain to me how we can get this to everybody, everybody on the planet. I've had some preliminary talks, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, for example, is very happy to give his name to this, as is Imam Feisal Rauf, the Imam in New York City. Also, I would be working with the Alliance of Civilizations at the United Nations. I was part of that United Nations initiative called the Alliance of Civilizations, which was asked by Kofi Annan to diagnose the causes of extremism, and to give practical guidelines to member states about how to avoid the escalation of further extremism.
And the Alliance has told me that they are very happy to work with it. The importance of this is that this is -- I can see some of you starting to look worried, because you think it's a slow and cumbersome body -- but what the United Nations can do is give us some neutrality, so that this isn't seen as a Western or a Christian initiative, but that it's coming, as it were, from the United Nations, from the world -- who would help with the sort of bureaucracy of this.
And so I do urge you to join me in making -- in this charter -- to building this charter, launching it and propagating it so that it becomes -- I'd like to see it in every college, every church, every mosque, every synagogue in the world, so that people can look at their tradition, reclaim it, and make religion a source of peace in the world, which it can and should be. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
I'm a potter, which seems like a fairly humble vocation. I know a lot about pots. I've spent about 15 years making them. One of the things that really excites me in my artistic practice and being trained as a potter is that you very quickly learn how to make great things out of nothing; that I spent a lot of time at my wheel with mounds of clay trying stuff; and that the limitations of my capacity, my ability, was based on my hands and my imagination; that if I wanted to make a really nice bowl and I didn't know how to make a foot yet, I would have to learn how to make a foot; that that process of learning has been very, very helpful to my life. I feel like, as a potter, you also start to learn how to shape the world.
There have been times in my artistic capacity that I wanted to reflect on other really important moments in the history of the U.S., the history of the world where tough things happened, but how do you talk about tough ideas without separating people from that content? Could I use art like these old, discontinued firehoses from Alabama, to talk about the complexities of a moment of civil rights in the '60s? Is it possible to talk about my father and I doing labor projects? My dad was a roofer, construction guy, he owned small businesses, and at 80, he was ready to retire and his tar kettle was my inheritance. Now, a tar kettle doesn't sound like much of an inheritance. It wasn't. It was stinky and it took up a lot of space in my studio, but I asked my dad if he would be willing to make some art with me, if we could reimagine this kind of nothing material as something very special. And by elevating the material and my dad's skill, could we start to think about tar just like clay, in a new way, shaping it differently, helping us to imagine what was possible?
After clay, I was then kind of turned on to lots of different kinds of materials, and my studio grew a lot because I thought, well, it's not really about the material, it's about our capacity to shape things. I became more and more interested in ideas and more and more things that were happening just outside my studio. Just to give you a little bit of context, I live in Chicago. I live on the South Side now. I'm a West Sider. For those of you who are not Chicagoans, that won't mean anything, but if I didn't mention that I was a West Sider, there would be a lot of people in the city that would be very upset.
The neighborhood that I live in is Grand Crossing. It's a neighborhood that has seen better days. It is not a gated community by far. There is lots of abandonment in my neighborhood, and while I was kind of busy making pots and busy making art and having a good art career, there was all of this stuff that was happening just outside my studio. All of us know about failing housing markets and the challenges of blight, and I feel like we talk about it with some of our cities more than others, but I think a lot of our U.S. cities and beyond have the challenge of blight, abandoned buildings that people no longer know what to do anything with. And so I thought, is there a way that I could start to think about these buildings as an extension or an expansion of my artistic practice? And that if I was thinking along with other creatives -- architects, engineers, real estate finance people -- that us together might be able to kind of think in more complicated ways about the reshaping of cities.
And so I bought a building. The building was really affordable. We tricked it out. We made it as beautiful as we could to try to just get some activity happening on my block. Once I bought the building for about 18,000 dollars, I didn't have any money left. So I started sweeping the building as a kind of performance. This is performance art, and people would come over, and I would start sweeping. Because the broom was free and sweeping was free. It worked out. (Laughter) But we would use the building, then, to stage exhibitions, small dinners, and we found that that building on my block, Dorchester -- we now referred to the block as Dorchester projects -- that in a way that building became a kind of gathering site for lots of different kinds of activity. We turned the building into what we called now the Archive House. The Archive House would do all of these amazing things. Very significant people in the city and beyond would find themselves in the middle of the hood. And that's when I felt like maybe there was a relationship between my history with clay and this new thing that was starting to develop, that we were slowly starting to reshape how people imagined the South Side of the city.
One house turned into a few houses, and we always tried to suggest that not only is creating a beautiful vessel important, but the contents of what happens in those buildings is also very important. So we were not only thinking about development, but we were thinking about the program, thinking about the kind of connections that could happen between one house and another, between one neighbor and another. This building became what we call the Listening House, and it has a collection of discarded books from the Johnson Publishing Corporation, and other books from an old bookstore that was going out of business. I was actually just wanting to activate these buildings as much as I could with whatever and whoever would join me.
In Chicago, there's amazing building stock. This building, which had been the former crack house on the block, and when the building became abandoned, it became a great opportunity to really imagine what else could happen there. So this space we converted into what we call Black Cinema House. Black Cinema House was an opportunity in the hood to screen films that were important and relevant to the folk who lived around me, that if we wanted to show an old Melvin Van Peebles film, we could. If we wanted to show "Car Wash," we could. That would be awesome. The building we soon outgrew, and we had to move to a larger space. Black Cinema House, which was made from just a small piece of clay, had to grow into a much larger piece of clay, which is now my studio.
What I realized was that for those of you who are zoning junkies, that some of the things that I was doing in these buildings that had been left behind, they were not the uses by which the buildings were built, and that there are city policies that say, "Hey, a house that is residential needs to stay residential." But what do you do in neighborhoods when ain't nobody interested in living there? That the people who have the means to leave have already left? What do we do with these abandoned buildings? And so I was trying to wake them up using culture.
We found that that was so exciting for folk, and people were so responsive to the work, that we had to then find bigger buildings. By the time we found bigger buildings, there was, in part, the resources necessary to think about those things. In this bank that we called the Arts Bank, it was in pretty bad shape. There was about six feet of standing water. It was a difficult project to finance, because banks weren't interested in the neighborhood because people weren't interested in the neighborhood because nothing had happened there. It was dirt. It was nothing. It was nowhere. And so we just started imagining, what else could happen in this building? (Applause)
And so now that the rumor of my block has spread, and lots of people are starting to visit, we've found that the bank can now be a center for exhibition, archives, music performance, and that there are people who are now interested in being adjacent to those buildings because we brought some heat, that we kind of made a fire.
One of the archives that we'll have there is this Johnson Publishing Corporation. We've also started to collect memorabilia from American history, from people who live or have lived in that neighborhood. Some of these images are degraded images of black people, kind of histories of very challenging content, and where better than a neighborhood with young people who are constantly asking themselves about their identity to talk about some of the complexities of race and class?
In some ways, the bank represents a hub, that we're trying to create a pretty hardcore node of cultural activity, and that if we could start to make multiple hubs and connect some cool green stuff around there, that the buildings that we've purchased and rehabbed, which is now around 60 or 70 units, that if we could land miniature Versailles on top of that, and connect these buildings by a beautiful greenbelt -- (Applause) -- that this place where people never wanted to be would become an important destination for folk from all over the country and world.
In some ways, it feels very much like I'm a potter, that we tackle the things that are at our wheel, we try with the skill that we have to think about this next bowl that I want to make. And it went from a bowl to a singular house to a block to a neighborhood to a cultural district to thinking about the city, and at every point, there were things that I didn't know that I had to learn. I've never learned so much about zoning law in my life. I never thought I'd have to. But as a result of that, I'm finding that there's not just room for my own artistic practice, there's room for a lot of other artistic practices.
So people started asking us, "Well, Theaster, how are you going to go to scale?" and, "What's your sustainability plan?"
(Laughter) (Applause)
And what I found was that I couldn't export myself, that what seems necessary in cities like Akron, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana, is that there are people in those places who already believe in those places, that are already dying to make those places beautiful, and that often, those people who are passionate about a place are disconnected from the resources necessary to make cool things happen, or disconnected from a contingency of people that could help make things happen. So now, we're starting to give advice around the country on how to start with what you got, how to start with the things that are in front of you, how to make something out of nothing, how to reshape your world at a wheel or at your block or at the scale of the city.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)
June Cohen: Thank you. So I think many people watching this will be asking themselves the question you just raised at the end: How can they do this in their own city? You can't export yourself. Give us a few pages out of your playbook about what someone who is inspired about their city can do to take on projects like yours?
Theaster Gates: One of the things I've found that's really important is giving thought to not just the kind of individual project, like an old house, but what's the relationship between an old house, a local school, a small bodega, and is there some kind of synergy between those things? Can you get those folk talking? I've found that in cases where neighborhoods have failed, they still often have a pulse. How do you identify the pulse in that place, the passionate people, and then how do you get folk who have been fighting, slogging for 20 years, reenergized about the place that they live? And so someone has to do that work. If I were a traditional developer, I would be talking about buildings alone, and then putting a "For Lease" sign in the window. I think that you actually have to curate more than that, that there's a way in which you have to be mindful about, what are the businesses that I want to grow here? And then, are there people who live in this place who want to grow those businesses with me? Because I think it's not just a cultural space or housing; there has to be the recreation of an economic core. So thinking about those things together feels right.
JC: It's hard to get people to create the spark again when people have been slogging for 20 years. Are there any methods you've found that have helped break through?
TG: Yeah, I think that now there are lots of examples of folk who are doing amazing work, but those methods are sometimes like, when the media is constantly saying that only violent things happen in a place, then based on your skill set and the particular context, what are the things that you can do in your neighborhood to kind of fight some of that? So I've found that if you're a theater person, you have outdoor street theater festivals. In some cases, we don't have the resources in certain neighborhoods to do things that are a certain kind of splashy, but if we can then find ways of making sure that people who are local to a place, plus people who could be supportive of the things that are happening locally, when those people get together, I think really amazing things can happen.
JC: So interesting. And how can you make sure that the projects you're creating are actually for the disadvantaged and not just for the sort of vegetarian indie movie crowd that might move in to take advantage of them.
TG: Right on. So I think this is where it starts to get into the thick weeds.
JC: Let's go there. TG: Right now, Grand Crossing is 99 percent black, or at least living, and we know that maybe who owns property in a place is different from who walks the streets every day. So it's reasonable to say that Grand Crossing is already in the process of being something different than it is today. But are there ways to think about housing trusts or land trusts or a mission-based development that starts to protect some of the space that happens, because when you have 7,500 empty lots in a city, you want something to happen there, but you need entities that are not just interested in the development piece, but entities that are interested in the stabilization piece, and I feel like often the developer piece is really motivated, but the other work of a kind of neighborhood consciousness, that part doesn't live anymore. So how do you start to grow up important watchdogs that ensure that the resources that are made available to new folk that are coming in are also distributed to folk who have lived in a place for a long time.
JC: That makes so much sense. One more question: You make such a compelling case for beauty and the importance of beauty and the arts. There would be others who would argue that funds would be better spent on basic services for the disadvantaged. How do you combat that viewpoint, or come against it?
TG: I believe that beauty is a basic service. (Applause) Often what I have found is that when there are resources that have not been made available to certain under-resourced cities or neighborhoods or communities, that sometimes culture is the thing that helps to ignite, and that I can't do everything, but I think that there's a way in which if you can start with culture and get people kind of reinvested in their place, other kinds of adjacent amenities start to grow, and then people can make a demand that's a poetic demand, and the political demands that are necessary to wake up our cities, they also become very poetic.
JC: It makes perfect sense to me. Theaster, thank you so much for being here with us today. Thank you. Theaster Gates.
(Applause) |
Why do we cheat? And why do happy people cheat? And when we say "infidelity," what exactly do we mean? Is it a hookup, a love story, paid sex, a chat room, a massage with a happy ending? Why do we think that men cheat out of boredom and fear of intimacy, but women cheat out of loneliness and hunger for intimacy? And is an affair always the end of a relationship?
For the past 10 years, I have traveled the globe and worked extensively with hundreds of couples who have been shattered by infidelity. There is one simple act of transgression that can rob a couple of their relationship, their happiness and their very identity: an affair. And yet, this extremely common act is so poorly understood. So this talk is for anyone who has ever loved.
Adultery has existed since marriage was invented, and so, too, the taboo against it. In fact, infidelity has a tenacity that marriage can only envy, so much so, that this is the only commandment that is repeated twice in the Bible: once for doing it, and once just for thinking about it. (Laughter) So how do we reconcile what is universally forbidden, yet universally practiced?
Now, throughout history, men practically had a license to cheat with little consequence, and supported by a host of biological and evolutionary theories that justified their need to roam, so the double standard is as old as adultery itself. But who knows what's really going on under the sheets there, right? Because when it comes to sex, the pressure for men is to boast and to exaggerate, but the pressure for women is to hide, minimize and deny, which isn't surprising when you consider that there are still nine countries where women can be killed for straying.
Now, monogamy used to be one person for life. Today, monogamy is one person at a time. (Laughter) (Applause)
I mean, many of you probably have said, "I am monogamous in all my relationships." (Laughter)
We used to marry, and had sex for the first time. But now we marry, and we stop having sex with others. The fact is that monogamy had nothing to do with love. Men relied on women's fidelity in order to know whose children these are, and who gets the cows when I die.
Now, everyone wants to know what percentage of people cheat. I've been asked that question since I arrived at this conference. (Laughter) It applies to you. But the definition of infidelity keeps on expanding: sexting, watching porn, staying secretly active on dating apps. So because there is no universally agreed-upon definition of what even constitutes an infidelity, estimates vary widely, from 26 percent to 75 percent. But on top of it, we are walking contradictions. So 95 percent of us will say that it is terribly wrong for our partner to lie about having an affair, but just about the same amount of us will say that that's exactly what we would do if we were having one. (Laughter)
Now, I like this definition of an affair -- it brings together the three key elements: a secretive relationship, which is the core structure of an affair; an emotional connection to one degree or another; and a sexual alchemy. And alchemy is the key word here, because the erotic frisson is such that the kiss that you only imagine giving, can be as powerful and as enchanting as hours of actual lovemaking. As Marcel Proust said, it's our imagination that is responsible for love, not the other person.
So it's never been easier to cheat, and it's never been more difficult to keep a secret. And never has infidelity exacted such a psychological toll. When marriage was an economic enterprise, infidelity threatened our economic security. But now that marriage is a romantic arrangement, infidelity threatens our emotional security. Ironically, we used to turn to adultery -- that was the space where we sought pure love. But now that we seek love in marriage, adultery destroys it.
Now, there are three ways that I think infidelity hurts differently today. We have a romantic ideal in which we turn to one person to fulfill an endless list of needs: to be my greatest lover, my best friend, the best parent, my trusted confidant, my emotional companion, my intellectual equal. And I am it: I'm chosen, I'm unique, I'm indispensable, I'm irreplaceable, I'm the one. And infidelity tells me I'm not. It is the ultimate betrayal. Infidelity shatters the grand ambition of love. But if throughout history, infidelity has always been painful, today it is often traumatic, because it threatens our sense of self.
So my patient Fernando, he's plagued. He goes on: "I thought I knew my life. I thought I knew who you were, who we were as a couple, who I was. Now, I question everything." Infidelity -- a violation of trust, a crisis of identity. "Can I ever trust you again?" he asks. "Can I ever trust anyone again?"
And this is also what my patient Heather is telling me, when she's talking to me about her story with Nick. Married, two kids. Nick just left on a business trip, and Heather is playing on his iPad with the boys, when she sees a message appear on the screen: "Can't wait to see you." Strange, she thinks, we just saw each other. And then another message: "Can't wait to hold you in my arms." And Heather realizes these are not for her. She also tells me that her father had affairs, but her mother, she found one little receipt in the pocket, and a little bit of lipstick on the collar. Heather, she goes digging, and she finds hundreds of messages, and photos exchanged and desires expressed. The vivid details of Nick's two-year affair unfold in front of her in real time, And it made me think: Affairs in the digital age are death by a thousand cuts.
But then we have another paradox that we're dealing with these days. Because of this romantic ideal, we are relying on our partner's fidelity with a unique fervor. But we also have never been more inclined to stray, and not because we have new desires today, but because we live in an era where we feel that we are entitled to pursue our desires, because this is the culture where I deserve to be happy. And if we used to divorce because we were unhappy, today we divorce because we could be happier. And if divorce carried all the shame, today, choosing to stay when you can leave is the new shame. So Heather, she can't talk to her friends because she's afraid that they will judge her for still loving Nick, and everywhere she turns, she gets the same advice: Leave him. Throw the dog on the curb. And if the situation were reversed, Nick would be in the same situation. Staying is the new shame.
So if we can divorce, why do we still have affairs? Now, the typical assumption is that if someone cheats, either there's something wrong in your relationship or wrong with you. But millions of people can't all be pathological. The logic goes like this: If you have everything you need at home, then there is no need to go looking elsewhere, assuming that there is such a thing as a perfect marriage that will inoculate us against wanderlust. But what if passion has a finite shelf life? What if there are things that even a good relationship can never provide? If even happy people cheat, what is it about?
The vast majority of people that I actually work with are not at all chronic philanderers. They are often people who are deeply monogamous in their beliefs, and at least for their partner. But they find themselves in a conflict between their values and their behavior. They often are people who have actually been faithful for decades, but one day they cross a line that they never thought they would cross, and at the risk of losing everything. But for a glimmer of what? Affairs are an act of betrayal, and they are also an expression of longing and loss. At the heart of an affair, you will often find a longing and a yearning for an emotional connection, for novelty, for freedom, for autonomy, for sexual intensity, a wish to recapture lost parts of ourselves or an attempt to bring back vitality in the face of loss and tragedy.
I'm thinking about another patient of mine, Priya, who is blissfully married, loves her husband, and would never want to hurt the man. But she also tells me that she's always done what was expected of her: good girl, good wife, good mother, taking care of her immigrant parents. Priya, she fell for the arborist who removed the tree from her yard after Hurricane Sandy. And with his truck and his tattoos, he's quite the opposite of her. But at 47, Priya's affair is about the adolescence that she never had. And her story highlights for me that when we seek the gaze of another, it isn't always our partner that we are turning away from, but the person that we have ourselves become. And it isn't so much that we're looking for another person, as much as we are looking for another self.
Now, all over the world, there is one word that people who have affairs always tell me. They feel alive. And they often will tell me stories of recent losses -- of a parent who died, and a friend that went too soon, and bad news at the doctor. Death and mortality often live in the shadow of an affair, because they raise these questions. Is this it? Is there more? Am I going on for another 25 years like this? Will I ever feel that thing again? And it has led me to think that perhaps these questions are the ones that propel people to cross the line, and that some affairs are an attempt to beat back deadness, in an antidote to death.
And contrary to what you may think, affairs are way less about sex, and a lot more about desire: desire for attention, desire to feel special, desire to feel important. And the very structure of an affair, the fact that you can never have your lover, keeps you wanting. That in itself is a desire machine, because the incompleteness, the ambiguity, keeps you wanting that which you can't have.
Now some of you probably think that affairs don't happen in open relationships, but they do. First of all, the conversation about monogamy is not the same as the conversation about infidelity. But the fact is that it seems that even when we have the freedom to have other sexual partners, we still seem to be lured by the power of the forbidden, that if we do that which we are not supposed to do, then we feel like we are really doing what we want to. And I've also told quite a few of my patients that if they could bring into their relationships one tenth of the boldness, the imagination and the verve that they put into their affairs, they probably would never need to see me. (Laughter)
So how do we heal from an affair? Desire runs deep. Betrayal runs deep. But it can be healed. And some affairs are death knells for relationships that were already dying on the vine. But others will jolt us into new possibilities. The fact is, the majority of couples who have experienced affairs stay together. But some of them will merely survive, and others will actually be able to turn a crisis into an opportunity. They'll be able to turn this into a generative experience. And I'm actually thinking even more so for the deceived partner, who will often say, "You think I didn't want more? But I'm not the one who did it." But now that the affair is exposed, they, too, get to claim more, and they no longer have to uphold the status quo that may not have been working for them that well, either.
I've noticed that a lot of couples, in the immediate aftermath of an affair, because of this new disorder that may actually lead to a new order, will have depths of conversations with honesty and openness that they haven't had in decades. And, partners who were sexually indifferent find themselves suddenly so lustfully voracious, they don't know where it's coming from. Something about the fear of loss will rekindle desire, and make way for an entirely new kind of truth.
So when an affair is exposed, what are some of the specific things that couples can do? We know from trauma that healing begins when the perpetrator acknowledges their wrongdoing. So for the partner who had the affair, for Nick, one thing is to end the affair, but the other is the essential, important act of expressing guilt and remorse for hurting his wife. But the truth is that I have noticed that quite a lot of people who have affairs may feel terribly guilty for hurting their partner, but they don't feel guilty for the experience of the affair itself. And that distinction is important. And Nick, he needs to hold vigil for the relationship. He needs to become, for a while, the protector of the boundaries. It's his responsibility to bring it up, because if he thinks about it, he can relieve Heather from the obsession, and from having to make sure that the affair isn't forgotten, and that in itself begins to restore trust.
But for Heather, or deceived partners, it is essential to do things that bring back a sense of self-worth, to surround oneself with love and with friends and activities that give back joy and meaning and identity. But even more important, is to curb the curiosity to mine for the sordid details -- Where were you? Where did you do it? How often? Is she better than me in bed? -- questions that only inflict more pain, and keep you awake at night. And instead, switch to what I call the investigative questions, the ones that mine the meaning and the motives -- What did this affair mean for you? What were you able to express or experience there that you could no longer do with me? What was it like for you when you came home? What is it about us that you value? Are you pleased this is over?
Every affair will redefine a relationship, and every couple will determine what the legacy of the affair will be. But affairs are here to stay, and they're not going away. And the dilemmas of love and desire, they don't yield just simple answers of black and white and good and bad, and victim and perpetrator. Betrayal in a relationship comes in many forms. There are many ways that we betray our partner: with contempt, with neglect, with indifference, with violence. Sexual betrayal is only one way to hurt a partner. In other words, the victim of an affair is not always the victim of the marriage.
Now, you've listened to me, and I know what you're thinking: She has a French accent, she must be pro-affair. (Laughter) So, you're wrong. I am not French. (Laughter) (Applause) And I'm not pro-affair. But because I think that good can come out of an affair, I have often been asked this very strange question: Would I ever recommend it? Now, I would no more recommend you have an affair than I would recommend you have cancer, and yet we know that people who have been ill often talk about how their illness has yielded them a new perspective. The main question that I've been asked since I arrived at this conference when I said I would talk about infidelity is, for or against? I said, "Yes." (Laughter)
I look at affairs from a dual perspective: hurt and betrayal on one side, growth and self-discovery on the other -- what it did to you, and what it meant for me. And so when a couple comes to me in the aftermath of an affair that has been revealed, I will often tell them this: Today in the West, most of us are going to have two or three relationships or marriages, and some of us are going to do it with the same person. Your first marriage is over. Would you like to create a second one together?
Thank you.
(Applause) |
I thought I'd tell you a little about what I like to write. And I like to immerse myself in my topics. I just like to dive right in and become sort of a human guinea pig. And I see my life as a series of experiments.
So, I work for Esquire magazine, and a couple of years ago, I wrote an article called "My Outsourced Life," where I hired a team of people in Bangalore, India, to live my life for me. So, they answered my emails. They answered my phone. They argued with my wife for me, and they read my son bedtime stories. It was the best month of my life, because I just sat back and I read books and watched movies. It was a wonderful experience.
More recently, I wrote an article for Esquire called -- about radical honesty. And this is a movement where -- this is started by a psychologist in Virginia, who says that you should never, ever lie, except maybe during poker and golf, his only exceptions. And, more than that, whatever is on your brain should come out of your mouth. So, I decided I would try this for a month. This was the worst month of my life. (Laughter) I do not recommend this at all. To give you a sense of the experience, the article was called, "I Think You're Fat." (Laughter) So, that was hard.
My most recent book -- my previous book was called "The Know-It-All," and it was about the year I spent reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z in my quest to learn everything in the world, or more precisely from Aak, which is a type of East Asian music, all the way to Zwyiec, which is -- well, I don't want to ruin the ending. (Laughter) It's a very exciting twist ending, like an O. Henry novel, so I won't ruin it. But I love that one, because that was an experiment about how much information one human brain could absorb. Although, listening to Kevin Kelly, you don't have to remember anything. You can just Google it. So, I wasted some time there.
I love those experiments, but I think that the most profound and life-changing experiment that I've done is my most recent experiment, where I spent a year trying to follow all of the rules of the Bible, "The Year of Living Biblically." And I undertook this for two reasons. The first was that I grew up with no religion at all. As I say in my book, I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. (Laughter) So, not very. But I've become increasingly interested in religion. I do think it's the defining issue of our time, or one of the main ones. And I have a son. I want to know what to teach him. So, I decided to dive in head first, and try to live the Bible.
The second reason I undertook this is because I'm concerned about the rise of fundamentalism, religious fundamentalism, and people who say they take the Bible literally, which is, according to some polls, as high as 45 or 50 percent of America. So I decided, what if you really did take the Bible literally? I decided to take it to its logical conclusion and take everything in the Bible literally, without picking and choosing.
The first thing I did was I got a stack of bibles. I had Christian bibles. I had Jewish bibles. A friend of mine sent me something called a hip-hop bible, where the twenty-third Psalm is rendered as, "The Lord is all that," as opposed to what I knew it as, "The Lord is my shepherd."
Then I went down and I read several versions, and I wrote down every single law that I could find. And this was a very long list -- over 700 rules. And they range from the famous ones that I had heard of -- The Ten Commandments, love your neighbor, be fruitful and multiply. So I wanted to follow those. And actually, I take my projects very seriously, because I had twins during my year, so I definitely take my projects seriously.
But I also wanted to follow the hundreds of arcane and obscure laws that are in the Bible. There is the law in Leviticus, "You cannot shave the corners of your beard." I didn't know where my corners were, so I decided to let the whole thing grow, and this is what I looked like by the end. As you can imagine, I spent a lot of time at airport security. (Laughter) My wife wouldn't kiss me for the last two months. So, certainly the challenge was there.
The Bible says you cannot wear clothes made of mixed fibers, so I thought, "Sounds strange, but I'll try it." You only know if you try it. I got rid of all my poly-cotton T-shirts. The Bible says that if two men are in a fight, and the wife of one of those men grabs the testicles of the other man, then her hand shall be cut off. So, I wanted to follow that rule. (Laughter) That one I followed by default, by not getting in a fight with a man whose wife was standing nearby, looking like she had a strong grip. (Laughter) So -- oh, there's another shot of my beard.
I will say it was an amazing year because it really was life changing, and incredibly challenging. And there were two types of laws that were particularly challenging. The first was avoiding the little sins that we all commit every day. You know, I could spend a year not killing, but spending a year not gossiping, not coveting, not lying -- you know, I live in New York, and I work as a journalist, so this was 75, 80 percent of my day I had to do it.
But it was really interesting, because I was able to make some progress, because I couldn't believe how much my behavior changed my thoughts. This was one of the huge lessons of the year, is that I almost pretended to be a better person, and I became a little bit of a better person. So I had always thought, you know, "You change your mind, and you change your behavior," but it's often the other way around. You change your behavior, and you change your mind. So, you know, if you want to become more compassionate, you visit sick people in the hospital, and you will become more compassionate. You donate money to a cause, and you become emotionally involved in that cause. So, it really was cognitive psychology -- you know, cognitive dissonance -- that I was experiencing. The Bible actually talks about cognitive psychology, very primitive cognitive psychology. In the Proverbs, it says that if you smile, you will become happier, which, as we know, is actually true.
The second type of rule that was difficult to obey was the rules that will get you into a little trouble in twenty-first-century America. And perhaps the clearest example of this is stoning adulterers. (Laughter) But it's a big part of the Bible, so I figured I had to address it. So, I was able to stone one adulterer. It happened -- I was in the park, and I was dressed in my biblical clothing, so sandals and sort of a white robe, you know, because again, the outer affects the inner. I wanted to see how dressing biblically affected my mind. And this man came up to me and he said, "Why are you dressed like that?" And I explained my project, and he said, "Well, I am an adulterer, are you going to stone me?" And I said, "Well, that would be great!" (Laughter) And I actually took out a handful of stones from my pocket that I had been carrying around for weeks, hoping for just this interaction -- and, you know, they were pebbles -- but he grabbed them out of my hand. He was actually an elderly man, mid-70s, just so you know. But he's still an adulterer, and still quite angry. He grabbed them out of my hand and threw them at my face, and I felt that I could -- eye for an eye -- I could retaliate, and throw one back at him.
So that was my experience stoning, and it did allow me to talk about, in a more serious way, these big issues. How can the Bible be so barbaric in some places, and yet so incredibly wise in others? How should we view the Bible? Should we view it, you know, as original intent, like a sort of a Scalia version of the Bible? How was the Bible written? And actually, since this is a tech crowd, I talk in the book about how the Bible actually reminds me of the Wikipedia, because it has all of these authors and editors over hundreds of years. And it's sort of evolved. It's not a book that was written and came down from on high.
So I thought I would end by telling you just a couple of the take-aways, the bigger lessons that I learned from my year. The first is, thou shalt not take the Bible literally. This became very, very clear, early on. Because if you do, then you end up acting like a crazy person, and stoning adulterers, or -- here's another example. Well, that's another. I did spend some time shepherding. (Laughter) It's a very relaxing vocation. I recommend it.
But this one is -- the Bible says that you cannot touch women during certain times of the month, and more than that, you cannot sit on a seat where a menstruating woman has sat. And my wife thought this was very offensive, so she sat in every seat in our apartment, and I had to spend much of the year standing until I bought my own seat and carried it around.
So, you know, I met with creationists. I went to the creationists' museum. And these are the ultimate literalists. And it was fascinating, because they were not stupid people at all. I would wager that their IQ is exactly the same as the average evolutionist. It's just that their faith is so strong in this literal interpretation of the Bible that they distort all the data to fit their model. And they go through these amazing mental gymnastics to accomplish this.
And I will say, though, the museum is gorgeous. They really did a fantastic job. If you're ever in Kentucky, there's, you can see a movie of the flood, and they have sprinklers in the ceiling that will sprinkle on you during the flood scenes. So, whatever you think of creationism -- and I think it's crazy -- they did a great job. (Laughter)
Another lesson is that thou shalt give thanks. And this one was a big lesson because I was praying, giving these prayers of thanksgiving, which was odd for an agnostic. But I was saying thanks all the time, every day, and I started to change my perspective. And I started to realize the hundreds of little things that go right every day, that I didn't even notice, that I took for granted, as opposed to focusing on the three or four that went wrong. So, this is actually a key to happiness for me, is to just remember when I came over here, the car didn't flip over, and I didn't trip coming up the stairs. It's a remarkable thing.
Third, that thou shall have reverence. This one was unexpected because I started the year as an agnostic, and by the end of the year, I became what a friend of mine calls a reverent agnostic, which I love. And I'm trying to start it as a movement. So, if anyone wants to join, the basic idea is, whether or not there is a God, there's something important and beautiful about the idea of sacredness, and that our rituals can be sacred. The Sabbath can be sacred. This was one of the great things about my year, doing the Sabbath, because I am a workaholic, so having this one day where you cannot work, it really, that changed my life. So, this idea of sacredness, whether or not there is a God.
Thou shall not stereotype. This one happened because I spent a lot of time with various religious communities throughout America because I wanted it to be more than about my journey. I wanted it to be about religion in America. So, I spent time with evangelical Christians, and Hasidic Jews, and the Amish. I'm very proud because I think I'm the only person in America to out Bible-talk a Jehovah's Witness. (Laughter) After three and a half hours, he looked at his watch, he's like, "I gotta go." (Laughter) Oh, thank you very much. Thank you. Bless you, bless you.
But it was interesting because I had some very preconceived notions about, for instance, evangelical Christianity, and I found that it's such a wide and varied movement that it is difficult to make generalizations about it. There's a group I met with called the Red Letter Christians, and they focus on the red words in the Bible, which are the ones that Jesus spoke. That's how they printed them in the old Bibles. And their argument is that Jesus never talked about homosexuality. They have a pamphlet that says, "Here's what Jesus said about homosexuality," and you open it up, and there's nothing in it. So, they say Jesus did talk a lot about helping the outcasts, helping poor people. So, this was very inspiring to me. I recommend Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo. They're very inspiring leaders, even though I disagree with much of what they say.
Also, thou shalt not disregard the irrational. This one was very unexpected because, you know, I grew up with the scientific worldview, and I was shocked learning how much of my life is governed by irrational forces. And the thing is, if they're not harmful, they're not to be completely dismissed. Because I learned that -- I was thinking, I was doing all these rituals, these biblical rituals, separating my wool and linen, and I would ask these religious people "Why would the Bible possibly tell us to do this? Why would God care?" And they said, "We don't know, but it's just rituals that give us meaning." And I would say, "But that's crazy." And they would say, "Well, what about you? You blow out candles on top of a birthday cake. If a guy from Mars came down and saw, here's one guy blowing out the fire on top of a cake versus another guy not wearing clothes of mixed fabrics, would the Martians say, 'Well, that guy, he makes sense, but that guy's crazy?'" So no, I think that rituals are, by nature, irrational. So the key is to choose the right rituals, the ones that are not harmful -- but rituals by themselves are not to be dismissed.
And finally I learned that thou shall pick and choose. And this one I learned because I tried to follow everything in the Bible. And I failed miserably. Because you can't. You have to pick and choose. And anyone who follows the Bible is going to be picking and choosing. The key is to pick and choose the right parts. There's the phrase called cafeteria religion, and the fundamentalists will use it in a denigrating way, and they'll say, "Oh, it's just cafeteria religion. You're just picking and choosing." But my argument is, "What's wrong with cafeterias?" I've had some great meals at cafeterias. I've also had some meals that make me want to dry heave. So, it's about choosing the parts of the Bible about compassion, about tolerance, about loving your neighbor, as opposed to the parts about homosexuality is a sin, or intolerance, or violence, which are very much in the Bible as well. So if we are to find any meaning in this book, then we have to really engage it, and wrestle with it.
And I thought I'd end with just a couple more. There's me reading the Bible. That's how I hailed taxicabs. (Laughter) Seriously, and it worked. And yes, that was actually a rented sheep, so I had to return that in the morning, but it served well for a day. So, anyway, thank you so much for letting me speak. |
I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction. In high school, I took a bus to school an hour each way every day. And I was always absorbed in a book, science fiction book, which took my mind to other worlds, and satisfied, in a narrative form, this insatiable sense of curiosity that I had.
And you know, that curiosity also manifested itself in the fact that whenever I wasn't in school I was out in the woods, hiking and taking "samples" -- frogs and snakes and bugs and pond water -- and bringing it back, looking at it under the microscope. You know, I was a real science geek. But it was all about trying to understand the world, understand the limits of possibility.
And my love of science fiction actually seemed mirrored in the world around me, because what was happening, this was in the late '60s, we were going to the moon, we were exploring the deep oceans. Jacques Cousteau was coming into our living rooms with his amazing specials that showed us animals and places and a wondrous world that we could never really have previously imagined. So, that seemed to resonate with the whole science fiction part of it.
And I was an artist. I could draw. I could paint. And I found that because there weren't video games and this saturation of CG movies and all of this imagery in the media landscape, I had to create these images in my head. You know, we all did, as kids having to read a book, and through the author's description, put something on the movie screen in our heads. And so, my response to this was to paint, to draw alien creatures, alien worlds, robots, spaceships, all that stuff. I was endlessly getting busted in math class doodling behind the textbook. That was -- the creativity had to find its outlet somehow.
And an interesting thing happened: The Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there was an alien world right here on Earth. I might not really go to an alien world on a spaceship someday -- that seemed pretty darn unlikely. But that was a world I could really go to, right here on Earth, that was as rich and exotic as anything that I had imagined from reading these books.
So, I decided I was going to become a scuba diver at the age of 15. And the only problem with that was that I lived in a little village in Canada, 600 miles from the nearest ocean. But I didn't let that daunt me. I pestered my father until he finally found a scuba class in Buffalo, New York, right across the border from where we live. And I actually got certified in a pool at a YMCA in the dead of winter in Buffalo, New York. And I didn't see the ocean, a real ocean, for another two years, until we moved to California.
Since then, in the intervening 40 years, I've spent about 3,000 hours underwater, and 500 hours of that was in submersibles. And I've learned that that deep-ocean environment, and even the shallow oceans, are so rich with amazing life that really is beyond our imagination. Nature's imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination. I still, to this day, stand in absolute awe of what I see when I make these dives. And my love affair with the ocean is ongoing, and just as strong as it ever was.
But when I chose a career as an adult, it was filmmaking. And that seemed to be the best way to reconcile this urge I had to tell stories with my urges to create images. And I was, as a kid, constantly drawing comic books, and so on. So, filmmaking was the way to put pictures and stories together, and that made sense. And of course the stories that I chose to tell were science fiction stories: "Terminator," "Aliens" and "The Abyss." And with "The Abyss," I was putting together my love of underwater and diving with filmmaking. So, you know, merging the two passions.
Something interesting came out of "The Abyss," which was that to solve a specific narrative problem on that film, which was to create this kind of liquid water creature, we actually embraced computer generated animation, CG. And this resulted in the first soft-surface character, CG animation that was ever in a movie. And even though the film didn't make any money -- barely broke even, I should say -- I witnessed something amazing, which is that the audience, the global audience, was mesmerized by this apparent magic.
You know, it's Arthur Clarke's law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. They were seeing something magical. And so that got me very excited. And I thought, "Wow, this is something that needs to be embraced into the cinematic art." So, with "Terminator 2," which was my next film, we took that much farther. Working with ILM, we created the liquid metal dude in that film. The success hung in the balance on whether that effect would work. And it did, and we created magic again, and we had the same result with an audience -- although we did make a little more money on that one.
So, drawing a line through those two dots of experience came to, "This is going to be a whole new world," this was a whole new world of creativity for film artists. So, I started a company with Stan Winston, my good friend Stan Winston, who is the premier make-up and creature designer at that time, and it was called Digital Domain. And the concept of the company was that we would leapfrog past the analog processes of optical printers and so on, and we would go right to digital production. And we actually did that and it gave us a competitive advantage for a while.
But we found ourselves lagging in the mid '90s in the creature and character design stuff that we had actually founded the company to do. So, I wrote this piece called "Avatar," which was meant to absolutely push the envelope of visual effects, of CG effects, beyond, with realistic human emotive characters generated in CG, and the main characters would all be in CG, and the world would be in CG. And the envelope pushed back, and I was told by the folks at my company that we weren't going to be able to do this for a while.
So, I shelved it, and I made this other movie about a big ship that sinks. (Laughter) You know, I went and pitched it to the studio as "'Romeo and Juliet' on a ship: "It's going to be this epic romance, passionate film." Secretly, what I wanted to do was I wanted to dive to the real wreck of "Titanic." And that's why I made the movie. (Applause) And that's the truth. Now, the studio didn't know that. But I convinced them. I said, "We're going to dive to the wreck. We're going to film it for real. We'll be using it in the opening of the film. It will be really important. It will be a great marketing hook." And I talked them into funding an expedition. (Laughter)
Sounds crazy. But this goes back to that theme about your imagination creating a reality. Because we actually created a reality where six months later, I find myself in a Russian submersible two and a half miles down in the north Atlantic, looking at the real Titanic through a view port. Not a movie, not HD -- for real. (Applause)
Now, that blew my mind. And it took a lot of preparation, we had to build cameras and lights and all kinds of things. But, it struck me how much this dive, these deep dives, was like a space mission. You know, where it was highly technical, and it required enormous planning. You get in this capsule, you go down to this dark hostile environment where there is no hope of rescue if you can't get back by yourself. And I thought like, "Wow. I'm like, living in a science fiction movie. This is really cool."
And so, I really got bitten by the bug of deep-ocean exploration. Of course, the curiosity, the science component of it -- it was everything. It was adventure, it was curiosity, it was imagination. And it was an experience that Hollywood couldn't give me. Because, you know, I could imagine a creature and we could create a visual effect for it. But I couldn't imagine what I was seeing out that window. As we did some of our subsequent expeditions, I was seeing creatures at hydrothermal vents and sometimes things that I had never seen before, sometimes things that no one had seen before, that actually were not described by science at the time that we saw them and imaged them.
So, I was completely smitten by this, and had to do more. And so, I actually made a kind of curious decision. After the success of "Titanic," I said, "OK, I'm going to park my day job as a Hollywood movie maker, and I'm going to go be a full-time explorer for a while." And so, we started planning these expeditions. And we wound up going to the Bismark, and exploring it with robotic vehicles. We went back to the Titanic wreck. We took little bots that we had created that spooled a fiber optic. And the idea was to go in and do an interior survey of that ship, which had never been done. Nobody had ever looked inside the wreck. They didn't have the means to do it, so we created technology to do it.
So, you know, here I am now, on the deck of Titanic, sitting in a submersible, and looking out at planks that look much like this, where I knew that the band had played. And I'm flying a little robotic vehicle through the corridor of the ship. When I say, "I'm operating it," but my mind is in the vehicle. I felt like I was physically present inside the shipwreck of Titanic. And it was the most surreal kind of deja vu experience I've ever had, because I would know before I turned a corner what was going to be there before the lights of the vehicle actually revealed it, because I had walked the set for months when we were making the movie. And the set was based as an exact replica on the blueprints of the ship.
So, it was this absolutely remarkable experience. And it really made me realize that the telepresence experience -- that you actually can have these robotic avatars, then your consciousness is injected into the vehicle, into this other form of existence. It was really, really quite profound. And it may be a little bit of a glimpse as to what might be happening some decades out as we start to have cyborg bodies for exploration or for other means in many sort of post-human futures that I can imagine, as a science fiction fan.
So, having done these expeditions, and really beginning to appreciate what was down there, such as at the deep ocean vents where we had these amazing, amazing animals -- they're basically aliens right here on Earth. They live in an environment of chemosynthesis. They don't survive on sunlight-based system the way we do. And so, you're seeing animals that are living next to a 500-degree-Centigrade water plumes. You think they can't possibly exist.
At the same time I was getting very interested in space science as well -- again, it's the science fiction influence, as a kid. And I wound up getting involved with the space community, really involved with NASA, sitting on the NASA advisory board, planning actual space missions, going to Russia, going through the pre-cosmonaut biomedical protocols, and all these sorts of things, to actually go and fly to the international space station with our 3D camera systems. And this was fascinating. But what I wound up doing was bringing space scientists with us into the deep. And taking them down so that they had access -- astrobiologists, planetary scientists, people who were interested in these extreme environments -- taking them down to the vents, and letting them see, and take samples and test instruments, and so on.
So, here we were making documentary films, but actually doing science, and actually doing space science. I'd completely closed the loop between being the science fiction fan, you know, as a kid, and doing this stuff for real. And you know, along the way in this journey of discovery, I learned a lot. I learned a lot about science. But I also learned a lot about leadership. Now you think director has got to be a leader, leader of, captain of the ship, and all that sort of thing.
I didn't really learn about leadership until I did these expeditions. Because I had to, at a certain point, say, "What am I doing out here? Why am I doing this? What do I get out of it?" We don't make money at these damn shows. We barely break even. There is no fame in it. People sort of think I went away between "Titanic" and "Avatar" and was buffing my nails someplace, sitting at the beach. Made all these films, made all these documentary films for a very limited audience.
No fame, no glory, no money. What are you doing? You're doing it for the task itself, for the challenge -- and the ocean is the most challenging environment there is -- for the thrill of discovery, and for that strange bond that happens when a small group of people form a tightly knit team. Because we would do these things with 10, 12 people, working for years at a time, sometimes at sea for two, three months at a time.
And in that bond, you realize that the most important thing is the respect that you have for them and that they have for you, that you've done a task that you can't explain to someone else. When you come back to the shore and you say, "We had to do this, and the fiber optic, and the attentuation, and the this and the that, all the technology of it, and the difficulty, the human-performance aspects of working at sea," you can't explain it to people. It's that thing that maybe cops have, or people in combat that have gone through something together and they know they can never explain it. Creates a bond, creates a bond of respect.
So, when I came back to make my next movie, which was "Avatar," I tried to apply that same principle of leadership, which is that you respect your team, and you earn their respect in return. And it really changed the dynamic. So, here I was again with a small team, in uncharted territory, doing "Avatar," coming up with new technology that didn't exist before. Tremendously exciting. Tremendously challenging. And we became a family, over a four-and-half year period. And it completely changed how I do movies. So, people have commented on how, "Well, you know, you brought back the ocean organisms and put them on the planet of Pandora." To me, it was more of a fundamental way of doing business, the process itself, that changed as a result of that.
So, what can we synthesize out of all this? You know, what are the lessons learned? Well, I think number one is curiosity. It's the most powerful thing you own. Imagination is a force that can actually manifest a reality. And the respect of your team is more important than all the laurels in the world. I have young filmmakers come up to me and say, "Give me some advice for doing this." And I say, "Don't put limitations on yourself. Other people will do that for you -- don't do it to yourself, don't bet against yourself, and take risks."
NASA has this phrase that they like: "Failure is not an option." But failure has to be an option in art and in exploration, because it's a leap of faith. And no important endeavor that required innovation was done without risk. You have to be willing to take those risks. So, that's the thought I would leave you with, is that in whatever you're doing, failure is an option, but fear is not. Thank you. (Applause) |
So historically there has been a huge divide between what people consider to be non-living systems on one side, and living systems on the other side. So we go from, say, this beautiful and complex crystal as non-life, and this rather beautiful and complex cat on the other side. Over the last hundred and fifty years or so, science has kind of blurred this distinction between non-living and living systems, and now we consider that there may be a kind of continuum that exists between the two. We'll just take one example here: a virus is a natural system, right? But it's very simple. It's very simplistic. It doesn't really satisfy all the requirements, it doesn't have all the characteristics of living systems and is in fact a parasite on other living systems in order to, say, reproduce and evolve.
But what we're going to be talking about here tonight are experiments done on this sort of non-living end of this spectrum -- so actually doing chemical experiments in the laboratory, mixing together nonliving ingredients to make new structures, and that these new structures might have some of the characteristics of living systems. Really what I'm talking about here is trying to create a kind of artificial life.
So what are these characteristics that I'm talking about? These are them. We consider first that life has a body. Now this is necessary to distinguish the self from the environment. Life also has a metabolism. Now this is a process by which life can convert resources from the environment into building blocks so it can maintain and build itself. Life also has a kind of inheritable information. Now we, as humans, we store our information as DNA in our genomes and we pass this information on to our offspring. If we couple the first two -- the body and the metabolism -- we can come up with a system that could perhaps move and replicate, and if we coupled these now to inheritable information, we can come up with a system that would be more lifelike, and would perhaps evolve. And so these are the things we will try to do in the lab, make some experiments that have one or more of these characteristics of life.
So how do we do this? Well, we use a model system that we term a protocell. You might think of this as kind of like a primitive cell. It is a simple chemical model of a living cell, and if you consider for example a cell in your body may have on the order of millions of different types of molecules that need to come together, play together in a complex network to produce something that we call alive. In the laboratory what we want to do is much the same, but with on the order of tens of different types of molecules -- so a drastic reduction in complexity, but still trying to produce something that looks lifelike. And so what we do is, we start simple and we work our way up to living systems. Consider for a moment this quote by Leduc, a hundred years ago, considering a kind of synthetic biology: "The synthesis of life, should it ever occur, will not be the sensational discovery which we usually associate with the idea." That's his first statement. So if we actually create life in the laboratories, it's probably not going to impact our lives at all.
"If we accept the theory of evolution, then the first dawn of synthesis of life must consist in the production of forms intermediate between the inorganic and the organic world, or between the non-living and living world, forms which possess only some of the rudimentary attributes of life" -- so, the ones I just discussed -- "to which other attributes will be slowly added in the course of development by the evolutionary actions of the environment." So we start simple, we make some structures that may have some of these characteristics of life, and then we try to develop that to become more lifelike. This is how we can start to make a protocell. We use this idea called self-assembly. What that means is, I can mix some chemicals together in a test tube in my lab, and these chemicals will start to self-associate to form larger and larger structures. So say on the order of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of molecules will come together to form a large structure that didn't exist before. And in this particular example, what I took is some membrane molecules, mixed those together in the right environment, and within seconds it forms these rather complex and beautiful structures here. These membranes are also quite similar, morphologically and functionally, to the membranes in your body, and we can use these, as they say, to form the body of our protocell.
Likewise, we can work with oil and water systems. As you know, when you put oil and water together, they don't mix, but through self-assembly we can get a nice oil droplet to form, and we can actually use this as a body for our artificial organism or for our protocell, as you will see later. So that's just forming some body stuff, right? Some architectures. What about the other aspects of living systems? So we came up with this protocell model here that I'm showing. We started with a natural occurring clay called montmorillonite. This is natural from the environment, this clay. It forms a surface that is, say, chemically active. It could run a metabolism on it. Certain kind of molecules like to associate with the clay. For example, in this case, RNA, shown in red -- this is a relative of DNA, it's an informational molecule -- it can come along and it starts to associate with the surface of this clay. This structure, then, can organize the formation of a membrane boundary around itself, so it can make a body of liquid molecules around itself, and that's shown in green here on this micrograph. So just through self-assembly, mixing things together in the lab, we can come up with, say, a metabolic surface with some informational molecules attached inside of this membrane body, right?
So we're on a road towards living systems. But if you saw this protocell, you would not confuse this with something that was actually alive. It's actually quite lifeless. Once it forms, it doesn't really do anything. So, something is missing. Some things are missing. So some things that are missing is, for example, if you had a flow of energy through a system, what we'd want is a protocell that can harvest some of that energy in order to maintain itself, much like living systems do. So we came up with a different protocell model, and this is actually simpler than the previous one. In this protocell model, it's just an oil droplet, but a chemical metabolism inside that allows this protocell to use energy to do something, to actually become dynamic, as we'll see here. You add the droplet to the system. It's a pool of water, and the protocell starts moving itself around in the system. Okay? Oil droplet forms through self-assembly, has a chemical metabolism inside so it can use energy, and it uses that energy to move itself around in its environment.
As we heard earlier, movement is very important in these kinds of living systems. It is moving around, exploring its environment, and remodeling its environment, as you see, by these chemical waves that are forming by the protocell. So it's acting, in a sense, like a living system trying to preserve itself. We take this same moving protocell here, and we put it in another experiment, get it moving. Then I'm going to add some food to the system, and you'll see that in blue here, right? So I add some food source to the system. The protocell moves. It encounters the food. It reconfigures itself and actually then is able to climb to the highest concentration of food in that system and stop there. Alright? So not only do we have this system that has a body, it has a metabolism, it can use energy, it moves around. It can sense its local environment and actually find resources in the environment to sustain itself.
Now, this doesn't have a brain, it doesn't have a neural system. This is just a sack of chemicals that is able to have this interesting and complex lifelike behavior. If we count the number of chemicals in that system, actually, including the water that's in the dish, we have five chemicals that can do this. So then we put these protocells together in a single experiment to see what they would do, and depending on the conditions, we have some protocells on the left that are moving around and it likes to touch the other structures in its environment. On the other hand we have two moving protocells that like to circle each other, and they form a kind of a dance, a complex dance with each other. Right? So not only do individual protocells have behavior, what we've interpreted as behavior in this system, but we also have basically population-level behavior similar to what organisms have. So now that you're all experts on protocells, we're going to play a game with these protocells. We're going to make two different kinds. Protocell A has a certain kind of chemistry inside that, when activated, the protocell starts to vibrate around, just dancing. So remember, these are primitive things, so dancing protocells, that's very interesting to us. (Laughter)
The second protocell has a different chemistry inside, and when activated, the protocells all come together and they fuse into one big one. Right? And we just put these two together in the same system. So there's population A, there's population B, and then we activate the system, and protocell Bs, they're the blue ones, they all come together. They fuse together to form one big blob, and the other protocell just dances around. And this just happens until all of the energy in the system is basically used up, and then, game over. So then I repeated this experiment a bunch of times, and one time something very interesting happened. So, I added these protocells together to the system, and protocell A and protocell B fused together to form a hybrid protocell AB. That didn't happen before. There it goes. There's a protocell AB now in this system. Protocell AB likes to dance around for a bit, while protocell B does the fusing, okay?
But then something even more interesting happens. Watch when these two large protocells, the hybrid ones, fuse together. Now we have a dancing protocell and a self-replication event. Right. (Laughter) Just with blobs of chemicals, again. So the way this works is, you have a simple system of five chemicals here, a simple system here. When they hybridize, you then form something that's different than before, it's more complex than before, and you get the emergence of another kind of lifelike behavior which in this case is replication.
So since we can make some interesting protocells that we like, interesting colors and interesting behaviors, and they're very easy to make, and they have interesting lifelike properties, perhaps these protocells have something to tell us about the origin of life on the Earth. Perhaps these represent an easily accessible step, one of the first steps by which life got started on the early Earth. Certainly, there were molecules present on the early Earth, but they wouldn't have been these pure compounds that we worked with in the lab and I showed in these experiments. Rather, they'd be a real complex mixture of all kinds of stuff, because uncontrolled chemical reactions produce a diverse mixture of organic compounds. Think of it like a primordial ooze, okay? And it's a pool that's too difficult to fully characterize, even by modern methods, and the product looks brown, like this tar here on the left. A pure compound is shown on the right, for contrast.
So this is similar to what happens when you take pure sugar crystals in your kitchen, you put them in a pan, and you apply energy. You turn up the heat, you start making or breaking chemical bonds in the sugar, forming a brownish caramel, right? If you let that go unregulated, you'll continue to make and break chemical bonds, forming an even more diverse mixture of molecules that then forms this kind of black tarry stuff in your pan, right, that's difficult to wash out. So that's what the origin of life would have looked like. You needed to get life out of this junk that is present on the early Earth, four, 4.5 billion years ago. So the challenge then is, throw away all your pure chemicals in the lab, and try to make some protocells with lifelike properties from this kind of primordial ooze.
So we're able to then see the self-assembly of these oil droplet bodies again that we've seen previously, and the black spots inside of there represent this kind of black tar -- this diverse, very complex, organic black tar. And we put them into one of these experiments, as you've seen earlier, and then we watch lively movement that comes out. They look really good, very nice movement, and also they appear to have some kind of behavior where they kind of circle around each other and follow each other, similar to what we've seen before -- but again, working with just primordial conditions, no pure chemicals. These are also, these tar-fueled protocells, are also able to locate resources in their environment. I'm going to add some resource from the left, here, that defuses into the system, and you can see, they really like that. They become very energetic, and able to find the resource in the environment, similar to what we saw before. But again, these are done in these primordial conditions, really messy conditions, not sort of sterile laboratory conditions. These are very dirty little protocells, as a matter of fact. (Laughter) But they have lifelike properties, is the point.
So, doing these artificial life experiments helps us define a potential path between non-living and living systems. And not only that, but it helps us broaden our view of what life is and what possible life there could be out there -- life that could be very different from life that we find here on Earth. And that leads me to the next term, which is "weird life." This is a term by Steve Benner. This is used in reference to a report in 2007 by the National Research Council in the United States, wherein they tried to understand how we can look for life elsewhere in the universe, okay, especially if that life is very different from life on Earth. If we went to another planet and we thought there might be life there, how could we even recognize it as life?
Well, they came up with three very general criteria. First is -- and they're listed here. The first is, the system has to be in non-equilibrium. That means the system cannot be dead, in a matter of fact. Basically what that means is, you have an input of energy into the system that life can use and exploit to maintain itself. This is similar to having the Sun shining on the Earth, driving photosynthesis, driving the ecosystem. Without the Sun, there's likely to be no life on this planet. Secondly, life needs to be in liquid form, so that means even if we had some interesting structures, interesting molecules together but they were frozen solid, then this is not a good place for life. And thirdly, we need to be able to make and break chemical bonds. And again this is important because life transforms resources from the environment into building blocks so it can maintain itself.
Now today, I told you about very strange and weird protocells -- some that contain clay, some that have primordial ooze in them, some that have basically oil instead of water inside of them. Most of these don't contain DNA, but yet they have lifelike properties. But these protocells satisfy these general requirements of living systems. So by making these chemical, artificial life experiments, we hope not only to understand something fundamental about the origin of life and the existence of life on this planet, but also what possible life there could be out there in the universe. Thank you. (Applause) |
I started juggling a long time ago, but long before that, I was a golfer, and that's what I was, a golfer. And as a golfer and as a kid, one of the things that really sort of seeped into my pores, that I sort of lived my whole life, is process. And it's the process of learning things. One of the great things was that my father was an avid golfer, but he was lefty. And he had a real passion for golf, and he also created this whole mythology about Ben Hogan and various things. Well, I learned a lot about interesting things that I knew nothing about at the time, but grew to know stuff about. And that was the mythology of skill.
So, one of the things that I love to do is to explore skill. And since Richard put me on this whole thing with music -- I'm supposed to actually be doing a project with Tod Machover with the MIT Media Lab -- it relates a lot to music. But Tod couldn't come and the project is sort of somewhere, I'm not sure whether it's happening the way we thought, or not. But I'm going to explore skill, and juggling, and basically visual music, I guess. OK, you can start the music, thanks.
(Music)
(Applause)
Thanks. Thank you. Now, juggling can be a lot of fun; play with skill and play with space, play with rhythm. And you can turn the mike on now. I'm going to do a couple of pieces. I do a big piece in a triangle and these are three sections from it. Part of the challenge was to try to understand rhythm and space using not just my hands -- because a lot of juggling is hand-oriented -- but using the rhythm of my body and feet, and controlling the balls with my feet.
(Applause)
Thanks. Now, this next section was an attempt to explore space. You see, I think Richard said something about people that are against something. Well, a lot of people think jugglers defy gravity or do stuff. Well, I kind of, from my childhood and golf and all that, it's a process of joining with forces. And so what I'd like to do is try to figure out how to join with the space through the technique. So juggling gravity -- up, down. If you figure out what up and down really are, it's a complex physical set of skills to be able to throw a ball down and up and everything, but then you add in sideways.
(Applause)
Now, I look at it somewhat as a way -- when you learn juggling what you learn is how to feel with your eyes, and see with your hands because you're not looking at your hands, you're looking at where the balls are or you're looking at the audience. So this next part is really a way of understanding space and rhythm, with the obvious reference to the feet, but it's also time -- where the feet were, where the balls were.
(Applause)
Thanks. So, visual music: rhythm and complexity. I'm going to build towards complexity now. Juggling three balls is simple and normal.
(Laughter)
Excuse me.
(Laughter)
We're jugglers, OK. And remember, you're transposing, you're getting into a subculture here.
(Laughter)
And juggling -- the balls cross and all that. OK, if you keep them in their assigned paths you get parallel lines of different heights, but then hopefully even rhythm. And you can change the rhythm -- good, Michael. You can change the rhythm, if you get out of the lights. OK? Change the rhythm, so it's even. Or you can go back and change the height. Now, skill. But you're boxed in, if you can only do it up and down that way. So, you've got to go after the space down there. OK, then you've got to combine them, because then you have the whole spatial palette in front of you. And then you get crazy.
(Applause)
Now, I'm actually going to ask you to try something, so you've got to pay attention. Complexity: if you spend enough time doing something, time slows down or your skill increases, so your perceptions change. It's learning skills -- like being in a high-speed car crash. Things slow down as you learn, as you learn, as you learn. You may not be able to affect it, it almost drifts on you. It goes. But that's the closest approximation I can have to it.
So, complexity. Now, how many here are jugglers? OK, so most of you are going to have a similar reaction to this. OK? And whoever laughed there -- you understood it completely, right?
(Laughter)
No, it looks like a mess. It looks like a mess with a guy there, who's got his hands around that mess, OK. Well, that's what juggling is about, right? It's being able to do something that other people can't do or can't understand. All right. So, that's one way of doing it, which is five balls down. OK? Another way is the outside. And you could play with the rhythm. Same pattern. Make it faster and smaller. Make it wider. Make it narrower. Bring it back up. OK. It's done. Thanks.
(Applause)
Now, what I wanted to get to is that you're all very bright, very tactile. I have no idea how computer-oriented or three-dimensionally-oriented you are, but let's try something. OK, so since you all don't understand what the five-ball pattern is, I'm going to give you a little clue. Enough of a clue? So, you get the pattern, right? OK.
(Laughter)
You're not getting off that easy. All right? Now, do me a favor: follow the ball that I ask you to follow. Green. Yellow. Pink. White. OK, you can do that? Yeah? OK.
Now, let's actually learn something. Actually, let me put you in that area of learning, which is very insecure. You want to do it? Yeah? OK. Hands out in front of you. Palms up, together. What you're going to learn is this.
(Laughter)
OK? So what I want you to do is just listen to me and do it. Index finger, middle finger, ring, little. Little, ring, middle, index. And then open. Finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. A little bit faster. Finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. Finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger.
(Laughter)
All right. A lot of different learning processes going on in here.
(Laughter)
One learning process that I see is this --
(Laughter)
OK. Another learning process that I see is this --
(Laughter)
OK. So, everybody take a deep breath in, breath out. OK. Now, one more time, and -- finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. Open. Finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. OK. Shake your hands out.
Now, I assume a lot of you spend a lot of time at a computer. OK? So, what you're doing is, you're going la, la, la, and you're getting this. OK? So that's exactly what I'm going to ask you to do, but in a slightly different way. You're going to combine it. So what I want you to do is -- fingers. I'll tell you what to do with your fingers, same thing. But I want you to do is also, with your eyes, is follow the colored ball that I ask you to follow.
(Laughter)
OK? Here we go. So, we're going to start off looking at the white ball -- and I'm going to tell you which color, and I'm also going to tell you to go with your fingers. OK? So white ball and -- finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. Pink. Finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. Green. Finger, finger, finger, finger. Yellow. Finger, finger, finger, pink or finger. Pink, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger, finger. All right.
(Applause)
How did you do? Well? OK. The reason I wanted you to do this is because that's actually what most people face throughout their lives, a moment of learning, a moment of challenge. It's a moment that you can't make sense of. Why the hell should I learn this? OK? Does it really have anything to do with anything in my life? You know, I can't decipher -- is it fun? Is it challenging? Am I supposed to cheat?
(Laughter)
You know, what are you supposed to do? You've got somebody up here who is the operative principle of doing that for his whole life. OK? Trying to figure that stuff out. But is it going to get you anywhere? It's just a moment. That's all it is, a moment. OK? I'm going to change the script for one second. Just let me do this. I don't need music for it. Talking about time in a moment. There's a piece that I recently developed which was all about that, a moment. And what I do as a creative artist is I develop vocabularies or languages of moving objects.
What I've done for you here, I developed a lot of those tricks and I put the choreography together, but they're not original techniques. Now, I'm going to start showing you some original techniques that come from the work that I've developed. OK? So, a moment, how would you define a moment? Well, as a juggler, what I wanted to do was create something that was representational of a moment.
Ahhh. All right, I'm going to get on my knees and do it. So, a moment.
(Rattling)
OK? And then, what I did as a juggler was say, OK, what can I do to make that something that is dependent on something else, another dynamic.
(Rattling)
So, a moment.
(Rattling)
Another moment.
(Rattling)
Excuse me, still getting there. A moment that travels.
(Rattling)
A moment -- no, we'll try that again. It separates, and comes back together. Time. How can you look at time? And what do you dedicate it to, in exploring a particular thing? Well, obviously, there's something in here, and you can all have a guess as to what it is. There's a mystery. There's a mystery in the moment. And it has to settle. And then it's dependent on something else. And then it comes to rest. Just a little thing about time.
Now, this has expanded into a much bigger piece, because I use ramps of different parabolas that I roll the balls on while I'm keeping time with this. But I just thought I'd talk about a moment.
(Applause)
All right. OK. Can we show the video of the triangle? Are we ready to do that? Yes? This is the piece that I told you about. It's a much bigger piece that I do exploring the space of a geometric triangle.
(Applause)
Thanks. The only thing I'll say about the last session is, you ever try juggling and driving the car with your knees at 120 miles an hour?
(Laughter)
The only other thing is, it was a real shock. I always drove motorcycles. And when I bought my first car, it shocked me that it cost three times more than my parents' house. Interesting.
Anyway, balance: constant movement to find an approach to stillness. Cheating.
(Laughter)
Balance: making up the rules so you can't cheat, so you learn to approach stillness with different parts of your body. To have a conversation with it. To speak. To listen.
(Laughter)
Hup. Now, it's dependent on rhythm, and keeping a center of balance. When it falls, going underneath. So, there's a rhythm to it. The rhythm can get much smaller. As your skill increases, you learn to find those tinier spaces, those tinier movements. Thanks.
(Applause)
Now, I'm going to show you the beginnings of a piece that is about balance in some ways, and also -- oh, actually, if you're bored, not here, here's one use for it.
(Laughter)
You can go with the "Sticks One" music.
(Music)
(Applause)
Thanks. That has a certain kind of balance to it, which is all about plumb. I apprenticed with a carpenter and learned about plumb, square and level. And they influenced that, and this next piece, which I'll do a little segment of. "Two Sticks," you can go with it. Thanks. Which is again exploring space, or the lines in space.
(Music)
(Applause)
Working with space and the lines in space in a different way. Oh, let's see here.
(Applause)
So, I'll come back to that in a second. But working with one ball, now, what if you attach something to it, or change it. This is a little thing that I made because I really like the idea of curves and balls together. And then creating space and the rhythm of space, using the surface of the balls, the surface of the arms. Just a little toy. Which leads me to the next thing, which is -- what have I got here? OK. All right.
I'm actually leading up to something, the newest thing that I'm working on. This is not it. This is exploring geometry and the rhythm of shape.
(Applause)
Now, what I just did was I worked with the mathematics -- the diameter and the circumference. Sometimes these pieces are mathematical, in that way that I look at a shape and say, what about if I use this and this and this. Sometimes what happens in life affects my choice of objects that I try to work with.
The next piece that I'm going to do -- which is the cylinders piece, if you want to get that up -- it has to do with cylinder seals from about 5,000 years ago, which were stones with designs that were used to roll over wet clay with all sorts of great designs. I love ceramics and all of that. It's a combination of that, the beauty of that, the shape, and the stories that were involved in it, as well as the fact that they protected the contents.
The second influence on this piece came from recycling and looking into a tin can recycling bin and seeing all that beautiful emptiness. So, if you want to go with the music for cylinders.
(Music)
(Applause)
Talking about geometry and everything, if you take the circle and you split it in half -- can you run "S-Curve music?" I'm going to do just a short version of it. Circles split in half and rotated, and mythology.
(Music)
(Applause)
Anyway, that piece also has a kinetic sculpture in the middle of it, and I dance around a small stage so -- two minutes, just to end? The latest piece that I'm working on -- what I love is that I never know what I'm working on, why I'm working on it. They're not ideas, they're instincts. And the latest thing that I'm working on --
(Clattering) --
is something really -- I don't know what it is yet. And that's good. I like not to know for as long as possible. Well, because then it tells me the truth, instead of me imposing the truth. And what it is, is working with both positive and negative space but also with these curves. And what it involves, and I don't know if my hands are too beaten up to do it or not, but I'll do a little bit of it.
It initially started off with me stacking these things, bunches of them, and then playing with the sense of space, of filling in the space. And then it started changing, and become folding on themselves. And then changing levels. Because my attempt is to make visual instruments, not to just make -- I'll try one other thing. For work in three dimensions, with your perceptions of space and time. Now, I don't know exactly where it's going, but I've got a bit of effort involved in this thing. And it's going to change as I go through it. But I really like it, it feels right. This may not be the right shape, and -- look at this shape, and then I'll show you the first design I ever put to it, just to see, just to play, because I love all different kinds of things to play with. Let's see here. To work with the positive and negative in a different way. And to change, and to change.
So, I'm off in my new direction with this to explore rhythm and space. We'll see what I come up with. Thanks for having me.
(Applause) |
In the last 50 years, we've been building the suburbs with a lot of unintended consequences. And I'm going to talk about some of those consequences and just present a whole bunch of really interesting projects that I think give us tremendous reasons to be really optimistic that the big design and development project of the next 50 years is going to be retrofitting suburbia. So whether it's redeveloping dying malls or re-inhabiting dead big-box stores or reconstructing wetlands out of parking lots, I think the fact is the growing number of empty and under-performing, especially retail, sites throughout suburbia gives us actually a tremendous opportunity to take our least-sustainable landscapes right now and convert them into more sustainable places. And in the process, what that allows us to do is to redirect a lot more of our growth back into existing communities that could use a boost, and have the infrastructure in place, instead of continuing to tear down trees and to tear up the green space out at the edges.
So why is this important? I think there are any number of reasons, and I'm just going to not get into detail but mention a few. Just from the perspective of climate change, the average urban dweller in the U.S. has about one-third the carbon footprint of the average suburban dweller, mostly because suburbanites drive a lot more, and living in detached buildings, you have that much more exterior surface to leak energy out of. So strictly from a climate change perspective, the cities are already relatively green. The big opportunity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is actually in urbanizing the suburbs. All that driving that we've been doing out in the suburbs, we have doubled the amount of miles we drive. It's increased our dependence on foreign oil despite the gains in fuel efficiency. We're just driving so much more; we haven't been able to keep up technologically.
Public health is another reason to consider retrofitting. Researchers at the CDC and other places have increasingly been linking suburban development patterns with sedentary lifestyles. And those have been linked then with the rather alarming, growing rates of obesity, shown in these maps here, and that obesity has also been triggering great increases in heart disease and diabetes to the point where a child born today has a one-in-three chance of developing diabetes. And that rate has been escalating at the same rate as children not walking to school anymore, again, because of our development patterns.
And then there's finally -- there's the affordability question. I mean, how affordable is it to continue to live in suburbia with rising gas prices? Suburban expansion to cheap land, for the last 50 years -- you know the cheap land out on the edge -- has helped generations of families enjoy the American dream. But increasingly, the savings promised by drive-till-you-qualify affordability -- which is basically our model -- those savings are wiped out when you consider the transportation costs. For instance, here in Atlanta, about half of households make between $20,000 and $50,000 a year, and they are spending 29 percent of their income on housing and 32 percent on transportation. I mean, that's 2005 figures. That's before we got up to the four bucks a gallon. You know, none of us really tend to do the math on our transportation costs, and they're not going down any time soon.
Whether you love suburbia's leafy privacy or you hate its soulless commercial strips, there are reasons why it's important to retrofit. But is it practical? I think it is. June Williamson and I have been researching this topic for over a decade, and we've found over 80 varied projects. But that they're really all market driven, and what's driving the market in particular -- number one -- is major demographic shifts. We all tend to think of suburbia as this very family-focused place, but that's really not the case anymore. Since 2000, already two-thirds of households in suburbia did not have kids in them. We just haven't caught up with the actual realities of this. The reasons for this have a lot to with the dominance of the two big demographic groups right now: the Baby Boomers retiring -- and then there's a gap, Generation X, which is a small generation. They're still having kids -- but Generation Y hasn't even started hitting child-rearing age. They're the other big generation.
So as a result of that, demographers predict that through 2025, 75 to 85 percent of new households will not have kids in them. And the market research, consumer research, asking the Boomers and Gen Y what it is they would like, what they would like to live in, tells us there is going to be a huge demand -- and we're already seeing it -- for more urban lifestyles within suburbia. That basically, the Boomers want to be able to age in place, and Gen Y would like to live an urban lifestyle, but most of their jobs will continue to be out in suburbia.
The other big dynamic of change is the sheer performance of underperforming asphalt. Now I keep thinking this would be a great name for an indie rock band, but developers generally use it to refer to underused parking lots -- and suburbia is full of them. When the postwar suburbs were first built out on the cheap land away from downtown, it made sense to just build surface parking lots. But those sites have now been leapfrogged and leapfrogged again, as we've just continued to sprawl, and they now have a relatively central location. It no longer just makes sense. That land is more valuable than just surface parking lots. It now makes sense to go back in, build a deck and build up on those sites. So what do you do with a dead mall, dead office park? It turns out, all sorts of things. In a slow economy like ours, re-inhabitation is one of the more popular strategies.
So this happens to be a dead mall in St. Louis that's been re-inhabited as art-space. It's now home to artist studios, theater groups, dance troupes. It's not pulling in as much tax revenue as it once was, but it's serving its community. It's keeping the lights on. It's becoming, I think, a really great institution. Other malls have been re-inhabited as nursing homes, as universities, and as all variety of office space. We also found a lot of examples of dead big-box stores that have been converted into all sorts of community-serving uses as well -- lots of schools, lots of churches and lots of libraries like this one.
This was a little grocery store, a Food Lion grocery store, that is now a public library. In addition to, I think, doing a beautiful adaptive reuse, they tore up some of the parking spaces, put in bioswales to collect and clean the runoff, put in a lot more sidewalks to connect to the neighborhoods. And they've made this, what was just a store along a commercial strip, into a community gathering space. This one is a little L-shaped strip shopping center in Phoenix, Arizona. Really all they did was they gave it a fresh coat of bright paint, a gourmet grocery, and they put up a restaurant in the old post office. Never underestimate the power of food to turn a place around and make it a destination. It's been so successful, they've now taken over the strip across the street. The real estate ads in the neighborhood all very proudly proclaim, "Walking distance to Le Grande Orange," because it provided its neighborhood with what sociologists like to call "a third place." If home is the first place and work is the second place, the third place is where you go to hang out and build community. And especially as suburbia is becoming less centered on the family, the family households, there's a real hunger for more third places.
So the most dramatic retrofits are really those in the next category, the next strategy: redevelopment. Now, during the boom, there were several really dramatic redevelopment projects where the original building was scraped to the ground and then the whole site was rebuilt at significantly greater density, a sort of compact, walkable urban neighborhoods. But some of them have been much more incremental. This is Mashpee Commons, the oldest retrofit that we've found. And it's just incrementally, over the last 20 years, built urbanism on top of its parking lots. So the black and white photo shows the simple 60's strip shopping center. And then the maps above that show its gradual transformation into a compact, mixed-use New England village, and it has plans now that have been approved for it to connect to new residential neighborhoods across the arterials and over to the other side. So, you know, sometimes it's incremental. Sometimes, it's all at once.
This is another infill project on the parking lots, this one of an office park outside of Washington D.C. When Metrorail expanded transit into the suburbs and opened a station nearby to this site, the owners decided to build a new parking deck and then insert on top of their surface lots a new Main Street, several apartments and condo buildings, while keeping the existing office buildings. Here is the site in 1940: It was just a little farm in the village of Hyattsville. By 1980, it had been subdivided into a big mall on one side and the office park on the other and then some buffer sites for a library and a church to the far right. Today, the transit, the Main Street and the new housing have all been built. Eventually, I expect that the streets will probably extend through a redevelopment of the mall. Plans have already been announced for a lot of those garden apartments above the mall to be redeveloped. Transit is a big driver of retrofits. So here's what it looks like. You can sort of see the funky new condo buildings in between the office buildings and the public space and the new Main Street.
This one is one of my favorites, Belmar. I think they really built an attractive place here and have just employed all-green construction. There's massive P.V. arrays on the roofs as well as wind turbines. This was a very large mall on a hundred-acre superblock. It's now 22 walkable urban blocks with public streets, two public parks, eight bus lines and a range of housing types, and so it's really given Lakewood, Colorado the downtown that this particular suburb never had. Here was the mall in its heyday. They had their prom in the mall. They loved their mall. So here's the site in 1975 with the mall. By 1995, the mall has died. The department store has been kept -- and we found this was true in many cases. The department stores are multistory; they're better built. They're easy to be re-adapted. But the one story stuff ... that's really history.
So here it is at projected build-out. This project, I think, has great connectivity to the existing neighborhoods. It's providing 1,500 households with the option of a more urban lifestyle. It's about two-thirds built out right now. Here's what the new Main Street looks like. It's very successful, and it's helped to prompt -- eight of the 13 regional malls in Denver have now, or have announced plans to be, retrofitted. But it's important to note that all of this retrofitting is not occurring -- just bulldozers are coming and just plowing down the whole city. No, it's pockets of walkability on the sites of under-performing properties. And so it's giving people more choices, but it's not taking away choices.
But it's also not really enough to just create pockets of walkability. You want to also try to get more systemic transformation. We need to also retrofit the corridors themselves. So this is one that has been retrofitted in California. They took the commercial strip shown on the black-and-white images below, and they built a boulevard that has become the Main Street for their town. And it's transformed from being an ugly, unsafe, undesirable address, to becoming a beautiful, attractive, dignified sort of good address. I mean now we're hoping we start to see it; they've already built City Hall, attracted two hotels. I could imagine beautiful housing going up along there without tearing down another tree. So there's a lot of great things, but I'd love to see more corridors getting retrofitting.
But densification is not going to work everywhere. Sometimes re-greening is really the better answer. There's a lot to learn from successful landbanking programs in cities like Flint, Michigan. There's also a burgeoning suburban farming movement -- sort of victory gardens meets the Internet. But perhaps one of the most important re-greening aspects is the opportunity to restore the local ecology, as in this example outside of Minneapolis. When the shopping center died, the city restored the site's original wetlands, creating lakefront property, which then attracted private investment, the first private investment to this very low-income neighborhood in over 40 years. So they've managed to both restore the local ecology and the local economy at the same time. This is another re-greening example. It also makes sense in very strong markets. This one in Seattle is on the site of a mall parking lot adjacent to a new transit stop. And the wavy line is a path alongside a creek that has now been daylit. The creek had been culverted under the parking lot. But daylighting our creeks really improves their water quality and contributions to habitat.
So I've shown you some of the first generation of retrofits. What's next? I think we have three challenges for the future. The first is to plan retrofitting much more systemically at the metropolitan scale. We need to be able to target which areas really should be re-greened. Where should we be redeveloping? And where should we be encouraging re-inhabitation? These slides just show two images from a larger project that looked at trying to do that for Atlanta. I led a team that was asked to imagine Atlanta 100 years from now. And we chose to try to reverse sprawl through three simple moves -- expensive, but simple. One, in a hundred years, transit on all major rail and road corridors. Two, in a hundred years, thousand foot buffers on all stream corridors. It's a little extreme, but we've got a little water problem. In a hundred years, subdivisions that simply end up too close to water or too far from transit won't be viable. And so we've created the eco-acre transfer-to-transfer development rights to the transit corridors and allow the re-greening of those former subdivisions for food and energy production.
So the second challenge is to improve the architectural design quality of the retrofits. And I close with this image of democracy in action: This is a protest that's happening on a retrofit in Silver Spring, Maryland on an Astroturf town green. Now, retrofits are often accused of being examples of faux downtowns and instant urbanism, and not without reason; you don't get much more phony than an Astroturf town green. I have to say, these are very hybrid places. They are new but trying to look old. They have urban streetscapes, but suburban parking ratios. Their populations are more diverse than typical suburbia, but they're less diverse than cities. And they are public places, but that are managed by private companies. And just the surface appearance are often -- like the Astroturf here -- they make me wince. So, you know, I mean I'm glad that the urbanism is doing its job. The fact that a protest is happening really does mean that the layout of the blocks, the streets and blocks, the putting in of public space, compromised as it may be, is still a really great thing. But we've got to get the architecture better.
The final challenge is for all of you. I want you to join the protest and start demanding more sustainable suburban places -- more sustainable places, period. But culturally, we tend to think that downtowns should be dynamic, and we expect that. But we seem to have an expectation that the suburbs should forever remain frozen in whatever adolescent form they were first given birth to. It's time to let them grow up, so I want you to all support the zoning changes, the road diets, the infrastructure improvements and the retrofits that are coming soon to a neighborhood near you.
Thank you. |
In the next 18 minutes, I'm going to take you on a journey. And it's a journey that you and I have been on for many years now, and it began some 50 years ago, when humans first stepped off our planet. And in those 50 years, not only did we literally, physically set foot on the moon, but we have dispatched robotic spacecraft to all the planets -- all eight of them -- and we have landed on asteroids, we have rendezvoused with comets, and, at this point in time, we have a spacecraft on its way to Pluto, the body formerly known as a planet. And all of these robotic missions are part of a bigger human journey: a voyage to understand something, to get a sense of our cosmic place, to understand something of our origins, and how Earth, our planet, and we, living on it, came to be.
And of all the places in the solar system that we might go to and search for answers to questions like this, there's Saturn. And we have been to Saturn before -- we visited Saturn in the early 1980s -- but our investigations of Saturn have become far more in-depth in detail since the Cassini spacecraft, traveling across interplanetary space for seven years, glided into orbit around Saturn in the summer of 2004, and became at that point the farthest robotic outpost that humanity had ever established around the Sun.
Now, the Saturn system is a rich planetary system. It offers mystery, scientific insight and obviously splendor beyond compare, and the investigation of this system has enormous cosmic reach. In fact, just studying the rings alone, we stand to learn a lot about the discs of stars and gas that we call the spiral galaxies. And here's a beautiful picture of the Andromeda Nebula, which is our closest, largest spiral galaxy to the Milky Way. And then, here's a beautiful composite of the Whirlpool Galaxy, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope.
So the journey back to Saturn is really part of and is also a metaphor for a much larger human voyage to understand the interconnectedness of everything around us, and also how humans fit into that picture. And it pains me that I can't tell you all that we have learned with Cassini. I can't show you all the beautiful pictures that we've taken in the last two and a half years, because I simply don't have the time. So I'm going to concentrate on two of the most exciting stories that have emerged out of this major exploratory expedition that we are conducting around Saturn, and have been for the past two and a half years.
