Datasets:

vietgpt
/

ted_talks_iwslt_en

Dataset card Viewer Files Files and versions

Split (1)

train · 2.29k rows

text stringlengths 991 34.9k
If nothing else, at least I've discovered what it is we put our speakers through: sweaty palms, sleepless nights, a wholly unnatural fear of clocks. I mean, it's quite brutal. And I'm also a little nervous about this. There are nine billion humans coming our way. Now, the most optimistic dreams can get dented by the prospect of people plundering the planet. But recently, I've become intrigued by a different way of thinking of large human crowds, because there are circumstances where they can do something really cool. It's a phenomenon that I think any organization or individual can tap into. It certainly impacted the way we think about TED's future, and perhaps the world's future overall. So, let's explore. The story starts with just a single person, a child, behaving a little strangely. This kid is known online as Lil Demon. He's doing tricks here, dance tricks, that probably no six-year-old in history ever managed before. How did he learn them? And what drove him to spend the hundreds of hours of practice this must have taken? Here's a clue. (Video) Lil Demon: ♫ Step your game up. Oh. Oh. ♫ ♫ Step your game up. Oh. Oh. ♫ Chris Anderson: So, that was sent to me by this man, a filmmaker, Jonathan Chu, who told me that was the moment he realized the Internet was causing dance to evolve. This is what he said at TED in February. In essence, dancers were challenging each other online to get better; incredible new dance skills were being invented; even the six-year-olds were joining in. It felt like a revolution. And so Jon had a brilliant idea: He went out to recruit the best of the best dancers off of YouTube to create this dance troupe -- The League of Extraordinary Dancers, the LXD. I mean, these kids were web-taught, but they were so good that they got to play at the Oscars this year. And at TED here in February, their passion and brilliance just took our breath away. So, this story of the evolution of dance seems strangely familiar. You know, a while after TEDTalks started taking off, we noticed that speakers were starting to spend a lot more time in preparation. It was resulting in incredible new talks like these two. ... Months of preparation crammed into 18 minutes, raising the bar cruelly for the next generation of speakers, with the effects that we've seen this week. It's not as if J.J. and Jill actually ended their talks saying, "Step your game up," but they might as well have. So, in both of these cases, you've got these cycles of improvement, apparently driven by people watching web video. What is going on here? Well, I think it's the latest iteration of a phenomenon we can call "crowd-accelerated innovation." And there are just three things you need for this thing to kick into gear. You can think of them as three dials on a giant wheel. You turn up the dials, the wheel starts to turn. And the first thing you need is ... a crowd, a group of people who share a common interest. The bigger the crowd, the more potential innovators there are. That's important, but actually most people in the crowd occupy these other roles. They're creating the ecosystem from which innovation emerges. The second thing you need is light. You need clear, open visibility of what the best people in that crowd are capable of, because that is how you will learn how you will be empowered to participate. And third, you need desire. You know, innovation's hard work. It's based on hundreds of hours of research, of practice. Absent desire, not going to happen. Now, here's an example -- pre-Internet -- of this machine in action. Dancers at a street corner -- it's a crowd, a small one, but they can all obviously see what each other can do. And the desire part comes, I guess, from social status, right? Best dancer walks tall, gets the best date. There's probably going to be some innovation happening here. But on the web, all three dials are ratcheted right up. The dance community is now global. There's millions connected. And amazingly, you can still see what the best can do, because the crowd itself shines a light on them, either directly, through comments, ratings, email, Facebook, Twitter, or indirectly, through numbers of views, through links that point Google there. So, it's easy to find the good stuff, and when you've found it, you can watch it in close-up repeatedly and read what hundreds of people have written about it. That's a lot of light. But the desire element is really dialed way up. I mean, you might just be a kid with a webcam, but if you can do something that goes viral, you get to be seen by the equivalent of sports stadiums crammed with people. You get hundreds of strangers writing excitedly about you. And even if it's not that eloquent -- and it's not -- it can still really make your day. So, this possibility of a new type of global recognition, I think, is driving huge amounts of effort. And it's important to note that it's not just the stars who are benefiting: because you can see the best, everyone can learn. Also, the system is self-fueling. It's the crowd that shines the light and fuels the desire, but the light and desire are a lethal one-two combination that attract new people to the crowd. So, this is a model that pretty much any organization could use to try and nurture its own cycle of crowd-accelerated innovation. Invite the crowd, let in the light, dial up the desire. And the hardest part about that is probably the light, because it means you have to open up, you have to show your stuff to the world. It's by giving away what you think is your deepest secret that maybe millions of people are empowered to help improve it. And, very happily, there's one class of people who really can't make use of this tool. The dark side of the web is allergic to the light. I don't think we're going to see terrorists, for example, publishing their plans online and saying to the world, "Please, could you help us to actually make them work this time?" But you can publish your stuff online. And if you can get that wheel to turn, look out. So, at TED, we've become a little obsessed with this idea of openness. In fact, my colleague, June Cohen, has taken to calling it "radical openness," because it works for us each time. We opened up our talks to the world, and suddenly there are millions of people out there helping spread our speakers' ideas, and thereby making it easier for us to recruit and motivate the next generation of speakers. By opening up our translation program, thousands of heroic volunteers -- some of them watching online right now, and thank you! -- have translated our talks into more than 70 languages, thereby tripling our viewership in non-English-speaking countries. By giving away our TEDx brand, we suddenly have a thousand-plus live experiments in the art of spreading ideas. And these organizers, they're seeing each other, they're learning from each other. We are learning from them. We're getting great talks back from them. The wheel is turning. Okay, step back a minute. I mean, it's really not news for me to tell you that innovation emerges out of groups. You know, we've heard that this week -- this romantic notion of the lone genius with the "eureka!" moment that changes the world is misleading. Even he said that, and he would know. We're a social species. We spark off each other. It's also not news to say that the Internet has accelerated innovation. For the past 15 years, powerful communities have been connecting online, sparking off each other. If you take programmers, you know, the whole open-source movement is a fantastic instance of crowd-accelerated innovation. But what's key here is, the reason these groups have been able to connect is because their work output is of the type that can be easily shared digitally -- a picture, a music file, software. And that's why what I'm excited about, and what I think is under-reported, is the significance of the rise of online video. This is the technology that's going to allow the rest of the world's talents to be shared digitally, thereby launching a whole new cycle of crowd-accelerated innovation. The first few years of the web were pretty much video-free, for this reason: video files are huge; the web couldn't handle them. But in the last 10 years, bandwidth has exploded a hundredfold. Suddenly, here we are. Humanity watches 80 million hours of YouTube every day. Cisco actually estimates that, within four years, more than 90 percent of the web's data will be video. If it's all puppies, porn and piracy, we're doomed. I don't think it will be. Video is high-bandwidth for a reason. It packs a huge amount of data, and our brains are uniquely wired to decode it. Here, let me introduce you to Sam Haber. He's a unicyclist. Before YouTube, there was no way for him to discover his sport's true potential, because you can't communicate this stuff in words, right? But looking at video clips posted by strangers, a world of possibility opens up for him. Suddenly, he starts to emulate and then to innovate. And a global community of unicyclists discover each other online, inspire each other to greatness. And there are thousands of other examples of this happening -- of video-driven evolution of skills, ranging from the physical to the artful. And I have to tell you, as a former publisher of hobbyist magazines, I find this strangely beautiful. I mean, there's a lot of passion right here on this screen. But if Rube Goldberg machines and video poetry aren't quite your cup of tea, how about this. Jove is a website that was founded to encourage scientists to publish their peer-reviewed research on video. There's a problem with a traditional scientific paper. It can take months for a scientist in another lab to figure out how to replicate the experiments that are described in print. Here's one such frustrated scientist, Moshe Pritsker, the founder of Jove. He told me that the world is wasting billions of dollars on this. But look at this video. I mean, look: if you can show instead of just describing, that problem goes away. So it's not far-fetched to say that, at some point, online video is going to dramatically accelerate scientific advance. Here's another example that's close to our hearts at TED, where video is sometimes more powerful than print -- the sharing of an idea. Why do people like watching TEDTalks? All those ideas are already out there in print. It's actually faster to read than to view. Why would someone bother? Well, so, there's some showing as well as telling. But even leaving the screen out of it, there's still a lot more being transferred than just words. And in that non-verbal portion, there's some serious magic. Somewhere hidden in the physical gestures, the vocal cadence, the facial expressions, the eye contact, the passion, the kind of awkward, British body language, the sense of how the audience are reacting, there are hundreds of subconscious clues that go to how well you will understand, and whether you're inspired -- light, if you like, and desire. Incredibly, all of this can be communicated on just a few square inches of a screen. Reading and writing are actually relatively recent inventions. Face-to-face communication has been fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution. That's what's made it into this mysterious, powerful thing it is. Someone speaks, there's resonance in all these receiving brains, the whole group acts together. I mean, this is the connective tissue of the human superorganism in action. It's probably driven our culture for millennia. 500 years ago, it ran into a competitor with a lethal advantage. It's right here. Print scaled. The world's ambitious innovators and influencers now could get their ideas to spread far and wide, and so the art of the spoken word pretty much withered on the vine. But now, in the blink of an eye, the game has changed again. It's not too much to say that what Gutenberg did for writing, online video can now do for face-to-face communication. So, that primal medium, which your brain is exquisitely wired for ... that just went global. Now, this is big. We may have to reinvent an ancient art form. I mean, today, one person speaking can be seen by millions, shedding bright light on potent ideas, creating intense desire for learning and to respond -- and in his case, intense desire to laugh. For the first time in human history, talented students don't have to have their potential and their dreams written out of history by lousy teachers. They can sit two feet in front of the world's finest. Now, TED is just a small part of this. I mean, the world's universities are opening up their curricula. Thousands of individuals and organizations are sharing their knowledge and data online. Thousands of people are figuring out new ways to learn and, crucially, to respond, completing the cycle. And so, as we've thought about this, you know, it's become clear to us what the next stage of TED's evolution has to be. TEDTalks can't be a one-way process, one-to-many. Our future is many-to-many. So, we're dreaming of ways to make it easier for you, the global TED community, to respond to speakers, to contribute your own ideas, maybe even your own TEDTalks, and to help shine a light on the very best of what's out there. Because, if we can bubble up the very best from a vastly larger pool, this wheel turns. Now, is it possible to imagine a similar process to this, happening to global education overall? I mean, does it have to be this painful, top-down process? Why not a self-fueling cycle in which we all can participate? It's the participation age, right? Schools can't be silos. We can't stop learning at age 21. What if, in the coming crowd of nine billion ... what if that crowd could learn enough to be net contributors, instead of net plunderers? That changes everything, right? I mean, that would take more teachers than we've ever had. But the good news is they are out there. They're in the crowd, and the crowd is switching on lights, and we can see them for the first time, not as an undifferentiated mass of strangers, but as individuals we can learn from. Who's the teacher? You're the teacher. You're part of the crowd that may be about to launch the biggest learning cycle in human history, a cycle capable of carrying all of us to a smarter, wiser, more beautiful place. Here's a group of kids in a village in Pakistan near where I grew up. Within five years, each of these kids is going to have access to a cellphone capable of full-on web video and capable of uploading video to the web. I mean, is it crazy to think that this girl, in the back, at the right, in 15 years, might be sharing the idea that keeps the world beautiful for your grandchildren? It's not crazy; it's actually happening right now. I want to introduce you to a good friend of TED who just happens to live in Africa's biggest shantytown. (Video) Christopher Makau: Hi. My name is Christopher Makau. I'm one of the organizers of TEDxKibera. There are so many good things which are happening right here in Kibera. There's a self-help group. They turned a trash place into a garden. The same spot, it was a crime spot where people were being robbed. They used the same trash to form green manure. The same trash site is feeding more than 30 families. We have our own film school. They are using Flip cameras to record, edit, and reporting to their own channel, Kibera TV. Because of a scarcity of land, we are using the sacks to grow vegetables, and also [we're] able to save on the cost of living. Change happens when we see things in a different way. Today, I see Kibera in a different way. My message to TEDGlobal and the entire world is: Kibera is a hotbed of innovation and ideas. (Applause) CA: You know what? I bet Chris has always been an inspiring guy. What's new -- and it's huge -- is that, for the first time, we get to see him, and he can see us. Right now, Chris and Kevin and Dennis and Dickson and their friends are watching us, in Nairobi, right now. Guys, we've learned from you today. Thank you. And thank you. (Applause)
I study the future of crime and terrorism, and frankly, I'm afraid. I'm afraid by what I see. I sincerely want to believe that technology can bring us the techno-utopia that we've been promised, but, you see, I've spent a career in law enforcement, and that's informed my perspective on things. I've been a street police officer, an undercover investigator, a counter-terrorism strategist, and I've worked in more than 70 countries around the world. I've had to see more than my fair share of violence and the darker underbelly of society, and that's informed my opinions. My work with criminals and terrorists has actually been highly educational. They have taught me a lot, and I'd like to be able to share some of these observations with you. Today I'm going to show you the flip side of all those technologies that we marvel at, the ones that we love. In the hands of the TED community, these are awesome tools which will bring about great change for our world, but in the hands of suicide bombers, the future can look quite different. I started observing technology and how criminals were using it as a young patrol officer. In those days, this was the height of technology. Laugh though you will, all the drug dealers and gang members with whom I dealt had one of these long before any police officer I knew did. Twenty years later, criminals are still using mobile phones, but they're also building their own mobile phone networks, like this one, which has been deployed in all 31 states of Mexico by the narcos. They have a national encrypted radio communications system. Think about that. Think about the innovation that went into that. Think about the infrastructure to build it. And then think about this: Why can't I get a cell phone signal in San Francisco? (Laughter) How is this possible? (Laughter) It makes no sense. (Applause) We consistently underestimate what criminals and terrorists can do. Technology has made our world increasingly open, and for the most part, that's great, but all of this openness may have unintended consequences. Consider the 2008 terrorist attack on Mumbai. The men that carried that attack out were armed with AK-47s, explosives and hand grenades. They threw these hand grenades at innocent people as they sat eating in cafes and waited to catch trains on their way home from work. But heavy artillery is nothing new in terrorist operations. Guns and bombs are nothing new. What was different this time is the way that the terrorists used modern information communications technologies to locate additional victims and slaughter them. They were armed with mobile phones. They had BlackBerries. They had access to satellite imagery. They had satellite phones, and they even had night vision goggles. But perhaps their greatest innovation was this. We've all seen pictures like this on television and in the news. This is an operations center. And the terrorists built their very own op center across the border in Pakistan, where they monitored the BBC, al Jazeera, CNN and Indian local stations. They also monitored the Internet and social media to monitor the progress of their attacks and how many people they had killed. They did all of this in real time. The innovation of the terrorist operations center gave terrorists unparalleled situational awareness and tactical advantage over the police and over the government. What did they do with this? They used it to great effect. At one point during the 60-hour siege, the terrorists were going room to room trying to find additional victims. They came upon a suite on the top floor of the hotel, and they kicked down the door and they found a man hiding by his bed. And they said to him, "Who are you, and what are you doing here?" And the man replied, "I'm just an innocent schoolteacher." Of course, the terrorists knew that no Indian schoolteacher stays at a suite in the Taj. They picked up his identification, and they phoned his name in to the terrorist war room, where the terrorist war room Googled him, and found a picture and called their operatives on the ground and said, "Your hostage, is he heavyset? Is he bald in front? Does he wear glasses?" "Yes, yes, yes," came the answers. The op center had found him and they had a match. He was not a schoolteacher. He was the second-wealthiest businessman in India, and after discovering this information, the terrorist war room gave the order to the terrorists on the ground in Mumbai. ("Kill him.") We all worry about our privacy settings on Facebook, but the fact of the matter is, our openness can be used against us. Terrorists are doing this. A search engine can determine who shall live and who shall die. This is the world that we live in. During the Mumbai siege, terrorists were so dependent on technology that several witnesses reported that as the terrorists were shooting hostages with one hand, they were checking their mobile phone messages in the very other hand. In the end, 300 people were gravely wounded and over 172 men, women and children lost their lives that day. Think about what happened. During this 60-hour siege on Mumbai, 10 men armed not just with weapons, but with technology, were able to bring a city of 20 million people to a standstill. Ten people brought 20 million people to a standstill, and this traveled around the world. This is what radicals can do with openness. This was done nearly four years ago. What could terrorists do today with the technologies available that we have? What will they do tomorrow? The ability of one to affect many is scaling exponentially, and it's scaling for good and it's scaling for evil. It's not just about terrorism, though. There's also been a big paradigm shift in crime. You see, you can now commit more crime as well. In the old days, it was a knife and a gun. Then criminals moved to robbing trains. You could rob 200 people on a train, a great innovation. Moving forward, the Internet allowed things to scale even more. In fact, many of you will remember the recent Sony PlayStation hack. In that incident, over 100 million people were robbed. Think about that. When in the history of humanity has it ever been possible for one person to rob 100 million? Of course, it's not just about stealing things. There are other avenues of technology that criminals can exploit. Many of you will remember this super cute video from the last TED, but not all quadcopter swarms are so nice and cute. They don't all have drumsticks. Some can be armed with HD cameras and do countersurveillance on protesters, or, as in this little bit of movie magic, quadcopters can be loaded with firearms and automatic weapons. Little robots are cute when they play music to you. When they swarm and chase you down the block to shoot you, a little bit less so. Of course, criminals and terrorists weren't the first to give guns to robots. We know where that started. But they're adapting quickly. Recently, the FBI arrested an al Qaeda affiliate in the United States, who was planning on using these remote-controlled drone aircraft to fly C4 explosives into government buildings in the United States. By the way, these travel at over 600 miles an hour. Every time a new technology is being introduced, criminals are there to exploit it. We've all seen 3D printers. We know with them that you can print in many materials ranging from plastic to chocolate to metal and even concrete. With great precision I actually was able to make this just the other day, a very cute little ducky. But I wonder to myself, for those people that strap bombs to their chests and blow themselves up, how might they use 3D printers? Perhaps like this. You see, if you can print in metal, you can print one of these, and in fact you can also print one of these too. The UK I know has some very strict firearms laws. You needn't bring the gun into the UK anymore. You just bring the 3D printer and print the gun while you're here, and, of course, the magazines for your bullets. But as these get bigger in the future, what other items will you be able to print? The technologies are allowing bigger printers. As we move forward, we'll see new technologies also, like the Internet of Things. Every day we're connecting more and more of our lives to the Internet, which means that the Internet of Things will soon be the Internet of Things To Be Hacked. All of the physical objects in our space are being transformed into information technologies, and that has a radical implication for our security, because more connections to more devices means more vulnerabilities. Criminals understand this. Terrorists understand this. Hackers understand this. If you control the code, you control the world. This is the future that awaits us. There has not yet been an operating system or a technology that hasn't been hacked. That's troubling, since the human body itself is now becoming an information technology. As we've seen here, we're transforming ourselves into cyborgs. Every year, thousands of cochlear implants, diabetic pumps, pacemakers and defibrillators are being implanted in people. In the United States, there are 60,000 people who have a pacemaker that connects to the Internet. The defibrillators allow a physician at a distance to give a shock to a heart in case a patient needs it. But if you don't need it, and somebody else gives you the shock, it's not a good thing. Of course, we're going to go even deeper than the human body. We're going down to the cellular level these days. Up until this point, all the technologies I've been talking about have been silicon-based, ones and zeroes, but there's another operating system out there: the original operating system, DNA. And to hackers, DNA is just another operating system waiting to be hacked. It's a great challenge for them. There are people already working on hacking the software of life, and while most of them are doing this to great good and to help us all, some won't be. So how will criminals abuse this? Well, with synthetic biology you can do some pretty neat things. For example, I predict that we will move away from a plant-based narcotics world to a synthetic one. Why do you need the plants anymore? You can just take the DNA code from marijuana or poppies or coca leaves and cut and past that gene and put it into yeast, and you can take those yeast and make them make the cocaine for you, or the marijuana, or any other drug. So how we use yeast in the future is going to be really interesting. In fact, we may have some really interesting bread and beer as we go into this next century. The cost of sequencing the human genome is dropping precipitously. It was proceeding at Moore's Law pace, but then in 2008, something changed. The technologies got better, and now DNA sequencing is proceeding at a pace five times that of Moore's Law. That has significant implications for us. It took us 30 years to get from the introduction of the personal computer to the level of cybercrime we have today, but looking at how biology is proceeding so rapidly, and knowing criminals and terrorists as I do, we may get there a lot faster with biocrime in the future. It will be easy for anybody to go ahead and print their own bio-virus, enhanced versions of ebola or anthrax, weaponized flu. We recently saw a case where some researchers made the H5N1 avian influenza virus more potent. It already has a 70 percent mortality rate if you get it, but it's hard to get. Engineers, by moving around a small number of genetic changes, were able to weaponize it and make it much more easy for human beings to catch, so that not thousands of people would die, but tens of millions. You see, you can go ahead and create new pandemics, and the researchers who did this were so proud of their accomplishments, they wanted to publish it openly so that everybody could see this and get access to this information. But it goes deeper than that. DNA researcher Andrew Hessel has pointed out quite rightly that if you can use cancer treatments, modern cancer treatments, to go after one cell while leaving all the other cells around it intact, then you can also go after any one person's cell. Personalized cancer treatments are the flip side of personalized bioweapons, which means you can attack any one individual, including all the people in this picture. How will we protect them in the future? What to do? What to do about all this? That's what I get asked all the time. For those of you who follow me on Twitter, I will be tweeting out the answer later on today. (Laughter) Actually, it's a bit more complex than that, and there are no magic bullets. I don't have all the answers, but I know a few things. In the wake of 9/11, the best security minds put together all their innovation and this is what they created for security. If you're expecting the people who built this to protect you from the coming robopocalypse — (Laughter) — uh, you may want to have a backup plan. (Laughter) Just saying. Just think about that. (Applause) Law enforcement is currently a closed system. It's nation-based, while the threat is international. Policing doesn't scale globally. At least, it hasn't, and our current system of guns, border guards, big gates and fences are outdated in the new world into which we're moving. So how might we prepare for some of these specific threats, like attacking a president or a prime minister? This would be the natural government response, to hide away all our government leaders in hermetically sealed bubbles. But this is not going to work. The cost of doing a DNA sequence is going to be trivial. Anybody will have it and we will all have them in the future. So maybe there's a more radical way that we can look at this. What happens if we were to take the President's DNA, or a king or queen's, and put it out to a group of a few hundred trusted researchers so they could study that DNA and do penetration testing against it as a means of helping our leaders? Or what if we sent it out to a few thousand? Or, controversially, and not without its risks, what happens if we just gave it to the whole public? Then we could all be engaged in helping. We've already seen examples of this working well. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project is staffed by journalists and citizens where they are crowd-sourcing what dictators and terrorists are doing with public funds around the world, and, in a more dramatic case, we've seen in Mexico, a country that has been racked by 50,000 narcotics-related murders in the past six years. They're killing so many people they can't even afford to bury them all in anything but these unmarked graves like this one outside of Ciudad Juarez. What can we do about this? The government has proven ineffective. So in Mexico, citizens, at great risk to themselves, are fighting back to build an effective solution. They're crowd-mapping the activities of the drug dealers. Whether or not you realize it, we are at the dawn of a technological arms race, an arms race between people who are using technology for good and those who are using it for ill. The threat is serious, and the time to prepare for it is now. I can assure you that the terrorists and criminals are. My personal belief is that, rather than having a small, elite force of highly trained government agents here to protect us all, we're much better off having average and ordinary citizens approaching this problem as a group and seeing what we can do. If we all do our part, I think we'll be in a much better space. The tools to change the world are in everybody's hands. How we use them is not just up to me, it's up to all of us. This was a technology I would frequently deploy as a police officer. This technology has become outdated in our current world. It doesn't scale, it doesn't work globally, and it surely doesn't work virtually. We've seen paradigm shifts in crime and terrorism. They call for a shift to a more open form and a more participatory form of law enforcement. So I invite you to join me. After all, public safety is too important to leave to the professionals. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)
Good morning. Happy to see so many fine folks out here and so many smiling faces. I have a very peculiar background, attitude and approach to the real world because I am a conjurer. Now, I prefer that term over magician, because if I were a magician, that would mean that I use spells and incantations and weird gestures in order to accomplish real magic. No, I don't do that; I'm a conjurer, who is someone who pretends to be a real magician. (Laughter) Now, how do we go about that sort of thing? We depend on the fact that audiences, such as yourselves, will make assumptions. For example, when I walked up here and I took the microphone from the stand and switched it on, you assumed this was a microphone, which it is not. (Laughter) As a matter of fact, this is something that about half of you, more than half of you will not be familiar with. It's a beard trimmer, you see? And it makes a very bad microphone; I've tried it many times. (Laughter) The other assumption that you made -- and this little lesson is to show you that you will make assumptions. Not only that you can, but that you will when they are properly suggested to you. You believe I'm looking at you. Wrong. I'm not looking at you. I can't see you. I know you're out there, they told me backstage, it's a full house and such. I know you're there because I can hear you, but I can't see you because I normally wear glasses. These are not glasses, these are empty frames. (Laughter) Quite empty frames. Now why would a grown man appear before you wearing empty frames on his face? To fool you, ladies and gentlemen, to deceive you, to show that you, too, can make assumptions. Don't you ever forget that. Now, I have to do something -- first of all, switch to real glasses so I can actually see you, which would probably be a convenience. I don't know. I haven't had a good look. Well, it's not that great a convenience. (Laughter) I have to do something now, which seems a little bit strange for a magician. But I'm going to take some medication. This is a full bottle of Calms Forte. I'll explain that in just a moment. Ignore the instructions, that's what the government has to put in there to confuse you, I'm sure. I will take enough of these. Mm. Indeed, the whole container. Thirty-two tablets of Calms Forte. Now that I've done that -- I'll explain it in a moment -- I must tell you that I am an actor. I'm an actor who plays a specific part. I play the part of a magician, a wizard, if you will, a real wizard. If someone were to appear on this stage in front of me and actually claim to be an ancient prince of Denmark named Hamlet, you would be insulted and rightly so. Why would a man assume that you would believe something bizarre like this? But there exists out there a very large population of people who will tell you that they have psychic, magical powers that they can predict the future, that they can make contact with the deceased. Oh, they also say they will sell you astrology or other fortunetelling methods. Oh, they gladly sell you that, yes. And they also say that they can give you perpetual motion machines and free energy systems. They claim to be psychics, or sensitives, whatever they can. But the one thing that has made a big comeback just recently is this business of speaking with the dead. Now, to my innocent mind, dead implies incapable of communicating. (Laughter) You might agree with me on that. But these people, they tend to tell you that not only can they communicate with the dead -- "Hi, there" -- but they can hear the dead as well, and they can relay this information back to the living. I wonder if that's true. I don't think so, because this subculture of people use exactly the same gimmicks that we magicians do, exactly the same -- the same physical methods, the same psychological methods -- and they effectively and profoundly deceive millions of people around the earth, to their detriment. They deceive these people, costs them a lot of money, cost them a lot of emotional anguish. Billions of dollars are spent every year, all over the globe, on these charlatans. Now, I have two questions I would like to ask these people if I had the opportunity to do so. First question: If I want to ask them to call up -- because they do hear them through the ear. They listen to the spirits like this -- I'm going to ask you to call up the ghost of my grandmother because, when she died, she had the family will, and she secreted it someplace. We don't know where it is, so we ask Granny, "Where is the will, Granny?" What does Granny say? She says, "I'm in heaven and it's wonderful. I'm here with all my old friends, my deceased friends, and my family and all the puppy dogs and the kittens that I used to have when I was a little girl. And I love you, and I'll always be with you. Good bye." And she didn't answer the damn question! Where is the will? Now, she could easily have said, "Oh, it's in the library on the second shelf, behind the encyclopedia," but she doesn't say that. No, she doesn't. She doesn't bring any useful information to us. We paid a lot of money for that information, be we didn't get it. The second question that I'd like to ask, rather simple: Suppose I ask them to contact the spirit of my deceased father-in-law, as an example. Why do they insist on saying -- remember, they speak into this ear -- why do they say, "My name starts with J or M?" Is this a hunting game? Hunting and fishing? What is it? Is it 20 questions? No, it's more like 120 questions. But it is a cruel, vicious, absolutely conscienceless -- I'll be all right, keep your seats (Laughter) -- game that these people play. And they take advantage of the innocent, the naive, the grieving, the needy people out there. Now, this is a process that is called cold reading. There's one fellow out there, Van Praagh is his name, James Van Praagh. He's one of the big practitioners of this sort of thing. John Edward, Sylvia Browne and Rosemary Altea, they are other operators. There are hundreds of them all over the earth, but in this country, James Van Praagh is very big. And what does he do? He likes to tell you how the deceased got deceased, the people he's talking to through his ear, you see? So what he says is, very often, is like this: he says, "He tells me, he tells me, before he passed, that he had trouble breathing." Folks, that's what dying is all about! (Laughter) You stop breathing, and then you're dead. It's that simple. And that's the kind of information they're going to bring back to you? I don't think so. Now, these people will make guesses, they'll say things like, "Why am I getting electricity? He's saying to me, 'Electricity.' Was he an electrician?" "No." "Did he ever have an electric razor?" "No." It was a game of hunting questions like this. This is what they go through. Now, folks often ask us at the James Randi Educational Foundation, they call me, they say, "Why are you so concerned about this, Mr. Randi? Isn't it just a lot of fun?" No, it is not fun. It is a cruel farce. Now, it may bring a certain amount of comfort, but that comfort lasts only about 20 minutes or so. And then the people look in the mirror, and they say, I just paid a lot of money for that reading. And what did she say to me? 'I love you!'" They always say that. They don't get any information, they don't get any value for what they spend. Now, Sylvia Browne is the big operator. We call her "The Talons." Sylvia Browne -- thank you -- Sylvia Browne is the big operator in this field at this very moment. Now, Sylvia Browne -- just to show you -- she actually gets 700 dollars for a 20 minute reading over the telephone, she doesn't even go there in person, and you have to wait up to two years because she's booked ahead that amount of time. You pay by credit card or whatever, and then she will call you sometime in the next two years. You can tell it's her. "Hello, this is Sylvia Browne." That's her, you can tell right away. Now, Montel Williams is an intelligent man. We all know who he is on television. He's well educated, he's smart, he knows what Sylvia Browne is doing but he doesn't give a damn. He just doesn't care. Because, the bottom line is, the sponsors love it, and he will expose her to television publicity all the time. Now, what does Sylvia Browne give you for that 700 dollars? She gives you the names of your guardian angels, that's first. Now, without that, how could we possibly function? (Laughter) She gives you the names of previous lives, who you were in previous lives. Duh. It turns out that the women that she gives readings for were all Babylonian princesses, or something like that. And the men were all Grecian warriors fighting with Agamemnon. Nothing is ever said about a 14 year-old bootblack in the streets of London who died of consumption. He isn't worth bringing back, obviously. And the strange thing -- folks, you may have noticed this too. You see these folks on television -- they never call anybody back from hell. (Laughter) Everyone comes back from heaven, but never from hell. If they call back any of my friends, they're not going to... Well, you see the story. (Laughter) Now, Sylvia Browne is an exception, an exception in one way, because the James Randi Educational Foundation, my foundation, offers a one million dollar prize in negotiable bonds. Very simply won. All you have to do is prove any paranormal, occult or supernatural event or power of any kind under proper observing conditions. It's very easy, win the million dollars. Sylvia Browne is an exception in that she's the only professional psychic in the whole world that has accepted our challenge. She did this on the "Larry King Live" show on CNN six and a half years ago. And we haven't heard from her since. Strange. She said that, first of all, that she didn't know how to contact me. Duh. A professional psychic who speaks to dead people, she can't reach me? (Laughter) I'm alive, you may have noticed. Well, pretty well anyway. She couldn't reach me. Now she says she doesn't want to reach me because I'm a godless person. All the more reason to take the million dollars, wouldn't you think, Sylvia? Now these people need to be stopped, seriously now. They need to be stopped because this is a cruel farce. We get people coming to the foundation all the time. They're ruined financially and emotionally because they've given their money and their faith to these people. Now, I popped some pills earlier. I have to explain that to you. Homeopathy, let's find out what that's all about. Hmm. You've heard of it. It's an alternative form of healing, right? Homeopathy actually consists -- and that's what this is. This is Calms Forte, 32 caplets of sleeping pills! I forgot to tell you that. I just ingested six and a half days worth of sleeping pills. (Laughter) Six and a half days, that certainly is a fatal dose. It says right on the back here, "In case of overdose, contact your poison control center immediately," and it gives an 800 number. Keep your seats -- it's going to be okay. I don't really need it because I've been doing this stunt for audiences all over the world for the last eight or 10 years, taking fatal doses of homeopathic sleeping pills. Why don't they affect me? (Laughter) (Applause) The answer may surprise you. What is homeopathy? It's taking a medicine that really works and diluting it down well beyond Avogadro's limit. Diluting it down to the point where there's none of it left. (Laughter) Now folks, this is not just a metaphor I'm going to give you now, it's true. It's exactly equivalent to taking one 325 milligram aspirin tablet, throwing it into the middle of Lake Tahoe, and then stirring it up, obviously with a very big stick, and waiting two years or so until the solution is homogeneous. Then, when you get a headache, you take a sip of this water, and -- voila! -- it is gone. (Laughter) Now that is true. That is what homeopathy is all about. And another claim that they make -- you'll love this one -- the more dilute the medicine is, they say, the more powerful it is. Now wait a minute, we heard about a guy in Florida. The poor man, he was on homeopathic medicine. He died of an overdose. He forgot to take his pill. (Laughter) Work on it. Work on it. It's a ridiculous thing. It is absolutely ridiculous. I don't know what we're doing, believing in all this nonsense over all these years. Now, let me tell you, The James Randi Educational Foundation is waving this very big carrot, but I must say, the fact that nobody has taken us up on this offer doesn't mean that the powers don't exist. They might, some place out there. Maybe these people are just independently wealthy. Well, with Sylvia Browne I would think so. You know, 700 dollars for a 20 minute reading over the telephone -- that's more than lawyers make! I mean that's a fabulous amount of money. These people don't need the million dollars perhaps, but wouldn't you think they'd like to take it just to make me look silly? Just to get rid of this godless person out there that Sylvia Browne talks about all the time? I think that something needs to be done about this. We really would love to have suggestions from you folks on how to contact federal, state and local authorities to get them to do something. If you find out -- now I understand. We've seen people, even today, speaking to us about AIDS epidemics and starving kids around the world and impure water supplies that people have to suffer with. Those are very important, critically important to us. And we must do something about those problems. But at the same time, as Arthur C. Clarke said, The rotting of the human mind, the business of believing in the paranormal and the occult and the supernatural -- all of this total nonsense, this medieval thinking -- I think something should be done about that, and it all lies in education. Largely, it's the media who are to blame for this sort of thing. They shamelessly promote all kinds of nonsense of this sort because it pleases the sponsors. It's the bottom line, the dollar line. That's what they're looking at. We really must do something about this. I'm willing to take your suggestions, and I'm willing to have you tune in to our webpage. It's www.randi.org. Go in there and look at the archives, and you will begin to understand much more of what I've been talking about today. You will see the records that we have. There's nothing like sitting in that library and having a family appear there and say that Mum gave away all the family fortune. She cashed in the CDs, she gave away the stocks and the certificates. That's really sad to hear, and it hasn't helped them one bit, hasn't solved any of their problems. Yes, there could be a rotting of the American mind, and of the minds all the way around the earth, if we don't start to think sensibly about these things. Now, we've offered this carrot, as I say, we've dangled the carrot. We're waiting for the psychics to come forth and snap at it. Oh, we get lots of them, hundreds of them every year come by. These are dowsers and people who think that they can talk to the dead as well, but they're amateurs; they don't know how to evaluate their own so-called powers. The professionals never come near us, except in that case of Sylvia Browne that I told you about a moment ago. She did accept and then backed away. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm James Randi, and I'm waiting. Thank you. (Applause)
Hans Rosling: I'm going to ask you three multiple choice questions. Use this device. Use this device to answer. The first question is, how did the number of deaths per year from natural disaster, how did that change during the last century? Did it more than double, did it remain about the same in the world as a whole, or did it decrease to less than half? Please answer A, B or C. I see lots of answers. This is much faster than I do it at universities. They are so slow. They keep thinking, thinking, thinking. Oh, very, very good. And we go to the next question. So how long did women 30 years old in the world go to school: seven years, five years or three years? A, B or C? Please answer. And we go to the next question. In the last 20 years, how did the percentage of people in the world who live in extreme poverty change? Extreme poverty — not having enough food for the day. Did it almost double, did it remain more or less the same, or did it halve? A, B or C? Now, answers. You see, deaths from natural disasters in the world, you can see it from this graph here, from 1900 to 2000. In 1900, there was about half a million people who died every year from natural disasters: floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruption, whatever, droughts. And then, how did that change? Gapminder asked the public in Sweden. This is how they answered. The Swedish public answered like this: Fifty percent thought it had doubled, 38 percent said it's more or less the same, 12 said it had halved. This is the best data from the disaster researchers, and it goes up and down, and it goes to the Second World War, and after that it starts to fall and it keeps falling and it's down to much less than half. The world has been much, much more capable as the decades go by to protect people from this, you know. So only 12 percent of the Swedes know this. So I went to the zoo and I asked the chimps. (Laughter) (Applause) The chimps don't watch the evening news, so the chimps, they choose by random, so the Swedes answer worse than random. Now how did you do? That's you. You were beaten by the chimps. (Laughter) But it was close. You were three times better than the Swedes, but that's not enough. You shouldn't compare yourself to Swedes. You must have higher ambitions in the world. Let's look at the next answer here: women in school. Here, you can see men went eight years. How long did women go to school? Well, we asked the Swedes like this, and that gives you a hint, doesn't it? The right answer is probably the one the fewest Swedes picked, isn't it? (Laughter) Let's see, let's see. Here we come. Yes, yes, yes, women have almost caught up. This is the U.S. public. And this is you. Here you come. Ooh. Well, congratulations, you're twice as good as the Swedes, but you don't need me — So how come? I think it's like this, that everyone is aware that there are countries and there are areas where girls have great difficulties. They are stopped when they go to school, and it's disgusting. But in the majority of the world, where most people in the world live, most countries, girls today go to school as long as boys, more or less. That doesn't mean that gender equity is achieved, not at all. They still are confined to terrible, terrible limitations, but schooling is there in the world today. Now, we miss the majority. When you answer, you answer according to the worst places, and there you are right, but you miss the majority. What about poverty? Well, it's very clear that poverty here was almost halved, and in U.S., when we asked the public, only five percent got it right. And you? Ah, you almost made it to the chimps. (Laughter) (Applause) That little, just a few of you! There must be preconceived ideas, you know. And many in the rich countries, they think that oh, we can never end extreme poverty. Of course they think so, because they don't even know what has happened. The first thing to think about the future is to know about the present. These questions were a few of the first ones in the pilot phase of the Ignorance Project in Gapminder Foundation that we run, and it was started, this project, last year by my boss, and also my son, Ola Rosling. (Laughter) He's cofounder and director, and he wanted, Ola told me we have to be more systematic when we fight devastating ignorance. So already the pilots reveal this, that so many in the public score worse than random, so we have to think about preconceived ideas, and one of the main preconceived ideas is about world income distribution. Look here. This is how it was in 1975. It's the number of people on each income, from one dollar a day — (Applause) See, there was one hump here, around one dollar a day, and then there was one hump here somewhere between 10 and 100 dollars. The world was two groups. It was a camel world, like a camel with two humps, the poor ones and the rich ones, and there were fewer in between. But look how this has changed: As I go forward, what has changed, the world population has grown, and the humps start to merge. The lower humps merged with the upper hump, and the camel dies and we have a dromedary world with one hump only. The percent in poverty has decreased. Still it's appalling that so many remain in extreme poverty. We still have this group, almost a billion, over there, but that can be ended now. The challenge we have now is to get away from that, understand where the majority is, and that is very clearly shown in this question. We asked, what is the percentage of the world's one-year-old children who have got those basic vaccines against measles and other things that we have had for many years: 20, 50 or 80 percent? Now, this is what the U.S. public and the Swedish answered. Look at the Swedish result: you know what the right answer is. (Laughter) Who the heck is a professor of global health in that country? Well, it's me. It's me. (Laughter) It's very difficult, this. It's very difficult. (Applause) However, Ola's approach to really measure what we know made headlines, and CNN published these results on their web and they had the questions there, millions answered, and I think there were about 2,000 comments, and this was one of the comments. "I bet no member of the media passed the test," he said. So Ola told me, "Take these devices. You are invited to media conferences. Give it to them and measure what the media know." And ladies and gentlemen, for the first time, the informal results from a conference with U.S. media. And then, lately, from the European Union media. (Laughter) You see, the problem is not that people don't read and listen to the media. The problem is that the media doesn't know themselves. What shall we do about this, Ola? Do we have any ideas? (Applause) Ola Rosling: Yes, I have an idea, but first, I'm so sorry that you were beaten by the chimps. Fortunately, I will be able to comfort you by showing why it was not your fault, actually. Then, I will equip you with some tricks for beating the chimps in the future. That's basically what I will do. But first, let's look at why are we so ignorant, and it all starts in this place. It's Hudiksvall. It's a city in northern Sweden. It's a neighborhood where I grew up, and it's a neighborhood with a large problem. Actually, it has exactly the same problem which existed in all the neighborhoods where you grew up as well. It was not representative. Okay? It gave me a very biased view of how life is on this planet. So this is the first piece of the ignorance puzzle. We have a personal bias. We have all different experiences from communities and people we meet, and on top of this, we start school, and we add the next problem. Well, I like schools, but teachers tend to teach outdated worldviews, because they learned something when they went to school, and now they describe this world to the students without any bad intentions, and those books, of course, that are printed are outdated in a world that changes. And there is really no practice to keep the teaching material up to date. So that's what we are focusing on. So we have these outdated facts added on top of our personal bias. What happens next is news, okay? An excellent journalist knows how to pick the story that will make headlines, and people will read it because it's sensational. Unusual events are more interesting, no? And they are exaggerated, and especially things we're afraid of. A shark attack on a Swedish person will get headlines for weeks in Sweden. So these three skewed sources of information were really hard to get away from. They kind of bombard us and equip our mind with a lot of strange ideas, and on top of it we put the very thing that makes us humans, our human intuition. It was good in evolution. It helped us generalize and jump to conclusions very, very fast. It helped us exaggerate what we were afraid of, and we seek causality where there is none, and we then get an illusion of confidence where we believe that we are the best car drivers, above the average. Everybody answered that question, "Yeah, I drive cars better." Okay, this was good evolutionarily, but now when it comes to the worldview, it is the exact reason why it's upside down. The trends that are increasing are instead falling, and the other way around, and in this case, the chimps use our intuition against us, and it becomes our weakness instead of our strength. It was supposed to be our strength, wasn't it? So how do we solve such problems? First, we need to measure it, and then we need to cure it. So by measuring it we can understand what is the pattern of ignorance. We started the pilot last year, and now we're pretty sure that we will encounter a lot of ignorance across the whole world, and the idea is really to scale it up to all domains or dimensions of global development, such as climate, endangered species, human rights, gender equality, energy, finance. All different sectors have facts, and there are organizations trying to spread awareness about these facts. So I've started actually contacting some of them, like WWF and Amnesty International and UNICEF, and asking them, what are your favorite facts which you think the public doesn't know? Okay, I gather those facts. Imagine a long list with, say, 250 facts. And then we poll the public and see where they score worst. So we get a shorter list with the terrible results, like some few examples from Hans, and we have no problem finding these kinds of terrible results. Okay, this little shortlist, what are we going to do with it? Well, we turn it into a knowledge certificate, a global knowledge certificate, which you can use, if you're a large organization, a school, a university, or maybe a news agency, to certify yourself as globally knowledgeable. Basically meaning, we don't hire people who score like chimpanzees. Of course you shouldn't. So maybe 10 years from now, if this project succeeds, you will be sitting in an interview having to fill out this crazy global knowledge. So now we come to the practical tricks. How are you going to succeed? There is, of course, one way, which is to sit down late nights and learn all the facts by heart by reading all these reports. That will never happen, actually. Not even Hans thinks that's going to happen. People don't have that time. People like shortcuts, and here are the shortcuts. We need to turn our intuition into strength again. We need to be able to generalize. So now I'm going to show you some tricks where the misconceptions are turned around into rules of thumb. Let's start with the first misconception. This is very widespread. Everything is getting worse. You heard it. You thought it yourself. The other way to think is, most things improve. So you're sitting with a question in front of you and you're unsure. You should guess "improve." Okay? Don't go for the worse. That will help you score better on our tests. (Applause) That was the first one. There are rich and poor and the gap is increasing. It's a terrible inequality. Yeah, it's an unequal world, but when you look at the data, it's one hump. Okay? If you feel unsure, go for "the most people are in the middle." That's going to help you get the answer right. Now, the next preconceived idea is first countries and people need to be very, very rich to get the social development like girls in school and be ready for natural disasters. No, no, no. That's wrong. Look: that huge hump in the middle already have girls in school. So if you are unsure, go for the "the majority already have this," like electricity and girls in school, these kinds of things. They're only rules of thumb, so of course they don't apply to everything, but this is how you can generalize. Let's look at the last one. If something, yes, this is a good one, sharks are dangerous. No — well, yes, but they are not so important in the global statistics, that is what I'm saying. I actually, I'm very afraid of sharks. So as soon as I see a question about things I'm afraid of, which might be earthquakes, other religions, maybe I'm afraid of terrorists or sharks, anything that makes me feel, assume you're going to exaggerate the problem. That's a rule of thumb. Of course there are dangerous things that are also great. Sharks kill very, very few. That's how you should think. With these four rules of thumb, you could probably answer better than the chimps, because the chimps cannot do this. They cannot generalize these kinds of rules. And hopefully we can turn your world around and we're going to beat the chimps. Okay? (Applause) That's a systematic approach. Now the question, is this important? Yeah, it's important to understand poverty, extreme poverty and how to fight it, and how to bring girls in school. When we realize that actually it's succeeding, we can understand it. But is it important for everyone else who cares about the rich end of this scale? I would say yes, extremely important, for the same reason. If you have a fact-based worldview of today, you might have a chance to understand what's coming next in the future. We're going back to these two humps in 1975. That's when I was born, and I selected the West. That's the current EU countries and North America. Let's now see how the rest and the West compares in terms of how rich you are. These are the people who can afford to fly abroad with an airplane for a vacation. In 1975, only 30 percent of them lived outside EU and North America. But this has changed, okay? So first, let's look at the change up till today, 2014. Today it's 50/50. The Western domination is over, as of today. That's nice. So what's going to happen next? Do you see the big hump? Did you see how it moved? I did a little experiment. I went to the IMF, International Monetary Fund, website. They have a forecast for the next five years of GDP per capita. So I can use that to go five years into the future, assuming the income inequality of each country is the same. I did that, but I went even further. I used those five years for the next 20 years with the same speed, just as an experiment what might actually happen. Let's move into the future. In 2020, it's 57 percent in the rest. In 2025, 63 percent. 2030, 68. And in 2035, the West is outnumbered in the rich consumer market. These are just projections of GDP per capita into the future. Seventy-three percent of the rich consumers are going to live outside North America and Europe. So yes, I think it's a good idea for a company to use this certificate to make sure to make fact- based decisions in the future. Thank you very much. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Hans and Ola Rosling!