Saturn is accompanied by a very large and diverse collection of moons. They range in size from a few kilometers across to as big across as the U.S. Most of the beautiful pictures we've taken of Saturn, in fact, show Saturn in accompaniment with some of its moons. Here's Saturn with Dione, and then, here's Saturn showing the rings edge-on, showing you just how vertically thin they are, with the moon Enceladus. Now, two of the 47 moons that Saturn has are standouts.
And those are Titan and Enceladus. Titan is Saturn's largest moon, and, until Cassini had arrived there, was the largest single expanse of unexplored terrain that we had remaining in our solar system. And it is a body that has long intrigued people who've watched the planets. It has a very large, thick atmosphere, and in fact, its surface environment was believed to be more like the environment we have here on the Earth, or at least had in the past, than any other body in the solar system. Its atmosphere is largely molecular nitrogen, like you are breathing here in this room, except that its atmosphere is suffused with simple organic materials like methane and propane and ethane. And these molecules high up in the atmosphere of Titan get broken down, and their products join together to make haze particles. This haze is ubiquitous. It's completely global and enveloping Titan. And that's why you cannot see down to the surface with our eyes in the visible region of the spectrum.
But these haze particles, it was surmised, before we got there with Cassini, over billions and billions of years, gently drifted down to the surface and coated the surface in a thick organic sludge. So like the equivalent, the Titan equivalent, of tar, or oil, or what -- we didn't know what. But this is what we suspected. And these molecules, especially methane and ethane, can be liquids at the surface temperatures of Titan. And so it turns out that methane is to Titan what water is to the Earth. It's a condensable in the atmosphere, and so recognizing this circumstance brought to the fore a whole world of bizarre possibilities. You can have methane clouds, OK, and above those clouds, you have this hundreds of kilometers of haze, which prevent any sunlight from getting to the surface. The temperature at the surface is some 350 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
But despite that cold, you could have rain falling down on the surface of Titan. And doing on Titan what rain does on the Earth: it carves gullies; it forms rivers and cataracts; it can create canyons; it can pool in large basins and craters. It can wash the sludge off high mountain peaks and hills, down into the lowlands. So stop and think for a minute. Try to imagine what the surface of Titan might look like. It's dark. High noon on Titan is as dark as deep earth twilight on the Earth. It's cold, it's eerie, it's misty, it might be raining, and you might be standing on the shores of Lake Michigan brimming with paint thinner. (Laughter)
That is the view that we had of the surface of Titan before we got there with Cassini, and I can tell you that what we have found on Titan, though it is not the same in detail, is every bit as fascinating as that story is. And for us, it has been like -- the Cassini people -- it has been like a Jules Verne adventure come true. As I said, it has a thick, extensive atmosphere. This is a picture of Titan, backlit by the Sun, with the rings as a beautiful backdrop. And yet another moon there -- I don't even know which one it is. It's a very extensive atmosphere. We have instruments on Cassini which can see down to the surface through this atmosphere, and my camera system is one of them. And we have taken pictures like this. And what you see is bright and dark regions, and that's about as far as it got for us. It was so mystifying: we couldn't make out what we were seeing on Titan. When you look closer at this region, you start to see things like sinuous channels -- we didn't know. You see a few round things. This, we later found out, is, in fact, a crater, but there are very few craters on the surface of Titan, meaning it's a very young surface. And there are features that look tectonic. They look like they've been pulled apart. Whenever you see anything linear on a planet, it means there's been a fracture, like a fault. And so it's been tectonically altered.
But we couldn't make sense of our images, until, six months after we got into orbit, an event occurred that many have regarded as the highlight of Cassini's investigation of Titan. And that was the deployment of the Huygens probe, the European-built Huygens probe that Cassini had carried for seven years across the solar system. We deployed it to the atmosphere of Titan, it took two and a half hours to descend, and it landed on the surface. And I just want to emphasize how significant an event this is. This is a device of human making, and it landed in the outer solar system for the first time in human history. It is so significant that, in my mind, this was an event that should have been celebrated with ticker tape parades in every city across the U.S. and Europe, and sadly, that wasn't the case. (Laughter).
It was significant for another reason. This is an international mission, and this event was celebrated in Europe, in Germany, and the celebratory presentations were given in English accents, and American accents, and German accents, and French and Italian and Dutch accents. It was a moving demonstration of what the words "united nations" are supposed to mean: a true union of nations joined together in a colossal effort for good. And, in this case, it was a massive undertaking to explore a planet, and to come to understand a planetary system that, for all of human history, had been unreachable, and now humans had actually touched it. So it was -- I mean, I'm getting goose bumps just talking about it. It was a tremendously emotional event, and it's something that I will personally never forget, and you shouldn't either. (Applause).
But anyway, the probe took measurements of the atmosphere on the way down, and it also took panoramic pictures. And I can't tell you what it was like to see the first pictures of Titan's surface from the probe. And this is what we saw. And it was a shocker, because it was everything we wanted those other pictures taken from orbit to be. It was an unambiguous pattern, a geological pattern. It's a dendritic drainage pattern that can be formed only by the flow of liquids. And you can follow these channels and you can see how they all converge. And they converge into this channel here, which drains into this region. You are looking at a shoreline. Was this a shoreline of fluids? We didn't know. But this is somewhat of a shoreline.
This picture is taken at 16 kilometers. This is the picture taken at eight kilometers, OK? Again, the shoreline. Okay, now, 16 kilometers, eight kilometers -- this is roughly an airline altitude. If you were going to take an airplane trip across the U.S., you would be flying at these altitudes. So, this is the picture you would have at the window of Titanian Airlines as you fly across the surface of Titan. (Laughter)
And then finally, the probe came to rest on the surface, and I'm going to show you, ladies and gentlemen, the first picture ever taken from the surface of a moon in the outer solar system. And here is the horizon, OK? These are probably water ice pebbles, yes? (Applause). And obviously, it landed in one of these flat, dark regions and it didn't sink out of sight. So it wasn't fluid that we landed in. What the probe came down in was basically the Titan equivalent of a mud flat. This is an unconsolidated ground that is suffused with liquid methane. And it's probably the case that this material has washed off the highlands of Titan through these channels that we saw, and has drained over billions of years to fill in low-lying basins. And that is what the Huygens probe landed in.
But still, there was no sign in our images, or even in the Huygens' images, of any large, open bodies of fluids. Where were they? It got even more puzzling when we found dunes. OK, so this is our movie of the equatorial region of Titan, showing these dunes. These are dunes that are 100 meters tall, separated by a few kilometers, and they go on for miles and miles and miles. There's hundreds, up to a 1,000 or 1,200 miles of dunes. This is the Saharan desert of Titan. It's obviously a place which is very dry, or you wouldn't get dunes.
So again, it got puzzling that there were no bodies of fluid, until finally, we saw lakes in the polar regions. And there is a lake scene in the south polar region of Titan. It's about the size of Lake Ontario. And then, only a week and a half ago, we flew over the north pole of Titan and found, again, we found a feature here the size of the Caspian Sea. So it seems that the liquids, for some reason we don't understand, or during at least this season, are apparently at the poles of Titan. And I think you would agree that we have found Titan is a remarkable, mystical place. It's exotic, it's alien, but yet strangely Earth-like, and having Earth-like geological formations and a tremendous geographical diversity, and is a fascinating world whose only rival in the solar system for complexity and richness is the Earth itself.
And so now we go onto Enceladus. Enceladus is a small moon, it's about a tenth the size of Titan. And you can see it here next to England, just to show you the size. This is not meant to be a threat. (Laughter). And Enceladus is very white, it's very bright, and its surface is obviously wrecked with fractures. It is a very geologically active body. But the mother lode of discoveries on Enceladus was found at the south pole -- and we're looking at the south pole here -- where we found this system of fractures. And they're a different color because they're a different composition. They are coated. These fractures are coated with organic materials. Moreover, this whole, entire region, the south polar region, has elevated temperatures. It's the hottest place on the planet, on the body. That's as bizarre as finding that the Antarctic on the Earth is hotter than the tropics.
And then, when we took additional pictures, we discovered that from these fractures are issuing jets of fine, icy particles extending hundreds of miles into space. And when we color-code this image, to bring out the faint light levels, we see that these jets feed a plume that, in fact, we see, in other images, goes thousands of miles into the space above Enceladus. My team and I have examined images like this, and like this one, and have thought about the other results from Cassini. And we have arrived at the conclusion that these jets may be erupting from pockets of liquid water under the surface of Enceladus.
So we have, possibly, liquid water, organic materials and excess heat. In other words, we have possibly stumbled upon the holy grail of modern day planetary exploration, or in other words, an environment that is potentially suitable for living organisms. And I don't think I need to tell you that the discovery of life elsewhere in our solar system, whether it be on Enceladus or elsewhere, would have enormous cultural and scientific implications. Because if we could demonstrate that genesis had occurred not once, but twice, independently, in our solar system, then that means, by inference, it has occurred a staggering number of times throughout the universe and its 13.7 billion year history.
Right now, Earth is the only planet still that we know is teeming with life. It is precious, it is unique, it is still, so far, the only home we've ever known. And if any of you were alert and coherent during the 1960s -- and we'd forgive you, if you weren't, OK -- you would remember this very famous picture taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts in 1968. It was the first time that Earth was imaged from space, and it had an enormous impact on our sense of place in the universe, and our sense of responsibility for the protection of our own planet.
Well, we on Cassini have taken an equivalent first, a picture that no human eye has ever seen before. It is a total eclipse of the Sun, seen from the other side of Saturn. And in this impossibly beautiful picture, you see the main rings backlit by the Sun, you see the refracted image of the Sun and you see this ring created, in fact, by the exhalations of Enceladus. But as if that weren't brilliant enough, we can spot, in this beautiful image, sight of our own planet, cradled in the arms of Saturn's rings.
Now, there is something deeply moving about seeing ourselves from afar, and capturing the sight of our little, blue-ocean planet in the skies of other worlds. And that, and the perspective of ourselves that we gain from that, may be, in the end, the finest reward that we earn from this journey of discovery that started half a century ago. And thank you very much. (Applause) |
A talk about surgical robots is also a talk about surgery. And while I've tried to make my images not too graphic, keep in mind that surgeons have a different relationship with blood than normal people do, because, after all, what a surgeon does to a patient, if it were done without consent, would be a felony. Surgeons are the tailors, the plumbers, the carpenters -- some would say the butchers -- of the medical world: cutting, reshaping, reforming, bypassing, fixing. But you need to talk about surgical instruments and the evolution of surgical technology together.
So in order to give you some kind of a perspective of where we are right now with surgical robots, and where we're going to be going in the future, I want to give you a little bit of perspective of how we got to this point, how we even came to believe that surgery was OK, that this was something that was possible to do, that this kind of cutting and reforming was OK.
So, a little bit of perspective -- about 10,000 years of perspective. This is a trephinated skull. And trephination is simply just cutting a hole in the skull. And many, many hundreds of skulls like this have been found in archaeological sites all over the world, dating back five to 10 thousand years. Five to 10 thousand years! Now imagine this. You are a healer in a Stone Age village. And you have some guy that you're not quite sure what's wrong with him -- Oliver Sacks is going to be born way in the future. He's got some seizure disorder. And you don't understand this. But you think to yourself, "I'm not quite sure what's wrong with this guy. But maybe if I cut a hole in his head I can fix it." (Laughter) Now that is surgical thinking.
Now we've got the dawn of interventional surgery here. What is astonishing about this is, even though we don't know really how much of this was intended to be religious, or how much of it was intended to be therapeutic, what we can tell is that these patients lived! Judging by the healing on the borders of these holes, they lived days, months, years following trephination. And so what we are seeing is evidence of a refined technique that was being handed down over thousands and thousands of years, all over the world. This arose independently at sites everywhere that had no communication to one another. We really are seeing the dawn of interventional surgery.
Now we can fast forward many thousands of years into the Bronze Age and beyond. And we see new refined tools coming out. But surgeons in these eras are a little bit more conservative than their bold, trephinating ancestors. These guys confined their surgery to fairly superficial injuries. And surgeons were tradesmen, rather than physicians. This persisted all the way into and through the Renaissance.
That may have saved the writers, but it didn't really save the surgeons terribly much. They were still a mistrusted lot. Surgeons still had a bit of a PR problem, because the landscape was dominated by the itinerant barber surgeon. These were folks that traveled from village to village, town to town, doing surgery sort of as a form of performance art. Because we were in the age before anesthesia, the agony of the patient is really as much of the public spectacle as the surgery itself. One of the most famous of these guys, Frere Jacques, shown here doing a lithotomy -- which is the removal of the bladder stone, one of the most invasive surgeries they did at the time -- had to take less than two minutes. You had to have quite a flair for the dramatic, and be really, really quick.
And so here you see him doing a lithotomy. And he is credited with doing over 4,000 of these public surgeries, wandering around in Europe, which is an astonishing number, when you think that surgery must have been a last resort. I mean who would put themselves through that? Until anesthesia, the absence of sensation. With the demonstration of the Morton Ether Inhaler at the Mass. General in 1847, a whole new era of surgery was ushered in. Anesthesia gave surgeons the freedom to operate. Anesthesia gave them the freedom to experiment, to start to delve deeper into the body. This was truly a revolution in surgery.
But there was a pretty big problem with this. After these very long, painstaking operations, attempting to cure things they'd never been able to touch before, the patients died. They died of massive infection. Surgery didn't hurt anymore, but it killed you pretty quickly. And infection would continue to claim a majority of surgical patients until the next big revolution in surgery, which was aseptic technique.
Joseph Lister was aepsis's, or sterility's, biggest advocate, to a very very skeptical bunch of surgeons. But eventually they did come around. The Mayo brothers came out to visit Lister in Europe. And they came back to their American clinic and they said they had learned it was as important to wash your hands before doing surgery as it was to wash up afterwards. (Laughter) Something so simple. And yet, operative mortality dropped profoundly.
These surgeries were actually now being effective. With the patient insensitive to pain, and a sterile operating field all bets were off, the sky was the limit. You could now start doing surgery everywhere, on the gut, on the liver, on the heart, on the brain. Transplantation: you could take an organ out of one person, you could put it in another person, and it would work. Surgeons didn't have a problem with respectability anymore; they had become gods.
The era of the "big surgeon, big incision" had arrived, but at quite a cost, because they are saving lives, but not necessarily quality of life, because healthy people don't usually need surgery, and unhealthy people have a very hard time recovering from a cut like that. The question had to be asked, "Well, can we do these same surgeries but through little incisions?" Laparoscopy is doing this kind of surgery: surgery with long instruments through small incisions. And it really changed the landscape of surgery. Some of the tools for this had been around for a hundred years, but it had only been used as a diagnostic technique until the 1980s, when there was changes in camera technologies and things like that, that allowed this to be done for real operations.
So what you see -- this is now the first surgical image -- as we're coming down the tube, this is a new entry into the body. It looks very different from what you're expecting surgery to look like. We bring instruments in, from two separate cuts in the side, and then you can start manipulating tissue. Within 10 years of the first gallbladder surgeries being done laparoscopically, a majority of gallbladder surgeries were being done laparoscopically -- truly a pretty big revolution.
But there were casualties of this revolution. These techniques were a lot harder to learn than people had anticipated. The learning curve was very long. And during that learning curve the complications went quite a bit higher. Surgeons had to give up their 3D vision. They had to give up their wrists. They had to give up intuitive motion in the instruments. This surgeon has over 3,000 hours of laparoscopic experience. Now this is a particularly frustrating placement of the needle. But this is hard. And one of the reasons why it is so hard is because the external ergonomics are terrible. You've got these long instruments, and you're working off your centerline. And the instruments are essentially working backwards.
So what you need to do, to take the capability of your hand, and put it on the other side of that small incision, is you need to put a wrist on that instrument. And so -- I get to talk about robots -- the da Vinci robot put just that wrist on the other side of that incision. And so here you're seeing the operation of this wrist. And now, in contrast to the laparoscopy, you can precisely place the needle in your instruments, and you can pass it all the way through and follow it in a trajectory. And the reason why this becomes so much easier is -- you can see on the bottom -- the hands are making the motions, and the instruments are following those motions exactly. Now, what you put between those instruments and those hands, is a large, fairly complicated robot. The surgeon is sitting at a console, and controlling the robot with these controllers. And the robot is moving these instruments around, and powering them, down inside the body. You have a 3D camera, so you get a 3D view.
And since this was introduced in 1999, a lot of these robots have been out and being used for surgical procedures like a prostatectomy, which is a prostate deep in the pelvis, and it requires fine dissection and delicate manipulation to be able to get a good surgical outcome. You can also sew bypass vessels directly onto a beating heart without cracking the chest. This is all done in between the ribs. And you can go inside the heart itself and repair the valves from the inside. You've got these technologies -- thank you -- (Applause) And so you might say, "Wow this is really cool! So, smartypants, why isn't all surgery being done this way?" And there are some reasons, some good reasons. And cost is one of them.
I talked about the large, complicated robot. With all its bells and whistles, one of those robots will cost you about as much as a solid gold surgeon. More useful than a solid gold surgeon, but, still, it's a fairly big capital investment. But once you've got it, your procedure costs do come down. But there are other barriers. So something like a prostatectomy -- the prostate is small, and it's in one spot, and you can set your robot up very precisely to work in that one spot. And so it's perfect for something like that. And in fact if you, or anyone you know, had their prostate taken out in the last couple of years, chances are it was done with one of these systems. But if you need to reach more places than just one, you need to move the robot. And you need to put some new incisions in there. And you need to re-set it up. And then you need to add some more ports, and more. And the problem is it gets time-consuming, and cumbersome.
And for that reason there are many surgeries that just aren't being done with the da Vinci. So we had to ask the question, "Well how do we fix that?" What if we could change it so that we didn't have to re-set up each time we wanted to move somewhere different? What if we could bring all the instruments in together in one place? How would that change the capabilities of the surgeon? And how would that change the experience for the patient? Now, to do that, we need to be able to bring a camera and instruments in together through one small tube, like that tube you saw in the laparoscopy video. Or, not so coincidentally, like a tube like this.
So what's going to come out of that tube is the debut of this new technology, this new robot that is going to be able to reach anywhere. Ready? So here it comes. This is the camera, and three instruments. And as you see it come out, in order to actually be able to do anything useful, it can't all stay clustered up like this. It has to be able to come off of the centerline and then be able to work back toward that centerline. He's a cheeky little devil. But what this lets you do is gives you that all-important traction, and counter-traction, so that you can dissect, so that you can sew, so that you can do all the things that you need to do, all the surgical tasks. But it's all coming in through one incision. It's not so simple. But it's worth it for the freedom that this gives us as we're going around. For the patient, however, it's transparent. This is all they're going to see.
It's very exciting to think where we get to go with this. We get to write the script of the next revolution in surgery. As we take these capabilities, and we get to go to the next places, we get to decide what our new surgeries are going to be. And I think to really get the rest of the way in that revolution, we need to not just take our hands in in new ways, we also need to take our eyes in in new ways. We need to see beyond the surface. We need to be able to guide what we're cutting in a much better way.
This is a cancer surgery. One of the problems with this, even for surgeons who've been looking at this a lot, is you can't see the cancer, especially when it's hidden below the surface. And so what we're starting to do is we're starting to inject specially designed markers into the bloodstream that will target the cancer. It will go, bind to the cancer. And we can make those markers glow. And we can take special cameras, and we can look at it. Now we know where we need to cut, even when it's below the surface. We can take these markers and we can inject them in a tumor site. And we can follow where they flow out from that tumor site, so we can see the first places where that cancer might travel. We can inject these dyes into the bloodstream, so that when we do a new vessel and we bypass a blockage on the heart, we can see if we actually made the connection, before we close that patient back up again -- something that we haven't been able to do without radiation before. We can light up tumors like this kidney tumor, so that you can exactly see where the boundary is between the kidney tumor and the kidney you want to leave behind, or the liver tumor and the liver you want to leave behind.
And we don't even need to confine ourselves to this macro vision. We have flexible microscopic probes that we can bring down into the body. And we can look at cells directly. I'm looking at nerves here. So these are nerves you see, down on the bottom, and the microscope probe that's being held by the robotic hand, up at the top. So this is all very prototypey at this point. But you care about nerves, if you are a surgical patient. Because they let you keep continence, bladder control, and sexual function after surgery, all of which is generally fairly important to the patient.
So, with the combination of these technologies we can reach it all, and we can see it all. We can heal the disease. And we can leave the patient whole and intact and functional afterwards. Now, I've talked about the patient as if the patient is, somehow, someone abstract outside this room. And that is not the case. Many of you, all of you maybe, will at some point, or have already, faced a diagnosis of cancer, or heart disease, or some organ dysfunction that's going to buy you a date with a surgeon. And when you get to that point -- I mean, these maladies don't care how many books you've written, how many companies you've started, that Nobel Prize you have yet to win, how much time you planned to spend with your children. These maladies come for us all.
And the prospect I'm offering you, of an easier surgery ... is that going to make that diagnosis any less terrifying? I'm not sure I really even want it to. Because facing your own mortality causes a re-evaluation of priorities, and a realignment of what your goals are in life, unlike anything else. And I would never want to deprive you of that epiphany. What I want instead, is for you to be whole, intact, and functional enough to go out and save the world, after you've decided you need to do it. And that is my vision for your future. Thank you. (Applause) |
I think the beautiful Malin [Akerman] put it perfectly. Every man deserves the opportunity to grow a little bit of luxury.
Ladies and gentlemen, and more importantly, Mo Bros and Mo Sistas — (Laughter) — for the next 17 minutes, I'm going to share with you my Movember journey, and how, through that journey, we've redefined charity, we're redefining the way prostate cancer researchers are working together throughout the world, and I hope, through that process, that I inspire you to create something significant in your life, something significant that will go on and make this world a better place.
So the most common question I get asked, and I'm going to answer it now so I don't have to do it over drinks tonight, is how did this come about? How did Movember start? Well, normally, a charity starts with the cause, and someone that is directly affected by a cause. They then go on to create an event, and beyond that, a foundation to support that. Pretty much in every case, that's how a charity starts. Not so with Movember. Movember started in a very traditional Australian way. It was on a Sunday afternoon. I was with my brother and a mate having a few beers, and I was watching the world go by, had a few more beers, and the conversation turned to '70s fashion — (Laughter) — and how everything manages to come back into style. And a few more beers, I said, "There has to be some stuff that hasn't come back." (Laughter) Then one more beer and it was, whatever happened to the mustache? Why hasn't that made a comeback? (Laughter) So then there was a lot more beers, and then the day ended with a challenge to bring the mustache back. (Laughter)
So in Australia, "mo" is slang for mustache, so we renamed the month of November "Movember" and created some pretty basic rules, which still stand today. And they are: start the month clean-shaven, rock a mustache -- not a beard, not a goatee, a mustache -- for the 30 days of November, and then we agreed that we would come together at the end of the month, have a mustache-themed party, and award a prize for the best, and of course, the worst mustache. (Laughter)
Now trust me, when you're growing a mustache back in 2003, and there were 30 of us back then, and this was before the ironic hipster mustache movement — (Laughter) — it created a lot of controversy. (Laughter) So my boss wouldn't let me go and see clients. My girlfriend at the time, who's no longer my girlfriend — (Laughter) — hated it. Parents would shuffle kids away from us. (Laughter) But we came together at the end of the month and we celebrated our journey, and it was a real journey. And we had a lot of fun, and in 2004, I said to the guys, "That was so much fun. We need to legitimize this so we can get away with it year on year." (Laughter)
So we started thinking about that, and we were inspired by the women around us and all they were doing for breast cancer. And we thought, you know what, there's nothing for men's health. Why is that? Why can't we combine growing a mustache and doing something for men's health? And I started to research that topic, and discovered prostate cancer is the male equivalent of breast cancer in terms of the number of men that die from it and are diagnosed with it.
But there was nothing for this cause, so we married growing a mustache with prostate cancer, and then we created our tagline, which is, "Changing the face of men's health." And that eloquently describes the challenge, changing your appearance for the 30 days, and also the outcome that we're trying to achieve: getting men engaged in their health, having them have a better understanding about the health risks that they face.
So with that model, I then cold-called the CEO of the Prostate Cancer Foundation. I said to him, "I've got the most amazing idea that's going to transform your organization." (Laughter) And I didn't want to share with him the idea over the phone, so I convinced him to meet with me for coffee in Melbourne in 2004. And we sat down, and I shared with him my vision of getting men growing mustaches across Australia, raising awareness for this cause, and funds for his organization. And I needed a partnership to legitimately do that. And I said, "We're going to come together at the end, we're going to have a mustache-themed party, we're going to have DJs, we're going to celebrate life, and we're going to change the face of men's health." And he just looked at me and laughed, and he said, he said, "Adam, that's a really novel idea, but we're an ultraconservative organization. We can't have anything to do with you." (Laughter) So I paid for coffee that day — (Laughter) — and his parting comment as we shook hands was, "Listen, if you happen to raise any money out of this, we'll gladly take it." (Laughter)
So my lesson that year was persistence. And we persisted, and we got 450 guys growing mustaches, and together we raised 54,000 dollars, and we donated every cent of that to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia, and that represented at the time the single biggest donation they'd ever received.
So from that day forward, my life has become about a mustache. Every day -- this morning, I wake up and go, my life is about a mustache. (Laughter) Essentially, I'm a mustache farmer. (Laughter) And my season is November. (Applause) (Applause)
So in 2005, the campaign got more momentum, was more successful in Australia and then New Zealand, and then in 2006 we came to a pivotal point. It was consuming so much of our time after hours on weekends that we thought, we either need to close this down or figure a way to fund Movember so that I could quit my job and go and spend more time in the organization and take it to the next level.
It's really interesting when you try and figure a way to fund a fundraising organization built off growing mustaches. (Laughter) Let me tell you that there's not too many people interested in investing in that, not even the Prostate Cancer Foundation, who we'd raised about 1.2 million dollars for at that stage. So again we persisted, and Foster's Brewing came to the party and gave us our first ever sponsorship, and that was enough for me to quit my job, I did consulting on the side. And leading into Movember 2006, we'd run through all the money from Foster's, we'd run through all the money I had, and essentially we had no money left, and we'd convinced all our suppliers -- creative agencies, web development agencies, hosting companies, whatnot -- to delay their billing until December. So we'd racked up at this stage about 600,000 dollars worth of debt. So if Movember 2006 didn't happen, the four founders, well, we would've been broke, we would've been homeless, sitting on the street with mustaches. (Laughter) But we thought, you know what, if that's the worst thing that happens, so what? We're going to have a lot of fun doing it, and it taught us the importance of taking risks and really smart risks.
Then in early 2007, a really interesting thing happened. We had Mo Bros from Canada, from the U.S., and from the U.K. emailing us and calling us and saying, hey, there's nothing for prostate cancer. Bring this campaign to these countries. So we thought, why not? Let's do it. So I cold-called the CEO of Prostate Cancer Canada, and I said to him, "I have this most amazing concept." (Laughter) "It's going to transform your organization. I don't want to tell you about it now, but will you meet with me if I fly all the way to Toronto?" So I flew here, met down on Front Street East, and we sat in the boardroom, and I said, "Right, here's my vision of getting men growing mustaches all across Canada raising awareness and funds for your organization." And he looked at me and laughed and said, "Adam, sounds like a really novel idea, but we're an ultraconservative organization." (Laughter) I've heard this before. I know how it goes. But he said, "We will partner with you, but we're not going to invest in it. You need to figure a way to bring this campaign across here and make it work."
So what we did was, we took some of the money that we raised in Australia to bring the campaign across to this country, the U.S, and the U.K., and we did that because we knew, if this was successful, we could raise infinitely more money globally than we could just in Australia. And that money fuels research, and that research will get us to a cure. And we're not about finding an Australian cure or a Canadian cure, we're about finding the cure.
So in 2007, we brought the campaign across here, and it was, it set the stage for the campaign. It wasn't as successful as we thought it would be. We were sort of very gung ho with our success in Australia and New Zealand at that stage. So that year really taught us the importance of being patient and really understanding the local market before you become so bold as to set lofty targets.
But what I'm really pleased to say is, in 2010, Movember became a truly global movement. Canada was just pipped to the post in terms of the number one fundraising campaign in the world. Last year we had 450,000 Mo Bros spread across the world and together we raised 77 million dollars. (Applause) And that makes Movember now the biggest funder of prostate cancer research and support programs in the world. And that is an amazing achievement when you think about us growing mustaches. (Laughter)
And for us, we have redefined charity. Our ribbon is a hairy ribbon. (Laughter) Our ambassadors are the Mo Bros and the Mo Sistas, and I think that's been fundamental to our success. We hand across our brand and our campaign to those people. We let them embrace it and interpret it in their own way.
So now I live in Los Angeles, because the Prostate Cancer Foundation of the U.S. is based there, and I always get asked by the media down there, because it's so celebrity-driven, "Who are your celebrity ambassadors?" And I say to them, "Last year we were fortunate enough to have 450,000 celebrity ambassadors." And they go, "What, what do you mean?" And it's like, everything single person, every single Mo Bro and Mo Sista that participates in Movember is our celebrity ambassador, and that is so, so important and fundamental to our success.
Now what I want to share with you is one of my most touching Movember moments, and it happened here in Toronto last year, at the end of the campaign. I was out with a team. It was the end of Movember. We'd had a great campaign, and to be honest, we'd had our fair share of beer that night, but I said, "You know what, I think we've got one more bar left in us." (Laughter) So we piled into a taxi, and this is our taxi driver, and I was sitting in the back seat, and he turned around and said, "Where are you going?" And I said, "Hang on, that is an amazing mustache." (Laughter) And he said, "I'm doing it for Movember." And I said, "So am I." And I said, "Tell me your Movember story." And he goes, "Listen, I know it's about men's health, I know it's about prostate cancer, but this is for breast cancer." And I said, "Okay, that's interesting." And he goes, "Last year, my mom passed away from breast cancer in Sri Lanka, because we couldn't afford proper treatment for her," and he said, "This mustache is my tribute to my mom." And we sort of all choked up in the back of the taxi, and I didn't tell him who I was, because I didn't think it was appropriate, and I just shook his hand and I said, "Thank you so much. Your mom would be so proud." And from that moment I realized that Movember is so much more than a mustache, having a joke. It's about each person coming to this platform, embracing it in their own way, and being significant in their own life.
For us now at Movember, we really focus on three program areas, and having a true impact: awareness and education, survivor support programs, and research. Now we always focus, naturally, on how much we raise, because it's a very tangible outcome, but for me, awareness and education is more important than the funds we raise, because I know that is changing and saving lives today, and it's probably best exampled by a young guy that I met at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, at the start of the year. He came up to me and said, "Thank you for starting Movember." And I said, "Thank you for doing Movember." And I looked at him, and I was like, "I'm pretty sure you can't grow a mustache." (Laughter) And I said, "What's your Movember story?" And he said, "I grew the worst mustache ever." (Laughter) "But I went home for Thanksgiving dinner, and pretty quickly the conversation around the table turned to what the hell was going on." (Laughter) "And we talked -- I talked to them about Movember, and then after that, my dad came up to me, and at the age of 26, for the first time ever, I had a conversation with my dad one on one about men's health. I had a conversation with my dad about prostate cancer, and I learned that my grandfather had prostate cancer and I was able to share with my dad that he was twice as likely to get that disease, and he didn't know that, and he hadn't been getting screened for it." So now, that guy is getting screened for prostate cancer.
So those conversations, getting men engaged in this, at whatever age, is so critically important, and in my view so much more important than the funds we raise.
Now to the funds we raise, and research, and how we're redefining research. We fund prostate cancer foundations now in 13 countries. We literally fund hundreds if not thousands of institutions and researchers around the world, and when we looked at this more recently, we realized there's a real lack of collaboration going on even within institutions, let alone nationally, let alone globally, and this is not unique to prostate cancer. This is cancer research the world over. And so we said, right, we'd redefined charity. We need to redefine the way these guys operate. How do we do that? So what we did was, we created a global action plan, and we're taking 10 percent of what's raised in each country now and putting it into a global fund, and we've got the best prostate cancer scientific minds in the world that look after that fund, and they come together each year and identify the number one priority, and that, last year, was getting a better screening test. So they identified that as a priority, and then they've got and recruited now 300 researchers from around the world that are studying that topic, essentially the same topic. So now we're funding them to the tune of about five or six million dollars to collaborate and bringing them together, and that's a unique thing in the cancer world, and we know, through that collaboration, it will accelerate outcomes. And that's how we're redefining the research world.
So, what I know about my Movember journey is that, with a really creative idea, with passion, with persistence, and a lot of patience, four mates, four mustaches, can inspire a room full of people, and that room full of people can go on and inspire a city, and that city is Melbourne, my home. And that city can go on and inspire a state, and that state can go on and inspire a nation, and beyond that, you can create a global movement that is changing the face of men's health.
My name is Adam Garone, and that's my story. Thank you. (Applause) |
I'm going to talk about compassion and the golden rule from a secular perspective and even from a kind of scientific perspective. I'm going to try to give you a little bit of a natural history of compassion and the golden rule. So, I'm going to be sometimes using kind of clinical language, and so it's not going to sound as warm and fuzzy as your average compassion talk. I want to warn you about that.
So, I do want to say, at the outset, that I think compassion's great. The golden rule is great. I'm a big supporter of both. And I think it's great that the leaders of the religions of the world are affirming compassion and the golden rule as fundamental principles that are integral to their faiths.
At the same time, I think religions don't deserve all the credit. I think nature gave them a helping hand here. I'm going to argue tonight that compassion and the golden rule are, in a certain sense, built into human nature. But I'm also going to argue that once you understand the sense in which they are built into human nature, you realize that just affirming compassion, and affirming the golden rule, is really not enough. There's a lot of work to be done after that.
OK so, a quick natural history, first of compassion. In the beginning, there was compassion, and I mean not just when human beings first showed up, but actually even before that. I think it's probably the case that, in the human evolutionary lineage, even before there were homo sapiens, feelings like compassion and love and sympathy had earned their way into the gene pool, and biologists have a pretty clear idea of how this first happened.
It happened through a principle known as kin selection. And the basic idea of kin selection is that, if an animal feels compassion for a close relative, and this compassion leads the animal to help the relative, then, in the end, the compassion actually winds up helping the genes underlying the compassion itself. So, from a biologist's point of view, compassion is actually a gene's way of helping itself. OK.
I warned you this was not going to be very warm and fuzzy. I'll get there -- I hope to get a little fuzzier. This doesn't bother me so much, that the underlying Darwinian rationale of compassion is kind of self-serving at the genetic level. Actually, I think the bad news about kin selection is just that it means that this kind of compassion is naturally deployed only within the family. That's the bad news. The good news is compassion is natural. The bad news is that this kin selected compassion is naturally confined to the family.
Now, there's more good news that came along later in evolution, a second kind of evolutionary logic. Biologists call that "reciprocal altruism." OK. And there, the basic idea is that compassion leads you to do good things for people who then will return the favor. Again, I know this is not as inspiring a notion of compassion as you may have heard in the past, but from a biologist's point of view, this reciprocal altruism kind of compassion is ultimately self-serving too. It's not that people think that, when they feel the compassion. It's not consciously self-serving, but to a biologist, that's the logic. And so, you wind up most easily extending compassion to friends and allies.
I'm sure a lot of you, if a close friend has something really terrible happen to them, you feel really bad. But if you read in the newspaper that something really horrible happened to somebody you've never heard of, you can probably live with that. That's just human nature. So, it's another good news/bad news story. It's good that compassion was extended beyond the family by this kind of evolutionary logic. The bad news is this doesn't bring us universal compassion by itself. So, there's still work to be done.
Now, there's one other result of this dynamic called reciprocal altruism, which I think is kind of good news, which is that the way that this is played out in the human species, it has given people an intuitive appreciation of the golden rule. I don't quite mean that the golden rule itself is written in our genes, but you can go to a hunter gatherer society that has had no exposure to any of the great religious traditions, no exposure to ethical philosophy, and you'll find, if you spend time with these people, that, basically, they believe that one good turn deserves another, and that bad deeds should be punished. And evolutionary psychologists think that these intuitions have a basis in the genes. So, they do understand that if you want to be treated well, you treat other people well. And it's good to treat other people well. That's close to being a kind of built-in intuition.
So, that's good news. Now, if you've been paying attention, you're probably anticipating that there's bad news here; we still aren't to universal love, and it's true because, although an appreciation of the golden rule is natural, it's also natural to carve out exceptions to the golden rule.
I mean, for example, none of us, probably, want to go to prison, but we all think that there are some people who should go to prison. Right? So, we think we should treat them differently than we would want to be treated. Now, we have a rationale for that. We say they did these bad things that make it just that they should go to prison.
None of us really extends the golden rule in truly diffuse and universal fashion. We have the capacity to carve out exceptions, put people in a special category. And the problem is that -- although in the case of sending people to prison, you have this impartial judiciary determining who gets excluded from the golden rule -- that in everyday life, the way we all make these decisions about who we're not going to extend the golden rule to, is we use a much rougher and readier formula. Basically it's just like, if you're my enemy, if you're my rival -- if you're not my friend, if you're not in my family -- I'm much less inclined to apply the golden rule to you.
We all do that, and you see it all over the world. You see it in the Middle East: people who, from Gaza, are firing missiles at Israel. They wouldn't want to have missiles fired at them, but they say, "Well, but the Israelis, or some of them have done things that put them in a special category." The Israelis would not want to have an economic blockade imposed on them, but they impose one on Gaza, and they say, "Well, the Palestinians, or some of them, have brought this on themselves."
So, it's these exclusions to the golden rule that amount to a lot of the world's trouble. And it's natural to do that. So, the fact that the golden rule is in some sense built in to us is not, by itself, going to bring us universal love. It's not going to save the world.
Now, there's one piece of good news I have that may save the world. Okay. Are you on the edges of your seats here? Good, because before I tell you about that good news, I'm going to have to take a little excursion through some academic terrain. So, I hope I've got your attention with this promise of good news that may save the world.
It's this non-zero-sumness stuff you just heard a little bit about. It's just a quick introduction to game theory. This won't hurt. Okay. It's about zero-sum and non-zero-sum games. If you ask what kind of a situation is conducive to people becoming friends and allies, the technical answer is a non-zero-sum situation. And if you ask what kind of situation is conducive to people defining people as enemies, it's a zero-sum situation.
So, what do those terms mean? Basically, a zero-sum game is the kind you're used to in sports, where there's a winner and a loser. So, their fortunes add up to zero. So, in tennis, every point is either good for you and bad for the other person, or good for them, bad for you. Either way, your fortunes add up to zero. That's a zero-sum game.
Now, if you're playing doubles, then the person on your side of the net is in a non-zero-sum relationship with you, because every point is either good for both of you -- positive, win-win -- or bad for both of you, it's lose-lose. That's a non-zero-sum game. And in real life, there are lots of non-zero-sum games. In the realm of economics, say, if you buy something: that means you'd rather have the merchandise than the money, but the merchant would rather have the money than the merchandise. You both feel you've won. In a war, two allies are playing a non-zero-sum game. It's going to either be win-win or lose-lose for them.
So, there are lots of non-zero-sum games in real life. And you could basically reformulate what I said earlier, about how compassion is deployed and the golden rule is deployed, by just saying, well, compassion most naturally flows along non-zero-sum channels where people perceive themselves as being in a potentially win-win situation with some of their friends or allies. The deployment of the golden rule most naturally happens along these non-zero-sum channels. So, kind of webs of non-zero-sumness are where you would expect compassion and the golden rule to kind of work their magic. With zero-sum channels you would expect something else.
Okay. So, now you're ready for the good news that I said might save the world. And now I can admit that it might not too, now that I've held your attention for three minutes of technical stuff. But it may. And the good news is that history has naturally expanded these webs of non-zero-sumness, these webs that can be these channels for compassion. You can go back all the way to the stone age: technological evolution -- roads, the wheel, writing, a lot of transportation and communication technologies -- has just inexorably made it so that more people can be in more non-zero-sum relationships with more and more people at greater and greater distances. That's the story of civilization. It's why social organization has grown from the hunter-gatherer village to the ancient state, the empire, and now here we are in a globalized world. And the story of globalization is largely a story of non-zero-sumness.
You've probably heard the term "interdependence" applied to the modern world. Well, that's just another term for non-zero-sum. If your fortunes are interdependent with somebody, then you live in a non-zero-sum relationship with them. And you see this all the time in the modern world. You saw it with the recent economic crash, where bad things happen in the economy -- bad for everybody, for much of the world. Good things happen, and it's good for much of the world.
And, you know, I'm happy to say, I think there's really evidence that this non-zero-sum kind of connection can expand the moral compass. I mean, if you look at the American attitudes toward Japanese during World War II -- look at the depictions of Japanese in the American media as just about subhuman, and look at the fact that we dropped atomic bombs, really without giving it much of a thought -- and you compare that to the attitude now, I think part of that is due to a kind of economic interdependence.
Any form of interdependence, or non-zero-sum relationship forces you to acknowledge the humanity of people. So, I think that's good. And the world is full of non-zero-sum dynamics. Environmental problems, in many ways, put us all in the same boat. And there are non-zero-sum relationships that maybe people aren't aware of.
For example, probably a lot of American Christians don't think of themselves as being in a non-zero-sum relationship with Muslims halfway around the world, but they really are, because if these Muslims become happier and happier with their place in the world and feel that they have a place in it, that's good for Americans, because there will be fewer terrorists to threaten American security. If they get less and less happy, that will be bad for Americans.
So, there's plenty of non-zero-sumness. And so, the question is: If there's so much non-zero-sumness, why has the world not yet been suffused in love, peace, and understanding? The answer's complicated. It's the occasion for a whole other talk. Certainly, a couple of things are that, first of all, there are a lot of zero-sum situations in the world. And also, sometimes people don't recognize the non-zero-sum dynamics in the world. In both of these areas, I think politicians can play a role.
This isn't only about religion. I think politicians can help foster non-zero-sum relationships, Economic engagement is generally better than blockades and so on, in this regard. And politicians can be aware, and should be aware that, when people around the world are looking at them, are looking at their nation and picking up their cues for whether they are in a zero-sum or a non-zero-sum relationship with a nation -- like, say, America, or any other nation -- human psychology is such that they use cues like: Do we feel we're being respected? Because, you know, historically, if you're not being respected, you're probably not going to wind up in a non-zero-sum, mutually profitable relationship with people. So, we need to be aware of what kind of signals we're sending out. And some of this, again, is in the realm of political work.
If there's one thing I can encourage everyone to do, politicians, religious leaders, and us, it would be what I call "expanding the moral imagination" -- that is to say, your ability to put yourself in the shoes of people in very different circumstances. This is not the same as compassion, but it's conducive to compassion. It opens the channels for compassion. And I'm afraid we have another good news/bad news story, which is that the moral imagination is part of human nature. That's good, but again we tend to deploy it selectively.
Once we define somebody as an enemy, we have trouble putting ourselves in their shoes, just naturally. So, if you want to take a particularly hard case for an American: somebody in Iran who is burning an American flag, and you see them on TV. Well, the average American is going to resist the moral exercise of putting themselves in that person's head and is going to resist the idea that they have much in common with that person. And if you tell them, "Well, they think America disrespects them and even wants to dominate them, and they hate America. Has there ever been somebody who disrespected you so much that you kind of hated them briefly"? You know, they'll resist that comparison and that's natural, that's human.
And, similarly, the person in Iran: when you try to humanize somebody in America who said that Islam is evil, they'll have trouble with that. So, it's a very difficult thing to get people to expand the moral imagination to a place it doesn't naturally go. I think it's worth the trouble because, again, it just helps us to understand. If you want to reduce the number of people who are burning flags, it helps to understand what makes them do it. And I think it's good moral exercise.
I would say here is where religious leaders come in, because religious leaders are good at reframing issues for people, at harnessing the emotional centers of the brain to get people to alter their awareness and reframe the way they think. I mean, religious leaders are kind of in the inspiration business. It's their great calling right now, to get people all around the world better at expanding their moral imaginations, appreciating that in so many ways they're in the same boat.
I would just sum up the way things look, at least from this secular perspective, as far as compassion and the golden rule go, by saying that it's good news that compassion and the golden rule are in some sense built into human nature. It's unfortunate that they tend to be selectively deployed. And it's going to take real work to change that. But, nobody ever said that doing God's work was going to be easy. Thanks. (Applause) |
How do you feed a city? It's one of the great questions of our time. Yet it's one that's rarely asked. We take it for granted that if we go into a shop or restaurant, or indeed into this theater's foyer in about an hour's time, there is going to be food there waiting for us, having magically come from somewhere.
But when you think that every day for a city the size of London, enough food has to be produced, transported, bought and sold, cooked, eaten, disposed of, and that something similar has to happen every day for every city on earth, it's remarkable that cities get fed at all.
We live in places like this as if they're the most natural things in the world, forgetting that because we're animals and that we need to eat, we're actually as dependent on the natural world as our ancient ancestors were. And as more of us move into cities, more of that natural world is being transformed into extraordinary landscapes like the one behind me -- it's soybean fields in Mato Grosso in Brazil -- in order to feed us. These are extraordinary landscapes, but few of us ever get to see them.
And increasingly these landscapes are not just feeding us either. As more of us move into cities, more of us are eating meat, so that a third of the annual grain crop globally now gets fed to animals rather than to us human animals. And given that it takes three times as much grain -- actually ten times as much grain -- to feed a human if it's passed through an animal first, that's not a very efficient way of feeding us.
And it's an escalating problem too. By 2050, it's estimated that twice the number of us are going to be living in cities. And it's also estimated that there is going to be twice as much meat and dairy consumed. So meat and urbanism are rising hand in hand. And that's going to pose an enormous problem. Six billion hungry carnivores to feed, by 2050. That's a big problem. And actually if we carry on as we are, it's a problem we're very unlikely to be able to solve.
Nineteen million hectares of rainforest are lost every year to create new arable land. Although at the same time we're losing an equivalent amount of existing arables to salinization and erosion. We're very hungry for fossil fuels too. It takes about 10 calories to produce every calorie of food that we consume in the West. And even though there is food that we are producing at great cost, we don't actually value it. Half the food produced in the USA is currently thrown away. And to end all of this, at the end of this long process, we're not even managing to feed the planet properly. A billion of us are obese, while a further billion starve. None of it makes very much sense.
And when you think that 80 percent of global trade in food now is controlled by just five multinational corporations, it's a grim picture. As we're moving into cities, the world is also embracing a Western diet. And if we look to the future, it's an unsustainable diet.
So how did we get here? And more importantly, what are we going to do about it? Well, to answer the slightly easier question first, about 10,000 years ago, I would say, is the beginning of this process in the ancient Near East, known as the Fertile Crescent. Because, as you can see, it was crescent shaped. And it was also fertile. And it was here, about 10,000 years ago, that two extraordinary inventions, agriculture and urbanism, happened roughly in the same place and at the same time.
This is no accident, because agriculture and cities are bound together. They need each other. Because it was discovery of grain by our ancient ancestors for the first time that produced a food source that was large enough and stable enough to support permanent settlements. And if we look at what those settlements were like, we see they were compact. They were surrounded by productive farm land and dominated by large temple complexes like this one at Ur, that were, in fact, effectively, spiritualized, central food distribution centers.
Because it was the temples that organized the harvest, gathered in the grain, offered it to the gods, and then offered the grain that the gods didn't eat back to the people. So, if you like, the whole spiritual and physical life of these cities was dominated by the grain and the harvest that sustained them. And in fact, that's true of every ancient city. But of course not all of them were that small. Famously, Rome had about a million citizens by the first century A.D. So how did a city like this feed itself? The answer is what I call "ancient food miles."
Basically, Rome had access to the sea, which made it possible for it to import food from a very long way away. This is the only way it was possible to do this in the ancient world, because it was very difficult to transport food over roads, which were rough. And the food obviously went off very quickly. So Rome effectively waged war on places like Carthage and Egypt just to get its paws on their grain reserves. And, in fact, you could say that the expansion of the Empire was really sort of one long, drawn out militarized shopping spree, really. (Laughter) In fact -- I love the fact, I just have to mention this: Rome in fact used to import oysters from London, at one stage. I think that's extraordinary.
So Rome shaped its hinterland through its appetite. But the interesting thing is that the other thing also happened in the pre-industrial world. If we look at a map of London in the 17th century, we can see that its grain, which is coming in from the Thames, along the bottom of this map. So the grain markets were to the south of the city. And the roads leading up from them to Cheapside, which was the main market, were also grain markets.
And if you look at the name of one of those streets, Bread Street, you can tell what was going on there 300 years ago. And the same of course was true for fish. Fish was, of course, coming in by river as well. Same thing. And of course Billingsgate, famously, was London's fish market, operating on-site here until the mid-1980s. Which is extraordinary, really, when you think about it. Everybody else was wandering around with mobile phones that looked like bricks and sort of smelly fish happening down on the port.
This is another thing about food in cities: Once its roots into the city are established, they very rarely move. Meat is a very different story because, of course, animals could walk into the city. So much of London's meat was coming from the northwest, from Scotland and Wales. So it was coming in, and arriving at the city at the northwest, which is why Smithfield, London's very famous meat market, was located up there. Poultry was coming in from East Anglia and so on, to the northeast. I feel a bit like a weather woman doing this. Anyway, and so the birds were coming in with their feet protected with little canvas shoes. And then when they hit the eastern end of Cheapside, that's where they were sold, which is why it's called Poultry.
And, in fact, if you look at the map of any city built before the industrial age, you can trace food coming in to it. You can actually see how it was physically shaped by food, both by reading the names of the streets, which give you a lot of clues. Friday Street, in a previous life, is where you went to buy your fish on a Friday. But also you have to imagine it full of food. Because the streets and the public spaces were the only places where food was bought and sold.
And if we look at an image of Smithfield in 1830 you can see that it would have been very difficult to live in a city like this and be unaware of where your food came from. In fact, if you were having Sunday lunch, the chances were it was mooing or bleating outside your window about three days earlier. So this was obviously an organic city, part of an organic cycle. And then 10 years later everything changed.
This is an image of the Great Western in 1840. And as you can see, some of the earliest train passengers were pigs and sheep. So all of a sudden, these animals are no longer walking into market. They're being slaughtered out of sight and mind, somewhere in the countryside. And they're coming into the city by rail. And this changes everything. To start off with, it makes it possible for the first time to grow cities, really any size and shape, in any place. Cities used to be constrained by geography; they used to have to get their food through very difficult physical means. All of a sudden they are effectively emancipated from geography.
And as you can see from these maps of London, in the 90 years after the trains came, it goes from being a little blob that was quite easy to feed by animals coming in on foot, and so on, to a large splurge, that would be very, very difficult to feed with anybody on foot, either animals or people. And of course that was just the beginning. After the trains came cars, and really this marks the end of this process. It's the final emancipation of the city from any apparent relationship with nature at all.
And this is the kind of city that's devoid of smell, devoid of mess, certainly devoid of people, because nobody would have dreamed of walking in such a landscape. In fact, what they did to get food was they got in their cars, drove to a box somewhere on the outskirts, came back with a week's worth of shopping, and wondered what on earth to do with it. And this really is the moment when our relationship, both with food and cities, changes completely.
Here we have food -- that used to be the center, the social core of the city -- at the periphery. It used to be a social event, buying and selling food. Now it's anonymous. We used to cook; now we just add water, or a little bit of an egg if you're making a cake or something. We don't smell food to see if it's okay to eat. We just read the back of a label on a packet. And we don't value food. We don't trust it. So instead of trusting it, we fear it. And instead of valuing it, we throw it away.
One of the great ironies of modern food systems is that they've made the very thing they promised to make easier much harder. By making it possible to build cities anywhere and any place, they've actually distanced us from our most important relationship, which is that of us and nature. And also they've made us dependent on systems that only they can deliver, that, as we've seen, are unsustainable.
So what are we going to do about that? It's not a new question. 500 years ago it's what Thomas More was asking himself. This is the frontispiece of his book "Utopia." And it was a series of semi-independent city-states, if that sounds remotely familiar, a day's walk from one another where everyone was basically farming-mad, and grew vegetables in their back gardens, and ate communal meals together, and so on. And I think you could argue that food is a fundamental ordering principle of Utopia, even though More never framed it that way.
And here is another very famous "Utopian" vision, that of Ebenezer Howard, "The Garden City." Same idea: series of semi-independent city-states, little blobs of metropolitan stuff with arable land around, joined to one another by railway. And again, food could be said to be the ordering principle of his vision. It even got built, but nothing to do with this vision that Howard had. And that is the problem with these Utopian ideas, that they are Utopian.
Utopia was actually a word that Thomas Moore used deliberately. It was a kind of joke, because it's got a double derivation from the Greek. It can either mean a good place, or no place. Because it's an ideal. It's an imaginary thing. We can't have it. And I think, as a conceptual tool for thinking about the very deep problem of human dwelling, that makes it not much use. So I've come up with an alternative, which is Sitopia, from the ancient Greek, "sitos" for food, and "topos" for place.
I believe we already live in Sitopia. We live in a world shaped by food, and if we realize that, we can use food as a really powerful tool -- a conceptual tool, design tool, to shape the world differently. So if we were to do that, what might Sitopia look like? Well I think it looks a bit like this. I have to use this slide. It's just the look on the face of the dog. But anyway, this is -- (Laughter) it's food at the center of life, at the center of family life, being celebrated, being enjoyed, people taking time for it. This is where food should be in our society.
But you can't have scenes like this unless you have people like this. By the way, these can be men as well. It's people who think about food, who think ahead, who plan, who can stare at a pile of raw vegetables and actually recognize them. We need these people. We're part of a network. Because without these kinds of people we can't have places like this. Here, I deliberately chose this because it is a man buying a vegetable. But networks, markets where food is being grown locally. It's common. It's fresh. It's part of the social life of the city. Because without that, you can't have this kind of place, food that is grown locally and also is part of the landscape, and is not just a zero-sum commodity off in some unseen hell-hole. Cows with a view. Steaming piles of humus. This is basically bringing the whole thing together.
And this is a community project I visited recently in Toronto. It's a greenhouse, where kids get told all about food and growing their own food. Here is a plant called Kevin, or maybe it's a plant belonging to a kid called Kevin. I don't know. But anyway, these kinds of projects that are trying to reconnect us with nature is extremely important.
So Sitopia, for me, is really a way of seeing. It's basically recognizing that Sitopia already exists in little pockets everywhere. The trick is to join them up, to use food as a way of seeing. And if we do that, we're going to stop seeing cities as big, metropolitan, unproductive blobs, like this. We're going to see them more like this, as part of the productive, organic framework of which they are inevitably a part, symbiotically connected. But of course, that's not a great image either, because we need not to be producing food like this anymore. We need to be thinking more about permaculture, which is why I think this image just sums up for me the kind of thinking we need to be doing. It's a re-conceptualization of the way food shapes our lives.
The best image I know of this is from 650 years ago. It's Ambrogio Lorenzetti's "Allegory of Good Government." It's about the relationship between the city and the countryside. And I think the message of this is very clear. If the city looks after the country, the country will look after the city. And I want us to ask now, what would Ambrogio Lorenzetti paint if he painted this image today? What would an allegory of good government look like today? Because I think it's an urgent question. It's one we have to ask, and we have to start answering. We know we are what we eat. We need to realize that the world is also what we eat. But if we take that idea, we can use food as a really powerful tool to shape the world better. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
It's an amazing thing that we're here to talk about the year of patients rising. You heard stories earlier today about patients who are taking control of their cases, patients who are saying, "You know what, I know what the odds are, but I'm going to go look for more information. I'm going to define what the terms of my success are." I'm going to be sharing with you how four years ago I almost died -- found out I was, in fact, already almost dead. And what I then found out about what's called the e-Patient movement -- I'll explain what that term means. I had been blogging under the name Patient Dave, and when I discovered this, I just renamed myself e-Patient Dave.
Regarding the word "patient," when I first started a few years ago getting involved in health care and attending meetings as just a casual observer, I noticed that people would talk about patients as if it was somebody who's not in the room here, somebody out there. Some of our talks today, we still act like that. But I'm here to tell you, "patient" is not a third-person word. You, yourself, will find yourself in a hospital bed -- or your mother, your child -- there are heads nodding, people who say, "Yes, I know exactly what you mean."
So when you hear what I'm going to talk about here today, first of all, I want to say that I am here on behalf of all the patients that I have ever met, all the ones I haven't met. This is about letting patients play a more active role in helping health care, in fixing health care. One of the senior doctors at my hospital, Charlie Safran, and his colleague, Warner Slack, have been saying for decades that the most underutilized resource in all of health care is the patient. They have been saying that since the 1970s.
Now I'm going to step back in history. This is from July, 1969. I was a freshman in college, and this was when we first landed on the Moon. And it was the first time we had ever seen from another surface -- that's the place where you and I are right now, where we live. The world was changing. It was about to change in ways that nobody could foresee. A few weeks later, Woodstock happened. Three days of fun and music. Here, just for historical authenticity, is a picture of me in that year. (Laughter) Yeah, the wavy hair, the blue eyes -- it was really something.
That Fall of 1969, the Whole Earth Catalog came out. It was a hippie journal of self-sufficiency. We think of hippies of being just hedonists, but there's a very strong component -- I was in that movement -- a very strong component of being responsible for yourself. This book's title's subtitle is: "Access to Tools." And it talked about how to build your own house, how to grow your own food, all kinds of things. In the 1980s, this young doctor, Tom Ferguson, was the medical editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. And he saw that the great majority of what we do in medicine and health care is taking care of ourselves. In fact, he said it was 70 to 80 percent of how we actually take care of our bodies. Well he also saw that when health care turns to medical care because of a more serious disease, the key thing that holds us back is access to information. And when the Web came along, that changed everything, because not only could we find information, we could find other people like ourselves who could gather, who could bring us information. And he coined this term e-Patients -- equipped, engaged, empowered, enabled. Obviously at this stage of life he was in a somewhat more dignified form than he was back then.
Now I was an engaged patient long before I ever heard of the term. In 2006, I went to my doctor for a regular physical, and I had said, "I have a sore shoulder." Well, I got an X-ray, and the next morning -- you may have noticed, those of you who have been through a medical crisis will understand this. This morning, some of the speakers named the date when they found out about their condition. For me, it was 9:00 AM on January 3, 2007. I was at the office; my desk was clean; I had the blue partition carpet on the walls. The phone rang and it was my doctor. He said, "Dave, I pulled up the X-ray image on the screen on the computer at home." He said, "Your shoulder's going to be fine, but Dave, there's something in your lung." And if you look in that red oval, that shadow was not supposed to be there. To make a long story short, I said, "So you need me to get back in there?" He said, "Yeah, we're going to need to do a CT scan of your chest." And in parting I said, "Is there anything I should do?" He said -- think about this one. This is the advice your doctor gives you: "just go home and have a glass of wine with your wife."
I went in for the CAT scan, and it turns out there were five of these things in both my lungs. So at that point we knew that it was cancer. We knew it wasn't lung cancer. That meant it was metastasized from somewhere. The question was, where from? So I went in for an ultrasound. I got to do what many women have -- the jelly on the belly and bzzzz. My wife came with me. She's a veterinarian, so she's seen lots of ultrasounds. I mean, she knows I'm not a dog. But what we saw -- this is an MRI image. This is much sharper than an ultrasound would be. What we saw in that kidney was that big blob there. And there were actually two of these. One was growing out the front and it had already erupted, and it latched onto the bowel. One was growing out the back, and it attached to the soleus muscle, which is a big muscle in the back that I'd never heard of, but all of a sudden I cared about it. I went home.
Now I've been Googling -- I've been online since 1989 on CompuServe. I went home, and I know you can't read the details here; that's not important. My point is I went to a respected medical website, WebMD, because I know how to filter out junk. I also found my wife online. Before I met her, I went through some suboptimal search results. (Laughter) So I looked for quality information. There's so much about trust -- what sources of information can we trust? Where does my body end and an invader start? And cancer, a tumor, is something you grow out of your own tissue. How does that happen? Where does medical ability end and start? Well, so what I read on WebMD: "The prognosis is poor for progressing renal cell cancer. Almost all patients are incurable." I've been online long enough to know if I don't like the first results I get, I go look for more. And what I found was on other websites, even by the third page of Google results, "Outlook is bleak", "Prognosis is grim." And I'm thinking, "What the heck?" I didn't feel sick at all. I mean, I'd been getting tired in the evening, but I was 56 years old. I was slowly losing weight, but for me, that was what the doctor told me to do. It was really something.
And this is the diagram of stage four kidney cancer from the drug I eventually got. Totally by coincidence, there's that thing in my lung. In the left femur, the left thigh bone, there's another one. I had one. My leg eventually snapped. I fainted and landed on it, and it broke. There's one in the skull, and then just for good measure, I had these other tumors -- including, by the time my treatment started, one was growing out of my tongue. I had kidney cancer growing out of my tongue. And what I read was that my median survival was 24 weeks. This was bad. I was facing the grave. I thought, "What's my mother's face going to look like on the day of my funeral?" I had to sit down with my daughter and say, "Here's the situation." Her boyfriend was with her. I said, "I don't want you guys to get married prematurely just so you can do it while Dad's still alive." It's really serious. Because if you wonder why patients are motivated and want to help, think about this.
Well, my doctor prescribed a patient community, Acor.org, a network of cancer patients, of all amazing things. Very quickly they told me, "Kidney cancer is an uncommon disease. Get yourself to a specialist center. There is no cure, but there's something that sometimes works -- it usually doesn't -- called high-dosage interleukin. Most hospitals don't offer it, so they won't even tell you it exists. And don't let them give you anything else first. And by the way, here are four doctors in your part of the United States who offer it and their phone numbers." How amazing is that?
(Applause)
Here's the thing. Here we are, four years later: you can't find a website that gives patients that information. Government-approved, American Cancer Society, but patients know what patients want to know. It's the power of patient networks. This amazing substance -- again I mentioned, where does my body end? My oncologist and I talk a lot these days because I try to keep my talks technically accurate. And he said, "You know, the immune system is good at detecting invaders -- bacteria coming from outside -- but when it's your own tissue that you've grown, it's a whole different thing." And I went through a mental exercise actually, because I started a patient support community of my own on a website, and one of my friends, one of my relatives actually, said, "Look, Dave, who grew this thing? Are you going to set yourself up as mentally attacking yourself?" So we went into it. And the story of how all that happens is in this book.
Anyway, this is the way the numbers unfolded. Me being me, I put the numbers from my hospital's website from my tumor sizes into a spreadsheet. Don't worry about the numbers. You see, that's the immune system. Amazing thing, those two yellow lines are where I got the two doses of interleukin two months apart. And look at how the tumor sizes plummeted in between. Just incredible. Who knows what we'll be able to do when we learn to make more use of it.
The punch line is that a year and a half later, I was there when this magnificent young woman, my daughter, got married. And when she came down those steps, and it was just her and me for that moment, I was so glad that she didn't have to say to her mother, "I wish Dad could have been here." And this is what we're doing when we make health care better.
Now I want to talk briefly about a couple of other patients who are doing everything in their power to improve health care. This is Regina Holliday, a painter in Washington D.C., whose husband died of kidney cancer a year after my disease. She's painting here a mural of his horrible final weeks in the hospital. One of the things that she discovered was that her husband's medical record in this paper folder was just disorganized. And she thought, "You know, if I have a nutrition facts label on the side of a cereal box, why can't there be something that simple telling every new nurse who comes on duty, every new doctor, the basics about my husband's condition?" So she painted this medical facts mural with a nutrition label, something like that, in a diagram of him. She then, last year, painted this diagram.
She studied health care like me. She came to realize that there were a lot of people who'd written patient advocate books that you just don't hear about at medical conferences. Patients are such an underutilized resource. Well as it says in my introduction, I've gotten somewhat known for saying that patients should have access to their data. And I actually said at one conference a couple of years ago, "Give me my damn data, because you people can't be trusted to keep it clean." And here she has our damned data -- it's a pun -- which is starting to break out, starting to break through -- the water symbolizes our data.
And in fact, I want to do a little something improvisational for you here. There's a guy on Twitter that I know, a health IT guy outside Boston, and he wrote the e-Patient rap. And it goes like this. ♫ Gimme my damn data ♫ ♫ I want to be an e-Patient just like Dave ♫ ♫ Gimme my damn data, cuz it's my life to save ♫ Now I'm not going to go any further. (Applause) Well thank you. That shot the timing.
(Laughter)
Think about the possibility, why is it that iPhones and iPads advance far faster than the health tools that are available to you to help take care of your family? Here's a website, VisibleBody.com, that I stumbled across. And I thought, "You know, I wonder what my soleus muscle is?" So you can click on things and remove it. And I saw, "Aha, that's the kidney and the soleus muscle." And I was rotating it in 3D and saying, "I understand now." And then I realized it reminded me of Google Earth, where you can fly to any address. And I thought, "Why not take this and connect it to my digital scan data and have Google Earth for my body?" What did Google come out with this year? Now there's Google Body browser. But you see, it's still generic. It's not my data. But if we can get that data out from behind the dam so software innovators can pounce on it, the way software innovators like to do, who knows what we'll be able to come up with.
One final story: this is Kelly Young, a rheumatoid arthritis patient from Florida. This is a live story unfolding just in the last few weeks. RA patients, as they call themselves -- her blog is RA Warrior -- have a big problem because 40 percent of them have no visible symptoms. And that makes it just really hard to tell how the disease is going. And some doctors think, "Yeah right, you're really in pain." Well she found, through her online research, a nuclear bone scan that's usually used for cancer, but it can also reveal inflammation. And she saw that if there is no inflammation then the scan is a uniform gray. So she took it. And the radiologist report said, "No cancer found." Well that's not what he was supposed to do with it. So she had it read again, she wanted to have it read again, and her doctor fired her. She pulled up the CD. He said, "If you don't want to follow my instructions, go away." So she pulled up the CD of the scan images, and look at all those hot spots. And she's now actively engaged on her blog in looking for assistance in getting better care. See, that is an empowered patient -- no medical training.
We are, you are, the most underused resource in health care. What she was able to do was because she had access to the raw data. How big a deal was this? Well at TED2009, Tim Berners-Lee himself, inventor of the Web, gave a talk where he said the next big thing is not to have your browser go out and find other people's articles about the data, but the raw data. And he got them chanting by the end of the talk, "Raw data now. Raw data now." And I ask you, three words, please, to improve health care: let patients help. Let patients help. Let patients help. Let patients help.
Thank you.
(Applause)
For all the patients around the world watching this on the webcast, God bless you, everyone -- let patients help.
Host: And bless yourself. Thank you very much. |
Well, indeed, I'm very, very lucky. My talk essentially got written by three historic events that happened within days of each other in the last two months -- seemingly unrelated, but as you will see, actually all having to do with the story I want to tell you today. The first one was actually a funeral -- to be more precise, a reburial. On May 22nd, there was a hero's reburial in Frombork, Poland of the 16th-century astronomer who actually changed the world. He did that, literally, by replacing the Earth with the Sun in the center of the Solar System, and then with this simple-looking act, he actually launched a scientific and technological revolution, which many call the Copernican Revolution. Now that was, ironically, and very befittingly, the way we found his grave. As it was the custom of the time, Copernicus was actually simply buried in an unmarked grave, together with 14 others in that cathedral. DNA analysis, one of the hallmarks of the scientific revolution of the last 400 years that he started, was the way we found which set of bones actually belonged to the person who read all those astronomical books which were filled with leftover hair that was Copernicus' hair -- obviously not many other people bothered to read these books later on. That match was unambiguous. The DNA matched, and we know that this was indeed Nicolaus Copernicus.
Now, the connection between biology and DNA and life is very tantalizing when you talk about Copernicus because, even back then, his followers very quickly made the logical step to ask: if the Earth is just a planet, then what about planets around other stars? What about the idea of the plurality of the worlds, about life on other planets? In fact, I'm borrowing here from one of those very popular books of the time. And at the time, people actually answered that question positively: "Yes." But there was no evidence. And here begins 400 years of frustration, of unfulfilled dreams -- the dreams of Galileo, Giordano Bruno, many others -- which never led to the answer of those very basic questions which humanity has asked all the time. "What is life? What is the origin of life? Are we alone?" And that especially happened in the last 10 years, at the end of the 20th century, when the beautiful developments due to molecular biology, understanding the code of life, DNA, all of that seemed to actually put us, not closer, but further apart from answering those basic questions.
Now, the good news. A lot has happened in the last few years, and let's start with the planets. Let's start with the old Copernican question: Are there earths around other stars? And as we already heard, there is a way in which we are trying, and now able, to answer that question. It's a new telescope. Our team, befittingly I think, named it after one of those dreamers of the Copernican time, Johannes Kepler, and that telescope's sole purpose is to go out, find the planets that orbit other stars in our galaxy, and tell us how often do planets like our own Earth happen to be out there. The telescope is actually built similarly to the, well-known to you, Hubble Space Telescope, except it does have an additional lens -- a wide-field lens, as you would call it as a photographer. And if, in the next couple of months, you walk out in the early evening and look straight up and place you palm like this, you will actually be looking at the field of the sky where this telescope is searching for planets day and night, without any interruption, for the next four years.
The way we do that, actually, is with a method, which we call the transit method. It's actually mini-eclipses that occur when a planet passes in front of its star. Not all of the planets will be fortuitously oriented for us to be able do that, but if you have a million stars, you'll find enough planets. And as you see on this animation, what Kepler is going to detect is just the dimming of the light from the star. We are not going to see the image of the star and the planet as this. All the stars for Kepler are just points of light. But we learn a lot from that: not only that there is a planet there, but we also learn its size. How much of the light is being dimmed depends on how big the planet is. We learn about its orbit, the period of its orbit and so on. So, what have we learned? Well, let me try to walk you through what we actually see and so you understand the news that I'm here to tell you today.
What Kepler does is discover a lot of candidates, which we then follow up and find as planets, confirm as planets. It basically tells us this is the distribution of planets in size. There are small planets, there are bigger planets, there are big planets, okay. So we count many, many such planets, and they have different sizes. We do that in our solar system. In fact, even back during the ancients, the Solar System in that sense would look on a diagram like this. There will be the smaller planets, and there will be the big planets, even back to the time of Epicurus and then of course Copernicus and his followers. Up until recently, that was the Solar System -- four Earth-like planets with small radius, smaller than about two times the size of the Earth -- and that was of course Mercury, Venus, Mars, and of course the Earth, and then the two big, giant planets. Then the Copernican Revolution brought in telescopes, and of course three more planets were discovered. Now the total planet number in our solar system was nine. The small planets dominated, and there was a certain harmony to that, which actually Copernicus was very happy to note, and Kepler was one of the big proponents of. So now we have Pluto to join the numbers of small planets. But up until, literally, 15 years ago, that was all we knew about planets. And that's what the frustration was. The Copernican dream was unfulfilled.
Finally, 15 years ago, the technology came to the point where we could discover a planet around another star, and we actually did pretty well. In the next 15 years, almost 500 planets were discovered orbiting other stars, with different methods. Unfortunately, as you can see, there was a very different picture. There was of course an explanation for it: We only see the big planets, so that's why most of those planets are really in the category of "like Jupiter." But you see, we haven't gone very far. We were still back where Copernicus was. We didn't have any evidence whether planets like the Earth are out there. And we do care about planets like the Earth because by now we understood that life as a chemical system really needs a smaller planet with water and with rocks and with a lot of complex chemistry to originate, to emerge, to survive. And we didn't have the evidence for that.
So today, I'm here to actually give you a first glimpse of what the new telescope, Kepler, has been able to tell us in the last few weeks, and, lo and behold, we are back to the harmony and to fulfilling the dreams of Copernicus. You can see here, the small planets dominate the picture. The planets which are marked "like Earth," [are] definitely more than any other planets that we see. And now for the first time, we can say that. There is a lot more work we need to do with this. Most of these are candidates. In the next few years we will confirm them. But the statistical result is loud and clear. And the statistical result is that planets like our own Earth are out there. Our own Milky Way Galaxy is rich in this kind of planets.
So the question is: what do we do next? Well, first of all, we can study them now that we know where they are. And we can find those that we would call habitable, meaning that they have similar conditions to the conditions that we experience here on Earth and where a lot of complex chemistry can happen. So, we can even put a number to how many of those planets now do we expect our own Milky Way Galaxy harbors. And the number, as you might expect, is pretty staggering. It's about 100 million such planets. That's great news. Why? Because with our own little telescope, just in the next two years, we'll be able to identify at least 60 of them. So that's great because then we can go and study them -- remotely, of course -- with all the techniques that we already have tested in the past five years. We can find what they're made of, would their atmospheres have water, carbon dioxide, methane. We know and expect that we'll see that.
That's great, but that is not the whole news. That's not why I'm here. Why I'm here is to tell you that the next step is really the exciting part. The one that this step is enabling us to do is coming next. And here comes biology -- biology, with its basic question, which still stands unanswered, which is essentially: "If there is life on other planets, do we expect it to be like life on Earth?" And let me immediately tell you here, when I say life, I don't mean "dolce vita," good life, human life. I really mean life on Earth, past and present, from microbes to us humans, in its rich molecular diversity, the way we now understand life on Earth as being a set of molecules and chemical reactions -- and we call that, collectively, biochemistry, life as a chemical process, as a chemical phenomenon.
So the question is: is that chemical phenomenon universal, or is it something which depends on the planet? Is it like gravity, which is the same everywhere in the universe, or there would be all kinds of different biochemistries wherever we find them? We need to know what we are looking for when we try to do that. And that's a very basic question, which we don't know the answer to, but which we can try -- and we are trying -- to answer in the lab. We don't need to go to space to answer that question. And so, that's what we are trying to do. And that's what many people now are trying to do. And a lot of the good news comes from that part of the bridge that we are trying to build as well.
So this is one example that I want to show you here. When we think of what is necessary for the phenomenon that we call life, we think of compartmentalization, keeping the molecules which are important for life in a membrane, isolated from the rest of the environment, but yet, in an environment in which they actually could originate together. And in one of our labs, Jack Szostak's labs, it was a series of experiments in the last four years that showed that the environments -- which are very common on planets, on certain types of planets like the Earth, where you have some liquid water and some clays -- you actually end up with naturally available molecules which spontaneously form bubbles. But those bubbles have membranes very similar to the membrane of every cell of every living thing on Earth looks like, like this. And they really help molecules, like nucleic acids, like RNA and DNA, stay inside, develop, change, divide and do some of the processes that we call life.
Now this is just an example to tell you the pathway in which we are trying to answer that bigger question about the universality of the phenomenon. And in a sense, you can think of that work that people are starting to do now around the world as building a bridge, building a bridge from two sides of the river. On one hand, on the left bank of the river, are the people like me who study those planets and try to define the environments. We don't want to go blind because there's too many possibilities, and there is not too much lab, and there is not enough human time to actually to do all the experiments. So that's what we are building from the left side of the river. From the right bank of the river are the experiments in the lab that I just showed you, where we actually tried that, and it feeds back and forth, and we hope to meet in the middle one day.
So why should you care about that? Why am I trying to sell you a half-built bridge? Am I that charming? Well, there are many reasons, and you heard some of them in the short talk today. This understanding of chemistry actually can help us with our daily lives. But there is something more profound here, something deeper. And that deeper, underlying point is that science is in the process of redefining life as we know it. And that is going to change our worldview in a profound way -- not in a dissimilar way as 400 years ago, Copernicus' act did, by changing the way we view space and time. Now it's about something else, but it's equally profound. And half the time, what's happened is it's related this kind of sense of insignificance to humankind, to the Earth in a bigger space. And the more we learn, the more that was reinforced. You've all learned that in school -- how small the Earth is compared to the immense universe. And the bigger the telescope, the bigger that universe becomes. And look at this image of the tiny, blue dot. This pixel is the Earth. It is the Earth as we know it. It is seen from, in this case, from outside the orbit of Saturn. But it's really tiny. We know that. Let's think of life as that entire planet because, in a sense, it is. The biosphere is the size of the Earth. Life on Earth is the size of the Earth. And let's compare it to the rest of the world in spatial terms. What if that Copernican insignificance was actually all wrong? Would that make us more responsible for what is happening today? Let's actually try that.
So in space, the Earth is very small. Can you imagine how small it is? Let me try it. Okay, let's say this is the size of the observable universe, with all the galaxies, with all the stars, okay, from here to here. Do you know what the size of life in this necktie will be? It will be the size of a single, small atom. It is unimaginably small. We can't imagine it. I mean look, you can see the necktie, but you can't even imagine seeing the size of a little, small atom. But that's not the whole story, you see. The universe and life are both in space and time. If that was the age of the universe, then this is the age of life on Earth. Think about those oldest living things on Earth, but in a cosmic proportion. This is not insignificant. This is very significant. So life might be insignificant in size, but it is not insignificant in time. Life and the universe compare to each other like a child and a parent, parent and offspring.
So what does this tell us? This tells us that that insignificance paradigm that we somehow got to learn from the Copernican principle, it's all wrong. There is immense, powerful potential in life in this universe -- especially now that we know that places like the Earth are common. And that potential, that powerful potential, is also our potential, of you and me. And if we are to be stewards of our planet Earth and its biosphere, we'd better understand the cosmic significance and do something about it. And the good news is we can actually, indeed do it. And let's do it. Let's start this new revolution at the tail end of the old one, with synthetic biology being the way to transform both our environment and our future. And let's hope that we can build this bridge together and meet in the middle.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) |
I'm here to tell you about the real search for alien life. Not little green humanoids arriving in shiny UFOs, although that would be nice. But it's the search for planets orbiting stars far away.
Every star in our sky is a sun. And if our sun has planets -- Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, etc., surely those other stars should have planets also, and they do. And in the last two decades, astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets.
Our night sky is literally teeming with exoplanets. We know, statistically speaking, that every star has at least one planet. And in the search for planets, and in the future, planets that might be like Earth, we're able to help address some of the most amazing and mysterious questions that have faced humankind for centuries. Why are we here? Why does our universe exist? How did Earth form and evolve? How and why did life originate and populate our planet? The second question that we often think about is: Are we alone? Is there life out there? Who is out there? You know, this question has been around for thousands of years, since at least the time of the Greek philosophers. But I'm here to tell you just how close we're getting to finding out the answer to this question. It's the first time in human history that this really is within reach for us.
Now when I think about the possibilities for life out there, I think of the fact that our sun is but one of many stars. This is a photograph of a real galaxy, we think our Milky Way looks like this galaxy. It's a collection of bound stars. But our [sun] is one of hundreds of billions of stars and our galaxy is one of upwards of hundreds of billions of galaxies. Knowing that small planets are very common, you can just do the math. And there are just so many stars and so many planets out there, that surely, there must be life somewhere out there. Well, the biologists get furious with me for saying that, because we have absolutely no evidence for life beyond Earth yet.
Well, if we were able to look at our galaxy from the outside and zoom in to where our sun is, we see a real map of the stars. And the highlighted stars are those with known exoplanets. This is really just the tip of the iceberg. Here, this animation is zooming in onto our solar system. And you'll see here the planets as well as some spacecraft that are also orbiting our sun. Now if we can imagine going to the West Coast of North America, and looking out at the night sky, here's what we'd see on a spring night. And you can see the constellations overlaid and again, so many stars with planets. There's a special patch of the sky where we have thousands of planets.
This is where the Kepler Space Telescope focused for many years. Let's zoom in and look at one of the favorite exoplanets. This star is called Kepler-186f. It's a system of about five planets. And by the way, most of these exoplanets, we don't know too much about. We know their size, and their orbit and things like that. But there's a very special planet here called Kepler-186f. This planet is in a zone that is not too far from the star, so that the temperature may be just right for life. Here, the artist's conception is just zooming in and showing you what that planet might be like.
So, many people have this romantic notion of astronomers going to the telescope on a lonely mountaintop and looking at the spectacular night sky through a big telescope. But actually, we just work on our computers like everyone else, and we get our data by email or downloading from a database. So instead of coming here to tell you about the somewhat tedious nature of the data and data analysis and the complex computer models we make, I have a different way to try to explain to you some of the things that we're thinking about exoplanets.
Here's a travel poster: "Kepler-186f: Where the grass is always redder on the other side." That's because Kepler-186f orbits a red star, and we're just speculating that perhaps the plants there, if there is vegetation that does photosynthesis, it has different pigments and looks red. "Enjoy the gravity on HD 40307g, a Super-Earth." This planet is more massive than Earth and has a higher surface gravity. "Relax on Kepler-16b, where your shadow always has company." (Laughter) We know of a dozen planets that orbit two stars, and there's likely many more out there. If we could visit one of those planets, you literally would see two sunsets and have two shadows. So actually, science fiction got some things right. Tatooine from Star Wars. And I have a couple of other favorite exoplanets to tell you about. This one is Kepler-10b, it's a hot, hot planet. It orbits over 50 times closer to its star than our Earth does to our sun. And actually, it's so hot, we can't visit any of these planets, but if we could, we would melt long before we got there. We think the surface is hot enough to melt rock and has liquid lava lakes.
Gliese 1214b. This planet, we know the mass and the size and it has a fairly low density. It's somewhat warm. We actually don't know really anything about this planet, but one possibility is that it's a water world, like a scaled-up version of one of Jupiter's icy moons that might be 50 percent water by mass. And in this case, it would have a thick steam atmosphere overlaying an ocean, not of liquid water, but of an exotic form of water, a superfluid -- not quite a gas, not quite a liquid. And under that wouldn't be rock, but a form of high-pressure ice, like ice IX.
So out of all these planets out there, and the variety is just simply astonishing, we mostly want to find the planets that are Goldilocks planets, we call them. Not too big, not too small, not too hot, not too cold -- but just right for life. But to do that, we'd have to be able to look at the planet's atmosphere, because the atmosphere acts like a blanket trapping heat -- the greenhouse effect. We have to be able to assess the greenhouse gases on other planets. Well, science fiction got some things wrong. The Star Trek Enterprise had to travel vast distances at incredible speeds to orbit other planets so that First Officer Spock could analyze the atmosphere to see if the planet was habitable or if there were lifeforms there.
Well, we don't need to travel at warp speeds to see other planet atmospheres, although I don't want to dissuade any budding engineers from figuring out how to do that. We actually can and do study planet atmospheres from here, from Earth orbit. This is a picture, a photograph of the Hubble Space Telescope taken by the shuttle Atlantis as it was departing after the last human space flight to Hubble. They installed a new camera, actually, that we use for exoplanet atmospheres. And so far, we've been able to study dozens of exoplanet atmospheres, about six of them in great detail. But those are not small planets like Earth. They're big, hot planets that are easy to see. We're not ready, we don't have the right technology yet to study small exoplanets. But nevertheless, I wanted to try to explain to you how we study exoplanet atmospheres.
I want you to imagine, for a moment, a rainbow. And if we could look at this rainbow closely, we would see that some dark lines are missing. And here's our sun, the white light of our sun split up, not by raindrops, but by a spectrograph. And you can see all these dark, vertical lines. Some are very narrow, some are wide, some are shaded at the edges. And this is actually how astronomers have studied objects in the heavens, literally, for over a century. So here, each different atom and molecule has a special set of lines, a fingerprint, if you will. And that's how we study exoplanet atmospheres. And I'll just never forget when I started working on exoplanet atmospheres 20 years ago, how many people told me, "This will never happen. We'll never be able to study them. Why are you bothering?" And that's why I'm pleased to tell you about all the atmospheres studied now, and this is really a field of its own. So when it comes to other planets, other Earths, in the future when we can observe them, what kind of gases would we be looking for? Well, you know, our own Earth has oxygen in the atmosphere to 20 percent by volume. That's a lot of oxygen. But without plants and photosynthetic life, there would be no oxygen, virtually no oxygen in our atmosphere. So oxygen is here because of life. And our goal then is to look for gases in other planet atmospheres, gases that don't belong, that we might be able to attribute to life. But which molecules should we search for? I actually told you how diverse exoplanets are. We expect that to continue in the future when we find other Earths.
And that's one of the main things I'm working on now, I have a theory about this. It reminds me that nearly every day, I receive an email or emails from someone with a crazy theory about physics of gravity or cosmology or some such. So, please don't email me one of your crazy theories. (Laughter) Well, I had my own crazy theory. But, who does the MIT professor go to? Well, I emailed a Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine and he said, "Sure, come and talk to me." So I brought my two biochemistry friends and we went to talk to him about our crazy theory. And that theory was that life produces all small molecules, so many molecules. Like, everything I could think of, but not being a chemist. Think about it: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, molecular hydrogen, molecular nitrogen, methane, methyl chloride -- so many gases. They also exist for other reasons, but just life even produces ozone. So we go to talk to him about this, and immediately, he shot down the theory. He found an example that didn't exist. So, we went back to the drawing board and we think we have found something very interesting in another field.
But back to exoplanets, the point is that life produces so many different types of gases, literally thousands of gases. And so what we're doing now is just trying to figure out on which types of exoplanets, which gases could be attributed to life. And so when it comes time when we find gases in exoplanet atmospheres that we won't know if they're being produced by intelligent aliens or by trees, or a swamp, or even just by simple, single-celled microbial life.
So working on the models and thinking about biochemistry, it's all well and good. But a really big challenge ahead of us is: how? How are we going to find these planets? There are actually many ways to find planets, several different ways. But the one that I'm most focused on is how can we open a gateway so that in the future, we can find hundreds of Earths. We have a real shot at finding signs of life. And actually, I just finished leading a two-year project in this very special phase of a concept we call the starshade. And the starshade is a very specially shaped screen and the goal is to fly that starshade so it blocks out the light of a star so that the telescope can see the planets directly. Here, you can see myself and two team members holding up one small part of the starshade. It's shaped like a giant flower, and this is one of the prototype petals. The concept is that a starshade and telescope could launch together, with the petals unfurling from the stowed position. The central truss would expand, with the petals snapping into place. Now, this has to be made very precisely, literally, the petals to microns and they have to deploy to millimeters. And this whole structure would have to fly tens of thousands of kilometers away from the telescope. It's about tens of meters in diameter. And the goal is to block out the starlight to incredible precision so that we'd be able to see the planets directly. And it has to be a very special shape, because of the physics of defraction. Now this is a real project that we worked on, literally, you would not believe how hard. Just so you believe it's not just in movie format, here's a real photograph of a second-generation starshade deployment test bed in the lab. And in this case, I just wanted you to know that that central truss has heritage left over from large radio deployables in space.
So after all of that hard work where we try to think of all the crazy gases that might be out there, and we build the very complicated space telescopes that might be out there, what are we going to find? Well, in the best case, we will find an image of another exo-Earth. Here is Earth as a pale blue dot. And this is actually a real photograph of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, four billion miles away. And that red light is just scattered light in the camera optics.
But what's so awesome to consider is that if there are intelligent aliens orbiting on a planet around a star near to us and they build complicated space telescopes of the kind that we're trying to build, all they'll see is this pale blue dot, a pinprick of light. And so sometimes, when I pause to think about my professional struggle and huge ambition, it's hard to think about that in contrast to the vastness of the universe. But nonetheless, I am devoting the rest of my life to finding another Earth.
And I can guarantee
that in the next generation of space telescopes, in the second generation, we will have the capability to find and identity other Earths. And the capability to split up the starlight so that we can look for gases and assess the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, estimate the surface temperature, and look for signs of life.
But there's more. In this case of searching for other planets like Earth, we are making a new kind of map of the nearby stars and of the planets orbiting them, including [planets] that actually might be inhabitable by humans.
And so I envision that our descendants, hundreds of years from now, will embark on an interstellar journey to other worlds. And they will look back at all of us as the generation who first found the Earth-like worlds.
Thank you.
(Applause)
June Cohen: And I give you, for a question, Rosetta Mission Manager Fred Jansen.
Fred Jansen: You mentioned halfway through that the technology to actually look at the spectrum of an exoplanet like Earth is not there yet. When do you expect this will be there, and what's needed?
Actually, what we expect is what we call our next-generation Hubble telescope. And this is called the James Webb Space Telescope, and that will launch in 2018, and that's what we're going to do, we're going to look at a special kind of planet called transient exoplanets, and that will be our first shot at studying small planets for gases that might indicate the planet is habitable.
JC: I'm going to ask you one follow-up question, too, Sara, as the generalist. So I am really struck by the notion in your career of the opposition you faced, that when you began thinking about exoplanets, there was extreme skepticism in the scientific community that they existed, and you proved them wrong. What did it take to take that on?
SS: Well, the thing is that as scientists, we're supposed to be skeptical, because our job to make sure that what the other person is saying actually makes sense or not. But being a scientist, I think you've seen it from this session, it's like being an explorer. You have this immense curiosity, this stubbornness, this sort of resolute will that you will go forward no matter what other people say.
JC: I love that. Thank you, Sara.
(Applause) |
I'm here to tell you about the real search for alien life. Not little green humanoids arriving in shiny UFOs, although that would be nice. But it's the search for planets orbiting stars far away.
Every star in our sky is a sun. And if our sun has planets -- Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, etc., surely those other stars should have planets also, and they do. And in the last two decades, astronomers have found thousands of exoplanets.
Our night sky is literally teeming with exoplanets. We know, statistically speaking, that every star has at least one planet. And in the search for planets, and in the future, planets that might be like Earth, we're able to help address some of the most amazing and mysterious questions that have faced humankind for centuries. Why are we here? Why does our universe exist? How did Earth form and evolve? How and why did life originate and populate our planet? The second question that we often think about is: Are we alone? Is there life out there? Who is out there? You know, this question has been around for thousands of years, since at least the time of the Greek philosophers. But I'm here to tell you just how close we're getting to finding out the answer to this question. It's the first time in human history that this really is within reach for us.
Now when I think about the possibilities for life out there, I think of the fact that our sun is but one of many stars. This is a photograph of a real galaxy, we think our Milky Way looks like this galaxy. It's a collection of bound stars. But our [sun] is one of hundreds of billions of stars and our galaxy is one of upwards of hundreds of billions of galaxies. Knowing that small planets are very common, you can just do the math. And there are just so many stars and so many planets out there, that surely, there must be life somewhere out there. Well, the biologists get furious with me for saying that, because we have absolutely no evidence for life beyond Earth yet.
Well, if we were able to look at our galaxy from the outside and zoom in to where our sun is, we see a real map of the stars. And the highlighted stars are those with known exoplanets. This is really just the tip of the iceberg. Here, this animation is zooming in onto our solar system. And you'll see here the planets as well as some spacecraft that are also orbiting our sun. Now if we can imagine going to the West Coast of North America, and looking out at the night sky, here's what we'd see on a spring night. And you can see the constellations overlaid and again, so many stars with planets. There's a special patch of the sky where we have thousands of planets.
This is where the Kepler Space Telescope focused for many years. Let's zoom in and look at one of the favorite exoplanets. This star is called Kepler-186f. It's a system of about five planets. And by the way, most of these exoplanets, we don't know too much about. We know their size, and their orbit and things like that. But there's a very special planet here called Kepler-186f. This planet is in a zone that is not too far from the star, so that the temperature may be just right for life. Here, the artist's conception is just zooming in and showing you what that planet might be like.
So, many people have this romantic notion of astronomers going to the telescope on a lonely mountaintop and looking at the spectacular night sky through a big telescope. But actually, we just work on our computers like everyone else, and we get our data by email or downloading from a database. So instead of coming here to tell you about the somewhat tedious nature of the data and data analysis and the complex computer models we make, I have a different way to try to explain to you some of the things that we're thinking about exoplanets.
Here's a travel poster: "Kepler-186f: Where the grass is always redder on the other side." That's because Kepler-186f orbits a red star, and we're just speculating that perhaps the plants there, if there is vegetation that does photosynthesis, it has different pigments and looks red. "Enjoy the gravity on HD 40307g, a Super-Earth." This planet is more massive than Earth and has a higher surface gravity. "Relax on Kepler-16b, where your shadow always has company." (Laughter) We know of a dozen planets that orbit two stars, and there's likely many more out there. If we could visit one of those planets, you literally would see two sunsets and have two shadows. So actually, science fiction got some things right. Tatooine from Star Wars. And I have a couple of other favorite exoplanets to tell you about. This one is Kepler-10b, it's a hot, hot planet. It orbits over 50 times closer to its star than our Earth does to our sun. And actually, it's so hot, we can't visit any of these planets, but if we could, we would melt long before we got there. We think the surface is hot enough to melt rock and has liquid lava lakes.
Gliese 1214b. This planet, we know the mass and the size and it has a fairly low density. It's somewhat warm. We actually don't know really anything about this planet, but one possibility is that it's a water world, like a scaled-up version of one of Jupiter's icy moons that might be 50 percent water by mass. And in this case, it would have a thick steam atmosphere overlaying an ocean, not of liquid water, but of an exotic form of water, a superfluid -- not quite a gas, not quite a liquid. And under that wouldn't be rock, but a form of high-pressure ice, like ice IX.
So out of all these planets out there, and the variety is just simply astonishing, we mostly want to find the planets that are Goldilocks planets, we call them. Not too big, not too small, not too hot, not too cold -- but just right for life. But to do that, we'd have to be able to look at the planet's atmosphere, because the atmosphere acts like a blanket trapping heat -- the greenhouse effect. We have to be able to assess the greenhouse gases on other planets. Well, science fiction got some things wrong. The Star Trek Enterprise had to travel vast distances at incredible speeds to orbit other planets so that First Officer Spock could analyze the atmosphere to see if the planet was habitable or if there were lifeforms there.
Well, we don't need to travel at warp speeds to see other planet atmospheres, although I don't want to dissuade any budding engineers from figuring out how to do that. We actually can and do study planet atmospheres from here, from Earth orbit. This is a picture, a photograph of the Hubble Space Telescope taken by the shuttle Atlantis as it was departing after the last human space flight to Hubble. They installed a new camera, actually, that we use for exoplanet atmospheres. And so far, we've been able to study dozens of exoplanet atmospheres, about six of them in great detail. But those are not small planets like Earth. They're big, hot planets that are easy to see. We're not ready, we don't have the right technology yet to study small exoplanets. But nevertheless, I wanted to try to explain to you how we study exoplanet atmospheres.
I want you to imagine, for a moment, a rainbow. And if we could look at this rainbow closely, we would see that some dark lines are missing. And here's our sun, the white light of our sun split up, not by raindrops, but by a spectrograph. And you can see all these dark, vertical lines. Some are very narrow, some are wide, some are shaded at the edges. And this is actually how astronomers have studied objects in the heavens, literally, for over a century. So here, each different atom and molecule has a special set of lines, a fingerprint, if you will. And that's how we study exoplanet atmospheres. And I'll just never forget when I started working on exoplanet atmospheres 20 years ago, how many people told me, "This will never happen. We'll never be able to study them. Why are you bothering?" And that's why I'm pleased to tell you about all the atmospheres studied now, and this is really a field of its own. So when it comes to other planets, other Earths, in the future when we can observe them, what kind of gases would we be looking for? Well, you know, our own Earth has oxygen in the atmosphere to 20 percent by volume. That's a lot of oxygen. But without plants and photosynthetic life, there would be no oxygen, virtually no oxygen in our atmosphere. So oxygen is here because of life. And our goal then is to look for gases in other planet atmospheres, gases that don't belong, that we might be able to attribute to life. But which molecules should we search for? I actually told you how diverse exoplanets are. We expect that to continue in the future when we find other Earths.
And that's one of the main things I'm working on now, I have a theory about this. It reminds me that nearly every day, I receive an email or emails from someone with a crazy theory about physics of gravity or cosmology or some such. So, please don't email me one of your crazy theories. (Laughter) Well, I had my own crazy theory. But, who does the MIT professor go to? Well, I emailed a Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine and he said, "Sure, come and talk to me." So I brought my two biochemistry friends and we went to talk to him about our crazy theory. And that theory was that life produces all small molecules, so many molecules. Like, everything I could think of, but not being a chemist. Think about it: carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, molecular hydrogen, molecular nitrogen, methane, methyl chloride -- so many gases. They also exist for other reasons, but just life even produces ozone. So we go to talk to him about this, and immediately, he shot down the theory. He found an example that didn't exist. So, we went back to the drawing board and we think we have found something very interesting in another field.
But back to exoplanets, the point is that life produces so many different types of gases, literally thousands of gases. And so what we're doing now is just trying to figure out on which types of exoplanets, which gases could be attributed to life. And so when it comes time when we find gases in exoplanet atmospheres that we won't know if they're being produced by intelligent aliens or by trees, or a swamp, or even just by simple, single-celled microbial life.
So working on the models and thinking about biochemistry, it's all well and good. But a really big challenge ahead of us is: how? How are we going to find these planets? There are actually many ways to find planets, several different ways. But the one that I'm most focused on is how can we open a gateway so that in the future, we can find hundreds of Earths. We have a real shot at finding signs of life. And actually, I just finished leading a two-year project in this very special phase of a concept we call the starshade. And the starshade is a very specially shaped screen and the goal is to fly that starshade so it blocks out the light of a star so that the telescope can see the planets directly. Here, you can see myself and two team members holding up one small part of the starshade. It's shaped like a giant flower, and this is one of the prototype petals. The concept is that a starshade and telescope could launch together, with the petals unfurling from the stowed position. The central truss would expand, with the petals snapping into place. Now, this has to be made very precisely, literally, the petals to microns and they have to deploy to millimeters. And this whole structure would have to fly tens of thousands of kilometers away from the telescope. It's about tens of meters in diameter. And the goal is to block out the starlight to incredible precision so that we'd be able to see the planets directly. And it has to be a very special shape, because of the physics of defraction. Now this is a real project that we worked on, literally, you would not believe how hard. Just so you believe it's not just in movie format, here's a real photograph of a second-generation starshade deployment test bed in the lab. And in this case, I just wanted you to know that that central truss has heritage left over from large radio deployables in space.
So after all of that hard work where we try to think of all the crazy gases that might be out there, and we build the very complicated space telescopes that might be out there, what are we going to find? Well, in the best case, we will find an image of another exo-Earth. Here is Earth as a pale blue dot. And this is actually a real photograph of Earth taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, four billion miles away. And that red light is just scattered light in the camera optics.
But what's so awesome to consider is that if there are intelligent aliens orbiting on a planet around a star near to us and they build complicated space telescopes of the kind that we're trying to build, all they'll see is this pale blue dot, a pinprick of light. And so sometimes, when I pause to think about my professional struggle and huge ambition, it's hard to think about that in contrast to the vastness of the universe. But nonetheless, I am devoting the rest of my life to finding another Earth.
And I can guarantee
that in the next generation of space telescopes, and the second generation, we will have the capability to find and identity other Earths. And the capability to split up the starlight so that we can look for gases and assess the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, estimate the surface temperature, and look for signs of life.
But there's more. In this case of searching for other planets like Earth, we are making a new kind of map of the nearby stars and of the planets orbiting them, including stars that actually might be inhabitable by humans.
And so I envision that our descendants, hundreds of years from now, will embark on an interstellar journey to other worlds. And they will look back at all of us as the generation who first found the Earth-like worlds.
Thank you.
(Applause)
June Cohen: And I give you, for a question, Rosetta Mission Manager Fred Jansen.
Fred Jansen: You mentioned halfway through that the technology to actually look at the spectrum of an exoplanet like Earth is not there yet. When do you expect this will be there, and what's needed?
Actually, what we expect is what we call our next-generation Hubble telescope. And this is called the James Webb Space Telescope, and that will launch in 2018, and that's what we're going to do, we're going to look at a special kind of planet called transient exoplanets, and that will be our first shot at studying small planets for gases that might indicate the planet is habitable.
JC: I'm going to ask you one follow-up question, too, Sara, as the generalist. So I am really struck by the notion in your career of the opposition you faced, that when you began thinking about exoplanets, there was extreme skepticism in the scientific community that they existed, and you proved them wrong. What did it take to take that on?
SS: Well, the thing is that as scientists, we're supposed to be skeptical, because our job to make sure that what the other person is saying actually makes sense or not. But being a scientist, I think you've seen it from this session, it's like being an explorer. You have this immense curiosity, this stubbornness, this sort of resolute will that you will go forward no matter what other people say.
JC: I love that. Thank you, Sara.
(Applause) |
Do you remember the story of Odysseus and the Sirens from high school or junior high school? There was this hero, Odysseus, who's heading back home after the Trojan War. And he's standing on the deck of his ship, he's talking to his first mate, and he's saying, "Tomorrow, we will sail past those rocks, and on those rocks sit some beautiful women called Sirens. And these women sing an enchanting song, a song so alluring that all sailors who hear it crash into the rocks and die." Now you would expect, given that, that they would choose an alternate route around the Sirens, but instead Odysseus says, "I want to hear that song. And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to pour wax in the ears of you and all the men -- stay with me -- so that you can't hear the song, and then I'm going to have you tie me to the mast so that I can listen and we can all sail by unaffected." So this is a captain putting the life of every single person on the ship at risk so that he can hear a song.
And I'd like to think if this was the case, they probably would have rehearsed it a few times. Odysseus would have said, "Okay, let's do a dry run. You tie me to the mast, and I'm going to beg and plead. And no matter what I say, you cannot untie me from the mast. All right, so tie me to the mast." And the first mate takes a rope and ties Odysseus to the mast in a nice knot. And Odysseus does his best job playacting and says, "Untie me. Untie me. I want to hear that song. Untie me." And the first mate wisely resists and doesn't untie Odysseus. And then Odysseus says, "I see that you can get it. All right, untie me now and we'll get some dinner." And the first mate hesitates. He's like, "Is this still the rehearsal, or should I untie him?" And the first mate thinks, "Well, I guess at some point the rehearsal has to end." So he unties Odysseus, and Odysseus flips out. He's like, "You idiot. You moron. If you do that tomorrow, I'll be dead, you'll be dead, every single one of the men will be dead. Now just don't untie me no matter what." He throws the first mate to the ground. This repeats itself through the night -- rehearsal, tying to the mast, conning his way out of it, beating the poor first mate up mercilessly. Hilarity ensues.
Tying yourself to a mast is perhaps the oldest written example of what psychologists call a commitment device. A commitment device is a decision that you make with a cool head to bind yourself so that you don't do something regrettable when you have a hot head. Because there's two heads inside one person when you think about it. Scholars have long invoked this metaphor of two selves when it comes to questions of temptation. There is first, the present self. This is like Odysseus when he's hearing the song. He just wants to get to the front row. He just thinks about the here and now and the immediate gratification. But then there's this other self, the future self. This is Odysseus as an old man who wants nothing more than to retire in a sunny villa with his wife Penelope outside of Ithaca -- the other one.
So why do we need commitment devices? Well resisting temptation is hard, as the 19th century English economist Nassau William Senior said, "To abstain from the enjoyment which is in our power, or to seek distant rather than immediate results, are among the most painful exertions of the human will." If you set goals for yourself and you're like a lot of other people, you probably realize it's not that your goals are physically impossible that's keeping you from achieving them, it's that you lack the self-discipline to stick to them. It's physically possible to lose weight. It's physically possible to exercise more. But resisting temptation is hard.
The other reason that it's difficult to resist temptation is because it's an unequal battle between the present self and the future self. I mean, let's face it, the present self is present. It's in control. It's in power right now. It has these strong, heroic arms that can lift doughnuts into your mouth. And the future self is not even around. It's off in the future. It's weak. It doesn't even have a lawyer present. There's nobody to stick up for the future self. And so the present self can trounce all over its dreams. So there's this battle between the two selves that's being fought, and we need commitment devices to level the playing field between the two.
Now I'm a big fan of commitment devices actually. Tying yourself to the mast is the oldest one, but there are other ones such as locking a credit card away with a key or not bringing junk food into the house so you won't eat it or unplugging your Internet connection so you can use your computer. I was creating commitment devices of my own long before I knew what they were. So when I was a starving post-doc at Columbia University, I was deep in a publish-or-perish phase of my career. I had to write five pages a day towards papers or I would have to give up five dollars.
And when you try to execute these commitment devices, you realize the devil is really in the details. Because it's not that easy to get rid of five dollars. I mean, you can't burn it; that's illegal. And I thought, well I could give it to a charity or give it to my wife or something like that. But then I thought, oh, I'm sending myself mixed messages. Because not writing is bad, but giving to charity is good. So then I would kind of justify not writing by giving a gift. And then I kind of flipped that around and thought, well I could give it to the neo-Nazis. But then I was like, that's more bad than writing is good, and so that wouldn't work. So ultimately, I just decided I would leave it in an envelope on the subway. Sometimes a good person would find it, sometimes a bad person would find it. On average, it was just a completely pointless exchange of money that I would regret. (Laughter) Such it is with commitment devices.
But despite my like for them, there's two nagging concerns that I've always had about commitment devices, and you might feel this if you use them yourself. So the first is, when you've got one of these devices going, such as this contract to write everyday or pay, it's just a constant reminder that you have no self-control. You're just telling yourself, "Without you, commitment device, I am nothing, I have no self-discipline." And then when you're ever in a situation where you don't have a commitment device in place -- like, "Oh my God, that person's offering me a doughnut, and I have no defense mechanism," -- you just eat it. So I don't like the way that they take the power away from you. I think self-discipline is something, it's like a muscle. The more you exercise it, the stronger it gets.
The other problem with commitment devices is that you can always weasel your way out of them. You say, "Well, of course I can't write today, because I'm giving a TEDTalk and I have five media interviews, and then I'm going to a cocktail party and then I'll be drunk after that. And so there's no way that this is going to work." So in effect, you are like Odysseus and the first mate in one person. You're putting yourself, you're binding yourself, and you're weaseling your way out of it, and then you're beating yourself up afterwards.
So I've been working for about a decade now on finding other ways to change people's relationship to the future self without using commitment devices. In particular, I'm interested in the relationship to the future financial self. And this is a timely issue. I'm talking about the topic of saving. Now saving is a classic two selves problem. The present self does not want to save at all. It wants to consume. Whereas the future self wants the present self to save. So this is a timely problem. We look at the savings rate and it has been declining since the 1950s. At the same time, the Retirement Risk Index, the chance of not being able to meet your needs in retirement, has been increasing. And we're at a situation now where for every three baby boomers, the McKinsey Global Institute predicts that two will not be able to meet their pre-retirement needs while they're in retirement.
So what can we do about this? There's a philosopher, Derek Parfit, who said some words that were inspiring to my coauthors and I. He said that, "We might neglect our future selves because of some failure of belief or imagination." That is to say, we somehow might not believe that we're going to get old, or we might not be able to imagine that we're going to get old some day. On the one hand, it sounds ridiculous. Of course, we know that we're going to get old. But aren't there things that we believe and don't believe at the same time?
So my coauthors and I have used computers, the greatest tool of our time, to assist people's imagination and help them imagine what it might be like to go into the future. And I'll show you some of these tools right here. The first is called the distribution builder. It shows people what the future might be like by showing them a hundred equally probable outcomes that might be obtained in the future. Each outcome is shown by one of these markers, and each sits on a row that represents a level of wealth and retirement. Being up at the top means that you're enjoying a high income in retirement. Being down at the bottom means that you're struggling to make ends meet. When you make an investment, what you're really saying is, "I accept that any one of these 100 things could happen to me and determine my wealth."
Now you can try to move your outcomes around. You can try to manipulate your fate, like this person is doing, but it costs you something to do it. It means that you have to save more today. Once you find an investment that you're happy with, what people do is they click "done" and the markers begin to disappear, slowly, one by one. It simulates what it is like to invest in something and to watch that investment pan out. At the end, there will only be one marker left standing and it will determine our wealth in retirement.
Yes, this person retired at 150 percent of their working income in retirement. They're making more money while retired than they were making while they were working. If you're like most people, just seeing that gave you a small sense of elation and joy -- just to think about making 50 percent more money in retirement than before. However, had you ended up on the very bottom, it might have given you a slight sense of dread and/or nausea thinking about struggling to get by in retirement. By using this tool over and over and simulating outcome after outcome, people can understand that the investments and savings that they undertake today determine their well-being in the future.
Now people are motivated through emotions, but different people find different things motivating. This is a simulation that uses graphics, but other people find motivating what money can buy, not just numbers. So here I made a distribution builder where instead of showing numerical outcomes, I show people what those outcomes will get you, in particular apartments that you can afford if you're retiring on 3,000, 2,500, 2,000 dollars per month and so on. As you move down the ladder of apartments, you see that they get worse and worse. Some of them look like places I lived in as a graduate student. And as you get to the very bottom, you're faced with the unfortunate reality that if you don't save anything for retirement, you won't be able to afford any housing at all. Those are actual pictures of actual apartments renting for that amount as advertised on the Internet.
The last thing I'll show you, the last behavioral time machine, is something that I created with Hal Hershfield, who was introduced to me by my coauthor on a previous project, Bill Sharpe. And what it is is an exploration into virtual reality. So what we do is we take pictures of people -- in this case, college-age people -- and we use software to age them and show these people what they'll look like when they're 60, 70, 80 years old. And we try to test whether actually assisting your imagination by looking at the face of your future self can change you investment behavior.
So this is one of our experiments. Here we see the face of the young subject on the left. He's given a control that allows him to adjust his savings rate. As he moves his savings rate down, it means that he's saving zero when it's all the way here at the left. You can see his current annual income -- this is the percentage of his paycheck that he can take home today -- is quite high, 91 percent, but his retirement income is quite low. He's going to retire on 44 percent of what he earned while he was working. If he saves the maximum legal amount, his retirement income goes up, but he's unhappy because now he has less money on the left-hand side to spend today. Other conditions show people the future self. And from the future self's point of view, everything is in reverse. If you save very little, the future self is unhappy living on 44 percent of the income. Whereas if the present self saves a lot, the future self is delighted, where the income is close up near 100 percent.
To bring this to a wider audience, I've been working with Hal and Allianz to create something we call the behavioral time machine, in which you not only get to see yourself in the future, but you get to see anticipated emotional reactions to different levels of retirement wealth. So for instance, here is somebody using the tool. And just watch the facial expressions as they move the slider. The younger face gets happier and happier, saving nothing. The older face is miserable. And slowly, slowly we're bringing it up to a moderate savings rate. And then it's a high savings rate. The younger face is getting unhappy. The older face is quite pleased with the decision. We're going to see if this has an effect on what people do. And what's nice about it is it's not something that biasing people actually, because as one face smiles, the other face frowns. It's not telling you which way to put the slider, it's just reminding you that you are connected to and legally tied to this future self.
Your decisions today are going to determine its well-being. And that's something that's easy to forget. This use of virtual reality is not just good for making people look older. There are programs you can get to see how people might look if they smoke, if they get too much exposure to the sun, if they gain weight and so on. And what's good is, unlike in the experiments that Hal and myself ran with Russ Smith, you don't have to program these by yourself in order to see the virtual reality. There are applications you can get on smartphones for just a few dollars that do the same thing. This is actually a picture of Hal, my coauthor. You might recognize him from the previous demos. And just for kicks we ran his picture through the balding, aging and weight gain software to see how he would look. Hal is here, so I think we owe it to him as well as yourself to disabuse you of that last image. And I'll close it there.
On behalf of Hal and myself, I wish all the best to your present and future selves. Thank you.
(Applause) |
I am no designer, nope, no way. My dad was, which is kind of an interesting way to grow up. I had to figure out what it is my dad did and why it was important.
Dad talked a lot about bad design when we were growing up, you know, "Bad design is just people not thinking, John," he would say whenever a kid would be injured by a rotary lawn mower or, say, a typewriter ribbon would get tangled or an eggbeater would get jammed in the kitchen.
You know, "Design -- bad design, there's just no excuse for it. It's letting stuff happen without thinking about it. Every object should be about something, John. It should imagine a user. It should cast that user in a story starring the user and the object.
Good design," my dad said, "is about supplying intent." That's what he said.
Dad helped design the control panels for the IBM 360 computer. That was a big deal; that was important. He worked for Kodak for a while; that was important. He designed chairs and desks and other office equipment for Steelcase; that was important. I knew design was important in my house because, for heaven's sake, it put food on our table, right?
And design was in everything my dad did. He had a Dixieland jazz band when we were growing up, and he would always cover Louis Armstrong tunes. And I would ask him every once in a while,
"Dad, do you want it to sound like the record?" We had lots of old jazz records lying around the house. And he said, "No, never, John, never. The song is just a given, that's how you have to think about it. You gotta make it your own. You gotta design it. Show everyone what you intend," is what he said. "Doing that, acting by design, is what we all should be doing. It's where we all belong."
All of us? Designers? Oh, oh, Dad. Oh, Dad.
The song is just a given. It's how you cover it that matters. Well, let's hold on to that thought for just a minute. It's kind of like this wheelchair I'm in, right? The original tune? It's a little scary.
"Ooh, what happened to that dude? He can't walk. Anybody know the story? Anybody?"
I don't like to talk about this very much, but I'll tell you guys the story today. All right, exactly 36 years ago this week, that's right, I was in a poorly designed automobile that hit a poorly designed guardrail on a poorly designed road in Pennsylvania, and plummeted down a 200-foot embankment and killed two people in the car. But ever since then, the wheelchair has been a given in my life. My life, at the mercy of good design and bad design.
Think about it. Now, in design terms, a wheelchair is a very difficult object. It mostly projects tragedy and fear and misfortune, and it projects that message, that story, so strongly that it almost blots out anything else.
I roll swiftly through an airport, right? And moms grab their kids out of the way and say, "Don't stare!" The poor kid, you know, has this terrified look on his face, God knows what they think. And for decades, I'm going, why does this happen? What can I do about it? How can I change this? I mean there must be something. So I would roll, I'd make no eye contact -- just kinda frown, right? Or I'd dress up really, really sharply or something. Or I'd make eye contact with everyone -- that was really creepy; that didn't work at all. (Laughter) You know anything, I'd try. I wouldn't shower for a week -- nothing worked.
Nothing whatsoever worked until a few years ago, my six-year-old daughters were looking at this wheelchair catalog that I had, and they said,
"Oh, Dad! Dad! Look, you gotta get these, these flashy wheels -- you gotta get 'em!"
And I said, "Oh, girls, Dad is a very important journalist, that just wouldn't do at all."
And of course, they immediately concluded,
"Oh, what a bummer, Dad. Journalists aren't allowed to have flashy wheels. I mean, how important could you be then?" they said.
I went, "Wait a minute, all right, right -- I'll get the wheels." Purely out of protest,
I got the flashy wheels, and I installed them and -- check this out. Could I have my special light cue please? (Laughter) Look at that! Now ... look at, look at this! Look at this!
So what you are looking at here has completely changed my life, I mean totally changed my life. Instead of blank stares and awkwardness, now it is pointing and smiling!
People going, "Awesome wheels, dude! Those are awesome! I mean, I want some of those wheels!" Little kids say, "Can I have a ride?" (Laughter)
And of course there's the occasional person -- usually a middle-aged male who will say, "Oh, those wheels are great! I guess they're for safety, right?" (Laughter) No! They're not for safety. No, no, no, no, no.
What's the difference here, the wheelchair with no lights and the wheelchair with lights? The difference is intent. That's right, that's right; I'm no longer a victim. I chose to change the situation -- I'm the Commander of the Starship Wheelchair with the phaser wheels in the front. Right? Intent changes the picture completely. I choose to enhance this rolling experience with a simple design element. Acting with intent. It conveys authorship. It suggests that someone is driving. It's reassuring; people are drawn to it. Someone making the experience their own. Covering the tragic tune with something different, something radically different. People respond to that.
Now it seems simple, but actually I think in our society and culture in general, we have a huge problem with intent. Now go with me here. Look at this guy. You know who this is? It's Anders Breivik. Now, if he intended to kill in Olso, Norway last year, dozens and dozens of young people -- if he intended to do that, he's a vicious criminal. We punish him. Life in prison. Death penalty in the United States, not so much in Norway. But, if he instead acted out of a delusional fantasy, if he was motivated by some random mental illness, he's in a completely different category. We may put him away for life, but we watch him clinically. It's a completely different domain. As an intentional murderer, Anders Breivik is merely evil. But as a dysfunctional, as a dysfunctional murderer/psychotic, he's something much more complicated. He's the breath of some primitive, ancient chaos. He's the random state of nature we emerged from. He's something very, very different.
It's as though intent is an essential component for humanity. It's what we're supposed to do somehow. We're supposed to act with intent. We're supposed to do things by design. Intent is a marker for civilization.
Now here's an example a little closer to home: My family is all about intent. You can probably tell there are two sets of twins, the result of IVF technology, in vitro fertilization technology, due to some physical limitations I won't go into. Anyway, in vitro technology, IVF, is about as intentional as agriculture. Let me tell you, some of you may have the experience. In fact, the whole technology of sperm extraction for spinal cord-injured males was invented by a veterinarian. I met the dude. He's a great guy. He carried this big leather bag full of sperm probes for all of the animals that he'd worked with, all the different animals. Probes he designed, and in fact, he was really, really proud of these probes.
He would say, "You're right between horse and squirrel, John." (Laughter) But anyway, so when my wife and I decided to upgrade our early middle age -- we had four kids, after all -- with a little different technology that I won't explain in too much detail here -- my urologist assured me I had nothing whatsoever to worry about.
"No need for birth control, Doc, are you sure about that?"
"John, John, I looked at your chart. From your sperm tests we can confidently say that you're basically a form of birth control."
Well! (Laughter) What a liberating thought! Yes! And after a couple very liberating weekends, my wife and I, utilizing some cutting-edge erectile technology that is certainly worthy of a TEDTalk someday but I won't get into it now, we noticed some familiar, if unexpected, symptoms. I wasn't exactly a form of birth control. Look at that font there. My wife was so pissed.
I mean, did a designer come up with that? No, I don't think a designer did come up with that. In fact, maybe that's the problem. And so, little Ajax was born. He's like our other children, but the experience is completely different. It's something like my accident, right? He came out of nowhere. But we all had to change, but not just react to the given; we bend to this new experience with intent. We're five now. Five. Facing the given with intent. Doing things by design. Hey, the name Ajax -- you can't get much more intentional than that, right? We're really hoping he thanks us for that later on. (Laughter)
But I never became a designer. No, no, no, no. Never attempted. Never even close. I did love some great designs as I was growing up: The HP 35S calculator -- God, I loved that thing. Oh God, I wish I had one. Man, I love that thing. I could afford that. Other designs I really couldn't afford, like the 1974 911 Targa. In school, I studied nothing close to design or engineering; I studied useless things like the Classics, but there were some lessons even there -- this guy, Plato, it turns out he's a designer. He designed a state in "The Republic," a design never implemented. Listen to one of the design features of Plato's Government 4.0:
"The State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst."
Well, got that wrong, didn't we? But look at that statement; it's all about intent. That's what I love about it. But consider what Plato is doing here. What is he doing? It's a grand idea of design -- a huge idea of design, common to all of the voices of religion and philosophy that emerged in the Classical period. What was going on then? They were trying to answer the question of what would human beings do now that they were no longer simply trying to survive? As the human race emerged from a prehistoric chaos, a confrontation with random, brutal nature, they suddenly had a moment to think -- and there was a lot to think about. All of a sudden, human existence needed an intent. Human life needed a reason. Reality itself needed a designer. The given was replaced by various aspects of intent, by various designs, by various gods. Gods we're still fighting about. Oh yeah.
Today we don't confront the chaos of nature. Today it is the chaos of humanity's impact on the Earth itself that we confront. This young discipline called design, I think, is in fact the emerging ethos formulating and then answering a very new question: What shall we do now in the face of the chaos that we have created? What shall we do? How shall we inscribe intent on all the objects we create, on all the circumstances we create, on all the places we change? The consequences of a planet with 7 billion people and counting. That's the tune we're all covering today, all of us. And we can't just imitate the past. No. That won't do. That won't do at all.
Here's my favorite design moment: In the city of Kinshasa in Zaire in the 1990s, I was working for ABC News, and I was reporting on the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator, the brutal dictator in Zaire, who raped and pillaged that country. There was rioting in the middle of Kinshasa. The place was falling apart; it was a horrible, horrible place, and I needed to go and explore the center of Kinshasa to report on the rioting and the looting. People were carrying off vehicles, carrying off pieces of buildings. Soldiers were in the streets shooting at looters and herding some in mass arrests. In the middle of this chaos, I'm rolling around in a wheelchair, and I was completely invisible. Completely. I was in a wheelchair; I didn't look like a looter. I was in a wheelchair; I didn't look like a journalist, particularly, at least from their perspective. And I didn't look like a soldier, that's for sure. I was part of this sort of background noise of the misery of Zaire, completely invisible. And all of a sudden, from around a corner, comes this young man, paralyzed, just like me, in this metal and wood and leather pedal, three-wheel tricycle-wheelchair device, and he pedals up to me as fast as he can.
He goes, "Hey, mister! Mister!"
And I looked at him -- he didn't know any other English than that, but we didn't need English, no, no, no, no, no. We sat there and compared wheels and tires and spokes and tubes. And I looked at his whacky pedal mechanism; he was full of pride over his design. I wish I could show you that contraption. His smile, our glow as we talked a universal language of design, invisible to the chaos around us. His machine: homemade, bolted, rusty, comical. My machine: American-made, confident, sleek. He was particularly proud of the comfortable seat, really comfortable seat he had made in his chariot and its beautiful fabric fringe around the edge. Oh, I wish I'd had those sparkly wheels back then to have shown him, man! He would have loved those! Oh yeah. He would have understood those; a chariot of pure intent -- think about it -- in a city out of control. Design blew it all away for a moment. We spoke for a few minutes and then each of us vanished back into the chaos. He went back to the streets of Kinshasa; I went to my hotel. And I think of him now, now ...
And I pose this question. An object imbued with intent -- it has power, it's treasure, we're drawn to it. An object devoid of intent -- it's random, it's imitative, it repels us. It's like a piece of junk mail to be thrown away. This is what we must demand of our lives, of our objects, of our things, of our circumstances: living with intent. And I have to say that on that score, I have a very unfair advantage over all of you.
And I want to explain it to you now because this is a very special day. Thirty-six years ago at nearly this moment, a 19-year-old boy awoke from a coma to ask a nurse a question, but the nurse was already there with an answer.
"You've had a terrible accident, young man. You've broken your back. You'll never walk again."
I said, "I know all that -- what day is it?" You see, I knew that the car had gone over the guardrail on the 28th of February, and I knew that 1976 was a leap year.
"Nurse! Is this the 28th or the 29th?"
And she looked at me and said, "It's March 1st."
And I went, "Oh my God. I've got some catching up to do!" And from that moment, I knew the given was that accident; I had no option but to make up this new life without walking. Intent -- a life with intent -- lived by design, covering the original with something better. It's something for all of us to do or find a way to do in these times.
To get back to this, to get back to design, and as my daddy suggested a long time ago,
"Make the song your own, John. Show everybody what you intend."
Daddy, this one's for you. (Music)
♫ Jo Jo was a man who thought he was a loner ♫ ♫ but he was another man. ♫ ♫ Jo Jo left his home in Tucson, Arizona to attend a California bash. ♫ ♫ Get back, get back, ♫ ♫ get back to where you once belonged. ♫ ♫ Get back, get back, ♫ ♫ get back to where you once belonged. ♫ (Applause) |
Now, have any of y'all ever looked up this word? You know, in a dictionary? (Laughter) Yeah, that's what I thought. How about this word? Here, I'll show it to you. Lexicography: the practice of compiling dictionaries. Notice -- we're very specific -- that word "compile." The dictionary is not carved out of a piece of granite, out of a lump of rock. It's made up of lots of little bits. It's little discrete -- that's spelled D-I-S-C-R-E-T-E -- bits. And those bits are words.
Now one of the perks of being a lexicographer -- besides getting to come to TED -- is that you get to say really fun words, like lexicographical. Lexicographical has this great pattern: it's called a double dactyl. And just by saying double dactyl, I've sent the geek needle all the way into the red. (Laughter) (Applause) But "lexicographical" is the same pattern as "higgledy-piggledy." Right? It's a fun word to say, and I get to say it a lot. Now, one of the non-perks of being a lexicographer is that people don't usually have a kind of warm, fuzzy, snuggly image of the dictionary. Right? Nobody hugs their dictionaries. But what people really often think about the dictionary is, they think more like this. Just to let you know, I do not have a lexicographical whistle. But people think that my job is to let the good words make that difficult left-hand turn into the dictionary, and keep the bad words out.
But the thing is, I don't want to be a traffic cop. For one thing, I just do not do uniforms. And for another, deciding what words are good and what words are bad is actually not very easy. And it's not very fun. And when parts of your job are not easy or fun, you kind of look for an excuse not to do them. So if I had to think of some kind of occupation as a metaphor for my work, I would much rather be a fisherman. I want to throw my big net into the deep, blue ocean of English and see what marvelous creatures I can drag up from the bottom. But why do people want me to direct traffic, when I would much rather go fishing? Well, I blame the Queen. Why do I blame the Queen? Well, first of all, I blame the Queen because it's funny. But secondly, I blame the Queen because dictionaries have really not changed.
Our idea of what a dictionary is has not changed since her reign. The only thing that Queen Victoria would not be amused by in modern dictionaries is our inclusion of the F-word, which has happened in American dictionaries since 1965. So, there's this guy, right? Victorian era. James Murray, first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary. I do not have that hat. I wish I had that hat. So he's really responsible for a lot of what we consider modern in dictionaries today. When a guy who looks like that, in that hat, is the face of modernity, you have a problem. And so, James Murray could get a job on any dictionary today. There'd be virtually no learning curve.
And of course, a few of us are saying: okay, computers! Computers! What about computers? The thing about computers is, I love computers. I mean, I'm a huge geek, I love computers. I would go on a hunger strike before I let them take away Google Book Search from me. But computers don't do much else other than speed up the process of compiling dictionaries. They don't change the end result. Because what a dictionary is, is it's Victorian design merged with a little bit of modern propulsion. It's steampunk. What we have is an electric velocipede. You know, we have Victorian design with an engine on it. That's all! The design has not changed.
And OK, what about online dictionaries, right? Online dictionaries must be different. This is the Oxford English Dictionary Online, one of the best online dictionaries. This is my favorite word, by the way. Erinaceous: pertaining to the hedgehog family; of the nature of a hedgehog. Very useful word. So, look at that. Online dictionaries right now are paper thrown up on a screen. This is flat. Look how many links there are in the actual entry: two! Right? Those little buttons, I had them all expanded except for the date chart. So there's not very much going on here. There's not a lot of clickiness. And in fact, online dictionaries replicate almost all the problems of print, except for searchability. And when you improve searchability, you actually take away the one advantage of print, which is serendipity. Serendipity is when you find things you weren't looking for, because finding what you are looking for is so damned difficult.
So -- (Laughter) (Applause) -- now, when you think about this, what we have here is a ham butt problem. Does everyone know the ham butt problem? Woman's making a ham for a big, family dinner. She goes to cut the butt off the ham and throw it away, and she looks at this piece of ham and she's like, "This is a perfectly good piece of ham. Why am I throwing this away?" She thought, "Well, my mom always did this." So she calls up mom, and she says, "Mom, why'd you cut the butt off the ham, when you're making a ham?" She says, "I don't know, my mom always did it!" So they call grandma, and grandma says, "My pan was too small!" (Laughter)
So, it's not that we have good words and bad words. We have a pan that's too small! You know, that ham butt is delicious! There's no reason to throw it away. The bad words -- see, when people think about a place and they don't find a place on the map, they think, "This map sucks!" When they find a nightspot or a bar, and it's not in the guidebook, they're like, "Ooh, this place must be cool! It's not in the guidebook." When they find a word that's not in the dictionary, they think, "This must be a bad word." Why? It's more likely to be a bad dictionary. Why are you blaming the ham for being too big for the pan? So, you can't get a smaller ham. The English language is as big as it is.
So, if you have a ham butt problem, and you're thinking about the ham butt problem, the conclusion that it leads you to is inexorable and counterintuitive: paper is the enemy of words. How can this be? I mean, I love books. I really love books. Some of my best friends are books. But the book is not the best shape for the dictionary. Now they're going to think "Oh, boy. People are going to take away my beautiful, paper dictionaries?" No. There will still be paper dictionaries. When we had cars -- when cars became the dominant mode of transportation, we didn't round up all the horses and shoot them. You know, there're still going to be paper dictionaries, but it's not going to be the dominant dictionary. The book-shaped dictionary is not going to be the only shape dictionaries come in. And it's not going to be the prototype for the shapes dictionaries come in.
So, think about it this way: if you've got an artificial constraint, artificial constraints lead to arbitrary distinctions and a skewed worldview. What if biologists could only study animals that made people go, "Aww." Right? What if we made aesthetic judgments about animals, and only the ones we thought were cute were the ones that we could study? We'd know a whole lot about charismatic megafauna, and not very much about much else. And I think this is a problem. I think we should study all the words, because when you think about words, you can make beautiful expressions from very humble parts. Lexicography is really more about material science. We are studying the tolerances of the materials that you use to build the structure of your expression: your speeches and your writing. And then, often people say to me, "Well, OK, how do I know that this word is real?" They think, "OK, if we think words are the tools that we use to build the expressions of our thoughts, how can you say that screwdrivers are better than hammers? How can you say that a sledgehammer is better than a ball-peen hammer?" They're just the right tools for the job.
And so people say to me, "How do I know if a word is real?" You know, anybody who's read a children's book knows that love makes things real. If you love a word, use it. That makes it real. Being in the dictionary is an artificial distinction. It doesn't make a word any more real than any other way. If you love a word, it becomes real. So if we're not worrying about directing traffic, if we've transcended paper, if we are worrying less about control and more about description, then we can think of the English language as being this beautiful mobile. And any time one of those little parts of the mobile changes, is touched, any time you touch a word, you use it in a new context, you give it a new connotation, you verb it, you make the mobile move. You didn't break it. It's just in a new position, and that new position can be just as beautiful.
Now, if you're no longer a traffic cop -- the problem with being a traffic cop is there can only be so many traffic cops in any one intersection, or the cars get confused. Right? But if your goal is no longer to direct the traffic, but maybe to count the cars that go by, then more eyeballs are better. You can ask for help! If you ask for help, you get more done. And we really need help. Library of Congress: 17 million books, of which half are in English. If only one out of every 10 of those books had a word that's not in the dictionary in it, that would be equivalent to more than two unabridged dictionaries.
And I find an un-dictionaried word -- a word like "un-dictionaried," for example -- in almost every book I read. What about newspapers? Newspaper archive goes back to 1759, 58.1 million newspaper pages. If only one in 100 of those pages had an un-dictionaried word on it, it would be an entire other OED. That's 500,000 more words. So that's a lot. And I'm not even talking about magazines. I'm not talking about blogs -- and I find more new words on BoingBoing in a given week than I do Newsweek or Time. There's a lot going on there.
And I'm not even talking about polysemy, which is the greedy habit some words have of taking more than one meaning for themselves. So if you think of the word "set," a set can be a badger's burrow, a set can be one of the pleats in an Elizabethan ruff, and there's one numbered definition in the OED. The OED has 33 different numbered definitions for set. Tiny, little word, 33 numbered definitions. One of them is just labeled "miscellaneous technical senses." Do you know what that says to me? That says to me, it was Friday afternoon and somebody wanted to go down the pub. (Laughter) That's a lexicographical cop out, to say, "miscellaneous technical senses."
So, we have all these words, and we really need help! And the thing is, we could ask for help -- asking for help's not that hard. I mean, lexicography is not rocket science. See, I just gave you a lot of words and a lot of numbers, and this is more of a visual explanation. If we think of the dictionary as being the map of the English language, these bright spots are what we know about, and the dark spots are where we are in the dark. If that was the map of all the words in American English, we don't know very much. And we don't even know the shape of the language. If this was the dictionary -- if this was the map of American English -- look, we have a kind of lumpy idea of Florida, but there's no California! We're missing California from American English. We just don't know enough, and we don't even know that we're missing California. We don't even see that there's a gap on the map.
So again, lexicography is not rocket science. But even if it were, rocket science is being done by dedicated amateurs these days. You know? It can't be that hard to find some words! So, enough scientists in other disciplines are really asking people to help, and they're doing a good job of it. For instance, there's eBird, where amateur birdwatchers can upload information about their bird sightings. And then, ornithologists can go and help track populations, migrations, etc.
And there's this guy, Mike Oates. Mike Oates lives in the U.K. He's a director of an electroplating company. He's found more than 140 comets. He's found so many comets, they named a comet after him. It's kind of out past Mars. It's a hike. I don't think he's getting his picture taken there anytime soon. But he found 140 comets without a telescope. He downloaded data from the NASA SOHO satellite, and that's how he found them. If we can find comets without a telescope, shouldn't we be able to find words?
Now, y'all know where I'm going with this. Because I'm going to the Internet, which is where everybody goes. And the Internet is great for collecting words, because the Internet's full of collectors. And this is a little-known technological fact about the Internet, but the Internet is actually made up of words and enthusiasm. And words and enthusiasm actually happen to be the recipe for lexicography. Isn't that great? So there are a lot of really good word-collecting sites out there right now, but the problem with some of them is that they're not scientific enough. They show the word, but they don't show any context. Where did it come from? Who said it? What newspaper was it in? What book?
Because a word is like an archaeological artifact. If you don't know the provenance or the source of the artifact, it's not science, it's a pretty thing to look at. So a word without its source is like a cut flower. You know, it's pretty to look at for a while, but then it dies. It dies too fast. So, this whole time I've been saying, "The dictionary, the dictionary, the dictionary, the dictionary." Not "a dictionary," or "dictionaries." And that's because, well, people use the dictionary to stand for the whole language. They use it synecdochically. And one of the problems of knowing a word like "synecdochically" is that you really want an excuse to say "synecdochically." This whole talk has just been an excuse to get me to the point where I could say "synecdochically" to all of you. So I'm really sorry. But when you use a part of something -- like the dictionary is a part of the language, or a flag stands for the United States, it's a symbol of the country -- then you're using it synecdochically. But the thing is, we could make the dictionary the whole language. If we get a bigger pan, then we can put all the words in. We can put in all the meanings. Doesn't everyone want more meaning in their lives? And we can make the dictionary not just be a symbol of the language -- we can make it be the whole language.
You see, what I'm really hoping for is that my son, who turns seven this month -- I want him to barely remember that this is the form factor that dictionaries used to come in. This is what dictionaries used to look like. I want him to think of this kind of dictionary as an eight-track tape. It's a format that died because it wasn't useful enough. It wasn't really what people needed. And the thing is, if we can put in all the words, no longer have that artificial distinction between good and bad, we can really describe the language like scientists. We can leave the aesthetic judgments to the writers and the speakers. If we can do that, then I can spend all my time fishing, and I don't have to be a traffic cop anymore. Thank you very much for your kind attention. |
Every presentation needs this slide in it. (Laughter) It's beautiful, isn't it? Do you see? All the points, all the lines -- it's incredible. It is the network; and in my case, the network has been important in media, because I get to connect to people. Isn't it amazing? Through that, I connect to people. And the way that I've been doing it has been multifaceted. For example, I get people to dress up their vacuum cleaners. (Laughter) I put together projects like Earth Sandwich, where I ask people to try and simultaneously place two pieces of bread perfectly opposite each other on the Earth. And people started laying bread in tribute, and eventually a team was able to do it between New Zealand and Spain. It's pretty incredible -- the video's online. Connecting to people in projects like YoungmeNowme for example. In YoungmeNowme, the audience was asked to find a childhood photograph of themselves and restage it as an adult. (Laughter) This is the same person -- top photo, James, bottom photo, [Jennifer]. Poignant. This was a Mother's Day gift. (Laughter) Particularly creepy. (Applause) (Laughter) My favorite of these photos, which I couldn't find, is there's a picture of a 30 year-old woman or so with a little baby on her lap, and the next photo is a 220-lb man with a tiny, little old lady peaking over his shoulder.
But this project changed the way that I thought about connecting to people. This is project called Ray. And what happened was I was sent this piece of audio and had no idea who generated the audio. Somebody said, "You have to listen to this." And this is what came to me.
Recording: Hi, my name is Ray, and on yesterday my daughter called me because she was stressed out because of things that were going on on her job that she felt was quite unfair. Being quite disturbed, she called for comfort, and I didn't really know what to tell her, because we have to deal with so much mess in our society. So I was led to write this song just for her, just to give her some encouragement while dealing with stress and pressures on her job. And I figured I'd put it on the Internet for all employees under stress to help you better deal with what you're going through on your job. Here's how the song goes.
♫ I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫
♫ Oh, I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫
♫ Oh, if you don't leave me alone, ♫
♫ you gonna have to send me home ♫
♫ 'Cause I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫
Now you might not be able to sing that out loud, but you can hum it to yourself, and you know what the words are. And let it give you some strength to get the next few moments on your job. All right. Stay strong. Peace.
Ze Frank: So -- yeah. No, no, no, shush. We've got to go quickly. So I was so moved by this -- this is incredible. This was connecting, right. This was, at a distance, realizing that someone was feeling something, wanting to affect them in a particular way, using media to do it, putting it online and realizing that there was a greater impact. This was incredible; this is what I wanted to do. So the first thing I thought of is we have to thank him. And I asked my audience, I said, "Listen to this piece of audio. We have to remix it. He's got a great voice. It's actually in the key of B flat. And have to do something with it." Hundreds of remixes came back -- lots of different attempts. One stood out in particular. It was done by a guy named Goose.
Remix: ♫ I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫
♫ Oh, I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫
♫ Oh, if you don't leave me alone, ♫
♫ You gonna have to send me home ♫
♫ Cuz I'm about to whip somebody's ass ♫
♫ I'm about to whip some ♫ --
ZF: Great, so it was incredible. That song -- (Applause) Thank you. So that song, somebody told me that it was at a baseball game in Kansas City. In the end, it was one of the top downloads on a whole bunch of music streaming services. And so I said, "Let's put this together in an album." And the audience came together, and they designed an album cover. And I said, "If you put it all on this, I'm going to deliver it to him, if you can figure out who this person is," because all I had was his name -- Ray -- and this little piece of audio and the fact that his daughter was upset. In two weeks, they found him. I received and email and it said, "Hi, I'm Ray. I heard you were looking for me." (Laughter) And I was like, "Yeah, Ray. It's been an interesting two weeks." And so I flew to St. Louis and met Ray, and he's a preacher -- (Laughter) among other things.
So but anyways, here's the thing -- is it reminds me of this, which is a sign that you see in Amsterdam on every street corner. And it's sort of a metaphor for me for the virtual world. I look at this photo, and he seems really interested in what's going on with that button, but it doesn't seem like he is really that interested in crossing the street. (Laughter) And it makes me think of this. On street corners everywhere, people are looking at their cell phones, and it's easy to dismiss this as some sort of bad trend in human culture. But the truth is life is being lived there. When they smile -- right, you've seen people stop -- all of a sudden, life is being lived there, somewhere up in that weird, dense network. And this is it, right, to feel and be felt. It's the fundamental force that we're all after. We can build all sorts of environments to make it a little bit easier, but ultimately, what we're trying to do is really connect with one other person. And that's not always going to happen in physical spaces. It's also going to now happen in virtual spaces, and we have to get better at figuring that out. I think, of the people that build all this technology in the network, a lot of them aren't very good at connecting with people. This is kind of like something I used to do in third grade.
(Laughter)
So here's a series of projects over the last few years where I've been inspired by trying to figure out how to really facilitate close connection. Sometimes they're very, very simple things. A Childhood Walk, which is a project where I ask people to remember a walk that they used to take as a child over and over again that was sort of meaningless -- like on the route to the bus stop, to a neighbor's house, and take it inside of Google Streetview. And I promise you, if you take that walk inside Google Streetview, you come to a moment where something comes back and hits you in the face. And I collected those moments -- the photos inside Google Streetview and the memories, specifically. "Our conversation started with me saying, 'I'm bored,' and her replying, 'When I'm bored I eat pretzels.' I remember this distinctly because it came up a lot." "Right after he told me and my brother he was going to be separating from my mom, I remember walking to a convenience store and getting a cherry cola." "They used some of the morbidly artist footage, a close-up of Chad's shoes in the middle of the highway. I guess the shoes came off when he was hit. He slept over at my house once, and he left his pillow. It had 'Chad' written in magic marker on it. He died long after he left the pillow at my house, but we never got around to returning it."
Sometimes they're a little bit more abstract. This is Pain Pack. Right after September 11th, last year, I was thinking about pain and the way that we disperse it, the way that we excise it from our bodies. So what I did is I opened up a hotline -- a hotline where people could leave voicemails of their pain, not necessarily related to that event. And people called in and left messages like this.
Recording: Okay, here's something. I'm not alone, and I am loved. I'm really fortunate. But sometimes I feel really lonely. And when I feel that way even the smallest act of kindness can make me cry. Like even people in convenience stores saying, "Have a nice day," when they're accidentally looking me in the eye.
ZF: So what I did was I took those voicemails, and with their permission, converted them to MP3s and distributed them to sound editors who created short sounds using just those voicemails. And those were then distributed to DJs who have made hundreds of songs using that source material. (Music) We don't have time to play much of it. You can look at it online.
"From 52 to 48 with love" was a project around the time of the last election cycle, where McCain and Obama both, in their speeches after the election, talked about reconciliation, and I was like, "What the hell does that look like?" So I thought, "Well let's just give it a try. Let's have people hold up signs about reconciliation." And so some really nice things came together. "I voted blue. I voted red. Together, for our future." These are very, very cute little things right. Some came from the winning party. "Dear 48, I promise to listen to you, to fight for you, to respect you always." Some came from the party who had just lost. "From a 48 to a 52, may your party's leadership be as classy as you, but I doubt it." But the truth was that as this start becoming popular, a couple rightwing blogs and some message boards apparently found it to be a little patronizing, which I could also see. And so I started getting amazing amounts of hate mail, death threats even. And one guy in particular kept on writing me these pretty awful messages, and he was dressed as Batman. And he said, "I'm dressed as Batman to hide my identity." Just in case I thought the real Batman was coming after me; which actually made me feel a little better -- like, "Phew, it's not him."
So what I did -- unfortunately, I was harboring all this kind of awful experience and this pain inside of me, and it started to eat away at my psyche. And I was protecting the project from it, I realized. I was protecting it -- I didn't want this special, little group of photographs to get sullied in some way. So what I did, I took all those emails, and I put them together into something called Angrigami, which was an origami template made out of this sort of vile stuff. And I asked people to send me beautiful things made out of the Angrigami. (Laughter) But this was the emotional moment. One of my viewer's uncles died on a particular day and he chose to commemorate it with a piece of hate. It's amazing.
The last thing I'm going to tell you about is a series of projects called Songs You Already Know, where the idea was, I was trying to figure out to address particular kinds of emotions with group projects. So one of them was fairly straightforward. A guy said that his daughter got scared at night and could I write a song for her, his daughter. And I said, "Oh yeah, I'll try to write a mantra that she can sing to herself to help herself go to sleep." And this was "Scared."
(Video) ♫ This is a song that I sing when I'm scared of something ♫
♫ I don't know why but it helps me get over it ♫
♫ The words of the song just move me along ♫
♫ And somehow I get over it ♫
♫ At least I don't suck at life ♫
♫ I keep on trying despite ♫
♫ At least I don't suck at life ♫
♫ I keep on trying despite ♫
♫ This is a song that I sing when I'm scared of something ♫
Okay, so I wrote that song, right. Thank you. So the nice thing was is he walked by his daughter's room at some point, and she actually was singing that song to herself. So I was like, "Awesome. This is great."
And then I got this email. And there's a little bit of a back story to this. And I don't have much time. But the idea was that at one point I did a project called Facebook Me Equals You, where I wanted to experience what it was like to live as another person. So I asked for people's usernames and passwords to be sent to me. And I got a lot, like 30 in a half an hour. And I shut that part down. And I chose two people to be, and I asked them to send me descriptions of how to act as them on Facebook. One person sent me a very detailed description; the other person didn't. And the person who didn't, it turned out, had just moved to a new city and taken on a new job. So, you know, people were writing me and saying, "How's your new job?" I was like, "I don't know. Didn't know I had one."
But anyway, this same person, Laura, ended up emailing me a little bit after that project. And I felt badly for not having done a good job. And she said, "I'm really anxious, I just moved to a new town, I have this new job, and I've just had this incredible amount of anxiety." So she had seen the "Scared" song and wondered if I could do something. So I asked her, "What does it feel like when you feel this way?" And she wrote a sort of descriptive set of what it felt like to have had this anxiety. And so what I decided to do. I said, "Okay, I'll think about it." And so quietly in the background, I started sending people this.
(Audio) ♫ Hey ♫
♫ You're okay ♫
♫ You'll be fine ♫
So I asked people whether they had basic audio capabilities, just so they could sing along to the song with headphones on, so I could just get their voices back. And this is the kind of thing that I got back.
Recording: ♫ Hey ♫
♫ You're okay ♫
♫ You'll be fine ♫
ZF: So that's one of the better ones, really. But what's awesome is, as I started getting more and more and more of them, all of a sudden I had 30, 40 voices from around the world. And when you put them together, something magical happens, something absolutely incredible happens, and all of a sudden I get a chorus from around the world. And what was really great is, I'm putting all this work together in the background, and Laura sent me a follow-up email because a good month had passed by. And she said, "I know you've forgotten about me. I just want to say thanks for even considering it." And then a few days later I sent her this.
(Audio) ♫ Right now, it feels like I forgot to turn the light on ♫
♫ And things that looked so good yesterday ♫
♫ are now shades of gray ♫
♫ And it seems like the world is spinning ♫
♫ while I'm standing still ♫
♫ Or maybe I am spinning I can't tell ♫
♫ And then you say ♫
♫ Hey ♫
♫ You're okay ♫
♫ You'll be fine ♫
♫ Just breathe ♫
♫ And now the words sing ♫
♫ Hey ♫
♫ You're okay ♫
♫ You'll be fine ♫
♫ Just breathe ♫
♫ Now everybody sings ♫
♫ Hey ♫
♫ You're okay ♫
♫ You'll be fine ♫
♫ Just breathe ♫
♫ Hey ♫
♫ You're okay ♫
♫ You'll be fine ♫
♫ Just breathe ♫
♫ Hey ♫
♫ You're okay ♫
♫ You'll be fine ♫
♫ Just breathe ♫
Thank you.
(Applause) |
Martin Luther King did not say, "I have a nightmare," when he inspired the civil rights movements. He said, "I have a dream." And I have a dream. I have a dream that we can stop thinking that the future will be a nightmare, and this is going to be a challenge, because, if you think of every major blockbusting film of recent times, nearly all of its visions for humanity are apocalyptic. I think this film is one of the hardest watches of modern times, "The Road." It's a beautiful piece of filmmaking, but everything is desolate, everything is dead. And just a father and son trying to survive, walking along the road. And I think the environmental movement of which I am a part of has been complicit in creating this vision of the future.
For too long, we have peddled a nightmarish vision of what's going to happen. We have focused on the worst-case scenario. We have focused on the problems. And we have not thought enough about the solutions. We've used fear, if you like, to grab people's attention. And any psychologist will tell you that fear in the organism is linked to flight mechanism. It's part of the fight and flight mechanism, that when an animal is frightened -- think of a deer. A deer freezes very, very still, poised to run away. And I think that's what we're doing when we're asking people to engage with our agenda around environmental degradation and climate change. People are freezing and running away because we're using fear. And I think the environmental movement has to grow up and start to think about what progress is.
What would it be like to be improving the human lot? And one of the problems that we face, I think, is that the only people that have cornered the market in terms of progress is a financial definition of what progress is, an economic definition of what progress is -- that somehow, if we get the right numbers to go up, we're going to be better off, whether that's on the stock market, whether that's with GDP and economic growth, that somehow life is going to get better. This is somehow appealing to human greed instead of fear -- that more is better. Come on. In the Western world, we have enough. Maybe some parts of the world don't, but we have enough. And we've know for a long time that this is not a good measure of the welfare of nations. In fact, the architect of our national accounting system, Simon Kuznets, in the 1930s, said that, "A nation's welfare can scarcely be inferred from their national income." But we've created a national accounting system which is firmly based on production and producing stuff. And indeed, this is probably historical, and it had its time. In the second World War, we needed to produce a lot of stuff. And indeed, we were so successful at producing certain types of stuff that we destroyed a lot of Europe, and we had to rebuild it afterwards. And so our national accounting system became fixated on what we can produce.
But as early as 1968, this visionary man, Robert Kennedy, at the start of his ill-fated presidential campaign, gave the most eloquent deconstruction of gross national product that ever has been. And he finished his talk with the phrase, that, "The gross national product measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile." How crazy is that? That our measure of progress, our dominant measure of progress in society, is measuring everything except that which makes life worthwhile? I believe, if Kennedy was alive today, he would be asking statisticians such as myself to go out and find out what makes life worthwhile. He'd be asking us to redesign our national accounting system to be based upon such important things as social justice, sustainability and people's well-being.
And actually, social scientists have already gone out and asked these questions around the world. This is from a global survey. It's asking people, what do they want. And unsurprisingly, people all around the world say that what they want is happiness, for themselves, for their families, their children, their communities. Okay, they think money is slightly important. It's there, but it's not nearly as important as happiness, and it's not nearly as important as love. We all need to love and be loved in life. It's not nearly as important as health. We want to be healthy and live a full life. These seem to be natural human aspirations. Why are statisticians not measuring these? Why are we not thinking of the progress of nations in these terms, instead of just how much stuff we have? And really, this is what I've done with my adult life -- is think about how do we measure happiness, how do we measure well-being, how can we do that within environmental limits.
And we created, at the organization that I work for, the New Economics Foundation, something we call the Happy Planet Index, because we think people should be happy and the planet should be happy. Why don't we create a measure of progress that shows that? And what we do, is we say that the ultimate outcome of a nation is how successful is it at creating happy and healthy lives for its citizens. That should be the goal of every nation on the planet. But we have to remember that there's a fundamental input to that, and that is how many of the planet's resources we use. We all have one planet. We all have to share it. It is the ultimate scarce resource, the one planet that we share. And economics is very interested in scarcity. When it has a scarce resource that it wants to turn into a desirable outcome, it thinks in terms of efficiency. It thinks in terms of how much bang do we get for our buck. And this is a measure of how much well-being we get for our planetary resource use. It is an efficiency measure. And probably the easiest way to show you that, is to show you this graph.
Running horizontally along the graph, is "ecological footprint," which is a measure of how much resources we use and how much pressure we put on the planet. More is bad. Running vertically upwards, is a measure called "happy life years." It's about the well-being of nations. It's like a happiness adjusted life-expectancy. It's like quality and quantity of life in nations. And the yellow dot there you see, is the global average. Now, there's a huge array of nations around that global average. To the top right of the graph, are countries which are doing reasonably well and producing well-being, but they're using a lot of planet to get there. They are the U.S.A., other Western countries going across in those triangles and a few Gulf states in there actually. Conversely, at the bottom left of the graph, are countries that are not producing much well-being -- typically, sub-Saharan Africa. In Hobbesian terms, life is short and brutish there. The average life expectancy in many of these countries is only 40 years. Malaria, HIV/AIDS are killing a lot of people in these regions of the world.
But now for the good news! There are some countries up there, yellow triangles, that are doing better than global average, that are heading up towards the top left of the graph. This is an aspirational graph. We want to be top left, where good lives don't cost the earth. They're Latin American. The country on its own up at the top is a place I haven't been to. Maybe some of you have. Costa Rica. Costa Rica -- average life expectancy is 78-and-a-half years. That is longer than in the USA. They are, according to the latest Gallup world poll, the happiest nation on the planet -- than anybody; more than Switzerland and Denmark. They are the happiest place. They are doing that on a quarter of the resources that are used typically in [the] Western world -- a quarter of the resources.
What's going on there? What's happening in Costa Rica? We can look at some of the data. 99 percent of their electricity comes from renewable resources. Their government is one of the first to commit to be carbon neutral by 2021. They abolished the army in 1949 -- 1949. And they invested in social programs -- health and education. They have one of the highest literacy rates in Latin America and in the world. And they have that Latin vibe, don't they. They have the social connectedness. (Laughter) The challenge is, that possibly -- and the thing we might have to think about -- is that the future might not be North American, might not be Western European. It might be Latin American. And the challenge, really, is to pull the global average up here. That's what we need to do. And if we're going to do that, we need to pull countries from the bottom, and we need to pull countries from the right of the graph. And then we're starting to create a happy planet. That's one way of looking at it.
Another way of looking at it is looking at time trends. We don't have good data going back for every country in the world, but for some of the richest countries, the OECD group, we do. And this is the trend in well-being over that time, a small increase, but this is the trend in ecological footprint. And so in strict happy-planet methodology, we've become less efficient at turning our ultimate scarce resource into the outcome we want to. And the point really is, is that I think, probably everybody in this room would like society to get to 2050 without an apocalyptic something happening. It's actually not very long away. It's half a human lifetime away. A child entering school today will be my age in 2050. This is not the very distant future. This is what the U.K. government target on carbon and greenhouse emissions looks like. And I put it to you, that is not business as usual. That is changing our business. That is changing the way we create our organizations, we do our government policy and we live our lives. And the point is, we need to carry on increasing well-being. No one can go to the polls and say that quality of life is going to reduce. None of us, I think, want human progress to stop. I think we want it to carry on. I think we want the lot of humanity to keep on increasing. And I think this is where climate change skeptics and deniers come in. I think this is what they want. They want quality of life to keep increasing. They want to hold on to what they've got. And if we're going to engage them, I think that's what we've got to do. And that means we have to really increase efficiency even more.
Now that's all very easy to draw graphs and things like that, but the point is we need to turn those curves. And this is where I think we can take a leaf out of systems theory, systems engineers, where they create feedback loops, put the right information at the right point of time. Human beings are very motivated by the "now." You put a smart meter in your home, and you see how much electricity you're using right now, how much it's costing you, your kids go around and turn the lights off pretty quickly. What would that look like for society? Why is it, on the radio news every evening, I hear the FTSE 100, the Dow Jones, the dollar pound ratio -- I don't even know which way the dollar pound ratio should go to be good news. And why do I hear that? Why don't I hear how much energy Britain used yesterday, or American used yesterday? Did we meet our three percent annual target on reducing carbon emissions? That's how you create a collective goal. You put it out there into the media and start thinking about it. And we need positive feedback loops for increasing well-being At a government level, they might create national accounts of well-being. At a business level, you might look at the well-being of your employees, which we know is really linked to creativity, which is linked to innovation, and we're going to need a lot of innovation to deal with those environmental issues. At a personal level, we need these nudges too. Maybe we don't quite need the data, but we need reminders. In the U.K., we have a strong public health message on five fruit and vegetables a day and how much exercise we should do -- never my best thing. What are these for happiness? What are the five things that you should do every day to be happier?
We did a project for the Government Office of Science a couple of years ago, a big program called the Foresight program -- lots and lots of people -- involved lots of experts -- everything evidence based -- a huge tome. But a piece of work we did was on: what five positive actions can you do to improve well-being in your life? And the point of these is they are, not quite, the secrets of happiness, but they are things that I think happiness will flow out the side from.
And the first of these is to connect, is that your social relationships are the most important cornerstones of your life. Do you invest the time with your loved ones that you could do, and energy? Keep building them. The second one is be active. The fastest way out of a bad mood: step outside, go for a walk, turn the radio on and dance. Being active is great for our positive mood. The third one is take notice. How aware are you of things going on around the world, the seasons changing, people around you? Do you notice what's bubbling up for you and trying to emerge? Based on a lot of evidence for mindfulness, cognitive behavioral therapy, [very] strong for our well being. The fourth is keep learning and keep is important -- learning throughout the whole life course. Older people who keep learning and are curious, they have much better health outcomes than those who start to close down. But it doesn't have to be formal learning; it's not knowledge based. It's more curiosity. It can be learning to cook a new dish, picking up an instrument you forgot as a child. Keep learning. And the final one is that most anti-economic of activities, but give. Our generosity, our altruism, our compassion, are all hardwired to the reward mechanism in our brain. We feel good if we give. You can do an experiment where you give two groups of people a hundred dollars in the morning. You tell one of them to spend it on themselves and one on other people. You measure their happiness at the end of the day, those that have gone and spent on other people are much happier that those that spent it on themselves.
And these five ways, which we put onto these handy postcards, I would say, don't have to cost the earth. They don't have any carbon content. They don't need a lot of material goods to be satisfied. And so I think it's really quite feasible that happiness does not cost the earth. Now, Martin Luther King, on the eve of his death, gave an incredible speech. He said, "I know there are challenges ahead, there may be trouble ahead, but I fear no one. I don't care. I have been to the mountain top, and I have seen the Promised Land." Now, he was a preacher, but I believe the environmental movement and, in fact, the business community, government, needs to go to the top of the mountain top, and it needs to look out, and it needs to see the Promised Land, or the land of promise, and it needs to have a vision of a world that we all want. And not only that, we need to create a Great Transition to get there, and we need to pave that great transition with good things.
Human beings want to be happy. Pave them with the five ways. And we need to have signposts gathering people together and pointing them -- something like the Happy Planet Index. And then I believe that we can all create a world we all want, where happiness does not cost the earth.
(Applause) |
The theme of my talk today is, "Be an artist, right now." Most people, when this subject is brought up, get tense and resist it: "Art doesn't feed me, and right now I'm busy. I have to go to school, get a job, send my kids to lessons ... " You think, "I'm too busy. I don't have time for art." There are hundreds of reasons why we can't be artists right now. Don't they just pop into your head?
There are so many reasons why we can't be, indeed, we're not sure why we should be. We don't know why we should be artists, but we have many reasons why we can't be. Why do people instantly resist the idea of associating themselves with art? Perhaps you think art is for the greatly gifted or for the thoroughly and professionally trained. And some of you may think you've strayed too far from art. Well you might have, but I don't think so. This is the theme of my talk today. We are all born artists.
If you have kids, you know what I mean. Almost everything kids do is art. They draw with crayons on the wall. They dance to Son Dam Bi's dance on TV, but you can't even call it Son Dam Bi's dance -- it becomes the kids' own dance. So they dance a strange dance and inflict their singing on everyone. Perhaps their art is something only their parents can bear, and because they practice such art all day long, people honestly get a little tired around kids.
Kids will sometimes perform monodramas -- playing house is indeed a monodrama or a play. And some kids, when they get a bit older, start to lie. Usually parents remember the very first time their kid lies. They're shocked. "Now you're showing your true colors," Mom says. She thinks, "Why does he take after his dad?" She questions him, "What kind of a person are you going to be?"
But you shouldn't worry. The moment kids start to lie is the moment storytelling begins. They are talking about things they didn't see. It's amazing. It's a wonderful moment. Parents should celebrate. "Hurray! My boy finally started to lie!" All right! It calls for celebration. For example, a kid says, "Mom, guess what? I met an alien on my way home." Then a typical mom responds, "Stop that nonsense." Now, an ideal parent is someone who responds like this: "Really? An alien, huh? What did it look like? Did it say anything? Where did you meet it?" "Um, in front of the supermarket."
When you have a conversation like this, the kid has to come up with the next thing to say to be responsible for what he started. Soon, a story develops. Of course this is an infantile story, but thinking up one sentence after the next is the same thing a professional writer like me does. In essence, they are not different. Roland Barthes once said of Flaubert's novels, "Flaubert did not write a novel. He merely connected one sentence after another. The eros between sentences, that is the essence of Flaubert's novel." That's right -- a novel, basically, is writing one sentence, then, without violating the scope of the first one, writing the next sentence. And you continue to make connections.
Take a look at this sentence: "One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug." Yes, it's the first sentence of Franz Kafka's "The Metamorphosis." Writing such an unjustifiable sentence and continuing in order to justify it, Kafka's work became the masterpiece of contemporary literature. Kafka did not show his work to his father. He was not on good terms with his father. On his own, he wrote these sentences. Had he shown his father, "My boy has finally lost it," he would've thought.
And that's right. Art is about going a little nuts and justifying the next sentence, which is not much different from what a kid does. A kid who has just started to lie is taking the first step as a storyteller. Kids do art. They don't get tired and they have fun doing it. I was in Jeju Island a few days ago. When kids are on the beach, most of them love playing in the water. But some of them spend a lot of time in the sand, making mountains and seas -- well, not seas, but different things -- people and dogs, etc. But parents tell them, "It will all be washed away by the waves." In other words, it's useless. There's no need. But kids don't mind. They have fun in the moment and they keep playing in the sand. Kids don't do it because someone told them to. They aren't told by their boss or anyone, they just do it.
When you were little, I bet you spent time enjoying the pleasure of primitive art. When I ask my students to write about their happiest moment, many write about an early artistic experience they had as a kid. Learning to play piano for the first time and playing four hands with a friend, or performing a ridiculous skit with friends looking like idiots -- things like that. Or the moment you developed the first film you shot with an old camera. They talk about these kinds of experiences. You must have had such a moment. In that moment, art makes you happy because it's not work. Work doesn't make you happy, does it? Mostly it's tough.
The French writer Michel Tournier has a famous saying. It's a bit mischievous, actually. "Work is against human nature. The proof is that it makes us tired." Right? Why would work tire us if it's in our nature? Playing doesn't tire us. We can play all night long. If we work overnight, we should be paid for overtime. Why? Because it's tiring and we feel fatigue. But kids, usually they do art for fun. It's playing. They don't draw to sell the work to a client or play the piano to earn money for the family. Of course, there were kids who had to. You know this gentleman, right? He had to tour around Europe to support his family -- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart -- but that was centuries ago, so we can make him an exception. Unfortunately, at some point our art -- such a joyful pastime -- ends. Kids have to go to lessons, to school, do homework and of course they take piano or ballet lessons, but they aren't fun anymore. You're told to do it and there's competition. How can it be fun? If you're in elementary school and you still draw on the wall, you'll surely get in trouble with your mom. Besides, if you continue to act like an artist as you get older, you'll increasingly feel pressure -- people will question your actions and ask you to act properly.
Here's my story: I was an eighth grader and I entered a drawing contest at school in Gyeongbokgung. I was trying my best, and my teacher came around and asked me, "What are you doing?" "I'm drawing diligently," I said. "Why are you using only black?" Indeed, I was eagerly coloring the sketchbook in black. And I explained, "It's a dark night and a crow is perching on a branch." Then my teacher said, "Really? Well, Young-ha, you may not be good at drawing but you have a talent for storytelling." Or so I wished. "Now you'll get it, you rascal!" was the response. (Laughter) "You'll get it!" he said. You were supposed to draw the palace, the Gyeonghoeru, etc., but I was coloring everything in black, so he dragged me out of the group. There were a lot of girls there as well, so I was utterly mortified.