Does anybody know when the stethoscope was invented? Any guesses? 1816. And what I can say is, in 2016, doctors aren't going to be walking around with stethoscopes. There's a whole lot better technology coming, and that's part of the change in medicine. What has changed our society has been wireless devices. But the future are digital medical wireless devices, OK? So, let me give you some examples of this to kind of make this much more concrete. This is the first one. This is an electrocardiogram. And, as a cardiologist, to think that you could see in real time a patient, an individual, anywhere in the world on your smartphone, watching your rhythm -- that's incredible, and it's with us today. But that's just the beginning. You check your email while you're sitting here. In the future you're going to be checking all your vital signs, all your vital signs: your heart rhythm, your blood pressure, your oxygen, your temperature, etc. This is already available today. This is AirStrip Technologies. It's now wired -- or I should say, wireless -- by taking the aggregate of these signals in the hospital, in the intensive care unit, and putting it on a smartphone for physicians. If you're an expectant parent, what about the ability to monitor, continuously, fetal heart rate, or intrauterine contractions, and not having to worry so much that things are fine as the pregnancy, and moving over into the time of delivery? And then as we go further, today we have continuous glucose sensors. Right now, they are under the skin, but in the future, they won't have to be implanted. And of course, the desired range -- trying to keep glucose between 75 and less than 200, checking it every five minutes in a continuous glucose sensor -- you'll see how that can impact diabetes. And what about sleep? We're going to zoom in on that a little bit. We're supposed to spend a third of our life in sleep. What if, on your phone, which will be available in the next few weeks, you had every minute of your sleep displayed? And this is, of course, as you can see, the awake is the orange. The REM sleep, rapid eye movement, dream state, is in light green; and light is gray, light sleep; and deep sleep, the best restorative sleep, is that dark green. How about counting every calorie? And this is ability, in real time, to actually take measurements of caloric intake as well as expenditure, through a Band-Aid. Now, what I've talked about are physiologic metrics. But what I want to get to, the next frontier, very quickly, and why the stethoscope is on its way out, is because we can transcend listening to the valve sounds, and the breath sounds, because now, introduced by G.E. is a handheld ultra-sound. Why is this important? Because this is so much more sensitive. Here is an example of an abdominal ultrasound, and also a cardiac echo, which can be sent wireless, and then there's an example of fetal monitoring on your smartphone. So, we're not just talking about physiologic metrics -- the key measurements of vital signs, and all those things in physiology -- but also all the imaging that one could look at in your smartphone. Now, this is an example of another obsolete technology, soon to be buried: the Holter Monitor. Twenty-four hour recording, lots of wires. This is now a little tiny patch. You can put it on for two weeks and send it in the mail. Now, how does this work? Well, there is these smart Band-Aids or these sensors that one would put on, on a shoe or on the wrist. And this sends a signal and it creates a body area network to a gateway. Gateway could be a smartphone or it could be a dedicated gateway, as today many of these things are dedicated gateways, because they are not so well integrated. That signal goes to the web, the cloud, and then it can be processed and sent anywhere: to a caregiver, to a physician, back to the patient, etc. So, that's basically very simplistic technology of how this works. Now, I have this device on. I didn't want to take my shirt off to show you, but I can tell you it's on. This is a device that not only measures cardiac rhythm, as you saw already, but it also goes well beyond that. This is me now. And you can see the ECG. Below that's the actual heart rate and the trend; to the right of that is a bioconductant. That's the fluid status, fluid status, that's really important if you're monitoring somebody with heart failure. And below that's temperature, and respiration, and oxygen, and then the position activity. So, this is really striking, because this device measures seven things that are very much vital signs for monitoring someone with heart failure. OK? And why is this important? Well, this is the most expensive bed. What if we could reduce the need for hospital beds? Well, we can. First of all, heart failure is the number one reason for hospital admissions and readmissions in this country. The cost of heart failure is 37 billion dollars a year, which is 80 percent related to hospitalization. And in the course of 30 days after a hospital stay for a Medicare greater than 65 years or older, is -- 27 percent are readmitted in 30 days, and by six months, over 56 percent are readmitted. So, can we improve that? Well the idea is we take this device that I'm wearing, and we put it on 600 patients with heart failure, randomly assigned, versus 600 patients who don't have active monitoring, and see whether we can reduce heart failure readmissions, and that's exciting. And we'll start that trial, and you'll hear more about how we're going to do that, but that's a type of wireless device trial that could change medicine in the years ahead. Why now? Why has this all of a sudden become a reality, an exciting direction in the future of medicine? What we have is, in a way, a perfect positive storm. This sets up consumer-driven healthcare. That's where this is all starting. Let me just give you specifics about why this is a big movement if you're not aware of it: 1.2 million Americans have gotten a Nike shoe, which is a body-area network that connects the shoe, the sole of the shoe to the iPhone, or an iPod. And this Wired Magazine cover article really captured a lot of this; it talked a lot about the Nike shoe and how quickly that's been adopted to monitor exercise physiology and energy expenditure. Here are some things, the principles that are guiding principles to keep in mind: "A data-driven health revolution promises to make us all better, faster, and stronger. Living by numbers." And this one, which is really telling, this was from July, this cover article: "The personal metrics movement goes way beyond diet and exercise. It's about tracking every facet of life, from sleep to mood to pain, 24/7/365." Well, I tried this device. A lot of you have gotten that Phillips Direct Life. I didn't have one of those, but I got the Fitbit. That looks like this. It's like a wireless accelerometer, pedometer. And I want to just give you the results of that testing, because I wanted to understand about the consumer movement. I hope the, by the way, the Phillips Direct Life works better -- I hope so. But this monitors food, it monitors activity and tracks weight. However you have to put in most of this stuff. The only thing it really tracks by itself is activity, and even then, it's not complete. So, you exercise and it picks up the exercise. You put in your height and weight, it calculates BMI, and of course it tells you how many calories you're expending from the exercise, and how many you took in, if you go in and enter all the foods. But it really wants you to enter all your activity. And so I went to this, and of course I was gratified that it picked up the 42 minutes of exercise, elliptical exercise I did, but then it wants more information. So, it says, "You want to log sexual activity. How long did you do it for?" (Laughter) And it says, "How hard was it?" (Laughter) Furthermore it says, "Start time." Now, this doesn't appear -- this just doesn't work, I mean, this just doesn't work. So, now I want to move to sleep. Who would ever have thought you could have your own EEG at your home, tagged to a very nice alarm clock, by the way? This is the headband that goes with this alarm clock. It monitors your brainwaves continuously, when you're sleeping. So, I did this thing for seven days getting ready for TEDMed. This is an important part of our life, one-third you're supposed to be sleeping. Of course how many here have any problems with sleeping? It's usually 90 percent. So, you tell me you sleep better than expected. Okay, well this was a week of my life in sleeping, and you get a Z.Q. score. Instead of an I.Q. score, you get a Z.Q. score when you wake up. You say, "Oh, OK." And a Z.Q. score is adjusted to age, and you want to get as high as you possibly can. So this is the moment-by-moment, or minute-by-minute sleep. And you see that Z.Q. there was 80-odd. And the wake time is in orange. And this can be a problem, as I learned. Because it not only helps you with quantifying your sleep, but also tells others you're awake. So, when my wife came in and she could tell you're awake. "Eric, I want to talk. I want to talk." And I'm trying to play possum. This thing is very, very impressive. OK. So, that's the first night. And this one is now 67, and that's not a good score. And this tells you, of course, how much you had in REM sleep, in deep sleep, and all this sort of thing. This was really fascinating because this gave that quantitation about all the different phases of sleep. So, it also then tells you how you do compared to your age group. It's like a managed competition of sleep. And really interesting stuff. Look at this thing and say, "Well, I didn't think I was a very good sleeper, but actually I did better than average in 50 to 60 year olds." OK? And the key thing was, what I didn't know, was that I was a really good dreamer. OK. Now let's move from sleep to diseases. Eighty percent of Americans have chronic disease, or 80 percent of age greater than 65 have two or more chronic disease, 140 million Americans have one or more chronic disease, and 80 percent of our 1.5, whatever, trillion expenditures are related to chronic disease. Now, diabetes is one of the big ones. Almost 24 million people have diabetes. And here is the latest map. It was published just a little more than a week ago in the New York Times, and it isn't looking good. That is, for men, 29 percent in the country over 60 have Type II diabetes, and women, although it's less, it's terribly high. But of course we have a way to measure that now on a continuous basis, with a sensor that detects blood glucose, and it's important because we could detect hyperglycemia that otherwise wouldn't be known, and also hypoglycemia. And you can see the red dots, in this particular patient's case, were finger sticks, which would have missed both ends. But by continuous monitoring, it captures all that vital information. The future of this though, is being able to move this to a Band-Aid type phenomenon, and that's not so far away. So, let me just give you, very quickly, 10 top targets for wireless medicine. All these things are possible -- some of them are very close, or already, as you heard, are available today, in some way or form. Alzheimer's disease: there's five million people affected, and you can check vital signs, activity, balance. Asthma: large number, we could detect things like pollen count, air quality, respiratory rate. Breast cancer, I'll show you an example of that real quickly. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Depression, there's a great approach to that in mood disorders. Diabetes I've just mentioned. Heart failure we already talked about. Hypertension: 74 million people could have continuous blood-pressure monitoring to come up with much better management and prevention. And obesity we already talked about, the ways to get to that. And sleep disorders. This is effective around the world. The access to smartphones and cell phones today is extraordinary. And this article from The Economist summed it up beautifully about the opportunities in health across the developing world: "Mobile phones made a bigger difference to the lives of more people, more quickly, than any previous technology." And that's before we got going on the m-health world. Aging: The problem is enormous, 300,000 broken hips per year; but the solutions are extraordinary, and they include so many different things. One of the ones I just wanted to mention: The iShoe is another example of a sensor that improves proprioception among the elderly to prevent falling. One of many different techniques using wireless sensors. So, we can change medicine across the continuum of care, across the ages from premies or unborn children to seniors; the pharmaceutical arena changes; the full spectrum of disease -- I hope I've given you a sense of that -- across the globe. There are two things that can really accelerate this whole process. One of them -- we're very fortunate -- is to develop a dedicated institute and that's work that started with the work that Scripps with Qualcomm ... and then the great fortune of meeting up with Gary and Mary West, to get behind this wireless health institute. San Diego is an extraordinary place for this. There's over 650 wireless companies, 100 of which or more are working in wireless health. It's the number one source of commerce, and interestingly it dovetails beautifully with over 500 life science companies. The wireless institute, the West Wireless Health Institute, is really the outgrowth of two extraordinary people who are here this evening: Gary and Mary West. And I'd like to give it up for them for getting behind this. (Applause) Their fantastic philanthropic investment made this possible, and this is really a nonprofit education center which is just about to open. It looks like this, this whole building dedicated. And what it's trying to do is accelerate this era: to take unmet medical needs, to work and innovate -- and we just appointed the chief engineer, Mehran Mehregany, it was announced on Monday -- then to move up with development, clinical trial validation and then changing medical practice, the most challenging thing of all, requiring attention to reimbursement, healthcare policy, healthcare economics. The other big thing, besides having this fantastic institute to catalyze this process is guidance, and that's of course relying on the fact that medicine goes digital. If we understand biology from genomics and omics and wireless through physiologic phenotyping, that's big. Because what it does is allow a convergence like we've never had before. Over 80 major diseases have been cracked at the genomic level, but this is quite extraordinary: More has been learned about the underpinnings of disease in the last two and a half years than in the history of man. And when you put that together with, for example, now an app for the iPhone with your genotype to guide drug therapy ... but, the future -- we can now tell who's going to get Type II diabetes from all the common variants, and that's going to get filled in more with low-frequency variants in the future. We can tell who's going to get breast cancer from the various genes. We can also know who's likely to get atrial fibrillation. And finally, another example: sudden cardiac death. Each of these has a sensor. We can give glucose a sensor for diabetes to prevent it. We can prevent, or have the earliest detection possible, for breast cancer with an ultrasound device given to the patient. An iPatch, iRhythm, for atrial fibrillation. And vital-signs monitoring to prevent sudden cardiac death. We lose 700,000 people a year in the U.S. from sudden cardiac death. So, I hope I've convinced you of this, of the impact on hospital clinic resources is profound and then the impact on diseases is equally impressive across all these different diseases and more. It's really taking individualized medicine to a new height and it's hyper-innovative, and I think it represents the black swan of medicine. Thanks for your attention. (Applause)
I want to talk to you today about something the open-source programming world can teach democracy, but before that, a little preamble. Let's start here. This is Martha Payne. Martha's a 9-year-old Scot who lives in the Council of Argyll and Bute. A couple months ago, Payne started a food blog called NeverSeconds, and she would take her camera with her every day to school to document her school lunches. Can you spot the vegetable? (Laughter) And, as sometimes happens, this blog acquired first dozens of readers, and then hundreds of readers, and then thousands of readers, as people tuned in to watch her rate her school lunches, including on my favorite category, "Pieces of hair found in food." (Laughter) This was a zero day. That's good. And then two weeks ago yesterday, she posted this. A post that read: "Goodbye." And she said, "I'm very sorry to tell you this, but my head teacher pulled me out of class today and told me I'm not allowed to take pictures in the lunch room anymore. I really enjoyed doing this. Thank you for reading. Goodbye." You can guess what happened next, right? (Laughter) The outrage was so swift, so voluminous, so unanimous, that the Council of Argyll and Bute reversed themselves the same day and said, "We would, we would never censor a nine-year-old." (Laughter) Except, of course, this morning. (Laughter) And this brings up the question, what made them think they could get away with something like that? (Laughter) And the answer is, all of human history prior to now. (Laughter) So, what happens when a medium suddenly puts a lot of new ideas into circulation? Now, this isn't just a contemporaneous question. This is something we've faced several times over the last few centuries. When the telegraph came along, it was clear that it was going to globalize the news industry. What would this lead to? Well, obviously, it would lead to world peace. The television, a medium that allowed us not just to hear but see, literally see, what was going on elsewhere in the world, what would this lead to? World peace. (Laughter) The telephone? You guessed it: world peace. Sorry for the spoiler alert, but no world peace. Not yet. Even the printing press, even the printing press was assumed to be a tool that was going to enforce Catholic intellectual hegemony across Europe. Instead, what we got was Martin Luther's 95 Theses, the Protestant Reformation, and, you know, the Thirty Years' War. All right, so what all of these predictions of world peace got right is that when a lot of new ideas suddenly come into circulation, it changes society. What they got exactly wrong was what happens next. The more ideas there are in circulation, the more ideas there are for any individual to disagree with. More media always means more arguing. That's what happens when the media's space expands. And yet, when we look back on the printing press in the early years, we like what happened. We are a pro-printing press society. So how do we square those two things, that it leads to more arguing, but we think it was good? And the answer, I think, can be found in things like this. This is the cover of "Philosophical Transactions," the first scientific journal ever published in English in the middle of the 1600s, and it was created by a group of people who had been calling themselves "The Invisible College," a group of natural philosophers who only later would call themselves scientists, and they wanted to improve the way natural philosophers argued with each other, and they needed to do two things for this. They needed openness. They needed to create a norm which said, when you do an experiment, you have to publish not just your claims, but how you did the experiment. If you don't tell us how you did it, we won't trust you. But the other thing they needed was speed. They had to quickly synchronize what other natural philosophers knew. Otherwise, you couldn't get the right kind of argument going. The printing press was clearly the right medium for this, but the book was the wrong tool. It was too slow. And so they invented the scientific journal as a way of synchronizing the argument across the community of natural scientists. The scientific revolution wasn't created by the printing press. It was created by scientists, but it couldn't have been created if they didn't have a printing press as a tool. So what about us? What about our generation, and our media revolution, the Internet? Well, predictions of world peace? Check. (Laughter) More arguing? Gold star on that one. (Laughter) (Laughter) I mean, YouTube is just a gold mine. (Laughter) Better arguing? That's the question. So I study social media, which means, to a first approximation, I watch people argue. And if I had to pick a group that I think is our Invisible College, is our generation's collection of people trying to take these tools and to press it into service, not for more arguments, but for better arguments, I'd pick the open-source programmers. Programming is a three-way relationship between a programmer, some source code, and the computer it's meant to run on, but computers are such famously inflexible interpreters of instructions that it's extraordinarily difficult to write out a set of instructions that the computer knows how to execute, and that's if one person is writing it. Once you get more than one person writing it, it's very easy for any two programmers to overwrite each other's work if they're working on the same file, or to send incompatible instructions that simply causes the computer to choke, and this problem grows larger the more programmers are involved. To a first approximation, the problem of managing a large software project is the problem of keeping this social chaos at bay. Now, for decades there has been a canonical solution to this problem, which is to use something called a "version control system," and a version control system does what is says on the tin. It provides a canonical copy of the software on a server somewhere. The only programmers who can change it are people who've specifically been given permission to access it, and they're only allowed to access the sub-section of it that they have permission to change. And when people draw diagrams of version control systems, the diagrams always look something like this. All right. They look like org charts. And you don't have to squint very hard to see the political ramifications of a system like this. This is feudalism: one owner, many workers. Now, that's fine for the commercial software industry. It really is Microsoft's Office. It's Adobe's Photoshop. The corporation owns the software. The programmers come and go. But there was one programmer who decided that this wasn't the way to work. This is Linus Torvalds. Torvalds is the most famous open-source programmer, created Linux, obviously, and Torvalds looked at the way the open-source movement had been dealing with this problem. Open-source software, the core promise of the open-source license, is that everybody should have access to all the source code all the time, but of course, this creates the very threat of chaos you have to forestall in order to get anything working. So most open-source projects just held their noses and adopted the feudal management systems. But Torvalds said, "No, I'm not going to do that." His point of view on this was very clear. When you adopt a tool, you also adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool, and he wasn't going to adopt anything that didn't work the way the Linux community worked. And to give you a sense of how enormous a decision like this was, this is a map of the internal dependencies within Linux, within the Linux operating system, which sub-parts of the program rely on which other sub-parts to get going. This is a tremendously complicated process. This is a tremendously complicated program, and yet, for years, Torvalds ran this not with automated tools but out of his email box. People would literally mail him changes that they'd agreed on, and he would merge them by hand. And then, 15 years after looking at Linux and figuring out how the community worked, he said, "I think I know how to write a version control system for free people." And he called it "Git." Git is distributed version control. It has two big differences with traditional version control systems. The first is that it lives up to the philosophical promise of open-source. Everybody who works on a project has access to all of the source code all of the time. And when people draw diagrams of Git workflow, they use drawings that look like this. And you don't have to understand what the circles and boxes and arrows mean to see that this is a far more complicated way of working than is supported by ordinary version control systems. But this is also the thing that brings the chaos back, and this is Git's second big innovation. This is a screenshot from GitHub, the premier Git hosting service, and every time a programmer uses Git to make any important change at all, creating a new file, modifying an existing one, merging two files, Git creates this kind of signature. This long string of numbers and letters here is a unique identifier tied to every single change, but without any central coordination. Every Git system generates this number the same way, which means this is a signature tied directly and unforgeably to a particular change. This has the following effect: A programmer in Edinburgh and a programmer in Entebbe can both get the same -- a copy of the same piece of software. Each of them can make changes and they can merge them after the fact even if they didn't know of each other's existence beforehand. This is cooperation without coordination. This is the big change. Now, I tell you all of this not to convince you that it's great that open-source programmers now have a tool that supports their philosophical way of working, although I think that is great. I tell you all of this because of what I think it means for the way communities come together. Once Git allowed for cooperation without coordination, you start to see communities form that are enormously large and complex. This is a graph of the Ruby community. It's an open-source programming language, and all of the interconnections between the people -- this is now not a software graph, but a people graph, all of the interconnections among the people working on that project — and this doesn't look like an org chart. This looks like a dis-org chart, and yet, out of this community, but using these tools, they can now create something together. So there are two good reasons to think that this kind of technique can be applied to democracies in general and in particular to the law. When you make the claim, in fact, that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often get this reaction. (Music) (Laughter) Which is, are you talking about the thing with the singing cats? Like, is that the thing you think is going to be good for society? To which I have to say, here's the thing with the singing cats. That always happens. And I don't just mean that always happens with the Internet, I mean that always happens with media, full stop. It did not take long after the rise of the commercial printing press before someone figured out that erotic novels were a good idea. (Laughter) You don't have to have an economic incentive to sell books very long before someone says, "Hey, you know what I bet people would pay for?" (Laughter) It took people another 150 years to even think of the scientific journal, right? So -- (Laughter) (Applause) So the harnessing by the Invisible College of the printing press to create the scientific journal was phenomenally important, but it didn't happen big, and it didn't happen quick, and it didn't happen fast, so if you're going to look for where the change is happening, you have to look on the margins. So, the law is also dependency-related. This is a graph of the U.S. Tax Code, and the dependencies of one law on other laws for the overall effect. So there's that as a site for source code management. But there's also the fact that law is another place where there are many opinions in circulation, but they need to be resolved to one canonical copy, and when you go onto GitHub, and you look around, there are millions and millions of projects, almost all of which are source code, but if you look around the edges, you can see people experimenting with the political ramifications of a system like that. Someone put up all the Wikileaked cables from the State Department, along with software used to interpret them, including my favorite use ever of the Cablegate cables, which is a tool for detecting naturally occurring haiku in State Department prose. (Laughter) Right. (Laughter) The New York Senate has put up something called Open Legislation, also hosting it on GitHub, again for all of the reasons of updating and fluidity. You can go and pick your Senator and then you can see a list of bills they have sponsored. Someone going by Divegeek has put up the Utah code, the laws of the state of Utah, and they've put it up there not just to distribute the code, but with the very interesting possibility that this could be used to further the development of legislation. Somebody put up a tool during the copyright debate last year in the Senate, saying, "It's strange that Hollywood has more access to Canadian legislators than Canadian citizens do. Why don't we use GitHub to show them what a citizen-developed bill might look like?" And it includes this very evocative screenshot. This is a called a "diff," this thing on the right here. This shows you, for text that many people are editing, when a change was made, who made it, and what the change is. The stuff in red is the stuff that got deleted. The stuff in green is the stuff that got added. Programmers take this capability for granted. No democracy anywhere in the world offers this feature to its citizens for either legislation or for budgets, even though those are the things done with our consent and with our money. Now, I would love to tell you that the fact that the open-source programmers have worked out a collaborative method that is large scale, distributed, cheap, and in sync with the ideals of democracy, I would love to tell you that because those tools are in place, the innovation is inevitable. But it's not. Part of the problem, of course, is just a lack of information. Somebody put a question up on Quora saying, "Why is it that lawmakers don't use distributed version control?" This, graphically, was the answer. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) And that is indeed part of the problem, but only part. The bigger problem, of course, is power. The people experimenting with participation don't have legislative power, and the people who have legislative power are not experimenting with participation. They are experimenting with openness. There's no democracy worth the name that doesn't have a transparency move, but transparency is openness in only one direction, and being given a dashboard without a steering wheel has never been the core promise a democracy makes to its citizens. So consider this. The thing that got Martha Payne's opinions out into the public was a piece of technology, but the thing that kept them there was political will. It was the expectation of the citizens that she would not be censored. That's now the state we're in with these collaboration tools. We have them. We've seen them. They work. Can we use them? Can we apply the techniques that worked here to this? T.S. Eliot once said, "One of the most momentous things that can happen to a culture is that they acquire a new form of prose." I think that's wrong, but -- (Laughter) I think it's right for argumentation. Right? A momentous thing that can happen to a culture is they can acquire a new style of arguing: trial by jury, voting, peer review, now this. Right? A new form of arguing has been invented in our lifetimes, in the last decade, in fact. It's large, it's distributed, it's low-cost, and it's compatible with the ideals of democracy. The question for us now is, are we going to let the programmers keep it to themselves? Or are we going to try and take it and press it into service for society at large? Thank you for listening. (Applause) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)
I'm a contemporary artist with a bit of an unexpected background. I was in my 20s before I ever went to an art museum. I grew up in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road in rural Arkansas, an hour from the nearest movie theater. And I think it was a great place to grow up as an artist because I grew up around quirky, colorful characters who were great at making with their hands. And my childhood is more hick than I could ever possibly relate to you, and also more intellectual than you would ever expect. For instance, me and my sister, when we were little, we would compete to see who could eat the most squirrel brains. (Laughter) But on the other side of that, though, we were big readers in our house. And if the TV was on, we were watching a documentary. And my dad is the most voracious reader I know. He can read a novel or two a day. But when I was little, I remember, he would kill flies in our house with my BB gun. And what was so amazing to me about that -- well he would be in his recliner, would holler for me to fetch the BB gun, and I'd go get it. And what was amazing to me -- well it was pretty kickass; he was killing a fly in the house with a gun -- but what was so amazing to me was that he knew just enough how to pump it. And he could shoot it from two rooms away and not damage what it was on because he knew how to pump it just enough to kill the fly and not damage what it landed on. So I should talk about art. (Laughter) Or we'll be here all day with my childhood stories. I love contemporary art, but I'm often really frustrated with the contemporary art world and the contemporary art scene. A few years ago, I spent months in Europe to see the major international art exhibitions that have the pulse of what is supposed to be going on in the art world. And I was struck by going to so many, one after the other, with some clarity of what it was that I was longing for. And I was longing for several things that I wasn't getting, or not getting enough of. But two of the main things: one of it, I was longing for more work that was appealing to a broad public, that was accessible. And the second thing that I was longing for was some more exquisite craftsmanship and technique. So I started thinking and listing what all it was that I thought would make a perfect biennial. So I decided, I'm going to start my own biennial. I'm going to organize it and direct it and get it going in the world. So I thought, okay, I have to have some criteria of how to choose work. So amongst all the criteria I have, there's two main things. One of them, I call my Mimaw's Test. And what that is is I imagine explaining a work of art to my grandmother in five minutes, and if I can't explain it in five minutes, then it's too obtuse or esoteric and it hasn't been refined enough yet. It needs to worked on until it can speak fluently. And then my other second set of rules -- I hate to say "rules" because it's art -- my criteria would be the three H's, which is head, heart and hands. And great art would have "head": it would have interesting intellectual ideas and concepts. It would have "heart" in that it would have passion and heart and soul. And it would have "hand" in that it would be greatly crafted. So I started thinking about how am I going to do this biennial, how am I going to travel the world and find these artists? And then I realized one day, there's an easier solution to this. I'm just going to make the whole thing myself. (Laughter) And so this is what I did. So I thought, a biennial needs artists. I'm going to do an international biennial; I need artists from all around the world. So what I did was I invented a hundred artists from around the world. I figured out their bios, their passions in life and their art styles, and I started making their work. (Laughter) (Applause) I felt, oh this is the kind of project that I could spend my whole life doing. So I decided, I'm going to make this a real biennial. It's going to be two years of studio work. And I'm going to create this in two years, and I have. So I should start to talk about these guys. Well the range is quite a bit. And I'm such a technician, so I loved this project, getting to play with all the techniques. So for example, in realist paintings, it ranges from this, which is kind of old masters style, to really realistic still-life, to this type of painting where I'm painting with a single hair. And then at the other end, there's performance and short films and indoor installations like this indoor installation and this one, and outdoor installations like this one and this one. I know I should mention: I'm making all these things. This isn't Photoshopped. I'm under the river with those fish. So now let me introduce some of my fictional artists to you. This is Nell Remmel. Nell is interested in agricultural processes, and her work is based in these practices. This piece, which is called "Flipped Earth" -- she was interested in taking the sky and using it to cleanse barren ground. And by taking giant mirrors -- (Applause) and here she's taking giant mirrors and pulling them into the dirt. And this is 22 feet long. And what I loved about her work is, when I would walk around it and look down into the sky, looking down to watch the sky, and it unfolded in a new way. And probably the best part of this piece is at dusk and dawn when the twilight wedge has fallen and the ground's dark, but there's still the light above, bright above. And so you're standing there and everything else is dark, but there's this portal that you want to jump in. This piece was great. This is in my parents' backyard in Arkansas. And I love to dig a hole. So this piece was great fun because it was two days of digging in soft dirt. The next artist is Kay Overstry, and she's interested in ephemerality and transience. And in her most recent project, it's called "Weather I Made." And she's making weather on her body's scale. And this piece is "Frost." And what she did was she went out on a cold, dry night and breathed back and forth on the lawn to leave -- to leave her life's mark, the mark of her life. (Applause) And so this is five-foot, five-inches of frost that she left behind. The sun rises, and it melts away. And that was played by my mom. So the next artist, this is a group of Japanese artists, a collective of Japanese artists -- (Laughter) in Tokyo. And they were interested in developing a new, alternative art space, and they needed funding for it, so they decided to come up with some interesting fundraising projects. One of these is scratch-off masterpieces. (Laughter) And so what they're doing -- each of these artists on a nine-by-seven-inch card, which they sell for 10 bucks, they drew original works of art. And you buy one, and maybe you get a real piece, and maybe not. Well this has sparked a craze in Japan, because everyone's wanting a masterpiece. And the ones that are the most sought after are the ones that are only barely scratched off. And all these works, in some way, talk about luck or fate or chance. Those first two are portraits of mega-jackpot winners years before and after their win. And in this one it's called "Drawing the Short Stick." (Laughter) I love this piece because I have a little cousin at home who introduced me -- which I think is such a great introduction -- to a friend one day as, "This is my cousin Shea. He draws sticks real good." (Laughter) Which is one of the best compliments ever. This artist is Gus Weinmueller, and he's doing a project, a large project, called "Art for the Peoples." And within this project, he's doing a smaller project called "Artists in Residence." And what he does is -- (Laughter) he spends a week at a time with a family. And he shows up on their porch, their doorstep, with a toothbrush and pajamas, and he's ready to spend the week with them. And using only what's present, he goes in and makes a little abode studio to work out of. And he spends that week talking to the family about what do they think great art is. He has all these discussions with their family, and he digs through everything they have, and he finds materials to make work. And he makes a work that answers what they think great art is. For this family, he made this still-life painting. And whatever he makes somehow references nesting and space and personal property. This next project, this is by Jaochim Parisvega, and he's interested in -- he believes art is everywhere waiting -- that it just needs a little bit of a push to happen. And he provides this push by harnessing natural forces, like in his series where he used rain to make paintings. This project is called "Love Nests." What he did was to get wild birds to make his art for him. So he put the material in places where the birds were going to collect them, and they crafted his nests for him. And this one's called "Lovelock's Nest." This one's called "Mixtape Love Song's Nest." (Laughter) And this one's called "Lovemaking Nest." (Laughted) Next is Sylvia Slater. Sylvia's interested in art training. She's a very serious Swiss artist. (Laughter) And she was thinking about her friends and family who work in chaos-ridden places and developing countries, and she was thinking, what can I make that would be of value to them, in case something bad happens and they have to buy their way across the border or pay off a gunman? And so she came up with creating these pocket-sized artworks that are portraits of the person that would carry them. And you would carry this around with you, and if everything went to hell, you could make payments and buy your life. So this life price is for an irrigation non-profit director. So hopefully what happens is you never use it, and it's an heirloom that you pass down. And she makes them so they could either be broken up into payments, or they could be like these, which are leaves that can be payments. And so they're valuable. This is precious metals and gemstones. And this one had to get broken up. He had to break off a piece to get out of Egypt recently. This is by a duo, Michael Abernathy and Bud Holland. And they're interested in creating culture, just tradition. So what they do is they move into an area and try to establish a new tradition in a small geographic area. So this is in Eastern Tennessee, and what they decided was that we need a positive tradition that goes with death. So they came up with "dig jigs." And a dig jig -- a dig jig is where, for a milestone anniversary or a birthday, you gather all your friends and family together and you dance on where you're going to be buried. (Laughter) And we got a lot of attention when we did it. I talked my family into doing this, and they didn't know what I was doing. And I was like, "Get dressed for a funeral. We're going to go do some work." And so we got to the grave and made this, which was hilarious -- the attention that we got. So what happens is you dance on the grave, and after you've done your dance, everyone toasts you and tells you how great you are. And you in essence have a funeral that you get to be present for. That's my mom and dad. This is by Jason Birdsong. He is interested in how we see as an animal, how we are interested in mimicry and camouflage. You know, we look down a dark alley or a jungle path, trying to make out a face or a creature. We just have that natural way of seeing. And he plays with this idea. And this piece: those aren't actually leaves. They're butterfly specimens who have a natural camouflage. So he pairs these up. There's another pile of leaves. Those are actually all real butterfly specimens. And he pairs these up with paintings. Like this is a painting of a snake in a box. So you open the box and you think, "Whoa, there's a snake in there." But it's actually a painting. So he makes these interesting conversations about realism and mimicry and our drive to be fooled by great camouflage. (Laughter) The next artist is Hazel Clausen. Hazel Clausen is an anthropologist who took a sabbatical and decided, "You know, I would learn a lot about culture if I created a culture that doesn't exist from scratch." So that's what she did. She created the Swiss people named the Uvulites, and they have this distinctive yodeling song that they use the uvula for. And also they reference how the uvula -- everything they say is fallen because of the forbidden fruit. And that's the symbol of their culture. And this is from a documentary called "Sexual Practices and Populations Control Among the Uvulites." This is a typical angora embroidery for them. This is one of their founders, Gert Schaeffer. (Laughter) And actually this is my Aunt Irene. It was so funny having a fake person who was making fake things. And I crack up at this piece, because when I see it I know that's French angora and all antique German ribbons and wool that I got in a Nebraska mill and carried around for 10 years and then antique Chinese skirts. The next is a collective of artists called the Silver Dobermans, and their motto is to spread pragmatism one person at a time. (Laughter) And they're really interested in how over-coddled we've become. So this is one of their comments on how over-coddled we've become. And what they've done is they put a warning sign on every single barb on this fence. (Laughter) (Applause) And this is called "Horse Sense Fence." The next artist is K. M. Yoon, a really interesting South Korean artist. And he's reworking a Confucian art tradition of scholar stones. Next is Maynard Sipes. And I love Maynard Sipes, but he's off in his own world, and, bless his heart, he's so paranoid. Next is Roy Penig, a really interesting Kentucky artist, and he's the nicest guy. He even once traded a work of art for a block of government cheese because the person wanted it so badly. Next is an Australian artist, Janeen Jackson, and this is from a project of hers called "What an Artwork Does When We're Not Watching." (Laughter) Next is by a Lithuanian fortune teller, Jurgi Petrauskas. Next is Ginger Cheshire. This is from a short film of hers called "The Last Person." And that's my cousin and my sister's dog, Gabby. The next, this is by Sam Sandy. He's an Australian Aboriginal elder, and he's also an artist. And this is from a large traveling sculpture project that he's doing. This is from Estelle Willoughsby. She heals with color. And she's one of the most prolific of all these hundred artists, even though she's going to be 90 next year. (Laughter) This is by Z. Zhou, and he's interested in stasis. Next is by Hilda Singh, and she's doing a whole project called "Social Outfits." Next is by Vera Sokolova. And I have to say, Vera kind of scares me. You can't look her directly in the eyes because she's kind of scary. And it's good that she's not real; she'd be mad that I said that. (Laughter) And she's an optometrist in St. Petersburg, and she plays with optics. Next, this is by Thomas Swifton. This is from a short film, "Adventures with Skinny." (Laughter) And this is by Cicily Bennett, and it's from a series of short films. And after this one, there's 77 other artists. And all together with those other 77 you're not seeing, that's my biennial. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. (Applause) Thank you. Thanks. (Applause)
Hi. Today I'm going to share my personal journey with female genital mutilation, FGM. Feel free to cry, laugh, cross your legs, or do anything your body feels like doing. I'm not going to name the things your body does. I was born in Sierra Leone. Did anybody watch "Blood Diamond"? If you have any thoughts -- I don't have any diamonds on me, by the way. If you have heard of Ebola, well, that's in Sierra Leone as well. I don't have Ebola. You're all safe. Don't rush to the door. Be seated. You're fine. I was checked before I got here. My grandfather had three wives. Don't ask me why a man needs more than one wife. Men, do you need more than one wife? I don't think so. There you go. He was looking for a heart attack, that's what I say. Oh yeah, he was. When I was three, war broke out in Sierra Leone in 1991. I remember literally going to bed one night, everything was good. The next day, I woke up, bombs were dropping everywhere, and people were trying to kill me and my family. We escaped the war and ended up in Gambia, in West Africa. Ebola is there as well. Stay away from it. While we were there as refugees, we didn't know what was going to become of us. My mom applied for refugee status. She's a wonderful, smart woman, that one, and we were lucky. Australia said, we will take you in. Good job, Aussies. Before we were meant to travel, my mom came home one day, and said, "We're going on a little holiday, a little trip." She put us in a car, and we drove for hours and ended up in a bush in a remote area in Gambia. In this bush, we found two huts. An old lady came towards us. She was ethnic-looking, very old. She had a chat with my mom, and went back. Then she came back and walked away from us into a second hut. I'm standing there thinking, "This is very confusing. I don't know what's going on." The next thing I knew, my mom took me into this hut. She took my clothes off, and then she pinned me down on the floor. I struggled and tried to get her off me, but I couldn't. Then the old lady came towards me with a rusty-looking knife, one of the sharp knives, orange-looking, has never seen water or sunlight before. I thought she was going to slaughter me, but she didn't. She slowly slid down my body and ended up where my vagina is. She took hold of what I now know to be my clitoris, she took that rusty knife, and started cutting away, inch by inch. I screamed, I cried, and asked my mom to get off me so this pain will stop, but all she did was say, "Be quiet." This old lady sawed away at my flesh for what felt like forever, and then when she was done, she threw that piece of flesh across the floor as if it was the most disgusting thing she's ever touched. They both got off me, and left me there bleeding, crying, and confused as to what just happened. We never talked about this again. Very soon, we found that we were coming to Australia, and this is when you had the Sydney Olympics at the time, and people said we were going to the end of the world, there was nowhere else to go after Australia. Yeah, that comforted us a bit. It took us three days to get here. We went to Senegal, then France, and then Singapore. We went to the bathroom to wash our hands. We spent 15 minutes opening the tap like this. Then somebody came in, slid their hand under and water came out, and we thought, is this what we're in for? Like, seriously. We got to Adelaide, small place, where literally they dumped us in Adelaide, that's what I would say. They dumped us there. We were very grateful. We settled and we liked it. We were like, "We're home, we're here." Then somebody took us to Rundle Mall. Adelaide has only one mall. It's this small place. And we saw a lot of Asian people. My mom said all of a sudden, panicking, "You brought us to the wrong place. You must take us back to Australia." Yeah. It had to be explained to her that there were a lot of Asians in Australia and we were in the right place. So fine, it's all good. My mom then had this brilliant idea that I should go to a girls school because they were less racist. I don't know where she read that publication. (Laughter) Never found evidence of it to this day. Six hundred white kids, and I was the only black child there. No, I was the only person with a bit of a color on me. Let me say that. Chocolate color. There were no Asians, no indigenous. All we had was some tan girls, girls who felt the need to be under the sun. It wasn't the same as my chocolate, though. Not the same. Settling in Australia was quite hard, but it became harder when I started volunteering for an organization called Women's Health Statewide, and I joined their female genital mutilation program without any awareness of what this program was actually about, or that it related to me in any way. I spent months educating nurses and doctors about what female genital mutilation was and where it was practiced: Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and now, Australia and London and America, because, as we all know, we live in a multicultural society, and people who come from those backgrounds come with their culture, and sometimes they have cultural practices that we may not agree with, but they continue to practice them. One day, I was looking at the chart of the different types of female genital mutilation, FGM, I will just say FGM for short. Type I is when they cut off the hood. Type II is when they cut off the whole clitoris and some of your labia majora, or your outer lips, and Type III is when they cut off the whole clitoris and then they sew you up so you only have a little hole to pee and have your period. My eyes went onto Type II. Before all of this, I pretty much had amnesia. I was in so much shock and traumatized by what had happened, I didn't remember any of it. Yes, I was aware something bad happened to me, but I had no recollection of what had happened. I knew I had a scar down there, but I thought everybody had a scar down there. This had happened to everybody else. But when I looked at Type II, it all came back to me. I remembered what was done to me. I remembered being in that hut with that old lady and my mom holding me down. Words cannot express the pain I felt, the confusion that I felt, because now I realized that what was done to me was a terrible thing that in this society was called barbaric, it was called mutilation. My mother had said it was called circumcision, but here it was mutilation. I was thinking, I'm mutilated? I'm a mutilated person. Oh my God. And then the anger came. I was a black angry woman. (Laughter) Oh yeah. A little one, but angry nevertheless. I went home and said to my mom, "You did something." This is not the African thing to do, pointing at your mother, but hey, I was ready for any consequences. "You did something to me." She's like, "What are you talking about, Khadija?" She's used to me mouthing off. I'm like, "Those years ago, You circumcised me. You cut away something that belonged to me." She said, "Yes, I did. I did it for your own good. It was in your best interest. Your grandmother did it to me, and I did it to you. It's made you a woman." I'm like, "How?" She said, "You're empowered, Khadija. Do you get itchy down there?" I'm like, "No, why would I get itchy down there?" She said, "Well, if you were not circumcised, you would get itchy down there. Women who are not circumcised get itchy all the time. Then they sleep around with everybody. You are not going to sleep around with anybody." And I thought, her definition of empowerment was very strange. (Laughter) That was the end of our first conversation. I went back to school. These were the days when we had Dolly and Girlfriend magazines. There was always the sealed section. Anybody remember those sealed sections? The naughty bits, you know? Oh yeah, I love those. (Laughter) Anyway, there was always an article about pleasure and relationships and, of course, sex. But it always assumed that you had a clitoris, though, and I thought, this doesn't fit me. This doesn't talk about people like me. I don't have a clitoris. I watched TV and those women would moan like, "Oh! Oh!" I was like, these people and their damned clitoris. (Laughter) What is a woman without a clitoris supposed to do with her life? That's what I want to know. I want to do that too -- "Oh! Oh!" and all of that. Didn't happen. So I came home once again and said to my mom, "Dolly and Girlfriend said I deserve pleasure, that I should be having orgasms, and that white men should figure out how to find the clitoris." Apparently, white men have a problem finding the clitoris. (Laughter) Just saying, it wasn't me. It was Dolly that said that. And I thought to myself, I had an inner joke in my head that said, "I will marry a white man. He won't have that problem with me." (Laughter) So I said to my mom, "Dolly and Girlfriend said I deserve pleasure, and do you know what you have taken away from me, what you have denied me? You have invaded me in the most sacred way. I want pleasure. I want to get horny, dammit, as well." And she said to me, "Who is Dolly and Girlfriend? Are they your new friends, Khadija?" I was like, "No, they're not. That's a magazine, mom, a magazine." She didn't get it. We came from two different worlds. When she was growing up, not having a clitoris was the norm. It was celebrated. I was an African Australian girl. I lived in a society that was very clitoris-centric. It was all about the damn clitoris! And I didn't have one! That pissed me off. So once I went through this strange phase of anger and pain and confusion, I remember booking an appointment with my therapist. Yes, I'm an African who has a therapist. There you go. And I said to her, "I was 13. I was a child. I was settling in a new country, I was dealing with racism and discrimination, English is my third language, and then there it was." I said to her, "I feel like I'm not a woman because of what was done to me. I feel incomplete. Am I going to be asexual?" Because from what I knew about FGM, the whole aim of it was to control the sexuality of women. It's so that we don't have any sexual desire. And I said, "Am I asexual now? Will I just live the rest of my life not feeling like having sex, not enjoying sex?" She couldn't answer my questions, so they went unanswered. When I started having my period around the age of 14, I realized I didn't have normal periods because of FGM. My periods were heavy, they were long, and they were very painful. Then they told me I had fibroids. They're like these little balls sitting there. One was covering one of my ovaries. And there came then the big news. "We don't think you can have children, Khadija." And once again, I was an angry black woman. I went home and I said to my mom, "Your act, your action, no matter what your may defense may be" -- because she thought she did it out love -- "what you did out of love is harming me, and it's hurting me. What do you have to say for that?" She said, "I did what I had to do as a mother." I'm still waiting for an apology, by the way. Then I got married. And once again -- FGM is like the gift that keeps giving. You figure that out very soon. Sex was very painful. It hurt all the time. And of course I realized, they said, "You can't have kids." I thought, "Wow, is this my existence? Is this what life is all about?" I'm proud to tell you, five months ago, I was told I was pregnant. (Applause) I am the lucky girl. There are so many women out there who have gone through FGM who have infertility. I know a nine-year-old girl who has incontinence, constant infections, pain. It's that gift. It doesn't stop giving. It affects every area of your life, and this happened to me because I was born a girl in the wrong place. That's why it happened to me. I channel all that anger, all that pain, into advocacy because I needed my pain to be worth something. So I'm the director of an organization called No FGM Australia. You heard me right. Why No FGM Australia? FGM is in Australia. Two days ago, I had to call Child Protective Services, because somewhere in Australia, there's a four-year old there's a four-year-old whose mom is planning on performing FGM on her. That child is in kindy. I'll let that sink in: four years old. A couple of months ago, I met a lady who is married to a Malaysian man. Her husband came home one day and said he was going to take their daughters back to Malaysia to cut off their clitoris. And she said, "Why?" He said they were dirty. And she said, "Well, you married me." He said, "Oh, this is my cultural belief." They then went into a whole discussion where she said to him, "Over my dead body will you do that to my daughters." But imagine if this woman wasn't aware of what FGM was, if they never had that conversation? Her children would have been flown over to Malaysia and they would have come back changed for the rest of their lives. Do you know the millions of dollars it would take us to deal with an issue like that? [Three children per day] in Australia are at risk of having FGM performed on them. This is an Australian problem, people. It's not an African problem. It's not a Middle Eastern problem. It's not white, it's not black, it has no color, it's everybody's problem. FGM is child abuse. It's violence against women. It's saying that women don't have a right to sexual pleasure. It says we don't have a right to our bodies. Well, I say no to that, and you know what? Bullshit. That's what I have to say to that. (Applause) I am proud to say that I'm doing my part in ending FGM. What are you going to do? There may be a child in your classroom who is at risk of FGM. There may be a patient who comes to your hospital who is at risk of FGM. But this is the reality, that even in our beloved Australia, the most wonderful place in the world, children are being abused because of a culture. Culture should not be a defense for child abuse. I want ever single one of you to see FGM as an issue for you. Make it personal. It could be your daughter, your sister, your cousin. I can't fight FGM alone. I could try, but I can't. So my appeal to you is, please join me. Sign my petition on Change.org and type in Khadija, my name, and it'll come up, and sign it. The aim of that is to get support for FGM victims in Australia and to protect little girls growing up here to not have this evil done to them, because every child has a right to pleasure. Every child has a right to their bodies being left intact, and dammit, ever child has a right to a clitoris. So please join me in ending this act. My favorite quote is, "All it takes for evil to prevail is for a few good men and women to do nothing." Are you going to let this evil of female genital mutilation to prevail in Australia? I don't think so, so please join me in ensuring that it ends in my generation. Thank you. (Applause)
I thought I would read poems I have that relate to the subject of youth and age. I was sort of astonished to find out how many I have actually. The first one is dedicated to Spencer, and his grandmother, who was shocked by his work. My poem is called "Dirt." My grandmother is washing my mouth out with soap; half a long century gone and still she comes at me with that thick cruel yellow bar. All because of a word I said, not even said really, only repeated. But "Open," she says, "open up!" her hand clawing at my head. I know now her life was hard; she lost three children as babies, then her husband died too, leaving young sons, and no money. She'd stand me in the sink to pee because there was never room in the toilet. But oh, her soap! Might its bitter burning have been what made me a poet? The street she lived on was unpaved, her flat, two cramped rooms and a fetid kitchen where she stalked and caught me. Dare I admit that after she did it I never really loved her again? She lived to a hundred, even then. All along it was the sadness, the squalor, but I never, until now loved her again. When that was published in a magazine I got an irate letter from my uncle. "You have maligned a great woman." It took some diplomacy. This is called "The Dress." It's a longer poem. In those days, those days which exist for me only as the most elusive memory now, when often the first sound you'd hear in the morning would be a storm of birdsong, then the soft clop of the hooves of the horse hauling a milk wagon down your block, and the last sound at night as likely as not would be your father pulling up in his car, having worked late again, always late, and going heavily down to the cellar, to the furnace, to shake out the ashes and damp the draft before he came upstairs to fall into bed -- in those long-ago days, women, my mother, my friends' mothers, our neighbors, all the women I knew -- wore, often much of the day, what were called housedresses, cheap, printed, pulpy, seemingly purposefully shapeless light cotton shifts that you wore over your nightgown and, when you had to go look for a child, hang wash on the line, or run down to the grocery store on the corner, under a coat, the twisted hem of the nightgown always lank and yellowed, dangling beneath. More than the curlers some of the women seemed constantly to have in their hair in preparation for some great event -- a ball, one would think -- that never came to pass; more than the way most women's faces not only were never made up during the day, but seemed scraped, bleached, and, with their plucked eyebrows, scarily masklike; more than all that it was those dresses that made women so unknowable and forbidding, adepts of enigmas to which men could have no access, and boys no conception. Only later would I see the dresses also as a proclamation: that in your dim kitchen, your laundry, your bleak concrete yard, what you revealed of yourself was a fabulation; your real sensual nature, veiled in those sexless vestments, was utterly your dominion. In those days, one hid much else as well: grown men didn't embrace one another, unless someone had died, and not always then; you shook hands or, at a ball game, thumped your friend's back and exchanged blows meant to be codes for affection; once out of childhood you'd never again know the shock of your father's whiskers on your cheek, not until mores at last had evolved, and you could hug another man, then hold on for a moment, then even kiss (your fathers bristles white and stiff now). What release finally, the embrace: though we were wary -- it seemed so audacious -- how much unspoken joy there was in that affirmation of equality and communion, no matter how much misunderstanding and pain had passed between you by then. We knew so little in those days, as little as now, I suppose about healing those hurts: even the women, in their best dresses, with beads and sequins sewn on the bodices, even in lipstick and mascara, their hair aflow, could only stand wringing their hands, begging for peace, while father and son, like thugs, like thieves, like Romans, simmered and hissed and hated, inflicting sorrows that endured, the worst anyway, through the kiss and embrace, bleeding from brother to brother, into the generations. In those days there was still countryside close to the city, farms, cornfields, cows; even not far from our building with its blurred brick and long shadowy hallway you could find tracts with hills and trees you could pretend were mountains and forests. Or you could go out by yourself even to a half-block-long empty lot, into the bushes: like a creature of leaves you'd lurk, crouched, crawling, simplified, savage, alone; already there was wanting to be simpler, wanting, when they called you, never to go back. (Applause) This is another longish one, about the old and the young. It actually happened right at the time we met. Part of the poem takes place in space we shared and time we shared. It's called "The Neighbor." Her five horrid, deformed little dogs who incessantly yap on the roof under my window. Her cats, God knows how many, who must piss on her rugs -- her landing's a sickening reek. Her shadow once, fumbling the chain on her door, then the door slamming fearfully shut, only the barking and the music -- jazz -- filtering as it does, day and night into the hall. The time it was Chris Connor singing "Lush Life" -- how it brought back my college sweetheart, my first real love, who -- till I left her -- played the same record. And head on my shoulder, hand on my thigh, sang sweetly along, of regrets and depletions she was too young for, as I was too young, later, to believe in her pain. It startled, then bored, then repelled me. My starting to fancy she'd ended up in this fire-trap in the Village, that my neighbor was her. My thinking we'd meet, recognize one another, become friends, that I'd accomplish a penance. My seeing her, it wasn't her, at the mailbox. Gray-yellow hair, army pants under a nightgown, her turning away, hiding her ravaged face in her hands, muttering an inappropriate "Hi." Sometimes there are frightening goings-on in the stairwell. A man shouting, "Shut up!" The dogs frantically snarling, claws scrabbling, then her -- her voice hoarse, harsh, hollow, almost only a tone, incoherent, a note, a squawk, bone on metal, metal gone molten, calling them back, "Come back darlings, come back dear ones. My sweet angels, come back." Medea she was, next time I saw her. Sorceress, tranced, ecstatic, stock-still on the sidewalk ragged coat hanging agape, passersby flowing around her, her mouth torn suddenly open as though in a scream, silently though, as though only in her brain or breast had it erupted. A cry so pure, practiced, detached, it had no need of a voice, or could no longer bear one. These invisible links that allure, these transfigurations, even of anguish, that hold us. The girl, my old love, the last lost time I saw her when she came to find me at a party, her drunkenly stumbling, falling, sprawling, skirt hiked, eyes veined red, swollen with tears, her shame, her dishonor. My ignorant, arrogant coarseness, my secret pride, my turning away. Still life on a rooftop, dead trees in barrels, a bench broken, dogs, excrement, sky. What pathways through pain, what junctures of vulnerability, what crossings and counterings? Too many lives in our lives already, too many chances for sorrow, too many unaccounted-for pasts. "Behold me," the god of frenzied, inexhaustible love says, rising in bloody splendor, "Behold me." Her making her way down the littered vestibule stairs, one agonized step at a time. My holding the door. Her crossing the fragmented tiles, faltering at the step to the street, droning, not looking at me, "Can you help me?" Taking my arm, leaning lightly against me. Her wavering step into the world. Her whispering, "Thanks love." Lightly, lightly against me. (Applause) I think I'll lighten up a little. (Laughter) Another, different kind of poem of youth and age. It's called "Gas." (Laughter) Wouldn't it be nice, I think, when the blue-haired lady in the doctor's waiting room bends over the magazine table and farts, just a little, and violently blushes. Wouldn't it be nice if intestinal gas came embodied in visible clouds, so she could see that her really quite inoffensive pop had only barely grazed my face before it drifted away. (Laughter) Besides, for this to have happened now is a nice coincidence. Because not an hour ago, while we were on our walk, my dog was startled by a backfire and jumped straight up like a horse bucking. And that brought back to me the stable I worked on weekends when I was 12, and a splendid piebald stallion, who whenever he was mounted would buck just like that, though more hugely of course, enormous, gleaming, resplendent. And the woman, her face abashedly buried in her "Elle" now, reminded me -- I'd forgotten that not the least part of my awe consisted of the fact that with every jump he took the horse would powerfully fart. Phwap! Phwap! Phwap! Something never mentioned in the dozens of books about horses and their riders I devoured in those days. All that savage grandeur, the steely glinting hooves, the eruptions driven from the creature's mighty innards, breath stopped, heart stopped, nostrils madly flared, I didn't know if I wanted to break him, or be him. (Laughter) (Applause) This is called "Thirst." Many -- most of my poems actually are urban poems. I happen to be reading a bunch that aren't. "Thirst." Here was my relation with the woman who lived all last autumn and winter, day and night, on a bench in the 103rd Street subway station, until finally one day she vanished. We regarded each other, scrutinized one another. Me shyly, obliquely, trying not to be furtive. She boldly, unblinkingly, even pugnaciously, wrathfully even, when her bottle was empty. I was frightened of her. I felt like a child. I was afraid some repressed part of myself would go out of control, and I'd be forever entrapped in the shocking seethe of her stench. Not excrement merely, not merely surface and orifice going unwashed, rediffusion of rum, there was will in it, and intention, power and purpose -- a social, ethical rage and rebellion -- despair too, though, grief, loss. Sometimes I'd think I should take her home with me, bathe her, comfort her, dress her. She wouldn't have wanted me to, I would think. Instead, I'd step into my train. How rich I would think, is the lexicon of our self-absolving. How enduring, our bland fatal assurance that reflection is righteousness being accomplished. The dance of our glances, the clash, pulling each other through our perceptual punctures, then holocaust, holocaust, host on host of ill, injured presences, squandered, consumed. Her vigil somewhere I know continues. Her occupancy, her absolute, faithful attendance. The dance of our glances, challenge, abdication, effacement, the perfume of our consternation. (Applause) This is a newer poem, a brand new poem. The title is "This Happened." A student, a young woman in a fourth-floor hallway of her lycee, perched on the ledge of an open window chatting with friends between classes; a teacher passes and chides her, "Be careful, you might fall," almost banteringly chides her, "You might fall," and the young woman, 18, a girl really, though she wouldn't think that, as brilliant as she is, first in her class, and "Beautiful, too," she's often told, smiles back, and leans into the open window, which wouldn't even be open if it were winter -- if it were winter someone would have closed it ("Close it!") -- leans into the window, farther, still smiling, farther and farther, though it takes less time than this, really an instant, and lets herself fall. Herself fall. A casual impulse, a fancy, never thought of until now, hardly thought of even now ... No, more than impulse or fancy, the girl knows what she's doing, the girl means something, the girl means to mean, because it occurs to her in that instant, that beautiful or not, bright yes or no, she's not who she is, she's not the person she is, and the reason, she suddenly knows, is that there's been so much premeditation where she is, so much plotting and planning, there's hardly a person where she is, or if there is, it's not her, or not wholly her, it's a self inhabited, lived in by her, and seemingly even as she thinks it she knows what's been missing: grace, not premeditation but grace, a kind of being in the world spontaneously, with grace. Weightfully upon me was the world. Weightfully this self which graced the world yet never wholly itself. Weightfully this self which weighed upon me, the release from which is what I desire and what I achieve. And the girl remembers, in this infinite instant already now so many times divided, the sadness she felt once, hardly knowing she felt it, to merely inhabit herself. Yes, the girl falls, absurd to fall, even the earth with its compulsion to take unto itself all that falls must know that falling is absurd, yet the girl falling isn't myself, or she is myself, but a self I took of my own volition unto myself. Forever. With grace. This happened. (Applause) I'll read just one more. I don't usually say that. I like to just end. But I'm afraid that Ricky will come out here and shake his fist at me. This is called "Old Man," appropriately enough. "Special: big tits," Says the advertisement for a soft-core magazine on our neighborhood newsstand. But forget her breasts. A lush, fresh-lipped blond, skin glowing gold, sprawls there, resplendent. 60 nearly, yet these hardly tangible, hardly better than harlots, can still stir me. Maybe a coming of age in the American sensual darkness, never seeing an unsmudged nipple, an uncensored vagina, has left me forever infected with an unquenchable lust of the eye. Always that erotic murmur, I'm hardly myself if I'm not in a state of incipient desire. God knows though, there are worse twists your obsessions can take. Last year in Israel, a young ultra-orthodox Rabbi guiding some teenage girls through the Shrine of the Shoah forbade them to look in one room. Because there were images in it he said were licentious. The display was a photo. Men and women stripped naked, some trying to cover their genitals, others too frightened to bother, lined up in snow waiting to be shot and thrown into a ditch. The girls, to my horror, averted their gaze. What carnal mistrust had their teacher taught them. Even that though. Another confession: Once in a book on pre-war Poland, a studio portrait, an absolute angel, an absolute angel with tormented, tormenting eyes. I kept finding myself at her page. That she died in the camps made her -- I didn't dare wonder why -- more present, more precious. Died in the camps, that too people -- or Jews anyway -- kept from their children back then. But it was like sex, you didn't have to be told. Sex and death, how close they can seem. So constantly conscious now of death moving towards me, sometimes I think I confound them. My wife's loveliness almost consumes me. My passion for her goes beyond reasonable bounds. When we make love, her holding me everywhere all around me, I'm there and not there. My mind teems, jumbles of faces, voices, impressions, I live my life over, as though I were drowning. Then I am drowning, in despair at having to leave her, this, everything, all, unbearable, awful. Still, to be able to die with no special contrition, not having been slaughtered, or enslaved. And not having to know history's next mad rage or regression, it might be a relief. No. Again, no. I don't mean that for a moment. What I mean is the world holds me so tightly -- the good and the bad -- my own follies and weakness that even this counterfeit Venus with her sham heat, and her bosom probably plumped with gel, so moves me my breath catches. Vamp. Siren. Seductress. How much more she reveals in her glare of ink than she knows. How she incarnates our desperate human need for regard, our passion to live in beauty, to be beauty, to be cherished by glances, if by no more, of something like love, or love. Thank you. (Applause)
So when the White House was built in the early 19th century, it was an open house. Neighbors came and went. Under President Adams, a local dentist happened by. He wanted to shake the President's hand. The President dismissed the Secretary of State, whom he was conferring with, and asked the dentist if he would remove a tooth. Later, in the 1850s, under President Pierce, he was known to have remarked — probably the only thing he's known for — when a neighbor passed by and said, "I'd love to see the beautiful house," and Pierce said to him, "Why my dear sir, of course you may come in. This isn't my house. It is the people's house." Well, when I got to the White House in the beginning of 2009, at the start of the Obama Administration, the White House was anything but open. Bomb blast curtains covered my windows. We were running Windows 2000. Social media were blocked at the firewall. We didn't have a blog, let alone a dozen twitter accounts like we have today. I came in to become the head of Open Government, to take the values and the practices of transparency, participation and collaboration, and instill them into the way that we work, to open up government, to work with people. Now one of the things that we know is that companies are very good at getting people to work together in teams and in networks to make very complex products, like cars and computers, and the more complex the products are a society creates, the more successful the society is over time. Companies make goods, but governments, they make public goods. They work on the cure for cancer and educating our children and making roads, but we don't have institutions that are particularly good at this kind of complexity. We don't have institutions that are good at bringing our talents to bear, at working with us in this kind of open and collaborative way. So when we wanted to create our Open Government policy, what did we do? We wanted, naturally, to ask public sector employees how we should open up government. Turns out that had never been done before. We wanted to ask members of the public to help us come up with a policy, not after the fact, commenting on a rule after it's written, the way is typically the case, but in advance. There was no legal precedent, no cultural precedent, no technical way of doing this. In fact, many people told us it was illegal. Here's the crux of the obstacle. Governments exist to channel the flow of two things, really, values and expertise to and from government and to and from citizens to the end of making decisions. But the way that our institutions are designed, in our rather 18th-century, centralized model, is to channel the flow of values through voting, once every four years, once every two years, at best, once a year. This is a rather anemic and thin way, in this era of social media, for us to actually express our values. Today we have technology that lets us express ourselves a great deal, perhaps a little too much. Then in the 19th century, we layer on the concept of bureaucracy and the administrative state to help us govern complex and large societies. But we've centralized these bureaucracies. We've entrenched them. And we know that the smartest person always works for someone else. We need to only look around this room to know that expertise and intelligence is widely distributed in society, and not limited simply to our institutions. Scientists have been studying in recent years the phenomenon that they often describe as flow, that the design of our systems, whether natural or social, channel the flow of whatever runs through them. So a river is designed to channel the flow of water, and the lightning bolt that comes out of a cloud channels the flow of electricity, and a leaf is designed to channel the flow of nutrients to the tree, sometimes even having to route around an obstacle, but to get that nutrition flowing. The same can be said for our social systems, for our systems of government, where, at the very least, flow offers us a helpful metaphor for understanding what the problem is, what's really broken, and the urgent need that we have, that we all feel today, to redesign the flow of our institutions. We live in a Cambrian era of big data, of social networks, and we have this opportunity to redesign these institutions that are actually quite recent. Think about it: What other business do you know, what other sector of the economy, and especially one as big as the public sector, that doesn't seek to reinvent its business model on a regular basis? Sure, we invest plenty in innovation. We invest in broadband and science education and science grants, but we invest far too little in reinventing and redesigning the institutions that we have. Now, it's very easy to complain, of course, about partisan politics and entrenched bureaucracy, and we love to complain about government. It's a perennial pastime, especially around election time, but the world is complex. We soon will have 10 billion people, many of whom will lack basic resources. So complain as we might, what actually can replace what we have today? What comes the day after the Arab Spring? Well, one attractive alternative that obviously presents itself to us is that of networks. Right? Networks like Facebook and Twitter. They're lean. They're mean. You've got 3,000 employees at Facebook governing 900 million inhabitants. We might even call them citizens, because they've recently risen up to fight against legislative incursion, and the citizens of these networks work together to serve each other in great ways. But private communities, private, corporate, privatizing communities, are not bottom-up democracies. They cannot replace government. Friending someone on Facebook is not complex enough to do the hard work of you and I collaborating with each other and doing the hard work of governance. But social media do teach us something. Why is Twitter so successful? Because it opens up its platform. It opens up the API to allow hundreds of thousands of new applications to be built on top of it, so that we can read and process information in new and exciting ways. We need to think about how to open up the API of government, and the way that we're going to do that, the next great superpower is going to be the one who can successfully combine the hierarchy of institution -- because we have to maintain those public values, we have to coordinate the flow -- but with the diversity and the pulsating life and the chaos and the excitement of networks, all of us working together to build these new innovations on top of our institutions, to engage in the practice of governance. We have a precedent for this. Good old Henry II here, in the 12th century, invented the jury. Powerful, practical, palpable model for handing power from government to citizens. Today we have the opportunity, and we have the imperative, to create thousands of new ways of interconnecting between networks and institutions, thousands of new kinds of juries: the citizen jury, the Carrotmob, the hackathon, we are just beginning to invent the models by which we can cocreate the process of governance. Now, we don't fully have a picture of what this will look like yet, but we're seeing pockets of evolution emerging all around us -- maybe not even evolution, I'd even start to call it a revolution -- in the way that we govern. Some of it's very high-tech, and some of it is extremely low-tech, such as the project that MKSS is running in Rajasthan, India, where they take the spending data of the state and paint it on 100,000 village walls, and then invite the villagers to come and comment who is on the government payroll, who's actually died, what are the bridges that have been built to nowhere, and to work together through civic engagement to save real money and participate and have access to that budget. But it's not just about policing government. It's also about creating government. Spacehive in the U.K. is engaging in crowd-funding, getting you and me to raise the money to build the goalposts and the park benches that will actually allow us to deliver better services in our communities. No one is better at this activity of actually getting us to engage in delivering services, sometimes where none exist, than Ushahidi. Created after the post-election riots in Kenya in 2008, this crisis-mapping website and community is actually able to crowdsource and target the delivery of better rescue services to people trapped under the rubble, whether it's after the earthquakes in Haiti, or more recently in Italy. And the Red Cross too is training volunteers and Twitter is certifying them, not simply to supplement existing government institutions, but in many cases, to replace them. Now what we're seeing lots of examples of, obviously, is the opening up of government data, not enough examples of this yet, but we're starting to see this practice of people creating and generating innovative applications on top of government data. There's so many examples I could have picked, and I selected this one of Jon Bon Jovi. Some of you may or may not know that he runs a soup kitchen in New Jersey, where he caters to and serves the homeless and particularly homeless veterans. In February, he approached the White House, and said, "I would like to fund a prize to create scalable national applications, apps, that will help not only the homeless but those who deliver services [to] them to do so better." February 2012 to June of 2012, the finalists are announced in the competition. Can you imagine, in the bureaucratic world of yesteryear, getting anything done in a four-month period of time? You can barely fill out the forms in that amount of time, let alone generate real, palpable innovations that improve people's lives. And I want to be clear to mention that this open government revolution is not about privatizing government, because in many cases what it can do when we have the will to do so is to deliver more progressive and better policy than the regulations and the legislative and litigation-oriented strategies by which we make policy today. In the State of Texas, they regulate 515 professions, from well-driller to florist. Now, you can carry a gun into a church in Dallas, but do not make a flower arrangement without a license, because that will land you in jail. So what is Texas doing? They're asking you and me, using online policy wikis, to help not simply get rid of burdensome regulations that impede entrepreneurship, but to replace those regulations with more innovative alternatives, sometimes using transparency in the creation of new iPhone apps that will allows us both to protect consumers and the public and to encourage economic development. That is a nice sideline of open government. It's not only the benefits that we've talked about with regard to development. It's the economic benefits and the job creation that's coming from this open innovation work. Sberbank, the largest and oldest bank in Russia, largely owned by the Russian government, has started practicing crowdsourcing, engaging its employees and citizens in the public in developing innovations. Last year they saved a billion dollars, 30 billion rubles, from open innovation, and they're pushing radically the extension of crowdsourcing, not only from banking, but into the public sector. And we see lots of examples of these innovators using open government data, not simply to make apps, but then to make companies and to hire people to build them working with the government. So a lot of these innovations are local. In San Ramon, California, they published an iPhone app in which they allow you or me to say we are certified CPR-trained, and then when someone has a heart attack, a notification goes out so that you can rush over to the person over here and deliver CPR. The victim who receives bystander CPR is more than twice as likely to survive. "There is a hero in all of us," is their slogan. But it's not limited to the local. British Columbia, Canada, is publishing a catalogue of all the ways that its residents and citizens can engage with the state in the cocreation of governance. Let me be very clear, and perhaps controversial, that open government is not about transparent government. Simply throwing data over the transom doesn't change how government works. It doesn't get anybody to do anything with that data to change lives, to solve problems, and it doesn't change government. What it does is it creates an adversarial relationship between civil society and government over the control and ownership of information. And transparency, by itself, is not reducing the flow of money into politics, and arguably, it's not even producing accountability as well as it might if we took the next step of combining participation and collaboration with transparency to transform how we work. We're going to see this evolution really in two phases, I think. The first phase of the open government revolution is delivering better information from the crowd into the center. Starting in 2005, and this is how this open government work in the U.S. really got started, I was teaching a patent law class to my students and explaining to them how a single person in the bureaucracy has the power to make a decision about which patent application becomes the next patent, and therefore monopolizes for 20 years the rights over an entire field of inventive activity. Well, what did we do? We said, we can make a website, we can make an expert network, a social network, that would connect the network to the institution to allow scientists and technologists to get better information to the patent office to aid in making those decisions. We piloted the work in the U.S. and the U.K. and Japan and Australia, and now I'm pleased to report that the United States Patent Office will be rolling out universal, complete, and total openness, so that all patent applications will now be open for citizen participation, beginning this year. The second phase of this evolution — Yeah. (Applause) They deserve a hand. (Applause) The first phase is in getting better information in. The second phase is in getting decision-making power out. Participatory budgeting has long been practiced in Porto Alegre, Brazil. They're just starting it in the 49th Ward in Chicago. Russia is using wikis to get citizens writing law together, as is Lithuania. When we start to see power over the core functions of government — spending, legislation, decision-making — then we're well on our way to an open government revolution. There are many things that we can do to get us there. Obviously opening up the data is one, but the important thing is to create lots more -- create and curate -- lots more participatory opportunities. Hackathons and mashathons and working with data to build apps is an intelligible way for people to engage and participate, like the jury is, but we're going to need lots more things like it. And that's why we need to start with our youngest people. We've heard talk here at TED about people biohacking and hacking their plants with Arduino, and Mozilla is doing work around the world in getting young people to build websites and make videos. When we start by teaching young people that we live, not in a passive society, a read-only society, but in a writable society, where we have the power to change our communities, to change our institutions, that's when we begin to really put ourselves on the pathway towards this open government innovation, towards this open government movement, towards this open government revolution. So let me close by saying that I think the important thing for us to do is to talk about and demand this revolution. We don't have words, really, to describe it yet. Words like equality and fairness and the traditional elections, democracy, these are not really great terms yet. They're not fun enough. They're not exciting enough to get us engaged in this tremendous opportunity that awaits us. But I would argue that if we want to see the kinds of innovations, the hopeful and exciting innovations that we hear talked about here at TED, in clean energy, in clean education, in development, if we want to see those adopted and we want to see those scaled, we want to see them become the governance of tomorrow, then we must all participate, then we must get involved. We must open up our institutions, and like the leaf, we must let the nutrients flow throughout our body politic, throughout our culture, to create open institutions to create a stronger democracy, a better tomorrow. Thank you. (Applause)
I'm going to be talking about designing humor, which is sort of an interesting thing, but it goes to some of the discussions about constraints, and how in certain contexts, humor is right, and in other contexts it's wrong. Now, I'm from New York, so it's 100 percent satisfaction here. Actually, that's ridiculous, because when it comes to humor, 75 percent is really absolutely the best you can hope for. Nobody is ever satisfied 100 percent with humor except this woman. (Video) Woman: (Laughs) Bob Mankoff: That's my first wife. (Laughter) That part of the relationship went fine. (Laughter) Now let's look at this cartoon. One of the things I'm pointing out is that cartoons appear within the context of The New Yorker magazine, that lovely Caslon type, and it seems like a fairly benign cartoon within this context. It's making a little bit fun of getting older, and, you know, people might like it. But like I said, you cannot satisfy everyone. You couldn't satisfy this guy. "Another joke on old white males. Ha ha. The wit. It's nice, I'm sure to be young and rude, but some day you'll be old, unless you drop dead as I wish." (Laughter) The New Yorker is rather a sensitive environment, very easy for people to get their nose out of joint. And one of the things that you realize is it's an unusual environment. Here I'm one person talking to you. You're all collective. You all hear each other laugh and know each other laugh. In The New Yorker, it goes out to a wide audience, and when you actually look at that, and nobody knows what anybody else is laughing at, and when you look at that the subjectivity involved in humor is really interesting. Let's look at this cartoon. "Discouraging data on the antidepressant." (Laughter) Indeed, it is discouraging. Now, you would think, well, look, most of you laughed at that. Right? You thought it was funny. In general, that seems like a funny cartoon, but let's look what online survey I did. Generally, about 85 percent of the people liked it. A hundred and nine voted it a 10, the highest. Ten voted it one. But look at the individual responses. "I like animals!!!!!" Look how much they like them. (Laughter) "I don't want to hurt them. That doesn't seem very funny to me." This person rated it a two. "I don't like to see animals suffer -- even in cartoons." To people like this, I point out we use anesthetic ink. Other people thought it was funny. That actually is the true nature of the distribution of humor when you don't have the contagion of humor. Humor is a type of entertainment. All entertainment contains a little frisson of danger, something that might happen wrong, and yet we like it when there's protection. That's what a zoo is. It's danger. The tiger is there. The bars protect us. That's sort of fun, right? That's a bad zoo. (Laughter) It's a very politically correct zoo, but it's a bad zoo. But this is a worse one. (Laughter) So in dealing with humor in the context of The New Yorker, you have to see, where is that tiger going to be? Where is the danger going to exist? How are you going to manage it? My job is to look at 1,000 cartoons a week. But The New Yorker only can take 16 or 17 cartoons, and we have 1,000 cartoons. Of course, many, many cartoons must be rejected. Now, we could fit more cartoons in the magazine if we removed the articles. (Laughter) But I feel that would be a huge loss, one I could live with, but still huge. Cartoonists come in through the magazine every week. The average cartoonist who stays with the magazine does 10 or 15 ideas every week. But they mostly are going to be rejected. That's the nature of any creative activity. Many of them fade away. Some of them stay. Matt Diffee is one of them. Here's one of his cartoons. (Laughter) Drew Dernavich. "Accounting night at the improv." "Now is the part of the show when we ask the audience to shout out some random numbers." Paul Noth. "He's all right. I just wish he were a little more pro-Israel." (Laughter) Now I know all about rejection, because when I quit -- actually, I was booted out of -- psychology school and decided to become a cartoonist, a natural segue, from 1974 to 1977 I submitted 2,000 cartoons to The New Yorker, and got 2,000 cartoons rejected by The New Yorker. At a certain point, this rejection slip, in 1977 -- [We regret that we are unable to use the enclosed material. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider it.] — magically changed to this. [Hey! You sold one. No shit! You really sold a cartoon to the fucking New Yorker magazine.] (Laughter) Now of course that's not what happened, but that's the emotional truth. And of course, that is not New Yorker humor. What is New Yorker humor? Well, after 1977, I broke into The New Yorker and started selling cartoons. Finally, in 1980, I received the revered New Yorker contract, which I blurred out parts because it's none of your business. From 1980. "Dear Mr. Mankoff, confirming the agreement there of -- " blah blah blah blah -- blur -- "for any idea drawings." With respect to idea drawings, nowhere in the contract is the word "cartoon" mentioned. The word "idea drawings," and that's the sine qua non of New Yorker cartoons. So what is an idea drawing? An idea drawing is something that requires you to think. Now that's not a cartoon. It requires thinking on the part of the cartoonist and thinking on your part to make it into a cartoon. (Laughter) Here are some, generally you get my cast of cartoon mind. "There is no justice in the world. There is some justice in the world. The world is just." This is What Lemmings Believe. (Laughter) The New Yorker and I, when we made comments, the cartoon carries a certain ambiguity about what it actually is. What is it, the cartoon? Is it really about lemmings? No. It's about us. You know, it's my view basically about religion, that the real conflict and all the fights between religion is who has the best imaginary friend. (Laughter) And this is my most well-known cartoon. "No, Thursday's out. How about never — is never good for you?" It's been reprinted thousands of times, totally ripped off. It's even on thongs, but compressed to "How about never — is never good for you?" Now these look like very different forms of humor but actually they bear a great similarity. In each instance, our expectations are defied. In each instance, the narrative gets switched. There's an incongruity and a contrast. In "No, Thursday's out. How about never — is never good for you?" what you have is the syntax of politeness and the message of being rude. That really is how humor works. It's a cognitive synergy where we mash up these two things which don't go together and temporarily in our minds exist. He is both being polite and rude. In here, you have the propriety of The New Yorker and the vulgarity of the language. Basically, that's the way humor works. So I'm a humor analyst, you would say. Now E.B. White said, analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Nobody is much interested, and the frog dies. Well, I'm going to kill a few, but there won't be any genocide. But really, it makes me — Let's look at this picture. This is an interesting picture, The Laughing Audience. There are the people, fops up there, but everybody is laughing, everybody is laughing except one guy. This guy. Who is he? He's the critic. He's the critic of humor, and really I'm forced to be in that position, when I'm at The New Yorker, and that's the danger that I will become this guy. Now here's a little video made by Matt Diffee, sort of how they imagine if we really exaggerated that. (Video) Bob Mankoff: "Oooh, no. Ehhh. Oooh. Hmm. Too funny. Normally I would but I'm in a pissy mood. I'll enjoy it on my own. Perhaps. No. Nah. No. Overdrawn. Underdrawn. Drawn just right, still not funny enough. No. No. For God's sake no, a thousand times no. (Music) No. No. No. No. No. [Four hours later] Hey, that's good, yeah, whatcha got there? Office worker: Got a ham and swiss on rye?BM: No. Office worker: Okay. Pastrami on sourdough?BM: No. Office worker: Smoked turkey with bacon?BM: No. Office worker: Falafel?BM: Let me look at it. Eh, no. Office worker: Grilled cheese?BM: No. Office worker: BLT?BM: No. Office worker: Black forest ham and mozzarella with apple mustard?BM: No. Office worker: Green bean salad?BM: No. (Music) No. No. Definitely no. [Several hours after lunch] (Siren) No. Get out of here. (Laughter) That's sort of an exaggeration of what I do. Now, we do reject, many, many, many cartoons, so many that there are many books called "The Rejection Collection." "The Rejection Collection" is not quite New Yorker kind of humor. And you might notice the bum on the sidewalk here who is boozing and his ventriloquist dummy is puking. See, that's probably not going to be New Yorker humor. It's actually put together by Matt Diffee, one of our cartoonists. So I'll give you some examples of rejection collection humor. "I'm thinking about having a child." (Laughter) There you have an interesting -- the guilty laugh, the laugh against your better judgment. (Laughter) "Ass-head. Please help." (Laughter) Now, in fact, within a context of this book, which says, "Cartoons you never saw and never will see in The New Yorker," this humor is perfect. I'm going to explain why. There's a concept about humor about it being a benign violation. In other words, for something to be funny, we've got to think it's both wrong and also okay at the same time. If we think it's completely wrong, we say, "That's not funny." And if it's completely okay, what's the joke? Okay? And so, this benign, that's true of "No, Thursday's out. How about never — is never good for you?" It's rude. The world really shouldn't be that way. Within that context, we feel it's okay. So within this context, "Asshead. Please help" is a benign violation. Within the context of The New Yorker magazine ... "T-Cell Army: Can the body's immune response help treat cancer?" Oh, goodness. You're reading about this smart stuff, this intelligent dissection of the immune system. You glance over at this, and it says, "Asshead. Please help"? God. So there the violation is malign. It doesn't work. There is no such thing as funny in and of itself. Everything will be within the context and our expectations. One way to look at it is this. It's sort of called a meta-motivational theory about how we look, a theory about motivation and the mood we're in and how the mood we're in determines the things we like or dislike. When we're in a playful mood, we want excitement. We want high arousal. We feel excited then. If we're in a purposeful mood, that makes us anxious. "The Rejection Collection" is absolutely in this field. You want to be stimulated. You want to be aroused. You want to be transgressed. It's like this, like an amusement park. Voice: Here we go. (Screams) He laughs. He is both in danger and safe, incredibly aroused. There's no joke. No joke needed. If you arouse people enough and get them stimulated enough, they will laugh at very, very little. This is another cartoon from "The Rejection Collection." "Too snug?" That's a cartoon about terrorism. The New Yorker occupies a very different space. It's a space that is playful in its own way, and also purposeful, and in that space, the cartoons are different. Now I'm going to show you cartoons The New Yorker did right after 9/11, a very, very sensitive area when humor could be used. How would The New Yorker attack it? It would not be with a guy with a bomb saying, "Too snug?" Or there was another cartoon I didn't show because actually I thought maybe people would be offended. The great Sam Gross cartoon, this happened after the Muhammad controversy where it's Muhammad in heaven, the suicide bomber is all in little pieces, and he's saying to the suicide bomber, "You'll get the virgins when we find your penis." (Laughter) Better left undrawn. The first week we did no cartoons. That was a black hole for humor, and correctly so. It's not always appropriate every time. But the next week, this was the first cartoon. "I thought I'd never laugh again. Then I saw your jacket." It basically was about, if we were alive, we were going to laugh. We were going to breathe. We were going to exist. Here's another one. "I figure if I don't have that third martini, then the terrorists win." These cartoons are not about them. They're about us. The humor reflects back on us. The easiest thing to do with humor, and it's perfectly legitimate, is a friend makes fun of an enemy. It's called dispositional humor. It's 95 percent of the humor. It's not our humor. Here's another cartoon. "I wouldn't mind living in a fundamentalist Islamic state." (Laughter) Humor does need a target. But interestingly, in The New Yorker, the target is us. The target is the readership and the people who do it. The humor is self-reflective and makes us think about our assumptions. Look at this cartoon by Roz Chast, the guy reading the obituary. "Two years younger than you, 12 years older than you, three years your junior, your age on the dot, exactly your age." That is a deeply profound cartoon. And so The New Yorker is also trying to, in some way, make cartoons say something besides funny and something about us. Here's another one. "I started my vegetarianism for health reasons, Then it became a moral choice, and now it's just to annoy people." (Laughter) "Excuse me — I think there's something wrong with this in a tiny way that no one other than me would ever be able to pinpoint." So it focuses on our obsessions, our narcissism, our foils and our foibles, really not someone else's. The New Yorker demands some cognitive work on your part, and what it demands is what Arthur Koestler, who wrote "The Act of Creation" about the relationship between humor, art and science, is what's called bisociation. You have to bring together ideas from different frames of reference, and you have to do it quickly to understand the cartoon. If the different frames of reference don't come together in about .5 seconds, it's not funny, but I think they will for you here. Different frames of reference. "You slept with her, didn't you?" (Laughter) "Lassie! Get help!!" (Laughter) It's called French Army Knife. (Laughter) And this is Einstein in bed. "To you it was fast." (Laughter) Now there are some cartoons that are puzzling. Like, this cartoon would puzzle many people. How many people know what this cartoon means? The dog is signaling he wants to go for a walk. This is the signal for a catcher to walk the dog. That's why we run a feature in the cartoon issue every year called "I Don't Get It: The New Yorker Cartoon I.Q. Test." (Laughter) The other thing The New Yorker plays around with is incongruity, and incongruity, I've shown you, is sort of the basis of humor. Something that's completely normal or logical isn't going to be funny. But the way incongruity works is, observational humor is humor within the realm of reality. "My boss is always telling me what to do." Okay? That could happen. It's humor within the realm of reality. Here, cowboy to a cow: "Very impressive. I'd like to find 5,000 more like you." We understand that. It's absurd. But we're putting the two together. Here, in the nonsense range: "Damn it, Hopkins, didn't you get yesterday's memo?" Now that's a little puzzling, right? It doesn't quite come together. In general, people who enjoy more nonsense, enjoy more abstract art, they tend to be liberal, less conservative, that type of stuff. But for us, and for me, helping design the humor, it doesn't make any sense to compare one to the other. It's sort of a smorgasbord that's made all interesting. So I want to sum all this up with a caption to a cartoon, and I think this sums up the whole thing, really, about The New Yorker cartoons. "It sort of makes you stop and think, doesn't it." (Laughter) And now, when you look at New Yorker cartoons, I'd like you to stop and think a little bit more about them. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
The problem that I want to talk with you about is really the problem of: How does one supply healthcare in a world in which cost is everything? How do you do that? And the basic paradigm we want to suggest to you, I want to suggest to you, is one in which you say that in order to treat disease you have to first know what you're treating -- that's diagnostics -- and then you have to do something. So, the program that we're involved in is something which we call Diagnostics for All, or zero-cost diagnostics. How do you provide medically relevant information at as close as possible to zero cost? How do you do it? Let me just give you two examples. The rigors of military medicine are not so dissimilar from the third world -- poor resources, a rigorous environment, a series of problems in lightweight, and things of this kind -- and also not so different from the home healthcare and diagnostic system world. So, the technology that I want to talk about is for the third world, for the developing world, but it has, I think, much broader application, because information is so important in the healthcare system. So, you see two examples here. One is a lab that is actually a fairly high-end laboratory in Africa. The second is basically an entrepreneur who is set up and doing who-knows-what in a table in a market. I don't know what kind of healthcare is delivered there. But it's not really what is probably most efficient. What is our approach? And the way in which one typically approaches a problem of lowering cost, starting from the perspective of the United States, is to take our solution, and then to try to cut cost out of it. No matter how you do that, you're not going to start with a 100,000-dollar instrument and bring it down to no-cost. It isn't going to work. So, the approach that we took was the other way around. To ask, "What is the cheapest possible stuff that you could make a diagnostic system out of, and get useful information, add function?" And what we've chosen is paper. What you see here is a prototypic device. It's about a centimeter on the side. It's about the size of a fingernail. The lines around the edges are a polymer. It's made of paper and paper, of course, wicks fluid, as you know, paper, cloth -- drop wine on the tablecloth, and the wine wicks all over everything. Put it on your shirt, it ruins the shirt. That's what a hydrophilic surface does. So, in this device the idea is that you drip the bottom end of it in a drop of, in this case, urine. The fluid wicks its way into those chambers at the top. The brown color indicates the amount of glucose in the urine, the blue color indicates the amount of protein in the urine. And the combination of those two is a first order shot at a number of useful things that you want. So, this is an example of a device made from a simple piece of paper. Now, how simple can you make the production? Why do we choose paper? There's an example of the same thing on a finger, showing you basically what it looks like. One reason for using paper is that it's everywhere. We have made these kinds of devices using napkins and toilet paper and wraps, and all kinds of stuff. So, the production capability is there. The second is, you can put lots and lots of tests in a very small place. I'll show you in a moment that the stack of paper there would probably hold something like 100,000 tests, something of that kind. And then finally, a point that you don't think of so much in developed world medicine: it eliminates sharps. And what sharps means is needles, things that stick. If you've taken a sample of someone's blood and the someone might have hepatitis C, you don't want to make a mistake and stick it in you. It just -- you don't want to do that. So, how do you dispose of that? It's a problem everywhere. And here you simply burn it. So, it's a sort of a practical approach to starting on things. Now, you say, "If paper is a good idea, other people have surely thought of it." And the answer is, of course, yes. Those half of you, roughly, who are women, at some point may have had a pregnancy test. And the most common of these is in a device that looks like the thing on the left. It's something called a lateral flow immunoassay. In that particular test, urine either, containing a hormone called HCG, does or does not flow across a piece of paper. And there are two bars. One bar indicates that the test is working, and if the second bar shows up, you're pregnant. This is a terrific kind of test in a binary world, and the nice thing about pregnancy is either you are pregnant or you're not pregnant. You're not partially pregnant or thinking about being pregnant or something of that sort. So, it works very well there, but it doesn't work very well when you need more quantitative information. There are also dipsticks, but if you look at the dipsticks, they're for another kind of urine analysis. There are an awful lot of colors and things like that. What do you actually do about that in a difficult circumstance? So, the approach that we started with is to ask: Is it really practical to make things of this sort? And that problem is now, in a purely engineering way, solved. And the procedure that we have is simply to start with paper. You run it through a new kind of printer called a wax printer. The wax printer does what looks like printing. It is printing. You put that on, you warm it a little bit, the wax prints through so it absorbs into the paper, and you end up with the device that you want. The printers cost 800 bucks now. They'll make, we estimate that if you were to run them 24 hours a day they'd make about 10 million tests a year. So, it's a solved problem, that particular problem is solved. And there is an example of the kind of thing that you see. That's on a piece of 8 by 12 paper. That takes about two seconds to make. And so I regard that as done. There is a very important issue here, which is that because it's a printer, a color printer, it prints colors. That's what color printers do. I'll show you in a moment, that's actually quite useful. Now, the next question that you would like to ask is: What would you like to measure? What would you like to analyze? And the thing which you'd most like to analyze, we're a fair distance from. It's what's called "fever of undiagnosed origin." Someone comes into the clinic, they have a fever, they feel bad. What do they have? Do they have T.B.? Do they have AIDS? Do they have a common cold? The triage problem. That's a hard problem for reasons that I won't go through. There are an awful lot of things that you'd like to distinguish among. But then there are a series of things: AIDS, hepatitis, malaria, TB, others and simpler ones, such as guidance of treatment. Now even that's more complicated than you think. A friend of mine works in transcultural psychiatry, and he is interested in the question of why people do and don't take their meds. So, Dapsone, or something like that, you have to take it for a while. He has a wonderful story of talking to a villager in India and saying, "Have you taken your Dapsone?" "Yes." "Have you taken it every day?" "Yes." "Have you taken if for a month?" "Yes." What the guy actually meant was that he'd fed a 30-day dose of Dapsone to his dog, that morning. (Laughter) He was telling the truth. Because in a different culture, the dog is a surrogate for you, you know, "today," "this month," "since the rainy season" -- there are lots of opportunities for misunderstanding, and so an issue here is to, in some cases, to figure out how to deal with matters that seem uninteresting, like compliance. Now, take a look at what a typical test looks like. Prick a finger, you get some blood, about 50 microliters. That's about all you're going to get, because you can't use the usual sort of systems. You can't manipulate it very well, although I'll show something about that in a moment. So, you take the drop of blood, no further manipulations, you put it on a little device, the device filters out the blood cells, lets the serum go through, and you get a series of colors down in the bottom there. And the colors indicate "disease" or "normal." But even that's complicated, because to you, to me, colors might indicate "normal," but, after all, we're all suffering from probably an excess of education. What you do about something which requires quantitative analysis? And so the solution that we and many other people are thinking about there, and at this point there is a dramatic flourish, and out comes the universal solution to everything these days, which is a cell phone. In this particular case, a camera phone. They're everywhere, six billion a month in India. And the idea is that what one does, is to take the device, you dip it, you develop the color, you take a picture, the picture goes to a central laboratory. You don't have to send out a doctor, you send out somebody who can just take the sample, and in the clinic either a doctor, or ideally a computer in this case, does the analysis. Turns out to work actually quite well, particularly when your color printer has printed the color bars that indicate how things work. So, my view of the health care worker of the future is not a doctor, but is an 18-year-old, otherwise unemployed, who has two things: He has a backpack full of these tests, and a lancet to occasionally take a blood sample, and an AK-47. And these are the things that get him through his day. There's another very interesting connection here, and that is that what one wants to do is to pass through useful information over what is generally a pretty awful telephone system. It turns out there's an enormous amount of information already available on that subject, which is the Mars rover problem. How do you get back an accurate view of the color on Mars if you have a really terrible bandwidth to do it with? And the answer is not complicated but it's one which I don't want to go through here, other than to say that the communication systems for doing this are really pretty well understood. Also, a fact which you may not know is that the compute capability of this thing is not so different from the compute capability of your desktop computer. This is a fantastic device which is only beginning to be tapped. I don't know whether the idea of one computer, one child makes any sense. Here's the computer of the future, because this screen is already there and they're ubiquitous. All right now let me show you just a little bit about advanced devices. And we'll start by posing a little problem. What you see here is another centimeter-sized device, and the different colors are different colors of dye. And you notice something which might strike you as a little bit interesting, which is the yellow seems to disappear, get through the blue, and then get through the red. How does that happen? How do you make something flow through something? And, of course the answer is, "You don't." You make it flow under and over. But now the question is: How do you make it flow under and over in a piece of paper? The answer is that what you do, and the details are not terribly important here, is to make something more elaborate: You take several different layers of paper, each one containing its own little fluid system, and you separate them by pieces of, literally, double-sided carpet tape, the stuff you use to stick the carpets onto the floor. And the fluid will flow from one layer into the next. It distributes itself, flows through further holes, distributes itself. And what you see, at the lower right-hand side there, is a sample in which a single sample of blood has been put on the top, and it has gone through and distributed itself into these 16 holes on the bottom, in a piece of paper -- basically it looks like a chip, two pieces of paper thick. And in this particular case we were just interested in the replicability of that. But that is, in principle, the way you solve the "fever of unexplained origin" problem, because each one of those spots then becomes a test for a particular set of markers of disease, and this will work in due course. Here is an example of a slightly more complicated device. There's the chip. You dip in a corner. The fluid goes into the center. It distributes itself out into these various wells or holes, and turns color, and all done with paper and carpet tape. So, I think it's as low-cost as we're likely to be able to come up and make things. Now, I have one last, two last little stories to tell you, in finishing off this business. This is one: One of the things that one does occasionally need to do is to separate blood cells from serum. And the question was, here we do it by taking a sample, we put it in a centrifuge, we spin it, and you get blood cells out. Terrific. What happens if you don't have an electricity, and a centrifuge, and whatever? And we thought for a while of how you might do this and the way, in fact, you do it is what's shown here. You get an eggbeater, which is everywhere, and you saw off a blade, and then you take tubing, and you stick it on that. You put the blood in, you spin it -- somebody sits there and spins it. It works really, really well. And we sat down, we did the physics of eggbeaters and self-aligning tubes and all the rest of that kind of thing, sent it off to a journal. We were very proud of this, particularly the title, which was "Eggbeater as Centrifuge." (Laughter) And we sent it off, and by return mail it came back. I called up the editor and I said, "What's going on? How is this possible?" The editor said, with enormous disdain, "I read this. And we're not going to publish it, because we only publish science." And it's an important issue because it means that we have to, as a society, think about what we value. And if it's just papers and phys. rev. letters, we've got a problem. Here is another example of something which is -- this is a little spectrophotometer. It measures the absorption of light in a sample The neat thing about this is, you have light source that flickers on and off at about 1,000 hertz, another light source that detects that light at 1,000 hertz, and so you can run this system in broad daylight. It performs about equivalently to a system that's in the order of 100,000 dollars. It costs 50 dollars. We can probably make it for 50 cents, if we put our mind to it. Why doesn't somebody do it? And the answer is, "How do you make a profit in a capitalist system, doing that?" Interesting problem. So, let me finish by saying that we've thought about this as a kind of engineering problem. And we've asked: What is the scientific unifying idea here? And we've decided that we should think about this not so much in terms of cost, but in terms of simplicity. Simplicity is a neat word. And you've got to think about what simplicity means. I know what it is but I don't actually know what it means. So, I actually was interested enough in this to put together several groups of people. And the most recent involved a couple of people at MIT, one of them being an exceptionally bright kid who is one of the very few people I would think of who's an authentic genius. We all struggled for an entire day to think about simplicity. And I want to give you the answer of this deep scientific thought. (Laughter) So, in a sense, you get what you pay for. Thank you very much. (Laughter)