None of my explanations or excuses were heard, and I really got it big time. If he was an ideal teacher, he would have responded like I said before, "Young-ha may not have a talent for drawing, but he has a gift for making up stories," and he would have encouraged me. But such a teacher is seldom found. Later, I grew up and went to Europe's galleries -- I was a university student -- and I thought this was really unfair. Look what I found. (Laughter)
Works like this were hung in Basel while I was punished and stood in front of the palace with my drawing in my mouth. Look at this. Doesn't it look just like wallpaper? Contemporary art, I later discovered, isn't explained by a lame story like mine. No crows are brought up. Most of the works have no title, Untitled. Anyways, contemporary art in the 20th century is about doing something weird and filling the void with explanation and interpretation -- essentially the same as I did. Of course, my work was very amateur, but let's turn to more famous examples.
This is Picasso's. He stuck handlebars into a bike seat and called it "Bull's Head." Sounds convincing, right? Next, a urinal was placed on its side and called "Fountain". That was Duchamp. So filling the gap between explanation and a weird act with stories -- that's indeed what contemporary art is all about. Picasso even made the statement, "I draw not what I see but what I think." Yes, it means I didn't have to draw Gyeonghoeru. I wish I knew what Picasso said back then. I could have argued better with my teacher. Unfortunately, the little artists within us are choked to death before we get to fight against the oppressors of art. They get locked in. That's our tragedy.
So what happens when little artists get locked in, banished or even killed? Our artistic desire doesn't go away. We want to express, to reveal ourselves, but with the artist dead, the artistic desire reveals itself in dark form. In karaoke bars, there are always people who sing "She's Gone" or "Hotel California," miming the guitar riffs. Usually they sound awful. Awful indeed. Some people turn into rockers like this. Or some people dance in clubs. People who would have enjoyed telling stories end up trolling on the Internet all night long. That's how a writing talent reveals itself on the dark side.
Sometimes we see dads get more excited than their kids playing with Legos or putting together plastic robots. They go, "Don't touch it. Daddy will do it for you." The kid has already lost interest and is doing something else, but the dad alone builds castles. This shows the artistic impulses inside us are suppressed, not gone. But they can often reveal themselves negatively, in the form of jealousy. You know the song "I would love to be on TV"? Why would we love it? TV is full of people who do what we wished to do, but never got to. They dance, they act -- and the more they do, they are praised. So we start to envy them. We become dictators with a remote and start to criticize the people on TV. "He just can't act." "You call that singing? She can't hit the notes." We easily say these sorts of things. We get jealous, not because we're evil, but because we have little artists pent up inside us. That's what I think.
What should we do then? Yes, that's right. Right now, we need to start our own art. Right this minute, we can turn off TV, log off the Internet, get up and start to do something. Where I teach students in drama school, there's a course called Dramatics. In this course, all students must put on a play. However, acting majors are not supposed to act. They can write the play, for example, and the writers may work on stage art. Likewise, stage art majors may become actors, and in this way you put on a show. Students at first wonder whether they can actually do it, but later they have so much fun. I rarely see anyone who is miserable doing a play. In school, the military or even in a mental institution, once you make people do it, they enjoy it. I saw this happen in the army -- many people had fun doing plays.
I have another experience: In my writing class, I give students a special assignment. I have students like you in the class -- many who don't major in writing. Some major in art or music and think they can't write. So I give them blank sheets of paper and a theme. It can be a simple theme: Write about the most unfortunate experience in your childhood. There's one condition: You must write like crazy. Like crazy! I walk around and encourage them, "Come on, come on!" They have to write like crazy for an hour or two. They only get to think for the first five minutes.
The reason I make them write like crazy is because when you write slowly and lots of thoughts cross your mind, the artistic devil creeps in. This devil will tell you hundreds of reasons why you can't write: "People will laugh at you. This is not good writing! What kind of sentence is this? Look at your handwriting!" It will say a lot of things. You have to run fast so the devil can't catch up. The really good writing I've seen in my class was not from the assignments with a long deadline, but from the 40- to 60-minute crazy writing students did in front of me with a pencil. The students go into a kind of trance. After 30 or 40 minutes, they write without knowing what they're writing. And in this moment, the nagging devil disappears.
So I can say this: It's not the hundreds of reasons why one can't be an artist, but rather, the one reason one must be that makes us artists. Why we cannot be something is not important. Most artists became artists because of the one reason. When we put the devil in our heart to sleep and start our own art, enemies appear on the outside. Mostly, they have the faces of our parents. (Laughter) Sometimes they look like our spouses, but they are not your parents or spouses. They are devils. Devils. They came to Earth briefly transformed to stop you from being artistic, from becoming artists. And they have a magic question. When we say, "I think I'll try acting. There's a drama school in the community center," or "I'd like to learn Italian songs," they ask, "Oh, yeah? A play? What for?" The magic question is, "What for?" But art is not for anything. Art is the ultimate goal. It saves our souls and makes us live happily. It helps us express ourselves and be happy without the help of alcohol or drugs. So in response to such a pragmatic question, we need to be bold. "Well, just for the fun of it. Sorry for having fun without you," is what you should say. "I'll just go ahead and do it anyway." The ideal future I imagine is where we all have multiple identities, at least one of which is an artist.
Once I was in New York and got in a cab. I took the backseat, and in front of me I saw something related to a play. So I asked the driver, "What is this?" He said it was his profile. "Then what are you?" I asked. "An actor," he said. He was a cabby and an actor. I asked, "What roles do you usually play?" He proudly said he played King Lear. King Lear. "Who is it that can tell me who I am?" -- a great line from King Lear. That's the world I dream of. Someone is a golfer by day and writer by night. Or a cabby and an actor, a banker and a painter, secretly or publicly performing their own arts.
In 1990, Martha Graham, the legend of modern dance, came to Korea. The great artist, then in her 90s, arrived at Gimpo Airport and a reporter asked her a typical question: "What do you have to do to become a great dancer? Any advice for aspiring Korean dancers?" Now, she was the master. This photo was taken in 1948 and she was already a celebrated artist. In 1990, she was asked this question. And here's what she answered: "Just do it." Wow. I was touched. Only those three words and she left the airport. That's it. So what should we do now? Let's be artists, right now. Right away. How? Just do it!
Thank you.
(Applause) |
A tourist is backpacking through the highlands of Scotland, and he stops at a pub to get a drink. And the only people in there is a bartender and an old man nursing a beer. And he orders a pint, and they sit in silence for a while. And suddenly the old man turns to him and goes, "You see this bar? I built this bar with my bare hands from the finest wood in the county. Gave it more love and care than my own child. But do they call me MacGregor the bar builder? No." Points out the window. "You see that stone wall out there? I built that stone wall with my bare hands. Found every stone, placed them just so through the rain and the cold. But do they call me MacGregor the stone wall builder? No." Points out the window. "You see that pier on the lake out there? I built that pier with my bare hands. Drove the pilings against the tide of the sand, plank by plank. But do they call me MacGregor the pier builder? No. But you fuck one goat ... "
(Laughter)
Storytelling -- (Laughter) is joke telling. It's knowing your punchline, your ending, knowing that everything you're saying, from the first sentence to the last, is leading to a singular goal, and ideally confirming some truth that deepens our understandings of who we are as human beings. We all love stories. We're born for them. Stories affirm who we are. We all want affirmations that our lives have meaning. And nothing does a greater affirmation than when we connect through stories. It can cross the barriers of time, past, present and future, and allow us to experience the similarities between ourselves and through others, real and imagined.
The children's television host Mr. Rogers always carried in his wallet a quote from a social worker that said, "Frankly, there isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story." And the way I like to interpret that is probably the greatest story commandment, which is "Make me care" -- please, emotionally, intellectually, aesthetically, just make me care. We all know what it's like to not care. You've gone through hundreds of TV channels, just switching channel after channel, and then suddenly you actually stop on one. It's already halfway over, but something's caught you and you're drawn in and you care. That's not by chance, that's by design.
So it got me thinking, what if I told you my history was story, how I was born for it, how I learned along the way this subject matter? And to make it more interesting, we'll start from the ending and we'll go to the beginning. And so if I were going to give you the ending of this story, it would go something like this: And that's what ultimately led me to speaking to you here at TED about story.
And the most current story lesson that I've had was completing the film I've just done this year in 2012. The film is "John Carter." It's based on a book called "The Princess of Mars," which was written by Edgar Rice Burroughs. And Edgar Rice Burroughs actually put himself as a character inside this movie, and as the narrator. And he's summoned by his rich uncle, John Carter, to his mansion with a telegram saying, "See me at once." But once he gets there, he's found out that his uncle has mysteriously passed away and been entombed in a mausoleum on the property.
(Video) Butler: You won't find a keyhole. Thing only opens from the inside. He insisted, no embalming, no open coffin, no funeral. You don't acquire the kind of wealth your uncle commanded by being like the rest of us, huh? Come, let's go inside.
AS: What this scene is doing, and it did in the book, is it's fundamentally making a promise. It's making a promise to you that this story will lead somewhere that's worth your time. And that's what all good stories should do at the beginning, is they should give you a promise. You could do it an infinite amount of ways. Sometimes it's as simple as "Once upon a time ... " These Carter books always had Edgar Rice Burroughs as a narrator in it. And I always thought it was such a fantastic device. It's like a guy inviting you around the campfire, or somebody in a bar saying, "Here, let me tell you a story. It didn't happen to me, it happened to somebody else, but it's going to be worth your time." A well told promise is like a pebble being pulled back in a slingshot and propels you forward through the story to the end.
In 2008, I pushed all the theories that I had on story at the time to the limits of my understanding on this project.
(Video) (Mechanical Sounds) ♫ And that is all ♫ ♫ that love's about ♫ ♫ And we'll recall ♫ ♫ when time runs out ♫ ♫ That it only ♫ (Laughter)
AS: Storytelling without dialogue. It's the purest form of cinematic storytelling. It's the most inclusive approach you can take. It confirmed something I really had a hunch on, is that the audience actually wants to work for their meal. They just don't want to know that they're doing that. That's your job as a storyteller, is to hide the fact that you're making them work for their meal. We're born problem solvers. We're compelled to deduce and to deduct, because that's what we do in real life. It's this well-organized absence of information that draws us in. There's a reason that we're all attracted to an infant or a puppy. It's not just that they're damn cute; it's because they can't completely express what they're thinking and what their intentions are. And it's like a magnet. We can't stop ourselves from wanting to complete the sentence and fill it in.
I first started really understanding this storytelling device when I was writing with Bob Peterson on "Finding Nemo." And we would call this the unifying theory of two plus two. Make the audience put things together. Don't give them four, give them two plus two. The elements you provide and the order you place them in is crucial to whether you succeed or fail at engaging the audience. Editors and screenwriters have known this all along. It's the invisible application that holds our attention to story. I don't mean to make it sound like this is an actual exact science, it's not. That's what's so special about stories, they're not a widget, they aren't exact. Stories are inevitable, if they're good, but they're not predictable.
I took a seminar in this year with an acting teacher named Judith Weston. And I learned a key insight to character. She believed that all well-drawn characters have a spine. And the idea is that the character has an inner motor, a dominant, unconscious goal that they're striving for, an itch that they can't scratch. She gave a wonderful example of Michael Corleone, Al Pacino's character in "The Godfather," and that probably his spine was to please his father. And it's something that always drove all his choices. Even after his father died, he was still trying to scratch that itch. I took to this like a duck to water. Wall-E's was to find the beauty. Marlin's, the father in "Finding Nemo," was to prevent harm. And Woody's was to do what was best for his child. And these spines don't always drive you to make the best choices. Sometimes you can make some horrible choices with them.
I'm really blessed to be a parent, and watching my children grow, I really firmly believe that you're born with a temperament and you're wired a certain way, and you don't have any say about it, and there's no changing it. All you can do is learn to recognize it and own it. And some of us are born with temperaments that are positive, some are negative. But a major threshold is passed when you mature enough to acknowledge what drives you and to take the wheel and steer it. As parents, you're always learning who your children are. They're learning who they are. And you're still learning who you are. So we're all learning all the time. And that's why change is fundamental in story. If things go static, stories die, because life is never static.
In 1998, I had finished writing "Toy Story" and "A Bug's Life" and I was completely hooked on screenwriting. So I wanted to become much better at it and learn anything I could. So I researched everything I possibly could. And I finally came across this fantastic quote by a British playwright, William Archer: "Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty." It's an incredibly insightful definition.
When you're telling a story, have you constructed anticipation? In the short-term, have you made me want to know what will happen next? But more importantly, have you made me want to know how it will all conclude in the long-term? Have you constructed honest conflicts with truth that creates doubt in what the outcome might be? An example would be in "Finding Nemo," in the short tension, you were always worried, would Dory's short-term memory make her forget whatever she was being told by Marlin. But under that was this global tension of will we ever find Nemo in this huge, vast ocean?
In our earliest days at Pixar, before we truly understood the invisible workings of story, we were simply a group of guys just going on our gut, going on our instincts. And it's interesting to see how that led us places that were actually pretty good. You've got to remember that in this time of year, 1993, what was considered a successful animated picture was "The Little Mermaid," "Beauty and the Beast," "Aladdin," "Lion King." So when we pitched "Toy Story" to Tom Hanks for the first time, he walked in and he said, "You don't want me to sing, do you?" And I thought that epitomized perfectly what everybody thought animation had to be at the time. But we really wanted to prove that you could tell stories completely different in animation.
We didn't have any influence then, so we had a little secret list of rules that we kept to ourselves. And they were: No songs, no "I want" moment, no happy village, no love story. And the irony is that, in the first year, our story was not working at all and Disney was panicking. So they privately got advice from a famous lyricist, who I won't name, and he faxed them some suggestions. And we got a hold of that fax. And the fax said, there should be songs, there should be an "I want" song, there should be a happy village song, there should be a love story and there should be a villain. And thank goodness we were just too young, rebellious and contrarian at the time. That just gave us more determination to prove that you could build a better story. And a year after that, we did conquer it. And it just went to prove that storytelling has guidelines, not hard, fast rules.
Another fundamental thing we learned was about liking your main character. And we had naively thought, well Woody in "Toy Story" has to become selfless at the end, so you've got to start from someplace. So let's make him selfish. And this is what you get.
(Voice Over) Woody: What do you think you're doing? Off the bed. Hey, off the bed! Mr. Potato Head: You going to make us, Woody? Woody: No, he is. Slinky? Slink ... Slinky! Get up here and do your job. Are you deaf? I said, take care of them. Slinky: I'm sorry, Woody, but I have to agree with them. I don't think what you did was right. Woody: What? Am I hearing correctly? You don't think I was right? Who said your job was to think, Spring Wiener?
AS: So how do you make a selfish character likable? We realized, you can make him kind, generous, funny, considerate, as long as one condition is met for him, is that he stays the top toy. And that's what it really is, is that we all live life conditionally. We're all willing to play by the rules and follow things along, as long as certain conditions are met. After that, all bets are off. And before I'd even decided to make storytelling my career, I can now see key things that happened in my youth that really sort of opened my eyes to certain things about story.
In 1986, I truly understood the notion of story having a theme. And that was the year that they restored and re-released "Lawrence of Arabia." And I saw that thing seven times in one month. I couldn't get enough of it. I could just tell there was a grand design under it -- in every shot, every scene, every line. Yet, on the surface it just seemed to be depicting his historical lineage of what went on. Yet, there was something more being said. What exactly was it? And it wasn't until, on one of my later viewings, that the veil was lifted and it was in a scene where he's walked across the Sinai Desert and he's reached the Suez Canal, and I suddenly got it.
(Video) Boy: Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey! Cyclist: Who are you? Who are you?
AS: That was the theme: Who are you? Here were all these seemingly disparate events and dialogues that just were chronologically telling the history of him, but underneath it was a constant, a guideline, a road map. Everything Lawrence did in that movie was an attempt for him to figure out where his place was in the world. A strong theme is always running through a well-told story.
When I was five, I was introduced to possibly the most major ingredient that I feel a story should have, but is rarely invoked. And this is what my mother took me to when I was five.
(Video) Thumper: Come on. It's all right. Look. The water's stiff. Bambi: Yippee! Thumper: Some fun, huh, Bambi? Come on. Get up. Like this. Ha ha. No, no, no.
AS: I walked out of there wide-eyed with wonder. And that's what I think the magic ingredient is, the secret sauce, is can you invoke wonder. Wonder is honest, it's completely innocent. It can't be artificially evoked. For me, there's no greater ability than the gift of another human being giving you that feeling -- to hold them still just for a brief moment in their day and have them surrender to wonder. When it's tapped, the affirmation of being alive, it reaches you almost to a cellular level. And when an artist does that to another artist, it's like you're compelled to pass it on. It's like a dormant command that suddenly is activated in you, like a call to Devil's Tower. Do unto others what's been done to you. The best stories infuse wonder.
When I was four years old, I have a vivid memory of finding two pinpoint scars on my ankle and asking my dad what they were. And he said I had a matching pair like that on my head, but I couldn't see them because of my hair. And he explained that when I was born, I was born premature, that I came out much too early, and I wasn't fully baked; I was very, very sick. And when the doctor took a look at this yellow kid with black teeth, he looked straight at my mom and said, "He's not going to live." And I was in the hospital for months. And many blood transfusions later, I lived, and that made me special.
I don't know if I really believe that. I don't know if my parents really believe that, but I didn't want to prove them wrong. Whatever I ended up being good at, I would strive to be worthy of the second chance I was given.
(Video) (Crying) Marlin: There, there, there. It's okay, daddy's here. Daddy's got you. I promise, I will never let anything happen to you, Nemo.
AS: And that's the first story lesson I ever learned. Use what you know. Draw from it. It doesn't always mean plot or fact. It means capturing a truth from your experiencing it, expressing values you personally feel deep down in your core. And that's what ultimately led me to speaking to you here at TEDTalk today.
Thank you.
(Applause) |
I'm not at all a cook. So don't fear, this is not going to be a cooking demonstration. But I do want to talk to you about something that I think is dear to all of us. And that is bread -- something which is as simple as our basic, most fundamental human staple. And I think few of us spend the day without eating bread in some form. Unless you're on one of these Californian low-carb diets, bread is standard. Bread is not only standard in the Western diet. As I will show to you, it is actually the mainstay of modern life.
So I'm going to bake bread for you. In the meantime I'm also talking to you, so my life is going to complicated. Bear with me. First of all, a little bit of audience participation. I have two loaves of bread here. One is a supermarket standard: white bread, pre-packaged, which I'm told is called a Wonderbread. (Laughter) I didn't know this word until I arrived. And this is more or less, a whole-meal, handmade, small-bakery loaf of bread. Here we go. I want to see a show of hands. Who prefers the whole-meal bread? Okay let me do this differently. Is anybody preferring the Wonderbread at all? (Laughter) I have two tentative male hands. (Laughter)
Okay, now the question is really, why is this so? And I think it is because we feel that this kind of bread really is about authenticity. It's about a traditional way of living. A way that is perhaps more real, more honest. This is an image from Tuscany, where we feel agriculture is still about beauty. And life is really, too. And this is about good taste, good traditions. Why do we have this image? Why do we feel that this is more true than this? Well I think it has a lot to do with our history. In the 10,000 years since agriculture evolved, most of our ancestors have actually been agriculturalists or they were closely related to food production. And we have this mythical image of how life was in rural areas in the past. Art has helped us to maintain that kind of image. It was a mythical past. Of course, the reality is quite different. These poor farmers working the land by hand or with their animals, had yield levels that are comparable to the poorest farmers today in West Africa. But we have, somehow, in the course of the last few centuries, or even decades, started to cultivate an image of a mythical, rural agricultural past.
It was only 200 years ago that we had the advent of the Industrial Revolution. And while I'm starting to make some bread for you here, it's very important to understand what that revolution did to us. It brought us power. It brought us mechanization, fertilizers. And it actually drove up our yields. And even sort of horrible things, like picking beans by hand, can now be done automatically. All that is a real, great improvement, as we shall see. Of course we also, particularly in the last decade, managed to envelop the world in a dense chain of supermarkets, in a chain of global trade. And it means that you now eat products, which can come from all around the world. That is the reality of our modern life. Now you may prefer this loaf of bread. Excuse my hands but this is how it is.
But actually the real relevant bread, historically, is this white Wonder loaf. And don't despise the white bread because it really, I think, symbolizes the fact that bread and food have become plentiful and affordable to all. And that is a feat that we are not really conscious of that much. But it has changed the world. This tiny bread that is tasteless in some ways and has a lot of problems has changed the world. So what is happening? Well the best way to look at that is to do a tiny bit of simplistic statistics. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution with modernization of agriculture in the last few decades, since the 1960s, food availability, per head, in this world, has increased by 25 percent. And the world population in the meantime has doubled. That means that we have now more food available than ever before in human history. And that is the result, directly, of being so successful at increasing the scale and volume of our production. And this is true, as you can see, for all countries, including the so-called developing countries.
What happened to our bread in the meantime? As food became plentiful here, it also meant that we were able to decrease the number of people working in agriculture to something like, on average, in the high income countries, five percent or less of the population. In the U.S. only one percent of the people are actually farmers. And it frees us all up to do other things -- to sit at TED meetings and not to worry about our food. That is, historically, a really unique situation. Never before has the responsibility to feed the world been in the hands of so few people. And never before have so many people been oblivious of that fact.
So as food became more plentiful, bread became cheaper. And as it became cheaper, bread manufacturers decided to add in all kinds of things. We added in more sugar. We add in raisins and oil and milk and all kinds of things to make bread, from a simple food into kind of a support for calories. And today, bread now is associated with obesity, which is very strange. It is the basic, most fundamental food that we've had in the last ten thousand years. Wheat is the most important crop -- the first crop we domesticated and the most important crop we still grow today.
But this is now this strange concoction of high calories. And that's not only true in this country, it is true all over the world. Bread has migrated to tropical countries, where the middle classes now eat French rolls and hamburgers and where the commuters find bread much more handy to use than rice or cassava. So bread has become from a main staple, a source of calories associated with obesity and also a source of modernity, of modern life. And the whiter the bread, in many countries, the better it is.
So this is the story of bread as we know it now. But of course the price of mass production has been that we moved large-scale. And large-scale has meant destruction of many of our landscapes, destruction of biodiversity -- still a lonely emu here in the Brazilian cerrado soybean fields. The costs have been tremendous -- water pollution, all the things you know about, destruction of our habitats.
What we need to do is to go back to understanding what our food is about. And this is where I have to query all of you. How many of you can actually tell wheat apart from other cereals? How many of you actually can make a bread in this way, without starting with a bread machine or just some kind of packaged flavor? Can you actually bake bread? Do you know how much a loaf of bread actually costs? We have become very removed from what our bread really is, which, again, evolutionarily speaking, is very strange. In fact not many of you know that our bread, of course, was not a European invention. It was invented by farmers in Iraq and Syria in particular. The tiny spike on the left to the center is actually the forefather of wheat. This is where it all comes from, and where these farmers who actually, ten thousand years ago, put us on the road of bread.
Now it is not surprising that with this massification and large-scale production, there is a counter-movement that emerged -- very much also here in California. The counter-movement says, "Let's go back to this. Let's go back to traditional farming. Let's go back to small-scale, to farmers' markets, small bakeries and all that." Wonderful. Don't we all agree? I certainly agree. I would love to go back to Tuscany to this kind of traditional setting, gastronomy, good food. But this is a fallacy. And the fallacy comes from idealizing a past that we have forgotten about.
If we do this, if we want to stay with traditional small-scale farming we are going, actually, to relegate these poor farmers and their husbands -- among whom I have lived for many years, working without electricity and water, to try to improve their food production -- we relegate them to poverty. What they want are implements to increase their production: something to fertilize the soil, something to protect their crop and to bring it to a market. We cannot just think that small-scale is the solution to the world food problem. It's a luxury solution for us who can afford it, if you want to afford it. In fact we do not want this poor woman to work the land like this. If we say just small-scale production, as is the tendency here, to go back to local food means that a poor man like Hans Rosling cannot even eat oranges anymore because in Scandinavia we don't have oranges. So local food production is out. But also we do not want to relegate to poverty in the rural areas. And we do not want to relegate the urban poor to starvation. So we must find other solutions.
One of our problems is that world food production needs to increase very rapidly -- doubling by about 2030. The main driver of that is actually meat. And meat consumption in Southeast Asia and China in particular is what drives the prices of cereals. That need for animal protein is going to continue. We can discuss alternatives in another talk, perhaps one day, but this is our driving force. So what can we do? Can we find a solution to produce more? Yes. But we need mechanization. And I'm making a real plea here. I feel so strongly that you cannot ask a small farmer to work the land and bend over to grow a hectare of rice, 150,000 times, just to plant a crop and weed it. You cannot ask people to work under these conditions. We need clever low-key mechanization that avoids the problems of the large-scale mechanization that we've had.
So what can we do? We must feed three billion people in cities. We will not do that through small farmers' markets because these people have no small farmers' markets at their disposal. They have low incomes. And they benefit from cheap, affordable, safe and diverse food. That's what we must aim for in the next 20 to 30 years.
But yes there are some solutions. And let me just do one simple conceptual thing: if I plot science as a proxy for control of the production process and scale. What you see is that we've started in the left-hand corner with traditional agriculture, which was sort of small-scale and low-control. We've moved towards large-scale and very high control. What I want us to do is to keep up the science and even get more science in there but go to a kind of regional scale -- not just in terms of the scale of the fields, but in terms of the entire food network. That's where we should move. And the ultimate may be, but it doesn't apply to cereals, that we have entirely closed ecosystems -- the horticultural systems right at the top left-hand corner. So we need to think differently about agriculture science. Agriculture science for most people -- and there are not many farmers among you here -- has this name of being bad, of being about pollution, about large-scale, about the destruction of the environment. That is not necessary. We need more science and not less. And we need good science.
So what kind of science can we have? Well first of all I think we can do much better on the existing technologies. Use biotechnology where useful, particularly in pest and disease resistance. There are also robots, for example, who can recognize weeds with a resolution of half an inch. We have much cleverer irrigation. We do not need to spill the water if we don't want to. And we need to think very dispassionately about the comparative advantages of small-scale and large-scale. We need to think that land is multi-functional. It has different functions. There are different ways in which we must use it -- for residential, for nature, for agriculture purposes. And we also need to re-examine livestock. Go regional and go to urban food systems. I want to see fish ponds in parking lots and basements. I want to have horticulture and greenhouses on top of residential areas. And I want to use the energy that comes from those greenhouses and from the fermentation of crops to heat our residential areas. There are all kinds of ways we can do it. We cannot solve the world food problem by using biological agriculture. But we can do a lot more.
And the main thing that I would really ask all of you as you go back to your countries, or as you stay here: ask your government for an integrated food policy. Food is as important as energy, as security, as the environment. Everything is linked together. So we can do that. In fact in a densely populated country like the River Delta, where I live in the Netherlands, we have combined these functions. So this is not science fiction. We can combine things even in a social sense of making the rural areas more accessible to people -- to house, for example, the chronically sick. There is all kinds of things we can do.
But there is something you must do. It's not enough for me to say, "Let's get more bold science into agriculture." You must go back and think about your own food chain. Talk to farmers. When was the last time you went to a farm and talked to a farmer? Talk to people in restaurants. Understand where you are in the food chain, where your food comes from. Understand that you are part of this enormous chain of events. And that frees you up to do other things. And above all, to me, food is about respect. It's about understanding, when you eat, that there are also many people who are still in this situation, who are still struggling for their daily food. And the kind of simplistic solutions that we sometimes have, to think that doing everything by hand is going to be the solution, is really not morally justified. We need to help to lift them out of poverty. We need to make them proud of being a farmer because they allow us to survive. Never before, as I said, has the responsibility for food been in the hands of so few. And never before have we had the luxury of taking it for granted because it is now so cheap.
And I think there is nobody else who has expressed better, to me, the idea that food, in the end, in our own tradition, is something holy. It's not about nutrients and calories. It's about sharing. It's about honesty. It's about identity. Who said this so beautifully was Mahatma Gandhi, 75 years ago, when he spoke about bread. He did not speak about rice, in India. He said, "To those who have to go without two meals a day, God can only appear as bread."
And so as I'm finishing my bread here -- and I've been baking it, and I'll try not to burn my hands. Let me share with those of you here in the first row. Let me share some of the food with you. Take some of my bread. And as you eat it, and as you try it -- please come and stand up. Have some of it. I want you to think that every bite connects you to the past and the future: to these anonymous farmers, that first bred the first wheat varieties; and to the farmers of today, who've been making this. And you don't even know who they are. Every meal you eat contains ingredients from all across the world. Everything makes us so privileged, that we can eat this food, that we don't struggle every day. And that, I think, evolutionarily-speaking is unique. We've never had that before. So enjoy your bread. Eat it, and feel privileged. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
I'm not at all a cook. So don't fear, this is not going to be a cooking demonstration. But I do want to talk to you about something that I think is dear to all of us. And that is bread -- something which is as simple as our basic, most fundamental human staple. And I think few of us spend the day without eating bread in some form. Unless you're on one of these Californian low-carb diets, bread is standard. Bread is not only standard in the Western diet. As I will show to you, it is actually the mainstay of modern life.
So I'm going to bake bread for you. In the meantime I'm also talking to you, so my life is going to be complicated. Bear with me. First of all, a little bit of audience participation. I have two loaves of bread here. One is a supermarket standard: white bread, pre-packaged, which I'm told is called a Wonderbread. (Laughter) I didn't know this word until I arrived. And this is more or less, a whole-meal, handmade, small-bakery loaf of bread. Here we go. I want to see a show of hands. Who prefers the whole-meal bread? Okay let me do this differently. Is anybody preferring the Wonderbread at all? (Laughter) I have two tentative male hands. (Laughter)
Okay, now the question is really, why is this so? And I think it is because we feel that this kind of bread really is about authenticity. It's about a traditional way of living. A way that is perhaps more real, more honest. This is an image from Tuscany, where we feel agriculture is still about beauty. And life is really, too. And this is about good taste, good traditions. Why do we have this image? Why do we feel that this is more true than this? Well I think it has a lot to do with our history. In the 10,000 years since agriculture evolved, most of our ancestors have actually been agriculturalists or they were closely related to food production. And we have this mythical image of how life was in rural areas in the past. Art has helped us to maintain that kind of image. It was a mythical past. Of course, the reality is quite different. These poor farmers working the land by hand or with their animals, had yield levels that are comparable to the poorest farmers today in West Africa. But we have, somehow, in the course of the last few centuries, or even decades, started to cultivate an image of a mythical, rural agricultural past.
It was only 200 years ago that we had the advent of the Industrial Revolution. And while I'm starting to make some bread for you here, it's very important to understand what that revolution did to us. It brought us power. It brought us mechanization, fertilizers. And it actually drove up our yields. And even sort of horrible things, like picking beans by hand, can now be done automatically. All that is a real, great improvement, as we shall see. Of course we also, particularly in the last decade, managed to envelop the world in a dense chain of supermarkets, in a chain of global trade. And it means that you now eat products, which can come from all around the world. That is the reality of our modern life. Now you may prefer this loaf of bread. Excuse my hands but this is how it is.
But actually the real relevant bread, historically, is this white Wonder loaf. And don't despise the white bread because it really, I think, symbolizes the fact that bread and food have become plentiful and affordable to all. And that is a feat that we are not really conscious of that much. But it has changed the world. This tiny bread that is tasteless in some ways and has a lot of problems has changed the world. So what is happening? Well the best way to look at that is to do a tiny bit of simplistic statistics. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution with modernization of agriculture in the last few decades, since the 1960s, food availability, per head, in this world, has increased by 25 percent. And the world population in the meantime has doubled. That means that we have now more food available than ever before in human history. And that is the result, directly, of being so successful at increasing the scale and volume of our production. And this is true, as you can see, for all countries, including the so-called developing countries.
What happened to our bread in the meantime? As food became plentiful here, it also meant that we were able to decrease the number of people working in agriculture to something like, on average, in the high income countries, five percent or less of the population. In the U.S. only one percent of the people are actually farmers. And it frees us all up to do other things -- to sit at TED meetings and not to worry about our food. That is, historically, a really unique situation. Never before has the responsibility to feed the world been in the hands of so few people. And never before have so many people been oblivious of that fact.
So as food became more plentiful, bread became cheaper. And as it became cheaper, bread manufacturers decided to add in all kinds of things. We added in more sugar. We add in raisins and oil and milk and all kinds of things to make bread, from a simple food into kind of a support for calories. And today, bread now is associated with obesity, which is very strange. It is the basic, most fundamental food that we've had in the last ten thousand years. Wheat is the most important crop -- the first crop we domesticated and the most important crop we still grow today.
But this is now this strange concoction of high calories. And that's not only true in this country, it is true all over the world. Bread has migrated to tropical countries, where the middle classes now eat French rolls and hamburgers and where the commuters find bread much more handy to use than rice or cassava. So bread has become from a main staple, a source of calories associated with obesity and also a source of modernity, of modern life. And the whiter the bread, in many countries, the better it is.
So this is the story of bread as we know it now. But of course the price of mass production has been that we moved large-scale. And large-scale has meant destruction of many of our landscapes, destruction of biodiversity -- still a lonely emu here in the Brazilian cerrado soybean fields. The costs have been tremendous -- water pollution, all the things you know about, destruction of our habitats.
What we need to do is to go back to understanding what our food is about. And this is where I have to query all of you. How many of you can actually tell wheat apart from other cereals? How many of you actually can make a bread in this way, without starting with a bread machine or just some kind of packaged flavor? Can you actually bake bread? Do you know how much a loaf of bread actually costs? We have become very removed from what our bread really is, which, again, evolutionarily speaking, is very strange. In fact not many of you know that our bread, of course, was not a European invention. It was invented by farmers in Iraq and Syria in particular. The tiny spike on the left to the center is actually the forefather of wheat. This is where it all comes from, and where these farmers who actually, ten thousand years ago, put us on the road of bread.
Now it is not surprising that with this massification and large-scale production, there is a counter-movement that emerged -- very much also here in California. The counter-movement says, "Let's go back to this. Let's go back to traditional farming. Let's go back to small-scale, to farmers' markets, small bakeries and all that." Wonderful. Don't we all agree? I certainly agree. I would love to go back to Tuscany to this kind of traditional setting, gastronomy, good food. But this is a fallacy. And the fallacy comes from idealizing a past that we have forgotten about.
If we do this, if we want to stay with traditional small-scale farming we are going, actually, to relegate these poor farmers and their husbands -- among whom I have lived for many years, working without electricity and water, to try to improve their food production -- we relegate them to poverty. What they want are implements to increase their production: something to fertilize the soil, something to protect their crop and to bring it to a market. We cannot just think that small-scale is the solution to the world food problem. It's a luxury solution for us who can afford it, if you want to afford it. In fact we do not want this poor woman to work the land like this. If we say just small-scale production, as is the tendency here, to go back to local food means that a poor man like Hans Rosling cannot even eat oranges anymore because in Scandinavia we don't have oranges. So local food production is out. But also we do not want to relegate to poverty in the rural areas. And we do not want to relegate the urban poor to starvation. So we must find other solutions.
One of our problems is that world food production needs to increase very rapidly -- doubling by about 2030. The main driver of that is actually meat. And meat consumption in Southeast Asia and China in particular is what drives the prices of cereals. That need for animal protein is going to continue. We can discuss alternatives in another talk, perhaps one day, but this is our driving force. So what can we do? Can we find a solution to produce more? Yes. But we need mechanization. And I'm making a real plea here. I feel so strongly that you cannot ask a small farmer to work the land and bend over to grow a hectare of rice, 150,000 times, just to plant a crop and weed it. You cannot ask people to work under these conditions. We need clever low-key mechanization that avoids the problems of the large-scale mechanization that we've had.
So what can we do? We must feed three billion people in cities. We will not do that through small farmers' markets because these people have no small farmers' markets at their disposal. They have low incomes. And they benefit from cheap, affordable, safe and diverse food. That's what we must aim for in the next 20 to 30 years.
But yes there are some solutions. And let me just do one simple conceptual thing: if I plot science as a proxy for control of the production process and scale. What you see is that we've started in the left-hand corner with traditional agriculture, which was sort of small-scale and low-control. We've moved towards large-scale and very high control. What I want us to do is to keep up the science and even get more science in there but go to a kind of regional scale -- not just in terms of the scale of the fields, but in terms of the entire food network. That's where we should move. And the ultimate may be, but it doesn't apply to cereals, that we have entirely closed ecosystems -- the horticultural systems right at the top left-hand corner. So we need to think differently about agriculture science. Agriculture science for most people -- and there are not many farmers among you here -- has this name of being bad, of being about pollution, about large-scale, about the destruction of the environment. That is not necessary. We need more science and not less. And we need good science.
So what kind of science can we have? Well first of all I think we can do much better on the existing technologies. Use biotechnology where useful, particularly in pest and disease resistance. There are also robots, for example, who can recognize weeds with a resolution of half an inch. We have much cleverer irrigation. We do not need to spill the water if we don't want to. And we need to think very dispassionately about the comparative advantages of small-scale and large-scale. We need to think that land is multi-functional. It has different functions. There are different ways in which we must use it -- for residential, for nature, for agriculture purposes. And we also need to re-examine livestock. Go regional and go to urban food systems. I want to see fish ponds in parking lots and basements. I want to have horticulture and greenhouses on top of residential areas. And I want to use the energy that comes from those greenhouses and from the fermentation of crops to heat our residential areas. There are all kinds of ways we can do it. We cannot solve the world food problem by using biological agriculture. But we can do a lot more.
And the main thing that I would really ask all of you as you go back to your countries, or as you stay here: ask your government for an integrated food policy. Food is as important as energy, as security, as the environment. Everything is linked together. So we can do that. In fact in a densely populated country like the River Delta, where I live in the Netherlands, we have combined these functions. So this is not science fiction. We can combine things even in a social sense of making the rural areas more accessible to people -- to house, for example, the chronically sick. There is all kinds of things we can do.
But there is something you must do. It's not enough for me to say, "Let's get more bold science into agriculture." You must go back and think about your own food chain. Talk to farmers. When was the last time you went to a farm and talked to a farmer? Talk to people in restaurants. Understand where you are in the food chain, where your food comes from. Understand that you are part of this enormous chain of events. And that frees you up to do other things. And above all, to me, food is about respect. It's about understanding, when you eat, that there are also many people who are still in this situation, who are still struggling for their daily food. And the kind of simplistic solutions that we sometimes have, to think that doing everything by hand is going to be the solution, is really not morally justified. We need to help to lift them out of poverty. We need to make them proud of being a farmer because they allow us to survive. Never before, as I said, has the responsibility for food been in the hands of so few. And never before have we had the luxury of taking it for granted because it is now so cheap.
And I think there is nobody else who has expressed better, to me, the idea that food, in the end, in our own tradition, is something holy. It's not about nutrients and calories. It's about sharing. It's about honesty. It's about identity. Who said this so beautifully was Mahatma Gandhi, 75 years ago, when he spoke about bread. He did not speak about rice, in India. He said, "To those who have to go without two meals a day, God can only appear as bread."
And so as I'm finishing my bread here -- and I've been baking it, and I'll try not to burn my hands. Let me share with those of you here in the first row. Let me share some of the food with you. Take some of my bread. And as you eat it, and as you try it -- please come and stand up. Have some of it. I want you to think that every bite connects you to the past and the future: to these anonymous farmers, that first bred the first wheat varieties; and to the farmers of today, who've been making this. And you don't even know who they are. Every meal you eat contains ingredients from all across the world. Everything makes us so privileged, that we can eat this food, that we don't struggle every day. And that, I think, evolutionarily-speaking is unique. We've never had that before. So enjoy your bread. Eat it, and feel privileged. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
I'm an ecologist, mostly a coral reef ecologist. I started out in Chesapeake Bay and went diving in the winter and became a tropical ecologist overnight. And it was really a lot of fun for about 10 years. I mean, somebody pays you to go around and travel and look at some of the most beautiful places on the planet. And that was what I did.
And I ended up in Jamaica, in the West Indies, where the coral reefs were really among the most extraordinary, structurally, that I ever saw in my life. And this picture here, it's really interesting, it shows two things: First of all, it's in black and white because the water was so clear and you could see so far, and film was so slow in the 1960s and early 70s, you took pictures in black and white. The other thing it shows you is that, although there's this beautiful forest of coral, there are no fish in that picture.
Those reefs at Discovery Bay, Jamaica were the most studied coral reefs in the world for 20 years. We were the best and the brightest. People came to study our reefs from Australia, which is sort of funny because now we go to theirs. And the view of scientists about how coral reefs work, how they ought to be, was based on these reefs without any fish. Then, in 1980, there was a hurricane, Hurricane Allen. I put half the lab up in my house. The wind blew very strong. The waves were 25 to 50 feet high. And the reefs disappeared, and new islands formed, and we thought, "Well, we're real smart. We know that hurricanes have always happened in the past." And we published a paper in Science, the first time that anybody ever described the destruction on a coral reef by a major hurricane. And we predicted what would happen, and we got it all wrong. And the reason was because of overfishing, and the fact that a last common grazer, a sea urchin, died. And within a few months after that sea urchin dying, the seaweed started to grow. And that is the same reef; that's the same reef 15 years ago; that's the same reef today. The coral reefs of the north coast of Jamaica have a few percent live coral cover and a lot of seaweed and slime. And that's more or less the story of the coral reefs of the Caribbean, and increasingly, tragically, the coral reefs worldwide.
Now, that's my little, depressing story. All of us in our 60s and 70s have comparable depressing stories. There are tens of thousands of those stories out there, and it's really hard to conjure up much of a sense of well-being, because it just keeps getting worse. And the reason it keeps getting worse is that after a natural catastrophe, like a hurricane, it used to be that there was some kind of successional sequence of recovery, but what's going on now is that overfishing and pollution and climate change are all interacting in a way that prevents that. And so I'm going to sort of go through and talk about those three kinds of things.
We hear a lot about the collapse of cod. It's difficult to imagine that two, or some historians would say three world wars were fought during the colonial era for the control of cod. Cod fed most of the people of Western Europe. It fed the slaves brought to the Antilles, the song "Jamaica Farewell" -- "Ackee rice salt fish are nice" -- is an emblem of the importance of salt cod from northeastern Canada. It all collapsed in the 80s and the 90s: 35,000 people lost their jobs. And that was the beginning of a kind of serial depletion from bigger and tastier species to smaller and not-so-tasty species, from species that were near to home to species that were all around the world, and what have you. It's a little hard to understand that, because you can go to a Costco in the United States and buy cheap fish. You ought to read the label to find out where it came from, but it's still cheap, and everybody thinks it's okay.
It's hard to communicate this, and one way that I think is really interesting is to talk about sport fish, because people like to go out and catch fish. It's one of those things. This picture here shows the trophy fish, the biggest fish caught by people who pay a lot of money to get on a boat, go to a place off of Key West in Florida, drink a lot of beer, throw a lot of hooks and lines into the water, come back with the biggest and the best fish, and the champion trophy fish are put on this board, where people take a picture, and this guy is obviously really excited about that fish. Well, that's what it's like now, but this is what it was like in the 1950s from the same boat in the same place on the same board on the same dock. The trophy fish were so big that you couldn't put any of those small fish up on it. And the average size trophy fish weighed 250 to 300 pounds, goliath grouper, and if you wanted to go out and kill something, you could pretty much count on being able to catch one of those fish. And they tasted really good. And people paid less in 1950 dollars to catch that than what people pay now to catch those little, tiny fish. And that's everywhere.
It's not just the fish, though, that are disappearing. Industrial fishing uses big stuff, big machinery. We use nets that are 20 miles long. We use longlines that have one million or two million hooks. And we trawl, which means to take something the size of a tractor trailer truck that weighs thousands and thousands of pounds, put it on a big chain, and drag it across the sea floor to stir up the bottom and catch the fish. Think of it as being kind of the bulldozing of a city or of a forest, because it clears it away. And the habitat destruction is unbelievable. This is a photograph, a typical photograph, of what the continental shelves of the world look like. You can see the rows in the bottom, the way you can see the rows in a field that has just been plowed to plant corn. What that was, was a forest of sponges and coral, which is a critical habitat for the development of fish. What it is now is mud, and the area of the ocean floor that has been transformed from forest to level mud, to parking lot, is equivalent to the entire area of all the forests that have ever been cut down on all of the earth in the history of humanity. We've managed to do that in the last 100 to 150 years.
We tend to think of oil spills and mercury and we hear a lot about plastic these days. And all of that stuff is really disgusting, but what's really insidious is the biological pollution that happens because of the magnitude of the shifts that it causes to entire ecosystems. And I'm going to just talk very briefly about two kinds of biological pollution: one is introduced species and the other is what comes from nutrients. So this is the infamous Caulerpa taxifolia, the so-called killer algae. A book was written about it. It's a bit of an embarrassment. It was accidentally released from the aquarium in Monaco, it was bred to be cold tolerant to have in peoples aquaria. It's very pretty, and it has rapidly started to overgrow the once very rich biodiversity of the northwestern Mediterranean. I don't know how many of you remember the movie "The Little Shop of Horrors," but this is the plant of "The Little Shop of Horrors." But, instead of devouring the people in the shop, what it's doing is overgrowing and smothering virtually all of the bottom-dwelling life of the entire northwestern Mediterranean Sea. We don't know anything that eats it, we're trying to do all sorts of genetics and figure out something that could be done, but, as it stands, it's the monster from hell, about which nobody knows what to do.
Now another form of pollution that's biological pollution is what happens from excess nutrients. The green revolution, all of this artificial nitrogen fertilizer, we use too much of it. It's subsidized, which is one of the reasons we used too much of it. It runs down the rivers, and it feeds the plankton, the little microscopic plant cells in the coastal water. But since we ate all the oysters and we ate all the fish that would eat the plankton, there's nothing to eat the plankton and there's more and more of it, so it dies of old age, which is unheard of for plankton. And when it dies, it falls to the bottom and then it rots, which means that bacteria break it down. And in the process they use up all the oxygen, and in using up all the oxygen they make the environment utterly lethal for anything that can't swim away. So, what we end up with is a microbial zoo dominated by bacteria and jellyfish, as you see on the left in front of you. And the only fishery left -- and it is a commercial fishery -- is the jellyfish fishery you see on the right, where there used to be prawns. Even in Newfoundland where we used to catch cod, we now have a jellyfish fishery.
And another version of this sort of thing is what is often called red tides or toxic blooms. That picture on the left is just staggering to me. I have talked about it a million times, but it's unbelievable. In the upper right of that picture on the left is almost the Mississippi Delta, and the lower left of that picture is the Texas-Mexico border. You're looking at the entire northwestern Gulf of Mexico; you're looking at one toxic dinoflagellate bloom that can kill fish, made by that beautiful little creature on the lower right. And in the upper right you see this black sort of cloud moving ashore. That's the same species. And as it comes to shore and the wind blows, and little droplets of the water get into the air, the emergency rooms of all the hospitals fill up with people with acute respiratory distress. And that's retirement homes on the west coast of Florida. A friend and I did this thing in Hollywood we called Hollywood ocean night, and I was trying to figure out how to explain to actors what's going on. And I said, "So, imagine you're in a movie called 'Escape from Malibu' because all the beautiful people have moved to North Dakota, where it's clean and safe. And the only people who are left there are the people who can't afford to move away from the coast, because the coast, instead of being paradise, is harmful to your health."
And then this is amazing. It was when I was on holiday last early autumn in France. This is from the coast of Brittany, which is being enveloped in this green, algal slime. The reason that it attracted so much attention, besides the fact that it's disgusting, is that sea birds flying over it are asphyxiated by the smell and die, and a farmer died of it, and you can imagine the scandal that happened. And so there's this war between the farmers and the fishermen about it all, and the net result is that the beaches of Brittany have to be bulldozed of this stuff on a regular basis.
And then, of course, there's climate change, and we all know about climate change. I guess the iconic figure of it is the melting of the ice in the Arctic Sea. Think about the thousands and thousands of people who died trying to find the Northwest Passage. Well, the Northwest Passage is already there. I think it's sort of funny; it's on the Siberian coast, maybe the Russians will charge tolls. The governments of the world are taking this really seriously. The military of the Arctic nations is taking it really seriously. For all the denial of climate change by government leaders, the CIA and the navies of Norway and the U.S. and Canada, whatever are busily thinking about how they will secure their territory in this inevitability from their point of view. And, of course, Arctic communities are toast.
The other kinds of effects of climate change -- this is coral bleaching. It's a beautiful picture, right? All that white coral. Except it's supposed to be brown. What happens is that the corals are a symbiosis, and they have these little algal cells that live inside them. And the algae give the corals sugar, and the corals give the algae nutrients and protection. But when it gets too hot, the algae can't make the sugar. The corals say, "You cheated. You didn't pay your rent." They kick them out, and then they die. Not all of them die; some of them survive, some more are surviving, but it's really bad news. To try and give you a sense of this, imagine you go camping in July somewhere in Europe or in North America, and you wake up the next morning, and you look around you, and you see that 80 percent of the trees, as far as you can see, have dropped their leaves and are standing there naked. And you come home, and you discover that 80 percent of all the trees in North America and in Europe have dropped their leaves. And then you read in the paper a few weeks later, "Oh, by the way, a quarter of those died." Well, that's what happened in the Indian Ocean during the 1998 El Nino, an area vastly greater than the size of North America and Europe, when 80 percent of all the corals bleached and a quarter of them died.
And then the really scary thing about all of this -- the overfishing, the pollution and the climate change -- is that each thing doesn't happen in a vacuum. But there are these, what we call, positive feedbacks, the synergies among them that make the whole vastly greater than the sum of the parts. And the great scientific challenge for people like me in thinking about all this, is do we know how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again? I mean, because we, at this point, we can protect it. But what does that mean? We really don't know.
So what are the oceans going to be like in 20 or 50 years? Well, there won't be any fish except for minnows, and the water will be pretty dirty, and all those kinds of things and full of mercury, etc., etc. And dead zones will get bigger and bigger and they'll start to merge, and we can imagine something like the dead-zonification of the global, coastal ocean. Then you sure won't want to eat fish that were raised in it, because it would be a kind of gastronomic Russian roulette. Sometimes you have a toxic bloom; sometimes you don't. That doesn't sell.
The really scary things though are the physical, chemical, oceanographic things that are happening. As the surface of the ocean gets warmer, the water is lighter when it's warmer, it becomes harder and harder to turn the ocean over. We say it becomes more strongly stratified. The consequence of that is that all those nutrients that fuel the great anchoveta fisheries, of the sardines of California or in Peru or whatever, those slow down and those fisheries collapse. And, at the same time, water from the surface, which is rich in oxygen, doesn't make it down and the ocean turns into a desert.
So the question is: How are we all going to respond to this? And we can do all sorts of things to fix it, but in the final analysis, the thing we really need to fix is ourselves. It's not about the fish; it's not about the pollution; it's not about the climate change. It's about us and our greed and our need for growth and our inability to imagine a world that is different from the selfish world we live in today. So the question is: Will we respond to this or not? I would say that the future of life and the dignity of human beings depends on our doing that.
Thank you. (Applause) |
This story starts: I was at a friend's house, and she had on her shelf a copy of the DSM manual, which is the manual of mental disorders. It lists every known mental disorder. And it used to be, back in the '50s, a very slim pamphlet. And then it got bigger and bigger and bigger, and now it's 886 pages long. And it lists currently 374 mental disorders.
So I was leafing through it, wondering if I had any mental disorders, and it turns out I've got 12. (Laughter) I've got generalized anxiety disorder, which is a given. I've got nightmare disorder, which is categorized if you have recurrent dreams of being pursued or declared a failure -- and all my dreams involve people chasing me down the street going, "You're a failure." (Laughter) I've got parent-child relational problems, which I blame my parents for. (Laughter) I'm kidding. I'm not kidding. I'm kidding. And I've got malingering. And I think it's actually quite rare to have both malingering and generalized anxiety disorder, because malingering tends to make me feel very anxious.
Anyway I was looking through this book, wondering if I was much crazier than I thought I was, or maybe it's not a good idea to diagnose yourself with a mental disorder if you're not a trained professional, or maybe the psychiatry profession has a strange desire to label what's essentially normal human behavior as a mental disorder. I didn't know which of these things was true, but I thought it was kind of interesting. And I thought maybe I should meet a critic of psychiatry to get their view. Which is how I ended up having lunch with the Scientologists.
It was a man called Brian who runs a crack team of Scientologists who are determined to destroy psychiatry wherever it lies. They're called the CCHR. And I said to him, "Can you prove to me that psychiatry is a pseudo-science that can't be trusted?" And he said, "Yes, we can prove it to you." And I said, "How?" And he said, "We're going to introduce you to Tony." And I said, "Who's Tony?" And he said, "Tony's in Broadmoor." Now Broadmoor is Broadmoor Hospital. It used to be known as the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. It's where they send the serial killers and the people who can't help themselves. And I said to Brian, "What did Tony do?" And he said, "Hardly anything. He beat someone up or something, and he decided to fake madness to get out of a prison sentence. But he faked it too well, and now he's stuck in Broadmoor and nobody will believe he's sane. Do you want us to try and get you into Broadmoor to meet Tony?" So I said, "Yes, please."
So I got the train to Broadmoor. I began to yawn uncontrollably around Kempton Park, which apparently is what dogs also do when anxious -- they yawn uncontrollably. And we got to Broadmoor. And I got taken through gate after gate after gate after gate into the wellness center, which is where you get to meet the patients. It looks like a giant Hampton Inn. It's all peach and pine and calming colors. And the only bold colors are the reds of the panic buttons. And the patients started drifting in. And they were quite overweight and wearing sweatpants and quite docile looking. And Brian the Scientologist whispered to me, "They're medicated," which to the Scientologists is like the worst evil in the world, but I'm thinking it's probably a good idea. (Laughter)
And then Brian said, "Here's Tony." And a man was walking in. And he wasn't overweight, he was in very good physical shape. And he wasn't wearing sweatpants, he was wearing a pinstriped suit. And he had his arm outstretched like someone out of The Apprentice. He looked like a man who wanted to wear an outfit that would convince me that he was very sane.
And he sat down. And I said, "So is it true that you faked your way in here?" And he said, "Yep. Yep. Absolutely. I beat someone up when I was 17. And I was in prison awaiting trial, and my cellmate said to me, 'You know what you have to do? Fake madness. Tell them you're mad. You'll get sent to some cushy hospital. Nurses will bring you pizzas. You'll have your own Playstation.'" So I said, "Well how did you do it?" He said, "I asked to see the prison psychiatrist. And I'd just seen a film called 'Crash' in which people get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls. So I said to the psychiatrist, 'I get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls.'" And I said, "What else?" He said, "Oh, yeah. I told the psychiatrist that I wanted to watch women as they died because it would make me feel more normal." And I said, "Where'd you get that from?" He said, "Oh, from a biography of Ted Bundy that they had at the prison library."
Anyway he faked madness too well, he said. And they didn't send him to some cushy hospital. They sent him to Broadmoor. And the minute he got there, he said he took one look at the place, asked to see the psychiatrist, said, "There's been a terrible misunderstanding. I'm not mentally ill." I said, "How long have you been here for?" He said, "Well, if I'd just done my time in prison for the original crime, I'd have got five years. I've been in Broadmoor for 12 years."
Tony said that it's a lot harder to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy. He said, "I thought the best way to seem normal would be to talk to people normally about normal things like football or what's on TV. I subscribe to New Scientist, and recently it had an article about how the U.S. Army was training bumblebees to sniff out explosives. So I said to a nurse, 'Did you know that the U.S. army is training bumblebees to sniff out explosives?' When I read my medical notes, I saw they'd written: 'Believes bees can sniff out explosives.'" He said, "You know, they're always looking out for non-verbal clues to my mental state. But how do you sit in a sane way? How do you cross your legs in a sane way? It's just impossible." And when Tony said that to me, I thought to myself, "Am I sitting like a journalist? Am I crossing my legs like a journalist?"
He said, "You know, I've got the Stockwell Strangler on one side of me and I've got the 'Tiptoe Through the Tulips' rapist on the other side of me. So I tend to stay in my room a lot because I find them quite frightening. And they take that as a sign of madness. They say it proves that I'm aloof and grandiose." So only in Broadmoor would not wanting to hang out with serial killers be a sign of madness. Anyway he seemed completely normal to me -- but what did I know?
And when I got home I emailed his clinician, Anthony Maden. I said, "What's the story?" And he said, "Yep. We accept that Tony faked madness to get out of a prison sentence because his hallucinations that had seemed quite cliché to begin with just vanished the minute he got to Broadmoor. However, we have assessed him. And we have determined that what he is is a psychopath." And in fact, faking madness is exactly the kind of cunning and manipulative act of a psychopath. It's on the checklist: cunning and manipulative. So faking your brain going wrong is evidence that your brain has gone wrong. And I spoke to other experts, and they said the pinstriped suit -- classic psychopath. Speaks to items one and two on the checklist -- glibness, superficial charm and grandiose sense of self-worth. And I said, "Well, what, he didn't want to hang out with the other patients?" Classic psychopath -- it speaks to grandiosity and also lack of empathy. So all the things that had seemed most normal about Tony was evidence, according to his clinician, that he was mad in this new way. He was a psychopath.
And his clinician said to me, "If you want to know more about psychopaths, you can go on a psychopath spotting course run by Robert Hare who invented the psychopath checklist." So I did. I went on a psychopath spotting course, and I am now a certified -- and I have to say, extremely adept -- psychopath spotter.
So here's the statistics: One in a hundred regular people is a psychopath. So there's 1,500 people in his room. Fifteen of you are psychopaths. Although that figure rises to four percent of CEO's and business leaders. So I think there's a very good chance there's about 30 or 40 psychopaths in this room. It could be carnage by the end of the night.
(Laughter) (Laughs)
Hare said the reason why is because capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior -- the lack of empathy, the glibness, cunning, manipulative. In fact, capitalism, perhaps at its most remorseless, is a physical manifestation of psychopathy. It's like a form of psychopathy that's come down to affect us all. And Hare said to me, "You know what? Forget about some guy at Broadmoor who may or may not have faked madness. Who cares? That's not a big story. The big story," he said, "is corporate psychopathy. You want to go and interview yourself some corporate psychopaths."
So I gave it a try. I wrote to the Enron people. I said, "Could I come and interview you in prison to find out it you're psychopaths?" And they didn't reply. So I changed tack. I emailed "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap, the asset stripper from the 1990s. He would come into failing businesses and close down 30 percent of the workforce, just turn American towns into ghost towns. And I emailed him and I said, "I believe you may have a very special brain anomaly that makes you special and interested in the predatory spirit and fearless. Can I come and interview you about your special brain anomaly?" And he said, "Come on over."
So I went to Al Dunlap's grand Florida mansion that was filled with sculptures of predatory animals. There were lions and tigers. He was taking me through the garden. There were falcons and eagles. He was saying to me, "Over there you've got sharks." He was saying this in a less effeminate way. "You've got more sharks and you've got tigers." It was like Narnia.
(Laughter)
And then we went into his kitchen. Now Al Dunlap would be brought in to save failing companies. He'd close down 30 percent of the workforce. And he'd quite often fire people with a joke. For instance, one famous story about him, somebody came up to him and said, "I've just bought myself a new car." And he said, "You may have a new car, but I'll tell you what you don't have, a job."
So in his kitchen -- he was standing there with his wife, Judy, and his bodyguard Sean -- and I said, "You know how I said in my email that you might have a special brain anomaly that makes you special?" He said, "Yeah, it's an amazing theory. It's like Star Trek. You're going where no man has gone before." And I said, "Well, some psychologists might say that this makes you ... " (Mumbles) (Laughter) And he said, "What?" And I said, "A psychopath." And I said, "I've got a list of psychopathic traits in my pocket. Can I go through them with you?"
And he looked intrigued despite himself, and he said, "Okay, go on." And I said, "Okay. Grandiose sense of self-worth." Which, I have to say, would have been hard for him to deny because he was standing underneath a giant oil painting of himself. (Laughter) He said, "Well, you've got to believe in you!" And I said, "Manipulative." He said, "That's leadership." And I said, "Shallow affect: an inability to experience a range of emotions." He said, "Who wants to be weighed down by some nonsense emotions?" So he was going down the psychopathic checklist, basically turning it into "Who Moved My Cheese?"
(Laughter)
But I did notice something happening to me the day I was with Al Dunlap. Whenever he said anything to me that was kind of normal -- like he said no to juvenile delinquency. He said he got accepted into West Point, and they don't let delinquents in West Point. He said no to many short-term marital relationships. He's only ever been married twice. Admittedly, his first wife cited in her divorce papers that he once threatened her with a knife and said he always wondered what human flesh tasted like, but people say stupid things to each other in bad marriages in the heat of an argument and his second marriage has lasted 41 years. So whenever he said anything to me that just seemed kind of non-psychopathic, I thought to myself, well I'm not going to put that in my book. And then I realized that becoming a psychopath spotter had turned me a little bit psychopathic. Because I was desperate to shove him in a box marked psychopath. I was desperate to define him by his maddest edges.
And I realized, oh my God. This is what I've been doing for 20 years. It's what all journalists do. We travel across the world with our notepads in our hands, and we wait for the gems. And the gems are always the outermost aspects of our interviewee's personality. And we stitch them together like medieval monks. And we leave the normal stuff on the floor. And this is a country that over-diagnoses certain mental disorders hugely. Childhood bipolar -- children as young as four are being labeled bipolar because they have temper tantrums, which scores them high on their bipolar checklist.
When I got back to London, Tony phoned me. He said, "Why haven't you been returning my calls?" I said, "Well they say that you're a psychopath." And he said, "I'm not a psychopath." He said, "You know what, one of the items on the checklist is lack of remorse, but another item on the checklist is cunning, manipulative. So when you say you feel remorse for your crime, they say, 'Typical of the psychopath to cunningly say he feels remorse when he doesn't.' It's like witchcraft. They turn everything upside-down." He said, "I've got a tribunal coming up. Will you come to it?" So I said okay.
So I went to his tribunal. And after 14 years in Broadmoor, they let him go. They decided that he shouldn't be held indefinitely because he scores high on a checklist that might mean that he would have a greater than average chance of recidivism. So they let him go. And outside in the corridor he said to me, "You know what, Jon? Everyone's a bit psychopathic." He said, "You are. I am. Well obviously I am." I said, "What are you going to do now?" He said, "I'm going to go to Belgium because there's a woman there that I fancy. But she's married, so I'm going to have to get her split up from her husband."
(Laughter)
Anyway, that was two years ago, and that's where my book ended. And for the last 20 months everything was fine. Nothing bad happened. He was living with a girl outside London. He was, according to Brian the Scientologist, making up for lost time -- which I know sounds ominous, but isn't necessarily ominous. Unfortunately, after 20 months, he did go back to jail for a month. He got into a fracas in a bar, he called it -- ended up going to jail for a month, which I know is bad, but at least a month implies that whatever the fracas was, it wasn't too bad.
And then he phoned me. And you know what, I think it's right that Tony is out. Because you shouldn't define people by their maddest edges. And what Tony is, is he's a semi-psychopath. He's a gray area in a world that doesn't like gray areas. But the gray areas are where you find the complexity, it's where you find the humanity and it's where you find the truth. And Tony said to me, "Jon, could I buy you a drink in a bar? I just want to thank you for everything you've done for me." And I didn't go. What would you have done?
Thank you.
(Applause) |
Good afternoon. I am not a farmer.
(Laughter)
I'm not. I'm a parent, I'm a resident and I'm a teacher. And this is my world. And along the way I've started noticing -- I'm on my third generation of kids -- that they're getting bigger. They're getting sicker. In addition to these complexities, I just learned that 70 percent of the kids that I see who are labeled learning disabled would not have been had they had proper prenatal nutrition.
The realities of my community are simple. They look like this. Kids should not have to grow up and look at things like this. And as jobs continue to leave my community, and energy continues to come in, be exported in, it's no wonder that really some people refer to the South Bronx as a desert. But I'm the oldest sixth grader you'll ever meet, so I get up every day with this tremendous amount of enthusiasm that I'm hoping to share with you all today. And with that note, I come to you with this belief that kids should not have to leave their communities to live, learn and earn in a better one.
So I'm here to tell you a story about me and this wall that I met outside, which I'm now bringing inside. And it starts with three people. The crazy teacher -- that's me on the left, I dress up pretty, thank you, my wife, I love you for getting a good suit -- my passionate borough president and a guy named George Irwin from Green Living Technologies who helped me with my class and helped me get involved with this patented technology. But it all starts with seeds in classrooms, in my place, which looks like this. And I'm here today hoping that my reach will exceed my grasp. And that's really what this is all about.
And it starts with incredible kids like this, who come early and stay late. All of my kids are either IEP or ELL learners, most come with a lot of handicaps, most are homeless and many are in foster care. Almost all of my kids live below poverty. But with those seeds, from day one, we are growing in my classroom, and this is what it looks like in my classroom. And you see how attentive these kids are to these seeds. And then you notice that those seeds become farms across the Bronx that look like this.
But again, I am not a farmer. I'm a teacher. And I don't like weeding, and I don't like back-breaking labor. So I wanted to figure out how I could get this kind of success into something small, like this, and bring it into my classroom so that handicapped kids could do it, kids who didn't want to be outside could do it, and everyone could have access. So I called George Irwin, and what do you know? He came to my class and we built an indoor edible wall. And what we do is we partner it with authentic learning experiences, private-based learning. And lo and behold, we gave birth to the first edible wall in New York City.
So if you're hungry, get up and eat. You can do it right now. My kids play cow all the time. Okay? But we were just getting started, the kids loved the technology, so we called up George and we said, "We gotta learn more!" Now, Mayor Bloomberg, thank you very much, we no longer need work permits, which comes with slices and bonded contractors -- we're available for you --
We decided to go to Boston. And my kids, from the poorest congressional district in America, became the first to install a green wall, designed by a computer, with real-live learning tools, 21 stories up -- if you're going to go visit it, it's on top of the John Hancock building. But closer to home, we started installing these walls in schools that look like this with lighting like that, real LED stuff, 21st-century technology. And what do you know? We made 21st century money, and that was groundbreaking. Wow!
This is my harvest, people. And what do you do with this food? You cook it! And those are my heirloom students making heirloom sauce, with plastic forks, and we get it into the cafeteria, and we grow stuff and we feed our teachers. And that is the youngest nationally certified workforce in America with our Bronx Borough President.
And what'd we do then? Well, I met nice people like you, and they invited us to the Hamptons. So I call this "from South Bronx to Southampton." And we started putting in roofs that look like this, and we came in from destitute neighborhoods to start building landscape like this, wow! People noticed. And so we got invited back this past summer, and we actually moved into the Hamptons, payed 3,500 dollars a week for a house, and we learned how to surf. And when you can do stuff like this -- These are my kids putting in this technology, and when you can build a roof that looks like that on a house that looks like that with sedum that looks like this, this is the new green graffiti.
So, you may wonder what does a wall like this really do for kids, besides changing landscapes and mindsets? Okay, I'm going to tell you what it does. It gets me to meet incredible contractors like this, Jim Ellenberger from Ellenberger Services. And this is where it becomes true triple bottom line. Because Jim realized that these kids, my future farmers, really had the skills he needed to build affordable housing for New Yorkers, right in their own neighborhood. And this is what my kids are doing, making living wage.
Now, if you're like me, you live in a building, there are seven guys out of work looking to manage a million dollars. I don't have it. But if you need a toilet fixed or, you know, some shelving, I gotta wait six months for an appointment with someone who drives a much nicer car than me. That's the beauty of this economy. But my kids are now licensed and bonded in trade. And that's my first student to open up, the first in his family to have a bank account. This immigrant student is the first one in his family to use an ATM. And this is the true triple bottom line, because we can take neighborhoods that were abandoned and destitute and turn them into something like this with interiors like this.
Wow! People noticed. And notice they did. So CNN called, and we were delighted to have them come to our farmer's market. And then when Rockefeller Center said, NBC, could you put this thing up on the walls? We were delighted. But this, I show you, when kids from the poorest congressional district in America can build a 30-foot by 15-foot wall, design it, plant it and install it in the heart of New York City, that's a true "sí se puede" moment. Really scholastic, if you ask me.
But this is not a Getty image. That's a picture I took of my Bronx Borough President, addressing my kids in his house, not the jailhouse, making them feel a part of it. That's our State Senator Gustavo Rivera and Bob Bieder, coming to my classroom to make my kids feel important. And when the Bronx Borough President shows up and the State Senator comes to our class, believe you me, the Bronx can change attitudes now. We are poised, ready, willing and able to export our talent and diversity in ways we've never even imagined. And when the local senator gets on the scale in public and says he's got to lose weight, so do I! And I tell you what, I'm doing it and so are the kids.
Okay? And then celebrities started. Produce Pete can't believe what we grow. Lorna Sass came and donated books. Okay? We're feeding seniors. And when we realized that we were growing for food justice in the South Bronx, so did the international community. And my kids in the South Bronx were repped in the first international green roof conference. And that's just great.
Except what about locally? Well, we met this woman, Avis Richards, with the Ground Up Campaign. Unbelievable! Through her, my kids, the most disenfranchised and marginalized, were able to roll out 100 gardens to New York City public schools. That's triple bottom line! Okay?
A year ago today, I was invited to the New York Academy of Medicine. I thought this concept of designing a strong and healthy New York made sense, especially when the resources were free. So thank you all and I love them. They introduced me to the New York City Strategic Alliance for Health, again, free resources, don't waste them. And what do you know? Six months later, my school and my kids were awarded the first ever high school award of excellence for creating a healthy school environment. The greenest class in New York City. But more importantly is my kids learned to get, they learned to give. And we took the money that we made from our farmer's market, and started buying gifts for the homeless and for needy around the world. So we started giving back. And that's when I realized that the greening of America starts first with the pockets, then with the heart and then with the mind.
So we were onto something, and we're still onto something. And thank God Trinity Wall Street noticed, because they gave us the birth of Green Bronx Machine. We're 3,000 strong right now. And what does it really do? It teaches kids to re-vision their communities, so when they grow up in places like this, they can imagine it like this. And my kids, trained and certified -- Ma, you get the tax abatement. Thank you, Mayor Bloomberg -- can take communities that look like this and convert them into things that look like that, and that to me, people, is another true "sí se puede" moment.
Now, how does it start? It starts in schools. No more little Knicks and little Nets. Group by broccoli, group by your favorite vegetable, something you can aspire to. Okay? And these are my future farmers of America, growing up in Brook Park on 141st Street, the most migrant community in America. When tenacious little ones learn how to garden like this, it's no wonder we get fruit like that. And I love it! And so do they. And we're building teepees in neighborhoods that were burning down. And that's a true "sí se puede" moment. And again, Brook Park feeds hundreds of people without a food stamp or a fingerprint. The poorest congressional district in America, the most migratory community in America, we can do this. Bissel Gardens is cranking out food in epic proportions, moving kids into an economy they never imagined.
Now, somewhere over the rainbow, my friends, is the South Bronx of America. And we're doing it. How does it start? Well, look at Jose's attention to detail. Thank God Omar knows that carrots come from the ground, and not aisle 9 at the supermarket or through a bullet-proof window or through a piece of styrofoam. And when Henry knows that green is good, so do I. And when you expand their palates, you expand their vocabulary. And most importantly, when you put big kids together with little kids, you get the big fat white guy out of the middle, which is cool, and you create this kind of accountability amongst peers, which is incredible.
God, I'm going to run out of time, so I've gotta keep it moving. But this is my weekly paycheck for kids; that's our green graffiti. This is what we're doing. And behold the glory and bounty that is Bronx County. Nothing thrills me more than to see kids pollinating plants instead of each other. I gotta tell you, I'm a protective parent. But those kids are the kids who are now putting pumpkin patches on top of trains. We're also designing coin ponds for the rich and affluent. We're also becoming children of the corn, creating farms in the middle of Fordham Road for awareness and window bottles out of garbage.
Now I don't expect every kid to be a farmer, but I expect you to read about it, write about it, blog about it, offer outstanding customer service. I expect them to be engaged, and man, are they! So that's my incredible classroom, that's the food. Where does it go? Zero miles to plate, right down into the cafeteria. Or more importantly, to local shelters, where most of our kids are getting one to two meals a day. And we're stepping it up. No Air Jordans were ever ruined on my farm. And in his day, a million dollar gardens and incredible installations.
Let me tell you something, people. This is a beautiful moment. Black field, brown field, toxic waste field, battlefield -- we're proving in the Bronx that you can grow anywhere, on cement. And we take orders for flowers. I'm putting the bake sale to shame. We take orders now. I'm booking for the spring. And these were all grown from seeds. We're learning everything. And again, when you can take kids from backgrounds as diverse as this to do something as special as this, we're really creating a moment.
Now, you may ask about these kids. Forty percent attendance to 93 percent attendance. All start overage and under-credit. They are now, my first cohort is all in college, earning a living wage. The rest are scheduled to graduate this June. Happy kids, happy families, happy colleagues. Amazed people. The glory and bounty that is Bronx County.
Let's talk about mint. Where is my mint? I grow seven kinds of mint in my class. Mojitos, anybody? I'll be at Telepan later. But, understand this is my intellectual Viagra. Ladies and gentlemen, I gotta move quick, but understand this: The borough that gave us baggy pants and funky fresh beats is becoming home to the organic ones. My green [unclear] 25,000 pounds of vegetables, I'm growing organic citizens, engaged kids. So help us go from this to this. Self-sustaining entities, 18 months return on investment, plus we're paying people living wage and health benefits, while feeding people for pennies on the dollar.
Martin Luther King said that people need to be uplifted with dignity. So here in New York, I urge you, my fellow Americans, to help us make America great again. It's simple. Share your passion. It's real easy. Go see these two videos, please. One got us invited to the White House, one's a recent incarnation.
And most importantly, get the biggest bully out of schools. This has got to go tomorrow. People, you can all do that. Keep kids out of stores that look like this. Make them a healthy plate, especially if you can pick it off the wall in your own classroom -- delicioso! Model good behavior. Get them to a green cart. Big kids love strawberries and bananas. Teach them entrepreneurship. Thank God for GrowNYC. Let them cook. Great lunch today, let them do culinary things. But most importantly, just love them. Nothing works like unconditional love.
So, my good friend Kermit said it's not easy being green. It's not. I come from a place where kids can buy 35 flavors of blunt wrap at any day of the moment, where ice cream freezers are filled with slushy malt liquor. Okay? My dear friend Majora Carter once told me, we have everything to gain and nothing to lose. So here, and at a time when we've gone from the audacity to hope to hope for some audacity, I urge you to do something. I urge you to do something.
Right now, we're all tadpoles, but I urge you to become a big frog and take that big, green leap. I don't care if you're on the left, on the right, up the middle, wherever. Join me. Use -- I've got a lot of energy. Help me use it. We can do something here. And along the way, please take time to smell the flowers, especially if you and your students grew them.
I'm Steve Ritz, this is Green Bronx Machine. I've got to say thank you to my wife and family, for my kids, thank you for coming every day, and for my colleagues, believing and supporting me. We are growing our way into a new economy. Thank you, God bless you and enjoy the day. I'm Steve Ritz.
Sí se puede!
(Applause) |
The things we make have one supreme quality -- they live longer than us. We perish, they survive; we have one life, they have many lives, and in each life they can mean different things. Which means that, while we all have one biography, they have many.
I want this morning to talk about the story, the biography -- or rather the biographies -- of one particular object, one remarkable thing. It doesn't, I agree, look very much. It's about the size of a rugby ball. It's made of clay, and it's been fashioned into a cylinder shape, covered with close writing and then baked dry in the sun. And as you can see, it's been knocked about a bit, which is not surprising because it was made two and a half thousand years ago and was dug up in 1879. But today, this thing is, I believe, a major player in the politics of the Middle East. And it's an object with fascinating stories and stories that are by no means over yet.
The story begins in the Iran-Iraq war and that series of events that culminated in the invasion of Iraq by foreign forces, the removal of a despotic ruler and instant regime change. And I want to begin with one episode from that sequence of events that most of you would be very familiar with, Belshazzar's feast -- because we're talking about the Iran-Iraq war of 539 BC. And the parallels between the events of 539 BC and 2003 and in between are startling. What you're looking at is Rembrandt's painting, now in the National Gallery in London, illustrating the text from the prophet Daniel in the Hebrew scriptures. And you all know roughly the story.
Belshazzar, the son of Nebuchadnezzar, Nebuchadnezzar who'd conquered Israel, sacked Jerusalem and captured the people and taken the Jews back to Babylon. Not only the Jews, he'd taken the temple vessels. He'd ransacked, desecrated the temple. And the great gold vessels of the temple in Jerusalem had been taken to Babylon. Belshazzar, his son, decides to have a feast. And in order to make it even more exciting, he added a bit of sacrilege to the rest of the fun, and he brings out the temple vessels. He's already at war with the Iranians, with the king of Persia.
And that night, Daniel tells us, at the height of the festivities a hand appeared and wrote on the wall, "You are weighed in the balance and found wanting, and your kingdom is handed over to the Medes and the Persians." And that very night Cyrus, king of the Persians, entered Babylon and the whole regime of Belshazzar fell. It is, of course, a great moment in the history of the Jewish people. It's a great story. It's story we all know. "The writing on the wall" is part of our everyday language. What happened next was remarkable, and it's where our cylinder enters the story.
Cyrus, king of the Persians, has entered Babylon without a fight -- the great empire of Babylon, which ran from central southern Iraq to the Mediterranean, falls to Cyrus. And Cyrus makes a declaration. And that is what this cylinder is, the declaration made by the ruler guided by God who had toppled the Iraqi despot and was going to bring freedom to the people. In ringing Babylonian -- it was written in Babylonian -- he says, "I am Cyrus, king of all the universe, the great king, the powerful king, king of Babylon, king of the four quarters of the world." They're not shy of hyperbole as you can see. This is probably the first real press release by a victorious army that we've got. And it's written, as we'll see in due course, by very skilled P.R. consultants. So the hyperbole is not actually surprising.
And what is the great king, the powerful king, the king of the four quarters of the world going to do? He goes on to say that, having conquered Babylon, he will at once let all the peoples that the Babylonians -- Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar -- have captured and enslaved go free. He'll let them return to their countries. And more important, he will let them all recover the gods, the statues, the temple vessels that had been confiscated. All the peoples that the Babylonians had repressed and removed will go home, and they'll take with them their gods. And they'll be able to restore their altars and to worship their gods in their own way, in their own place. This is the decree, this object is the evidence for the fact that the Jews, after the exile in Babylon, the years they'd spent sitting by the waters of Babylon, weeping when they remembered Jerusalem, those Jews were allowed to go home. They were allowed to return to Jerusalem and to rebuild the temple.
It's a central document in Jewish history. And the Book of Chronicles, the Book of Ezra in the Hebrew scriptures reported in ringing terms. This is the Jewish version of the same story. "Thus said Cyrus, king of Persia, 'All the kingdoms of the earth have the Lord God of heaven given thee, and he has charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem. Who is there among you of his people? The Lord God be with him, and let him go up.'" "Go up" -- aaleh. The central element, still, of the notion of return, a central part of the life of Judaism. As you all know, that return from exile, the second temple, reshaped Judaism. And that change, that great historic moment, was made possible by Cyrus, the king of Persia, reported for us in Hebrew in scripture and in Babylonian in clay.
Two great texts, what about the politics? What was going on was the fundamental shift in Middle Eastern history. The empire of Iran, the Medes and the Persians, united under Cyrus, became the first great world empire. Cyrus begins in the 530s BC. And by the time of his son Darius, the whole of the eastern Mediterranean is under Persian control. This empire is, in fact, the Middle East as we now know it, and it's what shapes the Middle East as we now know it. It was the largest empire the world had known until then. Much more important, it was the first multicultural, multifaith state on a huge scale. And it had to be run in a quite new way. It had to be run in different languages. The fact that this decree is in Babylonian says one thing. And it had to recognize their different habits, different peoples, different religions, different faiths. All of those are respected by Cyrus.
Cyrus sets up a model of how you run a great multinational, multifaith, multicultural society. And the result of that was an empire that included the areas you see on the screen, and which survived for 200 years of stability until it was shattered by Alexander. It left a dream of the Middle East as a unit, and a unit where people of different faiths could live together. The Greek invasions ended that. And of course, Alexander couldn't sustain a government and it fragmented. But what Cyrus represented remained absolutely central.
The Greek historian Xenophon wrote his book "Cyropaedia" promoting Cyrus as the great ruler. And throughout European culture afterward, Cyrus remained the model. This is a 16th century image to show you how widespread his veneration actually was. And Xenophon's book on Cyrus on how you ran a diverse society was one of the great textbooks that inspired the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution. Jefferson was a great admirer -- the ideals of Cyrus obviously speaking to those 18th century ideals of how you create religious tolerance in a new state.
Meanwhile, back in Babylon, things had not been going well. After Alexander, the other empires, Babylon declines, falls into ruins, and all the traces of the great Babylonian empire are lost -- until 1879 when the cylinder is discovered by a British Museum exhibition digging in Babylon. And it enters now another story. It enters that great debate in the middle of the 19th century: Are the scriptures reliable? Can we trust them? We only knew about the return of the Jews and the decree of Cyrus from the Hebrew scriptures. No other evidence. Suddenly, this appeared. And great excitement to a world where those who believed in the scriptures had had their faith in creation shaken by evolution, by geology, here was evidence that the scriptures were historically true. It's a great 19th century moment.