Probably a lot of you know the story of the two salesmen who went down to Africa in the 1900s. They were sent down to find if there was any opportunity for selling shoes, and they wrote telegrams back to Manchester. And one of them wrote, "Situation hopeless. Stop. They don't wear shoes." And the other one wrote, "Glorious opportunity. They don't have any shoes yet." (Laughter) Now, there's a similar situation in the classical music world, because there are some people who think that classical music is dying. And there are some of us who think you ain't seen nothing yet. And rather than go into statistics and trends, and tell you about all the orchestras that are closing, and the record companies that are folding, I thought we should do an experiment tonight. Actually, it's not really an experiment, because I know the outcome. (Laughter) But it's like an experiment. Now, before we start -- (Laughter) Before we start, I need to do two things. One is I want to remind you of what a seven-year-old child sounds like when he plays the piano. Maybe you have this child at home. He sounds something like this. (Music) (Music ends) I see some of you recognize this child. Now, if he practices for a year and takes lessons, he's now eight and he sounds like this. (Music) (Music ends) He practices for another year and takes lessons -- he's nine. (Music) (Music ends) Then he practices for another year and takes lessons -- now he's 10. (Music) (Music ends) At that point, they usually give up. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, if you'd waited for one more year, you would have heard this. (Music) (Music ends) Now, what happened was not maybe what you thought, which is, he suddenly became passionate, engaged, involved, got a new teacher, he hit puberty, or whatever it is. What actually happened was the impulses were reduced. You see, the first time, he was playing with an impulse on every note. (Music) And the second, with an impulse every other note. (Music) You can see it by looking at my head. (Laughter) The nine-year-old put an impulse on every four notes. (Music) The 10-year-old, on every eight notes. (Music) And the 11-year-old, one impulse on the whole phrase. (Music) I don't know how we got into this position. (Laughter) I didn't say, "I'm going to move my shoulder over, move my body." No, the music pushed me over, which is why I call it one-buttock playing. (Music) It can be the other buttock. (Music) You know, a gentleman was once watching a presentation I was doing, when I was working with a young pianist. He was the president of a corporation in Ohio. I was working with this young pianist, and said, "The trouble with you is you're a two-buttock player. You should be a one-buttock player." I moved his body while he was playing. And suddenly, the music took off. It took flight. The audience gasped when they heard the difference. Then I got a letter from this gentleman. He said, "I was so moved. I went back and I transformed my entire company into a one-buttock company." (Laughter) Now, the other thing I wanted to do is to tell you about you. There are 1,600 people, I believe. My estimation is that probably 45 of you are absolutely passionate about classical music. You adore classical music. Your FM is always on that classical dial. You have CDs in your car, and you go to the symphony, your children are playing instruments. You can't imagine your life without classical music. That's the first group, quite small. Then there's another bigger group. The people who don't mind classical music. (Laughter) You know, you've come home from a long day, and you take a glass of wine, and you put your feet up. A little Vivaldi in the background doesn't do any harm. That's the second group. Now comes the third group: people who never listen to classical music. It's just simply not part of your life. You might hear it like second-hand smoke at the airport ... (Laughter) -- and maybe a little bit of a march from "Aida" when you come into the hall. But otherwise, you never hear it. That's probably the largest group. And then there's a very small group. These are the people who think they're tone-deaf. Amazing number of people think they're tone-deaf. Actually, I hear a lot, "My husband is tone-deaf." (Laughter) Actually, you cannot be tone-deaf. Nobody is tone-deaf. If you were tone-deaf, you couldn't change the gears on your car, in a stick shift car. You couldn't tell the difference between somebody from Texas and somebody from Rome. And the telephone. The telephone. If your mother calls on the miserable telephone, she calls and says, "Hello," you not only know who it is, you know what mood she's in. You have a fantastic ear. Everybody has a fantastic ear. So nobody is tone-deaf. But I tell you what. It doesn't work for me to go on with this thing, with such a wide gulf between those who understand, love and are passionate about classical music, and those who have no relationship to it at all. The tone-deaf people, they're no longer here. But even between those three categories, it's too wide a gulf. So I'm not going to go on until every single person in this room, downstairs and in Aspen, and everybody else looking, will come to love and understand classical music. So that's what we're going to do. Now, you notice that there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that this is going to work, if you look at my face, right? It's one of the characteristics of a leader that he not doubt for one moment the capacity of the people he's leading to realize whatever he's dreaming. Imagine if Martin Luther King had said, "I have a dream. Of course, I'm not sure they'll be up to it." (Laughter) All right. So I'm going to take a piece of Chopin. This is a beautiful prelude by Chopin. Some of you will know it. (Music) Do you know what I think probably happened here? When I started, you thought, "How beautiful that sounds." (Music) "I don't think we should go to the same place for our summer holidays next year." (Laughter) It's funny, isn't it? It's funny how those thoughts kind of waft into your head. And of course -- (Applause) Of course, if the piece is long and you've had a long day, you might actually drift off. Then your companion will dig you in the ribs and say, "Wake up! It's culture!" And then you feel even worse. (Laughter) But has it ever occurred to you that the reason you feel sleepy in classical music is not because of you, but because of us? Did anybody think while I was playing, "Why is he using so many impulses?" If I'd done this with my head you certainly would have thought it. (Music) (Music ends) And for the rest of your life, every time you hear classical music, you'll always be able to know if you hear those impulses. So let's see what's really going on here. We have a B. This is a B. The next note is a C. And the job of the C is to make the B sad. And it does, doesn't it? (Laughter) Composers know that. If they want sad music, they just play those two notes. (Music) But basically, it's just a B, with four sads. (Laughter) Now, it goes down to A. Now to G. And then to F. So we have B, A, G, F. And if we have B, A, G, F, what do we expect next? (Music) That might have been a fluke. Let's try it again. (Music) Oh, the TED choir. (Laughter) And you notice nobody is tone-deaf, right? Nobody is. You know, every village in Bangladesh and every hamlet in China -- everybody knows: da, da, da, da -- da. Everybody knows, who's expecting that E. Chopin didn't want to reach the E there, because what will have happened? It will be over, like Hamlet. Do you remember? Act One, scene three, he finds out his uncle killed his father. He keeps on going up to his uncle and almost killing him. And then he backs away, he goes up to him again, almost kills him. The critics sitting in the back row there, they have to have an opinion, so they say, "Hamlet is a procrastinator." Or they say, "Hamlet has an Oedipus complex." No, otherwise the play would be over, stupid. (Laughter) That's why Shakespeare puts all that stuff in Hamlet -- Ophelia going mad, the play within the play, and Yorick's skull, and the gravediggers. That's in order to delay -- until Act Five, he can kill him. It's the same with the Chopin. He's just about to reach the E, and he says, "Oops, better go back up and do it again." So he does it again. Now, he gets excited. (Music) That's excitement, don't worry about it. Now, he gets to F-sharp, and finally he goes down to E, but it's the wrong chord -- because the chord he's looking for is this one, and instead he does ... Now, we call that a deceptive cadence, because it deceives us. I tell my students, "If you have a deceptive cadence, raise your eyebrows, and everybody will know." (Laughter) (Applause) Right. He gets to E, but it's the wrong chord. Now, he tries E again. That chord doesn't work. Now, he tries the E again. That chord doesn't work. Now, he tries E again, and that doesn't work. And then finally ... There was a gentleman in the front row who went, "Mmm." (Laughter) It's the same gesture he makes when he comes home after a long day, turns off the key in his car and says, "Aah, I'm home." Because we all know where home is. So this is a piece which goes from away to home. I'm going to play it all the way through and you're going to follow. B, C, B, C, B, C, B -- down to A, down to G, down to F. Almost goes to E, but otherwise the play would be over. He goes back up to B, he gets very excited. Goes to F-sharp. Goes to E. It's the wrong chord. It's the wrong chord. And finally goes to E, and it's home. And what you're going to see is one-buttock playing. (Laughter) Because for me, to join the B to the E, I have to stop thinking about every single note along the way, and start thinking about the long, long line from B to E. You know, we were just in South Africa, and you can't go to South Africa without thinking of Mandela in jail for 27 years. What was he thinking about? Lunch? No, he was thinking about the vision for South Africa and for human beings. This is about vision. This is about the long line. Like the bird who flies over the field and doesn't care about the fences underneath, all right? So now, you're going to follow the line all the way from B to E. And I've one last request before I play this piece all the way through. Would you think of somebody who you adore, who's no longer there? A beloved grandmother, a lover -- somebody in your life who you love with all your heart, but that person is no longer with you. Bring that person into your mind, and at the same time, follow the line all the way from B to E, and you'll hear everything that Chopin had to say. (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Now, you may be wondering -- (Applause) (Applause ends) You may be wondering why I'm clapping. Well, I did this at a school in Boston with about 70 seventh graders, 12-year-olds. I did exactly what I did with you, and I explained the whole thing. At the end, they went crazy, clapping. I was clapping. They were clapping. Finally, I said, "Why am I clapping?" And one of them said, "Because we were listening." (Laughter) Think of it. 1,600 people, busy people, involved in all sorts of different things, listening, understanding and being moved by a piece by Chopin. Now, that is something. Am I sure that every single person followed that, understood it, was moved by it? Of course, I can't be sure. But I'll tell you what happened to me in Ireland during the Troubles, 10 years ago, and I was working with some Catholic and Protestant kids on conflict resolution. And I did this with them -- a risky thing to do, because they were street kids. And one of them came to me the next morning and he said, "You know, I've never listened to classical music in my life, but when you played that shopping piece ..." (Laughter) He said, "My brother was shot last year and I didn't cry for him. But last night, when you played that piece, he was the one I was thinking about. And I felt the tears streaming down my face. And it felt really good to cry for my brother." So I made up my mind at that moment that classical music is for everybody. Everybody. Now, how would you walk -- my profession, the music profession doesn't see it that way. They say three percent of the population likes classical music. If only we could move it to four percent, our problems would be over. (Laughter) How would you walk? How would you talk? How would you be? If you thought, "Three percent of the population likes classical music, if only we could move it to four percent." How would you walk or talk? How would you be? If you thought, "Everybody loves classical music -- they just haven't found out about it yet." See, these are totally different worlds. Now, I had an amazing experience. I was 45 years old, I'd been conducting for 20 years, and I suddenly had a realization. The conductor of an orchestra doesn't make a sound. My picture appears on the front of the CD -- (Laughter) But the conductor doesn't make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful. And that changed everything for me. It was totally life-changing. People in my orchestra said, "Ben, what happened?" That's what happened. I realized my job was to awaken possibility in other people. And of course, I wanted to know whether I was doing that. How do you find out? You look at their eyes. If their eyes are shining, you know you're doing it. You could light up a village with this guy's eyes. (Laughter) Right. So if the eyes are shining, you know you're doing it. If the eyes are not shining, you get to ask a question. And this is the question: who am I being that my players' eyes are not shining? We can do that with our children, too. Who am I being, that my children's eyes are not shining? That's a totally different world. Now, we're all about to end this magical, on-the-mountain week, we're going back into the world. And I say, it's appropriate for us to ask the question, who are we being as we go back out into the world? And you know, I have a definition of success. For me, it's very simple. It's not about wealth and fame and power. It's about how many shining eyes I have around me. So now, I have one last thought, which is that it really makes a difference what we say -- the words that come out of our mouth. I learned this from a woman who survived Auschwitz, one of the rare survivors. She went to Auschwitz when she was 15 years old. And ... And her brother was eight, and the parents were lost. And she told me this, she said, "We were in the train going to Auschwitz, and I looked down and saw my brother's shoes were missing. I said, 'Why are you so stupid, can't you keep your things together for goodness' sake?'" The way an elder sister might speak to a younger brother. Unfortunately, it was the last thing she ever said to him, because she never saw him again. He did not survive. And so when she came out of Auschwitz, she made a vow. She told me this. She said, "I walked out of Auschwitz into life and I made a vow. And the vow was, "I will never say anything that couldn't stand as the last thing I ever say." Now, can we do that? No. And we'll make ourselves wrong and others wrong. But it is a possibility to live into. Thank you. (Applause) Shining eyes. (Applause) Shining eyes. (Applause) Thank you, thank you.
I'm extremely excited to be given the opportunity to come and speak to you today about what I consider to be the biggest stunt on Earth. Or perhaps not quite on Earth. A parachute jump from the very edge of space. More about that a bit later on. What I'd like to do first is take you through a very brief helicopter ride of stunts and the stunts industry in the movies and in television, and show you how technology has started to interface with the physical skills of the stunt performer in a way that makes the stunts bigger and actually makes them safer than they've ever been before. I've been a professional stunt man for 13 years. I'm a stunt coordinator. And as well as perform stunts I often design them. During that time, health and safety has become everything about my job. It's critical now that when a car crash happens it isn't just the stunt person we make safe, it's the crew. We can't be killing camera men. We can't be killing stunt men. We can't be killing anybody or hurting anybody on set, or any passerby. So, safety is everything. But it wasn't always that way. In the old days of the silent movies -- Harold Lloyd here, hanging famously from the clock hands -- a lot of these guys did their own stunts. They were quite remarkable. They had no safety, no real technology. What safety they had was very scant. This is the first stunt woman, Rosie Venger, an amazing woman. You can see from the slide, very very strong. She really paved the way at a time when nobody was doing stunts, let alone women. My favorite and a real hero of mine is Yakima Canutt. Yakima Canutt really formed the stunt fight. He worked with John Wayne and most of those old punch-ups you see in the Westerns. Yakima was either there or he stunt coordinated. This is a screen capture from "Stagecoach," where Yakima Canutt is doing one of the most dangerous stunts I've ever seen. There is no safety, no back support, no pads, no crash mats, no sand pits in the ground. That's one of the most dangerous horse stunts, certainly. Talking of dangerous stunts and bringing things slightly up to date, some of the most dangerous stunts we do as stunt people are fire stunts. We couldn't do them without technology. These are particularly dangerous because there is no mask on my face. They were done for a photo shoot. One for the Sun newspaper, one for FHM magazine. Highly dangerous, but also you'll notice it doesn't look as though I'm wearing anything underneath the suit. The fire suits of old, the bulky suits, the thick woolen suits, have been replaced with modern materials like Nomex or, more recently, Carbonex -- fantastic materials that enable us as stunt professionals to burn for longer, look more spectacular, and in pure safety. Here's a bit more. There's a guy with a flame thrower there, giving me what for. One of the things that a stuntman often does, and you'll see it every time in the big movies, is be blown through the air. Well, we used to use trampettes. In the old days, that's all they had. And that's a ramp. Spring off the thing and fly through the air, and hopefully you make it look good. Now we've got technology. This thing is called an air ram. It's a frightening piece of equipment for the novice stunt performer, because it will break your legs very, very quickly if you land on it wrong. Having said that, it works with compressed nitrogen. And that's in the up position. When you step on it, either by remote control or with the pressure of your foot, it will fire you, depending on the gas pressure, anything from five feet to 30 feet. I could, quite literally, fire myself into the gallery. Which I'm sure you wouldn't want. Not today. Car stunts are another area where technology and engineering advances have made life easier for us, and safer. We can do bigger car stunts than ever before now. Being run over is never easy. That's an old-fashioned, hard, gritty, physical stunt. But we have padding, and fantastic shock-absorbing things like Sorbothane -- the materials that help us, when we're hit like this, not to hurt ourselves too much. The picture in the bottom right-hand corner there is of some crash test dummy work that I was doing. Showing how stunts work in different areas, really. And testing breakaway signpost pillars. A company makes a Lattix pillar, which is a network, a lattice-type pillar that collapses when it's hit. The car on the left drove into the steel pillar. And you can't see it from there, but the engine was in the driver's lap. They did it by remote control. I drove the other one at 60 miles an hour, exactly the same speed, and clearly walked away from it. Rolling a car over is another area where we use technology. We used to have to drive up a ramp, and we still do sometimes. But now we have a compressed nitrogen cannon. You can just see, underneath the car, there is a black rod on the floor by the wheel of the other car. That's the piston that was fired out of the floor. We can flip lorries, coaches, buses, anything over with a nitrogen cannon with enough power. (Laughs) It's a great job, really. (Laughter) It's such fun! You should hear some of the phone conversations that I have with people on my Bluetooth in the shop. "Well, we can flip the bus over, we can have it burst into flames, and how about someone, you know, big explosion." And people are looking like this ... (Laughs) I sort of forget how bizarre some of those conversations are. The next thing that I'd like to show you is something that Dunlop asked me to do earlier this year with our Channel Five's "Fifth Gear Show." A loop-the-loop, biggest in the world. Only one person had ever done it before. Now, the stuntman solution to this in the old days would be, "Let's hit this as fast as possible. 60 miles an hour. Let's just go for it. Foot flat to the floor." Well, you'd die if you did that. We went to Cambridge University, the other university, and spoke to a Doctor of Mechanical Engineering there, a physicist who taught us that it had to be 37 miles an hour. Even then, I caught seven G and lost a bit of consciousness on the way in. That's a long way to fall, if you get it wrong. That was just about right. So again, science helps us, and with the engineering too -- the modifications to the car and the wheel. High falls, they're old fashioned stunts. What's interesting about high falls is that although we use airbags, and some airbags are quite advanced, they're designed so you don't slip off the side like you used to, if you land a bit wrong. So, they're a much safer proposition. Just basically though, it is a basic piece of equipment. It's a bouncy castle with slats in the side to allow the air to escape. That's all it is, a bouncy castle. That's the only reason we do it. See, it's all fun, this job. What's interesting is we still use cardboard boxes. They used to use cardboard boxes years ago and we still use them. And that's interesting because they are almost retrospective. They're great for catching you, up to certain heights. And on the other side of the fence, that physical art, the physical performance of the stuntman, has interfaced with the very highest technology in I.T. and in software. Not the cardboard box, but the green screen. This is a shot of "Terminator," the movie. Two stunt guys doing what I consider to be a rather benign stunt. It's 30 feet. It's water. It's very simple. With the green screen we can put any background in the world on it, moving or still, and I can assure you, nowadays you can't see the joint. This is a parachutist with another parachutist doing exactly the same thing. Completely in the safety of a studio, and yet with the green screen we can have some moving image that a skydiver took, and put in the sky moving and the clouds whizzing by. Decelerator rigs and wires, we use them a lot. We fly people on wires, like this. This guy is not skydiving. He's being flown like a kite, or moved around like a kite. And this is a Guinness World Record attempt. They asked me to open their 50th anniversary show in 2004. And again, technology meant that I could do the fastest abseil over 100 meters, and stop within a couple of feet of the ground without melting the rope with the friction, because of the alloys I used in the descender device. And that's Centre Point in London. We brought Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road to a standstill. Helicopter stunts are always fun, hanging out of them, whatever. And aerial stunts. No aerial stunt would be the same without skydiving. Which brings us quite nicely to why I'm really here today: Project Space Jump. In 1960, Joseph Kittenger of the United States Air Force did the most spectacular thing. He did a jump from 100,000 feet, 102,000 to be precise, and he did it to test high altitude systems for military pilots in the new range of aircraft that were going up to 80,000 feet or so. And I'd just like to show you a little footage of what he did back then. And just how brave he was in 1960, bear in mind. Project Excelsior, it was called. There were three jumps. They first dropped some dummies. So that's the balloon, big gas balloon. It's that shape because the helium has to expand. My balloon will expand to 500 times and look like a big pumpkin when it's at the top. These are the dummies being dropped from 100,000 feet, and there is the camera that's strapped to them. You can clearly see the curvature of the Earth at that kind of altitude. And I'm planning to go from 120,000 feet, which is about 22 miles. You're in a near vacuum in that environment, which is in minus 50 degrees. So it's an extremely hostile place to be. This is Joe Kittenger himself. Bear in mind, ladies and gents, this was 1960. He didn't know if he would live or die. This is an extremely brave man. I spoke with him on the phone a few months ago. He's a very humble and wonderful human being. He sent me an email, saying, "If you get this thing off the ground I wish you all the best." And he signed it, "Happy landings," which I thought was quite lovely. He's in his 80s and he lives in Florida. He's a tremendous guy. This is him in a pressure suit. Now one of the challenges of going up to altitude is when you get to 30,000 feet -- it's great, isn't it? -- When you get to 30,000 feet you can really only use oxygen. Above 30,000 feet up to nearly 50,000 feet, you need pressure breathing, which is where you're wearing a G suit. This is him in his old rock-and-roll jeans there, pushing him in, those turned up jeans. You need a pressure suit. You need a pressure breathing system with a G suit that squeezes you, that helps you to breathe in and helps you to exhale. Above 50,000 feet you need a space suit, a pressure suit. Certainly at 100,000 feet no aircraft will fly. Not even a jet engine. It needs to be rocket-powered or one of these things, a great big gas balloon. It took me a while; it took me years to find the right balloon team to build the balloon that would do this job. I've found that team in America now. And it's made of polyethylene, so it's very thin. We will have two balloons for each of my test jumps, and two balloons for the main jump, because they notoriously tear on takeoff. They're just so, so delicate. This is the step off. He's written on that thing, "The highest step in the world." And what must that feel like? I'm excited and I'm scared, both at the same time in equal measures. And this is the camera that he had on him as he tumbled before his drogue chute opened to stabilize him. A drogue chute is just a smaller chute which helps to keep your face down. You can just see them there, popping open. Those are the drogue chutes. He had three of them. I did quite a lot of research. And you'll see in a second there, he comes back down to the floor. Now just to give you some perspective of this balloon, the little black dots are people. It's hundreds of feet high. It's enormous. That's in New Mexico. That's the U.S. Air Force Museum. And they've made a dummy of him. That's exactly what it looked like. My gondola will be more simple than that. It's a three sided box, basically. So I've had to do quite a lot of training. This is Morocco last year in the Atlas mountains, training in preparation for some high altitude jumps. This is what the view is going to be like at 90,000 feet for me. Now you may think this is just a thrill-seeking trip, a pleasure ride, just the world's biggest stunt. Well there's a little bit more to it than that. Trying to find a space suit to do this has led me to an area of technology that I never really expected when I set about doing this. I contacted a company in the States who make suits for NASA. That's a current suit. This was me last year with their chief engineer. That suit would cost me about a million and a half dollars. And it weighs 300 pounds and you can't skydive in it. So I've been stuck. For the past 15 years I've been trying to find a space suit that would do this job, or someone that will make one. Something revolutionary happened a little while ago, at the same facility. That's the prototype of the parachute. I've now had them custom make one, the only one of its kind in the world. And that's the only suit of its kind in the world. It was made by a Russian that's designed most of the suits of the past 18 years for the Soviets. He left the company because he saw, as some other people in the space suit industry, an emerging market for space suits for space tourists. You know if you are in an aircraft at 30,000 feet and the cabin depressurizes, you can have oxygen. If you're at 100,000 feet you die. In six seconds you've lost consciousness. In 10 seconds you're dead. Your blood tries to boil. It's called vaporization. The body swells up. It's awful. And so we expect -- it's not much fun. We expect, and others expect, that perhaps the FAA, the CAA might say, "You need to put someone in a suit that's not inflated, that's connected to the aircraft." Then they're comfortable, they have good vision, like this great big visor. And then if the cabin depressurizes while the aircraft is coming back down, in whatever emergency measures, everyone is okay. I would like to bring Costa on, if he's here, to show you the only one of its kind in the world. I was going to wear it, but I thought I'd get Costa to do it, my lovely assistant. Thank you. He's very hot. Thank you, Costa. This is the communication headset you'll see on lots of space suits. It's a two-layer suit. NASA suits have got 13 layers. This is a very lightweight suit. It weighs about 15 pounds. It's next to nothing. Especially designed for me. It's a working prototype. I will use it for all the jumps. Would you just give us a little twirl, please, Costa? Thank you very much. And it doesn't look far different when it's inflated, as you can see from the picture down there. I've even skydived in it in a wind tunnel, which means that I can practice everything I need to practice, in safety, before I ever jump out of anything. Thanks very much, Costa. (Applause) Ladies and gentlemen, that's just about it from me. The status of my mission at the moment is it still needs a major sponsor. I'm confident that we'll find one. I think it's a great challenge. And I hope that you will agree with me, it is the greatest stunt on Earth. Thank you very much for your time. (Applause)
I'd like to share with you a discovery that I made a few months ago while writing an article for Italian Wired. I always keep my thesaurus handy whenever I'm writing anything, but I'd already finished editing the piece, and I realized that I had never once in my life looked up the word "disabled" to see what I'd find. Let me read you the entry. "Disabled, adjective: crippled, helpless, useless, wrecked, stalled, maimed, wounded, mangled, lame, mutilated, run-down, worn-out, weakened, impotent, castrated, paralyzed, handicapped, senile, decrepit, laid-up, done-up, done-for, done-in cracked-up, counted-out; see also hurt, useless and weak. Antonyms, healthy, strong, capable." I was reading this list out loud to a friend and at first was laughing, it was so ludicrous, but I'd just gotten past "mangled," and my voice broke, and I had to stop and collect myself from the emotional shock and impact that the assault from these words unleashed. You know, of course, this is my raggedy old thesaurus so I'm thinking this must be an ancient print date, right? But, in fact, the print date was the early 1980s, when I would have been starting primary school and forming an understanding of myself outside the family unit and as related to the other kids and the world around me. And, needless to say, thank God I wasn't using a thesaurus back then. I mean, from this entry, it would seem that I was born into a world that perceived someone like me to have nothing positive whatsoever going for them, when in fact, today I'm celebrated for the opportunities and adventures my life has procured. So, I immediately went to look up the 2009 online edition, expecting to find a revision worth noting. Here's the updated version of this entry. Unfortunately, it's not much better. I find the last two words under "Near Antonyms," particularly unsettling: "whole" and "wholesome." So, it's not just about the words. It's what we believe about people when we name them with these words. It's about the values behind the words, and how we construct those values. Our language affects our thinking and how we view the world and how we view other people. In fact, many ancient societies, including the Greeks and the Romans, believed that to utter a curse verbally was so powerful, because to say the thing out loud brought it into existence. So, what reality do we want to call into existence: a person who is limited, or a person who's empowered? By casually doing something as simple as naming a person, a child, we might be putting lids and casting shadows on their power. Wouldn't we want to open doors for them instead? One such person who opened doors for me was my childhood doctor at the A.I. duPont Institute in Wilmington, Delaware. His name was Dr. Pizzutillo, an Italian American, whose name, apparently, was too difficult for most Americans to pronounce, so he went by Dr. P. And Dr. P always wore really colorful bow ties and had the very perfect disposition to work with children. I loved almost everything about my time spent at this hospital, with the exception of my physical therapy sessions. I had to do what seemed like innumerable repetitions of exercises with these thick, elastic bands -- different colors, you know -- to help build up my leg muscles, and I hated these bands more than anything -- I hated them, had names for them. I hated them. And, you know, I was already bargaining, as a five year-old child, with Dr. P to try to get out of doing these exercises, unsuccessfully, of course. And, one day, he came in to my session -- exhaustive and unforgiving, these sessions -- and he said to me, "Wow. Aimee, you are such a strong and powerful little girl, I think you're going to break one of those bands. When you do break it, I'm going to give you a hundred bucks." Now, of course, this was a simple ploy on Dr. P's part to get me to do the exercises I didn't want to do before the prospect of being the richest five-year-old in the second floor ward, but what he effectively did for me was reshape an awful daily occurrence into a new and promising experience for me. And I have to wonder today to what extent his vision and his declaration of me as a strong and powerful little girl shaped my own view of myself as an inherently strong, powerful and athletic person well into the future. This is an example of how adults in positions of power can ignite the power of a child. But, in the previous instances of those thesaurus entries, our language isn't allowing us to evolve into the reality that we would all want, the possibility of an individual to see themselves as capable. Our language hasn't caught up with the changes in our society, many of which have been brought about by technology. Certainly, from a medical standpoint, my legs, laser surgery for vision impairment, titanium knees and hip replacements for aging bodies that are allowing people to more fully engage with their abilities, and move beyond the limits that nature has imposed on them -- not to mention social networking platforms allow people to self-identify, to claim their own descriptions of themselves, so they can go align with global groups of their own choosing. So, perhaps technology is revealing more clearly to us now what has always been a truth: that everyone has something rare and powerful to offer our society, and that the human ability to adapt is our greatest asset. The human ability to adapt, it's an interesting thing, because people have continually wanted to talk to me about overcoming adversity, and I'm going to make an admission: This phrase never sat right with me, and I always felt uneasy trying to answer people's questions about it, and I think I'm starting to figure out why. Implicit in this phrase of "overcoming adversity" is the idea that success, or happiness, is about emerging on the other side of a challenging experience unscathed or unmarked by the experience, as if my successes in life have come about from an ability to sidestep or circumnavigate the presumed pitfalls of a life with prosthetics, or what other people perceive as my disability. But, in fact, we are changed. We are marked, of course, by a challenge, whether physically, emotionally or both. And I'm going to suggest that this is a good thing. Adversity isn't an obstacle that we need to get around in order to resume living our life. It's part of our life. And I tend to think of it like my shadow. Sometimes I see a lot of it, sometimes there's very little, but it's always with me. And, certainly, I'm not trying to diminish the impact, the weight, of a person's struggle. There is adversity and challenge in life, and it's all very real and relative to every single person, but the question isn't whether or not you're going to meet adversity, but how you're going to meet it. So, our responsibility is not simply shielding those we care for from adversity, but preparing them to meet it well. And we do a disservice to our kids when we make them feel that they're not equipped to adapt. There's an important difference and distinction between the objective medical fact of my being an amputee and the subjective societal opinion of whether or not I'm disabled. And, truthfully, the only real and consistent disability I've had to confront is the world ever thinking that I could be described by those definitions. In our desire to protect those we care about by giving them the cold, hard truth about their medical prognosis, or, indeed, a prognosis on the expected quality of their life, we have to make sure that we don't put the first brick in a wall that will actually disable someone. Perhaps the existing model of only looking at what is broken in you and how do we fix it, serves to be more disabling to the individual than the pathology itself. By not treating the wholeness of a person, by not acknowledging their potency, we are creating another ill on top of whatever natural struggle they might have. We are effectively grading someone's worth to our community. So we need to see through the pathology and into the range of human capability. And, most importantly, there's a partnership between those perceived deficiencies and our greatest creative ability. So it's not about devaluing, or negating, these more trying times as something we want to avoid or sweep under the rug, but instead to find those opportunities wrapped in the adversity. So maybe the idea I want to put out there is not so much overcoming adversity as it is opening ourselves up to it, embracing it, grappling with it, to use a wrestling term, maybe even dancing with it. And, perhaps, if we see adversity as natural, consistent and useful, we're less burdened by the presence of it. This year we celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, and it was 150 years ago, when writing about evolution, that Darwin illustrated, I think, a truth about the human character. To paraphrase: It's not the strongest of the species that survives, nor is it the most intelligent that survives; it is the one that is most adaptable to change. Conflict is the genesis of creation. From Darwin's work, amongst others, we can recognize that the human ability to survive and flourish is driven by the struggle of the human spirit through conflict into transformation. So, again, transformation, adaptation, is our greatest human skill. And, perhaps, until we're tested, we don't know what we're made of. Maybe that's what adversity gives us: a sense of self, a sense of our own power. So, we can give ourselves a gift. We can re-imagine adversity as something more than just tough times. Maybe we can see it as change. Adversity is just change that we haven't adapted ourselves to yet. I think the greatest adversity that we've created for ourselves is this idea of normalcy. Now, who's normal? There's no normal. There's common, there's typical. There's no normal, and would you want to meet that poor, beige person if they existed? (Laughter) I don't think so. If we can change this paradigm from one of achieving normalcy to one of possibility -- or potency, to be even a little bit more dangerous -- we can release the power of so many more children, and invite them to engage their rare and valuable abilities with the community. Anthropologists tell us that the one thing we as humans have always required of our community members is to be of use, to be able to contribute. There's evidence that Neanderthals, 60,000 years ago, carried their elderly and those with serious physical injury, and perhaps it's because the life experience of survival of these people proved of value to the community. They didn't view these people as broken and useless; they were seen as rare and valuable. A few years ago, I was in a food market in the town where I grew up in that red zone in northeastern Pennsylvania, and I was standing over a bushel of tomatoes. It was summertime: I had shorts on. I hear this guy, his voice behind me say, "Well, if it isn't Aimee Mullins." And I turn around, and it's this older man. I have no idea who he is. And I said, "I'm sorry, sir, have we met? I don't remember meeting you." He said, "Well, you wouldn't remember meeting me. I mean, when we met I was delivering you from your mother's womb." (Laughter) Oh, that guy. And, but of course, actually, it did click. This man was Dr. Kean, a man that I had only known about through my mother's stories of that day, because, of course, typical fashion, I arrived late for my birthday by two weeks. And so my mother's prenatal physician had gone on vacation, so the man who delivered me was a complete stranger to my parents. And, because I was born without the fibula bones, and had feet turned in, and a few toes in this foot and a few toes in that, he had to be the bearer -- this stranger had to be the bearer of bad news. He said to me, "I had to give this prognosis to your parents that you would never walk, and you would never have the kind of mobility that other kids have or any kind of life of independence, and you've been making liar out of me ever since." (Laughter) (Applause) The extraordinary thing is that he said he had saved newspaper clippings throughout my whole childhood, whether winning a second grade spelling bee, marching with the Girl Scouts, you know, the Halloween parade, winning my college scholarship, or any of my sports victories, and he was using it, and integrating it into teaching resident students, med students from Hahnemann Medical School and Hershey Medical School. And he called this part of the course the X Factor, the potential of the human will. No prognosis can account for how powerful this could be as a determinant in the quality of someone's life. And Dr. Kean went on to tell me, he said, "In my experience, unless repeatedly told otherwise, and even if given a modicum of support, if left to their own devices, a child will achieve." See, Dr. Kean made that shift in thinking. He understood that there's a difference between the medical condition and what someone might do with it. And there's been a shift in my thinking over time, in that, if you had asked me at 15 years old, if I would have traded prosthetics for flesh-and-bone legs, I wouldn't have hesitated for a second. I aspired to that kind of normalcy back then. But if you ask me today, I'm not so sure. And it's because of the experiences I've had with them, not in spite of the experiences I've had with them. And perhaps this shift in me has happened because I've been exposed to more people who have opened doors for me than those who have put lids and cast shadows on me. See, all you really need is one person to show you the epiphany of your own power, and you're off. If you can hand somebody the key to their own power -- the human spirit is so receptive -- if you can do that and open a door for someone at a crucial moment, you are educating them in the best sense. You're teaching them to open doors for themselves. In fact, the exact meaning of the word "educate" comes from the root word "educe." It means "to bring forth what is within, to bring out potential." So again, which potential do we want to bring out? There was a case study done in 1960s Britain, when they were moving from grammar schools to comprehensive schools. It's called the streaming trials. We call it "tracking" here in the States. It's separating students from A, B, C, D and so on. And the "A students" get the tougher curriculum, the best teachers, etc. Well, they took, over a three-month period, D-level students, gave them A's, told them they were "A's," told them they were bright, and at the end of this three-month period, they were performing at A-level. And, of course, the heartbreaking, flip side of this study, is that they took the "A students" and told them they were "D's." And that's what happened at the end of that three-month period. Those who were still around in school, besides the people who had dropped out. A crucial part of this case study was that the teachers were duped too. The teachers didn't know a switch had been made. They were simply told, "These are the 'A-students,' these are the 'D-students.'" And that's how they went about teaching them and treating them. So, I think that the only true disability is a crushed spirit, a spirit that's been crushed doesn't have hope, it doesn't see beauty, it no longer has our natural, childlike curiosity and our innate ability to imagine. If instead, we can bolster a human spirit to keep hope, to see beauty in themselves and others, to be curious and imaginative, then we are truly using our power well. When a spirit has those qualities, we are able to create new realities and new ways of being. I'd like to leave you with a poem by a fourteenth-century Persian poet named Hafiz that my friend, Jacques Dembois told me about, and the poem is called "The God Who Only Knows Four Words": "Every child has known God, not the God of names, not the God of don'ts, but the God who only knows four words and keeps repeating them, saying, 'Come dance with me. Come, dance with me. Come, dance with me.'" Thank you. (Applause)
I'm going to tell you a little bit about my TEDxHouston Talk. I woke up the morning after I gave that talk with the worst vulnerability hangover of my life. And I actually didn't leave my house for about three days. The first time I left was to meet a friend for lunch. And when I walked in, she was already at the table. I sat down, and she said, "God, you look like hell." I said, "Thanks. I feel really -- I'm not functioning." And she said, "What's going on?" And I said, "I just told 500 people that I became a researcher to avoid vulnerability. And that when being vulnerable emerged from my data, as absolutely essential to whole-hearted living, I told these 500 people that I had a breakdown. I had a slide that said 'Breakdown.' At what point did I think that was a good idea?" (Laughter) And she said, "I saw your talk live-streamed. It was not really you. It was a little different than what you usually do. But it was great." And I said, "This can't happen. YouTube, they're putting this thing on YouTube. And we're going to be talking about 600, 700 people." (Laughter) And she said, "Well, I think it's too late." And I said, "Let me ask you something." And she said, "Yeah." I said, "Do you remember when we were in college, really wild and kind of dumb?" She said, "Yeah." I said, "Remember when we'd leave a really bad message on our ex-boyfriend's answering machine? Then we'd have to break into his dorm room and then erase the tape?" (Laughter) And she goes, "Uh... no." (Laughter) Of course, the only thing I could say at that point was, "Yeah, me neither. Yeah -- me neither." And I'm thinking to myself, "Brené, what are you doing? Why did you bring this up? Have you lost your mind? Your sisters would be perfect for this." (Laughter) So I looked back up and she said, "Are you really going to try to break in and steal the video before they put it on YouTube?" (Laughter) And I said, "I'm just thinking about it a little bit." (Laughter) She said, "You're like the worst vulnerability role model ever." (Laughter) Then I looked at her and I said something that at the time felt a little dramatic, but ended up being more prophetic than dramatic. "If 500 turns into 1,000 or 2,000, my life is over." (Laughter) I had no contingency plan for four million. (Laughter) And my life did end when that happened. And maybe the hardest part about my life ending is that I learned something hard about myself, and that was that, as much as I would be frustrated about not being able to get my work out to the world, there was a part of me that was working very hard to engineer staying small, staying right under the radar. But I want to talk about what I've learned. There's two things that I've learned in the last year. The first is: vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous. Let me ask you honestly -- and I'll give you this warning, I'm trained as a therapist, so I can out-wait you uncomfortably -- so if you could just raise your hand that would be awesome -- how many of you honestly, when you're thinking about doing or saying something vulnerable think, "God, vulnerability is weakness." How many of you think of vulnerability and weakness synonymously? The majority of people. Now let me ask you this question: This past week at TED, how many of you, when you saw vulnerability up here, thought it was pure courage? Vulnerability is not weakness. I define vulnerability as emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty. It fuels our daily lives. And I've come to the belief -- this is my 12th year doing this research -- that vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage -- to be vulnerable, to let ourselves be seen, to be honest. One of the weird things that's happened is, after the TED explosion, I got a lot of offers to speak all over the country -- everyone from schools and parent meetings to Fortune 500 companies. And so many of the calls went like this, "Dr. Brown, we loved your TED talk. We'd like you to come in and speak. We'd appreciate it if you wouldn't mention vulnerability or shame." (Laughter) What would you like for me to talk about? There's three big answers. This is mostly, to be honest with you, from the business sector: innovation, creativity and change. (Laughter) So let me go on the record and say, vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change. (Applause) To create is to make something that has never existed before. There's nothing more vulnerable than that. Adaptability to change is all about vulnerability. The second thing, in addition to really finally understanding the relationship between vulnerability and courage, the second thing I learned, is this: We have to talk about shame. And I'm going to be really honest with you. When I became a "vulnerability researcher" and that became the focus because of the TED talk -- and I'm not kidding. I'll give you an example. About three months ago, I was in a sporting goods store buying goggles and shin guards and all the things that parents buy at the sporting goods store. About from a hundred feet away, this is what I hear: "Vulnerability TED! Vulnerability TED!" (Laughter) (Laughter ends) I'm a fifth-generation Texan. Our family motto is "Lock and load." I am not a natural vulnerability researcher. So I'm like, just keep walking, she's on my six. (Laughter) And then I hear, "Vulnerability TED!" I turn around, I go, "Hi." She's right here and she said, "You're the shame researcher who had the breakdown." (Laughter) At this point, parents are, like, pulling their children close. (Laughter) "Look away." And I'm so worn out at this point in my life, I look at her and I actually say, "It was a fricking spiritual awakening." (Laughter) (Applause) And she looks back and does this, "I know." (Laughter) And she said, "We watched your TED talk in my book club. Then we read your book and we renamed ourselves 'The Breakdown Babes.'" (Laughter) And she said, "Our tagline is: 'We're falling apart and it feels fantastic.'" (Laughter) You can only imagine what it's like for me in a faculty meeting. (Sighs) So when I became Vulnerability TED, like an action figure -- Like Ninja Barbie, but I'm Vulnerability TED -- I thought, I'm going to leave that shame stuff behind, because I spent six years studying shame before I started writing and talking about vulnerability. And I thought, thank God, because shame is this horrible topic, no one wants to talk about it. It's the best way to shut people down on an airplane. "What do you do?" "I study shame." "Oh." (Laughter) And I see you. (Laughter) But in surviving this last year, I was reminded of a cardinal rule -- not a research rule, but a moral imperative from my upbringing -- "you've got to dance with the one who brung ya". And I did not learn about vulnerability and courage and creativity and innovation from studying vulnerability. I learned about these things from studying shame. And so I want to walk you in to shame. Jungian analysts call shame the swampland of the soul. And we're going to walk in. And the purpose is not to walk in and construct a home and live there. It is to put on some galoshes -- and walk through and find our way around. Here's why. We heard the most compelling call ever to have a conversation in this country, and I think globally, around race, right? Yes? We heard that. Yes? Cannot have that conversation without shame. Because you cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame. We heard a brilliant simple solution to not killing people in surgery, which is, have a checklist. You can't fix that problem without addressing shame, because when they teach those folks how to suture, they also teach them how to stitch their self-worth to being all-powerful. And all-powerful folks don't need checklists. And I had to write down the name of this TED Fellow so I didn't mess it up here. Myshkin Ingawale, I hope I did right by you. (Applause) I saw the TED Fellows my first day here. And he got up and he explained how he was driven to create some technology to help test for anemia, because people were dying unnecessarily. And he said, "I saw this need. So you know what I did? I made it." And everybody just burst into applause, and they were like "Yes!" And he said, "And it didn't work. (Laughter) And then I made it 32 more times, and then it worked." You know what the big secret about TED is? I can't wait to tell people this. I guess I'm doing it right now. (Laughter) This is like the failure conference. (Laughter) No, it is. (Applause) You know why this place is amazing? Because very few people here are afraid to fail. And no one who gets on the stage, so far that I've seen, has not failed. I've failed miserably, many times. I don't think the world understands that, because of shame. There's a great quote that saved me this past year by Theodore Roosevelt. A lot of people refer to it as the "Man in the Arena" quote. And it goes like this: "It is not the critic who counts. It is not the man who sits and points out how the doer of deeds could have done things better and how he falls and stumbles. The credit goes to the man in the arena whose face is marred with dust and blood and sweat. But when he's in the arena, at best, he wins, and at worst, he loses, but when he fails, when he loses, he does so daring greatly." And that's what this conference, to me, is about. Life is about daring greatly, about being in the arena. When you walk up to that arena and you put your hand on the door, and you think, "I'm going in and I'm going to try this," shame is the gremlin who says, "Uh, uh. You're not good enough. You never finished that MBA. Your wife left you. I know your dad really wasn't in Luxembourg, he was in Sing Sing. I know those things that happened to you growing up. I know you don't think that you're pretty, smart, talented or powerful enough. I know your dad never paid attention, even when you made CFO." Shame is that thing. And if we can quiet it down and walk in and say, "I'm going to do this," we look up and the critic that we see pointing and laughing, 99 percent of the time is who? Us. Shame drives two big tapes -- "never good enough" -- and, if you can talk it out of that one, "who do you think you are?" The thing to understand about shame is, it's not guilt. Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is "I am bad." Guilt is "I did something bad." How many of you, if you did something that was hurtful to me, would be willing to say, "I'm sorry. I made a mistake?" How many of you would be willing to say that? Guilt: I'm sorry. I made a mistake. Shame: I'm sorry. I am a mistake. There's a huge difference between shame and guilt. And here's what you need to know. Shame is highly, highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders. And here's what you even need to know more. Guilt, inversely correlated with those things. The ability to hold something we've done or failed to do up against who we want to be is incredibly adaptive. It's uncomfortable, but it's adaptive. The other thing you need to know about shame is it's absolutely organized by gender. If shame washes over me and washes over Chris, it's going to feel the same. Everyone sitting in here knows the warm wash of shame. We're pretty sure that the only people who don't experience shame are people who have no capacity for connection or empathy. Which means, yes, I have a little shame; no, I'm a sociopath. So I would opt for, yes, you have a little shame. Shame feels the same for men and women, but it's organized by gender. For women, the best example I can give you is Enjoli, the commercial. "I can put the wash on the line, pack the lunches, hand out the kisses and be at work at five to nine. I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan and never let you forget you're a man." For women, shame is, do it all, do it perfectly and never let them see you sweat. I don't know how much perfume that commercial sold, but I guarantee you, it moved a lot of antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds. (Laughter) Shame, for women, is this web of unobtainable, conflicting, competing expectations about who we're supposed to be. And it's a straight-jacket. For men, shame is not a bunch of competing, conflicting expectations. Shame is one, do not be perceived as what? Weak. I did not interview men for the first four years of my study. It wasn't until a man looked at me after a book signing, and said, "I love what say about shame, I'm curious why you didn't mention men." And I said, "I don't study men." And he said, "That's convenient." (Laughter) And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Because you say to reach out, tell our story, be vulnerable. But you see those books you just signed for my wife and my three daughters?" I said, "Yeah." "They'd rather me die on top of my white horse than watch me fall down. When we reach out and be vulnerable, we get the shit beat out of us. And don't tell me it's from the guys and the coaches and the dads. Because the women in my life are harder on me than anyone else." So I started interviewing men and asking questions. And what I learned is this: You show me a woman who can actually sit with a man in real vulnerability and fear, I'll show you a woman who's done incredible work. You show me a man who can sit with a woman who's just had it, she can't do it all anymore, and his first response is not, "I unloaded the dishwasher!" (Laughter) But he really listens -- because that's all we need -- I'll show you a guy who's done a lot of work. Shame is an epidemic in our culture. And to get out from underneath it -- to find our way back to each other, we have to understand how it affects us and how it affects the way we're parenting, the way we're working, the way we're looking at each other. Very quickly, some research by Mahalik at Boston College. He asked, what do women need to do to conform to female norms? The top answers in this country: nice, thin, modest and use all available resources for appearance. (Laughter) When he asked about men, what do men in this country need to do to conform with male norms, the answers were: always show emotional control, work is first, pursue status and violence. If we're going to find our way back to each other, we have to understand and know empathy, because empathy's the antidote to shame. If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment. If you put the same amount in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive. The two most powerful words when we're in struggle: me too. And so I'll leave you with this thought. If we're going to find our way back to each other, vulnerability is going to be that path. And I know it's seductive to stand outside the arena, because I think I did it my whole life, and think to myself, I'm going to go in there and kick some ass when I'm bulletproof and when I'm perfect. And that is seductive. But the truth is, that never happens. And even if you got as perfect as you could and as bulletproof as you could possibly muster when you got in there, that's not what we want to see. We want you to go in. We want to be with you and across from you. And we just want, for ourselves and the people we care about and the people we work with, to dare greatly. So thank you all very much. I really appreciate it. (Applause)
By birth and by choice, I've been involved with the auto industry my entire life, and for the past 30 years, I've worked at Ford Motor Company. And for most of those years, I worried about, how am I going to sell more cars and trucks? But today I worry about, what if all we do is sell more cars and trucks? What happens when the number of vehicles on the road doubles, triples, or even quadruples? My life is guided by two great passions, and the first is automobiles. I literally grew up with the Ford Motor Company. I thought it was so cool as a little boy when my dad would bring home the latest Ford or Lincoln and leave it in the driveway. And I decided about that time, about age 10, that it would be really cool if I was a test driver. So my parents would go to dinner. They'd sit down; I'd sneak out of the house. I'd jump behind the wheel and take the new model around the driveway, and it was a blast. And that went on for about two years, until -- I think I was about 12 -- my dad brought home a Lincoln Mark III. And it was snowing that day. So he and mom went to dinner, and I snuck out and thought it'd be really cool to do donuts or even some figure-eights in the snow. My dad finished dinner early that evening. And he was walking to the front hall and out the front door just about the same time I hit some ice and met him at the front door with the car -- and almost ended up in the front hall. So it kind of cooled my test-driving for a little while. But I really began to love cars then. And my first car was a 1975 electric-green Mustang. And even though the color was pretty hideous, I did love the car, and it really cemented my love affair with cars that's continued on to this day. But cars are really more than a passion of mine; they're quite literally in my blood. My great grandfather was Henry Ford, and on my mother's side, my great grandfather was Harvey Firestone. So when I was born, I guess you could say expectations were kind of high for me. But my great grandfather, Henry Ford, really believed that the mission of the Ford Motor Company was to make people's lives better and make cars affordable so that everyone could have them. Because he believed that with mobility comes freedom and progress. And that's a belief that I share. My other great passion is the environment. And as a young boy, I used to go up to Northern Michigan and fish in the rivers that Hemingway fished in and then later wrote about. And it really struck me as the years went by, in a very negative way, when I would go to some stream that I'd loved, and was used to walking through this field that was once filled with fireflies, and now had a strip mall or a bunch of condos on it. And so even at a young age, that really resonated with me, and the whole notion of environmental preservation, at a very basic level, sunk in with me. As a high-schooler, I started to read authors like Thoreau and Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey, and I really began to develop a deeper appreciation of the natural world. But it never really occurred to me that my love of cars and trucks would ever be in conflict with nature. And that was true until I got to college. And when I got to college, you can imagine my surprise when I would go to class and a number of my professors would say that Ford Motor Company and my family was everything that was wrong with our country. They thought that we were more interested, as an industry, in profits, rather than progress, and that we filled the skies with smog -- and frankly, we were the enemy. I joined Ford after college, after some soul searching whether or not this is really the right thing to do. But I decided that I wanted to go and see if I could affect change there. And as I look back over 30 years ago, it was a little naive to think at that age that I could. But I wanted to. And I really discovered that my professors weren't completely wrong. In fact, when I got back to Detroit, my environmental leanings weren't exactly embraced by those in my own company, and certainly by those in the industry. I had some very interesting conversations, as you can imagine. There were some within Ford who believed that all this ecological nonsense should just disappear and that I needed to stop hanging out with "environmental wackos." I was considered a radical. And I'll never forget the day I was called in by a member of top management and told to stop associating with any known or suspected environmentalists. (Laughter) Of course, I had no intention of doing that, and I kept speaking out about the environment, and it really was the topic that we now today call sustainability. And in time, my views went from controversial to more or less consensus today. I mean, I think most people in the industry understand that we've got to get on with it. And the good news is today we are tackling the big issues, of cars and the environment -- not only at Ford, but really as an industry. We're pushing fuel efficiency to new heights. And with new technology, we're reducing -- and I believe, someday we'll eliminate -- CO2 emissions. We're starting to sell electric cars, which is great. We're developing alternative powertrains that are going to make cars affordable in every sense of the word -- economically, socially and environmentally. And actually, although we've got a long way to go and a lot of work to do, I can see the day where my two great passions -- cars and the environment -- actually come into harmony. But unfortunately, as we're on our way to solving one monstrous problem -- and as I said, we're not there yet; we've got a lot of work to do, but I can see where we will -- but even as we're in the process of doing that, another huge problem is looming, and people aren't noticing. And that is the freedom of mobility that my great grandfather brought to people is now being threatened, just as the environment is. The problem, put in its simplest terms, is one of mathematics. Today there are approximately 6.8 billion people in the world, and within our lifetime, that number's going to grow to about nine billion. And at that population level, our planet will be dealing with the limits of growth. And with that growth comes some severe practical problems, one of which is our transportation system simply won't be able to deal with it. When we look at the population growth in terms of cars, it becomes even clearer. Today there are about 800 million cars on the road worldwide. But with more people and greater prosperity around the world, that number's going to grow to between two and four billion cars by mid century. And this is going to create the kind of global gridlock that the world has never seen before. Now think about the impact that this is going to have on our daily lives. Today the average American spends about a week a year stuck in traffic jams, and that's a huge waste of time and resources. But that's nothing compared to what's going on in the nations that are growing the fastest. Today the average driver in Beijing has a five-hour commute. And last summer -- many of you probably saw this -- there was a hundred-mile traffic jam that took 11 days to clear in China. In the decades to come, 75 percent of the world's population will live in cities, and 50 of those cities will be of 10 million people or more. So you can see the size of the issue that we're facing. When you factor in population growth, it's clear that the mobility model that we have today simply will not work tomorrow. Frankly, four billion clean cars on the road are still four billion cars, and a traffic jam with no emissions is still a traffic jam. So, if we make no changes today, what does tomorrow look like? Well I think you probably already have the picture. Traffic jams are just a symptom of this challenge, and they're really very, very inconvenient, but that's all they are. But the bigger issue is that global gridlock is going to stifle economic growth and our ability to deliver food and health care, particularly to people that live in city centers. And our quality of life is going to be severely compromised. So what's going to solve this? Well the answer isn't going to be more of the same. My great grandfather once said before he invented the Model T, "If I had asked people then what they wanted, they would have answered, 'We want faster horses.'" So the answer to more cars is simply not to have more roads. When America began moving west, we didn't add more wagon trains, we built railroads. And to connect our country after World War II, we didn't build more two-lane highways, we built the interstate highway system. Today we need that same leap in thinking for us to create a viable future. We are going to build smart cars, but we also need to build smart roads, smart parking, smart public transportation systems and more. We don't want to waste our time sitting in traffic, sitting at tollbooths or looking for parking spots. We need an integrated system that uses real time data to optimize personal mobility on a massive scale without hassle or compromises for travelers. And frankly, that's the kind of system that's going to make the future of personal mobility sustainable. Now the good news is some of this work has already begun in different parts of the world. The city of Masdar in Abu Dhabi uses driverless electric vehicles that can communicate with one another, and they go underneath the city streets. And up above, you've got a series of pedestrian walkways. On New York City's 34th Street, gridlock will soon be replaced with a connected system of vehicle-specific corridors. Pedestrian zones and dedicated traffic lanes are going to be created, and all of this will cut down the average rush hour commute to get across town in New York from about an hour today at rush hour to about 20 minutes. Now if you look at Hong Kong, they have a very interesting system called Octopus there. It's a system that really ties together all the transportation assets into a single payment system. So parking garages, buses, trains, they all operate within the same system. Now shared car services are also springing up around the world, and these efforts, I think, are great. They're relieving congestion, and they're frankly starting to save some fuel. These are all really good ideas that will move us forward. But what really inspires me is what's going to be possible when our cars can begin talking to each other. Very soon, the same systems that we use today to bring music and entertainment and GPS information into our vehicles are going to be used to create a smart vehicle network. Every morning I drive about 30 miles from my home in Ann Arbor to my office in Dearborn, Michigan. And every night I go home, my commute is a total crapshoot. And I often have to leave the freeway and look for different ways for me to try and make it home. But very soon we're going to see the days when cars are essentially talking to each other. So if the car ahead of me on I-94 hits traffic, it will immediately alert my car and tell my car to reroute itself to get me home in the best possible way. And these systems are being tested right now, and frankly they're going to be ready for prime time pretty soon. But the potential of a connected car network is almost limitless. So just imagine: one day very soon, you're going to be able to plan a trip downtown and your car will be connected to a smart parking system. So you get in your car, and as you get in your car, your car will reserve you a parking spot before you arrive -- no more driving around looking for one, which frankly is one of the biggest users of fuel in today's cars in urban areas -- is looking for parking spots. Or think about being in New York City and tracking down an intelligent cab on your smart phone so you don't have to wait in the cold to hail one. Or being at a future TED Conference and having your car talk to the calendars of everybody here and telling you all the best route to take home and when you should leave so that you can all arrive at your next destination on time. This is the kind of technology that will merge millions of individual vehicles into a single system. So I think it's clear we have the beginnings of a solution to this enormous problem. But as we found out with addressing CO2 issues, and also fossil fuels, there is no one silver bullet. The solution is not going to be more cars, more roads or a new rail system; it can only be found, I believe, in a global network of interconnected solutions. Now I know we can develop the technology that's going to make this work, but we've got to be willing to get out there and seek out the solutions -- whether that means vehicle sharing or public transportation or some other way we haven't even thought of yet; our overall transportation-mix and infrastructure must support all the future options. We need our best and our brightest to start entertaining this issue. Companies, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, they all need to understand this is a huge business opportunity, as well as an enormous social problem. And just as these groups embrace the green energy challenge -- and it's really been amazing to me to watch how much brain power, how much money and how much serious thought has, really over the last three years, just poured into the green energy field. We need that same kind of passion and energy to attack global gridlock. But we need people like all of you in this room, leading thinkers. I mean, frankly, I need all of you to think about how you can help solve this huge issue. And we need people from all walks of life; not just inventors, we need policymakers and government officials to also think about how they're going to respond to this challenge. This isn't going to be solved by any one person or one group. It's going to really require a national energy policy, frankly for each country, because the solutions in each country are going to be different based upon income levels, traffic jams and also how integrated the systems already are. But we need to get going, and we need to get going today. And we must have an infrastructure that's designed to support this flexible future. You know, we've come a long way. Since the Model T, most people never traveled more than 25 miles from home in their entire lifetime. And since then, the automobile has allowed us the freedom to choose where we live, where we work, where we play and frankly when we just go out and want to move around. We don't want to regress and lose that freedom. We're on our way to solving -- and as I said earlier, I know we've got a long way to go -- the one big issue that we're all focused on that threatens it, and that's the environmental issue, but I believe we all must turn all of our effort and all of our ingenuity and determination to help now solve this notion of global gridlock. Because in doing so, we're going to preserve what we've really come to take for granted, which is the freedom to move and move very effortlessly around the world. And it frankly will enhance our quality of life if we fix this. Because, if you can envision, as I do, a future of zero emissions and freedom to move around the country and around the world like we take for granted today, that's worth the hard work today to preserve that for tomorrow. I believe we're at our best when we're confronted with big issues. This is a big one, and it won't wait. So let's get started now. Thank you. (Applause)
Three years ago, I got a phone call, based on an earlier film I had made, with an offer to embed the New Hampshire National Guard. My idea -- and literally, I woke up in the middle of the night, and we've all have those moments. You know, you go to sleep -- I was excited, with this phone call. I was thinking, I just finished making another film about World War II vets, and I realized I'd gotten to know their stories, and I realized this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to tell a warrior's story as it unfolded. So I went to bed that night pretty excited. Not sure of all the details, but excited. It wasn't at four in the morning, but it was closer to midnight. Woke straight up. Wide-awake as could be. And I had this idea: what if I could, in effect, virtually embed, and create a permeable relationship with the soldiers? To tell the story from the inside out, versus the outside in? So, I called back Major Heilshorn, who's the public affairs officer of the New Hampshire National Guard. And he knew me, so I was like, "Greg?" He's like, "Yes, Deborah?" Told him my idea, and you know, he is one of the bravest men in the world, as is General Blair, who, in the end, gave me permission to try this experiment. Within 10 days, I was down at Fort Dix. He gave me my pick of units. I picked one unit -- Charlie Company, Third of the 172nd, they're mountain infantry -- for two reasons. One, they're infantry. Number two, they were going to be based at LSA Anaconda, so I knew they would have Internet access. The caveat for my access was I had to get the soldiers to volunteer. This was a big thing that I think when Major H told me, I wasn't really totally gathering what that would mean. So what that meant was, when I went down to Fort Dix, I had to hop out in front of 180 guys and tell them of my vision. You can imagine the hailstorm of questions I got. The opening one was, "What the fuck do you know about the National Guard?" I started with the 1607 Massachusetts Bay Colony Pequot Indian Wars. Gave them about a nine minute response, and there we went. So, I'd like to show the clip of the film. It's our trailer, because I know, obviously you guys are busy, many of you may not have had a chance to see it. So, I want to show the trailer, and then I'm going to take apart one scene in detail. If we could roll? (Video) Stephen Pink: This is Sergeant Stephen Pink. Michael Moriarty: Specialist Michael Moriarty. Zack Bazzi: Do I really want to go? Probably not. Soldier: We're not supposed to talk to the media. SP: I'm not the media, dammit! MM: The day is here. Life will change. Voice: The real deal, man! Narrator: You ready? Soldier: Bring it on! Narrator: You ready? Voice 2: Iraq, here we come! ZB: Every soldier eventually wants to go in combat. It's natural instinct. SP: If you let fear get to you, then you're not going to be doing your job. MM: Every single time you go out there, there's attacks. It's unbelievable. ZB: Hey, Nestor, your ass crack is right in my face. Soldiers: IV! Are we on fire? IV! Man down! Man down! MM: Keep going, brother. You wanna play? Michael Moriarty's Wife: It's really hard for him to not have his dad. MM: This little kid is in the middle of a war zone. Stephen Pink's Girlfriend: In the beginning, he's like, "Write something dirty!" George W. Bush: The world's newest democracy. MM: They're shooting at me. SP: You don't put 150,000 troops in there, and say we're there to create democracy. Soldier: We've got a drive through window at Burger King now. SP: We're here to create money. MM: I support George Bush. We're not there for the oil. Jon Baril: The worst thing in my life. SP: Baril, don't look at it, bud. Michael Moriarty's Wife: He's not the same person anymore. MM: I will not go back. Kevin Shangraw: The Iraqi people are who we are there to help -- and we just killed one. Soldiers: Sergeant Smith is down! Sergeant Smith is down? There they are! Right there! Fire, fire! JB: It'll be a better country in 20 years, 'cause we were there. I hope. (Applause) Deborah Scranton: Thank you. One of the things I'd like to talk to you about is having a conversation about something that is difficult to talk about. And I'd like to relate an experience I had here at TED. I don't know how many of you might imagine it, but there's actually a TEDster who recently got back from Iraq. Paul? Come on, stand up. This is Paul Anthony. He served -- (Applause) -- with the Marines, and I want to tell you a little, brief story. We were one of the lucky ones to get in the class with the Sony cameras and the Vista software. Right? And we started talking. People will see my tag, and they'll see "The War Tapes," and then we'll start talking about war. We got in a conversation with some other people in the class, and it went on and on. I mean, we were there for an hour, talking. And it really highlighted something that I would like to ask you guys to think about and hopefully to help with, which is, I think a lot of us are very afraid to have conversations about war, and about politics. And really -- because maybe we're going to disagree. Maybe it's going to get uncomfortable. How do we open it up to really be able to have a conversation? And you know, Paul was talking, and he then turned to Constance and said, "You know, I wouldn't have this conversation if she weren't here, because I know she has my back." And I want to say, I was nervous. Because I'm used to doing Q&As. I really related to what James was saying yesterday, because I'm behind the camera. You know, I can answer questions about my movie, but for me to come up and talk for 18 minutes is a really long time. So, I wanted to say, Paul, I'm happy you're here, because I know you have my back. This film was not about the Internet, but it could not have been made without it. The guys' tapes on average took two weeks to get from Iraq to me. In the meantime, the soldiers -- we would email and IM. I didn't save all of them, because I didn't realize at the beginning that it would be something that I would want to keep track of. But there were 3,211 emails and IMs and text messages that I was able to save. The reason I quantify that is because we really embarked on this as a mutual journey to really get inside of it. So I wanted to show you a clip, and then I was going tell you a little bit of how it got put together. If we could roll the clip. (Video) SP: Today is sport. [Unclear] Radio: [Unclear] Christian soldiers. SP: We like to give these insurgents a fair chance. So, what we do, we ride with the windows down. Because, you know, we obviously have the advantage. I'm just kidding. We don't fucking ride with the goddam windows down. It's not true. Very unsafe. Whoa. Soldier: Right there. SP: All right, let's get over to that site. Be advised, we're leaving Taji right now. We believe that the blast was right outside the gate of Taji, we're heading to that location now. Soldier: That's a fucking car bomb! Soldier: Motherfuckers! Soldiers: Get your vest on! Hey, get over the fucking -- yeah, yeah. Any one-four elements get to the gate! SP: Sheriff one-six, or any one-four elements, we need you at the gate of Taji right now, over. Soldier: I'll walk you through it. (Voices) SP: Stay low. Head over to the right. Get your bag, get your bag! (Screams) SP: It was mass casualties. Probably 20 dead, at least 20 or 30 wounded Iraqis. SP: It just looked like, you know, someone had thrown a quarter through a guy, and it was just like -- there was no blood coming from the shrapnel wounds. Everything was cauterized, and it was just like there was a void going through the body. This is the scene north. They just removed a burnt body, or half a body from here. I don't think there was anything left from his abdominal down. This is blood. And you know, you walk, and you hear the pieces of skin. And that's it, that's all that's left. I remember giving three IVs, bandaging several wounded. Soldiers sitting in the corner of a sandbag wall, shaking and screaming. Medics who were terrified and couldn't perform. I later heard that Iraqi casualties were not to be treated in Taji. They can work on the post for pennies, but can't die there. They've got to die outside. If one of those incompetent medical officers told me to stop treatment, I would've slit his throat right there. 21:00 hours, and it's just our squad going through today's events in our heads, whether we want to or not. News Anchor: More violence in Iraq. Twin suicide car bombings killed eight Iraqis and wounded dozens more near a coalition base north of Baghdad. SP: We made the news. I feel exploited and proud at the same time. I've lost all faith in the media -- a hapless joke I would much rather laugh at than become a part of. I should really thank God for saving my lucky ass. I'll do that, then I'm gonna jerk off. Because these pages smell like Linds, and there won't be any time for jerking off tomorrow. Another mission at 06:00. DS: Now -- (Applause) -- thanks. When I said earlier, to try and tell a story from the inside out, versus the outside in -- part of what Chris said so eloquently in his introduction -- is this melding. It's a new way of trying to make a documentary. When I met the guys, and 10 of them agreed to take cameras -- in total, 21 ended up filming. Five soldiers filmed the entire time. There are three featured in the film. The way I learned about Taji was Steve Pink sent me an email, and in it, attached a photo of that burned body out at the car. And the tone from the email was, you know, it had been a very bad day, obviously. And I saw in my IM window that Mike Moriarty was at the base. So, I pinged Mike and I said, "Mike, can you please go get that interview with Pink?" Because the thing that very often is missing is, in the military what they call "hot wash." It's that immediate interview after something immediately happens, you know. And if you let time go by, it kind of softens and smooths the edges. And for me, I really wanted that. So, in order to get the intimacy, to share that experience with you, the guys -- the two most popular mounts -- there was a camera on the turret, the gun turret, and then on the dashboard of the Humvee. Most of the Humvees, we ended up mounting two cameras in them. So you get to experience that in real time, right? The interview that you see is the one that Mike went and did within 24 hours of that episode happening. Steve Pink reading his journal happened five months after he came home. I knew about that journal, but it was very, very private. And you know, you earn someone's trust, especially in doc filmmaking, through your relationship. So, it wasn't until five months after he was home that he would read that journal. Now, the news footage I put in there to try to show -- you know, I think mainstream media tries to do the best they can in the format that they have. But the thing that I know you all have heard a lot of times, American soldiers saying, "Why don't they talk about the good stuff that we do?" OK, this is a perfect example. Pink's squad and another squad spent their entire day outside the wire. They didn't have to go outside the wire. There were not Americans hurt out there. They spent their entire day outside the wire trying to save Iraqi lives -- the Iraqis who work on the post. So, when you may hear soldiers complaining, that's what they're talking about, you know? And I think it's such an amazing gift that they would share this as a way of bridging. And when I talk about that polarity I get at so many different Q&As, and people are really opinionated. But it seems like people don't want to hear so much, or listen, or try to have an exchange. And I'm as fiery as the next person, but I really think -- you know, different speakers have talked about their concern for the world, and my concern is that we have to have these conversations. And we have to be able to go into scary places where we may, you know, we think we know. But we just have to leave that little bit of openness, to know. There's such a disconnect. And for me, it's trying to bridge that disconnect. I'll share one story. I get -- I'm often asked, you know, for me, what have been some of the special moments from having worked on this film. And at screenings, inevitably -- you know, as I'm sure all of you obviously do speaking stuff -- usually you have people who hang around and want to ask you more questions. And usually, the first questions are, "Oh, what kind of cameras did you use?" Or you know, these things. But there's always a few guys, almost always, who are the last ones. And I've learned over time that those are always the soldiers. And they wait until pretty much everybody's gone. And for me, one of the most profound stories someone shared with me, that then became my story, was -- for those of you who haven't seen the film, and it's not a spoiler -- it's very common there are a lot of civilian accidents, where people get in front of Humvees and they get killed. In this film, there is a scene where an Iraqi woman is killed. A soldier came up to me and stood, you know really, pretty close, a foot away from me. He's a big guy. And he looked at me, and I smiled, and then I saw the tears start welling up in his eyes. And he wasn't going to blink. And he said, "My gunner was throwing candy." And I knew what he was going to say. The gunner was throwing candy. They used to throw candy to the kids. Kids got too close, very often. And he said, "I killed a child. And I'm a father. I have children. I haven't been able to tell my wife. I'm afraid she's going to think I'm a monster." I hugged him, of course, and I said, you know, "It's going to be OK." And he said, "I'm going to bring her to see your film. And then I'm going to tell her." So when I talk about a disconnect, it's not only for maybe those people who don't know a soldier, which there obviously are. You know, these days, it's not like World War II, where there was a war front and a home front, and everybody seemed involved. You can go for days here and not feel like there's a war going on. And often, I'll hear people say, who maybe know that I did this film, and they say, "Oh, you know, I'm against the war, but I support the soldiers." And I've started to ask them, "Well, that's nice. What are you doing? Are you volunteering at a VA? You go and see anybody? Do you, if you find out your neighbor's been, do you spend some time? Not necessarily ask questions, but see if they want to talk? Do you give money to any of the charities?" You know, obviously, like Dean Kamen's working on that amazing thing, but there's charities where you can sponsor computers for wounded soldiers. I think, I challenge us to say -- to operationalize those terms, when we say we support someone, you know? Are you a friend to them? Do you really care? And I would just say it's my hope, and I would ask you guys to please, you know, reach out a hand. And really do give them a hug. Thank you.
I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "the danger of the single story." I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children's books. I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. (Laughter) Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to. My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. (Laughter) And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story. What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books. But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized. Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are. I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So the year I turned eight we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing." So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family. Then one Saturday we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them. Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my "tribal music," and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. (Laughter) She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove. What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals. I must say that before I went to the U.S. I didn't consciously identify as African. But in the U.S. whenever Africa came up people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity, and in many ways I think of myself now as African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country, the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in "India, Africa and other countries." (Laughter) So after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate's response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family. This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Locke, who sailed to west Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as "beasts who have no houses," he writes, "They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts." Now, I've laughed every time I've read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Locke. But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are "half devil, half child." And so I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not "authentically African." Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places, but I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. In fact I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore they were not authentically African. But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing. I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself. So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story. I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called American Psycho -- (Laughter) -- and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation. (Laughter) But it would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. This is not because I am a better person than that student, but because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America. When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me. (Laughter) But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family. But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have water. I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes my parents were not paid their salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives. All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them. I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar. So what if before my Mexican trip I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls "a balance of stories." What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Mukta Bakaray, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don't read literature. He disagreed. He felt that people who could read, would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them. Shortly after he published my first novel I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview, and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, "I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending. Now you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen ..." (Laughter) And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. I was not only charmed, I was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel. Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Fumi Onda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music, talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers. What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband's consent before renewing their passports? What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds, films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce? What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition? Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government, but also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer, and it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories. My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust, and we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist and providing books for state schools that don't have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories. Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North. She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind: "They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained." I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. Thank you. (Applause)
I'm a storyteller. And I would like to tell you a few personal stories about what I like to call "the danger of the single story." I grew up on a university campus in eastern Nigeria. My mother says that I started reading at the age of two, although I think four is probably close to the truth. So I was an early reader, and what I read were British and American children's books. I was also an early writer, and when I began to write, at about the age of seven, stories in pencil with crayon illustrations that my poor mother was obligated to read, I wrote exactly the kinds of stories I was reading: All my characters were white and blue-eyed, they played in the snow, they ate apples, (Laughter) and they talked a lot about the weather, how lovely it was that the sun had come out. (Laughter) Now, this despite the fact that I lived in Nigeria. I had never been outside Nigeria. We didn't have snow, we ate mangoes, and we never talked about the weather, because there was no need to. My characters also drank a lot of ginger beer, because the characters in the British books I read drank ginger beer. Never mind that I had no idea what ginger beer was. (Laughter) And for many years afterwards, I would have a desperate desire to taste ginger beer. But that is another story. What this demonstrates, I think, is how impressionable and vulnerable we are in the face of a story, particularly as children. Because all I had read were books in which characters were foreign, I had become convinced that books by their very nature had to have foreigners in them and had to be about things with which I could not personally identify. Now, things changed when I discovered African books. There weren't many of them available, and they weren't quite as easy to find as the foreign books. But because of writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate, whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized. Now, I loved those American and British books I read. They stirred my imagination. They opened up new worlds for me. But the unintended consequence was that I did not know that people like me could exist in literature. So what the discovery of African writers did for me was this: It saved me from having a single story of what books are. I come from a conventional, middle-class Nigerian family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator. And so we had, as was the norm, live-in domestic help, who would often come from nearby rural villages. So, the year I turned eight, we got a new house boy. His name was Fide. The only thing my mother told us about him was that his family was very poor. My mother sent yams and rice, and our old clothes, to his family. And when I didn't finish my dinner, my mother would say, "Finish your food! Don't you know? People like Fide's family have nothing." So I felt enormous pity for Fide's family. Then one Saturday, we went to his village to visit, and his mother showed us a beautifully patterned basket made of dyed raffia that his brother had made. I was startled. It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them. Years later, I thought about this when I left Nigeria to go to university in the United States. I was 19. My American roommate was shocked by me. She asked where I had learned to speak English so well, and was confused when I said that Nigeria happened to have English as its official language. She asked if she could listen to what she called my "tribal music," and was consequently very disappointed when I produced my tape of Mariah Carey. (Laughter) She assumed that I did not know how to use a stove. What struck me was this: She had felt sorry for me even before she saw me. Her default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa: a single story of catastrophe. In this single story, there was no possibility of Africans being similar to her in any way, no possibility of feelings more complex than pity, no possibility of a connection as human equals. I must say that before I went to the U.S., I didn't consciously identify as African. But in the U.S., whenever Africa came up, people turned to me. Never mind that I knew nothing about places like Namibia. But I did come to embrace this new identity, and in many ways I think of myself now as African. Although I still get quite irritable when Africa is referred to as a country, the most recent example being my otherwise wonderful flight from Lagos two days ago, in which there was an announcement on the Virgin flight about the charity work in "India, Africa and other countries." (Laughter) So, after I had spent some years in the U.S. as an African, I began to understand my roommate's response to me. If I had not grown up in Nigeria, and if all I knew about Africa were from popular images, I too would think that Africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals, and incomprehensible people, fighting senseless wars, dying of poverty and AIDS, unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind, white foreigner. I would see Africans in the same way that I, as a child, had seen Fide's family. This single story of Africa ultimately comes, I think, from Western literature. Now, here is a quote from the writing of a London merchant called John Locke, who sailed to west Africa in 1561 and kept a fascinating account of his voyage. After referring to the black Africans as "beasts who have no houses," he writes, "They are also people without heads, having their mouth and eyes in their breasts." Now, I've laughed every time I've read this. And one must admire the imagination of John Locke. But what is important about his writing is that it represents the beginning of a tradition of telling African stories in the West: A tradition of Sub-Saharan Africa as a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness, of people who, in the words of the wonderful poet Rudyard Kipling, are "half devil, half child." And so, I began to realize that my American roommate must have throughout her life seen and heard different versions of this single story, as had a professor, who once told me that my novel was not "authentically African." Now, I was quite willing to contend that there were a number of things wrong with the novel, that it had failed in a number of places, but I had not quite imagined that it had failed at achieving something called African authenticity. In fact, I did not know what African authenticity was. The professor told me that my characters were too much like him, an educated and middle-class man. My characters drove cars. They were not starving. Therefore they were not authentically African. But I must quickly add that I too am just as guilty in the question of the single story. A few years ago, I visited Mexico from the U.S. The political climate in the U.S. at the time was tense, and there were debates going on about immigration. And, as often happens in America, immigration became synonymous with Mexicans. There were endless stories of Mexicans as people who were fleecing the healthcare system, sneaking across the border, being arrested at the border, that sort of thing. I remember walking around on my first day in Guadalajara, watching the people going to work, rolling up tortillas in the marketplace, smoking, laughing. I remember first feeling slight surprise. And then, I was overwhelmed with shame. I realized that I had been so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself. So that is how to create a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become. It is impossible to talk about the single story without talking about power. There is a word, an Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of the world, and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another." Like our economic and political worlds, stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power. Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want to dispossess a people, the simplest way to do it is to tell their story and to start with, "secondly." Start the story with the arrows of the Native Americans, and not with the arrival of the British, and you have an entirely different story. Start the story with the failure of the African state, and not with the colonial creation of the African state, and you have an entirely different story. I recently spoke at a university where a student told me that it was such a shame that Nigerian men were physical abusers like the father character in my novel. I told him that I had just read a novel called "American Psycho" -- (Laughter) -- and that it was such a shame that young Americans were serial murderers. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, obviously I said this in a fit of mild irritation. (Laughter) But it would never have occurred to me to think that just because I had read a novel in which a character was a serial killer that he was somehow representative of all Americans. This is not because I am a better person than that student, but because of America's cultural and economic power, I had many stories of America. I had read Tyler and Updike and Steinbeck and Gaitskill. I did not have a single story of America. When I learned, some years ago, that writers were expected to have had really unhappy childhoods to be successful, I began to think about how I could invent horrible things my parents had done to me. (Laughter) But the truth is that I had a very happy childhood, full of laughter and love, in a very close-knit family. But I also had grandfathers who died in refugee camps. My cousin Polle died because he could not get adequate healthcare. One of my closest friends, Okoloma, died in a plane crash because our fire trucks did not have water. I grew up under repressive military governments that devalued education, so that sometimes, my parents were not paid their salaries. And so, as a child, I saw jam disappear from the breakfast table, then margarine disappeared, then bread became too expensive, then milk became rationed. And most of all, a kind of normalized political fear invaded our lives. All of these stories make me who I am. But to insist on only these negative stories is to flatten my experience and to overlook the many other stories that formed me. The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes: There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo and depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe, and it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them. I've always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar. So what if before my Mexican trip, I had followed the immigration debate from both sides, the U.S. and the Mexican? What if my mother had told us that Fide's family was poor and hardworking? What if we had an African television network that broadcast diverse African stories all over the world? What the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe calls "a balance of stories." What if my roommate knew about my Nigerian publisher, Muhtar Bakare, a remarkable man who left his job in a bank to follow his dream and start a publishing house? Now, the conventional wisdom was that Nigerians don't read literature. He disagreed. He felt that people who could read, would read, if you made literature affordable and available to them. Shortly after he published my first novel, I went to a TV station in Lagos to do an interview, and a woman who worked there as a messenger came up to me and said, "I really liked your novel. I didn't like the ending. Now, you must write a sequel, and this is what will happen ..." (Laughter) And she went on to tell me what to write in the sequel. I was not only charmed, I was very moved. Here was a woman, part of the ordinary masses of Nigerians, who were not supposed to be readers. She had not only read the book, but she had taken ownership of it and felt justified in telling me what to write in the sequel. Now, what if my roommate knew about my friend Fumi Onda, a fearless woman who hosts a TV show in Lagos, and is determined to tell the stories that we prefer to forget? What if my roommate knew about the heart procedure that was performed in the Lagos hospital last week? What if my roommate knew about contemporary Nigerian music, talented people singing in English and Pidgin, and Igbo and Yoruba and Ijo, mixing influences from Jay-Z to Fela to Bob Marley to their grandfathers. What if my roommate knew about the female lawyer who recently went to court in Nigeria to challenge a ridiculous law that required women to get their husband's consent before renewing their passports? What if my roommate knew about Nollywood, full of innovative people making films despite great technical odds, films so popular that they really are the best example of Nigerians consuming what they produce? What if my roommate knew about my wonderfully ambitious hair braider, who has just started her own business selling hair extensions? Or about the millions of other Nigerians who start businesses and sometimes fail, but continue to nurse ambition? Every time I am home I am confronted with the usual sources of irritation for most Nigerians: our failed infrastructure, our failed government, but also by the incredible resilience of people who thrive despite the government, rather than because of it. I teach writing workshops in Lagos every summer, and it is amazing to me how many people apply, how many people are eager to write, to tell stories. My Nigerian publisher and I have just started a non-profit called Farafina Trust, and we have big dreams of building libraries and refurbishing libraries that already exist and providing books for state schools that don't have anything in their libraries, and also of organizing lots and lots of workshops, in reading and writing, for all the people who are eager to tell our many stories. Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity. The American writer Alice Walker wrote this about her Southern relatives who had moved to the North. She introduced them to a book about the Southern life that they had left behind. "They sat around, reading the book themselves, listening to me read the book, and a kind of paradise was regained." I would like to end with this thought: That when we reject the single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise. Thank you. (Applause)
I want you to put off your preconceptions, your preconceived fears and thoughts about reptiles. Because that is the only way I'm going to get my story across to you. And by the way, if I come across as a sort of rabid, hippie conservationist, it's purely a figment of your imagination. (Laughter) Okay. We are actually the first species on Earth to be so prolific to actually threaten our own survival. And I know we've all seen images enough to make us numb, of the tragedies that we're perpetrating on the planet. We're kind of like greedy kids, using it all up, aren't we? And today is a time for me to talk to you about water. It's not only because we like to drink lots of it, and its marvelous derivatives, beer, wine, etc. And, of course, watch it fall from the sky and flow in our wonderful rivers, but for several other reasons as well. When I was a kid, growing up in New York, I was smitten by snakes, the same way most kids are smitten by tops, marbles, cars, trains, cricket balls. And my mother, brave lady, was partly to blame, taking me to the New York Natural History Museum, buying me books on snakes, and then starting this infamous career of mine, which has culminated in of course, arriving in India 60 years ago, brought by my mother, Doris Norden, and my stepfather, Rama Chattopadhyaya. It's been a roller coaster ride. Two animals, two iconic reptiles really captivated me very early on. One of them was the remarkable gharial. This crocodile, which grows to almost 20 feet long in the northern rivers, and this charismatic snake, the king cobra. What my purpose of the talk today really is, is to sort of indelibly scar your minds with these charismatic and majestic creatures. Because this is what you will take away from here, a reconnection with nature, I hope. The king cobra is quite remarkable for several reasons. What you're seeing here is very recently shot images in a forest nearby here, of a female king cobra making her nest. Here is a limbless animal, capable of gathering a huge mound of leaves, and then laying her eggs inside, to withstand 5 to 10 [meters of rainfall], in order that the eggs can incubate over the next 90 days, and hatch into little baby king cobras. So, she protects her eggs, and after three months, the babies finally do hatch out. A majority of them will die, of course. There is very high mortality in little baby reptiles who are just 10 to 12 inches long. My first experience with king cobras was in '72 at a magical place called Agumbe, in Karnataka, this state. And it is a marvelous rain forest. This first encounter was kind of like the Maasai boy who kills the lion to become a warrior. It really changed my life totally. And it brought me straight into the conservation fray. I ended up starting this research and education station in Agumbe, which you are all of course invited to visit. This is basically a base wherein we are trying to gather and learn virtually everything about the biodiversity of this incredibly complex forest system, and try to hang on to what's there, make sure the water sources are protected and kept clean, and of course, having a good time too. You can almost hear the drums throbbing back in that little cottage where we stay when we're there. It was very important for us to get through to the people. And through the children is usually the way to go. They are fascinated with snakes. They haven't got that steely thing that you end up either fearing or hating or despising or loathing them in some way. They are interested. And it really works to start with them. This gives you an idea of the size of some of these snakes. This is an average size king cobra, about 12 feet long. And it actually crawled into somebody's bathroom, and was hanging around there for two or three days. The people of this part of India worship the king cobra. And they didn't kill it. They called us to catch it. Now we've caught more than 100 king cobras over the last three years, and relocated them in nearby forests. But in order to find out the real secrets of these creatures [it was necessary] for us to actually insert a small radio transmitter inside [each] snake. Now we are able to follow them and find out their secrets, where the babies go after they hatch, and remarkable things like this you're about to see. This was just a few days ago in Agumbe. I had the pleasure of being close to this large king cobra who had caught a venomous pit viper. And it does it in such a way that it doesn't get bitten itself. And king cobras feed only on snakes. This [little snake] was kind of a tid-bit for it, what we'd call a "vadai" or a donut or something like that. (Laughter) Usually they eat something a bit larger. In this case a rather strange and inexplicable activity happened over the last breeding season, wherein a large male king cobra actually grabbed a female king cobra, didn't mate with it, actually killed it and swallowed it. We're still trying to explain and come to terms with what is the evolutionary advantage of this. But they do also a lot of other remarkable things. This is again, something [we were able to see] by virtue of the fact that we had a radio transmitter in one of the snakes. This male snake, 12 feet long, met another male king cobra. And they did this incredible ritual combat dance. It's very much like the rutting of mammals, including humans, you know, sorting out our differences, but gentler, no biting allowed. It's just a wresting match, but a remarkable activity. Now, what are we doing with all this information? What's the point of all this? Well, the king cobra is literally a keystone species in these rainforests. And our job is to convince the authorities that these forests have to be protected. And this is one of the ways we do it, by learning as much as we can about something so remarkable and so iconic in the rainforests there, in order to help protect trees, animals and of course the water sources. You've all heard, perhaps, of Project Tiger which started back in the early '70s, which was, in fact, a very dynamic time for conservation. We were piloted, I could say, by a highly autocratic stateswoman, but who also had an incredible passion for environment. And this is the time when Project Tiger emerged. And, just like Project Tiger, our activities with the king cobra is to look at a species of animal so that we protect its habitat and everything within it. So, the tiger is the icon. And now the king cobra is a new one. All the major rivers in south India are sourced in the Western Ghats, the chain of hills running along the west coast of India. It pours out millions of gallons every hour, and supplies drinking water to at least 300 million people, and washes many, many babies, and of course feeds many, many animals, both domestic and wild, produces thousands of tons of rice. And what do we do? How do we respond to this? Well, basically, we dam it, we pollute it, we pour in pesticides, weedicides, fungicides. You drink it in peril of your life. And the thing is, it's not just big industry. It's not misguided river engineers who are doing all this; it's us. It seems that our citizens find the best way to dispose of garbage are in water sources. Okay. Now we're going north, very far north. North central India, the Chambal River is where we have our base. This is the home of the gharial, this incredible crocodile. It is an animal which has been on the Earth for just about 100 million years. It survived even during the time that the dinosaurs died off. It has remarkable features. Even though it grows to 20 feet long, since it eats only fish it's not dangerous to human beings. It does have big teeth, however, and it's kind of hard to convince people if an animal has big teeth, that it's a harmless creature. But we, actually, back in the early '70s, did surveys, and found that gharial were extremely rare. In fact, if you see the map, the range of their original habitat was all the way from the Indus in Pakistan to the Irrawaddy in Burma. And now it's just limited to a couple of spots in Nepal and India. So, in fact at this point there are only 200 breeding gharial left in the wild. So, starting in the mid-'70s when conservation was at the fore, we were actually able to start projects which were basically government supported to collect eggs from the wild from the few remaining nests and release 5,000 baby gharial back to the wild. And pretty soon we were seeing sights like this. I mean, just incredible to see bunches of gharial basking on the river again. But complacency does have a tendency to breed contempt. And, sure enough, with all the other pressures on the river, like sand mining, for example, very, very heavy cultivation all the way down to the river's edge, not allowing the animals to breed anymore, we're looking at even more problems building up for the gharial, despite the early good intentions. Their nests hatching along the riverside producing hundreds of hatchlings. It's just an amazing sight. This was actually just taken last year. But then the monsoon arrives, and unfortunately downriver there is always a dam or there is always a barrage, and, shoop, they get washed down to their doom. Luckily there is still a lot of interest. My pals in the Crocodile Specialist Group of the IUCN, the [Madras Crocodile Bank], an NGO, the World Wildlife Fund, the Wildlife Institute of India, State Forest Departments, and the Ministry of Environment, we all work together on stuff. But it's possibly, and definitely not enough. For example, in the winter of 2007 and 2008, there was this incredible die-off of gharial, in the Chambal River. Suddenly dozens of gharial appearing on the river, dead. Why? How could it happen? This is a relatively clean river. The Chambal, if you look at it, has clear water. People scoop water out of the Chambal and drink it, something you wouldn't do in most north Indian rivers. So, in order to try to find out the answer to this, we got veterinarians from all over the world working with Indian vets to try to figure out what was happening. I was there for a lot of the necropsies on the riverside. And we actually looked through all their organs and tried to figure out what was going on. And it came down to something called gout, which, as a result of kidney breakdown is actually uric acid crystals throughout the body, and worse in the joints, which made the gharial unable to swim. And it's a horribly painful death. Just downriver from the Chambal is the filthy Yamuna river, the sacred Yamuna river. And I hate to be so ironic and sarcastic about it but it's the truth. It's just one of the filthiest cesspools you can imagine. It flows down through Delhi, Mathura, Agra, and gets just about every bit of effluent you can imagine. So, it seemed that the toxin that was killing the gharial was something in the food chain, something in the fish they were eating. And, you know, once a toxin is in the food chain everything is affected, including us. Because these rivers are the lifeblood of people all along their course. In order to try to answer some of these questions, we again turn to technology, to biological technology, in this case, again, telemetry, putting radios on 10 gharial, and actually following their movements. They're being watched everyday as we speak, to try to find out what this mysterious toxin is. The Chambal river is an absolutely incredible place. It's a place that's famous to a lot of you who know about the bandits, the dacoits who used to work up there. And there still are quite a few around. But Poolan Devi was one [of them]. Which actually Shekhar Kapur made an incredible movie, "The Bandit Queen," which I urge you to see. You'll get to see the incredible [Chambal] landscape as well. But, again, heavy fishing pressures. This is one of the last repositories of the Ganges river dolphin, various species of turtles, thousands of migratory birds, and fishing is causing problems like this. And now [these] new elements of human intolerance for river creatures like the gharial means that if they don't drown in the net, then they simply cut their beaks off. Animals like the Ganges river dolphin which is just down to a few left, and it is also critically endangered. So, who is next? Us? Because we are all dependent on these water sources. So, we all know about the Narmada river, the tragedies of dams, the tragedies of huge projects which displace people and wreck river systems without providing livelihoods. And development just basically going berserk, for a double figure growth index, basically. So, we're not sure where this story is going to end, whether it's got a happy or sad ending. And climate change is certainly going to turn all of our theories and predictions on their heads. We're still working hard at it. We've got a lot of a good team of people working up there. And the thing is, you know, the decision makers, the folks in power, they're up in their bungalows and so on in Delhi, in the city capitals. They are all supplied with plenty of water. It's cool. But out on the rivers there are still millions of people who are in really bad shape. And it's a bleak future for them. So, we have our Ganges and Yamuna cleanup project. We've spent hundreds of millions of dollars on it, and nothing to show for it. Incredible. So, people talk about political will. During the die-off of the gharial we did galvanize a lot of action. Government cut through all the red tape, we got foreign vets on it. It was great. So, we can do it. But if you stroll down to the Yamuna or to the Gomati in Lucknow, or to the Adyar river in Chennai, or the Mula-Mutha river in Pune, just see what we're capable of doing to a river. It's sad. But I think the final note really is that we can do it. The corporates, the artists, the wildlife nuts, the good old everyday folks can actually bring these rivers back. And the final word is that there is a king cobra looking over our shoulders. And there is a gharial looking at us from the river. And these are powerful water totems. And they are going to disturb our dreams until we do the right thing. Namaste. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thanks, Rom. Thanks a lot. You know, most people are terrified of snakes. And there might be quite a few people here who would be very glad to see the last king cobra bite the dust. Do you have those conversations with people? How do you really get them to care? Romulus Whitaker: I take the sort of humble approach, I guess you could say. I don't say that snakes are huggable exactly. It's not like the teddy bear. But I sort of -- there is an innocence in these animals. And when the average person looks at a cobra going "Ssssss!" like that, they say, "My god, look at that angry, dangerous creature." I look at it as a creature who is totally frightened of something so dangerous as a human being. And that is the truth. And that's what I try to get out. (Applause) CA: Now, incredible footage you showed of the viper being killed. You were saying that that hasn't been filmed before. RW: Yes, this is actually the first time anyone of us knew about it, for one thing. As I said, it's just like a little snack for him, you know? Usually they eat larger snakes like rat snakes, or even cobras. But this guy who we're following right now is in the deep jungle. Whereas other king cobras very often come into the human interface, you know, the plantations, to find big rat snakes and stuff. This guy specializes in pit vipers. And the guy who is working there with them, he's from Maharashtra, he said, "I think he's after the nusha." (Laughter) Now, the nusha means the high. Whenever he eats the pit viper he gets this little venom rush. (Laughter) CA: Thanks Rom. Thank you. (Applause)