But -- and this, of course, is where it becomes complicated -- the facts were true, hurrah for archeology, but the interpretation was rather more complicated. Because the cylinder account and the Hebrew Bible account differ in one key respect. The Babylonian cylinder is written by the priests of the great god of Bablyon, Marduk. And, not surprisingly, they tell you that all this was done by Marduk. "Marduk, we hold, called Cyrus by his name." Marduk takes Cyrus by the hand, calls him to shepherd his people and gives him the rule of Babylon. Marduk tells Cyrus that he will do these great, generous things of setting the people free. And this is why we should all be grateful to and worship Marduk.
The Hebrew writers in the Old Testament, you will not be surprised to learn, take a rather different view of this. For them, of course, it can't possibly by Marduk that made all this happen. It can only be Jehovah. And so in Isaiah, we have the wonderful texts giving all the credit of this, not to Marduk but to the Lord God of Israel -- the Lord God of Israel who also called Cyrus by name, also takes Cyrus by the hand and talks of him shepherding his people. It's a remarkable example of two different priestly appropriations of the same event, two different religious takeovers of a political fact.
God, we know, is usually on the side of the big battalions. The question is, which god was it? And the debate unsettles everybody in the 19th century to realize that the Hebrew scriptures are part of a much wider world of religion. And it's quite clear the cylinder is older than the text of Isaiah, and yet, Jehovah is speaking in words very similar to those used by Marduk. And there's a slight sense that Isaiah knows this, because he says, this is God speaking, of course, "I have called thee by thy name though thou hast not known me." I think it's recognized that Cyrus doesn't realize that he's acting under orders from Jehovah. And equally, he'd have been surprised that he was acting under orders from Marduk. Because interestingly, of course, Cyrus is a good Iranian with a totally different set of gods who are not mentioned in any of these texts.
(Laughter)
That's 1879. 40 years on and we're in 1917, and the cylinder enters a different world. This time, the real politics of the contemporary world -- the year of the Balfour Declaration, the year when the new imperial power in the Middle East, Britain, decides that it will declare a Jewish national home, it will allow the Jews to return. And the response to this by the Jewish population in Eastern Europe is rhapsodic. And across Eastern Europe, Jews display pictures of Cyrus and of George V side by side -- the two great rulers who have allowed the return to Jerusalem. And the Cyrus cylinder comes back into public view and the text of this as a demonstration of why what is going to happen after the war is over in 1918 is part of a divine plan. You all know what happened. The state of Israel is setup, and 50 years later, in the late 60s, it's clear that Britain's role as the imperial power is over. And another story of the cylinder begins.
The region, the U.K. and the U.S. decide, has to be kept safe from communism, and the superpower that will be created to do this would be Iran, the Shah. And so the Shah invents an Iranian history, or a return to Iranian history, that puts him in the center of a great tradition and produces coins showing himself with the Cyrus cylinder. When he has his great celebrations in Persepolis, he summons the cylinder and the cylinder is lent by the British Museum, goes to Tehran, and is part of those great celebrations of the Pahlavi dynasty. Cyrus cylinder: guarantor of the Shah.
10 years later, another story: Iranian Revolution, 1979. Islamic revolution, no more Cyrus; we're not interested in that history, we're interested in Islamic Iran -- until Iraq, the new superpower that we've all decided should be in the region, attacks. Then another Iran-Iraq war. And it becomes critical for the Iranians to remember their great past, their great past when they fought Iraq and won. It becomes critical to find a symbol that will pull together all Iranians -- Muslims and non-Muslims, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews living in Iran, people who are devout, not devout. And the obvious emblem is Cyrus.
So when the British Museum and Tehran National Musuem cooperate and work together, as we've been doing, the Iranians ask for one thing only as a loan. It's the only object they want. They want to borrow the Cyrus cylinder. And last year, the Cyrus cylinder went to Tehran for the second time. It's shown being presented here, put into its case by the director of the National Museum of Tehran, one of the many women in Iran in very senior positions, Mrs. Ardakani. It was a huge event. This is the other side of that same picture. It's seen in Tehran by between one and two million people in the space of a few months. This is beyond any blockbuster exhibition in the West. And it's the subject of a huge debate about what this cylinder means, what Cyrus means, but above all, Cyrus as articulated through this cylinder -- Cyrus as the defender of the homeland, the champion, of course, of Iranian identity and of the Iranian peoples, tolerant of all faiths. And in the current Iran, Zoroastrians and Christians have guaranteed places in the Iranian parliament, something to be very, very proud of.
To see this object in Tehran, thousands of Jews living in Iran came to Tehran to see it. It became a great emblem, a great subject of debate about what Iran is at home and abroad. Is Iran still to be the defender of the oppressed? Will Iran set free the people that the tyrants have enslaved and expropriated? This is heady national rhetoric, and it was all put together in a great pageant launching the return. Here you see this out-sized Cyrus cylinder on the stage with great figures from Iranian history gathering to take their place in the heritage of Iran. It was a narrative presented by the president himself.
And for me, to take this object to Iran, to be allowed to take this object to Iran was to be allowed to be part of an extraordinary debate led at the highest levels about what Iran is, what different Irans there are and how the different histories of Iran might shape the world today. It's a debate that's still continuing, and it will continue to rumble, because this object is one of the great declarations of a human aspiration. It stands with the American constitution. It certainly says far more about real freedoms than Magna Carta. It is a document that can mean so many things, for Iran and for the region.
A replica of this is at the United Nations. In New York this autumn, it will be present when the great debates about the future of the Middle East take place. And I want to finish by asking you what the next story will be in which this object figures. It will appear, certainly, in many more Middle Eastern stories. And what story of the Middle East, what story of the world, do you want to see reflecting what is said, what is expressed in this cylinder? The right of peoples to live together in the same state, worshiping differently, freely -- a Middle East, a world, in which religion is not the subject of division or of debate.
In the world of the Middle East at the moment, the debates are, as you know, shrill. But I think it's possible that the most powerful and the wisest voice of all of them may well be the voice of this mute thing, the Cyrus cylinder.
Thank you.
(Applause) |
Openness. It's a word that denotes opportunity and possibilities. Open-ended, open hearth, open source, open door policy, open bar. (Laughter)
And everywhere the world is opening up, and it's a good thing.
Why is this happening? The technology revolution is opening the world.
Yesterday's Internet was a platform for the presentation of content. The Internet of today is a platform for computation. The Internet is becoming a giant global computer, and every time you go on it, you upload a video, you do a Google search, you remix something, you're programming this big global computer that we all share. Humanity is building a machine, and this enables us to collaborate in new ways. Collaboration can occur on an astronomical basis.
Now a new generation is opening up the world as well. I started studying kids about 15 years ago, -- so actually 20 years ago now -- and I noticed how my own children were effortlessly able to use all this sophisticated technology, and at first I thought, "My children are prodigies!" (Laughter) But then I noticed all their friends were like them, so that was a bad theory. So I've started working with a few hundred kids, and I came to the conclusion that this is the first generation to come of age in the digital age, to be bathed in bits. I call them the Net Generation. I said, these kids are different. They have no fear of technology, because it's not there. It's like the air. It's sort of like, I have no fear of a refrigerator. And — (Laughter)
And there's no more powerful force to change every institution than the first generation of digital natives. I'm a digital immigrant. I had to learn the language.
The global economic crisis is opening up the world as well. Our opaque institutions from the Industrial Age, everything from old models of the corporation, government, media, Wall Street, are in various stages of being stalled or frozen or in atrophy or even failing, and this is now creating a burning platform in the world. I mean, think about Wall Street. The core modus operandi of Wall Street almost brought down global capitalism.
Now, you know the idea of a burning platform, that you're somewhere where the costs of staying where you are become greater than the costs of moving to something different, perhaps something radically different. And we need to change and open up all of our institutions.
So this technology push, a demographic kick from a new generation and a demand pull from a new economic global environment is causing the world to open up.
Now, I think, in fact, we're at a turning point in human history, where we can finally now rebuild many of the institutions of the Industrial Age around a new set of principles.
Now, what is openness? Well, as it turns out, openness has a number of different meanings, and for each there's a corresponding principle for the transformation of civilization. The first is collaboration. Now, this is openness in the sense of the boundaries of organizations becoming more porous and fluid and open.
The guy in the picture here, I'll tell you his story. His name is Rob McEwen. I'd like to say, "I have this think tank, we scour the world for amazing case studies." The reason I know this story is because he's my neighbor. (Laughter) He actually moved across the street from us, and he held a cocktail party to meet the neighbors, and he says, "You're Don Tapscott. I've read some of your books." I said, "Great. What do you do?" And he says, "Well I used to be a banker and now I'm a gold miner." And he tells me this amazing story. He takes over this gold mine, and his geologists can't tell him where the gold is. He gives them more money for geological data, they come back, they can't tell him where to go into production. After a few years, he's so frustrated he's ready to give up, but he has an epiphany one day. He wonders, "If my geologists don't know where the gold is, maybe somebody else does." So he does a "radical" thing. He takes his geological data, he publishes it and he holds a contest on the Internet called the Goldcorp Challenge. It's basically half a million dollars in prize money for anybody who can tell me, do I have any gold, and if so, where is it? (Laughter)
He gets submissions from all around the world. They use techniques that he's never heard of, and for his half a million dollars in prize money, Rob McEwen finds 3.4 billion dollars worth of gold. The market value of his company goes from 90 million to 10 billion dollars, and I can tell you, because he's my neighbor, he's a happy camper. (Laughter)
You know, conventional wisdom says talent is inside, right? Your most precious asset goes out the elevator every night. He viewed talent differently. He wondered, who are their peers? He should have fired his geology department, but he didn't. You know, some of the best submissions didn't come from geologists. They came from computer scientists, engineers. The winner was a computer graphics company that built a three dimensional model of the mine where you can helicopter underground and see where the gold is.
He helped us understand that social media's becoming social production. It's not about hooking up online. This is a new means of production in the making. And this Ideagora that he created, an open market, agora, for uniquely qualified minds, was part of a change, a profound change in the deep structure and architecture of our organizations, and how we sort of orchestrate capability to innovate, to create goods and services, to engage with the rest of the world, in terms of government, how we create public value. Openness is about collaboration.
Now secondly, openness is about transparency. This is different. Here, we're talking about the communication of pertinent information to stakeholders of organizations: employees, customers, business partners, shareholders, and so on.
And everywhere, our institutions are becoming naked. People are all bent out of shape about WikiLeaks, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. You see, people at their fingertips now, everybody, not just Julian Assange, have these powerful tools for finding out what's going on, scrutinizing, informing others, and even organizing collective responses. Institutions are becoming naked,
and if you're going to be naked, well, there's some corollaries that flow from that. I mean, one is, fitness is no longer optional. (Laughter) You know? Or if you're going to be naked, you'd better get buff.
Now, by buff I mean, you need to have good value, because value is evidenced like never before. You say you have good products. They'd better be good. But you also need to have values. You need to have integrity as part of your bones and your DNA as an organization, because if you don't, you'll be unable to build trust, and trust is a sine qua non of this new network world.
So this is good. It's not bad. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. And we need a lot of sunlight in this troubled world.
Now, the third meaning and corresponding principle of openness is about sharing. Now this is different than transparency. Transparency is about the communication of information. Sharing is about giving up assets, intellectual property.
And there are all kinds of famous stories about this. IBM gave away 400 million dollars of software to the Linux movement, and that gave them a multi-billion dollar payoff.
Now, conventional wisdom says, "Well, hey, our intellectual property belongs to us, and if someone tries to infringe it, we're going to get out our lawyers and we're going to sue them." Well, it didn't work so well for the record labels, did it? I mean, they took — They had a technology disruption, and rather than taking a business model innovation to correspond to that, they took and sought a legal solution and the industry that brought you Elvis and the Beatles is now suing children and is in danger of collapse.
So we need to think differently about intellectual property.
I'll give you an example. The pharmaceutical industry is in deep trouble. First of all, there aren't a lot of big inventions in the pipeline, and this is a big problem for human health, and the pharmaceutical industry has got a bigger problem, that they're about to fall off something called the patent cliff. Do you know about this? They're going to lose 20 to 35 percent of their revenue in the next 12 months. And what are you going to do, like, cut back on paper clips or something? No.
We need to reinvent the whole model of scientific research. The pharmaceutical industry needs to place assets in a commons. They need to start sharing precompetitive research. They need to start sharing clinical trial data, and in doing so, create a rising tide that could lift all boats, not just for the industry but for humanity.
Now, the fourth meaning of openness, and corresponding principle, is about empowerment. And I'm not talking about the motherhood sense here. Knowledge and intelligence is power, and as it becomes more distributed, there's a concomitant distribution and decentralization and disaggregation of power that's underway in the world today. The open world is bringing freedom.
Now, take the Arab Spring. The debate about the role of social media and social change has been settled. You know, one word: Tunisia. And then it ended up having a whole bunch of other words too. But in the Tunisian revolution, the new media didn't cause the revolution; it was caused by injustice. Social media didn't create the revolution; it was created by a new generation of young people who wanted jobs and hope and who didn't want to be treated as subjects anymore.
But just as the Internet drops transaction and collaboration costs in business and government, it also drops the cost of dissent, of rebellion, and even insurrection in ways that people didn't understand.
You know, during the Tunisian revolution, snipers associated with the regime were killing unarmed students in the street. So the students would take their mobile devices, take a picture, triangulate the location, send that picture to friendly military units, who'd come in and take out the snipers. You think that social media is about hooking up online? For these kids, it was a military tool to defend unarmed people from murderers. It was a tool of self-defense.
You know, as we speak today, young people are being killed in Syria, and up until three months ago, if you were injured on the street, an ambulance would pick you up, take you to the hospital, you'd go in, say, with a broken leg, and you'd come out with a bullet in your head.
So these 20-somethings created an alternative health care system, where what they did is they used Twitter and basic publicly available tools that when someone's injured, a car would show up, it would pick them up, take them to a makeshift medical clinic, where you'd get medical treatment, as opposed to being executed. So this is a time of great change.
Now, it's not without its problems. Up until two years ago, all revolutions in human history had a leadership, and when the old regime fell, the leadership and the organization would take power. Well, these wiki revolutions happen so fast they create a vacuum, and politics abhors a vacuum, and unsavory forces can fill that, typically the old regime, or extremists, or fundamentalist forces. You can see this playing out today in Egypt.
But that doesn't matter, because this is moving forward. The train has left the station. The cat is out of the bag. The horse is out of the barn. Help me out here, okay? (Laughter) The toothpaste is out of the tube. I mean, we're not putting this one back. The open world is bringing empowerment and freedom.
I think, at the end of these four days, that you'll come to conclude that the arc of history is a positive one, and it's towards openness.
If you go back a few hundred years, all around the world it was a very closed society. It was agrarian, and the means of production and political system was called feudalism, and knowledge was concentrated in the church and the nobility. People didn't know about things. There was no concept of progress. You were born, you lived your life and you died.
But then Johannes Gutenberg came along with his great invention, and, over time, the society opened up. People started to learn about things, and when they did, the institutions of feudal society appeared to be stalled, or frozen, or failing. It didn't make sense for the church to be responsible for medicine when people had knowledge.
So we saw the Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther called the printing press "God's highest act of grace." The creation of a corporation, science, the university, eventually the Industrial Revolution, and it was all good.
But it came with a cost.
And now, once again, the technology genie is out of the bottle, but this time it's different. The printing press gave us access to the written word. The Internet enables each of us to be a producer. The printing press gave us access to recorded knowledge. The Internet gives us access, not just to information and knowledge, but to the intelligence contained in the crania of other people on a global basis.
To me, this is not an information age, it's an age of networked intelligence. It's an age of vast promise, an age of collaboration, where the boundaries of our organizations are changing, of transparency, where sunlight is disinfecting civilization, an age of sharing and understanding the new power of the commons, and it's an age of empowerment and of freedom.
Now, what I'd like to do is, to close, to share with you some research that I've been doing. I've tried to study all kinds of organizations to understand what the future might look like, but I've been studying nature recently.
You know, bees come in swarms and fish come in schools. Starlings, in the area around Edinburgh, in the moors of England, come in something called a murmuration, and the murmuration refers to the murmuring of the wings of the birds, and throughout the day the starlings are out over a 20-mile radius sort of doing their starling thing. And at night they come together and they create one of the most spectacular things in all of nature, and it's called a murmuration. And scientists that have studied this have said they've never seen an accident. Now, this thing has a function. It protects the birds. You can see on the right here, there's a predator being chased away by the collective power of the birds, and apparently this is a frightening thing if you're a predator of starlings. And there's leadership, but there's no one leader.
Now, is this some kind of fanciful analogy, or could we actually learn something from this? Well, the murmuration functions to record a number of principles, and they're basically the principles that I have described to you today. This is a huge collaboration. It's an openness, it's a sharing of all kinds of information, not just about location and trajectory and danger and so on, but about food sources. And there's a real sense of interdependence, that the individual birds somehow understand that their interests are in the interest of the collective.
Perhaps like we should understand that business can't succeed in a world that's failing.
Well, I look at this thing, and I get a lot of hope. Think about the kids today in the Arab Spring, and you see something like this that's underway.
And imagine, just consider this idea, if you would: What if we could connect ourselves in this world through a vast network of air and glass? Could we go beyond just sharing information and knowledge? Could we start to share our intelligence? Could we create some kind of collective intelligence that goes beyond an individual or a group or a team to create, perhaps, some kind of consciousness on a global basis? Well, if we could do this, we could attack some big problems in the world.
And I look at this thing, and, I don't know, I get a lot of hope that maybe this smaller, networked, open world that our kids inherit might be a better one, and that this new age of networked intelligence could be an age of promise fulfilled and of peril unrequited.
Let's do this. Thank you.
(Applause) |
This is poo, and what I want to do today is share my passion for poo with you, which might be quite difficult, but I think what you might find more fascinating is the way these small animals deal with poo.
So this animal here has got a brain about the size of a grain of rice, and yet it can do things that you and I couldn't possibly entertain the idea of doing. And basically it's all evolved to handle its food source, which is dung.
So the question is, where do we start this story? And it seems appropriate to start at the end, because this is a waste product that comes out of other animals, but it still contains nutrients and there are sufficient nutrients in there for dung beetles basically to make a living, and so dung beetles eat dung, and their larvae are also dung-feeders. They are grown completely in a ball of dung. Within South Africa, we've got about 800 species of dung beetles, in Africa we've got 2,000 species of dung beetles, and in the world we have about 6,000 species of dung beetles. So, according to dung beetles, dung is pretty good.
Unless you're prepared to get dung under your fingernails and root through the dung itself, you'll never see 90 percent of the dung beetle species, because they go directly into the dung, straight down below it, and then they shuttle back and forth between the dung at the soil surface and a nest they make underground.
So the question is, how do they deal with this material? And most dung beetles actually wrap it into a package of some sort. Ten percent of the species actually make a ball, and this ball they roll away from the dung source, usually bury it at a remote place away from the dung source, and they have a very particular behavior by which they are able to roll their balls. So this is a very proud owner of a beautiful dung ball. You can see it's a male because he's got a little hair on the back of his legs there, and he's clearly very pleased about what he's sitting on there. And then he's about to become a victim of a vicious smash-and-grab. (Laughter) And this is a clear indication that this is a valuable resource. And so valuable resources have to be looked after and guarded in a particular way, and we think the reason they roll the balls away is because of this, because of the competition that is involved in getting hold of that dung. So this dung pat was actually -- well, it was a dung pat 15 minutes before this photograph was taken, and we think it's the intense competition that makes the beetles so well-adapted to rolling balls of dung.
So what you've got to imagine here is this animal here moving across the African veld. Its head is down. It's walking backwards. It's the most bizarre way to actually transport your food in any particular direction, and at the same time it's got to deal with the heat. This is Africa. It's hot.
So what I want to share with you now are some of the experiments that myself and my colleagues have used to investigate how dung beetles deal with these problems.
So watch this beetle, and there's two things that I would like you to be aware of. The first is how it deals with this obstacle that we've put in its way. See, look, it does a little dance, and then it carries on in exactly the same direction that it took in the first place. A little dance, and then heads off in a particular direction. So clearly this animal knows where it's going and it knows where it wants to go, and that's a very, very important thing, because if you think about it, you're at the dung pile, you've got this great big pie that you want to get away from everybody else, and the quickest way to do it is in a straight line. So we gave them some more tasks to deal with, and what we did here is we turned the world under their feet. And watch its response. So this animal has actually had the whole world turned under its feet. It's turned by 90 degrees. But it doesn't flinch. It knows exactly where it wants to go, and it heads off in that particular direction.
So our next question then was, how are they doing this? What are they doing? And there was a cue that was available to us. It was that every now and then they'd climb on top of the ball and they'd take a look at the world around them. And what do you think they could be looking at as they climb on top of the ball? What are the obvious cues that this animal could use to direct its movement? And the most obvious one is to look at the sky, and so we thought, now what could they be looking at in the sky? And the obvious thing to look at is the sun. So a classic experiment here, in that what we did was we moved the sun. What we're going to do now is shade the sun with a board and then move the sun with a mirror to a completely different position. And look at what the beetle does. It does a little double dance, and then it heads back in exactly the same direction it went in the first place. What happens now? So clearly they're looking at the sun. The sun is a very important cue in the sky for them.
The thing is the sun is not always available to you, because at sunset it disappears below the horizon. What is happening in the sky here is that there's a great big pattern of polarized light in the sky that you and I can't see. It's the way our eyes are built. But the sun is at the horizon over here and we know that when the sun is at the horizon, say it's over on this side, there is a north-south, a huge pathway across the sky of polarized light that we can't see that the beetles can see. So how do we test that? Well, that's easy. What we do is we get a great big polarization filter, pop the beetle underneath it, and the filter is at right angles to the polarization pattern of the sky. The beetle comes out from underneath the filter and it does a right-hand turn, because it comes back under the sky that it was originally orientated to and then reorientates itself back to the direction it was originally going in. So obviously beetles can see polarized light.
Okay, so what we've got so far is, what are beetles doing? They're rolling balls. How are they doing it? Well, they're rolling them in a straight line. How are they maintaining it in a particular straight line? Well, they're looking at celestial cues in the sky, some of which you and I can't see.
But how do they pick up those celestial cues? That was what was of interest to us next. And it was this particular little behavior, the dance, that we thought was important, because look, it takes a pause every now and then, and then heads off in the direction that it wants to go in. So what are they doing when they do this dance? How far can we push them before they will reorientate themselves? And in this experiment here, what we did was we forced them into a channel, and you can see he wasn't particularly forced into this particular channel, and we gradually displaced the beetle by 180 degrees until this individual ends up going in exactly the opposite direction that it wanted to go in, in the first place. And let's see what his reaction is as he's headed through 90 degrees here, and now he's going to -- when he ends up down here, he's going to be 180 degrees in the wrong direction. And see what his response is. He does a little dance, he turns around, and heads back in this. He knows exactly where he's going. He knows exactly what the problem is, and he knows exactly how to deal with it, and the dance is this transition behavior that allows them to reorientate themselves.
So that's the dance, but after spending many years sitting in the African bush watching dung beetles on nice hot days, we noticed that there was another behavior associated with the dance behavior. Every now and then, when they climb on top of the ball, they wipe their face. And you see him do it again. Now we thought, now what could be going on here? Clearly the ground is very hot, and when the ground is hot, they dance more often, and when they do this particular dance, they wipe the bottom of their face. And we thought that it could be a thermoregulatory behavior. We thought that maybe what they're doing is trying to get off the hot soil and also spitting onto their face to cool their head down.
So what we did was design a couple of arenas. one was hot, one was cold. We shaded this one. We left that one hot. And then what we did was we filmed them with a thermal camera. So what you're looking at here is a heat image of the system, and what you can see here emerging from the poo is a cool dung ball. So the truth is, if you look at the temperature over here, dung is cool. (Laughter)
So all we're interested in here is comparing the temperature of the beetle against the background. So the background here is around about 50 degrees centigrade. The beetle itself and the ball are probably around about 30 to 35 degrees centigrade, so this is a great big ball of ice cream that this beetle is now transporting across the hot veld. It isn't climbing. It isn't dancing, because its body temperature is actually relatively low. It's about the same as yours and mine. And what's of interest here is that little brain is quite cool. But if we contrast now what happens in a hot environment, look at the temperature of the soil. It's up around 55 to 60 degrees centigrade. Watch how often the beetle dances. And look at its front legs. They're roaringly hot. So the ball leaves a little thermal shadow, and the beetle climbs on top of the ball and wipes its face, and all the time it's trying to cool itself down, we think, and avoid the hot sand that it's walking across.
And what we did then was put little boots on these legs, because this was a way to test if the legs were involved in sensing the temperature of the soil. And if you look over here, with boots they climb onto the ball far less often when they had no boots on. So we described these as cool boots. It was a dental compound that we used to make these boots. And we also cooled down the dung ball, so we were able to put the ball in the fridge, gave them a nice cool dung ball, and they climbed onto that ball far less often than when they had a hot ball. So this is called stilting. It's a thermal behavior that you and I do if we cross the beach, we jump onto a towel, somebody has this towel -- "Sorry, I've jumped onto your towel." -- and then you scuttle across onto somebody else's towel, and that way you don't burn your feet. And that's exactly what the beetles are doing here.
However, there's one more story I'd like to share with you, and that's this particular species. It's from a genus called Pachysoma. There are 13 species in the genus, and they have a particular behavior that I think you will find interesting. This is a dung beetle. Watch what he's doing. Can you spot the difference? They don't normally go this slowly. It's in slow motion. but it's walking forwards, and it's actually taking a pellet of dry dung with it. This is a different species in the same genus but exactly the same foraging behavior.
There's one more interesting aspect of this dung beetle's behavior that we found quite fascinating, and that's that it forages and provisions a nest. So watch this individual here, and what he's trying to do is set up a nest. And he doesn't like this first position, but he comes up with a second position, and about 50 minutes later, that nest is finished, and he heads off to forage and provision at a pile of dry dung pellets. And what I want you to notice is the outward path compared to the homeward path, and compare the two. And by and large, you'll see that the homeward path is far more direct than the outward path. On the outward path, he's always on the lookout for a new blob of dung. On the way home, he knows where home is, and he wants to go straight to it. The important thing here is that this is not a one-way trip, as in most dung beetles. The trip here is repeated back and forth between a provisioning site and a nest site. And watch, you're going to see another South African crime taking place right now. (Laughter) And his neighbor steals one of his dung pellets.
So what we're looking at here is a behavior called path integration. And what's taking place is that the beetle has got a home spot, it goes out on a convoluted path looking for food, and then when it finds food, it heads straight home. It knows exactly where its home is. Now there's two ways it could be doing that, and we can test that by displacing the beetle to a new position when it's at the foraging site. If it's using landmarks, it will find its home. If it is using something called path integration, it will not find its home. It will arrive at the wrong spot, and what it's doing here if it's using path integration is it's counting its steps or measuring the distance out in this direction. It knows the bearing home, and it knows it should be in that direction. If you displace it, it ends up in the wrong place. So let's see what happens when we put this beetle to the test with a similar experiment.
So here's our cunning experimenter. He displaces the beetle, and now we have to see what is going to take place. What we've got is a burrow. That's where the forage was. The forage has been displaced to a new position. If he's using landmark orientation, he should be able to find the burrow, because he'll be able to recognize the landmarks around it. If he's using path integration, then it should end up in the wrong spot over here.
So let's watch what happens when we put the beetle through the whole test. So there he is there. He's about to head home, and look what happens. Shame. It hasn't a clue. It starts to search for its house in the right distance away from the food, but it is clearly completely lost. So we know now that this animal uses path integration to find its way around, and the callous experimenter leads it top left and leaves it. (Laughter)
So what we're looking at here are a group of animals that use a compass, and they use the sun as a compass to find their way around, and they have some sort of system for measuring that distance, and we know that these species here actually count the steps. That's what they use as an odometer, a step-counting system, to find their way back home. We don't know yet what dung beetles use.
So what have we learned from these animals with a brain that's the size of a grain of rice? Well, we know that they can roll balls in a straight line using celestial cues. We know that the dance behavior is an orientation behavior and it's also a thermoregulation behavior, and we also know that they use a path integration system for finding their way home. So for a small animal dealing with a fairly revolting substance we can actually learn an awful lot from these things doing behaviors that you and I couldn't possibly do. Thank you. (Applause) |
Hi there. I'm Hasan. I'm an artist. And usually when I tell people I'm an artist, they just look at me and say, "Do you paint?" or "What kind of medium do you work in?" Well most of my work that I work with is really a little bit about methodologies of working rather than actually a specific discipline or a specific technique. So what I'm really interested in is creative problem solving. And I had a little bit of a problem a few years ago. So let me show you a little of that.
So it started over here. And this is the Detroit airport in June 19th of 2002. I was flying back to the U.S. from an exhibition overseas. And as I was coming back, well I was taken by the FBI, met by an FBI agent, and went into a little room and he asked me all sorts of questions -- "Where were you? What were you doing? Who were you talking with? Why were you there? Who pays for your trips?" -- all these little details. And then literally just out of nowhere, the guy asks me, "Where were you September 12th?" And when most of us get asked, "Where were you September 12th?" or any date for that fact, it's like, "I don't exactly remember, but I can look it up for you."
So I pulled out my little PDA, and I said, "Okay, let's look up my appointments for September 12th." I had September 12th -- from 10:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m., I paid my storage bill. From 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., I met with Judith who was one of my graduate students at the time. From 12:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., I taught my intro class, 3:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., I taught my advanced class. "Where were you the 11th?" "Where were you the 10th?" "Where were you the 29th? the 30th?" "Where were you October 5th?" We read about six months of my calendar. And I don't think he was expecting me to have such detailed records of what I did. But good thing I did, because I don't look good in orange.
(Laughter)
So he asked me -- (Applause) "So this storage unit that you paid the rent on, what did you have in it?" This was in Tampa, Florida, so I was like, "Winter clothes that I have no use for in Florida. Furniture that I can't fit in my ratty apartment. Just assorted garage sale junk, because I'm a pack rat." And he looks at me really confused and says, "No explosives?" (Laughter) I was like, "No, no. I'm pretty certain there were no explosives. And if there were, I would have remembered that one." And he's still a little confused, but I think that anyone who talks to me for more than a couple of minutes realizes I'm not exactly a terrorist threat. And so we're sitting there, and eventually after about an hour, hour and a half of just going back and forth, he says, "Okay, I have enough information here. I'm going to pass this onto the Tampa office. They're the ones who initiated this. They'll follow up with you, and we'll take care of it." I was like, "Great."
So I got home and the phone rings, and a man introduced himself. Basically this is the FBI offices in Tampa where I spent six months of my life -- back and forth, not six months continuously. By the way, you folks know that in the United States, you can't take photographs of federal buildings, but Google can do it for you. So to the folks from Google, thank you. (Applause) So I spent a lot of time in this building. Questions like: "Have you ever witnessed or participated in any act that may be detrimental to the United States or a foreign nation?" And you also have to consider the state of mind you're in when you're doing this. You're basically face-to-face with someone that essentially decides life or death. Or questions such as -- actually, during the polygraph, which was how it finally ended after nine consecutive of them --
one of the polygraph questions was ... well the first one was, "Is your name Hasan?" "Yes." "Are we in Florida?" "Yes." "Is today Tuesday?" "Yes." Because you have to base it on a yes or no. Then, of course, the next question is: "Do you belong to any groups that wish to harm the United States?" I work at a university. (Laughter) So I was like, "Maybe you want to ask some of my colleagues that directly." But they said, "Okay, aside from what we had discussed, do you belong to any groups that wish to harm the United States?" I was like, "No."
So at the end of six months of this and nine consecutive polygraphs, they said, "Hey, everything's fine." I was like, "I know. That's what I've been trying to tell you guys all along. I know everything's fine." So they're looking at me really odd. And it's like, "Guys, I travel a lot." This is with the FBI. And I was like, "All we need is Alaska not to get the last memo, and here we go all over again." And there was a sincere concern there. And he was like, "You know, if you get into trouble, give us a call -- we'll take care of it."
So ever since then, before I would go anywhere, I would call the FBI. I would tell them, "Hey guys, this is where I'm going. This is my flight. Northwest flight seven coming into Seattle on March 12th" or whatever. A couple weeks later, I'd call again, let them know. It wasn't that I had to, but I chose to. Just wanted to say, "Hey guys. Don't want to make it look like I'm making any sudden moves." (Laughter) "I don't want you guys to think that I'm about to flee. Just letting you know. Heads up." And so I just kept doing this over and over and over. And then the phone calls turned into emails, and the emails got longer and longer and longer ... with pictures, with travel tips. Then I'd make websites. And then I built this over here. Let me go back to it over here.
So I actually designed this back in 2003. So this kind of tracks me at any given moment. I wrote some code for my mobile phone. Basically, what I decided is okay guys, you want to watch me, that's cool. But I'll watch myself. It's okay. You don't have to waste your energy or your resources. And I'll help you out. So in the process, I start thinking, well what else might they know about me? Well they probably have all my flight records, so I decided to put all my flight records from birth online. So you can see, Delta 1252 going from Kansas City to Atlanta. And then you see, these are some of the meals that I've been fed on the planes. This was on Delta 719 going from JFK to San Francisco. See that? They won't let me on a plane with that, but they'll give it to me on the plane. (Laughter) These are the airports that I hang out in, because I like airports. That's Kennedy airport, May 19th, Tuesday. This is in Warsaw. Singapore. You can see, they're kind of empty.
These images are shot really anonymously to the point where it could be anyone. But if you can cross-reference this with the other data, then you're basically replaying the roll of the FBI agent and putting it all together. And when you're in a situation where you have to justify every moment of your existence, you're put in the situation where you react in a very different manner. At the time that this was going on, the last thing on my mind was "art project." I was certainly not thinking, hey, I got new work here. But after going through this, after realizing, well what just happened? And after piecing together this, this and this, this way of actually trying to figure out what happened for myself eventually evolved into this, and it actually became this project.
So these are the stores that I shop in -- some of them -- because they need to know. This is me buying some duck flavored paste at the Ranch 99 in Daly City on Sunday, November 15th. At Coreana Supermarket buying my kimchi because I like kimchi. And I bought some crabs too right around there, and some chitlins at the Safeway in Emoryville. And laundry too. Laundry detergent at West Oakland -- East Oakland, sorry. And then my pickled jellyfish at the Hong Kong Supermarket on Route 18 in East Brunswick. Now if you go to my bank records, it'll actually show something from there, so you know that, on May 9th, that I bought $14.79 in fuel from Safeway Vallejo.
So not only that I'm giving this information here and there, but now there's a third party, an independent third party, my bank, that's verifying that, yes indeed, I was there at this time. So there's points, and these points are actually being cross-referenced. And there's a verification taking place. Sometimes they're really small purchases. So 34 cents foreign transaction fee. All of these are extracted directly from my bank accounts, and everything pops up right away.
Sometimes there's a lot of information. This is exactly where my old apartment in San Francisco was. And then sometimes you get this. Sometimes you just get this, just an empty hallway in Salt Lake City, January 22nd. And I can tell you exactly who I was with, where I was, because this is what I had to do with the FBI. I had to tell them every little detail of everything. I spend a lot of time on the road. This is a parking lot in Elko, Nevada off of Route 80 at 8:01 p.m. on August 19th. I spend a lot of time in gas stations too -- empty train stations. So there's multiple databases. And there's thousands and thousands and thousands of images. There's actually 46,000 images right now on my site, and the FBI has seen all of them -- at least I trust they've seen all of them. And then sometimes you don't get much information at all, you just get this empty bed. And sometimes you get a lot of text information and no visual information. So you get something like this. This, by the way, is the location of my favorite sandwich shop in California -- Vietnamese sandwich.
So there's different categorizations of meals eaten outside empty train stations, empty gas stations. These are some of the meals that I've been cooking at home. So how do you know these are meals eaten at home? Well the same plate shows up a whole bunch of times. So again, you have to do some detective work here. So sometimes the databases get so specific. These are all tacos eaten in Mexico City near a train station on July fifth to July sixth. At 11:39 a.m. was this one. At 1:56 p.m. was this one. At 4:59 p.m. was this one. So I time-stamp my life every few moments. Every few moments I shoot the image.
Now it's all done on my iPhone, and it all goes straight up to my server, and my server does all the backend work and categorizes things and puts everything together. They need to know where I'm doing my business, because they want to know about my business. So on December 4th, I went here. And on Sunday, June 14th at 2009 -- this was actually about two o'clock in the afternoon in Skowhegan, Maine -- this was my apartment there. So what you're basically seeing here is all bits and pieces and all this information.
If you go to my site, there's tons of things. And really, it's not the most user-friendly interface. It's actually quite user-unfriendly. And one of the reasons, also being part of the user-unfriendliness, is that everything is there, but you have to really work through it. So by me putting all this information out there, what I'm basically telling you is I'm telling you everything. But in this barrage of noise that I'm putting out, I actually live an incredibly anonymous and private life. And you know very little about me actually. And really so I've come to the conclusion that the way you protect your privacy, particularly in an era where everything is cataloged and everything is archived and everything is recorded, there's no need to delete information anymore.
So what do you do when everything is out there? Well you have to take control over it. And if I give you this information directly, it's a very different type of identity than if you were to try to go through and try to get bits and pieces. The other thing that's also interesting that's going on here is the fact that intelligence agencies -- and it doesn't matter who they are -- they all operate in an industry where their commodity is information, or restricted access to information. And the reason their information has any value is, well, because no one else has access to it. And by me cutting out the middle man and giving it straight to you, the information that the FBI has has no value, so thus devaluing their currency. And I understand that, on an individual level, it's purely symbolic. But if 300 million people in the U.S. started doing this, we would have to redesign the entire intelligence system from the ground up. Because it just wouldn't work if everybody was sharing everything. And we're getting to that.
When I first started this project, people were looking at me and saying, "Why would you want to tell everybody what you're doing, where you're at? Why are you posting these photos?" This was an age before people were Tweeting everywhere and 750 million people were posting status messages or poking people. So in a way, I'm glad that I'm completely obsolete. I'm still doing this project, but it is obsolete, because you're all doing it. This is something that we all are doing on a daily basis, whether we're aware of it or not. So we're creating our own archives and so on.
And you know, some of my friends have always said, "Hey, you're just paranoid. Why are you doing this? Because no one's really watching. No one's really going to bother you." So one of the things that I do is I actually look through my server logs very carefully. Because it's about surveillance. I'm watching who's watching me. And I came up with these. So these are some of my sample logs. And just little bits and pieces, and you can see some of the things there. And I cleaned up the list a little bit so you can see. So you can see that the Homeland Security likes to come by -- Department of Homeland Security. You can see the National Security Agency likes to come by. I actually moved very close to them. I live right down the street from them now. Central Intelligence Agency. Executive Office of the President. Not really sure why they show up, but they do. I think they kind of like to look at art. And I'm glad that we have patrons of the arts in these fields.
So thank you very much. I appreciate it.
(Applause)
Bruno Giussani: Hasan, just curious. You said, "Now everything automatically goes from my iPhone," but actually you do take the pictures and put on information. So how many hours of the day does that take?
HE: Almost none. It's no different than sending a text. It's no different than checking an email. It's one of those things, we got by just fine before we had to do any of those. So it's just become another day. I mean, when we update a status message, we don't really think about how long that's going to take. So it's really just a matter of my phone clicking a couple of clicks, send, and then it's done. And everything's automated at the other end.
BG: On the day you are in a place where there is no coverage, the FBI gets crazy?
HE: Well it goes to the last point that I was at. So it holds onto the very last point. So if I'm on a 12-hour flight, you'll see the last airport that I departed from.
BG: Hasan, thank you very much. (HE: Thank you.)
(Applause) |
The story starts: I was at a friend's house, and she had on her shelf a copy of the DSM manual, which is the manual of mental disorders. It lists every known mental disorder. And it used to be, back in the '50s, a very slim pamphlet. And then it got bigger and bigger and bigger, and now it's 886 pages long. And it lists currently 374 mental disorders.
So I was leafing through it, wondering if I had any mental disorders, and it turns out I've got 12.
(Laughter)
I've got generalized anxiety disorder, which is a given. I've got nightmare disorder, which is categorized if you have recurrent dreams of being pursued or declared a failure, and all my dreams involve people chasing me down the street going, "You're a failure!"
(Laughter)
I've got parent-child relational problems, which I blame my parents for.
(Laughter)
I'm kidding. I'm not kidding. I'm kidding. And I've got malingering. And I think it's actually quite rare to have both malingering and generalized anxiety disorder, because malingering tends to make me feel very anxious.
Anyway, I was looking through this book, wondering if I was much crazier than I thought I was, or maybe it's not a good idea to diagnose yourself with a mental disorder if you're not a trained professional, or maybe the psychiatry profession has a kind of strange desire to label what's essentially normal human behavior as a mental disorder. I didn't know which of these was true, but I thought it was kind of interesting, and I thought maybe I should meet a critic of psychiatry to get their view, which is how I ended up having lunch with the Scientologists.
(Laughter)
It was a man called Brian, who runs a crack team of Scientologists who are determined to destroy psychiatry wherever it lies. They're called the CCHR. And I said to him, "Can you prove to me that psychiatry is a pseudo-science that can't be trusted?" And he said, "Yes, we can prove it to you." And I said, "How?" And he said, "We're going to introduce you to Tony." And I said, "Who's Tony?" And he said, "Tony's in Broadmoor." Now, Broadmoor is Broadmoor Hospital. It used to be known as the Broadmoor Asylum for the Criminally Insane. It's where they send the serial killers, and the people who can't help themselves. And I said to Brian, "Well, what did Tony do?" And he said, "Hardly anything. He beat someone up or something, and he decided to fake madness to get out of a prison sentence. But he faked it too well, and now he's stuck in Broadmoor and nobody will believe he's sane. Do you want us to try and get you into Broadmoor to meet Tony?" So I said, "Yes, please."
So I got the train to Broadmoor. I began to yawn uncontrollably around Kempton Park, which apparently is what dogs also do when anxious, they yawn uncontrollably. And we got to Broadmoor. And I got taken through gate after gate after gate after gate into the wellness center, which is where you get to meet the patients. It looks like a giant Hampton Inn. It's all peach and pine and calming colors. And the only bold colors are the reds of the panic buttons. And the patients started drifting in. And they were quite overweight and wearing sweatpants, and quite docile-looking. And Brian the Scientologist whispered to me, "They're medicated," which, to the Scientologists, is like the worst evil in the world, but I'm thinking it's probably a good idea.
(Laughter)
And then Brian said, "Here's Tony." And a man was walking in. And he wasn't overweight, he was in very good physical shape. And he wasn't wearing sweatpants, he was wearing a pinstripe suit. And he had his arm outstretched like someone out of The Apprentice. He looked like a man who wanted to wear an outfit that would convince me that he was very sane.
And he sat down. And I said, "So is it true that you faked your way in here?" And he said, "Yep. Yep. Absolutely. I beat someone up when I was 17. And I was in prison awaiting trial, and my cellmate said to me, 'You know what you have to do? Fake madness. Tell them you're mad, you'll get sent to some cushy hospital. Nurses will bring you pizzas, you'll have your own PlayStation.'" I said, "Well, how did you do it?" He said, "Well, I asked to see the prison psychiatrist. And I'd just seen a film called 'Crash,' in which people get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls. So I said to the psychiatrist, 'I get sexual pleasure from crashing cars into walls.'" And I said, "What else?" He said, "Oh, yeah. I told the psychiatrist that I wanted to watch women as they died, because it would make me feel more normal." I said, "Where'd you get that from?" He said, "Oh, from a biography of Ted Bundy that they had at the prison library."
Anyway, he faked madness too well, he said. And they didn't send him to some cushy hospital. They sent him to Broadmoor. And the minute he got there, said he took one look at the place, asked to see the psychiatrist, said, "There's been a terrible misunderstanding. I'm not mentally ill." I said, "How long have you been here for?" He said, "Well, if I'd just done my time in prison for the original crime, I'd have got five years. I've been in Broadmoor for 12 years."
Tony said that it's a lot harder to convince people you're sane than it is to convince them you're crazy. He said, "I thought the best way to seem normal would be to talk to people normally about normal things like football or what's on TV. I subscribe to New Scientist, and recently they had an article about how the U.S. Army was training bumblebees to sniff out explosives. So I said to a nurse, 'Did you know that the U.S. Army is training bumblebees to sniff out explosives?' When I read my medical notes, I saw they'd written: 'Believes bees can sniff out explosives.'"
(Laughter)
He said, "You know, they're always looking out for nonverbal clues to my mental state. But how do you sit in a sane way? How do you cross your legs in a sane way? It's just impossible." When Tony said that to me, I thought to myself, "Am I sitting like a journalist? Am I crossing my legs like a journalist?"
He said, "You know, I've got the Stockwell Strangler on one side of me, and I've got the 'Tiptoe Through the Tulips' rapist on the other side of me. So I tend to stay in my room a lot because I find them quite frightening. And they take that as a sign of madness. They say it proves that I'm aloof and grandiose." So, only in Broadmoor would not wanting to hang out with serial killers be a sign of madness. Anyway, he seemed completely normal to me, but what did I know?
And when I got home I emailed his clinician, Anthony Maden. I said, "What's the story?" And he said, "Yep. We accept that Tony faked madness to get out of a prison sentence, because his hallucinations -- that had seemed quite cliche to begin with -- just vanished the minute he got to Broadmoor. However, we have assessed him, and we've determined that what he is is a psychopath." And in fact, faking madness is exactly the kind of cunning and manipulative act of a psychopath. It's on the checklist: cunning, manipulative. So, faking your brain going wrong is evidence that your brain has gone wrong. And I spoke to other experts, and they said the pinstripe suit -- classic psychopath -- speaks to items one and two on the checklist: glibness, superficial charm and grandiose sense of self-worth. And I said, "Well, but why didn't he hang out with the other patients?" Classic psychopath -- it speaks to grandiosity and also lack of empathy. So all the things that had seemed most normal about Tony was evidence, according to his clinician, that he was mad in this new way. He was a psychopath.
And his clinician said to me, "If you want to know more about psychopaths, you can go on a psychopath-spotting course run by Robert Hare, who invented the psychopath checklist." So I did. I went on a psychopath-spotting course, and I am now a certified -- and I have to say, extremely adept -- psychopath spotter.
So, here's the statistics: One in a hundred regular people is a psychopath. So there's 1,500 people in his room. Fifteen of you are psychopaths. Although that figure rises to four percent of CEOs and business leaders, so I think there's a very good chance there's about 30 or 40 psychopaths in this room. It could be carnage by the end of the night.
(Laughter)
Hare said the reason why is because capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathic behavior -- the lack of empathy, the glibness, cunning, manipulative. In fact, capitalism, perhaps at its most remorseless, is a physical manifestation of psychopathy. It's like a form of psychopathy that's come down to affect us all. Hare said, "You know what? Forget about some guy at Broadmoor who may or may not have faked madness. Who cares? That's not a big story. The big story," he said, "is corporate psychopathy. You want to go and interview yourself some corporate psychopaths."
So I gave it a try. I wrote to the Enron people. I said, "Could I come and interview you in prison, to find out it you're psychopaths?"
(Laughter)
And they didn't reply.
(Laughter)
So I changed tack. I emailed "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap, the asset stripper from the 1990s. He would come into failing businesses and close down 30 percent of the workforce, just turn American towns into ghost towns. And I emailed him and I said, "I believe you may have a very special brain anomaly that makes you ... special, and interested in the predatory spirit, and fearless. Can I come and interview you about your special brain anomaly?" And he said, "Come on over!"
(Laughter)
So I went to Al Dunlap's grand Florida mansion. It was filled with sculptures of predatory animals. There were lions and tigers -- he was taking me through the garden -- there were falcons and eagles, he was saying, "Over there you've got sharks and --" he was saying this in a less effeminate way -- "You've got more sharks and you've got tigers." It was like Narnia.
(Laughter)
And then we went into his kitchen. Now, Al Dunlap would be brought in to save failing companies, he'd close down 30 percent of the workforce. And he'd quite often fire people with a joke. Like, for instance, one famous story about him, somebody came up to him and said, "I've just bought myself a new car." And he said, "Well, you may have a new car, but I'll tell you what you don't have -- a job."
So in his kitchen -- he was in there with his wife, Judy, and his bodyguard, Sean -- and I said, "You know how I said in my email that you might have a special brain anomaly that makes you special?" He said, "Yeah, it's an amazing theory, it's like Star Trek. You're going where no man has gone before." And I said, "Well --" (Clears throat)
(Laughter)
Some psychologists might say that this makes you --" (Mumbles)
(Laughter)
And he said, "What?" And I said, "A psychopath." And I said, "I've got a list of psychopathic traits in my pocket. Can I go through them with you?"
And he looked intrigued despite himself, and he said, "Okay, go on." And I said, "Okay. Grandiose sense of self-worth." Which I have to say, would have been hard for him to deny, because he was standing under a giant oil painting of himself.
(Laughter)
He said, "Well, you've got to believe in you!" And I said, "Manipulative." He said, "That's leadership."
(Laughter)
And I said, "Shallow affect, an inability to experience a range of emotions." He said, "Who wants to be weighed down by some nonsense emotions?" So he was going down the psychopath checklist, basically turning it into "Who Moved My Cheese?"
(Laughter)
But I did notice something happening to me the day I was with Al Dunlap. Whenever he said anything to me that was kind of normal -- like he said "no" to juvenile delinquency, he said he got accepted into West Point, and they don't let delinquents in West Point. He said "no" to many short-term marital relationships. He's only ever been married twice. Admittedly, his first wife cited in her divorce papers that he once threatened her with a knife and said he always wondered what human flesh tasted like, but people say stupid things to each other in bad marriages in the heat of an argument, and his second marriage has lasted 41 years. So whenever he said anything to me that just seemed kind of non-psychopathic, I thought to myself, well I'm not going to put that in my book. And then I realized that becoming a psychopath spotter had kind of turned me a little bit psychopathic. Because I was desperate to shove him in a box marked "Psychopath." I was desperate to define him by his maddest edges.
And I realized, my God -- this is what I've been doing for 20 years. It's what all journalists do. We travel across the world with our notepads in our hands, and we wait for the gems. And the gems are always the outermost aspects of our interviewee's personality. And we stitch them together like medieval monks, and we leave the normal stuff on the floor. And you know, this is a country that over-diagnoses certain mental disorders hugely. Childhood bipolar -- children as young as four are being labeled bipolar because they have temper tantrums, which scores them high on the bipolar checklist.
When I got back to London, Tony phoned me. He said, "Why haven't you been returning my calls?" I said, "Well, they say that you're a psychopath." And he said, "I'm not a psychopath." He said, "You know what? One of the items on the checklist is lack of remorse, but another item on the checklist is cunning, manipulative. So when you say you feel remorse for your crime, they say, 'Typical of the psychopath to cunningly say he feels remorse when he doesn't.' It's like witchcraft, they turn everything upside-down." He said, "I've got a tribunal coming up. Will you come to it?" So I said okay.
So I went to his tribunal. And after 14 years in Broadmoor, they let him go. They decided that he shouldn't be held indefinitely because he scores high on a checklist that might mean that he would have a greater than average chance of recidivism. So they let him go. And outside in the corridor he said to me, "You know what, Jon? Everyone's a bit psychopathic." He said, "You are, I am. Well, obviously I am." I said, "What are you going to do now?" He said, "I'm going to go to Belgium. There's a woman there that I fancy. But she's married, so I'm going to have to get her split up from her husband."
(Laughter)
Anyway, that was two years ago, and that's where my book ended. And for the last 20 months, everything was fine. Nothing bad happened. He was living with a girl outside London. He was, according to Brian the Scientologist, making up for lost time, which I know sounds ominous, but isn't necessarily ominous. Unfortunately, after 20 months, he did go back to jail for a month. He got into a "fracas" in a bar, he called it. Ended up going to jail for a month, which I know is bad, but at least a month implies that whatever the fracas was, it wasn't too bad.
And then he phoned me. And you know what, I think it's right that Tony is out. Because you shouldn't define people by their maddest edges. And what Tony is, is he's a semi-psychopath. He's a gray area in a world that doesn't like gray areas. But the gray areas are where you find the complexity. It's where you find the humanity, and it's where you find the truth. And Tony said to me, "Jon, could I buy you a drink in a bar? I just want to thank you for everything you've done for me." And I didn't go. What would you have done?
Thank you.
(Applause) |
I love video games. I'm also slightly in awe of them. I'm in awe of their power in terms of imagination, in terms of technology, in terms of concept. But I think, above all, I'm in awe at their power to motivate, to compel us, to transfix us, like really nothing else we've ever invented has quite done before. And I think that we can learn some pretty amazing things by looking at how we do this. And in particular, I think we can learn things about learning. Now the video games industry is far and away the fastest growing of all modern media. From about 10 billion in 1990, it's worth 50 billion dollars globally today, and it shows no sign of slowing down. In four years' time, it's estimated it'll be worth over 80 billion dollars. That's about three times the recorded music industry. This is pretty stunning, but I don't think it's the most telling statistic of all. The thing that really amazes me is that, today, people spend about eight billion real dollars a year buying virtual items that only exist inside video games. This is a screenshot from the virtual game world, Entropia Universe. Earlier this year, a virtual asteroid in it sold for 330,000 real dollars. And this is a Titan class ship in the space game, EVE Online. And this virtual object takes 200 real people about 56 days of real time to build, plus countless thousands of hours of effort before that. And yet, many of these get built. At the other end of the scale, the game Farmville that you may well have heard of, has 70 million players around the world and most of these players are playing it almost every day.
This may all sound really quite alarming to some people, an index of something worrying or wrong in society. But we're here for the good news, and the good news is that I think we can explore why this very real human effort, this very intense generation of value, is occurring. And by answering that question, I think we can take something extremely powerful away. And I think the most interesting way to think about how all this is going on is in terms of rewards. And specifically, it's in terms of the very intense emotional rewards that playing games offers to people both individually and collectively. Now if we look at what's going on in someone's head when they are being engaged, two quite different processes are occurring. On the one hand, there's the wanting processes. This is a bit like ambition and drive -- I'm going to do that. I'm going to work hard. On the other hand, there's the liking processes, fun and affection and delight and an enormous flying beast with an orc on the back. It's a really great image. It's pretty cool. It's from the game World of Warcraft with more than 10 million players globally, one of whom is me, another of whom is my wife. And this kind of a world, this vast flying beast you can ride around, shows why games are so very good at doing both the wanting and the liking. Because it's very powerful. It's pretty awesome. It gives you great powers. Your ambition is satisfied, but it's very beautiful. It's a very great pleasure to fly around. And so these combine to form a very intense emotional engagement.
But this isn't the really interesting stuff. The really interesting stuff about virtuality is what you can measure with it. Because what you can measure in virtuality is everything. Every single thing that every single person who's ever played in a game has ever done can be measured. The biggest games in the world today are measuring more than one billion points of data about their players, about what everybody does -- far more detail than you'd ever get from any website. And this allows something very special to happen in games. It's something called the reward schedule. And by this, I mean looking at what millions upon millions of people have done and carefully calibrating the rate, the nature, the type, the intensity of rewards in games to keep them engaged over staggering amounts of time and effort. Now, to try and explain this in sort of real terms, I want to talk about a kind of task that might fall to you in so many games. Go and get a certain amount of a certain little game-y item. Let's say, for the sake of argument, my mission is to get 15 pies and I can get 15 pies by killing these cute, little monsters. Simple game quest. Now you can think about this, if you like, as a problem about boxes. I've got to keep opening boxes. I don't know what's inside them until I open them. And I go around opening box after box until I've got 15 pies. Now, if you take a game like Warcraft, you can think about it, if you like, as a great box-opening effort. The game's just trying to get people to open about a million boxes, getting better and better stuff in them.
This sounds immensely boring but games are able to make this process incredibly compelling. And the way they do this is through a combination of probability and data. Let's think about probability. If we want to engage someone in the process of opening boxes to try and find pies, we want to make sure it's neither too easy, nor too difficult, to find a pie. So what do you do? Well, you look at a million people -- no, 100 million people, 100 million box openers -- and you work out, if you make the pie rate about 25 percent -- that's neither too frustrating, nor too easy. It keeps people engaged. But of course, that's not all you do -- there's 15 pies. Now, I could make a game called Piecraft, where all you had to do was get a million pies or a thousand pies. That would be very boring. Fifteen is a pretty optimal number. You find that -- you know, between five and 20 is about the right number for keeping people going. But we don't just have pies in the boxes. There's 100 percent up here. And what we do is make sure that every time a box is opened, there's something in it, some little reward that keeps people progressing and engaged. In most adventure games, it's a little bit in-game currency, a little bit experience. But we don't just do that either.
We also say there's going to be loads of other items of varying qualities and levels of excitement. There's going to be a 10 percent chance you get a pretty good item. There's going to be a 0.1 percent chance you get an absolutely awesome item. And each of these rewards is carefully calibrated to the item. And also, we say, "Well, how many monsters? Should I have the entire world full of a billion monsters?" No, we want one or two monsters on the screen at any one time. So I'm drawn on. It's not too easy, not too difficult. So all this is very powerful. But we're in virtuality. These aren't real boxes. So we can do some rather amazing things. We notice, looking at all these people opening boxes, that when people get to about 13 out of 15 pies, their perception shifts, they start to get a bit bored, a bit testy. They're not rational about probability. They think this game is unfair. It's not giving me my last two pies. I'm going to give up. If they're real boxes, there's not much we can do, but in a game we can just say, "Right, well. When you get to 13 pies, you've got 75 percent chance of getting a pie now." Keep you engaged. Look at what people do -- adjust the world to match their expectation. Our games don't always do this. And one thing they certainly do at the moment is if you got a 0.1 percent awesome item, they make very sure another one doesn't appear for a certain length of time to keep the value, to keep it special.
And the point is really that we evolved to be satisfied by the world in particular ways. Over tens and hundreds of thousands of years, we evolved to find certain things stimulating, and as very intelligent, civilized beings, we're enormously stimulated by problem solving and learning. But now, we can reverse engineer that and build worlds that expressly tick our evolutionary boxes. So what does all this mean in practice? Well, I've come up with seven things that, I think, show how you can take these lessons from games and use them outside of games. The first one is very simple: experience bars measuring progress -- something that's been talked about brilliantly by people like Jesse Schell earlier this year. It's already been done at the University of Indiana in the States, among other places. It's the simple idea that instead of grading people incrementally in little bits and pieces, you give them one profile character avatar which is constantly progressing in tiny, tiny, tiny little increments which they feel are their own. And everything comes towards that, and they watch it creeping up, and they own that as it goes along.
Second, multiple long and short-term aims -- 5,000 pies, boring, 15 pies, interesting. So, you give people lots and lots of different tasks. You say, it's about doing 10 of these questions, but another task is turning up to 20 classes on time, but another task is collaborating with other people, another task is showing you're working five times, another task is hitting this particular target. You break things down into these calibrated slices that people can choose and do in parallel to keep them engaged and that you can use to point them towards individually beneficial activities.
Third, you reward effort. It's your 100 percent factor. Games are brilliant at this. Every time you do something, you get credit; you get a credit for trying. You don't punish failure. You reward every little bit of effort -- a little bit of gold, a little bit of credit. You've done 20 questions -- tick. It all feeds in as minute reinforcement.
Fourth, feedback. This is absolutely crucial, and virtuality is dazzling at delivering this. If you look at some of the most intractable problems in the world today that we've been hearing amazing things about, it's very, very hard for people to learn if they cannot link consequences to actions. Pollution, global warming, these things -- the consequences are distant in time and space. It's very hard to learn, to feel a lesson. But if you can model things for people, if you can give things to people that they can manipulate and play with and where the feedback comes, then they can learn a lesson, they can see, they can move on, they can understand.
And fifth, the element of uncertainty. Now this is the neurological goldmine, if you like, because a known reward excites people, but what really gets them going is the uncertain reward, the reward pitched at the right level of uncertainty, that they didn't quite know whether they were going to get it or not. The 25 percent. This lights the brain up. And if you think about using this in testing, in just introducing control elements of randomness in all forms of testing and training, you can transform the levels of people's engagement by tapping into this very powerful evolutionary mechanism. When we don't quite predict something perfectly, we get really excited about it. We just want to go back and find out more.
As you probably know, the neurotransmitter associated with learning is called dopamine. It's associated with reward-seeking behavior. And something very exciting is just beginning to happen in places like the University of Bristol in the U.K., where we are beginning to be able to model mathematically dopamine levels in the brain. And what this means is we can predict learning, we can predict enhanced engagement, these windows, these windows of time, in which the learning is taking place at an enhanced level. And two things really flow from this. The first has to do with memory, that we can find these moments. When someone is more likely to remember, we can give them a nugget in a window. And the second thing is confidence, that we can see how game-playing and reward structures make people braver, make them more willing to take risks, more willing to take on difficulty, harder to discourage. This can all seem very sinister. But you know, sort of "our brains have been manipulated; we're all addicts." The word "addiction" is thrown around. There are real concerns there. But the biggest neurological turn-on for people is other people. This is what really excites us. In reward terms, it's not money; it's not being given cash -- that's nice -- it's doing stuff with our peers, watching us, collaborating with us.
And I want to tell you a quick story about 1999 -- a video game called EverQuest. And in this video game, there were two really big dragons, and you had to team up to kill them -- 42 people, up to 42 to kill these big dragons. That's a problem because they dropped two or three decent items. So players addressed this problem by spontaneously coming up with a system to motivate each other, fairly and transparently. What happened was, they paid each other a virtual currency they called "dragon kill points." And every time you turned up to go on a mission, you got paid in dragon kill points. They tracked these on a separate website. So they tracked their own private currency, and then players could bid afterwards for cool items they wanted -- all organized by the players themselves. Now the staggering system, not just that this worked in EverQuest, but that today, a decade on, every single video game in the world with this kind of task uses a version of this system -- tens of millions of people. And the success rate is at close to 100 percent. This is a player-developed, self-enforcing, voluntary currency, and it's incredibly sophisticated player behavior.
And I just want to end by suggesting a few ways in which these principles could fan out into the world. Let's start with business. I mean, we're beginning to see some of the big problems around something like business are recycling and energy conservation. We're beginning to see the emergence of wonderful technologies like real-time energy meters. And I just look at this, and I think, yes, we could take that so much further by allowing people to set targets by setting calibrated targets, by using elements of uncertainty, by using these multiple targets, by using a grand, underlying reward and incentive system, by setting people up to collaborate in terms of groups, in terms of streets to collaborate and compete, to use these very sophisticated group and motivational mechanics we see. In terms of education, perhaps most obviously of all, we can transform how we engage people. We can offer people the grand continuity of experience and personal investment. We can break things down into highly calibrated small tasks. We can use calculated randomness. We can reward effort consistently as everything fields together. And we can use the kind of group behaviors that we see evolving when people are at play together, these really quite unprecedentedly complex cooperative mechanisms. Government, well, one thing that comes to mind is the U.S. government, among others, is literally starting to pay people to lose weight. So we're seeing financial reward being used to tackle the great issue of obesity. But again, those rewards could be calibrated so precisely if we were able to use the vast expertise of gaming systems to just jack up that appeal, to take the data, to take the observations, of millions of human hours and plow that feedback into increasing engagement.
And in the end, it's this word, "engagement," that I want to leave you with. It's about how individual engagement can be transformed by the psychological and the neurological lessons we can learn from watching people that are playing games. But it's also about collective engagement and about the unprecedented laboratory for observing what makes people tick and work and play and engage on a grand scale in games. And if we can look at these things and learn from them and see how to turn them outwards, then I really think we have something quite revolutionary on our hands.
Thank you very much.
(Applause) |
I love a challenge, and saving the Earth is probably a good one. We all know the Earth is in trouble. We have now entered in the 6X, the sixth major extinction on this planet. I often wondered, if there was a United Organization of Organisms -- otherwise known as "Uh-Oh" -- (Laughter) -- and every organism had a right to vote, would we be voted on the planet, or off the planet? I think that vote is occurring right now.
I want to present to you a suite of six mycological solutions, using fungi, and these solutions are based on mycelium. The mycelium infuses all landscapes, it holds soils together, it's extremely tenacious. This holds up to 30,000 times its mass. They're the grand molecular disassemblers of nature -- the soil magicians. They generate the humus soils across the landmasses of Earth. We have now discovered that there is a multi-directional transfer of nutrients between plants, mitigated by the mcyelium -- so the mycelium is the mother that is giving nutrients from alder and birch trees to hemlocks, cedars and Douglas firs.
Dusty and I, we like to say, on Sunday, this is where we go to church. I'm in love with the old-growth forest, and I'm a patriotic American because we have those. Most of you are familiar with Portobello mushrooms. And frankly, I face a big obstacle. When I mention mushrooms to somebody, they immediately think Portobellos or magic mushrooms, their eyes glaze over, and they think I'm a little crazy. So, I hope to pierce that prejudice forever with this group. We call it mycophobia, the irrational fear of the unknown, when it comes to fungi.
Mushrooms are very fast in their growth. Day 21, day 23, day 25. Mushrooms produce strong antibiotics. In fact, we're more closely related to fungi than we are to any other kingdom. A group of 20 eukaryotic microbiologists published a paper two years ago erecting opisthokonta -- a super-kingdom that joins animalia and fungi together. We share in common the same pathogens. Fungi don't like to rot from bacteria, and so our best antibiotics come from fungi. But here is a mushroom that's past its prime. After they sporulate, they do rot. But I propose to you that the sequence of microbes that occur on rotting mushrooms are essential for the health of the forest. They give rise to the trees, they create the debris fields that feed the mycelium.
And so we see a mushroom here sporulating. And the spores are germinating, and the mycelium forms and goes underground. In a single cubic inch of soil, there can be more than eight miles of these cells. My foot is covering approximately 300 miles of mycelium.
This is photomicrographs from Nick Read and Patrick Hickey. And notice that as the mycelium grows, it conquers territory and then it begins the net. I've been a scanning electron microscopist for many years, I have thousands of electron micrographs, and when I'm staring at the mycelium, I realize that they are microfiltration membranes. We exhale carbon dioxide, so does mycelium. It inhales oxygen, just like we do. But these are essentially externalized stomachs and lungs. And I present to you a concept that these are extended neurological membranes. And in these cavities, these micro-cavities form, and as they fuse soils, they absorb water. These are little wells. And inside these wells, then microbial communities begin to form. And so the spongy soil not only resists erosion, but sets up a microbial universe that gives rise to a plurality of other organisms.
I first proposed, in the early 1990s, that mycelium is Earth's natural Internet. When you look at the mycelium, they're highly branched. And if there's one branch that is broken, then very quickly, because of the nodes of crossing -- Internet engineers maybe call them hot points -- there are alternative pathways for channeling nutrients and information. The mycelium is sentient. It knows that you are there. When you walk across landscapes, it leaps up in the aftermath of your footsteps trying to grab debris. So, I believe the invention of the computer Internet is an inevitable consequence of a previously proven, biologically successful model. The Earth invented the computer Internet for its own benefit, and we now, being the top organism on this planet, are trying to allocate resources in order to protect the biosphere.
Going way out, dark matter conforms to the same mycelial archetype. I believe matter begets life; life becomes single cells; single cells become strings; strings become chains; chains network. And this is the paradigm that we see throughout the universe.
Most of you may not know that fungi were the first organisms to come to land. They came to land 1.3 billion years ago, and plants followed several hundred million years later. How is that possible? It's possible because the mycelium produces oxalic acids, and many other acids and enzymes, pockmarking rock and grabbing calcium and other minerals and forming calcium oxalates. Makes the rocks crumble, and the first step in the generation of soil. Oxalic acid is two carbon dioxide molecules joined together. So, fungi and mycelium sequester carbon dioxide in the form of calcium oxalates. And all sorts of other oxalates are also sequestering carbon dioxide through the minerals that are being formed and taken out of the rock matrix.
This was first discovered in 1859. This is a photograph by Franz Hueber. This photograph's taken 1950s in Saudi Arabia. 420 million years ago, this organism existed. It was called Prototaxites. Prototaxites, laying down, was about three feet tall. The tallest plants on Earth at that time were less than two feet. Dr. Boyce, at the University of Chicago, published an article in the Journal of Geology this past year determining that Prototaxites was a giant fungus, a giant mushroom. Across the landscapes of Earth were dotted these giant mushrooms. All across most land masses. And these existed for tens of millions of years.
Now, we've had several extinction events, and as we march forward -- 65 million years ago -- most of you know about it -- we had an asteroid impact. The Earth was struck by an asteroid, a huge amount of debris was jettisoned into the atmosphere. Sunlight was cut off, and fungi inherited the Earth. Those organisms that paired with fungi were rewarded, because fungi do not need light. More recently, at Einstein University, they just determined that fungi use radiation as a source of energy, much like plants use light. So, the prospect of fungi existing on other planets elsewhere, I think, is a forgone conclusion, at least in my own mind.
The largest organism in the world is in Eastern Oregon. I couldn't miss it. It was 2,200 acres in size: 2,200 acres in size, 2,000 years old. The largest organism on the planet is a mycelial mat, one cell wall thick. How is it that this organism can be so large, and yet be one cell wall thick, whereas we have five or six skin layers that protect us? The mycelium, in the right conditions, produces a mushroom -- it bursts through with such ferocity that it can break asphalt. We were involved with several experiments. I'm going to show you six, if I can, solutions for helping to save the world. Battelle Laboratories and I joined up in Bellingham, Washington. There were four piles saturated with diesel and other petroleum waste: one was a control pile; one pile was treated with enzymes; one pile was treated with bacteria; and our pile we inoculated with mushroom mycelium. The mycelium absorbs the oil. The mycelium is producing enzymes -- peroxidases -- that break carbon-hydrogen bonds. These are the same bonds that hold hydrocarbons together. So, the mycelium becomes saturated with the oil, and then, when we returned six weeks later, all the tarps were removed, all the other piles were dead, dark and stinky. We came back to our pile, it was covered with hundreds of pounds of oyster mushrooms, and the color changed to a light form. The enzymes remanufactured the hydrocarbons into carbohydrates -- fungal sugars.
Some of these mushrooms are very happy mushrooms. They're very large. They're showing how much nutrition that they could've obtained. But something else happened, which was an epiphany in my life. They sporulated, the spores attract insects, the insects laid eggs, eggs became larvae. Birds then came, bringing in seeds, and our pile became an oasis of life. Whereas the other three piles were dead, dark and stinky, and the PAH's -- the aromatic hydrocarbons -- went from 10,000 parts per million to less than 200 in eight weeks. The last image we don't have. The entire pile was a green berm of life. These are gateway species, vanguard species that open the door for other biological communities.
So I invented burlap sacks, bunker spawn -- and putting the mycelium -- using storm blown debris, you can take these burlap sacks and put them downstream from a farm that's producing E. coli, or other wastes, or a factory with chemical toxins, and it leads to habitat restoration. So, we set up a site in Mason County, Washington, and we've seen a dramatic decrease in the amount of coliforms. And I'll show you a graph here. This is a logarithmic scale, 10 to the eighth power. There's more than a 100 million colonies per gram, and 10 to the third power is around 1,000. In 48 hours to 72 hours, these three mushroom species reduced the amount of coliform bacteria 10,000 times. Think of the implications. This is a space-conservative method that uses storm debris -- and we can guarantee that we will have storms every year.
So, this one mushroom, in particular, has drawn our interest over time. This is my wife Dusty, with a mushroom called Fomitopsis officinalis -- Agarikon. It's a mushroom exclusive to the old-growth forest that Dioscorides first described in 65 A.D. as a treatment against consumption. This mushroom grows in Washington State, Oregon, northern California, British Columbia, now thought to be extinct in Europe. May not seem that large -- let's get closer. This is extremely rare fungus. Our team -- and we have a team of experts that go out -- we went out 20 times in the old-growth forest last year. We found one sample to be able to get into culture.
Preserving the genome of these fungi in the old-growth forest I think is absolutely critical for human health. I've been involved with the U.S. Defense Department BioShield program. We submitted over 300 samples of mushrooms that were boiled in hot water, and mycelium harvesting these extracellular metabolites. And a few years ago, we received these results. We have three different strains of Agarikon mushrooms that were highly active against poxviruses. Dr. Earl Kern, who's a smallpox expert of the U.S. Defense Department, states that any compounds that have a selectivity index of two or more are active. 10 or greater are considered to be very active. Our mushroom strains were in the highly active range. There's a vetted press release that you can read -- it's vetted by DOD -- if you Google "Stamets" and "smallpox." Or you can go to NPR.org and listen to a live interview.
So, encouraged by this, naturally we went to flu viruses. And so, for the first time, I am showing this. We have three different strains of Agarikon mushrooms highly active against flu viruses. Here's the selectivity index numbers -- against pox, you saw 10s and 20s -- now against flu viruses, compared to the ribavirin controls, we have an extraordinarily high activity. And we're using a natural extract within the same dosage window as a pure pharmaceutical. We tried it against flu A viruses -- H1N1, H3N2 -- as well as flu B viruses. So then we tried a blend, and in a blend combination we tried it against H5N1, and we got greater than 1,000 selectivity index. (Applause) I then think that we can make the argument that we should save the old-growth forest as a matter of national defense. (Applause)
I became interested in entomopathogenic fungi -- fungi that kill insects. Our house was being destroyed by carpenter ants. So, I went to the EPA homepage, and they were recommending studies with metarhizium species of a group of fungi that kill carpenter ants, as well as termites. I did something that nobody else had done. I actually chased the mycelium, when it stopped producing spores. These are spores -- this is in their spores. I was able to morph the culture into a non-sporulating form. And so the industry has spent over 100 million dollars specifically on bait stations to prevent termites from eating your house. But the insects aren't stupid, and they would avoid the spores when they came close, and so I morphed the cultures into a non-sporulating form. And I got my daughter's Barbie doll dish, I put it right where a bunch of carpenter ants were making debris fields, every day, in my house, and the ants were attracted to the mycelium, because there's no spores. They gave it to the queen. One week later, I had no sawdust piles whatsoever.
And then -- a delicate dance between dinner and death -- the mycelium is consumed by the ants, they become mummified, and, boing, a mushroom pops out of their head. (Laughter) Now after sporulation, the spores repel. So, the house is no longer suitable for invasion. So, you have a near-permanent solution for reinvasion of termites. And so my house came down, I received my first patent against carpenter ants, termites and fire ants. Then we tried extracts, and lo and behold, we can steer insects to different directions. This has huge implications. I then received my second patent -- and this is a big one. It's been called an Alexander Graham Bell patent. It covers over 200,000 species. This is the most disruptive technology -- I've been told by executives of the pesticide industry -- that they have ever witnessed. This could totally revamp the pesticide industries throughout the world. You could fly 100 Ph.D. students under the umbrella of this concept, because my supposition is that entomopathogenic fungi, prior to sporulation, attract the very insects that are otherwise repelled by those spores.
And so I came up with a Life Box, because I needed a delivery system. The Life Box -- you're gonna be getting a DVD of the TED conference -- you add soil, you add water, you have mycorrhizal and endophytic fungi as well as spores, like of the Agarikon mushroom. The seeds then are mothered by this mycelium. And then you put tree seeds in here, and then you end up growing -- potentially -- an old-growth forest from a cardboard box.
I want to reinvent the delivery system, and the use of cardboard around the world, so they become ecological footprints. If there's a YouTube-like site that you could put up, you could make it interactive, zip code specific -- where people could join together, and through satellite imaging systems, through Virtual Earth or Google Earth, you could confirm carbon credits are being sequestered by the trees that are coming through Life Boxes.
You could take a cardboard box delivering shoes, you could add water -- I developed this for the refugee community -- corns, beans and squash and onions. I took several containers -- my wife said, if I could do this, anybody could -- and I ended up growing a seed garden. Then you harvest the seeds -- and thank you, Eric Rasmussen, for your help on this -- and then you're harvesting the seed garden. Then you can harvest the kernels, and then you just need a few kernels. I add mycelium to it, and then I inoculate the corncobs. Now, three corncobs, no other grain -- lots of mushrooms begin to form. Too many withdrawals from the carbon bank, and so this population will be shut down. But watch what happens here. The mushrooms then are harvested, but very importantly, the mycelium has converted the cellulose into fungal sugars. And so I thought, how could we address the energy crisis in this country? And we came up with Econol.
Generating ethanol from cellulose using mycelium as an intermediary -- and you gain all the benefits that I've described to you already. But to go from cellulose to ethanol is ecologically unintelligent, and I think that we need to be econologically intelligent about the generation of fuels. So, we build the carbon banks on the planet, renew the soils. These are a species that we need to join with. I think engaging mycelium can help save the world. Thank you very much. (Applause) |
I've been spending a lot of time traveling around the world these days, talking to groups of students and professionals, and everywhere I'm finding that I hear similar themes. On the one hand, people say, "The time for change is now." They want to be part of it. They talk about wanting lives of purpose and greater meaning. But on the other hand, I hear people talking about fear, a sense of risk-aversion. They say, "I really want to follow a life of purpose, but I don't know where to start. I don't want to disappoint my family or friends." I work in global poverty. And they say, "I want to work in global poverty, but what will it mean about my career? Will I be marginalized? Will I not make enough money? Will I never get married or have children?" And as a woman who didn't get married until I was a lot older -- and I'm glad I waited -- (Laughter) -- and has no children, I look at these young people and I say, "Your job is not to be perfect. Your job is only to be human. And nothing important happens in life without a cost." These conversations really reflect what's happening at the national and international level. Our leaders and ourselves want everything, but we don't talk about the costs. We don't talk about the sacrifice.
One of my favorite quotes from literature was written by Tillie Olsen, the great American writer from the South. In a short story called "Oh Yes," she talks about a white woman in the 1950s who has a daughter who befriends a little African American girl, and she looks at her child with a sense of pride, but she also wonders, what price will she pay? "Better immersion than to live untouched." But the real question is, what is the cost of not daring? What is the cost of not trying?
I've been so privileged in my life to know extraordinary leaders who have chosen to live lives of immersion. One woman I knew who was a fellow at a program that I ran at the Rockefeller Foundation was named Ingrid Washinawatok. She was a leader of the Menominee tribe, a Native American peoples. And when we would gather as fellows, she would push us to think about how the elders in Native American culture make decisions. And she said they would literally visualize the faces of children for seven generations into the future, looking at them from the Earth, and they would look at them, holding them as stewards for that future. Ingrid understood that we are connected to each other, not only as human beings, but to every living thing on the planet.
And tragically, in 1999, when she was in Colombia working with the U'wa people, focused on preserving their culture and language, she and two colleagues were abducted and tortured and killed by the FARC. And whenever we would gather the fellows after that, we would leave a chair empty for her spirit. And more than a decade later, when I talk to NGO fellows, whether in Trenton, New Jersey or the office of the White House, and we talk about Ingrid, they all say that they're trying to integrate her wisdom and her spirit and really build on the unfulfilled work of her life's mission. And when we think about legacy, I can think of no more powerful one, despite how short her life was.
And I've been touched by Cambodian women -- beautiful women, women who held the tradition of the classical dance in Cambodia. And I met them in the early '90s. In the 1970s, under the Pol Pot regime, the Khmer Rouge killed over a million people, and they focused and targeted the elites and the intellectuals, the artists, the dancers. And at the end of the war, there were only 30 of these classical dancers still living. And the women, who I was so privileged to meet when there were three survivors, told these stories about lying in their cots in the refugee camps. They said they would try so hard to remember the fragments of the dance, hoping that others were alive and doing the same.
And one woman stood there with this perfect carriage, her hands at her side, and she talked about the reunion of the 30 after the war and how extraordinary it was. And these big tears fell down her face, but she never lifted her hands to move them. And the women decided that they would train not the next generation of girls, because they had grown too old already, but the next generation. And I sat there in the studio watching these women clapping their hands -- beautiful rhythms -- as these little fairy pixies were dancing around them, wearing these beautiful silk colors. And I thought, after all this atrocity, this is how human beings really pray. Because they're focused on honoring what is most beautiful about our past and building it into the promise of our future. And what these women understood is sometimes the most important things that we do and that we spend our time on are those things that we cannot measure.
I also have been touched by the dark side of power and leadership. And I have learned that power, particularly in its absolute form, is an equal opportunity provider. In 1986, I moved to Rwanda, and I worked with a very small group of Rwandan women to start that country's first microfinance bank. And one of the women was Agnes -- there on your extreme left -- she was one of the first three women parliamentarians in Rwanda, and her legacy should have been to be one of the mothers of Rwanda. We built this institution based on social justice, gender equity, this idea of empowering women.
But Agnes cared more about the trappings of power than she did principle at the end. And though she had been part of building a liberal party, a political party that was focused on diversity and tolerance, about three months before the genocide, she switched parties and joined the extremist party, Hutu Power, and she became the Minister of Justice under the genocide regime and was known for inciting men to kill faster and stop behaving like women. She was convicted of category one crimes of genocide. And I would visit her in the prisons, sitting side-by-side, knees touching, and I would have to admit to myself that monsters exist in all of us, but that maybe it's not monsters so much, but the broken parts of ourselves, sadnesses, secret shame, and that ultimately it's easy for demagogues to prey on those parts, those fragments, if you will, and to make us look at other beings, human beings, as lesser than ourselves -- and in the extreme, to do terrible things.