I want to talk about my investigations into what technology means in our lives -- not just our immediate life, but in the cosmic sense, in the kind of long history of the world and our place in the world: What is this stuff? What is the significance? And so, I want to kind of go through my little story of what I found out. And one of the first things that I started to investigate was the history of the name of technology. And in the United States there is a State of the Union address given by every president since 1790. And each one of those is really kind of summing up the most important things for the United States at that time. If you search for the word "technology," it was not used until 1952. So, technology was sort of absent from everybody's thinking until 1952, which happened to be the year of my birth. And obviously, technology had existed before then, but we weren't aware of it, and so it was sort of an awakening of this force in our life. I actually did research to find out the first use of the word "technology." It was in 1829, and it was invented by a guy who was starting a curriculum -- a course, bringing together all the kinds of arts and crafts, and industry -- and he called it "Technology." And that's the very first use of the word. So, what is this stuff that we're all consumed by, and bothered by? Alan Kay calls it, "Technology is anything that was invented after you were born." (Laughter) Which is sort of the idea that we normally have about what technology is: It's all that new stuff. It's not roads, or penicillin, or factory tires; it's the new stuff. My friend Danny Hillis says kind of a similar one, he says, "Technology is anything that doesn't work yet." (Laughter) Which is, again, a sense that it's all new. But we know that it's just not new. It actually goes way back, and what I want to suggest is it goes a long way back. So, another way to think about technology, what it means, is to imagine a world without technology. If we were to eliminate every single bit of technology in the world today -- and I mean everything, from blades to scrapers to cloth -- we as a species would not live very long. We would die by the billions, and very quickly: The wolves would get us, we would be defenseless, we would be unable to grow enough food, or find enough food. Even the hunter-gatherers used some elementary tools. And so, they had minimal technology, but they had some technology. And if we study those hunter-gatherer tribes and the Neanderthal, which are very similar to early man, we find out a very curious thing about this world without technology, and this is a kind of a curve of their average age. There are no Neanderthal fossils that are older than 40 years old that we've ever found, and the average age of most of these hunter-gatherer tribes is 20 to 30. There are very few young infants because they die -- high mortality rate -- and there's very few old people. And so the profile is sort of for your average San Francisco neighborhood: a lot of young people. And if you go there, you say, "Hey, everybody's really healthy." Well, that's because they're all young. And the same thing with the hunter-gatherer tribes and early man is that you didn't live beyond the age of 30. So, it was a world without grandparents. And grandparents are very important, because they are the transmitter of cultural evolution and information. Imagine a world and basically everybody was 20 to 30 years old. How much learning can you do? You can't do very much learning in your own life, it's so short, and there's nobody to pass on what you do learn. So, that's one aspect. It was a very short life. But at the same time anthropologists know that most hunter-gatherer tribes of the world, with that very little technology, actually did not spend a very long time gathering the food that they needed: three to six hours a day. Some anthropologists call that the original affluent society. Because they had banker hours basically. So, it was possible to get enough food. But when the scarcity came when the highs and lows and the droughts came, then people went into starvation. And that's why they didn't live very long. So, what technology brought, through the very simple tools like these stone tools here -- even something as small as this -- the early bands of humans were actually able to eliminate to extinction about 250 megafauna animals in North America when they first arrived 10,000 years ago. So, long before the industrial age we've been affecting the planet on a global scale, with just a small amount of technology. The other thing that the early man invented was fire. And fire was used to clear out, and again, affected the ecology of grass and whole continents, and was used in cooking. It enabled us to actually eat all kinds of things. It was sort of, in a certain sense, in a McLuhan sense, an external stomach, in the sense that it was cooking food that we could not eat otherwise. And if we don't have fire, we actually could not live. Our bodies have adapted to these new diets. Our bodies have changed in the last 10,000 years. So, with that little bit of technology, humans went from a small band of 10,000 or so -- the same number as Neanderthals everywhere -- and we suddenly exploded. With the invention of language around 50,000 years ago, the number of humans exploded, and very quickly became the dominant species on the planet. And they migrated into the rest of the world at two kilometers per year until, within several tens of thousands of years, we occupied every single watershed on the planet and became the most dominant species, with a very small amount of technology. And even at that time, with the introduction of agriculture, 8,000, 10,000 years ago we started to see climate change. So, climate change is not a new thing. What's new is just the degree of it. Even during the agricultural age there was climate change. And so, already small amounts of technology were transforming the world. And what this means, and where I'm going, is that technology has become the most powerful force in the world. All the things that we see today that are changing our lives, we can always trace back to the introduction of some new technology. So, it's a force that is the most powerful force that has been unleashed on this planet, and in such a degree that I think that it's become our -- who we are. In fact, our humanity, and everything that we think about ourselves is something that we've invented. So, we've invented ourselves. Of all the animals that we have domesticated, the most important animal that we've domesticated has been us. Okay? So, humanity is our greatest invention. But of course we're not done yet. We're still inventing, and this is what technology is allowing us to do -- it's continually to reinvent ourselves. It's a very, very strong force. I call this entire thing -- us humans as our technology, everything that we've made, gadgets in our lives -- we call that the technium. That's this world. My working definition of technology is "anything useful that a human mind makes." It's not just hammers and gadgets, like laptops. But it's also law. And of course cities are ways to make things more useful to us. While this is something that comes from our mind, it also has its roots deeply into the cosmos. It goes back. The origins and roots of technology go back to the Big Bang, in this way, in that they are part of this self-organizing thread that starts at the Big Bang and goes through galaxies and stars, into life, into us. And the three major phases of the early universe was energy, when the dominant force was energy; then it became, the dominant force, as it cooled, became matter; and then, with the invention of life, four billion years ago, the dominant force in our neighborhood became information. That's what life is: It's an information process that was restructuring and making new order. So, those energy, matter Einstein show were equivalent, and now new sciences of quantum computing show that entropy and information and matter and energy are all interrelated, so it's one long continuum. You put energy into the right kind of system and out comes wasted heat, entropy and extropy, which is order. It's the increased order. Where does this order come from? Its roots go way back. We actually don't know. But we do know that the self-organization trend throughout the universe is long, and it began with things like galaxies; they maintained their order for billions of years. Stars are basically nuclear fusion machines that self-organize and self-sustain themselves for billions of years, this order against the entropy of the world. And flowers and plants are the same thing, extended, and technology is basically an extension of life. One trend that we notice in all those things is that the amount of energy per gram per second that flows through this, is actually increasing. The amount of energy is increasing through this little sequence. And that the amount of energy per gram per second that flows through life is actually greater than a star -- because of the star's long lifespan, the energy density in life is actually higher than a star. And the energy density that we see in the greatest of anywhere in the universe is actually in a PC chip. There is more energy flowing through, per gram per second, than anything that we have any other experience with. What I would suggest is that if you want to see where technology is going, we continue that trajectory, and we say "Well what's going to become more energy-dense, that's where it's going." And so what I've done is, I've taken the same kinds of things and looked at other aspects of evolutionary life and say, "What are the general trends in evolutionary life?" And there are things moving towards greater complexity, moving towards greater diversity, moving towards greater specialization, sentience, ubiquity and most important, evolvability: Those very same things are also present in technology. That's where technology is going. In fact, technology is accelerating all the aspects of life, and we can see that happening; just as there's diversity in life, there's more diversity in things we make. Things in life start out being general cell, and they become specialized: You have tissue cells, you have muscle, brain cells. And same things happens with say, a hammer, which is general at first and becomes more specific. So, I would like to say that while there is six kingdoms of life, we can think of technology basically as a seventh kingdom of life. It's a branching off from the human form. But technology has its own agenda, like anything, like life itself. For instance, right now, three-quarters of the energy that we use is actually used to feed the technium itself. In transportation, it's not to move us, it's to move the stuff that we make or buy. I use the word "want." Technology wants. This is a robot that wants to plug itself in to get more power. Your cat wants more food. A bacterium, which has no consciousness at all, wants to move towards light. It has an urge, and technology has an urge. At the same time, it wants to give us things, and what it gives us is basically progress. You can take all kinds of curves, and they're all pointing up. There's really no dispute about progress, if we discount the cost of that. And that's the thing that bothers most people, is that progress is really real, but we wonder and question: What are the environmental costs of it? I did a survey of a number of species of artifacts in my house, and there's 6,000. Other people have come up with 10,000. When King Henry of England died, he had 18,000 things in his house, but that was the entire wealth of England. And with that entire wealth of England, King Henry could not buy any antibiotics, he could not buy refrigeration, he could not buy a trip of a thousand miles. Whereas this rickshaw wale in India could save up and buy antibiotics and he could buy refrigeration. He could buy things that King Henry, in all his wealth, could never buy. That's what progress is about. So, technology is selfish; technology is generous. That conflict, that tension, will be with us forever, that sometimes it wants to do what it wants to do, and sometimes it's going to do things for us. We have confusion about what we should think about a new technology. Right now the default position about when a new technology comes along, is we -- people talk about the precautionary principle, which is very common in Europe, which says, basically, "Don't do anything. When you meet a new technology, stop, until it can be proven that there's no harm." I think that really leads nowhere. But a better way is to, what I call proactionary principle, which is: You engage with technology. You try it out. You obviously do what the precautionary principle suggests, you try to anticipate it, but after anticipating it, you constantly asses it, not just once, but eternally. And when it diverts from what you want, we prioritize risk, we evaluate not just the new stuff, but the old stuff. We fix it, but most importantly, we relocate it. And what I mean by that is that we find a new job for it. Nuclear energy, fission, is really bad idea for bombs. But it may be a pretty good idea relocated into sustainable nuclear energy for electricity, instead of burning coal. When we have a bad idea, the response to a bad idea is not no ideas, it's not to stop thinking. The response to a bad idea -- like, say, a tungsten light bulb -- is a better idea. OK? So, better ideas is really -- always the response to technology that we don't like is basically, better technology. And actually, in a certain sense, technology is a kind of a method for generating better ideas, if you can think about it that way. So, maybe spraying DDT on crops is a really bad idea. But DDT sprayed on local homes, there's nothing better to eliminate malaria, besides insect DDT-impregnated mosquito nets. But that's a really good idea; that's a good job for technology. So, our job as humans is to parent our mind children, to find them good friends, to find them a good job. And so, every technology is sort of a creative force looking for the right job. That's actually my son, right here. (Laughter) There are no bad technologies, just as there are no bad children. We don't say children are neutral, children are positive. We just have to find them the right place. And so, what technology gives us, over the long term, over the sort of extended evolution -- from the beginning of time, through the invention of the plants and animals, and the evolution of life, the evolution of brains -- what that is constantly giving us is increasing differences: It's increasing diversity, it's increasing options, it's increasing choices, opportunities, possibilities and freedoms. That's what we get from technology all the time. That's why people leave villages and go into cities, is because they are always gravitating towards increased choices and possibilities. And we are aware of the price. We pay a price for that, but we are aware of it, and generally we will pay the price for increased freedoms, choices and opportunities. Even technology wants clean water. Is technology diametrically opposed to nature? Because technology is an extension of life, it's in parallel and aligned with the same things that life wants. So that I think technology loves biology, if we allow it to. Great movement that is starting billions of years ago is moving through us and it continues to go, and our choice, so to speak, in technology, is really to align ourselves with this force much greater than ourselves. So, technology is more than just the stuff in your pocket. It's more than just gadgets; it's more than just things that people invent. It's actually part of a very long story, a great story, that began billions of years ago. And it's moving through us, this self-organization, and we're extending and accelerating it, and we can be part of it by aligning the technology that we make with it. I really appreciate your attention today. Thank you. (Applause)
I've been at MIT for 44 years. I went to TED I. There's only one other person here, I think, who did that. All the other TEDs -- and I went to them all, under Ricky's regime -- I talked about what the Media Lab was doing, which today has almost 500 people in it. And if you read the press, last week it actually said I quit the Media Lab. I didn't quit the Media Lab, I stepped down as chairman -- which was a kind of ridiculous title, but someone else has taken it on -- and one of the things you can do as a professor is you stay on as a professor. And I will now do for the rest of my life the One Laptop Per Child, which I've sort of been doing for a year and a half, anyway. So I'm going to tell you about this, use my 18 minutes to tell you why we're doing it, how we're doing it and then what we're doing. And at some point I'll even pass around what the $100 laptop might be like. I was asked by Chris to talk about some of the big issues, and so I figured I'd start with the three that at least drove me to do this. And the first is pretty obvious. It's amazing when you meet a head of state, and you say, "What is your most precious natural resource?" They will not say "children" at first, and then when you say, "children," they will pretty quickly agree with you. And so that isn't very hard. (Laughter) Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they include education, sometimes can be just education and can never be without some element of education. So that's certainly part of it. And the third is a little bit less obvious. And that is that we all in this room learned how to walk, how to talk, not by being taught how to talk, or taught how to walk, but by interacting with the world, by having certain results as a consequence of being able to ask for something, or being able to stand up and reach it. Whereas at about the age six, we were told to stop learning that way, and that all learning from then on would happen through teaching, whether it's people standing up, like I'm doing now, or a book, or something. But it was really through teaching. And one of the things in general that computers have provided to learning is that it now includes a kind of learning which is a little bit more like walking and talking, in the sense that a lot of it is driven by the learner himself or herself. So with those as the principles -- some of you may know Seymour Papert. This is back in 1982, when we were working in Senegal. Because some people think that the $100 laptop just happened a year ago, or two years ago, or we were struck by lightning -- this actually has gone back a long time, and in fact, back to the '60s. Here we're in the '80s. Steve Jobs had given us some laptops. We were in Senegal. It didn't scale but it at least was bringing computers to developing countries and learning pretty quickly that these kids, even though English wasn't their language, the Latin alphabet barely was their language, but they could just swim like fish. They could play these like pianos. A little bit more recently, I got involved personally. And these are two anecdotes -- one was in Cambodia, in a village that has no electricity, no water, no television, no telephone, but has broadband Internet now. And these kids, their first English word is "Google" and they only know Skype. They've never heard of telephony. They just use Skype. And they go home at night -- they've got a broadband connection in a hut that doesn't have electricity. The parents love it, because when they open up the laptops, it's the brightest light source in the house. And talk about where metaphors and reality mix -- this is the actual school. In parallel with this, Seymour Papert got the governor of Maine to legislate one laptop per child in the year 2002. Now at the time, I think it's fair to say that 80 percent of the teachers were -- let me say, apprehensive. Really, they were actually against it. And they really preferred that the money would be used for higher salaries, more schools, whatever. And now, three and a half years later, guess what? They're reporting five things: drop of truancy to almost zero, attending parent-teacher meetings -- which nobody did and now almost everybody does -- drop in discipline problems, increase in student participation. Teachers are now saying it's kind of fun to teach. Kids are engaged -- they have laptops! -- and then the fifth, which interests me the most, is that the servers have to be turned off at certain times at night because the teachers are getting too much email from the kids asking them for help. So when you see that kind of thing -- this is not something that you have to test. The days of pilot projects are over, when people say, "We'd like to do three or four thousand in our country to see how it works." Screw you. Go to the back of the line and someone else will do it, and then when you figure out that this works, you can join as well. And this is what we're doing. (Laughter) (Applause) So, One Laptop Per Child was formed about a year and a half ago. It's a nonprofit association. It raised about 20 million dollars to do the engineering to just get this built, and then have it produced afterwards. Scale is truly important. And it's not important because you can buy components at a lower price, OK? It's because you can go to a manufacturer -- and I will leave the name out -- but we wanted a small display, doesn't have to have perfect color uniformity. It can even have a pixel or two missing. It doesn't have to be that bright. And this particular manufacturer said, "We're not interested in that. We're interested in the living room. We're interested in perfect color uniformity. We're interested in big displays, bright displays. You're not part of our strategic plan." And I said, "That's kind of too bad, because we need 100 million units a year." (Laughter) And they said, "Oh, well, maybe we could become part of your strategic plan." And that's why scale counts. And that's why we will not launch this without five to 10 million units in the first run. And the idea is to launch with enough scale that the scale itself helps bring the price down, and that's why I said seven to 10 million there. And we're doing it without a sales-and-marketing team. I mean, you're looking at the sales-and-marketing team. We will do it by going to seven large countries and getting them to agree and launch it, and then the others can follow. We have partners. It's not hard to guess Google would be one. The others are all playing to pending. And this has been in the press a great deal. It's the so-called Green Machine that we introduced with Kofi Annan in November at the World Summit that was held in Tunisia. Now once people start looking at this, they say, "Ah, this is a laptop project." Well, no, it's not a laptop project. It's an education project. And the fun part -- and I'm quite focused on it -- I tell people I used to be a light bulb, but now I'm a laser -- I'm just going to get that thing built, and it turns out it's not so hard. Because laptop economics are the following: I say 50 percent here -- it's more like 60, 60 percent of the cost of your laptop is sales, marketing, distribution and profit. Now we have none of those, OK? None of those figure into our cost, because first of all, we sell it at cost, and the governments distribute it. It gets distributed to the school system like a textbook. So that piece disappears. Then you have display and everything else. Now the display on your laptop costs, in rough numbers, 10 dollars a diagonal inch. That can drop to eight; it can drop to seven but it's not going to drop to two, or to one and a half, unless we do some pretty clever things. It's the rest -- that little brown box -- that is pretty fascinating, because the rest of your laptop is devoted to itself. It's a little bit like an obese person having to use most of their energy to move their obesity. (Laughter) And we have a situation today which is incredible. I've been using laptops since their inception. And my laptop runs slower, less reliably and less pleasantly than it ever has before. And this year is worse. (Applause) People clap, sometimes you even get standing ovations, and I say, "What the hell's wrong with you? Why are we all sitting there?" And somebody -- to remain nameless -- called our laptop a "gadget" recently. And I said, "God, our laptop's going to go like a bat out of hell. When you open it up, it's going to go 'bing.'" It'll be on. It'll be just like it was in 1985, when you bought an Apple Macintosh 512. It worked really well. And we've been going steadily downhill. Now, people ask all the time what it is. That's what it is. The two pieces that are probably notable: it'll be a mesh network, so when the kids open up their laptops, they all become a network, and then just need one or two points of backhaul. You can serve a couple of thousand kids with two megabits. So you really can bring into a village, and then the villages can connect themselves, and you really can do it quite well. The dual mode display -- the idea is to have a display that both works outdoors -- isn't it fun using your cell phone outdoors in the sunlight? Well, you can't see it. And one of the reasons you can't see it is because it's backlighting most of the time, most cell phones. Now, what we're doing is, we're doing one that will be both frontlit and backlit. And whether you manually switch it or you do it in the software is to be seen. But when it's backlit, it's color. And when it's frontlit, it's black and white at three times the resolution. Is it all worked out? No. That's why a lot of our people are more or less living in Taiwan right now. And in about 30 days, we'll know for sure whether this works. Probably the most important piece there is that the kids really can do the maintenance. And this is again something that people don't believe, but I really think it's quite true. That's the machine we showed in Tunis. This is more the direction that we're going to go. And it's something that we didn't think was possible. Now, I'm going to pass this around. This isn't a design, OK? So this is just a mechanical engineering sort of embodiment of it for you to play with. And it's clearly just a model. The working one is at MIT. I'm going to pass it to this handsome gentleman. At least you can decide whether it goes left or -- Chris Anderson: Before you do it, for the people down in simulcast -- Nicholas Negroponte: Sorry! I forgot. CA: Just show it off a bit. So wherever the camera is -- OK, good point. Thank you, Chris. The idea was that it would be not only a laptop, but that it could transform into an electronic book. So it's sort of an electronic book. This is where when you go outside, it's in black and white. The games buttons are missing, but it'll also be a games machine, book machine. Set it up this way, and it's a television set. Etc., etc. -- is that enough for simulcast? OK, sorry. I'll let Jim decide which way to send it afterwards. OK. Seven countries. (Laughter) I say "maybe" for Massachusetts, because they actually have to do a bid. By law you've got to bid, and so on and so forth. So I can't quite name them. In the other cases, they don't have to do bids. They can decide -- it's the federal government in each case. It's kind of agonizing, because a lot of people say, "Let's do it at the state level," because states are more nimble than the feds, just because of size. And yet we count. We're really dealing with the federal government. We're really dealing with ministries of education. And if you look at governments around the world, ministries of education tend to be the most conservative, and also the ones that have huge payrolls. Everybody thinks they know about education, a lot of culture is built into it as well. It's really hard. And so it's certainly the hard road. If you look at the countries, they're pretty geoculturally distributed. Have they all agreed? No, not completely. Probably Thailand, Brazil and Nigeria are the three that are the most active and most agreed. We're purposely not signing anything with anybody until we actually have the working ones. And since I visit each one of those countries within at least every three months, I'm just going around the world every three weeks. Here's sort of the schedule and I put at the bottom we might give some away free in two years at this meeting. Everybody says it's a $100 laptop -- you can't do it. Well, guess what, we're not. We're coming in probably at 135, to start, then drift down. And that's very important, because so many things hit the market at a price and then drift up. It's kind of the loss leader, and then as soon as it looks interesting, it can't be afforded, or it can't be scaled out. So we're targeting 50 dollars in 2010. The gray market's a big issue. And one of the ways -- just one -- but one of the ways to help in the case of the gray market is to make something that is so utterly unique -- It's a little bit like the fact that automobiles -- thousands of automobiles are stolen every day in the United States. Not one single post-office truck is stolen. (Laughter) And why? Because there's no market for post-office trucks. It looks like a post-office truck. You can spray paint it. You can do anything you want. I just learned recently: in South Africa, no white Volvos are stolen. Period. None. Zero. So we want to make it very much like a white Volvo. Each government has a task force. This perhaps is less interesting, but we're trying to get the governments to all work together and it's not easy. The economics of this is to start with the federal governments and then later, to subsequently go to other -- whether it's child-to-child funding, so a child in this country buys one for a child in the developing world, maybe of the same gender, maybe of the same age. An uncle gives a niece or a nephew that as a birthday present. I mean, there are all sorts of things that will happen, and they'll be very, very exciting. And everybody says -- I say -- it's an education project. Are we providing the software? The answer is: The system certainly has software, but no, we're not providing the education content. That is really done in the countries. But we are certainly constructionists. And we certainly believe in learning by doing and everything from Logo, which was started in 1968, to more modern things, like Scratch, if you've ever even heard of it, are very, very much part of it. And that's the rollout. Are we dreaming? Is this real? It actually is real. The only criticism, and people really don't want to criticize this, because it is a humanitarian effort, a nonprofit effort and to criticize it is a little bit stupid, actually. (Laughter) But the one thing that people could criticize was, "Great idea, but these guys can't do it." And that could either mean these guys, professors and so on couldn't do it, or that it's not possible. Well, on December 12, a company called Quanta agreed to build it, and since they make about one-third of all the laptops on the planet today, that question disappeared. So it's not a matter of whether it's going to happen. It is going to happen. And if it comes out at 138 dollars, so what? If it comes out six months late, so what? That's a pretty soft landing. Thank you. (Applause)
I think all of us have been interested, at one time or another, in the romantic mysteries of all those societies that collapsed, such as the classic Maya in the Yucatan, the Easter Islanders, the Anasazi, Fertile Crescent society, Angor Wat, Great Zimbabwe and so on. And within the last decade or two, archaeologists have shown us that there were environmental problems underlying many of these past collapses. But there were also plenty of places in the world where societies have been developing for thousands of years without any sign of a major collapse, such as Japan, Java, Tonga and Tikopea. So evidently, societies in some areas are more fragile than in other areas. How can we understand what makes some societies more fragile than other societies? The problem is obviously relevant to our situation today, because today as well, there are some societies that have already collapsed, such as Somalia and Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. There are also societies today that may be close to collapse, such as Nepal, Indonesia and Columbia. What about ourselves? What is there that we can learn from the past that would help us avoid declining or collapsing in the way that so many past societies have? Obviously the answer to this question is not going to be a single factor. If anyone tells you that there is a single-factor explanation for societal collapses, you know right away that they're an idiot. This is a complex subject. But how can we make sense out of the complexities of this subject? In analyzing societal collapses, I've arrived at a five-point framework -- a checklist of things that I go through to try and understand collapses. And I'll illustrate that five-point framework by the extinction of the Greenland Norse society. This is a European society with literate records, so we know a good deal about the people and their motivation. In AD 984 Vikings went out to Greenland, settled Greenland, and around 1450 they died out -- the society collapsed, and every one of them ended up dead. Why did they all end up dead? Well, in my five-point framework, the first item on the framework is to look for human impacts on the environment: people inadvertently destroying the resource base on which they depend. And in the case of the Viking Norse, the Vikings inadvertently caused soil erosion and deforestation, which was a particular problem for them because they required forests to make charcoal, to make iron. So they ended up an Iron Age European society, virtually unable to make their own iron. A second item on my checklist is climate change. Climate can get warmer or colder or dryer or wetter. In the case of the Vikings -- in Greenland, the climate got colder in the late 1300s, and especially in the 1400s. But a cold climate isn't necessarily fatal, because the Inuit -- the Eskimos inhabiting Greenland at the same time -- did better, rather than worse, with cold climates. So why didn't the Greenland Norse as well? The third thing on my checklist is relations with neighboring friendly societies that may prop up a society. And if that friendly support is pulled away, that may make a society more likely to collapse. In the case of the Greenland Norse, they had trade with the mother country -- Norway -- and that trade dwindled: partly because Norway got weaker, partly because of sea ice between Greenland and Norway. The fourth item on my checklist is relations with hostile societies. In the case of Norse Greenland, the hostiles were the Inuit -- the Eskimos sharing Greenland -- with whom the Norse got off to bad relationships. And we know that the Inuit killed the Norse and, probably of greater importance, may have blocked access to the outer fjords, on which the Norse depended for seals at a critical time of the year. And then finally, the fifth item on my checklist is the political, economic, social and cultural factors in the society that make it more or less likely that the society will perceive and solve its environmental problems. In the case of the Greenland Norse, cultural factors that made it difficult for them to solve their problems were: their commitments to a Christian society investing heavily in cathedrals; their being a competitive-ranked chiefly society; and their scorn for the Inuit, from whom they refused to learn. So that's how the five-part framework is relevant to the collapse and eventual extinction of the Greenland Norse. What about a society today? For the past five years, I've been taking my wife and kids to Southwestern Montana, where I worked as a teenager on the hay harvest. And Montana, at first sight, seems like the most pristine environment in the United States. But scratch the surface, and Montana suffers from serious problems. Going through the same checklist: human environmental impacts? Yes, acute in Montana. Toxic problems from mine waste have caused damage of billions of dollars. Problems from weeds, weed control, cost Montana nearly 200 million dollars a year. Montana has lost agricultural areas from salinization, problems of forest management, problems of forest fires. Second item on my checklist: climate change. Yes -- the climate in Montana is getting warmer and drier, but Montana agriculture depends especially on irrigation from the snow pack, and as the snow is melting -- for example, as the glaciers in Glacier National Park are disappearing -- that's bad news for Montana irrigation agriculture. Third thing on my checklist: relations with friendlies that can sustain the society. In Montana today, more than half of the income of Montana is not earned within Montana, but is derived from out of state: transfer payments from social security, investments and so on -- which makes Montana vulnerable to the rest of the United States. Fourth: relations with hostiles. Montanans have the same problems as do all Americans, in being sensitive to problems created by hostiles overseas affecting our oil supplies, and terrorist attacks. And finally, last item on my checklist: question of how political, economic, social, cultural attitudes play into this. Montanans have long-held values, which today seem to be getting in the way of their solving their own problems. Long-held devotion to logging and to mines and to agriculture, and to no government regulation; values that worked well in the past, but they don't seem to be working well today. So, I'm looking at these issues of collapses for a lot of past societies and for many present societies. Are there any general conclusions that arise? In a way, just like Tolstoy's statement about every unhappy marriage being different, every collapsed or endangered society is different -- they all have different details. But nevertheless, there are certain common threads that emerge from these comparisons of past societies that did or did not collapse and threatened societies today. One interesting common thread has to do with, in many cases, the rapidity of collapse after a society reaches its peak. There are many societies that don't wind down gradually, but they build up -- get richer and more powerful -- and then within a short time, within a few decades after their peak, they collapse. For example, the classic lowland Maya of the Yucatan began to collapse in the early 800s -- literally a few decades after the Maya were building their biggest monuments, and Maya population was greatest. Or again, the collapse of the Soviet Union took place within a couple of decades, maybe within a decade, of the time when the Soviet Union was at its greatest power. An analogue would be the growth of bacteria in a petri dish. These rapid collapses are especially likely where there's a mismatch between available resources and resource consumption, or a mismatch between economic outlays and economic potential. In a petri dish, bacteria grow. Say they double every generation, and five generations before the end the petri dish is 15/16ths empty, and then the next generation's 3/4ths empty, and the next generation half empty. Within one generation after the petri dish still being half empty, it is full. There's no more food and the bacteria have collapsed. So, this is a frequent theme: societies collapse very soon after reaching their peak in power. What it means to put it mathematically is that, if you're concerned about a society today, you should be looking not at the value of the mathematical function -- the wealth itself -- but you should be looking at the first derivative and the second derivatives of the function. That's one general theme. A second general theme is that there are many, often subtle environmental factors that make some societies more fragile than others. Many of those factors are not well understood. For example, why is it that in the Pacific, of those hundreds of Pacific islands, why did Easter Island end up as the most devastating case of complete deforestation? It turns out that there were about nine different environmental factors -- some, rather subtle ones -- that were working against the Easter Islanders, and they involve fallout of volcanic tephra, latitude, rainfall. Perhaps the most subtle of them is that it turns out that a major input of nutrients which protects island environments in the Pacific is from the fallout of continental dust from central Asia. Easter, of all Pacific islands, has the least input of dust from Asia restoring the fertility of its soils. But that's a factor that we didn't even appreciate until 1999. So, some societies, for subtle environmental reasons, are more fragile than others. And then finally, another generalization. I'm now teaching a course at UCLA, to UCLA undergraduates, on these collapses of societies. What really bugs my UCLA undergraduate students is, how on earth did these societies not see what they were doing? How could the Easter Islanders have deforested their environment? What did they say when they were cutting down the last palm tree? Didn't they see what they were doing? How could societies not perceive their impacts on the environments and stop in time? And I would expect that, if our human civilization carries on, then maybe in the next century people will be asking, why on earth did these people today in the year 2003 not see the obvious things that they were doing and take corrective action? It seems incredible in the past. In the future, it'll seem incredible what we are doing today. And so I've been trying to develop a hierarchical set of considerations about why societies fail to solve their problems -- why they fail to perceive the problems or, if they perceive them, why they fail to tackle them. Or, if they tackle them, why do they fail to succeed in solving them? I'll just mention two generalizations in this area. One blueprint for trouble, making collapse likely, is where there is a conflict of interest between the short-term interest of the decision-making elites and the long-term interest of the society as a whole, especially if the elites are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions. Where what's good in the short run for the elite is bad for the society as a whole, there's a real risk of the elite doing things that would bring the society down in the long run. For example, among the Greenland Norse -- a competitive rank society -- what the chiefs really wanted is more followers and more sheep and more resources to outcompete the neighboring chiefs. And that led the chiefs to do what's called flogging the land: overstocking the land, forcing tenant farmers into dependency. And that made the chiefs powerful in the short run, but led to the society's collapse in the long run. Those same issues of conflicts of interest are acute in the United States today. Especially because the decision makers in the United States are frequently able to insulate themselves from consequences by living in gated compounds, by drinking bottled water and so on. And within the last couple of years, it's been obvious that the elite in the business world correctly perceive that they can advance their short-term interest by doing things that are good for them but bad for society as a whole, such as draining a few billion dollars out of Enron and other businesses. They are quite correct that these things are good for them in the short term, although bad for society in the long term. So, that's one general conclusion about why societies make bad decisions: conflicts of interest. And the other generalization that I want to mention is that it's particularly hard for a society to make quote-unquote good decisions when there is a conflict involving strongly held values that are good in many circumstances but are poor in other circumstances. For example, the Greenland Norse, in this difficult environment, were held together for four-and-a-half centuries by their shared commitment to religion, and by their strong social cohesion. But those two things -- commitment to religion and strong social cohesion -- also made it difficult for them to change at the end and to learn from the Inuit. Or today -- Australia. One of the things that enabled Australia to survive in this remote outpost of European civilization for 250 years has been their British identity. But today, their commitment to a British identity is serving Australians poorly in their need to adapt to their situation in Asia. So it's particularly difficult to change course when the things that get you in trouble are the things that are also the source of your strength. What's going to be the outcome today? Well, all of us know the dozen sorts of ticking time bombs going on in the modern world, time bombs that have fuses of a few decades to -- all of them, not more than 50 years, and any one of which can do us in; the time bombs of water, of soil, of climate change, invasive species, the photosynthetic ceiling, population problems, toxics, etc., etc. -- listing about 12 of them. And while these time bombs -- none of them has a fuse beyond 50 years, and most of them have fuses of a few decades -- some of them, in some places, have much shorter fuses. At the rate at which we're going now, the Philippines will lose all its accessible loggable forest within five years. And the Solomon Islands are only one year away from losing their loggable forest, which is their major export. And that's going to be spectacular for the economy of the Solomons. People often ask me, Jared, what's the most important thing that we need to do about the world's environmental problems? And my answer is, the most important thing we need to do is to forget about there being any single thing that is the most important thing we need to do. Instead, there are a dozen things, any one of which could do us in. And we've got to get them all right, because if we solve 11, we fail to solve the 12th -- we're in trouble. For example, if we solve our problems of water and soil and population, but don't solve our problems of toxics, then we are in trouble. The fact is that our present course is a non-sustainable course, which means, by definition, that it cannot be maintained. And the outcome is going to get resolved within a few decades. That means that those of us in this room who are less than 50 or 60 years old will see how these paradoxes are resolved, and those of us who are over the age of 60 may not see the resolution, but our children and grandchildren certainly will. The resolution is going to achieve either of two forms: either we will resolve these non-sustainable time-fuses in pleasant ways of our own choice by taking remedial action, or else these conflicts are going to get settled in unpleasant ways not of our choice -- namely, by war, disease or starvation. But what's for sure is that our non-sustainable course will get resolved in one way or another in a few decades. In other words, since the theme of this session is choices, we have a choice. Does that mean that we should get pessimistic and overwhelmed? I draw the reverse conclusion. The big problems facing the world today are not at all things beyond our control. Our biggest threat is not an asteroid about to crash into us, something we can do nothing about. Instead, all the major threats facing us today are problems entirely of our own making. And since we made the problems, we can also solve the problems. That then means that it's entirely in our power to deal with these problems. In particular, what can all of us do? For those of you who are interested in these choices, there are lots of things you can do. There's a lot that we don't understand, and that we need to understand. And there's a lot that we already do understand, but aren't doing, and that we need to be doing. Thank you. (Applause)
I'm going to talk about the strategizing brain. We're going to use an unusual combination of tools from game theory and neuroscience to understand how people interact socially when value is on the line. So game theory is a branch of, originally, applied mathematics, used mostly in economics and political science, a little bit in biology, that gives us a mathematical taxonomy of social life and it predicts what people are likely to do and believe others will do in cases where everyone's actions affect everyone else. That's a lot of things: competition, cooperation, bargaining, games like hide-and-seek, and poker. Here's a simple game to get us started. Everyone chooses a number from zero to 100, we're going to compute the average of those numbers, and whoever's closest to two-thirds of the average wins a fixed prize. So you want to be a little bit below the average number, but not too far below, and everyone else wants to be a little bit below the average number as well. Think about what you might pick. As you're thinking, this is a toy model of something like selling in the stock market during a rising market. Right? You don't want to sell too early, because you miss out on profits, but you don't want to wait too late to when everyone else sells, triggering a crash. You want to be a little bit ahead of the competition, but not too far ahead. Okay, here's two theories about how people might think about this, and then we'll see some data. Some of these will sound familiar because you probably are thinking that way. I'm using my brain theory to see. A lot of people say, "I really don't know what people are going to pick, so I think the average will be 50." They're not being really strategic at all. "And I'll pick two-thirds of 50. That's 33." That's a start. Other people who are a little more sophisticated, using more working memory, say, "I think people will pick 33 because they're going to pick a response to 50, and so I'll pick 22, which is two-thirds of 33." They're doing one extra step of thinking, two steps. That's better. And of course, in principle, you could do three, four or more, but it starts to get very difficult. Just like in language and other domains, we know that it's hard for people to parse very complex sentences with a kind of recursive structure. This is called a cognitive hierarchy theory, by the way. It's something that I've worked on and a few other people, and it indicates a kind of hierarchy along with some assumptions about how many people stop at different steps and how the steps of thinking are affected by lots of interesting variables and variant people, as we'll see in a minute. A very different theory, a much more popular one, and an older one, due largely to John Nash of "A Beautiful Mind" fame, is what's called equilibrium analysis. So if you've ever taken a game theory course at any level, you will have learned a little bit about this. An equilibrium is a mathematical state in which everybody has figured out exactly what everyone else will do. It is a very useful concept, but behaviorally, it may not exactly explain what people do the first time they play these types of economic games or in situations in the outside world. In this case, the equilibrium makes a very bold prediction, which is everyone wants to be below everyone else, therefore they'll play zero. Let's see what happens. This experiment's been done many, many times. Some of the earliest ones were done in the '90s by me and Rosemarie Nagel and others. This is a beautiful data set of 9,000 people who wrote in to three newspapers and magazines that had a contest. The contest said, send in your numbers and whoever is close to two-thirds of the average will win a big prize. And as you can see, there's so much data here, you can see the spikes very visibly. There's a spike at 33. Those are people doing one step. There is another spike visible at 22. And notice, by the way, that most people pick numbers right around there. They don't necessarily pick exactly 33 and 22. There's something a little bit noisy around it. But you can see those spikes, and they're there. There's another group of people who seem to have a firm grip on equilibrium analysis, because they're picking zero or one. But they lose, right? Because picking a number that low is actually a bad choice if other people aren't doing equilibrium analysis as well. So they're smart, but poor. (Laughter) Where are these things happening in the brain? One study by Coricelli and Nagel gives a really sharp, interesting answer. So they had people play this game while they were being scanned in an fMRI, and two conditions: in some trials, they're told you're playing another person who's playing right now and we're going to match up your behavior at the end and pay you if you win. In the other trials, they're told, you're playing a computer. They're just choosing randomly. So what you see here is a subtraction of areas in which there's more brain activity when you're playing people compared to playing the computer. And you see activity in some regions we've seen today, medial prefrontal cortex, dorsomedial, however, up here, ventromedial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, an area that's involved in lots of types of conflict resolution, like if you're playing "Simon Says," and also the right and left temporoparietal junction. And these are all areas which are fairly reliably known to be part of what's called a "theory of mind" circuit, or "mentalizing circuit." That is, it's a circuit that's used to imagine what other people might do. So these were some of the first studies to see this tied in to game theory. What happens with these one- and two-step types? So we classify people by what they picked, and then we look at the difference between playing humans versus playing computers, which brain areas are differentially active. On the top you see the one-step players. There's almost no difference. The reason is, they're treating other people like a computer, and the brain is too. The bottom players, you see all the activity in dorsomedial PFC. So we know that those two-step players are doing something differently. Now if you were to step back and say, "What can we do with this information?" you might be able to look at brain activity and say, "This person's going to be a good poker player," or, "This person's socially naive," and we might also be able to study things like development of adolescent brains once we have an idea of where this circuitry exists. Okay. Get ready. I'm saving you some brain activity, because you don't need to use your hair detector cells. You should use those cells to think carefully about this game. This is a bargaining game. Two players who are being scanned using EEG electrodes are going to bargain over one to six dollars. If they can do it in 10 seconds, they're going to actually earn that money. If 10 seconds goes by and they haven't made a deal, they get nothing. That's kind of a mistake together. The twist is that one player, on the left, is informed about how much on each trial there is. They play lots of trials with different amounts each time. In this case, they know there's four dollars. The uninformed player doesn't know, but they know that the informed player knows. So the uninformed player's challenge is to say, "Is this guy really being fair or are they giving me a very low offer in order to get me to think that there's only one or two dollars available to split?" in which case they might reject it and not come to a deal. So there's some tension here between trying to get the most money but trying to goad the other player into giving you more. And the way they bargain is to point on a number line that goes from zero to six dollars, and they're bargaining over how much the uninformed player gets, and the informed player's going to get the rest. So this is like a management-labor negotiation in which the workers don't know how much profits the privately held company has, right, and they want to maybe hold out for more money, but the company might want to create the impression that there's very little to split: "I'm giving you the most that I can." First some behavior. So a bunch of the subject pairs, they play face to face. We have some other data where they play across computers. That's an interesting difference, as you might imagine. But a bunch of the face-to-face pairs agree to divide the money evenly every single time. Boring. It's just not interesting neurally. It's good for them. They make a lot of money. But we're interested in, can we say something about when disagreements occur versus don't occur? So this is the other group of subjects who often disagree. So they have a chance of -- they bicker and disagree and end up with less money. They might be eligible to be on "Real Housewives," the TV show. You see on the left, when the amount to divide is one, two or three dollars, they disagree about half the time, and when the amount is four, five, six, they agree quite often. This turns out to be something that's predicted by a very complicated type of game theory you should come to graduate school at CalTech and learn about. It's a little too complicated to explain right now, but the theory tells you that this shape kind of should occur. Your intuition might tell you that too. Now I'm going to show you the results from the EEG recording. Very complicated. The right brain schematic is the uninformed person, and the left is the informed. Remember that we scanned both brains at the same time, so we can ask about time-synced activity in similar or different areas simultaneously, just like if you wanted to study a conversation and you were scanning two people talking to each other and you'd expect common activity in language regions when they're actually kind of listening and communicating. So the arrows connect regions that are active at the same time, and the direction of the arrows flows from the region that's active first in time, and the arrowhead goes to the region that's active later. So in this case, if you look carefully, most of the arrows flow from right to left. That is, it looks as if the uninformed brain activity is happening first, and then it's followed by activity in the informed brain. And by the way, these were trials where their deals were made. This is from the first two seconds. We haven't finished analyzing this data, so we're still peeking in, but the hope is that we can say something in the first couple of seconds about whether they'll make a deal or not, which could be very useful in thinking about avoiding litigation and ugly divorces and things like that. Those are all cases in which a lot of value is lost by delay and strikes. Here's the case where the disagreements occur. You can see it looks different than the one before. There's a lot more arrows. That means that the brains are synced up more closely in terms of simultaneous activity, and the arrows flow clearly from left to right. That is, the informed brain seems to be deciding, "We're probably not going to make a deal here." And then later there's activity in the uninformed brain. Next I'm going to introduce you to some relatives. They're hairy, smelly, fast and strong. You might be thinking back to your last Thanksgiving. Maybe if you had a chimpanzee with you. Charles Darwin and I and you broke off from the family tree from chimpanzees about five million years ago. They're still our closest genetic kin. We share 98.8 percent of the genes. We share more genes with them than zebras do with horses. And we're also their closest cousin. They have more genetic relation to us than to gorillas. So how humans and chimpanzees behave differently might tell us a lot about brain evolution. So this is an amazing memory test from Nagoya, Japan, Primate Research Institute, where they've done a lot of this research. This goes back quite a ways. They're interested in working memory. The chimp is going to see, watch carefully, they're going to see 200 milliseconds' exposure — that's fast, that's eight movie frames — of numbers one, two, three, four, five. Then they disappear and they're replaced by squares, and they have to press the squares that correspond to the numbers from low to high to get an apple reward. Let's see how they can do it. This is a young chimp. The young ones are better than the old ones, just like humans. And they're highly experienced, so they've done this thousands and thousands of time. Obviously there's a big training effect, as you can imagine. (Laughter) You can see they're very blasé and kind of effortless. Not only can they do it very well, they do it in a sort of lazy way. Right? Who thinks you could beat the chimps? Wrong. (Laughter) We can try. We'll try. Maybe we'll try. Okay, so the next part of this study I'm going to go quickly through is based on an idea of Tetsuro Matsuzawa. He had a bold idea that -- what he called the cognitive trade-off hypothesis. We know chimps are faster and stronger. They're also very obsessed with status. His thought was, maybe they've preserved brain activities and they practice them in development that are really, really important to them to negotiate status and to win, which is something like strategic thinking during competition. So we're going to check that out by having the chimps actually play a game by touching two touch screens. The chimps are actually interacting with each other through the computers. They're going to press left or right. One chimp is called a matcher. They win if they press left, left, like a seeker finding someone in hide-and-seek, or right, right. The mismatcher wants to mismatch. They want to press the opposite screen of the chimp. And the rewards are apple cube rewards. So here's how game theorists look at these data. This is a graph of the percentage of times the matcher picked right on the x-axis, and the percentage of times they predicted right by the mismatcher on the y-axis. So a point here is the behavior by a pair of players, one trying to match, one trying to mismatch. The NE square in the middle -- actually NE, CH and QRE -- those are three different theories of Nash equilibrium, and others, tells you what the theory predicts, which is that they should match 50-50, because if you play left too much, for example, I can exploit that if I'm the mismatcher by then playing right. And as you can see, the chimps, each chimp is one triangle, are circled around, hovering around that prediction. Now we move the payoffs. We're actually going to make the left, left payoff for the matcher a little bit higher. Now they get three apple cubes. Game theoretically, that should actually make the mismatcher's behavior shift, because what happens is, the mismatcher will think, oh, this guy's going to go for the big reward, and so I'm going to go to the right, make sure he doesn't get it. And as you can see, their behavior moves up in the direction of this change in the Nash equilibrium. Finally, we changed the payoffs one more time. Now it's four apple cubes, and their behavior again moves towards the Nash equilibrium. It's sprinkled around, but if you average the chimps out, they're really, really close, within .01. They're actually closer than any species we've observed. What about humans? You think you're smarter than a chimpanzee? Here's two human groups in green and blue. They're closer to 50-50. They're not responding to payoffs as closely, and also if you study their learning in the game, they aren't as sensitive to previous rewards. The chimps are playing better than the humans, better in the sense of adhering to game theory. And these are two different groups of humans from Japan and Africa. They replicate quite nicely. None of them are close to where the chimps are. So here are some things we learned today. People seem to do a limited amount of strategic thinking using theory of mind. We have some preliminary evidence from bargaining that early warning signs in the brain might be used to predict whether there will be a bad disagreement that costs money, and chimps are better competitors than humans, as judged by game theory. Thank you. (Applause)
I'm going to talk to you today about my work on suspended animation. Now, usually when I mention suspended animation, people will flash me the Vulcan sign and laugh. But now, I'm not talking about gorking people out to fly to Mars or even Pandora, as much fun as that may be. I'm talking about the concept of using suspended animation to help people out in trauma. So what do I mean when I say "suspended animation"? It is the process by which animals de-animate, appear dead and then can wake up again without being harmed. OK, so here is the sort of big idea: If you look out at nature, you find that as you tend to see suspended animation, you tend to see immortality. And so, what I'm going to tell you about is a way to tell a person who's in trauma -- find a way to de-animate them a bit so they're a little more immortal when they have that heart attack. An example of an organism or two that happens to be quite immortal would be plant seeds or bacterial spores. These creatures are some of the most immortal life forms on our planet, and they tend to spend most of their time in suspended animation. Bacterial spores are thought now by scientists to exist as individual cells that are alive, but in suspended animation for as long as 250 million years. To suggest that this all, sort of, about little, tiny creatures, I want to bring it close to home. In the immortal germ line of human beings -- that is, the eggs that sit in the ovaries -- they actually sit there in a state of suspended animation for up to 50 years in the life of each woman. So then there's also my favorite example of suspended animation. This is Sea-Monkeys. Those of you with children, you know about them. You go to the pet store or the toy store, and you can buy these things. You just open the bag, and you just dump them into the plastic aquarium, and in about a week or so, you'll have little shrimps swimming around. Well, I wasn't so interested in the swimming. I was interested in what was going on in the bag, the bag on the toy store shelf where those shrimp sat in suspended animation indefinitely. So these ideas of suspended animation are not just about cells and weird, little organisms. Occasionally, human beings are briefly de-animated, and the stories of people who are briefly de-animated that interest me the most are those having to do with the cold. Ten years ago, there was a skier in Norway that was trapped in an icy waterfall, and she was there for two hours before they extracted her. She was extremely cold, and she had no heartbeat -- for all intents and purposes she was dead, frozen. Seven hours later, still without a heartbeat, they brought her back to life, and she went on to be the head radiologist in the hospital that treated her. A couple of years later -- so I get really excited about these things -- about a couple of years later, there was a 13-month-old, she was from Canada. Her father had gone out in the wintertime; he was working night shift, and she followed him outside in nothing but a diaper. And they found her hours later, frozen, lifeless, and they brought her back to life. There was a 65-year-old woman in Duluth, Minnesota last year that was found frozen and without a pulse in her front yard one morning in the winter, and they brought her back to life. The next day, she was doing so well, they wanted to run tests on her. She got cranky and just went home. (Laughter) So, these are miracles, right? These are truly miraculous things that happen. Doctors have a saying that, in fact, "You're not dead until you're warm and dead." And it's true. It's true. In the New England Journal of Medicine, there was a study published that showed that with appropriate rewarming, people who had suffered without a heartbeat for three hours could be brought back to life without any neurologic problems. That's over 50 percent. So what I was trying to do is think of a way that we could study suspended animation to think about a way to reproduce, maybe, what happened to the skier. Well, I have to tell you something very odd, and that is that being exposed to low oxygen does not always kill. So, in this room, there's 20 percent oxygen or so, and if we reduce the oxygen concentration, we will all be dead. And, in fact, the animals we were working with in the lab -- these little garden worms, nematodes -- they were also dead when we exposed them to low oxygen. And here's the thing that should freak you out. And that is that, when we lower the oxygen concentration further by 100 times, to 10 parts per million, they were not dead, they were in suspended animation, and we could bring them back to life without any harm. And this precise oxygen concentration, 10 parts per million, that caused suspended animation, is conserved. We can see it in a variety of different organisms. One of the creatures we see it in is a fish. And we can turn its heartbeat on and off by going in and out of suspended animation like you would a light switch. So this was pretty shocking to me, that we could do this. And so I was wondering, when we were trying to reproduce the work with the skier, that we noticed that, of course, she had no oxygen consumption, and so maybe she was in a similar state of suspended animation. But, of course, she was also extremely cold. So we wondered what would happen if we took our suspended animals and exposed them to the cold. And so, what we found out was that, if you take animals that are animated like you and I, and you make them cold -- that is, these were the garden worms -- now they're dead. But if you have them in suspended animation, and move them into the cold, they're all alive. And there's the very important thing there: If you want to survive the cold, you ought to be suspended. Right? It's a really good thing. And so, we were thinking about that, about this relationship between these things, and thinking about whether or not that's what happened to the skier. And so we wondered: Might there be some agent that is in us, something that we make ourselves, that we might be able to regulate our own metabolic flexibility in such a way as to be able to survive when we got extremely cold, and might otherwise pass away? I thought it might be interesting to sort of hunt for such things. You know? I should mention briefly here that physiology textbooks that you can read about will tell you that this is a kind of heretical thing to suggest. We have, from the time we are slapped on the butt until we take our last dying breath -- that's when we're newborn to when we're dead -- we cannot reduce our metabolic rate below what's called a standard, or basal metabolic rate. But I knew that there were examples of creatures, also mammals, that do reduce their metabolic rate such as ground squirrels and bears, they reduce their metabolic rate in the wintertime when they hibernate. So I wondered: Might we be able to find some agent or trigger that might induce such a state in us? And so, we went looking for such things. And this was a period of time when we failed tremendously. Ken Robinson is here. He talked about the glories of failure. Well, we had a lot of them. We tried many different chemicals and agents, and we failed over and over again. So, one time, I was at home watching television on the couch while my wife was putting our child to bed, and I was watching a television show. It was a television show -- it was a NOVA show on PBS -- about caves in New Mexico. And this particular cave was Lechuguilla, and this cave is incredibly toxic to humans. The researchers had to suit up just to enter it. It's filled with this toxic gas, hydrogen sulfide. Now, hydrogen sulfide is curiously present in us. We make it ourselves. The highest concentration is in our brains. Yet, it was used as a chemical warfare agent in World War I. It's an extraordinarily toxic thing. In fact, in chemical accidents, hydrogen sulfide is known to -- if you breathe too much of it, you collapse to the ground, you appear dead, but if you were brought out into room air, you can be reanimated without harm, if they do that quickly. So, I thought, "Wow, I have to get some of this." (Laughter) Now, it's post-9/11 America, and when you go into the research institute, and you say, "Hi. I'd like to buy some concentrated, compressed gas cylinders of a lethal gas because I have these ideas, see, about wanting to suspend people. It's really going to be OK." So that's kind of a tough day, but I said, "There really is some basis for thinking why you might want to do this." As I said, this agent is in us, and, in fact, here's a curious thing, it binds to the very place inside of your cells where oxygen binds, and where you burn it, and that you do this burning to live. And so we thought, like in a game of musical chairs, might we be able to give a person some hydrogen sulfide, and might it be able to occupy that place like in a game of musical chairs where oxygen might bind? And because you can't bind the oxygen, maybe you wouldn't consume it, and then maybe it would reduce your demand for oxygen. I mean, who knows? So -- (Laughter) So, there's the bit about the dopamine and being a little bit, what do you call it, delusional, and you might suggest that was it. And so, we wanted to find out might we be able to use hydrogen sulfide in the presence of cold, and we wanted to see whether we could reproduce this skier in a mammal. Now, mammals are warm-blooded creatures, and when we get cold, we shake and we shiver, right? We try to keep our core temperature at 37 degrees by actually burning more oxygen. So, it was interesting for us when we applied hydrogen sulfide to a mouse when it was also cold because what happened is the core temperature of the mouse got cold. It stopped moving. It appeared dead. Its oxygen consumption rate fell by tenfold. And here's the really important point. I told you hydrogen sulfide is in us. It's rapidly metabolized, and all you have to do after six hours of being in this state of de-animation is simply put the thing out in room air, and it warms up, and it's none the worse for wear. Now, this was cosmic. Really. Because we had found a way to de-animate a mammal, and it didn't hurt it. Now, we'd found a way to reduce its oxygen consumption to rock-bottom levels, and it was fine. Now, in this state of de-animation, it could not go out dancing, but it was not dead, and it was not harmed. So we started to think: Is this the agent that might have been present in the skier, and might have she had more of it than someone else, and might that have been able to reduce her demand for oxygen before she got so cold that she otherwise would have died, as we found out with our worm experiments? So, we wondered: Can we do anything useful with this capacity to control metabolic flexibility? And one of the things we wondered -- I'm sure some of you out there are economists, and you know all about supply and demand. And when supply is equal to demand, everything's fine, but when supply falls, in this case of oxygen, and demand stays high, you're dead. So, what I just told you is we can now reduce demand. We ought to be able to lower supply to unprecedented low levels without killing the animal. And with money we got from DARPA, we could show just that. If you give mice hydrogen sulfide, you can lower their demand for oxygen, and you can put them into oxygen concentrations that are as low as 5,000 feet above the top of Mt. Everest, and they can sit there for hours, and there's no problem. Well this was really cool. We also found out that we could subject animals to otherwise lethal blood loss, and we could save them if we gave them hydrogen sulfide. So these proof of concept experiments led me to say "I should found a company, and we should take this out to a wider playing field." I founded a company called Ikaria with others' help. And this company, the first thing it did was make a liquid formulation of hydrogen sulfide an injectable form that we could put in and send it out to physician scientists all over the world who work on models of critical care medicine, and the results are incredibly positive. In one model of heart attack, animals given hydrogen sulfide showed a 70 percent reduction in heart damage compared to those who got the standard of care that you and I would receive if we were to have a heart attack here today. Same is true for organ failure, when you have loss of function owing to poor perfusion of kidney, of liver, acute respiratory distress syndrome and damage suffered in cardiac-bypass surgery. So, these are the thought leaders in trauma medicine all over the world saying this is true, so it seems that exposure to hydrogen sulfide decreases damage that you receive from being exposed to otherwise lethal-low oxygen. And I should say that the concentrations of hydrogen sulfide required to get this benefit are low, incredibly low. In fact, so low that physicians will not have to lower or dim the metabolism of people much at all to see the benefit I just mentioned, which is a wonderful thing, if you're thinking about adopting this. You don't want to be gorking people out just to save them, it's really confusing. (Laughter) So, I want to say that we're in human trials. Now, and so -- (Applause) Thank you. The Phase 1 safety studies are over, and we're doing fine, we're now moved on. We have to get to Phase 2 and Phase 3. It's going to take us a few years. This has all moved very quickly, and the mouse experiments of hibernating mice happened in 2005; the first human studies were done in 2008, and we should know in a couple of years whether it works or not. And this all happened really quickly because of a lot of help from a lot of people. I want to mention that, first of all, my wife, without whom this talk and my work would not be possible, so thank you very much. Also, the brilliant scientists who work at my lab and also others on staff, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington -- wonderful place to work. And also the wonderful scientists and businesspeople at Ikaria. One thing those people did out there was take this technology of hydrogen sulfide, which is this start-up company that's burning venture capital very quickly, and they fused it with another company that sells another toxic gas that's more toxic than hydrogen sulfide, and they give it to newborn babies who would otherwise die from a failure to be able to oxygenate their tissues properly. And this gas that is delivered in over a thousand critical care hospitals worldwide, now is approved, on label, and saves thousands of babies a year from certain death. (Applause) So it's really incredible for me to be a part of this. And I want to say that I think we're on the path of understanding metabolic flexibility in a fundamental way, and that in the not too distant future, an EMT might give an injection of hydrogen sulfide, or some related compound, to a person suffering severe injuries, and that person might de-animate a bit, they might become a little more immortal. Their metabolism will fall as though you were dimming a switch on a lamp at home. And then, they will have the time, that will buy them the time, to be transported to the hospital to get the care they need. And then, after they get that care -- like the mouse, like the skier, like the 65-year-old woman -- they'll wake up. A miracle? We hope not, or maybe we just hope to make miracles a little more common. Thank you very much. (Applause)
This is Tim Ferriss circa 1979 A.D. Age two. You can tell by the power squat, I was a very confident boy -- and not without reason. I had a very charming routine at the time, which was to wait until late in the evening when my parents were decompressing from a hard day's work, doing their crossword puzzles, watching television. I would run into the living room, jump up on the couch, rip the cushions off, throw them on the floor, scream at the top of my lungs and run out because I was the Incredible Hulk. (Laughter) Obviously, you see the resemblance. And this routine went on for some time. When I was seven I went to summer camp. My parents found it necessary for peace of mind. And at noon each day the campers would go to a pond, where they had floating docks. You could jump off the end into the deep end. I was born premature. I was always very small. My left lung had collapsed when I was born. And I've always had buoyancy problems. So water was something that scared me to begin with. But I would go in on occasion. And on one particular day, the campers were jumping through inner tubes, They were diving through inner tubes. And I thought this would be great fun. So I dove through the inner tube, and the bully of the camp grabbed my ankles. And I tried to come up for air, and my lower back hit the bottom of the inner tube. And I went wild eyed and thought I was going to die. A camp counselor fortunately came over and separated us. From that point onward I was terrified of swimming. That is something that I did not get over. My inability to swim has been one of my greatest humiliations and embarrassments. That is when I realized that I was not the Incredible Hulk. But there is a happy ending to this story. At age 31 -- that's my age now -- in August I took two weeks to re-examine swimming, and question all the of the obvious aspects of swimming. And went from swimming one lap -- so 20 yards -- like a drowning monkey, at about 200 beats per minute heart rate -- I measured it -- to going to Montauk on Long Island, close to where I grew up, and jumping into the ocean and swimming one kilometer in open water, getting out and feeling better than when I went in. And I came out, in my Speedos, European style, feeling like the Incredible Hulk. And that's what I want everyone in here to feel like, the Incredible Hulk, at the end of this presentation. More specifically, I want you to feel like you're capable of becoming an excellent long-distance swimmer, a world-class language learner, and a tango champion. And I would like to share my art. If I have an art, it's deconstructing things that really scare the living hell out of me. So, moving onward. Swimming, first principles. First principles, this is very important. I find that the best results in life are often held back by false constructs and untested assumptions. And the turnaround in swimming came when a friend of mine said, "I will go a year without any stimulants" -- this is a six-double-espresso-per-day type of guy -- "if you can complete a one kilometer open water race." So the clock started ticking. I started seeking out triathletes because I found that lifelong swimmers often couldn't teach what they did. I tried kickboards. My feet would slice through the water like razors, I wouldn't even move. I would leave demoralized, staring at my feet. Hand paddles, everything. Even did lessons with Olympians -- nothing helped. And then Chris Sacca, who is now a dear friend mine, had completed an Iron Man with 103 degree temperature, said, "I have the answer to your prayers." And he introduced me to the work of a man named Terry Laughlin who is the founder of Total Immersion Swimming. That set me on the road to examining biomechanics. So here are the new rules of swimming, if any of you are afraid of swimming, or not good at it. The first is, forget about kicking. Very counterintuitive. So it turns out that propulsion isn't really the problem. Kicking harder doesn't solve the problem because the average swimmer only transfers about three percent of their energy expenditure into forward motion. The problem is hydrodynamics. So what you want to focus on instead is allowing your lower body to draft behind your upper body, much like a small car behind a big car on the highway. And you do that by maintaining a horizontal body position. The only way you can do that is to not swim on top of the water. The body is denser than water. 95 percent of it would be, at least, submerged naturally. So you end up, number three, not swimming, in the case of freestyle, on your stomach, as many people think, reaching on top of the water. But actually rotating from streamlined right to streamlined left, maintaining that fuselage position as long as possible. So let's look at some examples. This is Terry. And you can see that he's extending his right arm below his head and far in front. And so his entire body really is underwater. The arm is extended below the head. The head is held in line with the spine, so that you use strategic water pressure to raise your legs up -- very important, especially for people with lower body fat. Here is an example of the stroke. So you don't kick. But you do use a small flick. You can see this is the left extension. Then you see his left leg. Small flick, and the only purpose of that is to rotate his hips so he can get to the opposite side. And the entry point for his right hand -- notice this, he's not reaching in front and catching the water. Rather, he is entering the water at a 45-degree angle with his forearm, and then propelling himself by streamlining -- very important. Incorrect, above, which is what almost every swimming coach will teach you. Not their fault, honestly. And I'll get to implicit versus explicit in a moment. Below is what most swimmers will find enables them to do what I did, which is going from 21 strokes per 20-yard length to 11 strokes in two workouts with no coach, no video monitoring. And now I love swimming. I can't wait to go swimming. I'll be doing a swimming lesson later, for myself, if anyone wants to join me. Last thing, breathing. A problem a lot of us have, certainly, when you're swimming. In freestyle, easiest way to remedy this is to turn with body roll, and just to look at your recovery hand as it enters the water. And that will get you very far. That's it. That's really all you need to know. Languages. Material versus method. I, like many people, came to the conclusion that I was terrible at languages. I suffered through Spanish for junior high, first year of high school, and the sum total of my knowledge was pretty much, "Donde esta el bano?" And I wouldn't even catch the response. A sad state of affairs. Then I transferred to a different school sophomore year, and I had a choice of other languages. Most of my friends were taking Japanese. So I thought why not punish myself? I'll do Japanese. Six months later I had the chance to go to Japan. My teachers assured me, they said, "Don't worry. You'll have Japanese language classes every day to help you cope. It will be an amazing experience." My first overseas experience in fact. So my parents encouraged me to do it. I left. I arrived in Tokyo. Amazing. I couldn't believe I was on the other side of the world. I met my host family. Things went quite well I think, all things considered. My first evening, before my first day of school, I said to my mother, very politely, "Please wake me up at eight a.m." So, (Japanese) But I didn't say (Japanese). I said, (Japanese). Pretty close. But I said, "Please rape me at eight a.m." (Laughter) You've never seen a more confused Japanese woman. (Laughter) I walked in to school. And a teacher came up to me and handed me a piece of paper. I couldn't read any of it -- hieroglyphics, it could have been -- because it was Kanji, Chinese characters adapted into the Japanese language. Asked him what this said. And he goes, "Ahh, okay okay, eehto, World History, ehh, Calculus, Traditional Japanese." And so on. And so it came to me in waves. There had been something lost in translation. The Japanese classes were not Japanese instruction classes, per se. They were the normal high school curriculum for Japanese students -- the other 4,999 students in the school, who were Japanese, besides the American. And that's pretty much my response. (Laughter) And that set me on this panic driven search for the perfect language method. I tried everything. I went to Kinokuniya. I tried every possible book, every possible CD. Nothing worked until I found this. This is the Joyo Kanji. This is a Tablet rather, or a poster of the 1,945 common-use characters as determined by the Ministry of Education in 1981. Many of the publications in Japan limit themselves to these characters, to facilitate literacy -- some are required to. And this became my Holy Grail, my Rosetta Stone. As soon as I focused on this material, I took off. I ended up being able to read Asahi Shinbu, Asahi newspaper, about six months later -- so a total of 11 months later -- and went from Japanese I to Japanese VI. Ended up doing translation work at age 16 when I returned to the U.S., and have continued to apply this material over method approach to close to a dozen languages now. Someone who was terrible at languages, and at any given time, speak, read and write five or six. This brings us to the point, which is, it's oftentimes what you do, not how you do it, that is the determining factor. This is the difference between being effective -- doing the right things -- and being efficient -- doing things well whether or not they're important. You can also do this with grammar. I came up with these six sentences after much experimentation. Having a native speaker allow you to deconstruct their grammar, by translating these sentences into past, present, future, will show you subject, object, verb, placement of indirect, direct objects, gender and so forth. From that point, you can then, if you want to, acquire multiple languages, alternate them so there is no interference. We can talk about that if anyone in interested. And now I love languages. So ballroom dancing, implicit versus explicit -- very important. You might look at me and say, "That guy must be a ballroom dancer." But no, you'd be wrong because my body is very poorly designed for most things -- pretty well designed for lifting heavy rocks perhaps. I used to be much bigger, much more muscular. And so I ended up walking like this. I looked a lot like an orangutan, our close cousins, or the Incredible Hulk. Not very good for ballroom dancing. I found myself in Argentina in 2005, decided to watch a tango class -- had no intention of participating. Went in, paid my ten pesos, walked up -- 10 women two guys, usually a good ratio. The instructor says, "You are participating." Immediately: death sweat. (Laughter) Fight-or-flight fear sweat, because I tried ballroom dancing in college -- stepped on the girl's foot with my heel. She screamed. I was so concerned with her perception of what I was doing, that it exploded in my face, never to return to the ballroom dancing club. She comes up, and this was her approach, the teacher. "Okay, come on, grab me." Gorgeous assistant instructor. She was very pissed off that I had pulled her from her advanced practice. So I did my best. I didn't know where to put my hands. And she pulled back, threw down her arms, put them on her hips, turned around and yelled across the room, "This guy is built like a god-damned mountain of muscle, and he's grabbing me like a fucking Frenchman," (Laughter) which I found encouraging. (Laughter) Everyone burst into laughter. I was humiliated. She came back. She goes, "Come on. I don't have all day." As someone who wrestled since age eight, I proceeded to crush her, "Of Mice and Men" style. And she looked up and said, "Now that's better." So I bought a month's worth of classes. (Laughter) And proceeded to look at -- I wanted to set competition so I'd have a deadline -- Parkinson's Law, the perceived complexity of a task will expand to fill the time you allot it. So I had a very short deadline for a competition. I got a female instructor first, to teach me the female role, the follow, because I wanted to understand the sensitivities and abilities that the follow needed to develop, so I wouldn't have a repeat of college. And then I took an inventory of the characteristics, along with her, of the of the capabilities and elements of different dancers who'd won championships. I interviewed these people because they all taught in Buenos Aires. I compared the two lists, and what you find is that there is explicitly, expertise they recommended, certain training methods. Then there were implicit commonalities that none of them seemed to be practicing. Now the protectionism of Argentine dance teachers aside, I found this very interesting. So I decided to focus on three of those commonalities. Long steps. So a lot of milongueros -- the tango dancers will use very short steps. I found that longer steps were much more elegant. So you can have -- and you can do it in a very small space in fact. Secondly, different types of pivots. Thirdly, variation in tempo. These seemed to be the three areas that I could exploit to compete if I wanted to comptete against people who'd been practicing for 20 to 30 years. That photo is of the semi-finals of the Buenos Aires championships, four months later. Then one month later, went to the world championships, made it to the semi-final. And then set a world record, following that, two weeks later. I want you to see part of what I practiced. I'm going to jump forward here. This is the instructor that Alicia and I chose for the male lead. His name is Gabriel Misse. One of the most elegant dancers of his generation, known for his long steps, and his tempo changes and his pivots. Alicia, in her own right, very famous. So I think you'll agree, they look quite good together. Now what I like about this video is it's actually a video of the first time they ever danced together because of his lead. He had a strong lead. He didn't lead with his chest, which requires you lean forward. I couldn't develop the attributes in my toes, the strength in my feet, to do that. So he uses a lead that focuses on his shoulder girdle and his arm. So he can lift the woman to break her, for example. That's just one benefit of that. So then we broke it down. This would be an example of one pivot. This is a back step pivot. There are many different types. I have hundreds of hours of footage -- all categorized, much like George Carlin categorized his comedy. So using my arch-nemesis, Spanish, no less, to learn tango. So fear is your friend. Fear is an indicator. Sometimes it shows you what you shouldn't do. More often than not it shows you exactly what you should do. And the best results that I've had in life, the most enjoyable times, have all been from asking a simple question: what's the worst that can happen? Especially with fears you gained when you were a child. Take the analytical frameworks, the capabilities you have, apply them to old fears. Apply them to very big dreams. And when I think of what I fear now, it's very simple. When I imagine my life, what my life would have been like without the educational opportunities that I had, it makes me wonder. I've spent the last two years trying to deconstruct the American public school system, to either fix it or replace it. And have done experiments with about 50,000 students thus far -- built, I'd say, about a half dozen schools, my readers, at this point. And if any of you are interested in that, I would love to speak with you. I know nothing. I'm a beginner. But I ask a lot of questions, and I would love your advice. Thank you very much. (Applause)
Chris Anderson: Thank you so much, Prime Minister, that was both fascinating and quite inspiring. So, you're calling for a global ethic. Would you describe that as global citizenship? Is that an idea that you believe in, and how would you define that? Gordon Brown: It is about global citizenship and recognizing our responsibilities to others. There is so much to do over the next few years that is obvious to so many of us to build a better world. And there is so much shared sense of what we need to do, that it is vital that we all come together. But we don't necessarily have the means to do so. So there are challenges to be met. I believe the concept of global citizenship will simply grow out of people talking to each other across continents. But of course the task is to create the institutions that make that global society work. But I don't think we should underestimate the extent to which massive changes in technology make possible the linking up of people across the world. CA: But people get excited about this idea of global citizenship, but then they get confused a bit again when they start thinking about patriotism, and how to combine these two. I mean, you're elected as Prime Minister with a brief to bat for Britain. How do you reconcile the two things? GB: Well, of course national identity remains important. But it's not at the expense of people accepting their global responsibilities. And I think one of the problems of recession is that people become more protectionist, they look in on themselves, they try to protect their own nation, perhaps at the expense of other nations. When you actually look at the motor of the world economy, it cannot move forward unless there is trade between the different countries. And any nation that would become protectionist over the next few years would deprive itself of the chance of getting the benefits of growth in the world economy. So, you've got to have a healthy sense of patriotism; that's absolutely important. But you've got to realize that this world has changed fundamentally, and the problems we have cannot be solved by one nation and one nation alone. CA: Well, indeed. But what do you do when the two come into conflict and you're forced to make a decision that either is in Britain's interest, or the interest of Britons, or citizens elsewhere in the world? GB: Well I think we can persuade people that what is necessary for Britain's long-term interests, what is necessary for America's long-term interests, is proper engagement with the rest of the world, and taking the action that is necessary. There is a great story, again, told about Richard Nixon. 1958, Ghana becomes independent, so it is just over 50 years ago. Richard Nixon goes to represent the United States government at the celebrations for independence in Ghana. And it's one of his first outings as Vice President to an African country. He doesn't quite know what to do, so he starts going around the crowd and starts talking to people and he says to people in this rather unique way, "How does it feel to be free?" And he's going around, "How does it feel to be free?" "How does it feel to be free?" And then someone says, "How should I know? I come from Alabama." (Laughter) And that was the 1950s. Now, what is remarkable is that civil rights in America were achieved in the 1960s. But what is equally remarkable is socioeconomic rights in Africa have not moved forward very fast even since the age of colonialism. And yet, America and Africa have got a common interest. And we have got to realize that if we don't link up with those people who are sensible voices and democratic voices in Africa, to work together for common causes, then the danger of Al Qaeda and related groups making progress in Africa is very big. So, I would say that what seems sometimes to be altruism, in relation to Africa, or in relation to developing countries, is more than that. It is enlightened self-interest for us to work with other countries. And I would say that national interest and, if you like, what is the global interest to tackle poverty and climate change do, in the long run, come together. And whatever the short-run price for taking action on climate change or on security, or taking action to provide opportunities for people for education, these are prices that are worth paying so that you build a stronger global society where people feel able to feel comfortable with each other and are able to communicate with each other in such a way that you can actually build stronger links between different countries. CA: I still just want to draw out on this issue. So, you're on vacation at a nice beach, and word comes through that there's been a massive earthquake and that there is a tsunami advancing on the beach. One end of the beach, there is a house containing a family of five Nigerians. And at the other end of the beach there is a single Brit. You have time to -- (Laughter) you have time to alert one house. What do you do? (Laughter) GB: Modern communications. (Applause) Alert both. (Applause) I do agree that my responsibility is first of all to make sure that people in our country are safe. And I wouldn't like anything that is said today to suggest that I am diminishing the importance of the responsibility that each leader has for their own country. But I'm trying to suggest that there is a huge opportunity open to us that was never open to us before. But the power to communicate across borders allows us to organize the world in a different way. And I think, look at the tsunami, it's a classic example. Where was the early warning systems? Where was the world acting together to deal with the problems that they knew arose from the potential for earthquakes, as well as the potential for climate change? And when the world starts to work together, with better early-warning systems, you can deal with some of these problems in a better way. I just think we're not seeing, at the moment, the huge opportunities open to us by the ability of people to cooperate in a world where either there was isolationism before or there was limited alliances based on convenience which never actually took you to deal with some of the central problems. CA: But I think this is the frustration that perhaps a lot of people have, like people in the audience here, where we love the kind of language that you're talking about. It is inspiring. A lot of us believe that that has to be the world's future. And yet, when the situation changes, you suddenly hear politicians talking as if, you know, for example, the life of one American soldier is worth countless numbers of Iraqi civilians. When the pedal hits the metal, the idealism can get moved away. I'm just wondering whether you can see that changing over time, whether you see in Britain that there are changing attitudes, and that people are actually more supportive of the kind of global ethic that you talk about. GB: I think every religion, every faith, and I'm not just talking here to people of faith or religion -- it has this global ethic at the center of its credo. And whether it's Jewish or whether it's Muslim or whether it's Hindu, or whether it's Sikh, the same global ethic is at the heart of each of these religions. So, I think you're dealing with something that people instinctively see as part of their moral sense. So you're building on something that is not pure self-interest. You're building on people's ideas and values -- that perhaps they're candles that burn very dimly on certain occasions. But it is a set of values that cannot, in my view, be extinguished. Then the question is, how do you make that change happen? How do you persuade people that it is in their interest to build strong -- After the Second World War, we built institutions, the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the Marshall Plan. There was a period in which people talked about an act of creation, because these institutions were so new. But they are now out of date. They don't deal with the problems. You can't deal with the environmental problem through existing institutions. You can't deal with the security problem in the way that you need to. You can't deal with the economic and financial problem. So we have got to rebuild our global institutions, build them in a way that is suitable to the challenges of this time. And I believe that if you look at the biggest challenge we face, it is to persuade people to have the confidence that we can build a truly global society with the institutions that are founded on these rules. So, I come back to my initial point. Sometimes you think things are impossible. Nobody would have said 50 years ago that apartheid would have gone in 1990, or that the Berlin wall would have fallen at the turn of the '80s and '90s, or that polio could be eradicated, or perhaps 60 years ago, nobody would have said a man could gone to the Moon. All these things have happened. By tackling the impossible, you make the impossible possible. CA: And we have had a speaker who said that very thing, and swallowed a sword right after that, which was quite dramatic. (Laughter) GB: Followed my sword and swallow. CA: But, surely a true global ethic is for someone to say, "I believe that the life of every human on the planet is worth the same, equal consideration, regardless of nationality and religion." And you have politicians who have -- you're elected. In a way, you can't say that. Even if, as a human being, you believe that, you can't say that. You're elected for Britain's interests. GB: We have a responsibility to protect. I mean look, 1918, the Treaty of Versailles, and all the treaties before that, the Treaty of Westphalia and everything else, were about protecting the sovereign right of countries to do what they want. Since then, the world has moved forward, partly as a result of what happened with the Holocaust, and people's concern about the rights of individuals within territories where they need protection, partly because of what we saw in Rwanda, partly because of what we saw in Bosnia. The idea of the responsibility to protect all individuals who are in situations where they are at humanitarian risk is now being established as a principle which governs the world. So, while I can't automatically say that Britain will rush to the aid of any citizen of any country, in danger, I can say that Britain is in a position where we're working with other countries so that this idea that you have a responsibility to protect people who are victims of either genocide or humanitarian attack, is something that is accepted by the whole world. Now, in the end, that can only be achieved if your international institutions work well enough to be able to do so. And that comes back to what the future role of the United Nations, and what it can do, actually is. But, the responsibility to protect is a new idea that is, in a sense, taken over from the idea of self-determination as the principle governing the international community. CA: Can you picture, in our lifetimes, a politician ever going out on a platform of the kind of full-form global ethic, global citizenship? And basically saying, "I believe that all people across the planet have equal consideration, and if in power we will act in that way. And we believe that the people of this country are also now global citizens and will support that ethic." GB: Is that not what we're doing in the debate about climate change? We're saying that you cannot solve the problem of climate change in one country; you've got to involve all countries. You're saying that you must, and you have a duty to help those countries that cannot afford to deal with the problems of climate change themselves. You're saying you want a deal with all the different countries of the world where we're all bound together to cutting carbon emissions in a way that is to the benefit of the whole world. We've never had this before because Kyoto didn't work. If you could get a deal at Copenhagen, where people agreed, A, that there was a long-term target for carbon emission cuts, B, that there was short-range targets that had to be met so this wasn't just abstract; it was people actually making decisions now that would make a difference now, and if you could then find a financing mechanism that meant that the poorest countries that had been hurt by our inability to deal with climate change over many, many years and decades are given special help so that they can move to energy-efficient technologies, and they are in a position financially to be able to afford the long-term investment that is associated with cutting carbon emissions, then you are treating the world equally, by giving consideration to every part of the planet and the needs they have. It doesn't mean that everybody does exactly the same thing, because we've actually got to do more financially to help the poorest countries, but it does mean there is equal consideration for the needs of citizens in a single planet. CA: Yes. And then of course the theory is still that those talks get rent apart by different countries fighting over their own individual interests. GB: Yes, but I think Europe has got a position, which is 27 countries have already come together. I mean, the great difficulty in Europe is if you're at a meeting and 27 people speak, it takes a very, very long time. But we did get an agreement on climate change. America has made its first disposition on this with the bill that President Obama should be congratulated for getting through Congress. Japan has made an announcement. China and India have signed up to the scientific evidence. And now we've got to move them to accept a long-term target, and then short-term targets. But more progress has been made, I think, in the last few weeks than had been made for some years. And I do believe that there is a strong possibility that if we work together, we can get that agreement to Copenhagen. I certainly have been putting forward proposals that would have allowed the poorest parts of the world to feel that we have taken into account their specific needs. And we would help them adapt. And we would help them make the transition to a low-carbon economy. I do think a reform of the international institutions is vital to this. When the IMF was created in the 1940s, it was created with resources that were five percent or so of the world's GDP. The IMF now has limited resources, one percent. It can't really make the difference that ought to be made in a period of crisis. So, we've got to rebuild the world institutions. And that's a big task: persuading all the different countries with the different voting shares in these institutions to do so. There is a story told about the three world leaders of the day getting a chance to get some advice from God. And the story is told that Bill Clinton went to God and he asked when there will be successful climate change and a low-carbon economy. And God shook his head and said, "Not this year, not this decade, perhaps not even in [your] lifetime." And Bill Clinton walked away in tears because he had failed to get what he wanted. And then the story is that Barroso, the president of the European Commission, went to God and he asked, "When will we get a recovery of global growth?" And God said, "Not this year, not in this decade, perhaps not in your lifetime." So Barroso walked away crying and in tears. And then the Secretary-General of the United Nations came up to speak to God and said, "When will our international institutions work?" And God cried. (Laughter) It is very important to recognize that this reform of institutions is the next stage after agreeing upon ourselves that there is a clear ethic upon which we can build. CA: Prime Minister, I think there are many in the audience who are truly appreciative of the efforts you made in terms of the financial mess we got ourselves into. And there are certainly many people in the audience who will be cheering you on as you seek to advance this global ethic. Thank you so much for coming to TED. GB: Well, thank you. (Applause)