And there is no group more vulnerable to those kinds of manipulations than young men. I've heard it said that the most dangerous animal on the planet is the adolescent male. And so in a gathering where we're focused on women, while it is so critical that we invest in our girls and we even the playing field and we find ways to honor them, we have to remember that the girls and the women are most isolated and violated and victimized and made invisible in those very societies where our men and our boys feel disempowered, unable to provide. And that, when they sit on those street corners and all they can think of in the future is no job, no education, no possibility, well then it's easy to understand how the greatest source of status can come from a uniform and a gun.
Sometimes very small investments can release enormous, infinite potential that exists in all of us. One of the Acumen Fund fellows at my organization, Suraj Sudhakar, has what we call moral imagination -- the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes and lead from that perspective. And he's been working with this young group of men who come from the largest slum in the world, Kibera. And they're incredible guys. And together they started a book club for a hundred people in the slums, and they're reading many TED authors and liking it. And then they created a business plan competition. Then they decided that they would do TEDx's.
And I have learned so much from Chris and Kevin and Alex and Herbert and all of these young men. Alex, in some ways, said it best. He said, "We used to feel like nobodies, but now we feel like somebodies." And I think we have it all wrong when we think that income is the link. What we really yearn for as human beings is to be visible to each other. And the reason these young guys told me that they're doing these TEDx's is because they were sick and tired of the only workshops coming to the slums being those workshops focused on HIV, or at best, microfinance. And they wanted to celebrate what's beautiful about Kibera and Mathare -- the photojournalists and the creatives, the graffiti artists, the teachers and the entrepreneurs. And they're doing it. And my hat's off to you in Kibera.
My own work focuses on making philanthropy more effective and capitalism more inclusive. At Acumen Fund, we take philanthropic resources and we invest what we call patient capital -- money that will invest in entrepreneurs who see the poor not as passive recipients of charity, but as full-bodied agents of change who want to solve their own problems and make their own decisions. We leave our money for 10 to 15 years, and when we get it back, we invest in other innovations that focus on change. I know it works. We've invested more than 50 million dollars in 50 companies, and those companies have brought another 200 million dollars into these forgotten markets. This year alone, they've delivered 40 million services like maternal health care and housing, emergency services, solar energy, so that people can have more dignity in solving their problems.
Patient capital is uncomfortable for people searching for simple solutions, easy categories, because we don't see profit as a blunt instrument. But we find those entrepreneurs who put people and the planet before profit. And ultimately, we want to be part of a movement that is about measuring impact, measuring what is most important to us. And my dream is we'll have a world one day where we don't just honor those who take money and make more money from it, but we find those individuals who take our resources and convert it into changing the world in the most positive ways. And it's only when we honor them and celebrate them and give them status that the world will really change.
Last May I had this extraordinary 24-hour period where I saw two visions of the world living side-by-side -- one based on violence and the other on transcendence. I happened to be in Lahore, Pakistan on the day that two mosques were attacked by suicide bombers. And the reason these mosques were attacked is because the people praying inside were from a particular sect of Islam who fundamentalists don't believe are fully Muslim. And not only did those suicide bombers take a hundred lives, but they did more, because they created more hatred, more rage, more fear and certainly despair.
But less than 24 hours, I was 13 miles away from those mosques, visiting one of our Acumen investees, an incredible man, Jawad Aslam, who dares to live a life of immersion. Born and raised in Baltimore, he studied real estate, worked in commercial real estate, and after 9/11 decided he was going to Pakistan to make a difference. For two years, he hardly made any money, a tiny stipend, but he apprenticed with this incredible housing developer named Tasneem Saddiqui. And he had a dream that he would build a housing community on this barren piece of land using patient capital, but he continued to pay a price. He stood on moral ground and refused to pay bribes. It took almost two years just to register the land. But I saw how the level of moral standard can rise from one person's action.
Today, 2,000 people live in 300 houses in this beautiful community. And there's schools and clinics and shops. But there's only one mosque. And so I asked Jawad, "How do you guys navigate? This is a really diverse community. Who gets to use the mosque on Fridays?" He said, "Long story. It was hard, it was a difficult road, but ultimately the leaders of the community came together, realizing we only have each other. And we decided that we would elect the three most respected imams, and those imams would take turns, they would rotate who would say Friday prayer. But the whole community, all the different sects, including Shi'a and Sunni, would sit together and pray."
We need that kind of moral leadership and courage in our worlds. We face huge issues as a world -- the financial crisis, global warming and this growing sense of fear and otherness. And every day we have a choice. We can take the easier road, the more cynical road, which is a road based on sometimes dreams of a past that never really was, a fear of each other, distancing and blame. Or we can take the much more difficult path of transformation, transcendence, compassion and love, but also accountability and justice.
I had the great honor of working with the child psychologist Dr. Robert Coles, who stood up for change during the Civil Rights movement in the United States. And he tells this incredible story about working with a little six-year-old girl named Ruby Bridges, the first child to desegregate schools in the South -- in this case, New Orleans. And he said that every day this six-year-old, dressed in her beautiful dress, would walk with real grace through a phalanx of white people screaming angrily, calling her a monster, threatening to poison her -- distorted faces. And every day he would watch her, and it looked like she was talking to the people. And he would say, "Ruby, what are you saying?" And she'd say, "I'm not talking." And finally he said, "Ruby, I see that you're talking. What are you saying?" And she said, "Dr. Coles, I am not talking; I'm praying." And he said, "Well, what are you praying?" And she said, "I'm praying, 'Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.'" At age six, this child was living a life of immersion, and her family paid a price for it. But she became part of history and opened up this idea that all of us should have access to education.
My final story is about a young, beautiful man named Josephat Byaruhanga, who was another Acumen Fund fellow, who hails from Uganda, a farming community. And we placed him in a company in Western Kenya, just 200 miles away. And he said to me at the end of his year, "Jacqueline, it was so humbling, because I thought as a farmer and as an African I would understand how to transcend culture. But especially when I was talking to the African women, I sometimes made these mistakes -- it was so hard for me to learn how to listen." And he said, "So I conclude that, in many ways, leadership is like a panicle of rice. Because at the height of the season, at the height of its powers, it's beautiful, it's green, it nourishes the world, it reaches to the heavens." And he said, "But right before the harvest, it bends over with great gratitude and humility to touch the earth from where it came."
We need leaders. We ourselves need to lead from a place that has the audacity to believe we can, ourselves, extend the fundamental assumption that all men are created equal to every man, woman and child on this planet. And we need to have the humility to recognize that we cannot do it alone. Robert Kennedy once said that "few of us have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events." And it is in the total of all those acts that the history of this generation will be written. Our lives are so short, and our time on this planet is so precious, and all we have is each other. So may each of you live lives of immersion. They won't necessarily be easy lives, but in the end, it is all that will sustain us.
Thank you.
(Applause) |
Today I want to talk to you about the mathematics of love. Now, I think that we can all agree that mathematicians are famously excellent at finding love. But it's not just because of our dashing personalities, superior conversational skills and excellent pencil cases. It's also because we've actually done an awful lot of work into the maths of how to find the perfect partner.
Now, in my favorite paper on the subject, which is entitled, "Why I Don't Have a Girlfriend" -- (Laughter) -- Peter Backus tries to rate his chances of finding love. Now, Peter's not a very greedy man. Of all of the available women in the U.K., all Peter's looking for is somebody who lives near him, somebody in the right age range, somebody with a university degree, somebody he's likely to get on well with, somebody who's likely to be attractive, somebody who's likely to find him attractive. (Laughter) And comes up with an estimate of 26 women in the whole of the UK. It's not looking very good, is it Peter? Now, just to put that into perspective, that's about 400 times fewer than the best estimates of how many intelligent extraterrestrial life forms there are. And it also gives Peter a 1 in 285,000 chance of bumping into any one of these special ladies on a given night out. I'd like to think that's why mathematicians don't really bother going on nights out anymore.
The thing is that I personally don't subscribe to such a pessimistic view. Because I know, just as well as all of you do, that love doesn't really work like that. Human emotion isn't neatly ordered and rational and easily predictable. But I also know that that doesn't mean that mathematics hasn't got something that it can offer us because, love, as with most of life, is full of patterns and mathematics is, ultimately, all about the study of patterns. Patterns from predicting the weather to the fluctuations in the stock market, to the movement of the planets or the growth of cities. And if we're being honest, none of those things are exactly neatly ordered and easily predictable, either. Because I believe that mathematics is so powerful that it has the potential to offer us a new way of looking at almost anything. Even something as mysterious as love. And so, to try to persuade you of how totally amazing, excellent and relevant mathematics is, I want to give you my top three mathematically verifiable tips for love.
Okay, so Top Tip #1: How to win at online dating. So my favorite online dating website is OkCupid, not least because it was started by a group of mathematicians. Now, because they're mathematicians, they have been collecting data on everybody who uses their site for almost a decade. And they've been trying to search for patterns in the way that we talk about ourselves and the way that we interact with each other on an online dating website. And they've come up with some seriously interesting findings. But my particular favorite is that it turns out that on an online dating website, how attractive you are does not dictate how popular you are, and actually, having people think that you're ugly can work to your advantage. Let me show you how this works. In a thankfully voluntary section of OkCupid, you are allowed to rate how attractive you think people are on a scale between 1 and 5. Now, if we compare this score, the average score, to how many messages a selection of people receive, you can begin to get a sense of how attractiveness links to popularity on an online dating website.
This is the graph that the OkCupid guys have come up with. And the important thing to notice is that it's not totally true that the more attractive you are, the more messages you get. But the question arises then of what is it about people up here who are so much more popular than people down here, even though they have the same score of attractiveness? And the reason why is that it's not just straightforward looks that are important. So let me try to illustrate their findings with an example. So if you take someone like Portia de Rossi, for example, everybody agrees that Portia de Rossi is a very beautiful woman. Nobody thinks that she's ugly, but she's not a supermodel, either. If you compare Portia de Rossi to someone like Sarah Jessica Parker, now, a lot of people, myself included, I should say, think that Sarah Jessica Parker is seriously fabulous and possibly one of the most beautiful creatures to have ever have walked on the face of the Earth. But some other people, i.e., most of the Internet, seem to think that she looks a bit like a horse. (Laughter) Now, I think that if you ask people how attractive they thought Sarah Jessica Parker or Portia de Rossi were, and you ask them to give them a score between 1 and 5, I reckon that they'd average out to have roughly the same score. But the way that people would vote would be very different. So Portia's scores would all be clustered around the 4 because everybody agrees that she's very beautiful, whereas Sarah Jessica Parker completely divides opinion. There'd be a huge spread in her scores. And actually it's this spread that counts. It's this spread that makes you more popular on an online Internet dating website. So what that means then is that if some people think that you're attractive, you're actually better off having some other people think that you're a massive minger. That's much better than everybody just thinking that you're the cute girl next door.
Now, I think this begins makes a bit more sense when you think in terms of the people who are sending these messages. So let's say that you think somebody's attractive, but you suspect that other people won't necessarily be that interested. That means there's less competition for you and it's an extra incentive for you to get in touch. Whereas compare that to if you think somebody is attractive but you suspect that everybody is going to think they're attractive. Well, why would you bother humiliating yourself, let's be honest? Here's where the really interesting part comes. Because when people choose the pictures that they use on an online dating website, they often try to minimize the things that they think some people will find unattractive. The classic example is people who are, perhaps, a little bit overweight deliberately choosing a very cropped photo, or bald men, for example, deliberately choosing pictures where they're wearing hats. But actually this is the opposite of what you should do if you want to be successful. You should really, instead, play up to whatever it is that makes you different, even if you think that some people will find it unattractive. Because the people who fancy you are just going to fancy you anyway, and the unimportant losers who don't, well, they only play up to your advantage.
Okay, Top Tip #2: How to pick the perfect partner. So let's imagine then that you're a roaring success on the dating scene. But the question arises of how do you then convert that success into longer-term happiness and in particular, how do you decide when is the right time to settle down? Now generally, it's not advisable to just cash in and marry the first person who comes along and shows you any interest at all. But, equally, you don't really want to leave it too long if you want to maximize your chance of long-term happiness. As my favorite author, Jane Austen, puts it, "An unmarried woman of seven and twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again." (Laughter) Thanks a lot, Jane. What do you know about love?
So the question is then, how do you know when is the right time to settle down given all the people that you can date in your lifetime? Thankfully, there's a rather delicious bit of mathematics that we can use to help us out here, called optimal stopping theory. So let's imagine then, that you start dating when you're 15 and ideally, you'd like to be married by the time that you're 35. And there's a number of people that you could potentially date across your lifetime, and they'll be at varying levels of goodness. Now the rules are that once you cash in and get married, you can't look ahead to see what you could have had, and equally, you can't go back and change your mind. In my experience at least, I find that typically people don't much like being recalled years after being passed up for somebody else, or that's just me.
So the math says then that what you should do in the first 37 percent of your dating window, you should just reject everybody as serious marriage potential. (Laughter) And then, you should pick the next person that comes along that is better than everybody that you've seen before. So here's the example. Now if you do this, it can be mathematically proven, in fact, that this is the best possible way of maximizing your chances of finding the perfect partner. Now unfortunately, I have to tell you that this method does come with some risks. For instance, imagine if your perfect partner appeared during your first 37 percent. Now, unfortunately, you'd have to reject them. (Laughter) Now, if you're following the maths, I'm afraid no one else comes along that's better than anyone you've seen before, so you have to go on rejecting everyone and die alone. (Laughter) Probably surrounded by cats nibbling at your remains.
Okay, another risk is, let's imagine, instead, that the first people that you dated in your first 37 percent are just incredibly dull, boring, terrible people. Now, that's okay, because you're in your rejection phase, so thats fine, you can reject them. But then imagine, the next person to come along is just marginally less boring, dull and terrible than everybody that you've seen before. Now, if you are following the maths, I'm afraid you have to marry them and end up in a relationship which is, frankly, suboptimal. Sorry about that. But I do think that there's an opportunity here for Hallmark to cash in on and really cater for this market. A Valentine's Day card like this. (Laughter) "My darling husband, you are marginally less terrible than the first 37 percent of people I dated." It's actually more romantic than I normally manage.
Okay, so this method doesn't give you a 100 percent success rate, but there's no other possible strategy that can do any better. And actually, in the wild, there are certain types of fish which follow and employ this exact strategy. So they reject every possible suitor that turns up in the first 37 percent of the mating season, and then they pick the next fish that comes along after that window that's, I don't know, bigger and burlier than all of the fish that they've seen before. I also think that subconsciously, humans, we do sort of do this anyway. We give ourselves a little bit of time to play the field, get a feel for the marketplace or whatever when we're young. And then we only start looking seriously at potential marriage candidates once we hit our mid-to-late 20s. I think this is conclusive proof, if ever it were needed, that everybody's brains are prewired to be just a little bit mathematical.
Okay, so that was Top Tip #2. Now, Top Tip #3: How to avoid divorce. Okay, so let's imagine then that you picked your perfect partner and you're settling into a lifelong relationship with them. Now, I like to think that everybody would ideally like to avoid divorce, apart from, I don't know, Piers Morgan's wife, maybe? But it's a sad fact of modern life that 1 in 2 marriages in the States ends in divorce, with the rest of the world not being far behind. Now, you can be forgiven, perhaps for thinking that the arguments that precede a marital breakup are not an ideal candidate for mathematical investigation. For one thing, it's very hard to know what you should be measuring or what you should be quantifying. But this didn't stop a psychologist, John Gottman, who did exactly that. Gottman observed hundreds of couples having a conversation and recorded, well, everything you can think of. So he recorded what was said in the conversation, he recorded their skin conductivity, he recorded their facial expressions, their heart rates, their blood pressure, basically everything apart from whether or not the wife was actually always right, which incidentally she totally is. But what Gottman and his team found was that one of the most important predictors for whether or not a couple is going to get divorced was how positive or negative each partner was being in the conversation.
Now, couples that were very low-risk scored a lot more positive points on Gottman's scale than negative. Whereas bad relationships, by which I mean, probably going to get divorced, they found themselves getting into a spiral of negativity. Now just by using these very simple ideas, Gottman and his group were able to predict whether a given couple was going to get divorced with a 90 percent accuracy. But it wasn't until he teamed up with a mathematician, James Murray, that they really started to understand what causes these negativity spirals and how they occur. And the results that they found I think are just incredibly impressively simple and interesting. So these equations, they predict how the wife or husband is going to respond in their next turn of the conversation, how positive or negative they're going to be. And these equations, they depend on the mood of the person when they're on their own, the mood of the person when they're with their partner, but most importantly, they depend on how much the husband and wife influence one another.
Now, I think it's important to point out at this stage, that these exact equations have also been shown to be perfectly able at describing what happens between two countries in an arms race. (Laughter) So that -- an arguing couple spiraling into negativity and teetering on the brink of divorce -- is actually mathematically equivalent to the beginning of a nuclear war. (Laughter)
But the really important term in this equation is the influence that people have on one another, and in particular, something called the negativity threshold. Now, the negativity threshold, you can think of as how annoying the husband can be before the wife starts to get really pissed off, and vice versa. Now, I always thought that good marriages were about compromise and understanding and allowing the person to have the space to be themselves. So I would have thought that perhaps the most successful relationships were ones where there was a really high negativity threshold. Where couples let things go and only brought things up if they really were a big deal. But actually, the mathematics and subsequent findings by the team have shown the exact opposite is true. The best couples, or the most successful couples, are the ones with a really low negativity threshold. These are the couples that don't let anything go unnoticed and allow each other some room to complain. These are the couples that are continually trying to repair their own relationship, that have a much more positive outlook on their marriage. Couples that don't let things go and couples that don't let trivial things end up being a really big deal.
Now of course, it takes bit more than just a low negativity threshold and not compromising to have a successful relationship. But I think that it's quite interesting to know that there is really mathematical evidence to say that you should never let the sun go down on your anger.
So those are my top three tips of how maths can help you with love and relationships. But I hope that aside from their use as tips, they also give you a little bit of insight into the power of mathematics. Because for me, equations and symbols aren't just a thing. They're a voice that speaks out about the incredible richness of nature and the startling simplicity in the patterns that twist and turn and warp and evolve all around us, from how the world works to how we behave. So I hope that perhaps, for just a couple of you, a little bit of insight into the mathematics of love can persuade you to have a little bit more love for mathematics. Thank you. (Applause) |
I want to argue to you that in fact, politics and religion, which are the two primary factors -- not the sole, but overwhelmingly, the primary factors -- which are driving towards a war which looks extremely likely -- bordering on the inevitable at this point, whether one is in favor of that or not -- that politics and religion are, in fact, themselves better conceptualized as kinds of technology, and subject to kinds of questions that we regularly consider in the space of conceptual design.
Here's what I mean. Politics and -- let's focus on the political system in particular question here, which is the system of democracy. Democracy, as a type of politics, is a technology for the control and deployment of power. You can deploy power in a wide range of ways. The famous ones -- despotism is a good one; anarchy is a way to not deploy the power in any organized way, to do it in a radically diffused fashion; and democracy is a set of technologies, which have the effect of, in principle, diffusing the power source to a large number of people and then re-concentrating it in a smaller group of people who govern, and who themselves are, in principle, authorized to govern by virtue of what the broader public has done.
Now, consider religion -- in this case Islam, which is the religion that, in some direct sense, can be said to be precipitating what we're about to enter. Let me say parenthetically why I think that's the case, because I think it's a potentially controversial statement. I would put it in the following equation: no 9/11, no war. At the beginning of the Bush administration, when President Bush, now President Bush, was running for president, he made it very clear that he was not interested in intervening broadly in the world. In fact, the trend was for disengagement with the rest of the world. That's why we heard about the backing away from the Kyoto protocol, for example. After 9/11, the tables were turned. And the president decided, with his advisors, to undertake some kind of an active intervention in the world around us. That began with Afghanistan, and when Afghanistan went extremely smoothly and quickly, a decision was made through the technology of democracy -- again, notice, not a perfect technology -- but through the technology of democracy that this administration was going to push in the direction of another war -- this time, a war in Iraq.
Now, the reason I begin by saying "no 9/11, no war" is that we have to acknowledge that Islam, as interpreted by a very, very small, extremely radical group of people, was a precipitating cause of the 9/11 attacks -- the precipitating cause of the 9/11 attacks -- and as a consequence, at one degree of remove, the precipitating cause of the coming war that we're about to be engaged in. And I would add that bin Laden and his followers are consciously devoted to the goal of creating a conflict between democracy, or at least capitalist democracy, on the one hand, and the world of Islam as they see and define it.
Now, how is Islam a technology in this conceptual apparatus? Well, it's a technology for, first, salvation in its most basic sense. It's meant to be a mechanism for construing the universe in a way that will bring about the salvation of the individual believer, but it's also meant by the Islamists -- and I use that term to mean people who believe that Islam -- they follow the slogan, Islam is the answer to a wide range of questions, whether they're social, or political, or personal, or spiritual. Within the sphere of people who have that view, and it's a large number of people in the Muslim world who disagree with bin Laden in his application, but agree that Islam is the answer. Islam represents a way of engaging the world through which one can achieve certain desirable goals. And the goals from the perspective of Muslims are, in principle, peace, justice and equality, but on terms that correspond to traditional Muslim teachings.
Now, I don't want to leave a misimpression by identifying either of these propositions -- rather, either of these phenomena, democracy or Islam -- as technologies. I don't want to suggest that they are a single thing that you can point to. And I think a good way to prove this is simply to demonstrate to you what my thought process was when deciding what to put on the wall behind me when I spoke. And I ran immediately into a conceptual problem: you can't show a picture of democracy. You can show a slogan, or a symbol, or a sign that stands for democracy. You can show the Capitol -- I had the same problem when I was designing the cover of my forthcoming book, in fact -- what do you put on the cover to show democracy? And the same problem with respect to Islam. You can show a mosque, or you can show worshippers, but there's not a straightforward way of depicting Islam. That's because these are the kinds of concepts that are not susceptible to easy representation.
Now, it follows from that, that they're deeply contestable. It follows from that that all of the people in the world who say that they are Muslims can, in principle, subscribe to a wide range of different interpretations of what Islam really is, and the same is true of democracy. In other words, unlike the word hope, which one could look up in a dictionary and derive origins for, and, perhaps, reach some kind of a consensual use analysis, these are essentially contested concepts. They're ideas about which people disagree in the deepest possible sense. And as a consequence of this disagreement, it's very, very difficult for anyone to say, "I have the right version of Islam." You know, post-9/11, we were treated to the amazing phenomenon of George W. Bush saying, "Islam means peace." Well, so says George W. Bush. Other people would say it means something else. Some people would say that Islam means submission. Other people would say it means an acknowledgement or recognition of God's sovereignty. There are a wide range of different things that Islam can mean. And ostensibly, the same is true of democracy. Some people say that democracy consists basically in elections. Other people say no, that's not enough, there have to be basic liberal rights: free speech, free press, equality of citizens. These are contested points, and it's impossible to answer them by saying, "Ah ha, I looked in the right place, and I found out what these concepts mean."
Now, if Islam and democracy are at present in a moment of great confrontation, what does that mean? Well, you could fit it into a range of different interpretative frameworks. You could begin with the one that we began with a couple of days ago, which was fear. Fear is not an implausible reaction with a war just around the corner and with a very, very high likelihood that many, many people are going to die as a consequence of this confrontation -- a confrontation which many, many people in the Muslim world do not want, many, many people in the American democracy do not want, many people elsewhere in the world do not want, but which nonetheless is favored by a large enough number of people -- at least in the relevant space, which is the United States -- to actually go forward. So fear is not a crazy response at all. And I think that that's, in fact, probably the first appropriate response.
What I want to suggest to you, though, in the next couple of minutes is that there's also a hopeful response to this. And the hopeful response derives from recognizing that Islam and democracy are technologies. And by virtue of being technologies, they're manipulable. And they're manipulable in ways that can produce some extremely positive outcomes. What do I have in mind? Well, all over the Muslim world there are people who take Islam deeply seriously, people who care about Islam, for whom it's a source either of faith, or of civilization, or of deep values, or just a source of powerful personal identity, who think and are saying loudly that Islam and democracy are in fact not in conflict, but are in fact deeply compatible. And these Muslims -- and it's the vast majority of Muslims -- disagree profoundly with bin Laden's approach, profoundly. And they furthermore think overwhelmingly -- again one can't speak of every person, but overwhelmingly, and one can find this by reading any of the sources that they have produced, and they're all over the Internet and in all sorts of languages -- one can see that they're saying that their concern in their own countries is primarily to free up themselves to have choice in the spheres of personal life, in the sphere of economics, in the sphere of politics, and, yes, in the sphere of religion, which is itself closely regulated in most of the Muslim world.
And many of these Muslims further say that their disagreement with the United States is that it, in the past and still in the present, has sided with autocratic rulers in the Muslim world in order to promote America's short-term interests. Now, during the Cold War, that may have been a defensible position for the United States to take. That's an academic question. It may be that there was a great war to be fought between West and East, and it was necessary on the axis of democracy against communism. And it was necessary in some way for these to contradict each other, and as a consequence you have to make friends wherever you can get them. But now that the Cold War is over, there's nearly universal consensus in the Muslim world -- and pretty close to the same here in the United States, if you talk to people and ask them -- that in principle, there's no reason that democracy and Islam cannot co-exist. And we see this among activist, practical Muslims, like the Muslims who are presently the elected, parliamentary, democratic government of Turkey, who are behaving pragmatically, not ideologically, who are promoting their own religious values, who are elected by their own people because they were perceived as honest and sincere because of their religious values, but who do not think that Islam and a democratic system of governance are fundamentally incompatible.
Now, you may say, but surely, what we've seen on television about Saudi Islam convinces us that it can't possibly be compatible with what we consider the core of democracy -- namely, free political choice, basic liberty and basic equality. But I'm here to tell you that technologies are more malleable than that. I'm here to tell you that many, many Muslims believe -- the vast majority, in fact -- in fact I think I would go so far as to say that many Muslims in Saudi Arabia believe that the core values of Islam, namely acknowledgement of God's sovereignty and basic human equality before God, are themselves compatible with liberty, equality and free political choice. And there are Muslims, many Muslims out there, who are saying precisely this. And they're making this argument wherever they're permitted to make it. But their governments, needless to say, are relatively threatened by this. And for the most part try to stop them from making this argument.
So, for example, a group of young activists in Egypt try to form a party known as the Center Party, which advocated the compatibility of Islam and democracy. They weren't even allowed to form a party. They were actually blocked from even forming a party under the political system there. Why? Because they would have done extraordinarily well. In the most recent elections in the Muslim world -- which are those in Pakistan, those in Morocco and those in Turkey -- in each case, people who present themselves to the electorate as Islamic democrats were far and away the most successful vote-getters every place they were allowed to run freely. So in Morocco, for example, they finished third in the political race but they were only allowed to contest half the seats. So had they contested a larger number of the seats, they would have done even better. Now what I want to suggest to you is that the reason for hope in this case is that we are on the edge of a real transformation in the Muslim world. And that's a transformation in which many sincerely believing Muslims -- who care very, very deeply about their traditions, who do not want to compromise those values -- believe, through the malleability of the technology of democracy and the malleability and synthetic capability of the technology of Islam, that these two ideas can work together.
Now what would that look like? What does it mean to say that there's an Islamic democracy? Well, one thing is, it's not going to look identical to democracy as we know it in the United States. That may be a good thing, in light of some of the criticisms we've heard today -- for example, in the regulatory context -- of what democracy produces. It will also not look exactly the way either the people in this room, or Muslims out in the rest of the world -- I don't mean to imply there aren't Muslims here, there probably are -- conceptualize Islam. It will be transformative of Islam as well. And as a result of this convergence, this synthetic attempt to make sense of these two ideas together, there's a real possibility that, instead of a clash of Islamic civilization -- if there is such a thing -- and democratic civilization -- if there is such a thing -- we'll in fact have close compatibility.
Now, I began with the war because it's the elephant in the room, and you can't pretend that there isn't about to be a war if you're talking about these issues. The war has tremendous risks for the model that I'm describing because it's very possible that as a consequence of a war, many Muslims will conclude that the United States is not the kind of place that they want to emulate with respect to its forms of political government. On the other hand, there's a further possibility that many Americans, swept up in the fever of a war, will say, and feel, and think that Islam is the enemy somehow -- that Islam ought to be construed as the enemy. And even though, for political tactical reasons, the president has been very, very good about saying that Islam is not the enemy, nonetheless, there's a natural impulse when one enters war to think of the other side as an enemy. And one furthermore has the impulse to generalize, as much as possible, in defining who that enemy is. So the risks are very great.
On the other hand, the capacities for positive results in the aftermath of a war are also not to be underestimated, even by, and I would say especially by, people who are deeply skeptical about whether we should go to war in the first place. Those who oppose the war ought to realize that if a war happens, it cannot be the right strategy, either pragmatically, or spiritually, or morally, to say after the war, "Well, let's let it all run itself out, and play out however it wants to play out, because we opposed the war in the first place." That's not the way human circumstances operate. You face the circumstances you have in front of you and you go forward.
Well, what I'm here to say then is, for people who are skeptical about the war, it's especially important to recognize that in the aftermath of the war there is a possibility for the government of the United States and the Muslim peoples with whom it interacts to create real forms of government that are truly democratic and also truly Islamic. And it is crucial -- it is crucial in a practical, activist way -- for people who care about these issues to make sure that within the technology of democracy, in this system, they exercise their preferences, their choices and their voices to encourage that outcome. That's a hopeful message, but it's a message that's hopeful only if you understand it as incurring serious obligation for all of us. And I think that we are capable of taking on that obligation, but only if we put what we can into it. And if we do, then I don't think that the hope will be unwarranted altogether.
Thanks. |
Pat Mitchell: That day, January 8, 2011, began like all others. You were both doing the work that you love. You were meeting with constituents, which is something that you loved doing as a congresswoman, and Mark, you were happily preparing for your next space shuttle. And suddenly, everything that you had planned or expected in your lives was irrevocably changed forever.
Mark Kelly: Yeah, it's amazing, it's amazing how everything can change for any of us in an instant. People don't realize that. I certainly didn't. Gabby Giffords: Yes. MK: And on that Saturday morning, I got this horrible phone call from Gabby's chief of staff. She didn't have much other information. She just said, "Gabby was shot." A few minutes later, I called her back and I actually thought for a second, well, maybe I just imagined getting this phone call. I called her back, and that's when she told me that Gabby had been shot in the head. And from that point on, I knew that our lives were going to be a lot different.
PM: And when you arrived at the hospital, what was the prognosis that they gave you about Gabby's condition and what recovery, if any, you could expect?
MK: Well, for a gunshot wound to the head and a traumatic brain injury, they typically can't tell you much. Every injury is different. It's not predictable like often a stroke might be predictable, which is another TBI kind of injury. So they didn't know how long Gabby would be in a coma, didn't know when that would change and what the prognosis would be.
PM: Gabby, has your recovery been an effort to create a new Gabby Giffords or reclaim the old Gabby Giffords?
GG: The new one -- better, stronger, tougher. (Applause)
MK: That to say, when you look at the picture behind us, to come back from that kind of injury and come back strong and stronger than ever is a really tough thing to do. I don't know anybody that's as tough as my wonderful wife right here. (Applause)
PM: And what were the first signs that recovery was not only going to be possible but you were going to have some semblance of the life that you and Gabby had planned?
MK: Well, the first thing, for me, was Gabby was still kind of almost unconscious, but she did something when she was in the ICU hospital bed that she used to do when we might be out to dinner at a restaurant, in that she pulled my ring off and she flipped it from one finger to the next, and at that point I knew that she was still in there. PM: And there were certain words, too. Didn't she surprise you with words in the beginning?
MK: Well, it was tough in the beginning. GG: What? What? Chicken. Chicken. Chicken.
MK: Yeah, that was it. For the first month, that was the extent of Gabby's vocabulary. For some reason, she has aphasia, which is difficulty with communication. She latched on to the word "chicken," which isn't the best but certainly is not the worst. (Laughter) And we were actually worried it could have been a lot worse than that. PM: Gabby, what's been the toughest challenge for you during this recovery?
GG: Talking. Really hard. Really.
MK: Yeah, with aphasia, Gabby knows what she wants to say, she just can't get it out. She understands everything, but the communication is just very difficult because when you look at the picture, the part of your brain where those communication centers are are on the left side of your head, which is where the bullet passed through.
PM: So you have to do a very dangerous thing: speak for your wife.
MK: I do. It might be some of the most dangerous things I've ever done.
PM: Gabby, are you optimistic about your continuing recovery -- walking, talking, being able to move your arm and leg?
GG: I'm optimistic. It will be a long, hard haul, but I'm optimistic.
PM: That seems to be the number one characteristic of Gabby Giffords, wouldn't you say? (Applause)
MK: Gabby's always been really optimistic. She works incredibly hard every day.
GG: On the treadmill, walked on my treadmill, Spanish lessons, French horn.
MK: It's only my wife who could be -- and if you knew her before she was injured, you would kind of understand this -- somebody who could be injured and have such a hard time communicating and meets with a speech therapist, and then about a month ago, she says, "I want to learn Spanish again."
PM: Well, let's take a little closer look at the wife, and this was even before you met Gabby Giffords. And she's on a motor scooter there, but it's my understanding that's a very tame image of what Gabby Giffords was like growing up.
MK: Yeah, Gabby, she used to race motorcycles. So that's a scooter, but she had -- well, she still has a BMW motorcycle.
PM: Does she ride it? MK: Well, that's a challenge with not being able to move her right arm, but I think with something I know about, Velcro, we might be able to get her back on the bike, Velcro her right hand up onto the handlebar.
PM: I have a feeling we might see that picture next, Gabby. But you meet, you're already decided that you're going to dedicate your life to service. You're going into the military and eventually to become an astronaut. So you meet. What attracts you to Gabby?
MK: Well, when we met, oddly enough, it was the last time we were in Vancouver, about 10 years ago. We met in Vancouver, at the airport, on a trip that we were both taking to China, that I would actually, from my background, I would call it a boondoggle. Gabby would — GG: Fact-finding mission.
MK: She would call it an important fact-finding mission. She was a state senator at the time, and we met here, at the airport, before a trip to China.
PM: Would you describe it as a whirlwind romance?
GG: No, no, no. (Laughter) A good friend.
MK: Yeah, we were friends for a long time.
GG: Yes. (Laughter)
MK: And then she invited me on, about a year or so later, she invited me on a date. Where'd we go, Gabby?
GG: Death row.
MK: Yes. Our first date was to death row at the Florence state prison in Arizona, which was just outside Gabby's state senate district. They were working on some legislation that had to do with crime and punishment and capital punishment in the state of Arizona. So she couldn't get anybody else to go with her, and I'm like, "Of course I want to go to death row." So that was our first date. We've been together ever since. GG: Yes.
PM: Well, that might have contributed to the reason that Gabby decided to marry you. You were willing to go to death row, after all.
MK: I guess.
PM: Gabby, what did make you want to marry Mark?
GG: Um, good friends. Best friends. Best friends.
MK: I thought we always had a very special relationship. We've gone through some tough times and it's only made it stronger. GG: Stronger.
PM: After you got married, however, you continued very independent lives. Actually, you didn't even live together.
MK: We had one of those commuter marriages. In our case, it was Washington, D.C., Houston, Tucson. Sometimes we'd go clockwise, sometimes counterclockwise, to all those different places, and we didn't really live together until that Saturday morning. Within an hour of Gabby being shot, I was on an airplane to Tucson, and that was the moment where that had changed things.
PM: And also, Gabby, you had run for Congress after being a state senator and served in Congress for six years. What did you like best about being in Congress?
GG: Fast pace. Fast pace.
PM: Well it was the way you did it. GG: Yes, yes. Fast pace.
PM: I'm not sure people would describe it entirely that way. (Laughter)
MK: Yeah, you know, legislation is often at a colossally slow pace, but my wife, and I have to admit, a lot of other members of Congress that I know, work incredibly hard. I mean, Gabby would run around like a crazy person, never take a day off, maybe a half a day off a month, and whenever she was awake she was working, and she really, really thrived on that, and still does today. GG: Yes. Yes.
PM: Installing solar panels on the top of her house, I have to say. So after the tragic incident, Mark, you decided to resign your position as an astronaut, even though you were supposed to take the next space mission. Everybody, including Gabby, talked you into going back, and you did end up taking.
MK: Kind of. The day after Gabby was injured, I called my boss, the chief astronaut, Dr. Peggy Whitson, and I said, "Peggy, I know I'm launching in space in three months from now. Gabby's in a coma. I'm in Tucson. You've got to find a replacement for me." So I didn't actually resign from being an astronaut, but I gave up my job and they found a replacement. Months later, maybe about two months later, I started about getting my job back, which is something, when you become this primary caregiver person, which some people in the audience here have certainly been in that position, it's a challenging role but at some point you've got to figure out when you're going to get your life back, and at the time, I couldn't ask Gabby if she wanted me to go fly in the space shuttle again. But I knew she was— GG: Yes. Yes. Yes.
MK: She was the biggest supporter of my career, and I knew it was the right thing to do.
PM: And yet I'm trying to imagine, Mark, what that was like, going off onto a mission, one presumes safely, but it's never a guarantee, and knowing that Gabby is —
MK: Well not only was she still in the hospital, on the third day of that flight, literally while I was rendezvousing with the space station, and you've got two vehicles moving at 17,500 miles an hour, I'm actually flying it, looking out the window, a bunch of computers, Gabby was in brain surgery, literally at that time having the final surgery to replace the piece of skull that they took out on the day she was injured with a prosthetic, yeah, which is the whole side of her head. Now if any of you guys would ever come to our house in Tucson for the first time, Gabby would usually go up to the freezer and pull out the piece of Tupperware that has the real skull. (Laughter)
GG: The real skull. MK: Which freaks people out, sometimes.
PM: Is that for appetizer or dessert, Mark?
MK: Well, it just gets the conversation going.
PM: But there was a lot of conversation about something you did, Gabby, after Mark's flight. You had to make another step of courage too, because here was Congress deadlocked again, and you got out of the rehabilitation center, got yourself to Washington so that you could walk on the floor of the House -- I can barely talk about this without getting emotional — and cast a vote which could have been the deciding vote.
GG: The debt ceiling. The debt ceiling.
MK: Yeah, we had that vote, I guess about five months after Gabby was injured, and she made this bold decision to go back. A very controversial vote, but she wanted to be there to have her voice heard one more time.
PM: And after that, resigned and began what has been a very slow and challenging recovery. What's life like, day to day?
MK: Well, that's Gabby's service dog Nelson.
GG: Nelson.
MK: New member of our family. GG: Yes, yes.
MK: And we got him from a—
GG: Prison. Murder. MK: We have a lot of connections with prisons, apparently. (Laughter) Nelson came from a prison, raised by a murderer in Massachusetts. But she did a great job with this dog. He's a fabulous service dog.
PM: So Gabby, what have you learned from your experiences the past few years?
MK: Yeah, what have you learned? GG: Deeper. Deeper.
PM: Your relationship is deeper. It has to be. You're together all the time now.
MK: I imagine being grateful, too, right?
GG: Grateful.
PM: This is a picture of family and friends gathering, but I love these pictures because they show the Gabby and Mark relationship now. And you describe it, Gabby, over and over, as deeper on so many levels. Yes?
MK: I think when something tragic happens in a family, it can pull people together. Here's us watching the space shuttle fly over Tucson, the Space Shuttle Endeavour, the one that I was the commander on its last flight, on its final flight on top of an airplane on a 747 on its way to L.A., NASA was kind enough to have it fly over Tucson.
PM: And of course, the two of you go through these challenges of a slow and difficult recovery, and yet, Gabby, how do you maintain your optimism and positive outlook?
GG: I want to make the world a better place. (Applause)
PM: And you're doing that even though your recovery has to remain front and center for both of you. You are people who have done service to your country and you are continuing to do that with a new initiative, a new purpose. And Gabby, what's on the agenda now?
GG: Americans for Responsible Solutions.
MK: That's our political action committee, where we are trying to get members of Congress to take a more serious look at gun violence in this country, and to try to pass some reasonable legislation.
GG: Yes. Yes. (Applause)
MK: You know, this affected us very personally, but it wasn't what happened to Gabby that got us involved. It was really the 20 murdered first graders and kindergartners in Newtown, Connecticut, and the response that we saw afterwards where -- well, look what's happened so far. So far the national response has been pretty much to do nothing. We're trying to change that.
PM: There have been 11 mass shootings since Newtown, a school a week in the first two months of last year. What are you doing that's different than other efforts to balance rights for gun ownership and responsibilities?
MK: We're gun owners, we support gun rights. At the same time, we've got to do everything we can to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the dangerously mentally ill. It's not too difficult to do that. This issue, like many others, has become very polarizing and political, and we're trying to bring some balance to the debate in Washington.
PM: Thank you both for that effort. And not surprisingly for this woman of courage and of a sense of adventure, you just keep challenging yourself, and the sky seems to be the limit. I have to share this video of your most recent adventure. Take a look at Gabby.
MK: This is a couple months ago.
(Video) MK: You okay? You did great. GG: Yes, it's gorgeous. Thank you. Good stuff. Gorgeous. Oh, thank you. Mountains. Gorgeous mountains. (Applause)
MK: Let me just say one of the guys that Gabby jumped with that day was a Navy SEAL who she met in Afghanistan who was injured in combat, had a really rough time. Gabby visited him when he was at Bethesda and went through a really tough period. He started doing better. Months later, Gabby was shot in the head, and then he supported her while she was in the hospital in Houston. So they have a very, very nice connection.
GG: Yes.
PM: What a wonderful moment. Because this is the TED stage, Gabby, I know you worked very hard to think of the ideas that you wanted to leave with this audience.
GG: Thank you. Hello, everyone. Thank you for inviting us here today. It's been a long, hard haul, but I'm getting better. I'm working hard, lots of therapy -- speech therapy, physical therapy, and yoga too. But my spirit is strong as ever. I'm still fighting to make the world a better place, and you can too. Get involved with your community. Be a leader. Set an example. Be passionate. Be courageous. Be your best. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
MK: Thank you. GG: Thank you.
(Applause) MK: Thank you everybody. GG: Bye bye. (Applause) |
So I'm a city planner, an urban designer, former arts advocate, trained in architecture and art history, and I want to talk to you today not about design but about America and how America can be more economically resilient, how America can be healthier, and how America can be more environmentally sustainable. And I realize this is a global forum, but I think I need to talk about America because there is a history, in some places, not all, of American ideas being appropriated, being emulated, for better or for worse, around the world.
And the worst idea we've ever had is suburban sprawl. It's being emulated in many places as we speak. By suburban sprawl, I refer to the reorganization of the landscape and the creation of the landscape around the requirement of automobile use, and that the automobile that was once an instrument of freedom has become a gas-belching, time-wasting and life-threatening prosthetic device that many of us need just to, most Americans, in fact, need, just to live their daily lives. And there's an alternative. You know, we say, half the world is living in cities. Well, in America, that living in cities, for many of them, they're living in cities still where they're dependent on that automobile. And what I work for, and to do, is to make our cities more walkable. But I can't give design arguments for that that will have as much impact as the arguments that I've learned from the economists, the epidemiologists and the environmentalists. So these are the three arguments that I'm going to give you quickly today.
When I was growing up in the '70s, the typical American spent one tenth of their income, American family, on transportation. Since then, we've doubled the number of roads in America, and we now spend one fifth of our income on transportation. Working families, which are defined as earning between 20,000 and 50,000 dollars a year in America are spending more now on transportation than on housing, slightly more, because of this phenomenon called "drive till you qualify," finding homes further and further and further from the city centers and from their jobs, so that they're locked in this, two, three hours, four hours a day of commuting. And these are the neighborhoods, for example, in the Central Valley of California that weren't hurt when the housing bubble burst and when the price of gas went up; they were decimated. And in fact, these are many of the half-vacant communities that you see today. Imagine putting everything you have into your mortgage, it goes underwater, and you have to pay twice as much for all the driving that you're doing.
So we know what it's done to our society and all the extra work we have to do to support our cars. What happens when a city decides it's going to set other priorities? And probably the best example we have here in America is Portland, Oregon. Portland made a bunch of decisions in the 1970s that began to distinguish it from almost every other American city. While most other cities were growing an undifferentiated spare tire of sprawl, they instituted an urban growth boundary. While most cities were reaming out their roads, removing parallel parking and trees in order to flow more traffic, they instituted a skinny streets program. And while most cities were investing in more roads and more highways, they actually invested in bicycling and in walking. And they spent 60 million dollars on bike facilities, which seems like a lot of money, but it was spent over about 30 years, so two million dollars a year -- not that much -- and half the price of the one cloverleaf that they decided to rebuild in that city. These changes and others like them changed the way that Portlanders live, and their vehicle-miles traveled per day, the amount that each person drives, actually peaked in 1996, has been dropping ever since, and they now drive 20 percent less than the rest of the country. The typical Portland citizen drives four miles less, and 11 minutes less per day than they did before. The economist Joe Cortright did the math and he found out that those four miles plus those 11 minutes adds up to fully three and a half percent of all income earned in the region.
So if they're not spending that money on driving -- and by the way, 85 percent of the money we spend on driving leaves the local economy -- if they're not spending that money on driving, what are they spending it on? Well, Portland is reputed to have the most roof racks per capita, the most independent bookstores per capita, the most strip clubs per capita. These are all exaggerations, slight exaggerations of a fundamental truth, which is Portlanders spend a lot more on recreation of all kinds than the rest of America. Actually, Oregonians spend more on alcohol than most other states, which may be a good thing or a bad thing, but it makes you glad they're driving less.
(Laughter)
But actually, they're spending most of it in their homes, and home investment is about as local an investment as you can get. But there's a whole other Portland story, which isn't part of this calculus, which is that young, educated people have been moving to Portland in droves, so that between the last two censuses, they had a 50-percent increase in college-educated millennials, which is five times what you saw anywhere else in the country, or, I should say, of the national average.
So on the one hand, a city saves money for its residents by being more walkable and more bikeable, but on the other hand, it also is the cool kind of city that people want to be in these days. So the best economic strategy you can have as a city is not the old way of trying to attract corporations and trying to have a biotech cluster or a medical cluster, or an aerospace cluster, but to become a place where people want to be. And millennials, certainly, these engines of entrepreneurship, 64 percent of whom decide first where they want to live, then they move there, then they look for a job, they will come to your city.
The health argument is a scary one, and you've probably heard part of this argument before. Again, back in the '70s, a lot's changed since then, back in the '70s, one in 10 Americans was obese. Now one out of three Americans is obese, and a second third of the population is overweight. Twenty-five percent of young men and 40 percent of young women are too heavy to enlist in our own military forces. According to the Center for Disease Control, fully one third of all children born after 2000 will get diabetes. We have the first generation of children in America who are predicted to live shorter lives than their parents.
I believe that this American healthcare crisis that we've all heard about is an urban design crisis, and that the design of our cities lies at the cure. Because we've talked a long time about diet, and we know that diet impacts weight, and weight of course impacts health. But we've only started talking about inactivity, and how inactivity born of our landscape, inactivity that comes from the fact that we live in a place where there is no longer any such thing as a useful walk, is driving our weight up. And we finally have the studies, one in Britain called "Gluttony versus sloth" that tracked weight against diet and tracked weight against inactivity, and found a much higher, stronger correlation between the latter two. Dr. James Levine at, in this case, the aptly-named Mayo Clinic put his test subjects in electronic underwear, held their diet steady, and then started pumping the calories in. Some people gained weight, some people didn't gain weight. Expecting some metabolic or DNA factor at work, they were shocked to learn that the only difference between the subjects that they could figure out was the amount they were moving, and that in fact those who gained weight were sitting, on average, two hours more per day than those who didn't.
So we have these studies that tie weight to inactivity, but even more, we now have studies that tie weight to where you live. Do you live in a more walkable city or do you live in a less walkable city, or where in your city do you live? In San Diego, they used Walk Score -- Walk Score rates every address in America and soon the world in terms of how walkable it is -- they used Walk Score to designate more walkable neighborhoods and less walkable neighborhoods. Well guess what? If you lived in a more walkable neighborhood, you were 35 percent likely to be overweight. If you lived in a less walkable neighborhood, you were 60 percent likely to be overweight. So we have study after study now that's tying where you live to your health, particularly as in America, the biggest health crisis we have is this one that's stemming from environmental-induced inactivity. And I learned a new word last week. They call these neighborhoods "obesageneric." I may have that wrong, but you get the idea.
Now that's one thing, of course. Briefly mentioning, we have an asthma epidemic in this country. You probably haven't thought that much about it. Fourteen Americans die each day from asthma, three times what it was in the '90s, and it's almost all coming from car exhaust. American pollution does not come from factories anymore, it comes from tailpipes, and the amount that people are driving in your city, your urban VMT, is a good prediction of the asthma problems in your city.
And then finally, in terms of driving, there's the issue of the single-largest killer of healthy adults, and one of the largest killers of all people, is car crashes. And we take car crashes for granted. We figure it's a natural risk of being on the road. But in fact, here in America, 12 people out of every 100,000 die every year from car crashes. We're pretty safe here. Well, guess what? In England, it's seven per 100,000. It's Japan, it's four per 100,000. Do you know where it's three per 100,000? New York City. San Francisco, the same thing. Portland, the same thing. Oh, so cities make us safer because we're driving less? Tulsa: 14 per 100,000. Orlando: 20 per 100,000. It's not whether you're in the city or not, it's how is your city designed? Was it designed around cars or around people? Because if your city is designed around cars, it's really good at smashing them into each other.
That's part of a much larger health argument.
Finally, the environmental argument is fascinating, because the environmentalists turned on a dime about 10 years ago. The environmental movement in America has historically been an anti-city movement from Jefferson on.
"Cities are pestilential to the health, to the liberties, to the morals of man. If we continue to pile upon ourselves in cities, as they do in Europe, we shall become as corrupt as they are in Europe and take to eating one another as they do there."
He apparently had a sense of humor.
And then the American environmental movement has been a classically Arcadian movement. To become more environmental, we move into the country, we commune with nature, we build suburbs. But, of course, we've seen what that does.
The carbon mapping of America, where is the CO2 being emitted, for many years only hammered this argument in more strongly. If you look at any carbon map, because we map it per square mile, any carbon map of the U.S., it looks like a night sky satellite photo of the U.S., hottest in the cities, cooler in the suburbs, dark, peaceful in the countryside. Until some economists said, you know, is that the right way to measure CO2? There are only so many people in this country at any given time, and we can choose to live where perhaps we would have a lighter impact. And they said, let's measure CO2 per household, and when they did that, the maps just flipped, coolest in the center city, warmer in the suburbs, and red hot in these exurban "drive till you qualify" neighborhoods. So a fundamental shift, and now you have environmentalists and economists like Ed Glaeser saying we are a destructive species. If you love nature, the best thing you can do is stay the heck away from it, move to a city, and the denser the better, and the denser cities like Manhattan are the cities that perform the best. So the average Manhattanite is consuming gasoline at the rate the rest of the nation hasn't seen since the '20s, consuming half of the electricity of Dallas. But of course, we can do better. Canadian cities, they consume half the gasoline of American cities. European cities consume half as much again. So obviously, we can do better, and we want to do better, and we're all trying to be green.
My final argument in this topic is that I think we're trying to be green the wrong way, and I'm one of many people who believes that this focus on gadgets, on accessorizing -- What can I add to my house, what can I add to what I've already got to make my lifestyle more sustainable? -- has kind of dominated the discussion. So I'm not immune to this. My wife and I built a new house on an abandoned lot in Washington, D.C., and we did our best to clear the shelves of the sustainability store. We've got the solar photovoltaic system, solar hot water heater, dual-flush toilets, bamboo floors. A log burning in my German high-tech stove apparently, supposedly, contributes less carbon to the atmosphere than were it left alone to decompose in the forest. Yet all of these innovations -- That's what they said in the brochure. (Laughter) All of these innovations together contribute a fraction of what we contribute by living in a walkable neighborhood three blocks from a metro in the heart of a city. We've changed all our light bulbs to energy-savers, and you should do the same thing, but changing all your light bulbs to energy-savers saves as much energy in a year as moving to a walkable city does in a week.
And we don't want to have this argument. Politicians and marketers are afraid of marketing green as a "lifestyle choice." You don't want to tell Americans, God forbid, that they have to change their lifestyle. But what if lifestyle was really about quality of life and about perhaps something that we would all enjoy more, something that would be better than what we have right now?
Well, the gold standard of quality of life rankings, it's called the Mercer Survey. You may have heard of it. They rank hundreds of nations worldwide according to 10 criteria that they believe add up to quality of life: health, economics, education, housing, you name it. There's six more. Short talk.
(Laughter)
And it's very interesting to see that the highest-ranking American city, Honolulu, number 28, is followed by kind of the usual suspects of Seattle and Boston and all walkable cities. The driving cities in the Sun Belt, the Dallases and the Phoenixes and, sorry, Atlanta, these cities are not appearing on the list. But who's doing even better? The Canadian cities like Vancouver, where again, they're burning half the fuel. And then it's usually won by cities where they speak German, like Dusseldorf or Vienna, where they're burning, again, half as much fuel. And you see this alignment, this strange alignment.
Is being more sustainble what gives you a higher quality of life? I would argue the same thing that makes you more sustainble is what gives you a higher quality of life, and that's living in a walkable neighborhood. So sustainability, which includes our wealth and our health may not be a direct function of our sustainability. But particularly here in America, we are polluting so much because we're throwing away our time and our money and our lives on the highway, then these two problems would seem to share the same solution, which is to make our cities more walkable.
Doing so isn't easy, but it can be done, it has been done, and it's being done now in more than a few cities, around the globe and in our country. I take some solace from Winston Churchill, who put it this way: "The Americans can be counted on to do the right thing once they have exhausted the alternatives." (Laughter)
Thank you.
(Applause) |
It's not about technology, it's about people and stories. I could show you what recently was on television as a high quality video: 60 Minutes, many of you may have seen it. And it was the now director of the entire piece of the veteran's administration -- who, himself, had lost an arm 39 years ago in Vietnam -- who was adamantly opposed to these crazy devices that don't work. And it turns out that with 60 Minutes cameras rolling in the background, after he pretty much made his position clear on this -- he had his hook and he had his -- he wore this arm for less than two hours and was able to pour himself a drink and got quite emotional over the fact that, quote -- his quote -- it's the first time he's felt like he's had an arm in 39 years.
But that would sort of be jumping to the middle of the story, and I'm not going to show you that polished video. I'm going to, instead, in a minute or two, show you an early, crude video because I think it's a better way to tell a story.
A few years ago I was visited by the guy that runs DARPA, the people that fund all the advanced technologies that businesses and universities probably wouldn't take the risk of doing. They have a particular interest in ones that will help our soldiers. I get this sort of unrequested -- by me anyway -- visit, and sitting in my conference room is a very senior surgeon from the military and the guy that runs DARPA.
They proceed to tell me a story which comes down to basically the following. We have used such advanced technologies now and made them available in the most remote places that we put soldiers: hills of Afghanistan, Iraq ... They were quite proud of the fact that you know, before the dust clears, if some soldier has been hurt they will have collected him or her, they will have brought him back, they will be getting world-class triage emergency care faster than you and I would be getting it if we were hurt in a car accident in a major city in the United States. That's the good news.
The bad news is if they've collected this person and he or she is missing an arm or leg, part of the face, it's probably not coming back. So, they started giving me the statistics on how many of these kids had lost an arm. And then the surgeon pointed out, with a lot of anger, he said, "Why is it? At the end of the Civil War, they were shooting each other with muskets. If somebody lost an arm, we gave them a wooden stick with a hook on it. Now we've got F18s and F22s, and if somebody loses an arm, we give them a plastic stick with a hook on it."
And they basically said, "This is unacceptable," and then the punchline: "So, Dean, we're here because you make medical stuff. You're going to give us an arm." And I was waiting for the 500 pages of bureaucracy, paperwork and DODs. No, the guy says, "We're going to bring a guy into this conference room, and wearing the arm you're going to give us, he or she is going to pick up a raisin or a grape off this table. If it's the grape, they won't break it." Great he needs efferent, afferent, haptic response sensors. "If it's the raisin, they won't drop it." So he wants fine motor control: flex at the wrist, flex at the elbow, abduct and flex at the shoulder. Either way they were going to eat it.
"Oh, by the way Dean. It's going to fit on a 50th percentile female frame -- namely 32 inches from the long finger -- and weigh less than nine pounds." 50th percentile female frame. "And it's going to be completely self contained including all its power." So, they finished that. And I, as you can tell, am a bashful guy. I told them they're nuts. (Laughter) They've been watching too much "Terminator." (Laughter) Then, the surgeon says to me, "Dean, you need to know more than two dozen of these kids have come back bilateral." Now, I cannot imagine -- I'm sorry, you may have a better imagination than I do -- I can't imagine losing my arm, and typically at 22 years old. But compared to that, losing two? Seems like that would be an inconvenience.
Anyway, I went home that night. I thought about it. I literally could not sleep thinking about, "I wonder how you'd roll over with no shoulders." So, I decided we've got to do this. And trust me, I've got a day job, I've got a lot of day jobs. Most of my day job keeps me busy funding my fantasies like FIRST and water and power .... And I've got a lot of day jobs. But I figured I gotta do this. Did a little investigation, went down to Washington, told them I still think they're nuts but we're going to do it. And I told them I'd build them an arm. I told them it would probably take five years to get through the FDA, and probably 10 years to be reasonably functional. Look what it takes to make things like iPods. "Great," he said, "You got two years." (Laughter) I said, "I'll tell you what. I'll build you an arm that's under nine pounds that has all that capability in one year. It will take the other nine to make it functional and useful." We sort of agreed to disagree.
I went back and I started putting a team together, the best guys I could find with a passion to do this. At the end of exactly one year we had a device with 14 degrees of freedom, all the sensors, all the microprocessors, all the stuff inside. I could show you it with a cosmesis on it that's so real it's eerie, but then you wouldn't see all this cool stuff. I then thought it would be years before we'd be able to make it really, really useful. It turned out, as I think you could see in Aimee's capabilities and attitudes, people with a desire to do something are quite remarkable and nature is quite adaptable.
Anyway, with less than 10 hours of use, two guys -- one that's bilateral. He's literally, he's got no shoulder on one side, and he's high trans-humeral on the other. And that's Chuck and Randy together, after 10 hours -- were playing in our office. And we took some pretty cruddy home movies. At the end of the one I'm going to show, it's only about a minute and a couple of seconds long, Chuck does something that to this day I'm jealous of, I can't do it. He picks up a spoon, picks it up, scoops out some Shredded Wheat and milk, holds the spoon level as he translates it, moving all these joints simultaneously, to his mouth, and he doesn't drop any milk. (Laughter) I cannot do that. (Laughter) His wife was standing behind me. She's standing behind me at the time and she says, "Dean, Chuck hasn't fed himself in 19 years. So, you've got a choice: We keep the arm, or you keep Chuck." (Laughter) (Applause)
So, can we see that? This is Chuck showing simultaneous control of all the joints. He's punching our controls guy. The guy behind him is our engineer/surgeon, which is a convenient guy to have around. There's Randy, these guys are passing a rubber little puck between them. And just as in the spirit of FIRST, gracious professionalism, they are quite proud of this, so they decide to share a drink. This is a non-trivial thing to do, by the way. Imagine doing that with a wooden stick and a hook on the end of it, doing either of those. Now Chuck is doing something quite extraordinary, at least for my limited physical skill. And now he's going to do what DARPA asked me for. He's going to pick up a grape -- he didn't drop it, he didn't break it -- and he's going to eat it. So, that's where we were at the end of about 15 months. (Applause)
But, as I've learned from Richard, the technology, the processors, the sensors, the motors, is not the story. I hadn't dealt with this kind of problem or frankly, this whole segment of the medical world. I'll give you some astounding things that have happened as we started this. After we were pretty much convinced we had a good design, and we'd have to make all the standard engineering trade-offs you always make -- you can always get three out of four of anything you want; the weight, the size, the cost, the functionality -- I put a bunch of guys in my plane and I said, "We're flying down to Walter Reed, and we're going talk to these kids, because frankly it doesn't matter whether we like this arm. It doesn't matter whether the Department of Defense likes this arm." When I told them that they weren't entirely enthusiastic, but I told them, "It really doesn't matter what their opinion is. There is only one opinion that matters, the kids that are either going to use it or not."
I told a bunch of my engineers, "Look we're going to walk into Walter Reed, and you're going to see people, lots of them, missing major body parts. They're probably going to be angry, depressed, frustrated. We're probably going to have to give them support, encouragement. But we've got to extract from them enough information to make sure we're doing the right thing." We walked into Walter Reed and I could not have been more wrong. We did see a bunch of people, a lot of them missing a lot of body parts, and parts they had left were burned; half a face gone, an ear burned off.
They were sitting at a table. They were brought together for us. And we started asking them all questions. "Look," I'd say to them, "We're not quite as good as nature yet. I could give you fine motor control, or I could let you curl 40 pounds; I probably can't do both. I can give you fast control with low reduction ratios in these gears, or I can give you power; I can't give you both. And we were trying to get them to all help us know what to give them. Not only were they enthusiastic, they kept thinking they're there to help us. "Well, would it help if I ..." "Guys, and woman, you've given enough. We're here to help you. We need data. We need to know what you need."
After a half an hour, maybe, there was one guy at the far end of the table who wasn't saying much. You could see he was missing an arm. He was leaning on his other arm. I called down to the end, "Hey, you haven't said much. If we needed this or this, what would you want?" And he said, "You know, I'm the lucky guy at this table. I lost my right arm, but I'm a lefty." (Laughter) So, he wouldn't say much. He had a great spirit, like all the rest of them had great spirits. And he made a few comments. And then the meeting ended. We said goodbye to all these guys. And that guy pushed himself back from the table ... he has no legs.
So, we left. And I was thinking, "We didn't give them support and encouragement; they gave it to us. They're not finished giving yet." It was astounding. So, we went back. And I started working harder, faster. Then we went out to Brooke Army Medical Center. And we saw lots of these kids, lots of them. And it was astounding how positive they are. So, we went back, and we've been working harder yet. We're in clinical trials, we've got five of them on people. We're screaming along. And I get a call and we go back to Washington.
We go back to Walter Reed, and a kid, literally, 20 some-odd days before that was blown up. And they shipped him to Germany and 24 hours later they shipped him from Germany to Walter Reed. And he was there, and they said we needed to come. And I went down and they rolled him into a room. He's got no legs. He's got no arms. He's got a small residual limb on one side. Half of his face is gone, but they said his vision is coming back. He had one good eye. His name is Brandon Marrocco.
And he said, "I need your arms, but I need two of them." "You'll get them." This kid was from Staten Island. And he said, "I had a truck, before I went over there, and it had a stick. You think I'll be able to drive it?" "Sure." And I turned around and went, "How are we going to do this?" (Laughter) Anyway, he was just like all the rest of them. He doesn't really want a lot. He wants to help. He told me that he wanted to go back to help his buddies.
So, I was on my way out here. I was asked to stop at Texas. There were 3,500 people, the Veteran's Administration, U.S. ... just 3,500 at this huge event to help the families of all the kids -- some that have died, some that are like Brandon -- and they wanted me to speak. I said, "What am I going to say? This is not a happy thing. Look, if this happens to you, I can give you ... This stuff is still not as good at the original equipment." "You need to come."
So, I went. And, as I think you get the point, there were a lot people there recovering. Some further along than others. But universally, these people that had been through this had astounding attitudes, and just the fact that people care makes a huge difference to them.
I'll shut up, except one message or concern I have. I don't think anybody does it intentionally, but there were people there literally talking about, "Well, how much will they get?" You know, this country is involved as we've all heard, in this great healthcare debate. "Who is entitled to what? Who is entitled to how much? Who is going to pay for it?" Those are tough questions. I don't have an answer to that. Not everybody can be entitled to everything simply because you were born here. It's not possible. It would be nice but let's be realistic.
They were tough questions. There's polarized groups down there. I don't know the answers. There are other questions that are tough. "Should we be there? How do we get out? What do we need to do?" There's very polarized answers to that question too, and I don't have any answers to that. Those are political questions, economic questions, strategic questions. I don't have the answer. But let me give you a simple concern or maybe statement, then. It is an easy answer.
I know what these kids deserve on the healthcare side. I was talking to one of them, and he was really liking this arm -- it's way, way, way better than a plastic stick with a hook on it -- but there's nobody in this room that would rather have that than the one you got. But I was saying to him, "You know, the first airplane went 100 feet in 1903. Wilbur and Orville. But you know what? It wouldn't have made an old pigeon jealous. But now we got Eagles out there, F15s, even that Bald Eagle. I've never seen a bird flying around at Mach 2. I think eventually we'll make these things extraordinary." And I said to that kid, "I'll stop when your buddies are envious of your Luke arm because of what it can do, and how it does it. And we'll keep working. And I'm not going to stop working until we do that."
And I think this country ought to continue its great debate, whining and complaining, "I'm entitled." "You're a victim." And whining and complaining about what our foreign policy ought to be. But while we have the luxury of whining and complaining about who's paying for what and how much we get, the people that are out there giving us that great privilege of whining and complaining, I know what they deserve: everything humanly possible. And we ought to give it to them. (Applause) |
My students often ask me, "What is sociology?" And I tell them, "It's the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they don't see." And they say, "So how can I be a sociologist? How can I understand those invisible forces?" And I say, "Empathy. Start with empathy. It all begins with empathy. Take yourself out of your shoes, put yourself into the shoes of another person."
Here, I'll give you an example. So I imagine my life: if a hundred years ago China had been the most powerful nation in the world and they came to the United States in search of coal, and they found it, and, in fact, they found lots of it right here. And pretty soon, they began shipping that coal, ton by ton, rail car by rail car, boatload by boatload, back to China and elsewhere around the world. And they got fabulously wealthy in doing so. And they built beautiful cities all powered on that coal. And back here in the United States, we saw economic despair, deprivation. This is what I saw. I saw people struggling to get by, not knowing what was what and what was next. And then I asked myself the question. I say, "How's it possible that we could be so poor here in the United States, because the coal is such a wealthy resource, it's so much money?" And I realized, because the Chinese ingratiated themselves with a small ruling class here in the United States who stole all of that money and all of that wealth for themselves. And the rest of us, the vast majority of us, struggle to get by. And the Chinese gave this small ruling elite loads of military weapons and sophisticated technology in order to ensure that people like me would not speak out against this relationship. Does this sound familiar?
And they did things like train Americans to help protect the coal. And everywhere, were symbols of the Chinese -- everywhere, a constant reminder. And back in China, what do they say in China? Nothing. They don't talk about us. They don't talk about the coal. If you ask them, they'll say, "Well, you know the coal, we need the coal. I mean, come on, I'm not going to turn down my thermostat. You can't expect that." And so I get angry, and I get pissed, as do lots of average people. And we fight back, and it gets really ugly. And the Chinese respond in a very ugly way. And before we know it, they send in the tanks and then send in the troops, and lots of people are dying, and it's a very, very difficult situation.
Can you imagine what you would feel if you were in my shoes? Can you imagine walking out of this building and seeing a tank sitting out there or a truck full of soldiers? And just imagine what you would feel. Because you know why they're here, and you know what they're doing here. And you just feel the anger and you feel the fear. If you can, that's empathy -- that's empathy. You've left your shoes, and you've stood in mine. And you've got to feel that.
Okay, so that's the warm up. That's the warm up. Now we're going to have the real radical experiment. And so for the remainder of my talk, what I want you to do is put yourselves in the shoes of an ordinary Arab Muslim living in the Middle East -- in particular, in Iraq. And so to help you, perhaps you're a member of this middle class family in Baghdad -- and what you want is the best for your kids. You want your kids to have a better life. And you watch the news, you pay attention, you read the newspaper, you go down to the coffee shop with your friends, and you read the newspapers from around the world. And sometimes you even watch satellite, CNN, from the United States. So you have a sense of what the Americans are thinking. But really, you just want a better life for yourself. That's what you want. You're Arab Muslim living in Iraq. You want a better life for yourself.
So here, let me help you. Let me help you with some things that you might be thinking. Number one: this incursion into your land these past 20 years, and before, the reason anyone is interested in your land, and particularly the United States, it's oil. It's all about oil; you know that, everybody knows that. People here back in the United States know it's about oil. It's because somebody else has a design for your resource. It's your resource; it's not somebody else's. It's your land; it's your resource. Somebody else has a design for it. And you know why they have a design? You know why they have their eyes set on it? Because they have an entire economic system that's dependent on that oil -- foreign oil, oil from other parts of the world that they don't own.
And what else do you think about these people? The Americans, they're rich. Come on, they live in big houses, they have big cars, they all have blond hair, blue eyes, they're happy. You think that. It's not true, of course, but that's the media impression, and that's like what you get. And they have big cities, and the cities are all dependent on oil. And back home, what do you see? Poverty, despair, struggle. Look, you don't live in a wealthy country. This is Iraq. This is what you see. You see people struggling to get by. I mean, it's not easy; you see a lot of poverty. And you feel something about this. These people have designs for your resource, and this is what you see?
Something else you see that you talk about -- Americans don't talk about this, but you do. There's this thing, this militarization of the world, and it's centered right in the United States. And the United States is responsible for almost one half of the world's military spending -- four percent of the world's population. And you feel it; you see it every day. It's part of your life. And you talk about it with your friends. You read about it. And back when Saddam Hussein was in power, the Americans didn't care about his crimes. When he was gassing the Kurds and gassing Iran, they didn't care about it. When oil was at stake, somehow, suddenly, things mattered. And what you see, something else, the United States, the hub of democracy around the world, they don't seem to really be supporting democratic countries all around the world. There are a lot of countries, oil-producing countries, that aren't very democratic, but supported by the United States. That's odd.
Oh, these incursions, these two wars, the 10 years of sanctions, the eight years of occupation, the insurgency that's been unleashed on your people, the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, all because of oil. You can't help but think that. You talk about it. It's in the forefront of your mind always. You say, "How is that possible?" And this man, he's every man -- your grandfather, your uncle, your father, your son, your neighbor, your professor, your student. Once a life of happiness and joy and suddenly, pain and sorrow. Everyone in your country has been touched by the violence, the bloodshed, the pain, the horror, everybody. Not a single person in your country has not been touched.
But there's something else. There's something else about these people, these Americans who are there. There's something else about them that you see -- they don't see themselves. And what do you see? They're Christians. They're Christians. They worship the Christian God, they have crosses, they carry Bibles. Their Bibles have a little insignia that says "U.S. Army" on them. And their leaders, their leaders: before they send their sons and daughters off to war in your country -- and you know the reason -- before they send them off, they go to a Christian church, and they pray to their Christian God, and they ask for protection and guidance from that god. Why? Well, obviously, when people die in the war, they are Muslims, they are Iraqis -- they're not Americans. You don't want Americans to die. Protect our troops. And you feel something about that -- of course you do. And they do wonderful things. You read about it, you hear about it. They're there to build schools and help people, and that's what they want to do. They do wonderful things, but they also do the bad things, and you can't tell the difference.
And this guy, you get a guy like Lt. Gen. William Boykin. I mean, here's a guy who says that your God is a false God. Your God's an idol; his God is the true God. The solution to the problem in the Middle East, according to him, is to convert you all to Christianity -- just get rid of your religion. And you know that. Americans don't read about this guy. They don't know anything about him, but you do. You pass it around. You pass his words around. I mean this is serious. You're afraid. He was one of the leading commanders in the second invasion of Iraq. And you're thinking, "God, if this guy is saying that, then all the soldiers must be saying that." And this word here, George Bush called this war a crusade. Man, the Americans, they're just like, "Ah, crusade. Whatever. I don't know." You know what it means. It's a holy war against Muslims. Look, invade, subdue them, take their resources. If they won't submit, kill them. That's what this is about. And you're thinking, "My God, these Christians are coming to kill us." This is frightening. You feel frightened. Of course you feel frightened.
And this man, Terry Jones: I mean here's a guy who wants to burn Korans, right? And the Americans: "Ah, he's a knucklehead. He's a former hotel manager; he's got three-dozen members of his church." They laugh him off. You don't laugh him off. Because in the context of everything else, all the pieces fit. I mean, of course, this is how Americans take it, so people all over the Middle East, not just in your country, are protesting. "He wants to burn Korans, our holy book. These Christians, who are these Christians? They're so evil, they're so mean -- this is what they're about." This is what you're thinking as an Arab Muslim, as an Iraqi. Of course you're going to think this.
And then your cousin says, "Hey cuz, check out this website. You've got to see this -- Bible Boot Camp. These Christians are nuts. They're training their little kids to be soldiers for Jesus. And they take these little kids and they run them through these things till they teach them how to say, "Sir, yes, sir," and things like grenade toss and weapons care and maintenance. And go to the website. It says "U.S. Army" right on it. I mean, these Christians, they're nuts. How would they do this to their little kids?" And you're reading this website. And of course, Christians back in the United States, or anybody, says, "Ah, this is some little, tiny church in the middle of nowhere." You don't know that. For you, this is like all Christians. It's all over the Web, Bible Boot Camp. And look at this: they even teach their kids -- they train them in the same way the U.S. Marines train. Isn't that interesting. And it scares you, and it frightens you.
So these guys, you see them. You see, I, Sam Richards, I know who these guys are. They're my students, my friends. I know what they're thinking: "You don't know." When you see them, they're something else, they're something else. That's what they are to you. We don't see it that way in the United States, but you see it that way. So here. Of course, you got it wrong. You're generalizing. It's wrong. You don't understand the Americans. It's not a Christian invasion. We're not just there for oil; we're there for lots of reasons. You have it wrong. You've missed it. And of course, most of you don't support the insurgency; you don't support killing Americans; you don't support the terrorists. Of course you don't. Very few people do. But some of you do. And this is a perspective. Okay, so now, here's what we're going to do.
Step outside of your shoes that you're in right now and step back into your normal shoes. So everyone's back in the room, okay. Now here comes the radical experiment. So we're all back home. This photo: this woman, man, I feel her. I feel her. She's my sister, my wife, my cousin, my neighbor. She's anybody to me. These guys standing there, everybody in the photo, I feel this photo, man. So here's what I want you to do.
Let's go back to my first example of the Chinese. So I want you to go there. So it's all about coal, and the Chinese are here in the United States. And what I want you to do is picture her as a Chinese woman receiving a Chinese flag because her loved one has died in America in the coal uprising. And the soldiers are Chinese, and everybody else is Chinese. As an American, how do you feel about this picture? What do you think about that scene?
Okay, try this. Bring it back. This is the scene here. It's an American, American soldiers, American woman who lost her loved one in the Middle East -- in Iraq or Afghanistan. Now, put yourself in the shoes, go back to the shoes of an Arab Muslim living in Iraq. What are you feeling and thinking about this photo, about this woman?
Okay, now follow me on this, because I'm taking a big risk here. And so I'm going to invite you to take a risk with me. These gentlemen here, they're insurgents. They were caught by the American soldiers, trying to kill Americans. And maybe they succeeded. Maybe they succeeded. Put yourself in the shoes of the Americans who caught them. Can you feel the rage? Can you feel that you just want to take these guys and wring their necks? Can you go there? It shouldn't be that difficult. You just -- oh, man. Now, put yourself in their shoes. Are they brutal killers or patriotic defenders? Which one? Can you feel their anger, their fear, their rage at what has happened in their country? Can you imagine that maybe one of them in the morning bent down to their child and hugged their child and said, "Dear, I'll be back later. I'm going out to defend your freedom, your lives. I'm going out to look out for us, the future of our country." Can you imagine that? Can you imagine saying that? Can you go there? What do you think they're feeling? You see, that's empathy. It's also understanding.
Now, you might ask, "Okay, Sam, so why do you do this sort of thing? Why would you use this example of all examples?" And I say, because ... because. You're allowed to hate these people. You're allowed to just hate them with every fiber of your being. And if I can get you to step into their shoes and walk an inch, one tiny inch, then imagine the kind of sociological analysis that you can do in all other aspects of your life. You can walk a mile when it comes to understanding why that person's driving 40 miles per hour in the passing lane, or your teenage son, or your neighbor who annoys you by cutting his lawn on Sunday mornings. Whatever it is, you can go so far. And this is what I tell my students: step outside of your tiny, little world. Step inside of the tiny, little world of somebody else. And then do it again and do it again and do it again. And suddenly all these tiny, little worlds, they come together in this complex web. And they build a big, complex world. And suddenly, without realizing it, you're seeing the world differently. Everything has changed. Everything in your life has changed. And that's, of course, what this is about.
Attend to other lives, other visions. Listen to other people, enlighten ourselves. I'm not saying that I support the terrorists in Iraq, but as a sociologist, what I am saying is I understand. And now perhaps -- perhaps -- you do too.
Thank you.
(Applause) |
I got my first computer when I was a teenager growing up in Accra, and it was a really cool device. You could play games with it. You could program it in BASIC. And I was fascinated. So I went into the library to figure out how did this thing work. I read about how the CPU is constantly shuffling data back and forth between the memory, the RAM and the ALU, the arithmetic and logic unit. And I thought to myself, this CPU really has to work like crazy just to keep all this data moving through the system.
But nobody was really worried about this. When computers were first introduced, they were said to be a million times faster than neurons. People were really excited. They thought they would soon outstrip the capacity of the brain. This is a quote, actually, from Alan Turing: "In 30 years, it will be as easy to ask a computer a question as to ask a person." This was in 1946. And now, in 2007, it's still not true. And so, the question is, why aren't we really seeing this kind of power in computers that we see in the brain?
What people didn't realize, and I'm just beginning to realize right now, is that we pay a huge price for the speed that we claim is a big advantage of these computers. Let's take a look at some numbers. This is Blue Gene, the fastest computer in the world. It's got 120,000 processors; they can basically process 10 quadrillion bits of information per second. That's 10 to the sixteenth. And they consume one and a half megawatts of power. So that would be really great, if you could add that to the production capacity in Tanzania. It would really boost the economy. Just to go back to the States, if you translate the amount of power or electricity this computer uses to the amount of households in the States, you get 1,200 households in the U.S. That's how much power this computer uses.
Now, let's compare this with the brain. This is a picture of, actually Rory Sayres' girlfriend's brain. Rory is a graduate student at Stanford. He studies the brain using MRI, and he claims that this is the most beautiful brain that he has ever scanned. (Laughter) So that's true love, right there. Now, how much computation does the brain do? I estimate 10 to the 16 bits per second, which is actually about very similar to what Blue Gene does. So that's the question. The question is, how much -- they are doing a similar amount of processing, similar amount of data -- the question is how much energy or electricity does the brain use? And it's actually as much as your laptop computer: it's just 10 watts. So what we are doing right now with computers with the energy consumed by 1,200 houses, the brain is doing with the energy consumed by your laptop.
So the question is, how is the brain able to achieve this kind of efficiency? And let me just summarize. So the bottom line: the brain processes information using 100,000 times less energy than we do right now with this computer technology that we have. How is the brain able to do this? Let's just take a look about how the brain works, and then I'll compare that with how computers work. So, this clip is from the PBS series, "The Secret Life of the Brain." It shows you these cells that process information. They are called neurons. They send little pulses of electricity down their processes to each other, and where they contact each other, those little pulses of electricity can jump from one neuron to the other. That process is called a synapse. You've got this huge network of cells interacting with each other -- about 100 million of them, sending about 10 quadrillion of these pulses around every second. And that's basically what's going on in your brain right now as you're watching this.
How does that compare with the way computers work? In the computer, you have all the data going through the central processing unit, and any piece of data basically has to go through that bottleneck, whereas in the brain, what you have is these neurons, and the data just really flows through a network of connections among the neurons. There's no bottleneck here. It's really a network in the literal sense of the word. The net is doing the work in the brain. If you just look at these two pictures, these kind of words pop into your mind. This is serial and it's rigid -- it's like cars on a freeway, everything has to happen in lockstep -- whereas this is parallel and it's fluid. Information processing is very dynamic and adaptive.
So I'm not the first to figure this out. This is a quote from Brian Eno: "the problem with computers is that there is not enough Africa in them." (Laughter) Brian actually said this in 1995. And nobody was listening then, but now people are beginning to listen because there's a pressing, technological problem that we face. And I'll just take you through that a little bit in the next few slides.
This is -- it's actually really this remarkable convergence between the devices that we use to compute in computers, and the devices that our brains use to compute. The devices that computers use are what's called a transistor. This electrode here, called the gate, controls the flow of current from the source to the drain -- these two electrodes. And that current, electrical current, is carried by electrons, just like in your house and so on. And what you have here is, when you actually turn on the gate, you get an increase in the amount of current, and you get a steady flow of current. And when you turn off the gate, there's no current flowing through the device. Your computer uses this presence of current to represent a one, and the absence of current to represent a zero.
Now, what's happening is that as transistors are getting smaller and smaller and smaller, they no longer behave like this. In fact, they are starting to behave like the device that neurons use to compute, which is called an ion channel. And this is a little protein molecule. I mean, neurons have thousands of these. And it sits in the membrane of the cell and it's got a pore in it. And these are individual potassium ions that are flowing through that pore. Now, this pore can open and close. But, when it's open, because these ions have to line up and flow through, one at a time, you get a kind of sporadic, not steady -- it's a sporadic flow of current. And even when you close the pore -- which neurons can do, they can open and close these pores to generate electrical activity -- even when it's closed, because these ions are so small, they can actually sneak through, a few can sneak through at a time. So, what you have is that when the pore is open, you get some current sometimes. These are your ones, but you've got a few zeros thrown in. And when it's closed, you have a zero, but you have a few ones thrown in.
Now, this is starting to happen in transistors. And the reason why that's happening is that, right now, in 2007 -- the technology that we are using -- a transistor is big enough that several electrons can flow through the channel simultaneously, side by side. In fact, there's about 12 electrons can all be flowing this way. And that means that a transistor corresponds to about 12 ion channels in parallel. Now, in a few years time, by 2015, we will shrink transistors so much. This is what Intel does to keep adding more cores onto the chip. Or your memory sticks that you have now can carry one gigabyte of stuff on them -- before, it was 256. Transistors are getting smaller to allow this to happen, and technology has really benefitted from that.
But what's happening now is that in 2015, the transistor is going to become so small, that it corresponds to only one electron at a time can flow through that channel, and that corresponds to a single ion channel. And you start having the same kind of traffic jams that you have in the ion channel. The current will turn on and off at random, even when it's supposed to be on. And that means your computer is going to get its ones and zeros mixed up, and that's going to crash your machine.
So, we are at the stage where we don't really know how to compute with these kinds of devices. And the only kind of thing -- the only thing we know right now that can compute with these kinds of devices are the brain.
OK, so a computer picks a specific item of data from memory, it sends it into the processor or the ALU, and then it puts the result back into memory. That's the red path that's highlighted. The way brains work, I told you all, you have got all these neurons. And the way they represent information is they break up that data into little pieces that are represented by pulses and different neurons. So you have all these pieces of data distributed throughout the network. And then the way that you process that data to get a result is that you translate this pattern of activity into a new pattern of activity, just by it flowing through the network. So you set up these connections such that the input pattern just flows and generates the output pattern.
What you see here is that there's these redundant connections. So if this piece of data or this piece of the data gets clobbered, it doesn't show up over here, these two pieces can activate the missing part with these redundant connections. So even when you go to these crappy devices where sometimes you want a one and you get a zero, and it doesn't show up, there's redundancy in the network that can actually recover the missing information. It makes the brain inherently robust. What you have here is a system where you store data locally. And it's brittle, because each of these steps has to be flawless, otherwise you lose that data, whereas in the brain, you have a system that stores data in a distributed way, and it's robust.
What I want to basically talk about is my dream, which is to build a computer that works like the brain. This is something that we've been working on for the last couple of years. And I'm going to show you a system that we designed to model the retina, which is a piece of brain that lines the inside of your eyeball. We didn't do this by actually writing code, like you do in a computer. In fact, the processing that happens in that little piece of brain is very similar to the kind of processing that computers do when they stream video over the Internet. They want to compress the information -- they just want to send the changes, what's new in the image, and so on -- and that is how your eyeball is able to squeeze all that information down to your optic nerve, to send to the rest of the brain.
Instead of doing this in software, or doing those kinds of algorithms, we went and talked to neurobiologists who have actually reverse engineered that piece of brain that's called the retina. And they figured out all the different cells, and they figured out the network, and we just took that network and we used it as the blueprint for the design of a silicon chip. So now the neurons are represented by little nodes or circuits on the chip, and the connections among the neurons are represented, actually modeled by transistors. And these transistors are behaving essentially just like ion channels behave in the brain. It will give you the same kind of robust architecture that I described.
Here is actually what our artificial eye looks like. The retina chip that we designed sits behind this lens here. And the chip -- I'm going to show you a video that the silicon retina put out of its output when it was looking at Kareem Zaghloul, who's the student who designed this chip. Let me explain what you're going to see, OK, because it's putting out different kinds of information, it's not as straightforward as a camera. The retina chip extracts four different kinds of information. It extracts regions with dark contrast, which will show up on the video as red. And it extracts regions with white or light contrast, which will show up on the video as green.
This is Kareem's dark eyes and that's the white background that you see here. And then it also extracts movement. When Kareem moves his head to the right, you will see this blue activity there; it represents regions where the contrast is increasing in the image, that's where it's going from dark to light. And you also see this yellow activity, which represents regions where contrast is decreasing; it's going from light to dark. And these four types of information -- your optic nerve has about a million fibers in it, and 900,000 of those fibers send these four types of information. So we are really duplicating the kind of signals that you have on the optic nerve.
What you notice here is that these snapshots taken from the output of the retina chip are very sparse, right? It doesn't light up green everywhere in the background, only on the edges, and then in the hair, and so on. And this is the same thing you see when people compress video to send: they want to make it very sparse, because that file is smaller. And this is what the retina is doing, and it's doing it just with the circuitry, and how this network of neurons that are interacting in there, which we've captured on the chip.
But the point that I want to make -- I'll show you up here. So this image here is going to look like these ones, but here I'll show you that we can reconstruct the image, so, you know, you can almost recognize Kareem in that top part there. And so, here you go. Yes, so that's the idea. When you stand still, you just see the light and dark contrasts. But when it's moving back and forth, the retina picks up these changes. And that's why, you know, when you're sitting here and something happens in your background, you merely move your eyes to it. There are these cells that detect change and you move your attention to it. So those are very important for catching somebody who's trying to sneak up on you.
Let me just end by saying that this is what happens when you put Africa in a piano, OK. This is a steel drum here that has been modified, and that's what happens when you put Africa in a piano. And what I would like us to do is put Africa in the computer, and come up with a new kind of computer that will generate thought, imagination, be creative and things like that. Thank you. (Applause)
Chris Anderson: Question for you, Kwabena. Do you put together in your mind the work you're doing, the future of Africa, this conference -- what connections can we make, if any, between them?
Kwabena Boahen: Yes, like I said at the beginning, I got my first computer when I was a teenager, growing up in Accra. And I had this gut reaction that this was the wrong way to do it. It was very brute force; it was very inelegant. I don't think that I would've had that reaction, if I'd grown up reading all this science fiction, hearing about RD2D2, whatever it was called, and just -- you know, buying into this hype about computers. I was coming at it from a different perspective, where I was bringing that different perspective to bear on the problem. And I think a lot of people in Africa have this different perspective, and I think that's going to impact technology. And that's going to impact how it's going to evolve. And I think you're going to be able to see, use that infusion, to come up with new things, because you're coming from a different perspective. I think we can contribute. We can dream like everybody else.
CA: Thanks Kwabena, that was really interesting. Thank you.
(Applause) |
We most certainly do talk to terrorists, no question about it. We are at war with a new form of terrorism. It's sort of the good old, traditional form of terrorism, but it's sort of been packaged for the 21st century. One of the big things about countering terrorism is, how do you perceive it? Because perception leads to your response to it. So if you have a traditional perception of terrorism, it would be that it's one of criminality, one of war. So how are you going to respond to it? Naturally, it would follow that you meet kind with kind. You fight it. If you have a more modernist approach, and your perception of terrorism is almost cause-and-effect, then naturally from that, the responses that come out of it are much more asymmetrical.
We live in a modern, global world. Terrorists have actually adapted to it. It's something we have to, too, and that means the people who are working on counterterrorism responses have to start, in effect, putting on their Google-tinted glasses, or whatever.
For my part, what I wanted us to do was just to look at terrorism as though it was a global brand, say, Coca-Cola. Both are fairly bad for your health. (Laughter) If you look at it as a brand in those ways, what you'll come to realize is, it's a pretty flawed product. As we've said, it's pretty bad for your health, it's bad for those who it affects, and it's not actually good if you're a suicide bomber either. It doesn't actually do what it says on the tin. You're not really going to get 72 virgins in heaven. It's not going to happen, I don't think. And you're not really going to, in the '80s, end capitalism by supporting one of these groups. It's a load of nonsense.
But what you realize, it's got an Achilles' heel. The brand has an Achilles' heel. We've mentioned the health, but it needs consumers to buy into it. The consumers it needs are the terrorist constituency. They're the people who buy into the brand, support them, facilitate them, and they're the people we've got to reach out to. We've got to attack that brand in front of them.
There's two essential ways of doing that, if we carry on this brand theme. One is reducing their market. What I mean is, it's their brand against our brand. We've got to compete. We've got to show we're a better product. If I'm trying to show we're a better product, I probably wouldn't do things like Guantanamo Bay. We've talked there about curtailing the underlying need for the product itself. You could be looking there at poverty, injustice, all those sorts of things which feed terrorism.
The other thing to do is to knock the product, attack the brand myth, as we've said. You know, there's nothing heroic about killing a young kid. Perhaps we need to focus on that and get that message back across. We've got to reveal the dangers in the product. Our target audience, it's not just the producers of terrorism, as I've said, the terrorists. It's not just the marketeers of terrorism, which is those who finance, those who facilitate it, but it's the consumers of terrorism. We've got to get in to those homelands. That's where they recruit from. That's where they get their power and strength. That's where their consumers come from. And we have to get our messaging in there. So the essentials are, we've got to have interaction in those areas, with the terrorists, the facilitators, etc. We've got to engage, we've got to educate, and we've got to have dialogue.
Now, staying on this brand thing for just a few more seconds, think about delivery mechanisms. How are we going to do these attacks? Well, reducing the market is really one for governments and civil society. We've got to show we're better. We've got to show our values. We've got to practice what we preach. But when it comes to knocking the brand, if the terrorists are Coca-Cola and we're Pepsi, I don't think, being Pepsi, anything we say about Coca-Cola, anyone's going to believe us.
So we've got to find a different mechanism, and one of the best mechanisms I've ever come across is the victims of terrorism. They are somebody who can actually stand there and say, "This product's crap. I had it and I was sick for days. It burnt my hand, whatever." You believe them. You can see their scars. You trust them. But whether it's victims, whether it's governments, NGOs, or even the Queen yesterday, in Northern Ireland, we have to interact and engage with those different layers of terrorism, and, in effect, we do have to have a little dance with the devil.
This is my favorite part of my speech. I wanted to blow you all up to try and make a point, but — (Laughter) — TED, for health and safety reasons, have told me I've got to do a countdown, so I feel like a bit of an Irish or Jewish terrorist, sort of a health and safety terrorist, and I — (Laughter) — I've got to count 3, 2, 1, and it's a bit alarming, so thinking of what my motto would be, and it would be, "Body parts, not heart attacks." So 3, 2, 1. (Explosion sound) Very good. (Laughter) Now, lady in 15J was a suicide bomber amongst us all. We're all victims of terrorism. There's 625 of us in this room. We're going to be scarred for life. There was a father and a son who sat in that seat over there. The son's dead. The father lives. The father will probably kick himself for years to come that he didn't take that seat instead of his kid. He's going to take to alcohol, and he's probably going to kill himself in three years. That's the stats. There's a very young, attractive lady over here, and she has something which I think's the worst form of psychological, physical injury I've ever seen out of a suicide bombing: It's human shrapnel. What it means is, when she sat in a restaurant in years to come, 10 years to come, 15 years to come, or she's on the beach, every so often she's going to start rubbing her skin, and out of there will come a piece of that shrapnel. And that is a hard thing for the head to take. There's a lady over there as well who lost her legs in this bombing. She's going to find out that she gets a pitiful amount of money off our government for looking after what's happened to her. She had a daughter who was going to go to one of the best universities. She's going to give up university to look after Mum. We're all here, and all of those who watch it are going to be traumatized by this event, but all of you here who are victims are going to learn some hard truths. That is, our society, we sympathize, but after a while, we start to ignore. We don't do enough as a society. We do not look after our victims, and we do not enable them, and what I'm going to try and show is that actually, victims are the best weapon we have against more terrorism.
How would the government at the turn of the millennium approach today? Well, we all know. What they'd have done then is an invasion. If the suicide bomber was from Wales, good luck to Wales, I'd say. Knee-jerk legislation, emergency provision legislation -- which hits at the very basis of our society, as we all know -- it's a mistake. We're going to drive prejudice throughout Edinburgh, throughout the U.K., for Welsh people.
Today's approach, governments have learned from their mistakes. They are looking at what I've started off on, on these more asymmetrical approaches to it, more modernist views, cause and effect. But mistakes of the past are inevitable. It's human nature. The fear and the pressure to do something on them is going to be immense. They are going to make mistakes. They're not just going to be smart.
There was a famous Irish terrorist who once summed up the point very beautifully. He said, "The thing is, about the British government, is, is that it's got to be lucky all the time, and we only have to be lucky once."
So what we need to do is we have to effect it. We've got to start thinking about being more proactive. We need to build an arsenal of noncombative weapons in this war on terrorism. But of course, it's ideas -- is not something that governments do very well.
I want to go back just to before the bang, to this idea of brand, and I was talking about Coke and Pepsi, etc. We see it as terrorism versus democracy in that brand war. They'll see it as freedom fighters and truth against injustice, imperialism, etc.
We do have to see this as a deadly battlefield. It's not just [our] flesh and blood they want. They actually want our cultural souls, and that's why the brand analogy is a very interesting way of looking at this. If we look at al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was essentially a product on a shelf in a souk somewhere which not many people had heard of. 9/11 launched it. It was its big marketing day, and it was packaged for the 21st century. They knew what they were doing. They were effectively [doing] something in this brand image of creating a brand which can be franchised around the world, where there's poverty, ignorance and injustice.
We, as I've said, have got to hit that market, but we've got to use our heads rather than our might. If we perceive it in this way as a brand, or other ways of thinking at it like this, we will not resolve or counter terrorism.
What I'd like to do is just briefly go through a few examples from my work on areas where we try and approach these things differently. The first one has been dubbed "lawfare," for want of a better word. When we originally looked at bringing civil actions against terrorists, everyone thought we were a bit mad and mavericks and crackpots. Now it's got a title. Everyone's doing it. There's a bomb, people start suing. But one of the first early cases on this was the Omagh Bombing. A civil action was brought from 1998. In Omagh, bomb went off, Real IRA, middle of a peace process. That meant that the culprits couldn't really be prosecuted for lots of reasons, mostly to do with the peace process and what was going on, the greater good. It also meant, then, if you can imagine this, that the people who bombed your children and your husbands were walking around the supermarket that you lived in. Some of those victims said enough is enough. We brought a private action, and thank God, 10 years later, we actually won it. There is a slight appeal on at the moment so I have to be a bit careful, but I'm fairly confident.
Why was it effective? It was effective not just because justice was seen to be done where there was a huge void. It was because the Real IRA and other terrorist groups, their whole strength is from the fact that they are an underdog. When we put the victims as the underdog and flipped it, they didn't know what to do. They were embarrassed. Their recruitment went down. The bombs actually stopped -- fact -- because of this action. We became, or those victims became, more importantly, a ghost that haunted the terrorist organization.
There's other examples. We have a case called Almog which is to do with a bank that was, allegedly, from our point of view, giving rewards to suicide bombers. Just by bringing the very action, that bank has stopped doing it, and indeed, the powers that be around the world, which for real politic reasons before, couldn't actually deal with this issue, because there was lots of competing interests, have actually closed down those loopholes in the banking system. There's another case called the McDonald case, where some victims of Semtex, of the Provisional IRA bombings, which were supplied by Gaddafi, sued, and that action has led to amazing things for new Libya. New Libya has been compassionate towards those victims, and started taking it -- so it started a whole new dialogue there. But the problem is, we need more and more support for these ideas and cases.
Civil affairs and civil society initiatives. A good one is in Somalia. There's a war on piracy. If anyone thinks you can have a war on piracy like a war on terrorism and beat it, you're wrong. What we're trying to do there is turn pirates to fisherman. They used to be fisherman, of course, but we stole their fish and dumped a load of toxic waste in their water, so what we're trying to do is create security and employment by bringing a coastguard along with the fisheries industry, and I can guarantee you, as that builds, al Shabaab and such likes will not have the poverty and injustice any longer to prey on those people. These initiatives cost less than a missile, and certainly less than any soldier's life, but more importantly, it takes the war to their homelands, and not onto our shore, and we're looking at the causes.
The last one I wanted to talk about was dialogue. The advantages of dialogue are obvious. It self-educates both sides, enables a better understanding, reveals the strengths and weaknesses, and yes, like some of the speakers before, the shared vulnerability does lead to trust, and it does then become, that process, part of normalization. But it's not an easy road. After the bomb, the victims are not into this. There's practical problems. It's politically risky for the protagonists and for the interlocutors. On one occasion I was doing it, every time I did a point that they didn't like, they actually threw stones at me, and when I did a point they liked, they starting shooting in the air, equally not great. (Laughter) Whatever the point, it gets to the heart of the problem, you're doing it, you're talking to them.
Now, I just want to end with saying, if we follow reason, we realize that I think we'd all say that we want to have a perception of terrorism which is not just a pure military perception of it. We need to foster more modern and asymmetrical responses to it. This isn't about being soft on terrorism. It's about fighting them on contemporary battlefields. We must foster innovation, as I've said. Governments are receptive. It won't come from those dusty corridors. The private sector has a role. The role we could do right now is going away and looking at how we can support victims around the world to bring initiatives.
If I was to leave you with some big questions here which may change one's perception to it, and who knows what thoughts and responses will come out of it, but did myself and my terrorist group actually need to blow you up to make our point? We have to ask ourselves these questions, however unpalatable. Have we been ignoring an injustice or a humanitarian struggle somewhere in the world? What if, actually, engagement on poverty and injustice is exactly what the terrorists wanted us to do? What if the bombs are just simply wake-up calls for us? What happens if that bomb went off because we didn't have any thoughts and things in place to allow dialogue to deal with these things and interaction?
What is definitely uncontroversial is that, as I've said, we've got to stop being reactive, and more proactive, and I just want to leave you with one idea, which is that it's a provocative question for you to think about, and the answer will require sympathy with the devil. It's a question that's been tackled by many great thinkers and writers: What if society actually needs crisis to change? What if society actually needs terrorism to change and adapt for the better? It's those Bulgakov themes, it's that picture of Jesus and the Devil hand in hand in Gethsemane walking into the moonlight. What it would mean is that humans, in order to survive in development, quite Darwinian spirit here, inherently must dance with the devil.
A lot of people say that communism was defeated by the Rolling Stones. It's a good theory. Maybe the Rolling Stones has a place in this. Thank you. (Music) (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. (Applause) |
About 10 years ago, I went through a little bit of a hard time. So I decided to go see a therapist. I had been seeing her for a few months, when she looked at me one day and said, "Who actually raised you until you were three?" Seemed like a weird question. I said, "My parents." And she said, "I don't think that's actually the case; because if it were, we'd be dealing with things that are far more complicated than just this."
It sounded like the setup to a joke, but I knew she was serious. Because when I first started seeing her, I was trying to be the funniest person in the room. And I would try and crack these jokes, but she caught on to me really quickly, and whenever I tried to make a joke, she would look at me and say, "That is actually really sad." (Laughter) It's terrible.
So I knew I had to be serious, and I asked my parents who had actually raised me until I was three? And to my surprise, they said my primary caregiver had been a distant relative of the family. I had called her my auntie.
I remember my auntie so clearly, it felt like she had been part of my life when I was much older. I remember the thick, straight hair, and how it would come around me like a curtain when she bent to pick me up; her soft, southern Thai accent; the way I would cling to her, even if she just wanted to go to the bathroom or get something to eat. I loved her, but [with] the ferocity that a child has sometimes before she understands that love also requires letting go.
But my clearest and sharpest memory of my auntie, is also one of my first memories of life at all. I remember her being beaten and slapped by another member of my family. I remember screaming hysterically and wanting it to stop, as I did every single time it happened, for things as minor as wanting to go out with her friends, or being a little late. I became so hysterical over her treatment, that eventually, she was just beaten behind closed doors.
Things got so bad for her that eventually she ran away. As an adult, I learned later that she had been just 19 when she was brought over from Thailand to the States to care for me, on a tourist visa. She wound up working in Illinois for a time, before eventually returning to Thailand, which is where I ran into her again, at a political rally in Bangkok. I clung to her again, as I had when I was a child, and I let go, and then I promised that I would call. I never did, though. Because I was afraid if I said everything that she meant to me -- that I owed perhaps the best parts of who I became to her care, and that the words "I'm sorry" were like a thimble to bail out all the guilt and shame and rage I felt over everything she had endured to care for me for as long as she had -- I thought if I said those words to her, I would never stop crying again. Because she had saved me. And I had not saved her.
I'm a journalist, and I've been writing and researching human trafficking for the past eight years or so, and even so, I never put together this personal story with my professional life until pretty recently. I think this profound disconnect actually symbolizes most of our understanding about human trafficking. Because human trafficking is far more prevalent, complex and close to home than most of us realize.
I spent time in jails and brothels, interviewed hundreds of survivors and law enforcement, NGO workers. And when I think about what we've done about human trafficking, I am hugely disappointed. Partly because we don't even talk about the problem right at all. When I say "human trafficking," most of you probably don't think about someone like my auntie. You probably think about a young girl or woman, who's been brutally forced into prostitution by a violent pimp. That is real suffering, and that is a real story. That story makes me angry for far more than just the reality of that situation, though.
As a journalist, I really care about how we relate to each other through language, and the way we tell that story, with all the gory, violent detail, the salacious aspects -- I call that "look at her scars" journalism. We use that story to convince ourselves that human trafficking is a bad man doing a bad thing to an innocent girl. That story lets us off the hook. It takes away all the societal context that we might be indicted for, for the structural inequality, or the poverty, or the barriers to migration. We let ourselves think that human trafficking is only about forced prostitution, when in reality, human trafficking is embedded in our everyday lives.
Let me show you what I mean. Forced prostitution accounts for 22 percent of human trafficking. Ten percent is in state- imposed forced labor. but a whopping 68 percent is for the purpose of creating the goods and delivering the services that most of us rely on every day, in sectors like agricultural work, domestic work and construction. That is food and care and shelter. And somehow, these most essential workers are also among the world's most underpaid and exploited today. Human trafficking is the use of force, fraud or coercion to compel another person's labor. And it's found in cotton fields, and coltan mines, and even car washes in Norway and England. It's found in U.S. military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It's found in Thailand's fishing industry. That country has become the largest exporter of shrimp in the world. But what are the circumstances behind all that cheap and plentiful shrimp? Thai military were caught selling Burmese and Cambodian migrants onto fishing boats. Those fishing boats were taken out, the men put to work, and they were thrown overboard if they made the mistake of falling sick, or trying to resist their treatment. Those fish were then used to feed shrimp, The shrimp were then sold to four major global retailers: Costco, Tesco, Walmart and Carrefour.
Human trafficking is found on a smaller scale than just that, and in places you would never even imagine. Traffickers have forced young people to drive ice cream trucks, or to sing in touring boys' choirs. Trafficking has even been found in a hair braiding salon in New Jersey.
The scheme in that case was incredible. The traffickers found young families who were from Ghana and Togo, and they told these families that "your daughters are going to get a fine education in the United States." They then located winners of the green card lottery, and they told them, "We'll help you out. We'll get you a plane ticket. We'll pay your fees. All you have to do is take this young girl with you, say that she's your sister or your spouse. Once everyone arrived in New Jersey, the young girls were taken away, and put to work for 14-hour days, seven days a week, for five years. They made their traffickers nearly four million dollars.
This is a huge problem. So what have we done about it? We've mostly turned to the criminal justice system. But keep in mind, most victims of human trafficking are poor and marginalized. They're migrants, people of color. Sometimes they're in the sex trade. And for populations like these, the criminal justice system is too often part of the problem, rather than the solution. In study after study, in countries ranging from Bangladesh to the United States, between 20 and 60 percent of the people in the sex trade who were surveyed said that they had been raped or assaulted by the police in the past year alone. People in prostitution, including people who have been trafficked into it, regularly receive multiple convictions for prostitution. Having that criminal record makes it so much more difficult to leave poverty, leave abuse, or leave prostitution, if that person so desires. Workers outside of the sex sector -- if they try and resist their treatment, they risk deportation. In case after case I've studied, employers have no problem calling on law enforcement to try and threaten or deport their striking trafficked workers. If those workers run away, they risk becoming part of the great mass of undocumented workers who are also subject to the whims of law enforcement if they're caught.
Law enforcement is supposed to identify victims and prosecute traffickers. But out of an estimated 21 million victims of human trafficking in the world, they have helped and identified fewer than 50,000 people. That's like comparing the population of the world to the population of Los Angeles, proportionally speaking. As for convictions, out of an estimated 5,700 convictions in 2013, fewer than 500 were for labor trafficking. Keep in mind that labor trafficking accounts for 68 percent of all trafficking, but fewer than 10 percent of the convictions.
I've heard one expert say that trafficking happens where need meets greed. I'd like to add one more element to that. Trafficking happens in sectors where workers are excluded from protections, and denied the right to organize. Trafficking doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens in systematically degraded work environments. You might be thinking, oh, she's talking about failed states, or war-torn states, or -- I'm actually talking about the United States. Let me tell you what that looks like.
I spent many months researching a trafficking case called Global Horizons, involving hundreds of Thai farm workers. They were sent all over the States, to work in Hawaii pineapple plantations, and Washington apple orchards, and anywhere the work was needed. They were promised three years of solid agricultural work. So they made a calculated risk. They sold their land, they sold their wives' jewelry, to make thousands in recruitment fees for this company, Global Horizons. But once they were brought over, their passports were confiscated. Some of the men were beaten and held at gunpoint. They worked so hard they fainted in the fields. This case hit me so hard.
After I came back home, I was wandering through the grocery store, and I froze in the produce department. I was remembering the over-the-top meals the Global Horizons survivors would make for me every time I showed up to interview them. They finished one meal with this plate of perfect, long-stemmed strawberries, and as they handed them to me, they said, "Aren't these the kind of strawberries you eat with somebody special in the States? And don't they taste so much better when you know the people whose hands picked them for you?"
As I stood in that grocery store weeks later, I realized I had no idea of who to thank for this plenty, and no idea of how they were being treated. So, like the journalist I am, I started digging into the agricultural sector. And I found there are too many fields, and too few labor inspectors. I found multiple layers of plausible deniability between grower and distributor and processor, and God knows who else. The Global Horizons survivors had been brought to the States on a temporary guest worker program. That guest worker program ties a person's legal status to his or her employer, and denies that worker the right to organize. Mind you, none of what I am describing about this agricultural sector or the guest worker program is actually human trafficking. It is merely what we find legally tolerable. And I would argue this is fertile ground for exploitation. And all of this had been hidden to me, before I had tried to understand it.
I wasn't the only person grappling with these issues. Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, is one of the biggest anti-trafficking philanthropists in the world. And even he wound up accidentally investing nearly 10 million dollars in the pineapple plantation cited as having the worst working conditions in that Global Horizons case. When he found out, he and his wife were shocked and horrified, and they wound up writing an op-ed for a newspaper, saying that it was up to all of us to learn everything we can about the labor and supply chains of the products that we support. I totally agree.
What would happen if each one of us decided that we are no longer going to support companies if they don't eliminate exploitation from their labor and supply chains? If we demanded laws calling for the same? If all the CEOs out there decided that they were going to go through their businesses and say, "no more"? If we ended recruitment fees for migrant workers? If we decided that guest workers should have the right to organize without fear of retaliation? These would be decisions heard around the world. This isn't a matter of buying a fair-trade peach and calling it a day, buying a guilt-free zone with your money. That's not how it works. This is the decision to change a system that is broken, and that we have unwittingly but willingly allowed ourselves to profit from and benefit from for too long.
We often dwell on human trafficking survivors' victimization. But that is not my experience of them. Over all the years that I've been talking to them, they have taught me that we are more than our worst days. Each one of us is more than what we have lived through. Especially trafficking survivors. These people were the most resourceful and resilient and responsible in their communities. They were the people that you would take a gamble on. You'd say, I'm gong to sell my rings, because I have the chance to send you off to a better future. They were the emissaries of hope.
These survivors don't need saving. They need solidarity, because they're behind some of the most exciting social justice movements out there today. The nannies and housekeepers who marched with their families and their employers' families -- their activism got us an international treaty on domestic workers' rights. The Nepali women who were trafficked into the sex trade -- they came together, and they decided that they were going to make the world's first anti-trafficking organization actually headed and run by trafficking survivors themselves. These Indian shipyard workers were trafficked to do post-Hurricane Katrina reconstruction. They were threatened with deportation, but they broke out of their work compound and they marched from New Orleans to Washington, D.C., to protest labor exploitation. They cofounded an organization called the National Guest Worker Alliance, and through this organization, they have wound up helping other workers bring to light exploitation and abuses in supply chains in Walmart and Hershey's factories. And although the Department of Justice declined to take their case, a team of civil rights lawyers won the first of a dozen civil suits this February, and got their clients 14 million dollars.
These survivors are fighting for people they don't even know yet, other workers, and for the possibility of a just world for all of us. This is our chance to do the same. This is our chance to make the decision that tells us who we are, as a people and as a society; that our prosperity is no longer prosperity, as long as it is pinned to other people's pain; that our lives are inextricably woven together; and that we have the power to make a different choice.
I was so reluctant to share my story of my auntie with you. Before I started this TED process and climbed up on this stage, I had told literally a handful of people about it, because, like many a journalist, I am far more interested in learning about your stories than sharing much, if anything, about my own. I also haven't done my journalistic due diligence on this. I haven't issued my mountains of document requests, and interviewed everyone and their mother, and I haven't found my auntie yet. I don't know her story of what happened, and of her life now. The story as I've told it to you is messy and unfinished. But I think it mirrors the messy and unfinished situation we're all in, when it comes to human trafficking. We are all implicated in this problem. But that means we are all also part of its solution. Figuring out how to build a more just world is our work to do, and our story to tell. So let us tell it the way we should have done, from the very beginning. Let us tell this story together.
Thank you so much.
(Applause) |
When you're a child, anything and everything is possible. The challenge, so often, is hanging on to that as we grow up. And as a four-year-old, I had the opportunity to sail for the first time.
I will never forget the excitement as we closed the coast. I will never forget the feeling of adventure as I climbed on board the boat and stared into her tiny cabin for the first time. But the most amazing feeling was the feeling of freedom, the feeling that I felt when we hoisted her sails. As a four-year-old child, it was the greatest sense of freedom that I could ever imagine. I made my mind up there and then that one day, somehow, I was going to sail around the world.
So I did what I could in my life to get closer to that dream. Age 10, it was saving my school dinner money change. Every single day for eight years, I had mashed potato and baked beans, which cost 4p each, and gravy was free. Every day I would pile up the change on the top of my money box, and when that pile reached a pound, I would drop it in and cross off one of the 100 squares I'd drawn on a piece of paper. Finally, I bought a tiny dinghy. I spent hours sitting on it in the garden dreaming of my goal. I read every book I could on sailing, and then eventually, having been told by my school I wasn't clever enough to be a vet, left school age 17 to begin my apprenticeship in sailing.
So imagine how it felt just four years later to be sitting in a boardroom in front of someone who I knew could make that dream come true. I felt like my life depended on that moment, and incredibly, he said yes. And I could barely contain my excitement as I sat in that first design meeting designing a boat on which I was going to sail solo nonstop around the world. From that first meeting to the finish line of the race, it was everything I'd ever imagined. Just like in my dreams, there were amazing parts and tough parts. We missed an iceberg by 20 feet. Nine times, I climbed to the top of her 90-foot mast. We were blown on our side in the Southern Ocean. But the sunsets, the wildlife, and the remoteness were absolutely breathtaking. After three months at sea, age just 24, I finished in second position. I'd loved it, so much so that within six months I decided to go around the world again, but this time not in a race: to try to be the fastest person ever to sail solo nonstop around the world. Now for this, I needed a different craft: bigger, wider, faster, more powerful. Just to give that boat some scale, I could climb inside her mast all the way to the top. Seventy-five foot long, 60 foot wide. I affectionately called her Moby. She was a multihull. When we built her, no one had ever made it solo nonstop around the world in one, though many had tried, but whilst we built her, a Frenchman took a boat 25 percent bigger than her and not only did he make it, but he took the record from 93 days right down to 72. The bar was now much, much higher.
And these boats were exciting to sail. This was a training sail off the French coast. This I know well because I was one of the five crew members on board. Five seconds is all it took from everything being fine to our world going black as the windows were thrust underwater, and that five seconds goes quickly. Just see how far below those guys the sea is. Imagine that alone in the Southern Ocean plunged into icy water, thousands of miles away from land.
It was Christmas Day. I was forging into the Southern Ocean underneath Australia. The conditions were horrendous. I was approaching a part in the ocean which was 2,000 miles away from the nearest town. The nearest land was Antarctica, and the nearest people would be those manning the European Space Station above me. (Laughter) You really are in the middle of nowhere. If you need help, and you're still alive, it takes four days for a ship to get to you and then four days for that ship to get you back to port. No helicopter can reach you out there, and no plane can land. We are forging ahead of a huge storm. Within it, there was 80 knots of wind, which was far too much wind for the boat and I to cope with. The waves were already 40 to 50 feet high, and the spray from the breaking crests was blown horizontally like snow in a blizzard. If we didn't sail fast enough, we'd be engulfed by that storm, and either capsized or smashed to pieces. We were quite literally hanging on for our lives and doing so on a knife edge.
The speed I so desperately needed brought with it danger. We all know what it's like driving a car 20 miles an hour, 30, 40. It's not too stressful. We can concentrate. We can turn on the radio. Take that 50, 60, 70, accelerate through to 80, 90, 100 miles an hour. Now you have white knuckles and you're gripping the steering wheel. Now take that car off road at night and remove the windscreen wipers, the windscreen, the headlights and the brakes. That's what it's like in the Southern Ocean. (Laughter) (Applause) You could imagine it would be quite difficult to sleep in that situation, even as a passenger. But you're not a passenger. You're alone on a boat you can barely stand up in, and you have to make every single decision on board. I was absolutely exhausted, physically and mentally. Eight sail changes in 12 hours. The mainsail weighed three times my body weight, and after each change, I would collapse on the floor soaked with sweat with this freezing Southern Ocean air burning the back of my throat.
But out there, those lowest of the lows are so often contrasted with the highest of the highs. A few days later, we came out of the back of the low. Against all odds, we'd been able to drive ahead of the record within that depression. The sky cleared, the rain stopped, and our heartbeat, the monstrous seas around us were transformed into the most beautiful moonlit mountains.
It's hard to explain, but you enter a different mode when you head out there. Your boat is your entire world, and what you take with you when you leave is all you have. If I said to you all now, "Go off into Vancouver and find everything you will need for your survival for the next three months," that's quite a task. That's food, fuel, clothes, even toilet roll and toothpaste. That's what we do, and when we leave we manage it down to the last drop of diesel and the last packet of food. No experience in my life could have given me a better understanding of the definition of the word "finite." What we have out there is all we have. There is no more.
And never in my life had I ever translated that definition of finite that I'd felt on board to anything outside of sailing until I stepped off the boat at the finish line having broken that record.
(Applause)
Suddenly I connected the dots. Our global economy is no different. It's entirely dependent on finite materials we only have once in the history of humanity. And it was a bit like seeing something you weren't expecting under a stone and having two choices: I either put that stone to one side and learn more about it, or I put that stone back and I carry on with my dream job of sailing around the world.
I chose the first. I put it to one side and I began a new journey of learning, speaking to chief executives, experts, scientists, economists to try to understand just how our global economy works. And my curiosity took me to some extraordinary places.
This photo was taken in the burner of a coal-fired power station. I was fascinated by coal, fundamental to our global energy needs, but also very close to my family. My great-grandfather was a coal miner, and he spent 50 years of his life underground. This is a photo of him, and when you see that photo, you see someone from another era. No one wears trousers with a waistband quite that high in this day and age. (Laughter) But yet, that's me with my great-grandfather, and by the way, they are not his real ears. (Laughter)
We were close. I remember sitting on his knee listening to his mining stories. He talked of the camaraderie underground, and the fact that the miners used to save the crusts of their sandwiches to give to the ponies they worked with underground. It was like it was yesterday. And on my journey of learning, I went to the World Coal Association website, and there in the middle of the homepage, it said, "We have about 118 years of coal left." And I thought to myself, well, that's well outside my lifetime, and a much greater figure than the predictions for oil. But I did the math, and I realized that my great-grandfather had been born exactly 118 years before that year, and I sat on his knee until I was 11 years old, and I realized it's nothing in time, nor in history. And it made me make a decision I never thought I would make: to leave the sport of solo sailing behind me and focus on the greatest challenge I'd ever come across: the future of our global economy.
And I quickly realized it wasn't just about energy. It was also materials. In 2008, I picked up a scientific study looking at how many years we have of valuable materials to extract from the ground: copper, 61; tin, zinc, 40; silver, 29. These figures couldn't be exact, but we knew those materials were finite. We only have them once. And yet, our speed that we've used these materials has increased rapidly, exponentially. With more people in the world with more stuff, we've effectively seen 100 years of price declines in those basic commodities erased in just 10 years. And this affects all of us. It's brought huge volatility in prices, so much so that in 2011, your average European car manufacturer saw a raw material price increase of 500 million Euros, wiping away half their operating profits through something they have absolutely no control over.
And the more I learned, the more I started to change my own life. I started traveling less, doing less, using less. It felt like actually doing less was what we had to do. But it sat uneasy with me. It didn't feel right. It felt like we were buying ourselves time. We were eking things out a bit longer. Even if everybody changed, it wouldn't solve the problem. It wouldn't fix the system. It was vital in the transition, but what fascinated me was, in the transition to what? What could actually work?
It struck me that the system itself, the framework within which we live, is fundamentally flawed, and I realized ultimately that our operating system, the way our economy functions, the way our economy's been built, is a system in itself. At sea, I had to understand complex systems. I had to take multiple inputs, I had to process them, and I had to understand the system to win. I had to make sense of it. And as I looked at our global economy, I realized it too is that system, but it's a system that effectively can't run in the long term.
And I realized we've been perfecting what's effectively a linear economy for 150 years, where we take a material out of the ground, we make something out of it, and then ultimately that product gets thrown away, and yes, we do recycle some of it, but more an attempt to get out what we can at the end, not by design. It's an economy that fundamentally can't run in the long term, and if we know that we have finite materials, why would we build an economy that would effectively use things up, that would create waste? Life itself has existed for billions of years and has continually adapted to use materials effectively. It's a complex system, but within it, there is no waste. Everything is metabolized. It's not a linear economy at all, but circular.
And I felt like the child in the garden. For the first time on this new journey, I could see exactly where we were headed. If we could build an economy that would use things rather than use them up, we could build a future that really could work in the long term. I was excited. This was something to work towards. We knew exactly where we were headed. We just had to work out how to get there, and it was exactly with this in mind that we created the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in September 2010.
Many schools of thought fed our thinking and pointed to this model: industrial symbiosis, performance economy, sharing economy, biomimicry, and of course, cradle-to-cradle design. Materials would be defined as either technical or biological, waste would be designed out entirely, and we would have a system that could function absolutely in the long term.
So what could this economy look like? Maybe we wouldn't buy light fittings, but we'd pay for the service of light, and the manufacturers would recover the materials and change the light fittings when we had more efficient products. What if packaging was so nontoxic it could dissolve in water and we could ultimately drink it? It would never become waste. What if engines were re-manufacturable, and we could recover the component materials and significantly reduce energy demand. What if we could recover components from circuit boards, reutilize them, and then fundamentally recover the materials within them through a second stage? What if we could collect food waste, human waste? What if we could turn that into fertilizer, heat, energy, ultimately reconnecting nutrients systems and rebuilding natural capital? And cars -- what we want is to move around. We don't need to own the materials within them. Could cars become a service and provide us with mobility in the future? All of this sounds amazing, but these aren't just ideas, they're real today, and these lie at the forefront of the circular economy. What lies before us is to expand them and scale them up.
So how would you shift from linear to circular? Well, the team and I at the foundation thought you might want to work with the top universities in the world, with leading businesses within the world, with the biggest convening platforms in the world, and with governments. We thought you might want to work with the best analysts and ask them the question, "Can the circular economy decouple growth from resource constraints? Is the circular economy able to rebuild natural capital? Could the circular economy replace current chemical fertilizer use?" Yes was the answer to the decoupling, but also yes, we could replace current fertilizer use by a staggering 2.7 times. But what inspired me most about the circular economy was its ability to inspire young people. When young people see the economy through a circular lens, they see brand new opportunities on exactly the same horizon. They can use their creativity and knowledge to rebuild the entire system, and it's there for the taking right now, and the faster we do this, the better.
So could we achieve this in their lifetimes? Is it actually possible? I believe yes. When you look at the lifetime of my great-grandfather, anything's possible. When he was born, there were only 25 cars in the world; they had only just been invented. When he was 14, we flew for the first time in history. Now there are 100,000 charter flights every single day. When he was 45, we built the first computer. Many said it wouldn't catch on, but it did, and just 20 years later we turned it into a microchip of which there will be thousands in this room here today. Ten years before he died, we built the first mobile phone. It wasn't that mobile, to be fair, but now it really is, and as my great-grandfather left this Earth, the Internet arrived. Now we can do anything, but more importantly, now we have a plan.
Thank you.
(Applause) |
(Applause) David Gallo: This is Bill Lange. I'm Dave Gallo. And we're going to tell you some stories from the sea here in video. We've got some of the most incredible video of Titanic that's ever been seen, and we're not going to show you any of it. (Laughter)
The truth of the matter is that the Titanic -- even though it's breaking all sorts of box office records -- it's not the most exciting story from the sea. And the problem, I think, is that we take the ocean for granted. When you think about it, the oceans are 75 percent of the planet. Most of the planet is ocean water. The average depth is about two miles. Part of the problem, I think, is we stand at the beach, or we see images like this of the ocean, and you look out at this great big blue expanse, and it's shimmering and it's moving and there's waves and there's surf and there's tides, but you have no idea for what lies in there. And in the oceans, there are the longest mountain ranges on the planet. Most of the animals are in the oceans. Most of the earthquakes and volcanoes are in the sea, at the bottom of the sea. The biodiversity and the biodensity in the ocean is higher, in places, than it is in the rainforests. It's mostly unexplored, and yet there are beautiful sights like this that captivate us and make us become familiar with it.
But when you're standing at the beach, I want you to think that you're standing at the edge of a very unfamiliar world. We have to have a very special technology to get into that unfamiliar world. We use the submarine Alvin and we use cameras, and the cameras are something that Bill Lange has developed with the help of Sony. Marcel Proust said, "The true voyage of discovery is not so much in seeking new landscapes as in having new eyes." People that have partnered with us have given us new eyes, not only on what exists -- the new landscapes at the bottom of the sea -- but also how we think about life on the planet itself.
Here's a jelly. It's one of my favorites, because it's got all sorts of working parts. This turns out to be the longest creature in the oceans. It gets up to about 150 feet long. But see all those different working things? I love that kind of stuff. It's got these fishing lures on the bottom. They're going up and down. It's got tentacles dangling, swirling around like that. It's a colonial animal. These are all individual animals banding together to make this one creature. And it's got these jet thrusters up in front that it'll use in a moment, and a little light. If you take all the big fish and schooling fish and all that, put them on one side of the scale, put all the jelly-type of animals on the other side, those guys win hands down.
Most of the biomass in the ocean is made out of creatures like this. Here's the X-wing death jelly. (Laughter) The bioluminescence -- they use the lights for attracting mates and attracting prey and communicating. We couldn't begin to show you our archival stuff from the jellies. They come in all different sizes and shapes.
Bill Lange: We tend to forget about the fact that the ocean is miles deep on average, and that we're real familiar with the animals that are in the first 200 or 300 feet, but we're not familiar with what exists from there all the way down to the bottom. And these are the types of animals that live in that three-dimensional space, that micro-gravity environment that we really haven't explored. You hear about giant squid and things like that, but some of these animals get up to be approximately 140, 160 feet long. They're very little understood.
DG: This is one of them, another one of our favorites, because it's a little octopod. You can actually see through his head. And here he is, flapping with his ears and very gracefully going up. We see those at all depths and even at the greatest depths. They go from a couple of inches to a couple of feet. They come right up to the submarine -- they'll put their eyes right up to the window and peek inside the sub.
This is really a world within a world, and we're going to show you two. In this case, we're passing down through the mid-ocean and we see creatures like this. This is kind of like an undersea rooster. This guy, that looks incredibly formal, in a way. And then one of my favorites. What a face! This is basically scientific data that you're looking at. It's footage that we've collected for scientific purposes. And that's one of the things that Bill's been doing, is providing scientists with this first view of animals like this, in the world where they belong. They don't catch them in a net. They're actually looking at them down in that world. We're going to take a joystick, sit in front of our computer, on the Earth, and press the joystick forward, and fly around the planet.
We're going to look at the mid-ocean ridge, a 40,000-mile long mountain range. The average depth at the top of it is about a mile and a half. And we're over the Atlantic -- that's the ridge right there -- but we're going to go across the Caribbean, Central America, and end up against the Pacific, nine degrees north. We make maps of these mountain ranges with sound, with sonar, and this is one of those mountain ranges. We're coming around a cliff here on the right. The height of these mountains on either side of this valley is greater than the Alps in most cases. And there's tens of thousands of those mountains out there that haven't been mapped yet.
This is a volcanic ridge. We're getting down further and further in scale. And eventually, we can come up with something like this.
This is an icon of our robot, Jason, it's called. And you can sit in a room like this, with a joystick and a headset, and drive a robot like that around the bottom of the ocean in real time. One of the things we're trying to do at Woods Hole with our partners is to bring this virtual world -- this world, this unexplored region -- back to the laboratory. Because we see it in bits and pieces right now. We see it either as sound, or we see it as video, or we see it as photographs, or we see it as chemical sensors, but we never have yet put it all together into one interesting picture.
Here's where Bill's cameras really do shine. This is what's called a hydrothermal vent. And what you're seeing here is a cloud of densely packed, hydrogen-sulfide-rich water coming out of a volcanic axis on the sea floor. Gets up to 600, 700 degrees F, somewhere in that range. So that's all water under the sea -- a mile and a half, two miles, three miles down. And we knew it was volcanic back in the '60s, '70s. And then we had some hint that these things existed all along the axis of it, because if you've got volcanism, water's going to get down from the sea into cracks in the sea floor, come in contact with magma, and come shooting out hot. We weren't really aware that it would be so rich with sulfides, hydrogen sulfides. We didn't have any idea about these things, which we call chimneys.
This is one of these hydrothermal vents. Six hundred degree F water coming out of the Earth. On either side of us are mountain ranges that are higher than the Alps, so the setting here is very dramatic.
BL: The white material is a type of bacteria that thrives at 180 degrees C.
DG: I think that's one of the greatest stories right now that we're seeing from the bottom of the sea, is that the first thing we see coming out of the sea floor after a volcanic eruption is bacteria. And we started to wonder for a long time, how did it all get down there? What we find out now is that it's probably coming from inside the Earth. Not only is it coming out of the Earth -- so, biogenesis made from volcanic activity -- but that bacteria supports these colonies of life. The pressure here is 4,000 pounds per square inch. A mile and a half from the surface to two miles to three miles -- no sun has ever gotten down here. All the energy to support these life forms is coming from inside the Earth -- so, chemosynthesis. And you can see how dense the population is. These are called tube worms.
BL: These worms have no digestive system. They have no mouth. But they have two types of gill structures. One for extracting oxygen out of the deep-sea water, another one which houses this chemosynthetic bacteria, which takes the hydrothermal fluid -- that hot water that you saw coming out of the bottom -- and converts that into simple sugars that the tube worm can digest.
DG: You can see, here's a crab that lives down there. He's managed to grab a tip of these worms. Now, they normally retract as soon as a crab touches them. Oh! Good going. So, as soon as a crab touches them, they retract down into their shells, just like your fingernails. There's a whole story being played out here that we're just now beginning to have some idea of because of this new camera technology.
BL: These worms live in a real temperature extreme. Their foot is at about 200 degrees C and their head is out at three degrees C, so it's like having your hand in boiling water and your foot in freezing water. That's how they like to live. (Laughter)
DG: This is a female of this kind of worm. And here's a male. You watch. It doesn't take long before two guys here -- this one and one that will show up over here -- start to fight. Everything you see is played out in the pitch black of the deep sea. There are never any lights there, except the lights that we bring. Here they go. On one of the last dive series, we counted 200 species in these areas -- 198 were new, new species.
BL: One of the big problems is that for the biologists working at these sites, it's rather difficult to collect these animals. And they disintegrate on the way up, so the imagery is critical for the science.
DG: Two octopods at about two miles depth. This pressure thing really amazes me -- that these animals can exist there at a depth with pressure enough to crush the Titanic like an empty Pepsi can. What we saw up till now was from the Pacific. This is from the Atlantic. Even greater depth. You can see this shrimp is harassing this poor little guy here, and he'll bat it away with his claw. Whack! (Laughter)
And the same thing's going on over here. What they're getting at is that -- on the back of this crab -- the foodstuff here is this very strange bacteria that lives on the backs of all these animals. And what these shrimp are trying to do is actually harvest the bacteria from the backs of these animals. And the crabs don't like it at all. These long filaments that you see on the back of the crab are actually created by the product of that bacteria. So, the bacteria grows hair on the crab. On the back, you see this again. The red dot is the laser light of the submarine Alvin to give us an idea about how far away we are from the vents. Those are all shrimp. You see the hot water over here, here and here, coming out. They're clinging to a rock face and actually scraping bacteria off that rock face. Here's a tiny, little vent that's come out of the side of that pillar. Those pillars get up to several stories. So here, you've got this valley with this incredible alien landscape of pillars and hot springs and volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, inhabited by these very strange animals that live only on chemical energy coming out of the ground. They don't need the sun at all.
BL: You see this white V-shaped mark on the back of the shrimp? It's actually a light-sensing organ. It's how they find the hydrothermal vents. The vents are emitting a black body radiation -- an IR signature -- and so they're able to find these vents at considerable distances.
DG: All this stuff is happening along that 40,000-mile long mountain range that we're calling the ribbon of life, because just even today, as we speak, there's life being generated there from volcanic activity. This is the first time we've ever tried this any place. We're going to try to show you high definition from the Pacific. We're moving up one of these pillars. This one's several stories tall. In it, you'll see that it's a habitat for a lot of different animals. There's a funny kind of hot plate here, with vent water coming out of it. So all of these are individual homes for worms.
Now here's a closer view of that community. Here's crabs here, worms here. There are smaller animals crawling around. Here's pagoda structures. I think this is the neatest-looking thing. I just can't get over this -- that you've got these little chimneys sitting here smoking away. This stuff is toxic as hell, by the way. You could never get a permit to dump this in the ocean, and it's coming out all from it. (Laughter) It's unbelievable. It's basically sulfuric acid, and it's being just dumped out, at incredible rates. And animals are thriving -- and we probably came from here. That's probably where we evolved from.
BL: This bacteria that we've been talking about turns out to be the most simplest form of life found. There are a number of groups that are proposing that life evolved at these vent sites. Although the vent sites are short-lived -- an individual site may last only 10 years or so -- as an ecosystem they've been stable for millions -- well, billions -- of years.
DG: It works too well. You see there're some fish inside here as well. There's a fish sitting here. Here's a crab with his claw right at the end of that tube worm, waiting for that worm to stick his head out. (Laughter)
BL: The biologists right now cannot explain why these animals are so active. The worms are growing inches per week!
DG: I already said that this site, from a human perspective, is toxic as hell. Not only that, but on top -- the lifeblood -- that plumbing system turns off every year or so. Their plumbing system turns off, so the sites have to move. And then there's earthquakes, and then volcanic eruptions, on the order of one every five years, that completely wipes the area out. Despite that, these animals grow back in about a year's time. You're talking about biodensities and biodiversity, again, higher than the rainforest that just springs back to life. Is it sensitive? Yes. Is it fragile? No, it's not really very fragile.
I'll end up with saying one thing. There's a story in the sea, in the waters of the sea, in the sediments and the rocks of the sea floor. It's an incredible story. What we see when we look back in time, in those sediments and rocks, is a record of Earth history. Everything on this planet -- everything -- works by cycles and rhythms. The continents move apart. They come back together. Oceans come and go. Mountains come and go. Glaciers come and go. El Nino comes and goes. It's not a disaster, it's rhythmic. What we're learning now, it's almost like a symphony. It's just like music -- it really is just like music. And what we're learning now is that you can't listen to a five-billion-year long symphony, get to today and say, "Stop! We want tomorrow's note to be the same as it was today." It's absurd. It's just absurd. So, what we've got to learn now is to find out where this planet's going at all these different scales and work with it. Learn to manage it. The concept of preservation is futile. Conservation's tougher, but we can probably get there. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) |
You might be wondering why I'm wearing sunglasses, and one answer to that is, because I'm here to talk about glamour. So, we all think we know what glamour is. Here it is. It's glamorous movie stars, like Marlene Dietrich. And it comes in a male form, too -- very glamorous. Not only can he shoot, drive, drink -- you know, he drinks wine, there actually is a little wine in there -- and of course, always wears a tuxedo. But I think that glamour actually has a much broader meaning -- one that is true for the movie stars and the fictional characters, but also comes in other forms.
A magazine? Well, it's certainly not this one. This is the least glamorous magazine on the newsstand -- it's all about sex tips. Sex tips are not glamorous. And Drew Barrymore, for all her wonderful charm, is not glamorous either. But there is a glamour of industry. This is Margaret Bourke-White's -- one of her pictures she did. Fantastic, glamorous pictures of steel mills and paper mills and all kinds of glamorous industrial places. And there's the mythic glamour of the garage entrepreneur. This is the Hewlett-Packard garage. We know everyone who starts a business in a garage ends up founding Hewlett-Packard. There's the glamour of physics. What could be more glamorous than understanding the entire universe, grand unification? And, by the way, it helps if you're Brian Greene -- he has other kinds of glamour.
And there is, of course, this glamour. This is very, very glamorous: the glamour of outer space -- and not the alien-style glamour, but the nice, clean, early '60s version. So what do we mean by glamour? Well, one thing you can do if you want to know what glamour means is you can look in the dictionary. And it actually helps a lot more if you look in a very old dictionary, in this case the 1913 dictionary. Because for centuries, glamour had a very particular meaning, and the word was actually used differently from the way we think of it. You had "a" glamour. It wasn't glamour as a quality -- you "cast a glamour." Glamour was a literal magic spell. Not a metaphorical one, the way we use it today, but a literal magic spell associated with witches and gypsies and to some extent, Celtic magic. And over the years, around the turn of the 20th century, it started to take on this other kind of deception -- this definition for any artificial interest in, or association with, an object through which it appears delusively magnified or glorified. But still, glamour is an illusion. Glamour is a magic spell. And there's something dangerous about glamour throughout most of history. When the witches cast a magic spell on you, it was not in your self-interest -- it was to get you to act against your interest.
Well of course, in the 20th century, glamour came to have this different meaning associated with Hollywood. And this is Hedy Lamarr. Hedy Lamarr said, "Anyone can look glamorous, all you have to do is sit there and look stupid." (Laughter) But in fact, with all due respect to Hedy -- about whom we'll hear more later -- there's a lot more to it. There was a tremendous amount of technical achievement associated with creating this Hollywood glamour. There were scores of retouchers and lighting experts and make-up experts. You can go to the museum of Hollywood history in Hollywood and see Max Factor's special rooms that he painted different colors depending on the complexion of the star he was going to make up. So you've got this highly stylized portrait of something that was not entirely of this earth -- it was a portrait of a star. And actually, we see glamorized photos of stars all the time -- they call them false color.
Glamour is a form of falsification, but falsification to achieve a particular purpose. It may be to illuminate the star; it may be to sell a film. And it involves a great deal of technique. It's not -- glamour is not something -- you don't wake up in the morning glamorous. I don't care who you are. Even Nicole Kidman doesn't wake up in the morning glamorous. There is a process of "idealization, glorification and dramatization," and it's not just the case for people. Glamour doesn't have to be people. Architectural photography -- Julius Schulman, who has talked about transfiguration, took this fabulous, famous picture of the Kauffman House. Architectural photography is extremely glamorous. It puts you into this special, special world. This is Alex Ross's comic book art, which appears to be extremely realistic, as part of his style is he gives you a kind of realism in his comic art. Except that light doesn't work this way in the real world.
When you stack people in rows, the ones in the background look smaller than the ones in the foreground -- but not in the world of glamour. What glamour is all about -- I took this from a blurb in the table of contents of New York magazine, which was telling us that glamour is back -- glamour is all about transcending the everyday. And I think that that's starting to get at what the core that combines all sorts of glamour is. This is Filippino Lippi's 1543 portrait of Saint Apollonia. And I don't know who she is either, but this is the [16th] century equivalent of a supermodel. It's a very glamorous portrait. Why is it glamorous? It's glamorous, first, because she is beautiful -- but that does not make you glamorous, that only makes you beautiful. She is graceful, she is mysterious and she is transcendent, and those are the central qualities of glamour. You don't see her eyes; they're looking downward. She's not looking away from you exactly, but you have to mentally imagine her world. She's encouraging you to contemplate this higher world to which she belongs, where she can be completely tranquil while holding the iron instruments of her death by torture. Mel Gibson's "Passion Of The Christ" -- not glamorous. That's glamour: that's Michelangelo's "Pieta," where Mary is the same age as Jesus and they're both awfully happy and pleasant.
Glamour invites us to live in a different world. It has to simultaneously be mysterious, a little bit distant -- that's why, often in these glamour shots, the person is not looking at the audience, it's why sunglasses are glamorous -- but also not so far above us that we can't identify with the person. In some sense, there has to be something like us. So as I say, in religious art, you know, God is not glamorous. God cannot be glamorous because God is omnipotent, omniscient -- too far above us. And yet you will see in religious art, saints or the Virgin Mary will often be portrayed -- not always -- in glamorous forms. As I said earlier, glamour does not have to be about people, but it has to have this transcendent quality. What is it about Superman? Aside from Alex Ross's style, which is very glamorous, one thing about Superman is he makes you believe that a man can fly.
Glamour is all about transcending this world and getting to an idealized, perfect place. And this is one reason that modes of transportation tend to be extremely glamorous. The less experience we have with them, the more glamorous they are. So you can do a glamorized picture of a car, but you can't do a glamorized picture of traffic. You can do a glamorized picture of an airplane, but not the inside. The notion is that it's going to transport you, and the story is not about, you know, the guy in front of you in the airplane, who has this nasty little kid, or the big cough. The story is about where you're arriving, or thinking about where you're arriving. And this sense of being transported is one reason that we have glamour styling. This sort of streamlining styling is not just glamorous because we associate it with movies of that period, but because, in it's streamlining, it transports us from the everyday.
The same thing -- arches are very glamorous. Arches with stained glass -- even more glamorous. Staircases that curve away from you are glamorous. I happen to find that particular staircase picture very glamorous because, to me, it captures the whole promise of the academic contemplative life -- but maybe that's because I went to Princeton. Anyway, skylines are super glamorous, city streets -- not so glamorous. You know, when you get, actually to this town it has reality. The horizon, the open road, is very, very glamorous. There are few things more glamorous than the horizon -- except, possibly, multiple horizons. Of course, here you don't feel the cold, or the heat -- you just see the possibilities. In order to pull glamour off, you need this Renaissance quality of sprezzatura, which is a term coined by Castiglione in his book, "The Book Of The Courtier." There's the not-glamorous version of what it looks like today, after a few centuries.
And sprezzatura is the art that conceals art. It makes things look effortless. You don't think about how Nicole Kidman is maneuvering that dress -- she just looks completely natural. And I remember reading, after the Lara Croft movies, how Angelina Jolie would go home completely black and blue. Of course, they covered that with make-up, because Lara Croft did all those same stunts -- but she doesn't get black and blue, because she has sprezzatura. "To conceal all art and make whatever is done or said appear to be without effort": And this is one of the critical aspects of glamour. Glamour is about editing. How do you create the sense of transcendence, the sense of evoking a perfect world? The sense of, you know, life could be better, I could join this -- I could be a perfect person, I could join this perfect world. We don't tell you all the grubby details.
Now, this was kindly lent to me by Jeff Bezos, from last year. This is underneath Jeff's desk. This is what the real world of computers, lamps, electrical appliances of all kinds, looks like. But if you look in a catalog -- particularly a catalog of modern, beautiful objects for your home -- it looks like this. There are no cords. Look next time you get these catalogs in your mail -- you can usually figure out where they hid the cord. But there's always this illusion that if you buy this lamp, you will live in a world without cords. (Laughter) And the same thing is true of, if you buy this laptop or you buy this computer -- and even in these wireless eras, you don't get to live in the world without cords. You have to have mystery and you have to have grace. And there she is -- Grace. This is the most glamorous picture, I think, ever. Part of the thing is that, in "Rear Window," the question is, is she too glamorous to live in his world? And the answer is no, but of course it's really just a movie.
Here's Hedy Lamarr again. And, you know, this kind of head covering is extremely glamorous because, like sunglasses, it conceals and reveals at the same time. Translucence is glamorous -- that's why all these people wear pearls. It's why barware is glamorous. Glamour is translucent -- not transparent, not opaque. It invites us into the world but it doesn't give us a completely clear picture. And I think if Grace Kelly is the most glamorous person, maybe a spiral staircase with glass block may be the most glamorous interior shot, because a spiral staircase is incredibly glamorous. It has that sense of going up and away, and yet you never think about how you would really trip if you were -- particularly going down. And of course glass block has that sense of translucence. So, this session's supposed to be about pure pleasure but glamour's really partly about meaning. All individuals and all cultures have ideals that cannot possibly be realized in reality.
They have contradictions, they uphold principles that are incommensurable with each other -- whatever it is -- and yet these ideals give meaning and purpose to our lives as cultures and as individuals. And the way we deal with that is we displace them -- we put them into a golden world, an imagined world, an age of heroes, the world to come. And in the life of an individual, we often associate that with some object. The white picket fence, the perfect house. The perfect kitchen -- no bills on the counter in the perfect kitchen. You know, you buy that Viking range, this is what your kitchen will look like. The perfect love life -- symbolized by the perfect necklace, the perfect diamond ring. The perfect getaway in your perfect car. This is an interior design firm that is literally called Utopia. The perfect office -- again, no cords, as far as I can tell. And certainly, no, it doesn't look a thing like my office. I mean, there's no paper on the desk. We want this golden world. And some people get rich enough, and if they have their ideals -- in a sort of domestic sense, they get to acquire their perfect world.
Dean Koontz built this fabulous home theater, which is -- I don't think accidentally -- in Art Deco style. That symbolizes this sense of being safe and at home. This is not always good, because what is your perfect world? What is your ideal, and also, what has been edited out? Is it something important? "The Matrix" is a movie that is all about glamour. I could do a whole talk on "The Matrix" and glamour. It was criticized for glamorizing violence, because, look -- sunglasses and those long coats, and, of course, they could walk up walls and do all these kinds of things that are impossible in the real world. This is another Margaret Bourke-White photo. This is from Soviet Union. Attractive. I mean, look how happy the people are, and good-looking too. You know, we're marching toward Utopia.
I'm not a fan of PETA, but I think this is a great ad. Because what they're doing is they're saying, your coat's not so glamorous, what's been edited out is something important. But actually, what's even more important than remembering what's been edited out is thinking, are the ideals good? Because glamour can be very totalitarian and deceptive. And it's not just a matter of glamorizing cleaning your floor. This is from "Triumph Of The Will" -- brilliant editing to cut together things. There's a glamour shot. National Socialism is all about glamour. It was a very aesthetic ideology. It was all about cleaning up Germany, and the West, and the world, and ridding it of anything unglamorous. So glamour can be dangerous.
I think glamour has a genuine appeal, has a genuine value. I'm not against glamour. But there's a kind of wonder in the stuff that gets edited away in the cords of life. And there is both a way to avoid the dangers of glamour and a way to broaden your appreciation of it. And that's to take Isaac Mizrahi's advice and confront the manipulation of it all, and sort of admit that manipulation is something that we enjoy, but also enjoy how it happens. And here's Hedy Lamarr. She's very glamorous but, you know, she invented spread-spectrum technology. So she's even more glamorous if you know that she really wasn't stupid, even though she thought she could look stupid.
David Hockney talks about how the appreciation of this very glamorous painting is heightened if you think about the fact that it takes two weeks to paint this splash, which only took a fraction of a second to happen. There is a book out in the bookstore -- it's called "Symphony In Steel," and it's about the stuff that's hidden under the skin of the Disney Center. And that has a fascination. It's not necessarily glamorous, but unveiling the glamour has an appeal. There's a wonderful book called "Crowns" that's all these glamour pictures of black women in their church hats. And there's a quote from one of these women, and she talks about, "As a little girl, I'd admire women at church with beautiful hats. They looked like beautiful dolls, like they'd just stepped out of a magazine. But I also knew how hard they worked all week. Sometimes under those hats there's a lot of joy and a lot of sorrow." And, actually, you get more appreciation for glamour when you realize what went into creating it. Thank you. |
So, I'm in Chile, in the Atacama desert, sitting in a hotel lobby, because that's the only place that I can get a Wi-Fi connection, and I have this picture up on my screen, and a woman comes up behind me. She says, "Oh, that's beautiful. What is it? Is that Jackson Pollock?" And unfortunately, I can be a little too honest. I said, "No, it's -- it's penguin shit."
(Laughter)
And, you know, "Excuse me!" And I could sense that she thought I was speaking synecdochically.
(Laughter)
So, I said, "No, no, really -- it's penguin shit."
(Laughter)
Because I had just been in the Falkland Islands taking pictures of penguins. This is a Gentoo penguin. And she was still skeptical. So, literally, a few minutes before that, I downloaded this scientific paper about calculations on avian defecation, which is really quite interesting, because it turns out you can model this as something called "Poiseuille flow," and you can learn an awful lot about the physics of the avian rectum. Actually, technically, it's not a rectum. It's called a cloaca.
At this point, she stops me, and she says, "Who are you? Wha -- what do you do?" And I was stuck, because I didn't have any way to describe what I do. And so, in some sense, this talk today is my answer to that. It's a selection of a random bunch of the stuff that I do. And it's very hard for me to make sense of it, so I'm not sure that you can. It's the kind of thing that I sit up late at night thinking about sometimes -- often at four in the morning.
So, some people are afraid of what I do. Some people think I am the nerd Tony Soprano, and in response, I have ordered a bulletproof pocket protector. I'm not sure what these people think, because I don't speak Norsk.
(Laughter)
But I'm not thinking "monsteret" is a good thing. I don't know, you know? So, one of the things that I love to do is travel around the world and look at archaeological sites. Because archaeology gives us an opportunity to study past civilizations, and see where they succeeded and where they failed. Use science to, you know, work backwards and say, "Well, really, what were they thinking?"
And recently, I was in Easter Island, which is an incredibly beautiful place, and an incredibly mysterious place, because no matter where you go in Easter Island, you're struck by these statues, called the moai. The place is 64 square miles. They made, so far as we can tell, 900 of them. Why on Earth? And if you haven't read Jared Diamond's book, "Collapse," I totally recommend that you do. He's got a great chapter about it. Basically, these people committed ecological suicide in order to make more of these. And somewhere along the line, somebody said, "I know! Let's cut down the last tree and commit suicide, because we need more identical statues."
(Laughter)
And, one thing that isn't a mystery, actually, was when I grew up -- because when I was a little kid, I'd seen these pictures -- and I thought, "Well, why that look on the face? Why that brow?" I mean, it's such a powerful thing. Where did they get that inspiration? And then I met Yoyo, who is the native Rapa Nui-an guide, and if you look at Yoyo's face, you kind of figure out where they got it.
There's many mysteries, these statues. Everyone wants to know, how did they make them, how did they transport them? This woman in the foreground is Jo Anne Van Tilberg. She's the leading archaeologist working Easter Island today. And she has studied the statues for 20-some years, and she has detailed records of every single statue. The one on the page here is the same that's up there. One interesting problem is the stone isn't very hard. So, this used to be completely smooth. In fact, in many of the statues, when you excavate them, the backs are totally smooth -- almost glass smooth. But after 1,000 years out in the weather, they look like this.
Jo Anne and I have just embarked on a project to digitize them all, and we're going to do a very high-res digitization, first because it's a way of preserving them. Second, we have these ideas about how you can algorithmically, then, learn a few of the mysteries about them. How long have they been standing in what positions? And maybe, indirectly, get at some of the issues of what caused them to be the way they are. While I was in Easter Island, comet McNaught was there also, so you get a gratuitous picture of a moai with a comet.
I also have an archaeological project going on in Egypt. "Going on" is perhaps a little bit strong. We're trying to get all of the permissions to get everything all set, to get it going. So, I'll talk about it at a future TED. But there's some amazing opportunities in Egypt as well. Another thing I do is I invent stuff. In fact, I design nuclear reactors. Not a joke. This is the conventional nuclear fuel cycle. The red line is what is done in most nuclear reactors. It's called the open fuel cycle. The white lines are what's called an advance fuel cycle, where you reprocess.
Now, this is the normal way it's done. It's got the huge advantage that it does not create carbon pollution. It has a lot of disadvantages: each one of these steps is extremely expensive, it's potentially dangerous and they have the interesting property that the step cannot be performed in anyone's backyard, which is a problem. So, our reactor eliminates these steps, which, if we can actually make it work, is a really cool thing. Now, it's kind of nuts to work on a new nuclear reactor. There's -- no reactor's been even built to an old design, much less a new one, in the United States for 25 years. It's the kind of very high-risk, but potentially very high-return thing that we do.
Changing into a totally different field, we do a lot of stuff in solid state physics, particularly in an area called metamaterials. A metamaterial is an artificial material, which manipulates, in this case, electromagnetic radiation, in a way that you couldn't otherwise. So, this device here is an invisibility cloak. It may not seem that, but if you were a microwave, this is how you would view it. Rays of light -- in this case, microwave light -- come in, and they just squish around the cell, and they come back the other side. Now, you could do that with mirrors from one angle. The cool thing is, this does it from all angles. Metamaterials, unfortunately -- A, it only works on microwave, and B, it doesn't work all that well yet. But metamaterials are an incredibly exciting field. It's -- you know, today I'd like to say it's a zero billion dollar business, but, in fact, it's negative. But some day, some day, maybe it's going to work.
We do a lot of work in biomedical fields. In this case, we're working with a major medical foundation to develop inexpensive ways of diagnosing diseases in developing countries. So, they say the eyes are the windows of the soul -- turns out they're a window to a whole lot more stuff. And these happen to be my eyes, by the way.
Now, I'm also very interested in cooking. While I was at Microsoft, I took a leave of absence and went to a chef school in France. I used to work, also while at Microsoft, at a leading restaurant in Seattle, so I do a lot of cooking. I've been on a team that won the world championship of barbecue. But barbecue's interesting, because it's one of these cult foods like chili, or bouillabaisse. Various parts of the world will have a cult food that people get enormously attached to -- there's tremendous traditions, there's secrecy. And I'm trying to use a very scientific approach. So, this is my latest cooker, and if this looks more complicated than the nuclear reactor, that's because it is. But if you get to play with all those knobs and dials -- and of course, really the controller over there does it all on software -- you can make some terrific ribs.
(Laughter)
This is a high-speed centrifuge. You should all have one in your kitchen, beside your Turbochef. This subjects food to a force about 50,000 times that of normal gravity, and oh boy, does it clarify chicken stock. You would not believe it! I perform a series of ghoulish experiments on food -- in this case, trying to calibrate a mathematical model so that one can predict exactly what the internal cooking times are. It turns out, A, it's useful, and for a geek like me, it's fun. Theory is red, black is experiment. So, I'm either really good at faking it, or this particular model seems to work.
So, another random thing I do is the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI. And you may be familiar with the movie "Contact," which sort of popularized that. It turns out there are real people who go out and search for extraterrestrials in a very scientific way. In fact, almost everybody in the movie is based on a real character, a real person. So, the Jodie Foster character here is actually this woman, Jill Tarter, and Jill has dedicated her life to this. You know, a lot of people risk their lives in a brief act of heroism, which is kind of cool, but Jill has what I call slow heroism. She is risking her professional life on something that her own calculations show may not work for a thousand years -- may not ever. So, I like to support people that are risking their lives.
After the movie came out, of course, there was a lot of interest in SETI. My kids saw the movie, and afterwards they came to me and they said, "So, Dad, so -- so -- that character -- that's Jill, right?" I said, "Oh, yeah, yeah -- absolutely." "And that other person, that's someone -- " I said, "Yes." They said, "Well, you know that creepy rich guy in the movie? Is that you?" I said, "Well, you know, it's just a movie! Come on."
(Laughter)
So, the SETI Institute, with a little bit of help from me, and a lot of help from Paul Allen and a variety of other people, is building a dedicated radio telescope in Hat Creek, California, so they can do this SETI work. Now, I travel a lot, and I change cell phones a lot, and the one person who always gets updated on all my cell phones and pagers and everything else is Jill, because I really don't want to miss "the call."
(Laughter)
I mean, can you imagine? E.T.'s phoning home, and I'm not, like, there? You know, horrible! So, I do a lot of work on dinosaurs. I'm known to TEDsters as the guy that has sex with dinosaurs. And I resemble that remark. I'm going to talk about a different aspect of dinosaurs, which is the finding of them. Now, to find dinosaurs, you hike around in horrible conditions looking for a dinosaur. It sounds really dumb, but that's what it is. It's horrible conditions, because wherever you have nice weather, plants grow, and you don't get any erosion, and you don't see any dinosaurs. So, you always find dinosaurs in deserts or badlands, areas that have very little plant growth and have flash floods in the spring. You know, skiers pray for snow? Paleontologists pray for erosion.
So, you hike around and -- this is after you dig them up, they look like this. You hike around, you see something like this. Now, this is something I found, so look at it very closely here. You've got this bentonite clay, which is -- sort of swells up and expands. And there's some stuff poking out. So, you look at that, and you look up close, and you say, "Well, gee, that's kind of interesting. What are all of these pieces?" Well, if you look closely, you can recognize, actually, from the shape, that these are skull fragments. And then when you look at this, you say, "That's a tooth. It's a big tooth." It's about the size of a banana. It has a big serration on the edge. This is what Tyrannosaurus rex looks like in the ground. And this is what it's like to find a Tyrannosaurus rex, which I was lucky enough to do a few years ago.
Now, this is what Tyrannosaurus rex looks like in my living room. Not the same one, actually. This is a cast, which I had bought, and then, after buying the cast, I found my own, and I don't have room for two. You know. So, the thing that's wonderful for me about finding dinosaurs is that it is both an intellectual thing, because you're trying to reconstruct the environment of millions of years ago. It's something that can inform all sorts of science in unexpected ways. The study of dinosaurs led to the realization that there's a problem with asteroid impact, for example. The study of dinosaurs may, literally, one day save the planet.
Study of the ancient climate is very important. In fact, the Mesozoic, when dinosaurs lived, had much higher CO2 than today, was much warmer than today, and is one of the interesting proof points for the effects of CO2 on climate. But, besides being intellectually and scientifically interesting, it's also very different than the other things I do, because you get to hike around in the badlands. This is actually what most dinosaur research looks like. This is one of my papers: "A pygostyle from a non-avian theropod." It's not as gripping as dinosaur sex, so we're not going to go into it further.
Now, I'm also really big on photography. I travel all over the world taking pictures -- some of them good, most of them not. These days, bits are cheap. Unfortunately, that means you've got to spend more time sorting through them. Here's a picture I took in the Falkland Islands of king penguins on a beach. Here's a picture I took in Alaska, a few years ago, of Orcas. I'd gone up to photograph Orcas, and we had looked for a week, and we hadn't seen a damn Orca. And the last day, the sun comes out, the Orcas come, they're right by the boat. It's fantastic. And I get lots of pictures like this. Then, a little bit later, I start getting some pictures like this. Now, to a human audience, I need to explain that if Penthouse magazine had a marine mammal edition, this would be the centerfold. It's true. So, there's more and more activity near the boat, and all of a sudden somebody shouts, "What's that in the water?" I said, "Well, I think that's what you call a free willy."
(Laughter)
There's a variety of things you can learn from watching whales have sex.
(Laughter) The first thing you learn is the overwhelming importance of hands. They don't have them.
(Laughter)
I think Paul Simon is in the audience, and he has -- he may not realize it, but he wrote a song all about whale sex, "Slip-Slidin' Away." That's kind of what it's like. The other interesting thing that I learned about whale sex: they curl their toes too.
(Laughter)
So -- where do you go putting all of these disparate pieces together? You know, there's a tremendous amount of wisdom in finding a great thing, passion in life, and focusing all your energy on it, and I've never been able to do that. I just -- you know, because, yes, I'll focus passion on something, but then there will be something else, and then there's something else again. And for a long time I fought this, and I thought, "Well, gee, I really ought to buckle down." And you know, when I was at Microsoft, that was so engrossing, and the whole industry was expanding so much, that it did tend to crowd out most of the other things in my life.
But ultimately, I decided that what I really ought to do is not fight being who I am, but embrace it. And say, "Yeah, you know, I -- this whole talk has been a mile wide and an inch deep, but that's really what works for me." And regardless of whether it's nuclear reactors or metamaterials or whale sex, the common -- or lowest common denominator -- is me. That's it, thank you.
(Applause) |
You know for me, the interest in contemporary forms of slavery started with a leaflet that I picked up in London. It was the early '90s, and I was at a public event. I saw this leaflet and it said, "There are millions of slaves in the world today." And I thought, "No way, no way." And I'm going to admit to hubris. Because I also, I'm going to admit to you, I also thought, "How can I be like a hot-shot young full professor who teaches human rights and not know this? So it can't be true."
Well, if you teach, if you worship in the temple of learning, do not mock the gods, because they will take you, fill you with curiosity and desire, and drive you. Drive you with a passion to change things. I went out and did a lit review, 3,000 articles on the key word "slavery." Two turned out to be about contemporary -- only two. All the rest were historical. They were press pieces and they were full of outrage, they were full of speculation, they were anecdotal -- no solid information.
So, I began to do a research project of my own. I went to five countries around the world. I looked at slaves. I met slaveholders, and I looked very deeply into slave-based businesses because this is an economic crime. People do not enslave people to be mean to them. They do it to make a profit. And I've got to tell you, what I found out in the world in four different continents, was depressingly familiar. Like this: Agricultural workers in Africa, whipped and beaten, showing us how they were beaten in the fields before they escaped from slavery and met up with our film crew. It was mind-blowing.
And I want to be very clear. I'm talking about real slavery. This is not about lousy marriages, this is not about jobs that suck. This is about people who can not walk away, people who are forced to work without pay, people who are operating 24/7 under a threat of violence and have no pay. It's real slavery in exactly the same way that slavery would be recognized throughout all of human history.
Now, where is it? Well, this map in the sort of redder, yellower colors are the places with the highest densities of slavery. But in fact that kind of bluey color are the countries where we can't find any cases of slavery. And you might notice that it's only Iceland and Greenland where we can't find any cases of enslavement around the world.
We're also particularly interested and looking very carefully at places where slaves are being used to perpetrate extreme environmental destruction. Around the world, slaves are used to destroy the environment, cutting down trees in the Amazon; destroying forest areas in West Africa; mining and spreading mercury around in places like Ghana and the Congo; destroying the coastal ecosystems in South Asia. It's a pretty harrowing linkage between what's happening to our environment and what's happening to our human rights.
Now, how on Earth did we get to a situation like this, where we have 27 million people in slavery in the year 2010? That's double the number that came out of Africa in the entire transatlantic slave trade. Well, it builds up with these factors. They are not causal, they are actually supporting factors. One we all know about, the population explosion: the world goes from two billion people to almost seven billion people in the last 50 years. Being numerous does not make you a slave. Add in the increased vulnerability of very large numbers of people in the developing world, caused by civil wars, ethnic conflicts, kleptocratic governments, disease ... you name it, you know it.
We understand how that works. In some countries all of those things happen at once, like Sierra Leone a few years ago, and push enormous parts ... about a billion people in the world, in fact, as we know, live on the edge, live in situations where they don't have any opportunity and are usually even destitute. But that doesn't make you a slave either. What it takes to turn a person who is destitute and vulnerable into a slave, is the absence of the rule of law. If the rule of law is sound, it protects the poor and it protects the vulnerable. But if corruption creeps in and people don't have the opportunity to have that protection of the rule of law, then if you can use violence, if you can use violence with impunity, you can reach out and harvest the vulnerable into slavery.
Well, that is precisely what has happened around the world. Though, for a lot of people, the people who step into slavery today don't usually get kidnapped or knocked over the head. They come into slavery because someone has asked them this question.
All around the world I've been told an almost identical story. People say, "I was home, someone came into our village, they stood up in the back of a truck, they said, 'I've got jobs, who needs a job?'" And they did exactly what you or I would do in the same situation. They said, "That guy looked sketchy. I was suspicious, but my children were hungry. We needed medicine. I knew I had to do anything I could to earn some money to support the people I care about." They climb into the back of the truck. They go off with the person who recruits them. Ten miles, 100 miles, 1,000 miles later, they find themselves in dirty, dangerous, demeaning work. They take it for a little while, but when they try to leave, bang!, the hammer comes down, and they discover they're enslaved.
Now, that kind of slavery is, again, pretty much what slavery has been all through human history. But there is one thing that is particularly remarkable and novel about slavery today, and that is a complete collapse in the price of human beings -- expensive in the past, dirt cheap now. Even the business programs have started picking up on this. I just want to share a little clip for you.
Daphne: OK. Llively discussion guaranteed here, as always, as we get macro and talk commodities. Continuing here in the studio with our guest Michael O'Donohue, head of commodities at Four Continents Capital Management. And we're also joined by Brent Lawson from Lawson Frisk Securities.
Brent Lawson: Happy to be here.
D: Good to have you with us, Brent. Now, gentlemen ... Brent, where is your money going this year?
BL: Well Daphne, we've been going short on gas and oil recently and casting our net just a little bit wider. We really like the human being story a lot. If you look at a long-term chart, prices are at historical lows and yet global demand for forced labor is still real strong. So, that's a scenario that we think we should be capitalizing on.
D: Michael, what's your take on the people story? Are you interested?
Michael O'Donoghue: Oh definitely. Non-voluntary labor's greatest advantage as an asset is the endless supply. We're not about to run out of people. No other commodity has that.
BL: Daphne, if I may draw your attention to one thing. That is that private equity has been sniffing around, and that tells me that this market is about to explode. Africans and Indians, as usual, South Americans, and Eastern Europeans in particular are on our buy list.
D: Interesting. Micheal, bottom line, what do you recommend?
MO: We're recommending to our clients a buy and hold strategy. There's no need to play the market. There's a lot of vulnerable people out there. It's very exciting.
D: Exciting stuff indeed. Gentlemen, thank you very much.
Kevin Bales: Okay, you figured it out. That's a spoof. Though I enjoyed watching your jaws drop, drop, drop, until you got it. MTV Europe worked with us and made that spoof, and they've been slipping it in between music videos without any introduction, which I think is kind of fun. Here's the reality. The price of human beings across the last 4,000 years in today's money has averaged about 40,000 dollars. Capital purchase items. You can see that the lines cross when the population explodes.
The average price of a human being today, around the world, is about 90 dollars. They are more expensive in places like North America. Slaves cost between 3,000 to 8,000 dollars in North America, but I could take you places in India or Nepal where human beings can be acquired for five or 10 dollars. They key here is that people have ceased to be that capital purchase item and become like Styrofoam cups. You buy them cheaply, you use them, you crumple them up, and then when you're done with them you just throw them away.
These young boys are in Nepal. They are basically the transport system on a quarry run by a slaveholder. There are no roads there, so they carry loads of stone on their backs, often of their own weight, up and down the Himalaya Mountains. One of their mothers said to us, "You know, we can't survive here, but we can't even seem to die either." It's a horrible situation. And if there is anything that makes me feel very positive about this, it's that there are also -- in addition to young men like this who are still enslaved -- there are ex-slaves who are now working to free others. Or, we say, Frederick Douglass is in the house.
I don't know if you've ever had a daydream about, "Wow. What would it be like to meet Harriet Tubman? What would it be like to meet Frederick Douglass?" I've got to say, one of the most exciting parts about my job is that I get to, and I want to introduce you to one of those. His name is James Kofi Annan. He was a slave child in Ghana enslaved in the fishing industry, and he now, after escape and building a new life, has formed an organization that we work closely with to go back and get people out of slavery. This is not James, this is one of the kids that he works with.
James Kofi Annan (Video): He was hit with a paddle in the head. And this reminds me of my childhood when I used to work here.
KB: James and our country director in Ghana, Emmanuel Otoo are now receiving regular death threats because the two of them managed to get convictions and imprisonment for three human traffickers for the very first time in Ghana for enslaving people, from the fishing industry, for enslaving children.
Now, everything I've been telling you, I admit, is pretty disheartening. But there is actually a very positive side to this, and that is this: The 27 million people who are in slavery today, that's a lot of people, but it's also the smallest fraction of the global population to ever be in slavery. And likewise, the 40 billion dollars that they generate into the global economy each year is the tiniest proportion of the global economy to ever be represented by slave labor.
Slavery, illegal in every country has been pushed to the edges of our global society. And in a way, without us even noticing, has ended up standing on the precipice of its own extinction, waiting for us to give it a big boot and knock it over. And get rid of it. And it can be done.
Now, if we do that, if we put the resources and the focus to it, what does it actually cost to get people out of slavery? Well, first, before I even tell you the cost I've got to be absolutely clear. We do not buy people out of slavery. Buying people out of slavery is like paying a burglar to get your television back; it's abetting a crime. Liberation, however, costs some money.
Liberation, and more importantly all the work that comes after liberation. It's not an event, it's a process. It's about helping people to build lives of dignity, stability, economic autonomy, citizenship. Well, amazingly, in places like India where costs are very low, that family, that three-generation family that you see there who were in hereditary slavery -- so, that granddad there, was born a baby into slavery -- but the total cost, amortized across the rest of the work, was about 150 dollars to bring that family out of slavery and then take them through a two year process to build a stable life of citizenship and education.
A boy in Ghana rescued from fishing slavery, about 400 dollars. In the United States, North America, much more expensive. Legal costs, medical costs ... we understand that it's expensive here: about 30,000 dollars. But most of the people in the world in slavery live in those places where the costs are lowest. And in fact, the global average is about what it is for Ghana.
And that means, when you multiply it up, the estimated cost of not just freedom but sustainable freedom for the entire 27 million people on the planet in slavery is something like 10.8 billion dollars -- what Americans spend on potato chips and pretzels, what Seattle is going to spend on its light rail system: usually the annual expenditure in this country on blue jeans, or in the last holiday period when we bought GameBoys and iPods and other tech gifts for people, we spent 10.8 billion dollars. Intel's fourth quarter earnings: 10.8 billion.
It's not a lot of money at the global level. In fact, it's peanuts. And the great thing about it is that it's not money down a hole, there is a freedom dividend. When you let people out of slavery to work for themselves, are they motivated? They take their kids out of the workplace, they build a school, they say, "We're going to have stuff we've never had before like three squares, medicine when we're sick, clothing when we're cold." They become consumers and producers and local economies begin to spiral up very rapidly.
That's important, all of that about how we rebuild sustainable freedom, because we'd never want to repeat what happened in this country in 1865. Four million people were lifted up out of slavery and then dumped. Dumped without political participation, decent education, any kind of real opportunity in terms of economic lives, and then sentenced to generations of violence and prejudice and discrimination. And America is still paying the price for the botched emancipation of 1865.
We have made a commitment that we will never let people come out of slavery on our watch, and end up as second class citizens. It's just not going to happen. This is what liberation really looks like. Children rescued from slavery in the fishing industry in Ghana, reunited with their parents, and then taken with their parents back to their villages to rebuild their economic well-being so that they become slave-proof -- absolutely unenslaveable.
Now, this woman lived in a village in Nepal. We'd been working there about a month. They had just begun to come out of a hereditary kind of slavery. They'd just begun to light up a little bit, open up a little bit. But when we went to speak with her, when we took this photograph, the slaveholders were still menacing us from the sidelines. They hadn't been really pushed back. I was frightened. We were frightened. We said to her, "Are you worried? Are you upset?"
She said, "No, because we've got hope now. How could we not succeed," she said, "when people like you from the other side of the world are coming here to stand beside us?"
Okay, we have to ask ourselves, are we willing to live in a world with slavery? If we don't take action, we just leave ourselves open to have someone else jerk the strings that tie us to slavery in the products we buy, and in our government policies. And yet, if there's one thing that every human being can agree on, I think it's that slavery should end.
And if there is a fundamental violation of our human dignity that we would all say is horrific, it's slavery. And we've got to say, what good is all of our intellectual and political and economic power -- and I'm really thinking intellectual power in this room -- if we can't use it to bring slavery to an end? I think there is enough intellectual power in this room to bring slavery to an end. And you know what? If we can't do that, if we can't use our intellectual power to end slavery, there is one last question: Are we truly free? Okay, thank you so much. (Applause) |
Zach Kaplan: Keith and I lead a research team. We investigate materials and technologies that have unexpected properties. Over the last three years, we found over 200 of these things, and so we looked back into our library and selected six we thought would be most surprising for TED. Of these six, the first one that we're going to talk about is in the black envelope you're holding. It comes from a company in Japan called GelTech. Now go ahead and open it up.
Keith Schacht: Now be sure and take the two pieces apart. What's unexpected about this is that it's soft, but it's also a strong magnet. Zach and I have always been fascinated observing unexpected things like this. We spent a long time thinking about why this is, and it's just recently that we realized: it's when we see something unexpected, it changes our understanding of the way things work. As you're seeing this gel magnet for the first time, if you assume that all magnets had to be hard, then seeing this surprised you and it changed your understanding of the way magnets could work.
ZK: Now, it's important to understand what the unexpected properties are. But to really think about the implications of what this makes possible, we found that it helps to think about how it could be applied in the world. So, a first idea is to use it on cabinet doors. If you line the sides of the cabinets using the gel material -- if a cabinet slams shut it wouldn't make a loud noise, and in addition the magnets would draw the cabinets closed. Imagine taking the same material, but putting it on the bottom of a sneaker. You know, this way you could go to the container store and buy one of those metal sheets that they hang on the back of your door, in your closet, and you could literally stick your shoes up instead of using a shelf. For me, I really love this idea. (Laughter) If you come to my apartment and see my closet, I'm sure you'd figure out why: it's a mess.
KS: Seeing the unexpected properties and then seeing a couple of applications -- it helps you see why this is significant, what the potential is. But we've found that the way we present our ideas it makes a big difference.
ZK: It was like six months ago that Keith and I were out in L.A., and we were at Starbucks having coffee with Roman Coppola. He works on mostly music videos and commercials with his company, The Directors Bureau. As we were talking, Roman told us that he's kind of an inventor on the side. And we were showing him the same gel magnet that you're holding in your hand -- and you know, we shared the same ideas. And you could see it in his face: Roman starts to get really excited and he whips out this manila folder; he opens it up and Keith and I look in, and he starts showing us concepts that he's been working on. These things just get him really excited. And so we're looking at these concepts, and we were just like, whoa, this guy's good. Because the way that he presented the concept -- his approach was totally different than ours. He sold it to you as if it was for sale right now. When we were going in the car back to the airport, we were thinking: why was this so powerful? And as we thought about it more, we realized that it let you fill in all the details about the experience, just as if you saw it on TV. So, for TED we decided to take our favorite idea for the gel magnet and work with Roman and his team at the Directors Bureau to create a commercial for a product from the future.
Narrator: Do you have a need for speed? Inventables Water Adventures dares you to launch yourself on a magnetically-levitating board down a waterslide so fast, so tall, that when you hit the bottom, it uses brakes to stop. Aqua Rocket: coming this summer.
KS: Now, we showed the concept to a few people before this, and they asked us, when's it coming out? So I just wanted to let you know, it's not actually coming out, just the concept is.
ZK: So now, when we dream up these concepts, it's important for us to make sure that they work from a technical standpoint. So I just want to quickly explain how this would work. This is the magnetically-levitating board that they mentioned in the commercial. The gel that you're holding would be lining the bottom of the board. Now this is important for two reasons. One: the soft properties of the magnet that make it so that, if it were to hit the rider in the head, it wouldn't injure him. In addition, you can see from the diagram on the right, the underpart of the slide would be an electromagnet. So this would actually repel the rider a little bit as you're going down. The force of the water rushing down, in addition to that repulsion force, would make this slide go faster than any slide on the market. It's because of this that you need the magnetic braking system. When you get to the very bottom of the slide -- (Laughter) -- the rider passes through an aluminum tube. And I'm going to kick it to Keith to explain why that's important from a technical standpoint.
KS: So I'm sure all you engineers know that even though aluminum is a metal, it's not a magnetic material. But something unexpected happens when you drop a magnet down an aluminum tube. So we set up a quick experiment here to show that to you. (Laughter) Now, you see the magnet fell really slowly. Now, I'm not going to get into the physics of it, but all you need to know is that the faster the magnet's falling, the greater the stopping force.
ZK: Now, our next technology is actually a 10-foot pole, and I have it right here in my pocket. (Laughter) There're a few different versions of it. (Laughter) KS: Some of them automatically unroll like this one. They can be made to automatically roll up, or they can be made stable, like Zach's, to hold any position in between.
ZK: As we were talking to the vendor -- to try to learn about how you could apply these, or how they're being applied currently -- he was telling us that, in the military they use this one so soldiers can keep it on their chests -- very concealed -- and then, when they're out on the field, erect it as an antenna to clearly send signals back to the base. In our brainstorms, we came up with the idea you could use it for a soccer goal: so at the end of the game, you just roll up the goal and put it in your gym bag. (Laughter)
KS: Now, the interesting thing about this is, you don't have to be an engineer to appreciate why a 10-foot pole that can fit in your pocket is so interesting. (Laughter) So we decided to go out onto the streets of Chicago and ask a few people on the streets what they thought you could do with this.
Man: I clean my ceiling fans with that and I get the spider webs off my house -- I do it that way. Woman: I'd make my very own walking stick. Woman: I would create a ladder to use to get up on top of the tree. Woman: An olive server. Man: Some type of extension pole -- like what the painters use. Woman: I would make a spear that, when you went deep sea diving, you could catch the fish really fast, and then roll it back up, and you could swim easier ... Yeah. (Laughter)
ZK: Now, for our next technology we're going to do a little demonstration, and so we need a volunteer from the audience. You sir, come on up. (Laughter) Come on up. Tell everybody your name.
Steve Jurvetson: Steve.
ZK: It's Steve. All right Steve, now, follow me. We need you to stand right in front of the TED sign. Right there. That's great. And hold onto this. Good luck to you. (Laughter)
KS: No, not yet. (Laughter)
ZK: I'd just like to let you all know that this presentation has been brought to you by Target.
KS: Little bit -- that's perfect, just perfect. Now, Zach, we're going to demonstrate a water gun fight from the future. (Laughter) So here, come on up to the front. All right, so now if you'll see here -- no, no, it's OK. So, describe to the audience the temperature of your shirt. Go ahead.
SJ: It's cold.
KS: Now the reason it's cold is that's it's not actually water loaded into these squirt guns -- it's a dry liquid developed by 3M. It's perfectly clear, it's odorless, it's colorless. It's so safe you could drink this stuff. (Laughter) And the reason it feels cold is because it evaporates 25 times faster than water. (Laughter) All right, well thanks for coming up. (Laughter)
ZK: Wait, wait, Steven -- before you go we filled this with the dry liquid so during the break you can shoot your friends. SJ: Excellent, thank you.
KS: Thanks for coming up. Let's give him a big round of applause. (Applause)
So what's the significance of this dry liquid? Early versions of the fluid were actually used on a Cray Supercomputer. Now, the unexpected thing about this is that Zach could stand up on stage and drench a perfectly innocent member of the audience without any concern that we'd damage the electronics, that we'd get him wet, that we'd hurt the books or the computers. It works because it's non-conductive. So you can see here, you can immerse a whole circuit board in this and it wouldn't cause any damage. You can circulate it to draw the heat away. But today it's most widely used in office buildings -- in the sprinkler system -- as a fire-suppression fluid. Again, it's perfectly safe for people. It puts out the fires, doesn't hurt anything. But our favorite idea for this was using it in a basketball game. So during halftime, it could rain down on the players, cool everyone down, and in a matter of minutes it would dry. Wouldn't hurt the court.
ZK: Our next technology comes to us from a company in Japan called Sekisui Chemical. One of their R&D engineers was working on a way to make plastic stiffer. While he was doing this, he noticed an unexpected thing. We have a video to show you.
KS: So you see there, it didn't bounce back. Now, this was an unintended side effect of some experiments they were doing. It's technically called, "shape-retaining property." Now, think about your interactions with aluminum foil. Shape-retaining is common in metal: you bend a piece of aluminum foil, and it holds its place. Contrast that with a plastic garbage can -- and you can push in the sides and it always bounces back.
ZK: For example, you could make a watch that wraps around your wrist, but doesn't use a buckle. Taking it a little further, if you wove those strips together -- kind of like a little basket -- you could make a shape-retaining sheet, and then you could embed it in a cloth: so you could make a picnic sheet that wraps around the table, so that way on a windy day it wouldn't blow away. For our next technology, it's hard to observe the unexpected property by itself, because it's an ink. So, we've prepared a video to show it applied to paper.
KS: As this paper is bending, the resistance of the ink changes. So with simple electronics, you can detect how much the page is being bent. Now, to think about the potential for this, think of all the places ink is supplied: on business cards, on the back of cereal boxes, board games. Any place you use ink, you could change the way you interact with it.
ZK: So my favorite idea for this is to apply the ink to a book. This could totally change the way that you interface with paper. You see the dark line on the side and the top. As you turn the pages of the book, the book can actually detect what page you're on, based on the curvature of the pages. In addition, if you were to fold in one of the corners, then you could program the book to actually email you the text on the page for your notes.
KS: For our last technology, we worked again with Roman and his team at the Directors Bureau to develop a commercial from the future to explain how it works.
Old Milk Carton: Oh yeah, it smells good. Who are you? New Milk Carton: I'm New Milk. OMC: I used to smell like you. Narrator: Fresh Watch, from Inventables Dairy Farms. Packaging that changes color when your milk's gone off. Don't let milk spoil your morning.
ZK: Now, this technology was developed by these two guys: Professor Ken Suslick and Neil Rakow, of the University of Illinois.
KS: Now the way it works: there's a matrix of color dyes. And these dyes change color in response to odors. So the smell of vanilla, that might change the four on the left to brown and the one on the right to yellow. This matrix can produce thousands of different color combinations to represent thousands of different smells. But like in the milk commercial, if you know what odor you want to detect, then they can formulate a specific dye to detect just that odor.
ZK: Right. It was that that started a conversation with Professor Suslick and myself, and he was explaining to me the things that this is making possible, beyond just detecting spoiled food. It's really where the significance of it lies. His company actually did a survey of firemen all across the country to try to learn, how are they currently testing the air when they respond to an emergency scene? And he kind of comically explained that time after time, what the firemen would say is: they would rush to the scene of the crime; they would look around; if there were no dead policemen, it was OK to go. (Laughter) I mean, this is a true story. They're using policemen as canaries. (Laughter) But more seriously, they determined that you could develop a device that can smell better than the humans, and say if it's safe for the firemen. In addition, he's spun off a company from the University called ChemSensing, where they're working on medical equipment. So, a patient can come in and actually blow into their device. By detecting the odor of particular bacteria, or viruses, or even lung cancer, the dots will change and they can use software to analyze the results. This can radically improve the way that doctors diagnose patients. Currently, they're using a method of trial and error, but this could tell you precisely what disease you have.
KS: So that was the six we had for you today, but I hope you're starting to see why we find these things so fascinating. Because every one of these six changed our understanding of what was possible in the world. Prior to seeing this, we would have assumed: a 10-foot pole couldn't fit in your pocket; something as inexpensive as ink couldn't sense the way paper is being bent; every one of these things -- and we're constantly trying to find more.
ZK: This is something that Keith and I really enjoy doing. I'm sure it's obvious to you now, but it was actually yesterday that I was reminded of why. I was having a conversation with Steve Jurvetson, over downstairs by the escalators, and he was telling me that when Chris sent out that little box, one of the items in it was the hydrophobic sand -- the sand that doesn't get wet. He said that he was playing with it with his son. And you know, his son was mesmerized, because he would dunk it in the water, he would take it out and it was bone dry. A few weeks later, he said that his son was playing with a lock of his mother's hair, and he noticed that there were some drops of water on the hair. And he took the thing and he looked up to Steve and he said, "Look, hydrophobic string." (Laughter) I mean, after hearing that story -- that really summed it up for me. Thank you very much.
KS: Thank you. (Applause) |
Now, extinction is a different kind of death. It's bigger. We didn't really realize that until 1914, when the last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died at the Cincinnati zoo. This had been the most abundant bird in the world that'd been in North America for six million years. Suddenly it wasn't here at all. Flocks that were a mile wide and 400 miles long used to darken the sun. Aldo Leopold said this was a biological storm, a feathered tempest. And indeed it was a keystone species that enriched the entire eastern deciduous forest, from the Mississippi to the Atlantic, from Canada down to the Gulf. But it went from five billion birds to zero in just a couple decades. What happened?
Well, commercial hunting happened. These birds were hunted for meat that was sold by the ton, and it was easy to do because when those big flocks came down to the ground, they were so dense that hundreds of hunters and netters could show up and slaughter them by the tens of thousands. It was the cheapest source of protein in America. By the end of the century, there was nothing left but these beautiful skins in museum specimen drawers.
There's an upside to the story. This made people realize that the same thing was about to happen to the American bison, and so these birds saved the buffalos.
But a lot of other animals weren't saved. The Carolina parakeet was a parrot that lit up backyards everywhere. It was hunted to death for its feathers. There was a bird that people liked on the East Coast called the heath hen. It was loved. They tried to protect it. It died anyway. A local newspaper spelled out, "There is no survivor, there is no future, there is no life to be recreated in this form ever again." There's a sense of deep tragedy that goes with these things, and it happened to lots of birds that people loved. It happened to lots of mammals. Another keystone species is a famous animal called the European aurochs. There was sort of a movie made about it recently. And the aurochs was like the bison. This was an animal that basically kept the forest mixed with grasslands across the entire Europe and Asian continent, from Spain to Korea. The documentation of this animal goes back to the Lascaux cave paintings.
The extinctions still go on. There's an ibex in Spain called the bucardo. It went extinct in 2000. There was a marvelous animal, a marsupial wolf called the thylacine in Tasmania, south of Australia, called the Tasmanian tiger. It was hunted until there were just a few left to die in zoos. A little bit of film was shot.
Sorrow, anger, mourning. Don't mourn. Organize. What if you could find out that, using the DNA in museum specimens, fossils maybe up to 200,000 years old could be used to bring species back, what would you do? Where would you start?
Well, you'd start by finding out if the biotech is really there. I started with my wife, Ryan Phelan, who ran a biotech business called DNA Direct, and through her, one of her colleagues, George Church, one of the leading genetic engineers who turned out to be also obsessed with passenger pigeons and a lot of confidence that methodologies he was working on might actually do the deed.
So he and Ryan organized and hosted a meeting at the Wyss Institute in Harvard bringing together specialists on passenger pigeons, conservation ornithologists, bioethicists, and fortunately passenger pigeon DNA had already been sequenced by a molecular biologist named Beth Shapiro. All she needed from those specimens at the Smithsonian was a little bit of toe pad tissue, because down in there is what is called ancient DNA. It's DNA which is pretty badly fragmented, but with good techniques now, you can basically reassemble the whole genome.
Then the question is, can you reassemble, with that genome, the whole bird? George Church thinks you can. So in his book, "Regenesis," which I recommend, he has a chapter on the science of bringing back extinct species, and he has a machine called the Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering machine. It's kind of like an evolution machine. You try combinations of genes that you write at the cell level and then in organs on a chip, and the ones that win, that you can then put into a living organism. It'll work. The precision of this, one of George's famous unreadable slides, nevertheless points out that there's a level of precision here right down to the individual base pair. The passenger pigeon has 1.3 billion base pairs in its genome.
So what you're getting is the capability now of replacing one gene with another variation of that gene. It's called an allele. Well that's what happens in normal hybridization anyway. So this is a form of synthetic hybridization of the genome of an extinct species with the genome of its closest living relative. Now along the way, George points out that his technology, the technology of synthetic biology, is currently accelerating at four times the rate of Moore's Law. It's been doing that since 2005, and it's likely to continue.
Okay, the closest living relative of the passenger pigeon is the band-tailed pigeon. They're abundant. There's some around here. Genetically, the band-tailed pigeon already is mostly living passenger pigeon. There's just some bits that are band-tailed pigeon. If you replace those bits with passenger pigeon bits, you've got the extinct bird back, cooing at you.
Now, there's work to do. You have to figure out exactly what genes matter. So there's genes for the short tail in the band-tailed pigeon, genes for the long tail in the passenger pigeon, and so on with the red eye, peach-colored breast, flocking, and so on. Add them all up and the result won't be perfect. But it should be be perfect enough, because nature doesn't do perfect either.
So this meeting in Boston led to three things.
First off, Ryan and I decided to create a nonprofit called Revive and Restore that would push de-extinction generally and try to have it go in a responsible way, and we would push ahead with the passenger pigeon.
Another direct result was a young grad student named Ben Novak, who had been obsessed with passenger pigeons since he was 14 and had also learned how to work with ancient DNA, himself sequenced the passenger pigeon, using money from his family and friends. We hired him full-time. Now, this photograph I took of him last year at the Smithsonian, he's looking down at Martha, the last passenger pigeon alive. So if he's successful, she won't be the last.
The third result of the Boston meeting was the realization that there are scientists all over the world working on various forms of de-extinction, but they'd never met each other. And National Geographic got interested because National Geographic has the theory that the last century, discovery was basically finding things, and in this century, discovery is basically making things. De-extinction falls in that category. So they hosted and funded this meeting. And 35 scientists, they were conservation biologists and molecular biologists, basically meeting to see if they had work to do together. Some of these conservation biologists are pretty radical. There's three of them who are not just re-creating ancient species, they're recreating extinct ecosystems in northern Siberia, in the Netherlands, and in Hawaii.
Henri, from the Netherlands, with a Dutch last name I won't try to pronounce, is working on the aurochs. The aurochs is the ancestor of all domestic cattle, and so basically its genome is alive, it's just unevenly distributed. So what they're doing is working with seven breeds of primitive, hardy-looking cattle like that Maremmana primitivo on the top there to rebuild, over time, with selective back-breeding, the aurochs. Now, re-wilding is moving faster in Korea than it is in America, and so the plan is, with these re-wilded areas all over Europe, they will introduce the aurochs to do its old job, its old ecological role, of clearing the somewhat barren, closed-canopy forest so that it has these biodiverse meadows in it.
Another amazing story came from Alberto Fernández-Arias. Alberto worked with the bucardo in Spain. The last bucardo was a female named Celia who was still alive, but then they captured her, they got a little bit of tissue from her ear, they cryopreserved it in liquid nitrogen, released her back into the wild, but a few months later, she was found dead under a fallen tree. They took the DNA from that ear, they planted it as a cloned egg in a goat, the pregnancy came to term, and a live baby bucardo was born. It was the first de-extinction in history.
(Applause)
It was short-lived. Sometimes interspecies clones have respiration problems. This one had a malformed lung and died after 10 minutes, but Alberto was confident that cloning has moved along well since then, and this will move ahead, and eventually there will be a population of bucardos back in the mountains in northern Spain.
Cryopreservation pioneer of great depth is Oliver Ryder. At the San Diego zoo, his frozen zoo has collected the tissues from over 1,000 species over the last 35 years. Now, when it's frozen that deep, minus 196 degrees Celsius, the cells are intact and the DNA is intact. They're basically viable cells, so someone like Bob Lanza at Advanced Cell Technology took some of that tissue from an endangered animal called the Javan banteng, put it in a cow, the cow went to term, and what was born was a live, healthy baby Javan banteng, who thrived and is still alive.
The most exciting thing for Bob Lanza is the ability now to take any kind of cell with induced pluripotent stem cells and turn it into germ cells, like sperm and eggs.
So now we go to Mike McGrew who is a scientist at Roslin Institute in Scotland, and Mike's doing miracles with birds. So he'll take, say, falcon skin cells, fibroblast, turn it into induced pluripotent stem cells. Since it's so pluripotent, it can become germ plasm. He then has a way to put the germ plasm into the embryo of a chicken egg so that that chicken will have, basically, the gonads of a falcon. You get a male and a female each of those, and out of them comes falcons. (Laughter) Real falcons out of slightly doctored chickens.
Ben Novak was the youngest scientist at the meeting. He showed how all of this can be put together. The sequence of events: he'll put together the genomes of the band-tailed pigeon and the passenger pigeon, he'll take the techniques of George Church and get passenger pigeon DNA, the techniques of Robert Lanza and Michael McGrew, get that DNA into chicken gonads, and out of the chicken gonads get passenger pigeon eggs, squabs, and now you're getting a population of passenger pigeons.
It does raise the question of, they're not going to have passenger pigeon parents to teach them how to be a passenger pigeon. So what do you do about that? Well birds are pretty hard-wired, as it happens, so most of that is already in their DNA, but to supplement it, part of Ben's idea is to use homing pigeons to help train the young passenger pigeons how to flock and how to find their way to their old nesting grounds and feeding grounds.
There were some conservationists, really famous conservationists like Stanley Temple, who is one of the founders of conservation biology, and Kate Jones from the IUCN, which does the Red List. They're excited about all this, but they're also concerned that it might be competitive with the extremely important efforts to protect endangered species that are still alive, that haven't gone extinct yet. You see, you want to work on protecting the animals out there. You want to work on getting the market for ivory in Asia down so you're not using 25,000 elephants a year.
But at the same time, conservation biologists are realizing that bad news bums people out. And so the Red List is really important, keep track of what's endangered and critically endangered, and so on. But they're about to create what they call a Green List, and the Green List will have species that are doing fine, thank you, species that were endangered, like the bald eagle, but they're much better off now, thanks to everybody's good work, and protected areas around the world that are very, very well managed. So basically, they're learning how to build on good news. And they see reviving extinct species as the kind of good news you might be able to build on.
Here's a couple related examples. Captive breeding will be a major part of bringing back these species. The California condor was down to 22 birds in 1987. Everybody thought is was finished. Thanks to captive breeding at the San Diego Zoo, there's 405 of them now, 226 are out in the wild. That technology will be used on de-extincted animals. Another success story is the mountain gorilla in Central Africa. In 1981, Dian Fossey was sure they were going extinct. There were just 254 left. Now there are 880. They're increasing in population by three percent a year. The secret is, they have an eco-tourism program, which is absolutely brilliant. So this photograph was taken last month by Ryan with an iPhone. That's how comfortable these wild gorillas are with visitors.
Another interesting project, though it's going to need some help, is the northern white rhinoceros. There's no breeding pairs left. But this is the kind of thing that a wide variety of DNA for this animal is available in the frozen zoo. A bit of cloning, you can get them back.
So where do we go from here? These have been private meetings so far. I think it's time for the subject to go public. What do people think about it? You know, do you want extinct species back? Do you want extinct species back?
(Applause)
Tinker Bell is going to come fluttering down. It is a Tinker Bell moment, because what are people excited about with this? What are they concerned about?
We're also going to push ahead with the passenger pigeon. So Ben Novak, even as we speak, is joining the group that Beth Shapiro has at UC Santa Cruz. They're going to work on the genomes of the passenger pigeon and the band-tailed pigeon. As that data matures, they'll send it to George Church, who will work his magic, get passenger pigeon DNA out of that. We'll get help from Bob Lanza and Mike McGrew to get that into germ plasm that can go into chickens that can produce passenger pigeon squabs that can be raised by band-tailed pigeon parents, and then from then on, it's passenger pigeons all the way, maybe for the next six million years. You can do the same thing, as the costs come down, for the Carolina parakeet, for the great auk, for the heath hen, for the ivory-billed woodpecker, for the Eskimo curlew, for the Caribbean monk seal, for the woolly mammoth.
Because the fact is, humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. We have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage. Most of that we'll do by expanding and protecting wildlands, by expanding and protecting the populations of endangered species. But some species that we killed off totally we could consider bringing back to a world that misses them.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Chris Anderson: Thank you. I've got a question. So, this is an emotional topic. Some people stand. I suspect there are some people out there sitting, kind of asking tormented questions, almost, about, well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait a minute, there's something wrong with mankind interfering in nature in this way. There's going to be unintended consequences. You're going to uncork some sort of Pandora's box of who-knows-what. Do they have a point?
Stewart Brand: Well, the earlier point is we interfered in a big way by making these animals go extinct, and many of them were keystone species, and we changed the whole ecosystem they were in by letting them go. Now, there's the shifting baseline problem, which is, so when these things come back, they might replace some birds that are there that people really know and love. I think that's, you know, part of how it'll work. This is a long, slow process -- One of the things I like about it, it's multi-generation. We will get woolly mammoths back.
CA: Well it feels like both the conversation and the potential here are pretty thrilling. Thank you so much for presenting. SB: Thank you.
CA: Thank you. (Applause) |
I am going to be talking about secrets. Obviously the best way to divulge a secret is to tell someone to not say anything about it. (Laughter) Secrets. I'm using PowerPoint this year just because, you know, I'm into the TED thing. (Laughter) And when you use these things you don't have to go like that. You just press it. (Laughter) Oh, man. Um, yes. (Laughter) Yes. I'm sure! Just change it! (Laughter) Is Bill Gates here? Change it! Come on! What? (Laughter) Ah! Okay. That's not my slides, but it's okay. (Laughter)
As you can see, these are all maps. And maps are important devices for transferring information, especially if you have human cognitive ability. We can see that all formulas are really maps. Now, as humans, we make maps of places that we seldom even go, which seems a little wasteful of time.
This, of course, is a map of the moon. There're some very delightful names. Tranquilacalitis, [unclear]. My favorite is Frigoris. What are these people thinking? Frigoris? What the Frigoris you doing? Names are important. Frigoris? This is the Moon. People could live there one day. I'll meet you at Frigoris. No. I don't think so. (Laughter)
There we see Mars, again with various names. And this is all done, by the way, by the International Astronomical Union. This is an actual group of people that sit around naming planetary objects. This is from their actual book. These are some of the names that they have chosen, ladies and gentlemen.
I'll go through a little of them. Bolotnitsa. That, of course, is the Slavic swamp mermaid. (Laughter) Now I think the whole concept of a mermaid doesn't really blend into the swamp feel. (Laughter) "Oh look! Mermaid come out of swamp. Oh boy! It's time for Bolotnitsa!" (Laughter)
Djabran Fluctus. If that don't flow off the tongue, what does? (Laughter) I mean kids are studying this stuff and they've got the word "fluctus" up there. That's wrong. (Laughter) One dyslexic kid and he could be ruining his life. (Laughter) "It fluctus up, Mama."
Hikuleo Fluctus. That's a little more flowing. Hikuleo sounds like a kind of a Leonardo DiCaprio 17 syllable thing. And that's the Tonga underworld.
And one of my favorites is the Itoki Fluctus, who is the Nicaraguan goddess of insects, stars, and planets. Now, if you're a goddess of stars and planets wouldn't you relegate insects to somebody else? (Laughter) "No, no, really, I'm so busy with the stars. Would you mind taking the insects? Thank you darling. Oh take the spiders too. I know they're not insects, but I don't care. Monkeys, chimps, just get rid of the hairy creatures." (Laughter)
Now, we're going to be going to Mars one day. And when we do, it's going to be unfair for the people that are living there to have to live with these ridiculous names. So, you'll be on Mars, and you're at Hellespointica Depressio which has got to be a really "up" place. (Laughter)
Yeah, I'm at the Depressio, and I want to get over to Amazonis so I plug it into the Mars map, and click the button and there's my directions. I go to Chrysokeras. (Laughter) Left to the Thymiamata. Then to Niliacus Lacus, which is not a bad name. Niliacus Lacus, try to get the practice, slick-a-tick-a-bacus. That's a cool name. I will say that. So, I hold back a little of my venom for these astronomical misnomers.
And then of course Arnon to Thoth. And of course there will be advertisements. This is from their rule book, the International Astronomical Union. And you know they're international because they put it "en Francais" as well. L'Union Astronomique Internationale, for those of you who don't speak French. I thought I'd translate for you.
From the rulebook: Nomenclature is a tool. The first consideration, make it clear, simple and unambiguous. And I think that Djabran Fluctus, that fits that mode. (Laughter) That's simple, the goddess of goats, very simple. Djabran Fluctus. "Now, Frank is this clear to you, Djabran Fluctus?" "Yeah, that's the goat goddess right? The Abacazanian? (Laughter) It's clear to me." "Listen, I'm going back to the swamp mermaid. Can you call me in a little while?" (Laughter)
Also, from the actual document I highlighted a part I thought may be of interest. Anyone can suggest changing a name. So, I look to you, fellow member of the Earth community. We've got to change this stuff up fast. So, these are actual names of people that work there. I did some more investigation. These are more people working for this group. And, as you can see, they don't use their first names. (Laughter) These are people naming planets, and they won't use their first names. Something is askew here. (Laughter) Is it because his name is really Jupiter Blunck? (Laughter) Is that Ganymede Andromeda Burba? (Laughter) Is that Mars Ya Marov? I don't know. But it's investigative material, no doubt.
There are some mapping people who do use their names. Witness please, Eugene Shoemaker, who, diligently, from a young boy decided he wanted to make maps of celestial bodies. Must have been a very interesting day in the Shoemaker house. "Mom, I want to make maps." "That's wonderful Eugene. You could make maps of Toronto." "No, I want to make maps of planets." "Yeah, go to your room." (Laughter)
Martians, Venusians, Jovians. We have names for places where people don't exist. That seems a little silly to me. There are no Jovians.
Getting back to my premise, I used stamps, by the way, because you don't have to pay anybody for the rights. (Laughter) (Applause) There is obviously Einstein, Niels Bohr, de Fermat's last theorem, and I'm not sure whether that's James Coburn or Richard Harris. (Laughter) It's definitely one of the two. I'm not really clear which one.
But obviously the point is that numbers are maps. And within numbers, is there an underlying secret to the universe? That is the premise of this particular presentation. By the way, that's a natural picture of Saturn, no adjustments. I mean that's just beautiful. So beautiful that I will even give up a laugh to explain my love of this particular planet, and the day Saturday, named after it, wonderfully.
So, formulas relate number to form. That's Euler, his formula was one of the inspirations that lead to the beginning of string theory which is kind of cool, not that funny, but it is cool. (Laughter) He was also famous for having no body. (Laughter) Which a lot of you are like, "How did he figure that out?" He's got no body, no man, just a head floating high. Here comes Euler. (Laughter)
And that's an icosahedron, which is one of the five sacred solids, very important shapes. You see the icosahedron again. The dodecahedron, it's dual. There is a dodecahedron which I had to do in my room last night. The five sacred solids, as you can see there. Which is not to be confused with the five sacred salads. (Laughter) Blue cheese, ranch, oil and vinegar, thousand islands and house. I suggest the house.
The reality, now here is something important. What's important about this is these shapes are duals of each other. And you can see how the icosahedron withdraws into the dodecahedron and then they just merge into each other. So, the whole concept of branes in the universe, if the universe is shaped like a dodecahedron this is a very good map of what could possibly be. And that is, of course, what we are here to talk about.
What a coincidence! October 9th, in France, Jean-Pierre Luminet said that the universe is probably shaped like a dodecahedron, based on information that they got from this probe. This would be a normal wave pattern. But what they're seeing, way out there in the far reaches of the microwave background, is this kind of odd undulation. It doesn't plug in to what they suspected a flat universe would be.
So, you can kind of get an idea from this extrapolating that back under this huge picture, so we get this idea of what the primal universe looked like. And judging from this, it looks a little like a cheeseburger. (Laughter) So, I'm thinking the universe is either a dodecahedron or a cheeseburger. And for me, that's a win-win. Everybody goes, I'm happy. (Laughter) Better really hurry up.
I just threw this in because as important as all of our intellectual abilities are, without heart and without love it's just -- it's all meaningless. And that, to me, is really beautiful. (Laughter) Except for that creepy guy in the background. (Laughter)
Getting back to the point of my particular presentation, Kepler, one of my great heroes, who realized that these five solids, which I spoke of earlier, were related somehow to the planets, but he couldn't prove it. It freaked him out. But it did lead to Newton discovering gravity. So, maps of things leading to organized understandings of the universe in which we emerge.
Now this is Isaac from a Vietnamese stamp. (Laughter) I am not suggesting at all that my Vietnamese brothers and sisters could maybe use a little art class here and there. But ... (Laughter) that's not a good picture. (Laughter) Not a good picture. Now, my friends in the island of Nevis are a little better. Look at that! That's Isaac Newton. That guy is rockin'. (Laughter) What a handsome cat.
Once again, Nicaragua let me down. (Laughter) And Copernicus looks like Johnny Carson, which is really weird. (Laughter) I don't get that at all. Once again, these guys rock it out. Isaac is kickin' ass. Man, he looks like a rock star. This is freaky is a major way. This is Sierra Leone. They got little babies in there, floating in there. (Laughter)
Man. I don't really need to comment on this. But I didn't know that Isaac Newton was in the Moody Blues. Did you? (Laughter) When did this happen? (Laughter) It's a different kind of course. And they've got five apples? I mean these guys are extrapolating in realms that are not necessarily valid. Although five is a good number, of course.
Ecuador, my friend Kepler, as you can see, they call him Juan. (Laughter) Juan? No! Johannes, not Juan. It wasn't Carlos Chaplain. It's wrong. (Laughter)
René Descartes, of course. Once again these Grenada people, this is like way too sick for anybody's imagination. He's all murky. There is little kids leaning on his leg, little ghosts flying around. We gotta clean this stuff up fast, ladies and gentlemen. (Laughter)
This is, of course, the Cartesian coordinates. Once again, that's Sierra Leone. This is again, indicating how numbers relate to space relate to form, maps of the universe. Because that's why we're here, really, I think to figure stuff out and to love each other.
Descartes. (Laughter) Before the horse. (Laughter) Now, Monaco took Descartes, and just flipped him around. Now, Monaco is problematic for me, and I'll show you why. Here is a map. All they have is a casino on it. (Laughter) And why Franklin Delano Roosevelt is on their map I don't even want to hazard a guess. But I'd say he'd been to Hellespointica Depressio recently. (Laughter)
This is the flag of Monaco. Ladies and gentlemen, the flag of Indonesia. Please examine. (Laughter) (Applause) Not sure how this came to be, but it's not right. In Monaco, "No, what are you talking about? They are so different. Look, ours is more red, it's longer. They stole our flag! They stole our flag!" (Laughter)
Bode's law wasn't even his law. It was a guy named Titus. And the reason I just bring this up because it is a law that doesn't really work. That's Jude Law and some of his films recently didn't work. (Laughter) Just a correlation that indicates how things are misinterpreted.
And I wonder if the photographer said, "Okay, Jude, could you touch your tooth? That's good." Just a tip, if you're being photographed for press pictures, don't touch your teeth. (Laughter)
Prime numbers, Gauss, one of my favorites. Golden section, I've been obsessed with this thing since before I was born. I know that scares a lot of you, but that was my purpose entirely. There we can see Fibonacci numbers related to the Golden Section, because Fibonacci and Golden Section relate to the unfolding of the measured meter of matter, as I refer to it. If Fibonacci had been on Paxil, (Laughter) that would be the Fibonacci series. "Ten milligram, 20 milligram." "Leonardo, dinner's ready, put down those books and take your pills." "Yes, Mama." (Laughter)
Alright where is this going? That's a good question. Here is the premise that I began 27 years ago. If numbers can express the laws of this incredible universe that we live, I reason, through some sort of reverse engineering, we could extrapolate from them some basic structural element of this universe. And that's what I did. Twenty-seven years ago I started working on this.
And I tried to build a particle accelerator. (Laughter) And that didn't work out well. So, then I thought a calculator is a metaphor. I can just divide numbers, that's like atom smashing. That's what I did. That's how I found Moleeds. Moleeds are what I believe the thing that will allow string theory to be proved. They are the nodes on the string, patterns and relationships, 27, 37. That was the first chart I came up with.
You can see, even if you don't go for the numbers, the beauty of the symmetry. The numbers from one to 36, divided into six groups. Symmetry, pairs. Every top adds up to 37. Bottom, all 74. There is so many intricate relationships that I'm not going to go there now, because you would say, "Hey, go back to the Fluctus part." (Laughter)
Circle of Fifths, acoustic harmony, geometric symmetry. I knew those two were related. Once again, the Cartesian kind of cross-over. So, I said if I'm going to put a circle, see what kind of patterns I get, boom, the Red System. Look at that. You can't just make this stuff up, ladies and gentlemen. (Laughter) You can't just go around going, "Oh, I'm going to put some triangles in a circle and they're going to be symmetrical. And they're all going to add up, and it's going to be, oh yeah, I figured that out."
This is beyond anything anybody could just make up. There is the Orange System. (Laughter) And you'll see over here, these are multiples of the number 27. And they recapitulate that shape, even though that's a circle of nine and that's a circle of 36. It's nuts. (Laughter) That's the Green System. It all folds in half on the Green System, right between 18 and 19. The Blue System. The Violet. It's all there. (Laughter) Look at that! I mean you cannot make that stuff up. (Laughter) That just doesn't fall out of a tree, ladies and gentlemen. Twenty-seven years of my life! (Laughter) And I'm presenting it here at TED. Why? Because this is the place if aliens land, I hope they come here. (Laughter) "We are going to destroy the Earth. Hmmm ... maybe not." (Laughter)
In this last year I have found these subsequent systems which allow for the mathematic possibilities of the Calabi-Yau manifolds in a way that doesn't necessitate these little hidden dimensions. Which works mathematically, but it just doesn't seem God-like to me. It just seems like it's not sexy and elegant, it's hidden. I don't want hidden, I want to see it. (Laughter)
I found other pairs all have symmetry, even though, unlike the master one, their symmetry is split. Unbelievable. This is like crazy. Am I the only one that sees this? (Laughter) You know, I didn't just draw this in a day, by the way. You know, try making some charts like this at home. You gotta be accurate! There's measurement involved, increments. These are maps, by the way. Not stamps, but one day. (Laughter)
Okay, I'm getting to the punch. Golden Ratio, it's crazy. And look at this, built within it is the Golden Ratio. I start looking at that, and look at them again. They start looking like planets. I go to JPL. I look at the orbits of the planets. I find 18 examples of it in our solar system. I never told anybody. This is the first thing. This could be history. (Laughter) Kepler was right. (Laughter) Eighteen and 19, the middle of the Moleeds, 0.618 is the golden section. Multiply them together, 18.618 x 19.618 is 365.247. Which is .005 different from the number of days in a year.
Hey, you can't make this up. (Laughter) Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) |
Welcome to Africa! Or rather, I should say, welcome home. Because this is where it all really began, isn't it? Looking at fossils dating back several millions of years -- it all points to evidence that life for the human species as we know it began right here. We are on an amazing journey the next four days. You're going to hear stories of "Africa: The Next Chapter." Fantastic tales, anecdotes from speakers. But I want to turn that upside down for a moment, and get something out on the table and clear the air so to say. What's the worst thing you've ever heard about Africa? And this is not a rhetorical question. I actually want answers from you. Go for it! The worst. Famine. Corruption. More. Genocide. AIDS. Slavery. That's enough.
We've all heard these things. But this is about Africa, the story we have not heard. The stories that we want to know, and the stories that do exist about positive tales. A part of my talk is going to be about investment opportunities that exist on this continent, to separate the rhetoric from the reality, the fact from the fiction. To go to the actual data and statistics that exist about the actual things that are happening on the ground that make Africa a realistic investment opportunity and option for you. So let's get going because Africa, to some degree, is on a turnaround. A turnaround in terms of how it manages its image, and how it takes control of its own destiny. And turnarounds are part and parcel of what I have focused on for most of my professional career. And it all started almost a decade ago, as a young consultant at McKinsey & Company at their first African office in Johannesburg.
And there we worked with leading CEOs on African issues, and African companies on turnarounds, making the companies not just the best in Africa but the best globally. But I really formalized this focus on turnarounds when I was completing my MBA in the United States. It all began with a fantastic phone call. It was from Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Harvard Business School guru and a professor of mine. And she said, "I want to write a case, Euvin -- a case on a public-sector leader that has lessons for the corporate world." And the leader that came to mind was Nelson Mandela. Because Nelson Mandela, as he took over power as the first democratically-elected president of South Africa, faced a situation of a country that could have slid into the abyss of chaos. But he started the country on a path of a positive cycle.
Now the case, "Nelson Mandela: Change Leader," became part of the research base for a chapter in Rosabeth's new book called "Confidence." And "Confidence" became a New York Times bestseller and topped Business Week's hardcover bestseller list. And why I tell you this story is because later, when I was interviewed on SABC Africa, on a pan-African broadcast, they asked, "What is your key lesson, or the key thing you enjoy the most?" -- because it was a huge privilege to be part of such a project. The lesson from that was that it was Africa -- an African story -- that was used to share news with the rest of the world of what the benchmark can be for corporate turnarounds. Africa was being used as a success story!
So I want to share with you a personal story about a turnaround or a transformation. And that has to do with me because in 1994, I packed a few things into a backpack and headed off for a year of travel in the middle of my university career. You should have seen my parents' reaction!
(Laughter)
But very soon, I found myself from the southern part of Africa, in South Africa -- at the very north, in Egypt. And I sought out the most remote places. I went to the Siwa Oasis. That was one of my stops. And the Siwa Oasis is famous for several things, but the key thing is that it was the place that Alexander the Great went to when he wanted to find out what his destiny had in store for him. And legend has it that Alexander trekked through this desert. Half his battalion was wiped out in the sandstorm. And myth says that he had an audience with the oracle, and it foretold his destiny of greatness. This was 300 BC. So Africa had long been seen as a place to go to for answers.
Now, the thing I remember about Siwa was the magical view of the sky at night. With no natural light source, Siva is one of these amazing places that when you look up you see a perfect tapestry. Fast forward to 2002. I'm sitting in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the Healthcare Development Conference. And I see the same picture, but from the opposite side. A satellite picture looking down at the earth. And it was that picture that made such a profound impact on me because I'll never forget it. I remember the very moment. And I wanted to share that image with you of what I saw at that point. The first thing that I saw was North America at night -- glowing, in all its glory. A warm feeling. Light.
And then I saw it -- Africa. Quite literally the "Dark Continent." And while Africa may be dark, the thing that brought the message home to me was that this is the challenge we are facing, but it's also the opportunity. Because whilst Africa may be dark -- other than the few specks that exist north and in the south and other areas -- it's aglow with the light in the hearts of the millions of people that are there. Entrepreneurs, dynamic people, people with hope. It was George Kimble, the geographer, who said that, "The only thing dark about Africa is our ignorance of it." So let's start shedding light on this amazing eclectic continent that has so much to offer.
Let's start unpacking it. Africa is the second-largest continent, a landmass second from Asia. It also is the second most populated continent, with 900 million people. In fact -- coming back to the land mass -- Africa is so big that you could fit in the continental United States, China, and the entire Europe into Africa, and still have space. Africa is home to over 1,000 languages -- 2,000 is another estimate that's out there -- with over 2,000 languages and dialects. But you could say, "Invest in Africa in over 1,000 languages, and it wouldn't make a difference." What does the data say? As an investment banker, I'm in the cross-flow of information and the changes that are taking place in capital markets. So I want to share with you some of these bellwether signals, or signs, and winds of change that are sweeping this continent.
So let's start on that. And let's start at the high level, on the macro-factors. Inflation, in general, is coming down across Africa -- that's the first sign -- in many countries reaching double-digit figures. So let's start looking at some of those. I call it my Z.E.N. cluster. Zambia: from 2004 to 2006, moves from the 18 percent in inflation to the nine percent. Egypt: from the 16 percent to about 8.4 percent. Nigeria: a similar situation, from the 16 percent to the eight percent. Single digits. More fascinating, you have other countries -- South Africa, Mauritius, Namibia -- all in single digits. But that's just part of the story. You have a similar trend with currencies -- currencies going through an extreme time of stability. But that's looking at the big picture. And the first myth to dispel is that Africa is not a country. It's made up --
(Applause)
It's made up of 53 different countries. So the very definition -- to say "invest in Africa" is a no-go. It's meaningless. Each country has a unique value proposition. You can make money, you can lose money in Africa. But opportunities, boy oh boy, they exist. And this is what today is about -- it's about discussing those very opportunities. So let's start getting into the countries and into the specific material and data. I was recently elected, as Emeka mentioned, as the President of the South African Chamber of Commerce in America. And I'm very proud and happy to be in that role because it is a fascinating position to be in. To hear this dialogue that's just increasing in tenor and velocity, of decisions about trade and companies wanting to come. So the first port of call: let's talk a little bit about South Africa. But not the South Africa we always talk about -- the gold, the minerals, the First World infrastructure -- a bit about the other side of it.
For example, South Africa was recently voted as the top destination for the top 1,000 UK companies for offshore call-centers. Same language, timeline, et cetera. Makes sense. Other headlines that have recently reached South Africa were Bain Capital and KKR, the big boys of private equity. Headline in South Africa: "They have landed." Quite ominous. But what were they there for? To acquire assets. Bing Capital's acquisition of Edcon, a large retailer, is testimony to the confidence they are starting to place in the economy. Because it is actually a long-term play. Being a retailer, it is a play on the belief that this middle-class that's growing will continue to grow, that the boom and the confidence in consumer spending will continue. But the story of Africa, and my focus, is beyond South Africa because there's so much happening. Undoubtedly, Nigeria is clearly a hot spot. Challenges -- and we will hear a lot about Nigeria in these four days.
But looking at Goldman Sachs' work -- we had the famous BRIC Report. The new report, "The Next Eleven," highlights that by 2020 Nigeria is going to be amongst the top 10 economies in the world. It's an investment opportunity. Think about that. Is anyone -- our banks, our investors -- seriously thinking about going to Nigeria? If you haven't, why not? What's going on in Nigeria? A couple of things. I want to talk about it from the perspective of capital markets. Bellwether signs again. Guarantee Trust Bank recently issued the first Euro Bond out of Africa, and this excludes South Africa. But the first Eurobond, the raising of international capital offshore, off its own balance sheet, without any sovereign backing -- that is an indication of the confidence that is taking place in that economy. Without any sovereign backing, a Nigerian company raising capital offshore. It's just a sign of things to come.
Looking at the oil industry, Africa provides 18 percent of the U.S.'s oil supply, with the Middle East just 16 percent. It's an important strategic partner. Let's put Nigeria in perspective. 2.2 to 2.4 million barrels of oil a day -- the same league as Kuwait, the same league as Venezuela. But with Africa, let's start being careful about this. And Emeka and I have had these discussions. We have to move away from what's called "the curse of the commodities." Because it's not about oil, it's not about commodities. For Africa to truly be sustainable, we have to move beyond to other industries.
So let's unpack those very quickly, and I'm going to move through these very, very, very fast because I can see that clock counting down. What else is going on there? Egypt. Egypt is launching a first large industrial zone -- 2.8 billion investment. The announcement just came out the last few weeks. Close to the Mediterranean, near Alexandria -- textiles, petrochemicals. It's being managed by a Singaporean-based management company. So they want to emerge as an industrial powerhouse across the industries -- away from oil.
Let's look at agriculture. Let's look at forestry. What's going on there? In Tanzania last week, we had the launch of the East African Organic Produce Standard. Again, gathering together farmers, gathering together stakeholders in East Africa to get standards for organic produce. Better prices. It ties in with small-scale farmers in terms of no pesticides, no fertilizers. Again, opportunity to tackle markets to get that higher price. Uganda: the New Forest Company, replanting and redeveloping their forests. Why is that important? As the energy needs are met and electricity is needed [we will need] poles for rolling out electricity. But here is the sweetener in the deal. They're going to be tapping into carbon credits. Let's go back to Nigeria. The banking sector has undergone tremendous transformation, from over 80 banks to 25 banks. Strengthening of the system. But what's going on there? Only 10 percent of the country is banked. The largest population in Africa is in Nigeria. 135 million-plus people. Think about that. There are only 700 ATMs in the country. Opportunity.
The same for telecoms across the country. Now let's look at the continent as a whole. People look at the roads, for example, and they'd say, "Angola: 90 percent of roads are untarred. Ah, problem!" It's more expensive to transport goods. Prices of goods go up, inflation is affected. Nigeria: 70 percent of roads are untarred. Zambia: 80 percent. In general, more than 50 percent of roads are untarred. This is an opportunity! Energy needs -- it's an opportunity. So what are the signs that things are fundamentally changing? Let's look at the stock markets in Africa. If I had to ask you, "In 2005 what was the best performing stock market or stock exchange in the world?" Would Egypt come to mind? In 2005, the Egyptian stock exchange returned over 145 percent. What's going on in some of the other countries? Let's look at some 2006 numbers. Kenya: over 60 percent. Nigeria: over 40 percent. South Africa: in the 20 percents. High ones. These are the trends that are taking place. But in any investment decision, the key question is, "What is my alternative investment?"
Because in Africa today, we are competing globally for capital. And global capital is agnostic -- it has no loyalties. There's an overhang of capital in the U.S., and the key is yield pickup. What Africa is providing is a diversification play, and also opportunities for yield pickup for the investor that's aware of what he or she is doing. Now, when looking at Africa vis-a-vis other things, and countries in Africa vis-a-vis other things, comparisons become important. 10 years ago there, were very few countries that received sovereign ratings from the Standard & Poors, Moody's and Fitch's. Today, 16 African countries and growing have sovereign country ratings. What does this mean? Take Nigeria again: double B-minus -- in the league of Ukraine and Turkey. Immediately we have a comparison. The backbone of making investment decisions for global holders of capital. Some other figures. South Africa: triple B-plus. Botswana: A-plus. Bakino Faso: B-minus. And so on.
In fact, one of the big agencies is setting up an office in Africa. Why are they doing that? Because they expect investment to follow. So one of the big bellwethers, and one of my final points I want to mention, is the interesting thing I read is that CNBC has launched their first African channel. Why is CNBC doing this? It's the 24-hour rolling African news channel. They're doing it because they are expecting things to happen. Me and you, the investments we are going to be making, the investments the world is going to be making -- that's the 24-hour news channel dedicated to Africa. So that's the change that's coming down the pipeline.
So in conclusion, I want to turn back to that very slide that made such a deep impact on me all those years ago. This time [I'll] give you the entire picture that I saw in 2002, and ask you that when you think about what your role can be in Africa, think about your journey in terms of bringing light to this continent. Because there are amazing opportunities available. And think about the concept of transformation in the back of your mind because things can be turned around rather quickly.
In 1899, Joseph Conrad released "The Heart of Darkness," a tale of grim horror along the Congo River. If one looks carefully, on the Congo River is one of those bright lights. And that's the very Congo river generating light -- the old heart of darkness now generating light with hydro-electric power. That is a transformation in power of ideas. So the next step, over the next four days, is us exploring more of these ideas. And perchance, if you can always keep this picture in your mind, that when we convene maybe in the distant future, in 2020, that picture will look very different. Thank you.
(Applause) |
I have a question for you: Are you religious? Please raise your hand right now if you think of yourself as a religious person. Let's see, I'd say about three or four percent. I had no idea there were so many believers at a TED Conference. (Laughter) Okay, here's another question: Do you think of yourself as spiritual in any way, shape or form? Raise your hand. Okay, that's the majority.
My Talk today is about the main reason, or one of the main reasons, why most people consider themselves to be spiritual in some way, shape or form. My Talk today is about self-transcendence. It's just a basic fact about being human that sometimes the self seems to just melt away. And when that happens, the feeling is ecstatic and we reach for metaphors of up and down to explain these feelings. We talk about being uplifted or elevated.
Now it's really hard to think about anything abstract like this without a good concrete metaphor. So here's the metaphor I'm offering today. Think about the mind as being like a house with many rooms, most of which we're very familiar with. But sometimes it's as though a doorway appears from out of nowhere and it opens onto a staircase. We climb the staircase and experience a state of altered consciousness.
In 1902, the great American psychologist William James wrote about the many varieties of religious experience. He collected all kinds of case studies. He quoted the words of all kinds of people who'd had a variety of these experiences. One of the most exciting to me is this young man, Stephen Bradley, had an encounter, he thought, with Jesus in 1820. And here's what Bradley said about it.
(Music)
(Video) Stephen Bradley: I thought I saw the savior in human shape for about one second in the room, with arms extended, appearing to say to me, "Come." The next day I rejoiced with trembling. My happiness was so great that I said I wanted to die. This world had no place in my affections. Previous to this time, I was very selfish and self-righteous. But now I desired the welfare of all mankind and could, with a feeling heart, forgive my worst enemies.
JH: So note how Bradley's petty, moralistic self just dies on the way up the staircase. And on this higher level he becomes loving and forgiving. The world's many religions have found so many ways to help people climb the staircase. Some shut down the self using meditation. Others use psychedelic drugs. This is from a 16th century Aztec scroll showing a man about to eat a psilocybin mushroom and at the same moment get yanked up the staircase by a god. Others use dancing, spinning and circling to promote self-transcendence. But you don't need a religion to get you through the staircase. Lots of people find self-transcendence in nature. Others overcome their self at raves.
But here's the weirdest place of all: war. So many books about war say the same thing, that nothing brings people together like war. And that bringing them together opens up the possibility of extraordinary self-transcendent experiences. I'm going to play for you an excerpt from this book by Glenn Gray. Gray was a soldier in the American army in World War II. And after the war he interviewed a lot of other soldiers and wrote about the experience of men in battle. Here's a key passage where he basically describes the staircase.
(Video) Glenn Gray: Many veterans will admit that the experience of communal effort in battle has been the high point of their lives. "I" passes insensibly into a "we," "my" becomes "our" and individual faith loses its central importance. I believe that it is nothing less than the assurance of immortality that makes self-sacrifice at these moments so relatively easy. I may fall, but I do not die, for that which is real in me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for whom I gave up my life.
JH: So what all of these cases have in common is that the self seems to thin out, or melt away, and it feels good, it feels really good, in a way totally unlike anything we feel in our normal lives. It feels somehow uplifting. This idea that we move up was central in the writing of the great French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Durkheim even called us Homo duplex, or two-level man. The lower level he called the level of the profane. Now profane is the opposite of sacred. It just means ordinary or common. And in our ordinary lives we exist as individuals. We want to satisfy our individual desires. We pursue our individual goals. But sometimes something happens that triggers a phase change. Individuals unite into a team, a movement or a nation, which is far more than the sum of its parts.
Durkheim called this level the level of the sacred because he believed that the function of religion was to unite people into a group, into a moral community. Durkheim believed that anything that unites us takes on an air of sacredness. And once people circle around some sacred object or value, they'll then work as a team and fight to defend it. Durkheim wrote about a set of intense collective emotions that accomplish this miracle of E pluribus unum, of making a group out of individuals. Think of the collective joy in Britain on the day World War II ended. Think of the collective anger in Tahrir Square, which brought down a dictator. And think of the collective grief in the United States that we all felt, that brought us all together, after 9/11.
So let me summarize where we are. I'm saying that the capacity for self-transcendence is just a basic part of being human. I'm offering the metaphor of a staircase in the mind. I'm saying we are Homo duplex and this staircase takes us up from the profane level to the level of the sacred. When we climb that staircase, self-interest fades away, we become just much less self-interested, and we feel as though we are better, nobler and somehow uplifted.
So here's the million-dollar question for social scientists like me: Is the staircase a feature of our evolutionary design? Is it a product of natural selection, like our hands? Or is it a bug, a mistake in the system -- this religious stuff is just something that happens when the wires cross in the brain -- Jill has a stroke and she has this religious experience, it's just a mistake?
Well many scientists who study religion take this view. The New Atheists, for example, argue that religion is a set of memes, sort of parasitic memes, that get inside our minds and make us do all kinds of crazy religious stuff, self-destructive stuff, like suicide bombing. And after all, how could it ever be good for us to lose ourselves? How could it ever be adaptive for any organism to overcome self-interest? Well let me show you.
In "The Descent of Man," Charles Darwin wrote a great deal about the evolution of morality -- where did it come from, why do we have it. Darwin noted that many of our virtues are of very little use to ourselves, but they're of great use to our groups. He wrote about the scenario in which two tribes of early humans would have come in contact and competition. He said, "If the one tribe included a great number of courageous, sympathetic and faithful members who are always ready to aid and defend each other, this tribe would succeed better and conquer the other." He went on to say that "Selfish and contentious people will not cohere, and without coherence nothing can be effected." In other words, Charles Darwin believed in group selection.
Now this idea has been very controversial for the last 40 years, but it's about to make a major comeback this year, especially after E.O. Wilson's book comes out in April, making a very strong case that we, and several other species, are products of group selection. But really the way to think about this is as multilevel selection.
So look at it this way: You've got competition going on within groups and across groups. So here's a group of guys on a college crew team. Within this team there's competition. There are guys competing with each other. The slowest rowers, the weakest rowers, are going to get cut from the team. And only a few of these guys are going to go on in the sport. Maybe one of them will make it to the Olympics. So within the team, their interests are actually pitted against each other. And sometimes it would be advantageous for one of these guys to try to sabotage the other guys. Maybe he'll badmouth his chief rival to the coach. But while that competition is going on within the boat, this competition is going on across boats. And once you put these guys in a boat competing with another boat, now they've got no choice but to cooperate because they're all in the same boat. They can only win if they all pull together as a team. I mean, these things sound trite, but they are deep evolutionary truths.
The main argument against group selection has always been that, well sure, it would be nice to have a group of cooperators, but as soon as you have a group of cooperators, they're just going to get taken over by free-riders, individuals that are going to exploit the hard work of the others. Let me illustrate this for you. Suppose we've got a group of little organisms -- they can be bacteria, they can be hamsters; it doesn't matter what -- and let's suppose that this little group here, they evolved to be cooperative. Well that's great. They graze, they defend each other, they work together, they generate wealth. And as you'll see in this simulation, as they interact they gain points, as it were, they grow, and when they've doubled in size, you'll see them split, and that's how they reproduce and the population grows.
But suppose then that one of them mutates. There's a mutation in the gene and one of them mutates to follow a selfish strategy. It takes advantage of the others. And so when a green interacts with a blue, you'll see the green gets larger and the blue gets smaller. So here's how things play out. We start with just one green, and as it interacts it gains wealth or points or food. And in short order, the cooperators are done for. The free-riders have taken over. If a group cannot solve the free-rider problem then it cannot reap the benefits of cooperation and group selection cannot get started.
But there are solutions to the free-rider problem. It's not that hard a problem. In fact, nature has solved it many, many times. And nature's favorite solution is to put everyone in the same boat. For example, why is it that the mitochondria in every cell has its own DNA, totally separate from the DNA in the nucleus? It's because they used to be separate free-living bacteria and they came together and became a superorganism. Somehow or other -- maybe one swallowed another; we'll never know exactly why -- but once they got a membrane around them, they were all in the same membrane, now all the wealth-created division of labor, all the greatness created by cooperation, stays locked inside the membrane and we've got a superorganism.
And now let's rerun the simulation putting one of these superorganisms into a population of free-riders, of defectors, of cheaters and look what happens. A superorganism can basically take what it wants. It's so big and powerful and efficient that it can take resources from the greens, from the defectors, the cheaters. And pretty soon the whole population is actually composed of these new superorganisms. What I've shown you here is sometimes called a major transition in evolutionary history. Darwin's laws don't change, but now there's a new kind of player on the field and things begin to look very different.
Now this transition was not a one-time freak of nature that just happened with some bacteria. It happened again about 120 or a 140 million years ago when some solitary wasps began creating little simple, primitive nests, or hives. Once several wasps were all together in the same hive, they had no choice but to cooperate, because pretty soon they were locked into competition with other hives. And the most cohesive hives won, just as Darwin said.
These early wasps gave rise to the bees and the ants that have covered the world and changed the biosphere. And it happened again, even more spectacularly, in the last half-million years when our own ancestors became cultural creatures, they came together around a hearth or a campfire, they divided labor, they began painting their bodies, they spoke their own dialects, and eventually they worshiped their own gods. Once they were all in the same tribe, they could keep the benefits of cooperation locked inside. And they unlocked the most powerful force ever known on this planet, which is human cooperation -- a force for construction and destruction.
Of course, human groups are nowhere near as cohesive as beehives. Human groups may look like hives for brief moments, but they tend to then break apart. We're not locked into cooperation the way bees and ants are. In fact, often, as we've seen happen in a lot of the Arab Spring revolts, often those divisions are along religious lines. Nonetheless, when people do come together and put themselves all into the same movement, they can move mountains.
Look at the people in these photos I've been showing you. Do you think they're there pursuing their self-interest? Or are they pursuing communal interest, which requires them to lose themselves and become simply a part of a whole?
Okay, so that was my Talk delivered in the standard TED way. And now I'm going to give the whole Talk over again in three minutes in a more full-spectrum sort of way.
(Music)
(Video) Jonathan Haidt: We humans have many varieties of religious experience, as William James explained. One of the most common is climbing the secret staircase and losing ourselves. The staircase takes us from the experience of life as profane or ordinary upwards to the experience of life as sacred, or deeply interconnected. We are Homo duplex, as Durkheim explained. And we are Homo duplex because we evolved by multilevel selection, as Darwin explained. I can't be certain if the staircase is an adaptation rather than a bug, but if it is an adaptation, then the implications are profound. If it is an adaptation, then we evolved to be religious.
I don't mean that we evolved to join gigantic organized religions. Those things came along too recently. I mean that we evolved to see sacredness all around us and to join with others into teams and circle around sacred objects, people and ideas. This is why politics is so tribal. Politics is partly profane, it's partly about self-interest, but politics is also about sacredness. It's about joining with others to pursue moral ideas. It's about the eternal struggle between good and evil, and we all believe we're on the good team.
And most importantly, if the staircase is real, it explains the persistent undercurrent of dissatisfaction in modern life. Because human beings are, to some extent, hivish creatures like bees. We're bees. We busted out of the hive during the Enlightenment. We broke down the old institutions and brought liberty to the oppressed. We unleashed Earth-changing creativity and generated vast wealth and comfort.
Nowadays we fly around like individual bees exulting in our freedom. But sometimes we wonder: Is this all there is? What should I do with my life? What's missing? What's missing is that we are Homo duplex, but modern, secular society was built to satisfy our lower, profane selves. It's really comfortable down here on the lower level. Come, have a seat in my home entertainment center.
One great challenge of modern life is to find the staircase amid all the clutter and then to do something good and noble once you climb to the top. I see this desire in my students at the University of Virginia. They all want to find a cause or calling that they can throw themselves into. They're all searching for their staircase. And that gives me hope because people are not purely selfish.
Most people long to overcome pettiness and become part of something larger. And this explains the extraordinary resonance of this simple metaphor conjured up nearly 400 years ago. "No man is an island entire of itself. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main."
JH: Thank you.
(Applause) |
I'm a believer. I'm a believer in global warming, and my record is good on the subject. But my subject is national security. We have to get off of oil purchased from the enemy. I'm talking about OPEC oil. And let me take you back 100 years to 1912. You're probably thinking that was my birth year. (Laughter) It wasn't. It was 1928. But go back to 1912, 100 years ago, and look at that point what we, our country, was faced with. It's the same energy question that you're looking at today, but it's different sources of fuel. A hundred years ago we were looking at coal, of course, and we were looking at whale oil and we were looking at crude oil. At that point, we were looking for a fuel that was cleaner, it was cheaper, and it wasn't ours though, it was theirs.
So at that point, 1912, we selected crude oil over whale oil and some more coal. But as we moved on to the period now, 100 years later, we're back really at another decision point. What is the decision point? It's what we're going to use in the future. So from here, it's pretty clear to me, we would prefer to have cleaner, cheaper, domestic, ours -- and we have that, we have that -- which is natural gas.
So here you are, that the cost of all this to the world is 89 million barrels of oil, give or take a few barrels, every day. And the cost annually is three trillion dollars. And one trillion of that goes to OPEC. That has got to be stopped. Now if you look at the cost of OPEC, it cost seven trillion dollars -- on the Milken Institute study last year -- seven trillion dollars since 1976, is what we paid for oil from OPEC. Now that includes the cost of military and the cost of the fuel both. But it's the greatest transfer of wealth, from one group to another in the history of mankind. And it continues.
Now when you look at where is the transfer of wealth, you can see here that we have the arrows going into the Mid-East and away from us. And with that, we have found ourselves to be the world's policemen. We are policing the world, and how are we doing that? I know the response to this. I would bet there aren't 10 percent of you in the room that know how many aircraft carriers there are in the world. Raise your hand if you think you know. There are 12. One is under construction by the Chinese and the other 11 belong to us.
Why do we have 11 aircraft carriers? Do we have a corner on the market? Are we smarter than anybody else? I'm not sure. If you look at where they're located -- and on this slide it's the red blobs on there -- there are five that are operating in the Mid-East, and the rest of them are in the United States. They just move back to the Mid-East and those come back. So actually most of the 11 we have are tied up in the Mid-East. Why? Why are they in the Mid-East? They're there to control, keep the shipping lanes open and make oil available. And the United States uses about 20 million barrels a day, which is about 25 percent of all the oil used everyday in the world. And we're doing it with four percent of the population. Somehow that doesn't seem right. That's not sustainable.
So where do we go from here? Does that continue? Yes, it's going to continue. The slide you're looking at here is 1990 to 2040. Over that period you are going to double your demand. And when you look at what we're using the oil for, 70 percent of it is used for transportation fuel. So when somebody says, "Let's go more nuclear, let's go wind, let's go solar," fine; I'm for anything American, anything American. But if you're going to do anything about the dependency on foreign oil, you have to address transportation.
So here we are using 20 million barrels a day -- producing eight, importing 12, and from the 12, five comes from OPEC. When you look at the biggest user and the second largest user, we use 20 million barrels and the Chinese use 10. The Chinese have a little bit better plan -- or they have a plan; we have no plan. In the history of America, we've never had an energy plan. We don't even realize the resources that we have available to us. If you take the last 10 years and bring forward, you've transferred to OPEC a trillion dollars. If you go forward the next 10 years and cap the price of oil at 100 dollars a barrel, you will pay 2.2 trillion. That's not sustainable either.
But the days of cheap oil are over. They're over. They make it very clear to you, the Saudis do, they have to have 94 dollars a barrel to make their social commitments. Now I had people in Washington last week told me, he said, "The Saudis can produce the oil for five dollars a barrel. That has nothing to do with it. It's what they have to pay for is what we are going to pay for oil." There is no free market for oil. The oil is priced off the margin. And the OPEC nations are the ones that price the oil.
So where are we headed from here? We're headed to natural gas. Natural gas will do everything we want it to do. It's 130 octane fuel. It's 25 percent cleaner than oil. It's ours, we have an abundance of it. And it does not require a refinery. It comes out of the ground at 130 octane. Run it through the separator and you're ready to use it. It's going to be very simple for us to use. It's going to be simple to accomplish this. You're going to find, and I'll tell you in just a minute, what you're looking for to make it happen. But here you can look at the list. Natural gas will fit all of those. It will replace or be able to be used for that. It's for power generation, transportation, it's peaking fuel, it's all those.
Do we have enough natural gas? Look at the bar on the left. It's 24 trillion. It's what we use a year. Go forward and the estimates that you have from the EIA and onto the industry estimates -- the industry knows what they're talking about -- we've got 4,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that's available to us. How does that translate to barrels of oil equivalent? It would be three times what the Saudis claim they have. And they claim they have 250 billion barrels of oil, which I do not believe. I think it's probably 175 billion barrels. But anyway, whether they say they're right or whatever, we have plenty of natural gas.
So I have tried to target on where we use the natural gas. And where I've targeted is on the heavy-duty trucks. There are eight million of them. You take eight million trucks -- these are 18-wheelers -- and take them to natural gas, reduce carbon by 30 percent, it is cheaper and it will cut our imports three million barrels. So you will cut 60 percent off of OPEC with eight million trucks. There are 250 million vehicles in America.
So what you have is natural gas is the bridge fuel, is the way I see it. I don't have to worry about the bridge to where at my age. (Laughter) That's your concern. But when you look at the natural gas we have it could very well be the bridge to natural gas, because you have plenty of natural gas. But as I said, I'm for anything American.
Now let me take you -- I've been a realist -- I went from theorist early to realist. I'm back to theorist again. If you look at the world, you have methane hydrates in the ocean around every continent. And here you can see methane, if that's the way you're going to go, that there's plenty of methane -- natural gas is methane, methane and natural gas are interchangeable -- but if you decide that you're going to use some methane -- and I'm gone, so it's up to you -- but we do have plenty of methane hydrates.
So I think I've made my point that we have to get on our own resources in America. If we do -- it's costing us a billion dollars a day for oil. And yet, we have no energy plan. So there's nothing going on that impresses me in Washington on that plan, other than I'm trying to focus on that eight million 18-wheelers. If we could do that, I think we would take our first step to an energy plan. If we did, we could see that our own resources are easier to use than anybody can imagine.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Chris Anderson: Thanks for that. So from your point of view, you had this great Pickens Plan that was based on wind energy, and you abandoned it basically because the economics changed. What happened?
TBP: I lost 150 million dollars. (Laughter) That'll make you abandon something. No, what happened to us, Chris, is that power, it's priced off the margin. And so the margin is natural gas. And at the time I went into the wind business, natural gas was nine dollars. Today it's two dollars and forty cents. You cannot do a wind deal under six dollars an MCF.
CA: So what happened was that, through increased ability to use fracking technology, the calculated reserves of natural gas kind of exploded and the price plummeted, which made wind uncompetitive. In a nutshell that's what happened?
TBP: That's what happened. We found out that we could go to the source rock, which were the carboniferous shales in the basins. The first one was Barnett Shale in Texas and then the Marcellus up in the Northeast across New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia; and Haynesville in Louisiana. This stuff is everywhere. We are overwhelmed with natural gas.
CA: And now you're a big investor in that and bringing that to market?
TBP: Well you say a big investor. It's my life. I'm a geologist, got out of school in '51, and I've been in the industry my entire life. Now I do own stocks. I'm not a big natural gas producer. Somebody the other day said I was the second largest natural gas producer in the United States. Don't I wish. But no, I'm not. I own stocks. But I also am in the fueling business.
CA: But natural gas is a fossil fuel. You burn it, you release CO2. So you believe in the threat of climate change. Why doesn't that prospect concern you?
TBP: Well you're going to have to use something. What do you have to replace it? (Laughter)
CA: No, no. The argument that it's a bridge fuel makes sense, because the amount of CO2 per unit of energy is lower than oil and coal, correct? And so everyone can be at least happy to see a shift from coal or oil to natural gas. But if that's it and that becomes the reason that renewables don't get invested in, then, long-term, we're screwed anyway, right?
TBP: Well I'm not ready to give up, but Jim and I talked there as he left, and I said, "How do you feel about natural gas?" And he said, "Well it's a bridge fuel, is what it is." And I said, "Bridge to what? Where are we headed?" See but again, I told you, I don't have to worry with that. You all do.
CA: But I don't think that's right, Boone. I think you're a person who believes in your legacy. You've made the money you need. You're one of the few people in a position to really swing the debate. Do you support the idea of some kind of price on carbon? Does that make sense?
TBP: I don't like that because it ends up the government is going to run the program. I can tell you it will be a failure. The government is not successful on these things. They just aren't, it's a bad deal. Look at Solyndra, or whatever it was. I mean, that was told to be a bad idea 10 times, they went ahead and did it anyway. But that only blew out 500 million. I think it's closer to a billion. But Chris, I think where we're headed, the long-term, I don't mind going back to nuclear. And I can tell you what the last page of the report that will take them five years to write will be. One, don't build a reformer on a fault. (Laughter) And number two, do not build a reformer on the ocean. And now I think reformers are safe. Move them inland and on very stable ground and build the reformers. There isn't anything wrong with nuke. You're going to have to have energy. There is no question. You can't -- okay.
CA: One of the questions from the audience is, with fracking and the natural gas process, what about the problem of methane leaking from that, methane being a worse global warming gas than CO2? Is that a concern?
TBP: Fracking? What is fracking?
CA: Fracking.
TBP: I'm teasing.
(Laughter)
CA: We've got a little bit of accent incompatibility here, you know.
TBP: No, let me tell you, I've told you what my age was. I got out of school in '51. I witnessed my first frack job at border Texas in 1953. Fracking came out in '47, and don't believe for a minute when our president gets up there and says the Department of Energy 30 years ago developed fracking. I don't know what in the hell he's talking about. I mean seriously, the Department of Energy did not have anything to do with fracking. The first frack job was in '47. I saw my first one in '53. I've fracked over 3,000 wells in my life. Never had a problem with messing up an aquifer or anything else. Now the largest aquifer in North America is from Midland, Texas to the South Dakota border, across eight states -- big aquifer: Ogallala, Triassic age. There had to have been 800,000 wells fracked in Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas in that aquifer. There's no problems. I don't understand why the media is focused on Eastern Pennsylvania.
CA: All right, so you don't support a carbon tax of any kind or a price on carbon. Your picture then I guess of how the world eventually gets off fossil fuels is through innovation ultimately, that we'll someday make solar and nuclear cost competitive?
TBP: Solar and wind, Jim and I agreed on that in 13 seconds. That is, it's going to be a small part, because you can't rely on it.
CA: So how does the world get off fossil fuels?
TBP: How do we get there? We have so much natural gas, a day will not come where you say, "Well let's don't use that anymore." You'll keep using it. It is the cleanest of all. And if you look at California, they use 2,500 buses. LAMTA have been on natural gas for 25 years. The Ft. Worth T has been on it for 25 years. Why? Air quality was the reason they used natural gas and got away from diesel. Why are all the trash trucks today in Southern California on natural gas? It's because of air quality. I know what you're telling me, and I'm not disagreeing with you. How in the hell can we get off the natural gas at some point? And I say, that is your problem.
(Laughter)
CA: All right, so it's the bridge fuel. What is at the other end of that bridge is for this audience to figure out. If someone comes to you with a plan that really looks like it might be part of this solution, are you ready to invest in those technologies, even if they aren't maximized for profits, they might be maximized for the future health of the planet?
TBP: I lost 150 million on the wind, okay. Yeah, sure, I'm game for it. Because, again, I'm trying to get energy solved for America. And anything American will work for me.
CA: Boone, I really, really appreciate you coming here, engaging in this conversation. I think there's a lot of people who will want to engage with you. And that was a real gift you gave this audience. Thank you so much. (TBP: You bet, Chris. Thank you.)
(Applause) |