I was born in Den Bosch, where the painter Hieronymus Bosch named himself after. And so I've always been very fond of this painter who lived and worked in the 15th century. And what is interesting about him in relation to morality is that he lived at a time where religion's influence was waning, and he was sort of wondering, I think, what would happen with society if there was no religion or if there was less religion. And so he painted this famous painting, "The Garden of Earthly Delights," which some have interpreted as being humanity before the Fall, or being humanity without any Fall at all. And so it makes you wonder, what would happen if we hadn't tasted the fruit of knowledge, so to speak, and what kind of morality would we have? Much later, as a student, I went to a very different garden, a zoological garden in Arnhem where we keep chimpanzees. This is me at an early age with a baby chimpanzee. (Laughter) And I discovered there that the chimpanzees are very power hungry and wrote a book about it. And at that time the focus in a lot of animal research was on aggression and competition. I painted a whole picture of the animal kingdom, and humanity included, was that deep down we are competitors, we are aggressive, we're all out for our own profit basically. This is the launch of my book. I'm not sure how well the chimpanzees read it, but they surely seemed interested in the book. Now in the process of doing all this work on power and dominance and aggression and so on, I discovered that chimpanzees reconcile after fights. And so what you see here is two males who have had a fight. They ended up in a tree, and one of them holds out a hand to the other. And about a second after I took the picture, they came together in the fork of the tree and they kissed and embraced each other. Now this is very interesting because at the time everything was about competition and aggression, and so it wouldn't make any sense. The only thing that matters is that you win or that you lose. But why would you reconcile after a fight? That doesn't make any sense. This is the way bonobos do it. Bonobos do everything with sex. And so they also reconcile with sex. But the principle is exactly the same. The principle is that you have a valuable relationship that is damaged by conflict, so you need to do something about it. So my whole picture of the animal kingdom, and including humans also, started to change at that time. So we have this image in political science, economics, the humanities, philosophy for that matter, that man is a wolf to man. And so deep down our nature's actually nasty. I think it's a very unfair image for the wolf. The wolf is, after all, a very cooperative animal. And that's why many of you have a dog at home, which has all these characteristics also. And it's really unfair to humanity, because humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than given credit for. So I started getting interested in those issues and studying that in other animals. So these are the pillars of morality. If you ask anyone, "What is morality based on?" these are the two factors that always come out. One is reciprocity, and associated with it is a sense of justice and a sense of fairness. And the other one is empathy and compassion. And human morality is more than this, but if you would remove these two pillars, there would be not much remaining I think. And so they're absolutely essential. So let me give you a few examples here. This is a very old video from the Yerkes Primate Center where they train chimpanzees to cooperate. So this is already about a hundred years ago that we were doing experiments on cooperation. What you have here is two young chimpanzees who have a box, and the box is too heavy for one chimp to pull in. And of course, there's food on the box. Otherwise they wouldn't be pulling so hard. And so they're bringing in the box. And you can see that they're synchronized. You can see that they work together, they pull at the same moment. It's already a big advance over many other animals who wouldn't be able to do that. And now you're going to get a more interesting picture, because now one of the two chimps has been fed. So one of the two is not really interested in the task anymore. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Laughter) Now look at what happens at the very end of this. (Laughter) He takes basically everything. (Laughter) So there are two interesting parts about this. One is that the chimp on the right has a full understanding he needs the partner -- so a full understanding of the need for cooperation. The second one is that the partner is willing to work even though he's not interested in the food. Why would that be? Well that probably has to do with reciprocity. There's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors. So he will get a return favor at some point in the future. And so that's how this all operates. We do the same task with elephants. Now with elephants, it's very dangerous to work with elephants. Another problem with elephants is that you cannot make an apparatus that is too heavy for a single elephant. Now you can probably make it, but it's going to be a pretty flimsy apparatus I think. And so what we did in that case -- we do these studies in Thailand for Josh Plotnik -- is we have an apparatus around which there is a rope, a single rope. And if you pull on this side of the rope, the rope disappears on the other side. So two elephants need to pick it up at exactly the same time and pull. Otherwise nothing is going to happen and the rope disappears. And the first tape you're going to see is two elephants who are released together arrive at the apparatus. The apparatus is on the left with food on it. And so they come together, they arrive together, they pick it up together and they pull together. So it's actually fairly simple for them. There they are. And so that's how they bring it in. But now we're going to make it more difficult. Because the whole purpose of this experiment is to see how well they understand cooperation. Do they understand that as well as the chimps, for example? And so what we do in the next step is we release one elephant before the other, and that elephant needs to be smart enough to stay there and wait and not pull at the rope -- because if he pulls at the rope, it disappears and the whole test is over. Now this elephant does something illegal that we did not teach it. But it shows the understanding that he has, because he puts his big foot on the rope, stands on the rope and waits there for the other, and then the other is going to do all the work for him. So it's what we call freeloading. (Laughter) But it shows the intelligence that the elephants have. They develop several of these alternative techniques that we did not approve of necessarily. So the other elephant is now coming and is going to pull it in. Now look at the other. The other doesn't forget to eat, of course. (Laughter) This was the cooperation, reciprocity part. Now something on empathy. Empathy is my main topic at the moment of research. And empathy has sort of two qualities. One is the understanding part of it. This is just a regular definition: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. And the emotional part. And so empathy has basically two channels. One is the body channel. If you talk with a sad person, you're going to adopt a sad expression and a sad posture, and before you know it you feel sad. And that's sort of the body channel of emotional empathy, which many animals have. Your average dog has that also. That's actually why people keep mammals in the home and not turtles or snakes or something like that who don't have that kind of empathy. And then there's a cognitive channel, which is more that you can take the perspective of somebody else. And that's more limited. There's few animals -- I think elephants and apes can do that kind of thing -- but there are very few animals who can do that. So synchronization, which is part of that whole empathy mechanism is a very old one in the animal kingdom. And in humans, of course, we can study that with yawn contagion. Humans yawn when others yawn. And it's related to empathy. It activates the same areas in the brain. Also, we know that people who have a lot of yawn contagion are highly empathic. People who have problems with empathy, such as autistic children, they don't have yawn contagion. So it is connected. And we study that in our chimpanzees by presenting them with an animated head. So that's what you see on the upper-left, an animated head that yawns. And there's a chimpanzee watching, an actual real chimpanzee watching a computer screen on which we play these animations. (Laughter) So yawn contagion that you're probably all familiar with -- and maybe you're going to start yawning soon now -- is something that we share with other animals. And that's related to that whole body channel of synchronization that underlies empathy and that is universal in the mammals basically. Now we also study more complex expressions. This is consolation. This is a male chimpanzee who has lost a fight and he's screaming, and a juvenile comes over and puts an arm around him and calms him down. That's consolation. It's very similar to human consolation. And consolation behavior, it's empathy driven. Actually the way to study empathy in human children is to instruct a family member to act distressed, and then they see what young children do. And so it is related to empathy, and that's the kind of expressions we look at. We also recently published an experiment you may have heard about. It's on altruism and chimpanzees where the question is, do chimpanzees care about the welfare of somebody else? And for decades it had been assumed that only humans can do that, that only humans worry about the welfare of somebody else. Now we did a very simple experiment. We do that on chimpanzees that live in Lawrenceville, in the field station of Yerkes. And so that's how they live. And we call them into a room and do experiments with them. In this case, we put two chimpanzees side-by-side. and one has a bucket full of tokens, and the tokens have different meanings. One kind of token feeds only the partner who chooses, the other one feeds both of them. So this is a study we did with Vicky Horner. And here you have the two color tokens. So they have a whole bucket full of them. And they have to pick one of the two colors. You will see how that goes. So if this chimp makes the selfish choice, which is the red token in this case, he needs to give it to us. So we pick it up, we put it on a table where there's two food rewards, but in this case only the one on the right gets food. The one on the left walks away because she knows already. that this is not a good test for her. Then the next one is the pro-social token. So the one who makes the choices -- that's the interesting part here -- for the one who makes the choices, it doesn't really matter. So she gives us now a pro-social token and both chimps get fed. So the one who makes the choices always gets a reward. So it doesn't matter whatsoever. And she should actually be choosing blindly. But what we find is that they prefer the pro-social token. So this is the 50 percent line that's the random expectation. And especially if the partner draws attention to itself, they choose more. And if the partner puts pressure on them -- so if the partner starts spitting water and intimidating them -- then the choices go down. It's as if they're saying, "If you're not behaving, I'm not going to be pro-social today." And this is what happens without a partner, when there's no partner sitting there. And so we found that the chimpanzees do care about the well-being of somebody else -- especially, these are other members of their own group. So the final experiment that I want to mention to you is our fairness study. And so this became a very famous study. And there's now many more, because after we did this about 10 years ago, it became very well known. And we did that originally with capuchin monkeys. And I'm going to show you the first experiment that we did. It has now been done with dogs and with birds and with chimpanzees. But with Sarah Brosnan we started out with capuchin monkeys. So what we did is we put two capuchin monkeys side-by-side. Again, these animals, they live in a group, they know each other. We take them out of the group, put them in a test chamber. And there's a very simple task that they need to do. And if you give both of them cucumber for the task, the two monkeys side-by-side, they're perfectly willing to do this 25 times in a row. So cucumber, even though it's only really water in my opinion, but cucumber is perfectly fine for them. Now if you give the partner grapes -- the food preferences of my capuchin monkeys correspond exactly with the prices in the supermarket -- and so if you give them grapes -- it's a far better food -- then you create inequity between them. So that's the experiment we did. Recently we videotaped it with new monkeys who'd never done the task, thinking that maybe they would have a stronger reaction, and that turned out to be right. The one on the left is the monkey who gets cucumber. The one on the right is the one who gets grapes. The one who gets cucumber, note that the first piece of cucumber is perfectly fine. The first piece she eats. Then she sees the other one getting grape, and you will see what happens. So she gives a rock to us. That's the task. And we give her a piece of cucumber and she eats it. The other one needs to give a rock to us. And that's what she does. And she gets a grape and she eats it. The other one sees that. She gives a rock to us now, gets, again, cucumber. (Laughter) She tests a rock now against the wall. She needs to give it to us. And she gets cucumber again. (Laughter) So this is basically the Wall Street protest that you see here. (Laughter) (Applause) Let me tell you -- I still have two minutes left, let me tell you a funny story about this. This study became very famous and we got a lot of comments, especially anthropologists, economists, philosophers. They didn't like this at all. Because they had decided in their minds, I believe, that fairness is a very complex issue and that animals cannot have it. And so one philosopher even wrote us that it was impossible that monkeys had a sense of fairness because fairness was invented during the French Revolution. (Laughter) Now another one wrote a whole chapter saying that he would believe it had something to do with fairness if the one who got grapes would refuse the grapes. Now the funny thing is that Sarah Brosnan, who's been doing this with chimpanzees, had a couple of combinations of chimpanzees where, indeed, the one who would get the grape would refuse the grape until the other guy also got a grape. So we're getting very close to the human sense of fairness. And I think philosophers need to rethink their philosophy for awhile. So let me summarize. I believe there's an evolved morality. I think morality is much more than what I've been talking about, but it would be impossible without these ingredients that we find in other primates, which are empathy and consolation, pro-social tendencies and reciprocity and a sense of fairness. And so we work on these particular issues to see if we can create a morality from the bottom up, so to speak, without necessarily God and religion involved, and to see how we can get to an evolved morality. And I thank you for your attention. (Applause)
I've been at MIT for 44 years. I went to TED I. There's only one other person here, I think, who did that. All the other TEDs -- and I went to them all, under Ricky's regime -- I talked about what the Media Lab was doing, which today has almost 500 people in it. And if you read the press, it actually last week said I quit the Media Lab. I didn't quit the Media Lab; I stepped down as chairman -- which was a kind of ridiculous title, but someone else has taken it on, and one of the things you can do as a professor, is you stay on as a professor. And I will now do for the rest of my life the One Laptop Per Child, which I've sort of been doing for a year and a half, anyway. So I'm going to tell you about this, use my 18 minutes to tell you why I'm doing it, how we're doing it, and then what we're doing. And at some point I'll even pass around what the $100 laptop might be like. Now, I was asked by Chris to talk about some of the big issues, and so I figured I'd start with the three that at least drove me to do this. And the first is pretty obvious. It's amazing when you meet a head of state, and you say, "What is your most precious natural resource?" They will not say children at first, and then when you say, "children," they will pretty quickly agree with you. And so that isn't very hard. (Laughter) Everybody agrees that whatever the solutions are to the big problems, they include education, sometimes can be just education, and can never be without some element of education. So that's certainly part of it. And the third is a little bit less obvious. And that is that we all in this room learned how to walk, how to talk, not by being taught how to talk, or taught how to walk, but by interacting with the world, by having certain results as a consequence of being able to ask for something, or being able to stand up and reach it. Whereas at about the age six, we were told to stop learning that way, and that all learning from then on would happen through teaching, whether it's people standing up, like I'm doing now, or a book, or something. But it was really through teaching. And one of the things in general that computers have provided to learning is that it now includes a kind of learning which is a little bit more like walking and talking, in the sense that a lot of it's driven by the learner himself or herself. So with those as the principles -- some of you may know Seymour Papert; this is back in 1982, when we were working in Senegal. Because some people think that the $100 laptop just happened a year ago, or two years ago, or we were struck by lightning -- this actually has gone back a long time, and in fact, back to the '60s. Here we're in the '80s. Steve Jobs had given us some laptops; we were in Senegal. It didn't scale but it at least was bringing computers to developing countries, and learning pretty quickly that these kids -- even though English wasn't their language, the Latin alphabet barely was their language, but they could just swim like fish; they could play these like pianos. A little bit more recently, I got involved personally. And these are two anecdotes -- one was in Cambodia, in a village that has no electricity, no water, no television, no telephone, but has broadband Internet now. And these kids, their first English word is "Google," and they only know Skype. They've never heard of telephony. OK, they just use Skype. And they go home at night; they've got a broadband connection in a hut that doesn't have electricity. The parents love it, because when they open up the laptops, it's the brightest light source in the house. And talk about where metaphors and reality mix -- this is the actual school. In parallel with this, Seymour Papert got the governor of Maine to legislate one laptop per child in the year 2002. Now at the time, I think it's fair to say that 80 percent of the teachers were -- let me say, apprehensive. Really, they were actually against it. And they really preferred that the money would be used for higher salaries, more schools, whatever. And now, three and a half years later, guess what? They're reporting five things: drop of truancy to almost zero; attending parent-teacher meetings -- which nobody did and now almost everybody does -- drop in discipline problems; increase in student participation -- teachers are now saying it's kind of fun to teach; kids are engaged -- they have laptops! -- and then the fifth, which interests me the most, is that the servers have to be turned off at certain times at night because the teachers are just getting too much email from the kids asking them for help. So when you see that kind of thing, this is not something that you have to test. The days of pilot projects are over, when people say, "Well, we'd like to do three or four thousand in our country to see how it works." Screw you. Go to the back of the line and someone else will do it, and then when you figure out that this works, you can join as well. And this is what we're doing. (Laughter) (Applause) So, One Laptop Per Child was formed about a year and a half ago. It's a nonprofit association; it raised about 20 million dollars to do the engineering to just get this built, and then have it produced afterwards. Scale is truly important. And it's not important because you can buy components at a lower price, OK? It's because you can go to a manufacturer -- and I will leave the name out -- but we wanted a small display, doesn't have to have perfect color uniformity; it can even have a pixel or two missing; it doesn't have to be that bright. And this particular manufacturer said, "Well, you know, we're not interested in that. We're interested in the living room. We're interested in perfect color uniformity. We're interested in big displays, bright displays. You're not part of our strategic plan." And I said, "Well, that's kind of too bad, because we need 100 million units a year." (Laughter) And they said, "Oh, well maybe we could become part of your strategic plan." And that's why scale counts. And that's why we will not launch this without five to 10 million units in the first run. And the idea is to launch with enough scale that the scale itself helps bring the price down, and that's why I said seven to 10 million there. And we're doing it without a sales and marketing team. I mean, you're looking at the sales and marketing team. We will do it by going to seven large countries and getting them to agree and launch it, and then the others can follow. We have partners; it's not hard to guess Google would be one; the others are all playing to pending. And this has been in the press a great deal. It's the so-called Green Machine that we introduced with Kofi Annan in November at the World Summit that was held in Tunisia. Now once people start looking at this, they say, ah, this is a laptop project. Well, no, it's not a laptop project. It's an education project. And the fun part -- and I'm quite focused on it -- I tell people I used to be a light bulb, but now I'm a laser -- I'm just going to get that thing built, and it turns out it's not so hard. Because laptop economics are the following: I say 50 percent here; it's more like 60, 60 percent of the cost of your laptop is sales, marketing, distribution and profit. Now we have none of those, OK? None of those figure into our cost, because first of all, we sell it at cost, and the governments distribute it. It gets distributed to the school system like a textbook. So that piece disappears, and then you have display and everything else. Now the display on your laptop costs, in rough numbers, 10 dollars a diagonal inch. Now that can drop to eight; it can drop to seven; but it's not going to drop to two, or to one and a half, unless we do some pretty clever things. It's the rest -- that little brown box -- that is pretty fascinating, because the rest of your laptop is devoted to itself. It's a little bit like an obese person having to use most of their energy to move their obesity. OK? (Laughter) And we have a situation today which is incredible. OK, I've been using laptops since their inception. And my laptop runs slower, less reliably and less pleasantly than it ever has before. And this year is worse. Now people clap, sometimes you even get standing ovations and I say, "What the hell's wrong with you? Why are we all sitting there?" And somebody -- to remain nameless -- called our laptop a "gadget" recently. And I said, God, our laptop's going to go like a bat out of hell. When you open it up, it's going to go "bing;" it'll be on; it'll use it; it'll be just like it was in 1985, when you bought an Apple Macintosh 512. It worked really well. And we've been going steadily downhill. Now this people ask all the time what it is. That's what it is. The two pieces that are probably notable is it'll be a mesh network, so when the kids open up their laptops, they all become a network, and then just need one or two points of backhaul. You can serve a couple of thousand kids with two megabits. So you really can bring into a village, and then the villages can connect themselves, and you really can do it quite well. The dual mode display -- the idea is to have a display that both works outdoors -- isn't it fun using your cell phone outdoors in the sunlight? Well, you can't see it. And one of the reasons you can't see it is because it's backlighting most of the time, most cell phones. Now, what we're doing is, we're doing one that will be both frontlit and backlit. And whether you manually switch it or you do it in the software is to be seen. But when it's backlit, it's color; and when it's frontlit, it's black and white at three times the resolution. Is it all worked out? No. That's why a lot of our people are more or less living in Taiwan right now. And in about 30 days we'll know for sure whether this works. Probably the most important piece there is that the kids really can do the maintenance. And this is again something that people don't believe, but I really think it's quite true. That's the machine we showed in Tunis. This is more the direction that we're going to go. And it's something that we didn't think was possible. Now, I'm going to pass this around. This isn't a design, OK? So this is just a mechanical engineering sort of embodiment of it for you to play with. And it's clearly just a model. The working one is at MIT. I'm going to pass it to this handsome gentleman. At least you can then decide whether it goes left or -- oh, simulcast. Sorry! I forgot. I forgot. OK, so wherever the camera is -- OK, good point. Thank you, Chris. The idea was that it would be not only a laptop, but that it could transform and be into an electronic book. So it's sort of an electronic book. This is where when you go outside, it's in black and white. The games buttons are missing, but it'll also be a games machine, book machine. Set it up this way and it's a television set. Etc., etc. -- is that enough for simulcast? OK, sorry. I'll let Jim decide which way to send it afterwards. OK. Seven countries. (Laughter) I say "maybe" for Massachusetts, because they actually have to do a bid. By law you've got to bid, and so on and so forth. So I can't quite name them. In the other cases, they don't have to do bids. They can decide. It's the federal government in each case. It's kind of agonizing, because a lot of people say, "Well, let's do it at the state level," because, of course, states are more nimble than the feds, just because of size. And yet we count. We're really dealing with the federal government; we're really dealing with ministries of education. And if you look at governments around the world, ministries of education tend to be the most conservative, and also the ones that have huge payrolls. Everybody thinks they know about education, a lot of culture is built into it as well. It's really hard. And so it's certainly the hard road. If you look at the countries, they're pretty geoculturally distributed. Have they all agreed? No, not completely; probably Thailand, Brazil and Nigeria are the three that are the most active, and most agreed. We're purposely not signing anything with anybody until we actually have the working ones. And since I visit each one of those countries within at least every three months, I'm just going around the world every three weeks. Here's sort of the schedule, and I put at the bottom we might give some away free in two years at this meeting. Everybody says it's a $100 laptop; you can't do it. Well, guess what, we're not. We're coming in probably at 135, to start, then drift down. And that's very important, because so many things hit the market at a price and then drift up. It's kind of the loss leader, and then as soon as it looks interesting, it can't be afforded, or it can't be scaled out. So we're targeting 50 dollars in 2010. The gray market's a big issue. And one of the ways -- just one -- but one of the ways to help in the case of the gray market is to make something that is so utterly unique. It's a little bit like the fact that automobiles -- thousands of automobiles are stolen every day in the United States; not one single post office truck is stolen. OK. And why? Because there's no market for post office trucks. It looks like a post office truck. You can spray paint it; you can do anything you want. I just learned recently: in South Africa, no white Volvos are stolen. Period. None. Zero. So we want to make it very much like a white Volvo. Each government has a task force. This perhaps is less interesting, but we're trying to get the governments to all work together, and it's not easy. The economics of this is to start with the federal governments, and then later to go to other -- whether it's child-to-child funding, so a child in this country buys one for a child in the developing world, maybe of the same gender, maybe of the same age. An uncle gives a niece or a nephew that as a birthday present. I mean, there are all sorts of things that will happen, and they'll be very, very exciting. And everybody says -- I say -- it's an education project. Are we providing the software? The answer is, the system certainly has software, but no, we're not providing the education content. That is really done in the countries. But we are certainly constructionists. And we certainly believe in learning by doing, and everything from Logo, which was started in 1968, to more modern things, like Scratch, if you've ever even heard of it, are very, very much part of it. And that's the rollout. Are we dreaming? Is this real? It actually is real. The only criticism, and people really don't want to criticize this, because it is a humanitarian effort; it is a nonprofit effort; and to criticize it is a little bit stupid, actually. (Laughter) But the one thing that people could criticize was, great idea, but these guys can't do it. And that could either mean these guys, professors and so on couldn't do it, or that it's not possible. Well, on December 12, a company called Quanta agreed to build it, and since they make about one-third of all the laptops on the planet today, that question disappeared. So it's not a matter of whether it's going to happen. It is going to happen. And if it comes out at 138 dollars, so what? If it comes out six months late, so what? That's a pretty soft landing. Thank you. (Applause)
The most massive tsunami perfect storm is bearing down upon us. This perfect storm is mounting a grim reality, increasingly grim reality, and we are facing that reality with the full belief that we can solve our problems with technology, and that's very understandable. Now, this perfect storm that we are facing is the result of our rising population, rising towards 10 billion people, land that is turning to desert, and, of course, climate change. Now there's no question about it at all: we will only solve the problem of replacing fossil fuels with technology. But fossil fuels, carbon -- coal and gas -- are by no means the only thing that is causing climate change. Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert, and this happens only when we create too much bare ground. There's no other cause. And I intend to focus on most of the world's land that is turning to desert. But I have for you a very simple message that offers more hope than you can imagine. We have environments where humidity is guaranteed throughout the year. On those, it is almost impossible to create vast areas of bare ground. No matter what you do, nature covers it up so quickly. And we have environments where we have months of humidity followed by months of dryness, and that is where desertification is occurring. Fortunately, with space technology now, we can look at it from space, and when we do, you can see the proportions fairly well. Generally, what you see in green is not desertifying, and what you see in brown is, and these are by far the greatest areas of the Earth. About two thirds, I would guess, of the world is desertifying. I took this picture in the Tihamah Desert while 25 millimeters -- that's an inch of rain -- was falling. Think of it in terms of drums of water, each containing 200 liters. Over 1,000 drums of water fell on every hectare of that land that day. The next day, the land looked like this. Where had that water gone? Some of it ran off as flooding, but most of the water that soaked into the soil simply evaporated out again, exactly as it does in your garden if you leave the soil uncovered. Now, because the fate of water and carbon are tied to soil organic matter, when we damage soils, you give off carbon. Carbon goes back to the atmosphere. Now you're told over and over, repeatedly, that desertification is only occurring in arid and semi-arid areas of the world, and that tall grasslands like this one in high rainfall are of no consequence. But if you do not look at grasslands but look down into them, you find that most of the soil in that grassland that you've just seen is bare and covered with a crust of algae, leading to increased runoff and evaporation. That is the cancer of desertification that we do not recognize till its terminal form. Now we know that desertification is caused by livestock, mostly cattle, sheep and goats, overgrazing the plants, leaving the soil bare and giving off methane. Almost everybody knows this, from nobel laureates to golf caddies, or was taught it, as I was. Now, the environments like you see here, dusty environments in Africa where I grew up, and I loved wildlife, and so I grew up hating livestock because of the damage they were doing. And then my university education as an ecologist reinforced my beliefs. Well, I have news for you. We were once just as certain that the world was flat. We were wrong then, and we are wrong again. And I want to invite you now to come along on my journey of reeducation and discovery. When I was a young man, a young biologist in Africa, I was involved in setting aside marvelous areas as future national parks. Now no sooner — this was in the 1950s — and no sooner did we remove the hunting, drum-beating people to protect the animals, than the land began to deteriorate, as you see in this park that we formed. Now, no livestock were involved, but suspecting that we had too many elephants now, I did the research and I proved we had too many, and I recommended that we would have to reduce their numbers and bring them down to a level that the land could sustain. Now, that was a terrible decision for me to have to make, and it was political dynamite, frankly. So our government formed a team of experts to evaluate my research. They did. They agreed with me, and over the following years, we shot 40,000 elephants to try to stop the damage. And it got worse, not better. Loving elephants as I do, that was the saddest and greatest blunder of my life, and I will carry that to my grave. One good thing did come out of it. It made me absolutely determined to devote my life to finding solutions. When I came to the United States, I got a shock, to find national parks like this one desertifying as badly as anything in Africa. And there'd been no livestock on this land for over 70 years. And I found that American scientists had no explanation for this except that it is arid and natural. So I then began looking at all the research plots I could over the whole of the Western United States where cattle had been removed to prove that it would stop desertification, but I found the opposite, as we see on this research station, where this grassland that was green in 1961, by 2002 had changed to that situation. And the authors of the position paper on climate change from which I obtained these pictures attribute this change to "unknown processes." Clearly, we have never understood what is causing desertification, which has destroyed many civilizations and now threatens us globally. We have never understood it. Take one square meter of soil and make it bare like this is down here, and I promise you, you will find it much colder at dawn and much hotter at midday than that same piece of ground if it's just covered with litter, plant litter. You have changed the microclimate. Now, by the time you are doing that and increasing greatly the percentage of bare ground on more than half the world's land, you are changing macroclimate. But we have just simply not understood why was it beginning to happen 10,000 years ago? Why has it accelerated lately? We had no understanding of that. What we had failed to understand was that these seasonal humidity environments of the world, the soil and the vegetation developed with very large numbers of grazing animals, and that these grazing animals developed with ferocious pack-hunting predators. Now, the main defense against pack-hunting predators is to get into herds, and the larger the herd, the safer the individuals. Now, large herds dung and urinate all over their own food, and they have to keep moving, and it was that movement that prevented the overgrazing of plants, while the periodic trampling ensured good cover of the soil, as we see where a herd has passed. This picture is a typical seasonal grassland. It has just come through four months of rain, and it's now going into eight months of dry season. And watch the change as it goes into this long dry season. Now, all of that grass you see aboveground has to decay biologically before the next growing season, and if it doesn't, the grassland and the soil begin to die. Now, if it does not decay biologically, it shifts to oxidation, which is a very slow process, and this smothers and kills grasses, leading to a shift to woody vegetation and bare soil, releasing carbon. To prevent that, we have traditionally used fire. But fire also leaves the soil bare, releasing carbon, and worse than that, burning one hectare of grassland gives off more, and more damaging, pollutants than 6,000 cars. And we are burning in Africa, every single year, more than one billion hectares of grasslands, and almost nobody is talking about it. We justify the burning, as scientists, because it does remove the dead material and it allows the plants to grow. Now, looking at this grassland of ours that has gone dry, what could we do to keep that healthy? And bear in mind, I'm talking of most of the world's land now. Okay? We cannot reduce animal numbers to rest it more without causing desertification and climate change. We cannot burn it without causing desertification and climate change. What are we going to do? There is only one option, I'll repeat to you, only one option left to climatologists and scientists, and that is to do the unthinkable, and to use livestock, bunched and moving, as a proxy for former herds and predators, and mimic nature. There is no other alternative left to mankind. So let's do that. So on this bit of grassland, we'll do it, but just in the foreground. We'll impact it very heavily with cattle to mimic nature, and we've done so, and look at that. All of that grass is now covering the soil as dung, urine and litter or mulch, as every one of the gardeners amongst you would understand, and that soil is ready to absorb and hold the rain, to store carbon, and to break down methane. And we did that, without using fire to damage the soil, and the plants are free to grow. When I first realized that we had no option as scientists but to use much-vilified livestock to address climate change and desertification, I was faced with a real dilemma. How were we to do it? We'd had 10,000 years of extremely knowledgeable pastoralists bunching and moving their animals, but they had created the great manmade deserts of the world. Then we'd had 100 years of modern rain science, and that had accelerated desertification, as we first discovered in Africa and then confirmed in the United States, and as you see in this picture of land managed by the federal government. Clearly more was needed than bunching and moving the animals, and humans, over thousands of years, had never been able to deal with nature's complexity. But we biologists and ecologists had never tackled anything as complex as this. So rather than reinvent the wheel, I began studying other professions to see if anybody had. And I found there were planning techniques that I could take and adapt to our biological need, and from those I developed what we call holistic management and planned grazing, a planning process, and that does address all of nature's complexity and our social, environmental, economic complexity. Today, we have young women like this one teaching villages in Africa how to put their animals together into larger herds, plan their grazing to mimic nature, and where we have them hold their animals overnight -- we run them in a predator-friendly manner, because we have a lot of lands, and so on -- and where they do this and hold them overnight to prepare the crop fields, we are getting very great increases in crop yield as well. Let's look at some results. This is land close to land that we manage in Zimbabwe. It has just come through four months of very good rains it got that year, and it's going into the long dry season. But as you can see, all of that rain, almost of all it, has evaporated from the soil surface. Their river is dry despite the rain just having ended, and we have 150,000 people on almost permanent food aid. Now let's go to our land nearby on the same day, with the same rainfall, and look at that. Our river is flowing and healthy and clean. It's fine. The production of grass, shrubs, trees, wildlife, everything is now more productive, and we have virtually no fear of dry years. And we did that by increasing the cattle and goats 400 percent, planning the grazing to mimic nature and integrate them with all the elephants, buffalo, giraffe and other animals that we have. But before we began, our land looked like that. This site was bare and eroding for over 30 years regardless of what rain we got. Okay? Watch the marked tree and see the change as we use livestock to mimic nature. This was another site where it had been bare and eroding, and at the base of the marked small tree, we had lost over 30 centimeters of soil. Okay? And again, watch the change just using livestock to mimic nature. And there are fallen trees in there now, because the better land is now attracting elephants, etc. This land in Mexico was in terrible condition, and I've had to mark the hill because the change is so profound. (Applause) I began helping a family in the Karoo Desert in the 1970s turn the desert that you see on the right there back to grassland, and thankfully, now their grandchildren are on the land with hope for the future. And look at the amazing change in this one, where that gully has completely healed using nothing but livestock mimicking nature, and once more, we have the third generation of that family on that land with their flag still flying. The vast grasslands of Patagonia are turning to desert as you see here. The man in the middle is an Argentinian researcher, and he has documented the steady decline of that land over the years as they kept reducing sheep numbers. They put 25,000 sheep in one flock, really mimicking nature now with planned grazing, and they have documented a 50-percent increase in the production of the land in the first year. We now have in the violent Horn of Africa pastoralists planning their grazing to mimic nature and openly saying it is the only hope they have of saving their families and saving their culture. Ninety-five percent of that land can only feed people from animals. I remind you that I am talking about most of the world's land here that controls our fate, including the most violent region of the world, where only animals can feed people from about 95 percent of the land. What we are doing globally is causing climate change as much as, I believe, fossil fuels, and maybe more than fossil fuels. But worse than that, it is causing hunger, poverty, violence, social breakdown and war, and as I am talking to you, millions of men, women and children are suffering and dying. And if this continues, we are unlikely to be able to stop the climate changing, even after we have eliminated the use of fossil fuels. I believe I've shown you how we can work with nature at very low cost to reverse all this. We are already doing so on about 15 million hectares on five continents, and people who understand far more about carbon than I do calculate that, for illustrative purposes, if we do what I am showing you here, we can take enough carbon out of the atmosphere and safely store it in the grassland soils for thousands of years, and if we just do that on about half the world's grasslands that I've shown you, we can take us back to pre-industrial levels, while feeding people. I can think of almost nothing that offers more hope for our planet, for your children, and their children, and all of humanity. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, Chris. Chris Anderson: Thank you. I have, and I'm sure everyone here has, A) a hundred questions, B) wants to hug you. I'm just going to ask you one quick question. When you first start this and you bring in a flock of animals, it's desert. What do they eat? How does that part work? How do you start? Allan Savory: Well, we have done this for a long time, and the only time we have ever had to provide any feed is during mine reclamation, where it's 100 percent bare. But many years ago, we took the worst land in Zimbabwe, where I offered a £5 note in a hundred-mile drive if somebody could find one grass in a hundred-mile drive, and on that, we trebled the stocking rate, the number of animals, in the first year with no feeding, just by the movement, mimicking nature, and using a sigmoid curve, that principle. It's a little bit technical to explain here, but just that. CA: Well, I would love to -- I mean, this such an interesting and important idea. The best people on our blog are going to come and talk to you and try and -- I want to get more on this that we could share along with the talk.AS: Wonderful. CA: That is an astonishing talk, truly an astonishing talk, and I think you heard that we all are cheering you on your way. Thank you so much.AS: Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. (Applause)
The most massive tsunami perfect storm is bearing down upon us. This perfect storm is mounting a grim reality, increasingly grim reality, and we are facing that reality with the full belief that we can solve our problems with technology, and that's very understandable. Now, this perfect storm that we are facing is the result of our rising population, rising towards 10 billion people, land that is turning to desert, and, of course, climate change. Now there's no question about it at all: we will only solve the problem of replacing fossil fuels with technology. But fossil fuels, carbon -- coal and gas -- are by no means the only thing that is causing climate change. Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert, and this happens only when we create too much bare ground. There's no other cause. And I intend to focus on most of the world's land that is turning to desert. But I have for you a very simple message that offers more hope than you can imagine. We have environments where humidity is guaranteed throughout the year. On those, it is almost impossible to create vast areas of bare ground. No matter what you do, nature covers it up so quickly. And we have environments where we have months of humidity followed by months of dryness, and that is where desertification is occurring. Fortunately, with space technology now, we can look at it from space, and when we do, you can see the proportions fairly well. Generally, what you see in green is not desertifying, and what you see in brown is, and these are by far the greatest areas of the Earth. About two thirds, I would guess, of the world is desertifying. I took this picture in the Tihamah Desert while 25 millimeters -- that's an inch of rain -- was falling. Think of it in terms of drums of water, each containing 200 liters. Over 1,000 drums of water fell on every hectare of that land that day. The next day, the land looked like this. Where had that water gone? Some of it ran off as flooding, but most of the water that soaked into the soil simply evaporated out again, exactly as it does in your garden if you leave the soil uncovered. Now, because the fate of water and carbon are tied to soil organic matter, when we damage soils, you give off carbon. Carbon goes back to the atmosphere. Now you're told over and over, repeatedly, that desertification is only occurring in arid and semi-arid areas of the world, and that tall grasslands like this one in high rainfall are of no consequence. But if you do not look at grasslands but look down into them, you find that most of the soil in that grassland that you've just seen is bare and covered with a crust of algae, leading to increased runoff and evaporation. That is the cancer of desertification that we do not recognize till its terminal form. Now we know that desertification is caused by livestock, mostly cattle, sheep and goats, overgrazing the plants, leaving the soil bare and giving off methane. Almost everybody knows this, from nobel laureates to golf caddies, or was taught it, as I was. Now, the environments like you see here, dusty environments in Africa where I grew up, and I loved wildlife, and so I grew up hating livestock because of the damage they were doing. And then my university education as an ecologist reinforced my beliefs. Well, I have news for you. We were once just as certain that the world was flat. We were wrong then, and we are wrong again. And I want to invite you now to come along on my journey of reeducation and discovery. When I was a young man, a young biologist in Africa, I was involved in setting aside marvelous areas as future national parks. Now no sooner — this was in the 1950s — and no sooner did we remove the hunting, drum-beating people to protect the animals, then the land began to deteriorate, as you see in this park that we formed. Now, no livestock were involved, but suspecting that we had too many elephants now, I did the research and I proved we had too many, and I recommended that we would have to reduce their numbers and bring them down to a level that the land could sustain. Now, that was a terrible decision for me to have to make, and it was political dynamite, frankly. So our government formed a team of experts to evaluate my research. They did. They agreed with me, and over the following years, we shot 40,000 elephants to try to stop the damage. And it got worse, not better. Loving elephants as I do, that was the saddest and greatest blunder of my life, and I will carry that to my grave. One good thing did come out of it. It made me absolutely determined to devote my life to finding solutions. When I came to the United States, I got a shock, to find national parks like this one desertifying as badly as anything in Africa. And there'd been no livestock on this land for over 70 years. And I found that American scientists had no explanation for this except that it is arid and natural. So I then began looking at all the research plots I could over the whole of the Western United States where cattle had been removed to prove that it would stop desertification, but I found the opposite, as we see on this research station, where this grassland that was green in 1961, by 2002 had changed to that situation. And the authors of the position paper on climate change from which I obtained these pictures attribute this change to "unknown processes." Clearly, we have never understood what is causing desertification, which has destroyed many civilizations and now threatens us globally. We have never understood it. Take one square meter of soil and make it bare like this is down here, and I promise you, you will find it much colder at dawn and much hotter at midday than that same piece of ground if it's just covered with litter, plant litter. You have changed the microclimate. Now, by the time you are doing that and increasing greatly the percentage of bare ground on more than half the world's land, you are changing macroclimate. But we have just simply not understood why was it beginning to happen 10,000 years ago? Why has it accelerated lately? We had no understanding of that. What we had failed to understand was that these seasonal humidity environments of the world, the soil and the vegetation developed with very large numbers of grazing animals, and that these grazing animals developed with ferocious pack-hunting predators. Now, the main defense against pack-hunting predators is to get into herds, and the larger the herd, the safer the individuals. Now, large herds dung and urinate all over their own food, and they have to keep moving, and it was that movement that prevented the overgrazing of plants, while the periodic trampling ensured good cover of the soil, as we see where a herd has passed. This picture is a typical seasonal grassland. It has just come through four months of rain, and it's now going into eight months of dry season. And watch the change as it goes into this long dry season. Now, all of that grass you see aboveground has to decay biologically before the next growing season, and if it doesn't, the grassland and the soil begin to die. Now, if it does not decay biologically, it shifts to oxidation, which is a very slow process, and this smothers and kills grasses, leading to a shift to woody vegetation and bare soil, releasing carbon. To prevent that, we have traditionally used fire. But fire also leaves the soil bare, releasing carbon, and worse than that, burning one hectare of grassland gives off more, and more damaging, pollutants than 6,000 cars. And we are burning in Africa, every single year, more than one billion hectares of grasslands, and almost nobody is talking about it. We justify the burning, as scientists, because it does remove the dead material and it allows the plants to grow. Now, looking at this grassland of ours that has gone dry, what could we do to keep that healthy? And bear in mind, I'm talking of most of the world's land now. Okay? We cannot reduce animal numbers to rest it more without causing desertification and climate change. We cannot burn it without causing desertification and climate change. What are we going to do? There is only one option, I'll repeat to you, only one option left to climatologists and scientists, and that is to do the unthinkable, and to use livestock, bunched and moving, as a proxy for former herds and predators, and mimic nature. There is no other alternative left to mankind. So let's do that. So on this bit of grassland, we'll do it, but just in the foreground. We'll impact it very heavily with cattle to mimic nature, and we've done so, and look at that. All of that grass is now covering the soil as dung, urine and litter or mulch, as every one of the gardeners amongst you would understand, and that soil is ready to absorb and hold the rain, to store carbon, and to break down methane. And we did that, without using fire to damage the soil, and the plants are free to grow. When I first realized that we had no option as scientists but to use much-vilified livestock to address climate change and desertification, I was faced with a real dilemma. How were we to do it? We'd had 10,000 years of extremely knowledgeable pastoralists bunching and moving their animals, but they had created the great manmade deserts of the world. Then we'd had 100 years of modern rain science, and that had accelerated desertification, as we first discovered in Africa and then confirmed in the United States, and as you see in this picture of land managed by the federal government. Clearly more was needed than bunching and moving the animals, and humans, over thousands of years, had never been able to deal with nature's complexity. But we biologists and ecologists had never tackled anything as complex as this. So rather than reinvent the wheel, I began studying other professions to see if anybody had. And I found there were planning techniques that I could take and adapt to our biological need, and from those I developed what we call holistic management and planned grazing, a planning process, and that does address all of nature's complexity and our social, environmental, economic complexity. Today, we have young women like this one teaching villages in Africa how to put their animals together into larger herds, plan their grazing to mimic nature, and where we have them hold their animals overnight -- we run them in a predator-friendly manner, because we have a lot of lands, and so on -- and where they do this and hold them overnight to prepare the crop fields, we are getting very great increases in crop yield as well. Let's look at some results. This is land close to land that we manage in Zimbabwe. It has just come through four months of very good rains it got that year, and it's going into the long dry season. But as you can see, all of that rain, almost of all it, has evaporated from the soil surface. Their river is dry despite the rain just having ended, and we have 150,000 people on almost permanent food aid. Now let's go to our land nearby on the same day, with the same rainfall, and look at that. Our river is flowing and healthy and clean. It's fine. The production of grass, shrubs, trees, wildlife, everything is now more productive, and we have virtually no fear of dry years. And we did that by increasing the cattle and goats 400 percent, planning the grazing to mimic nature and integrate them with all the elephants, buffalo, giraffe and other animals that we have. But before we began, our land looked like that. This site was bare and eroding for over 30 years regardless of what rain we got. Okay? Watch the marked tree and see the change as we use livestock to mimic nature. This was another site where it had been bare and eroding, and at the base of the marked small tree, we had lost over 30 centimeters of soil. Okay? And again, watch the change just using livestock to mimic nature. And there are fallen trees in there now, because the better land is now attracting elephants, etc. This land in Mexico was in terrible condition, and I've had to mark the hill because the change is so profound. (Applause) I began helping a family in the Karoo Desert in the 1970s turn the desert that you see on the right there back to grassland, and thankfully, now their grandchildren are on the land with hope for the future. And look at the amazing change in this one, where that gully has completely healed using nothing but livestock mimicking nature, and once more, we have the third generation of that family on that land with their flag still flying. The vast grasslands of Patagonia are turning to desert as you see here. The man in the middle is an Argentinian researcher, and he has documented the steady decline of that land over the years as they kept reducing sheep numbers. They put 25,000 sheep in one flock, really mimicking nature now with planned grazing, and they have documented a 50-percent increase in the production of the land in the first year. We now have in the violent Horn of Africa pastoralists planning their grazing to mimic nature and openly saying it is the only hope they have of saving their families and saving their culture. Ninety-five percent of that land can only feed people from animals. I remind you that I am talking about most of the world's land here that controls our fate, including the most violent region of the world, where only animals can feed people from about 95 percent of the land. What we are doing globally is causing climate change as much as, I believe, fossil fuels, and maybe more than fossil fuels. But worse than that, it is causing hunger, poverty, violence, social breakdown and war, and as I am talking to you, millions of men, women and children are suffering and dying. And if this continues, we are unlikely to be able to stop the climate changing, even after we have eliminated the use of fossil fuels. I believe I've shown you how we can work with nature at very low cost to reverse all this. We are already doing so on about 15 million hectares on five continents, and people who understand far more about carbon than I do calculate that, for illustrative purposes, if we do what I am showing you here, we can take enough carbon out of the atmosphere and safely store it in the grassland soils for thousands of years, and if we just do that on about half the world's grasslands that I've shown you, we can take us back to pre-industrial levels, while feeding people. I can think of almost nothing that offers more hope for our planet, for your children, and their children, and all of humanity. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, Chris. Chris Anderson: Thank you. I have, and I'm sure everyone here has, A) a hundred questions, B) wants to hug you. I'm just going to ask you one quick question. When you first start this and you bring in a flock of animals, it's desert. What do they eat? How does that part work? How do you start? Allan Savory: Well, we have done this for a long time, and the only time we have ever had to provide any feed is during mine reclamation, where it's 100 percent bare. But many years ago, we took the worst land in Zimbabwe, where I offered a £5 note in a hundred-mile drive if somebody could find one grass in a hundred-mile drive, and on that, we trebled the stocking rate, the number of animals, in the first year with no feeding, just by the movement, mimicking nature, and using a sigmoid curve, that principle. It's a little bit technical to explain here, but just that. CA: Well, I would love to -- I mean, this such an interesting and important idea. The best people on our blog are going to come and talk to you and try and -- I want to get more on this that we could share along with the talk.AS: Wonderful. CA: That is an astonishing talk, truly an astonishing talk, and I think you heard that we all are cheering you on your way. Thank you so much.AS: Well, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. (Applause)
So, what I'm going to do is just give you the latest episode of India's -- maybe the world's -- longest running soap opera, which is cricket. And may it run forever, because it gives people like me a living. It's got everything that you'd want a normal soap opera to want: It's got love, joy, happiness, sadness, tears, laughter, lots of deceit, intrigue. And like all good soaps, it jumps 20 years when the audience interest changes. And that's exactly what cricket has done. It's jumped 20 years into 20-over game. And that's what I'm going to talk about, how a small change leads to a very big revolution. But it wasn't always like that. Cricket wasn't always this speed-driven generations game. There was a time when you played cricket, you played timeless test matches, when you played on till the game got over. And there was this game in March 1939 that started on the third of March and ended on the 14th of March. And it only ended because the English cricketers had to go from Durban to Cape Town, which is a two-hour train journey, to catch the ship that left on the 17th, because the next ship wasn't around for a long time. So, the match was ended in between. And one of the English batsmen said, "You know what? Another half an hour and we would have won." (Laughter) Another half an hour after 12 days. There were two Sundays in between. But of course, Sundays are church days, so you don't play on Sundays. And one day it rained, so they all sat around making friends with each other. But there is a reason why India fell in love with cricket: because we had about the same pace of life. (Laughter) The Mahabharata was like that as well, wasn't it? You fought by day, then it was sunset, so everyone went back home. And then you worked out your strategy, and you came and fought the next day, and you went back home again. The only difference between the Mahabharata and our cricket was that in cricket, everybody was alive to come back and fight the next day. Princes patronize the game, not because they love the game, but because it was a means of ingratiating themselves to the British rulers. But there is one other reason why India fell in love with cricket, which was, all you needed was a plank of wood and a rubber ball, and any number of people could play it anywhere. Take a look: You could play it in the dump with some rocks over there, you could play it in a little alley -- you couldn't hit square anywhere, because the bat hit the wall; don't forget the air conditioning and the cable wires. (Laughter) You could play it on the banks of the Ganges -- that's as clean as the Ganges has been for a long time. Or you could play many games in one small patch of land, even if you didn't know which game you were actually in. (Laughter) As you can see, you can play anywhere. But slowly the game moved on, you know, finally. You don't always have five days. So, we moved on, and we started playing 50-over cricket. And then an enormous accident took place. In Indian sport we don't make things happen, accidents happen and we're in the right place at the right time, sometimes. And we won this World Cup in 1983. And suddenly we fell in love with the 50-over game, and we played it virtually every day. There was more 50-over cricket than anywhere. But there was another big date. 1983 was when we won the World Cup. 1991,'92, we found a finance minister and a prime minister willing to let the world look at India, rather than be this great country of intrigue and mystery in this closed country. And so we allowed multinationals into India. We cut customs duties, we reduced import duties, and we got all the multinationals coming in, with multinational budgets, who looked at per-capita income and got very excited about the possibilities in India, and were looking for a vehicle to reach every Indian. And there are only two vehicles in India -- one real, one scripted. The scripted one is what you see in the movies, the real one was cricket. And so one of my friends sitting right here in front of me, Ravi Dhariwal from Pepsi, decided he's going to take it all over the world. And Pepsi was this big revolution, because they started taking cricket all over. And so cricket started becoming big; cricket started bringing riches in. Television started covering cricket. For a long time television said, "We won't cover cricket unless you pay us to cover it." Then they said, "OK, the next rights are sold for 55 million dollars. The next rights are sold for 612 million dollars." So, it's a bit of a curve, that. And then another big accident happened in our cricket. England invented 20 overs cricket, and said, "The world must play 20 overs cricket." Just as England invented cricket, and made the rest of the world play it. Thank God for them. (Laughter) And so, India had to go and play the T20 World Cup, you see. India didn't want to play the T20 World Cup. But we were forced to play it by an 8-1 margin. And then something very dramatic happened. We got to the final, and then this moment, that will remain enshrined forever, for everybody, take a look. (Crowd cheering) The Pakistani batsman trying to clear the fielder. Announcer: And Zishan takes it! India wins! What a match for a Twenty20 final. India, the world champions. (Cheering) India, T20 champions. But what a game we had, M. S. Dhoni got it right in the air, but Misbah-ul-Haq, what a player. A massive, massive success: India, the world TT champions. Harsha Bhogle: Suddenly India discovered this power of 20-overs cricket. The accident, of course, there, was that the batsman thought the bowler was bowling fast. (Laughter) If he had bowled fast, the ball would have gone where it was meant to go, but it didn't go. And we suddenly discovered that we could be good at this game. And what it also did was it led to a certain pride in the fact that India could be the best in the world. It was at a time when investment was coming in, India was feeling a little more confident about itself. And so there was a feeling that there was great pride in what we can do. And thankfully for all of us, the English are very good at inventing things, and then the gracious people that they are, they let the world become very good at it. (Laughter) And so England invented T20 cricket, and allowed India to hijack it. It was not like reengineering that we do in medicine, we just took it straight away, as is. (Laughter) And so, we launched our own T20 league. Six weeks, city versus city. It was a new thing for us. We had only ever supported our country -- the only two areas in which India was very proud about their country, representing itself on the field. One was war, the Indian army, which we don't like to happen very often. The other was Indian cricket. Now, suddenly we had to support city leagues. But the people getting into these city leagues were people who were taking their cues from the West. America is a home of leagues. And they said, "Right, we'll build some glitzy leagues here in India." But was India ready for it? Because cricket, for a long time in India was always organized. It was never promoted, it was never sold -- it was organized. And look what they did with our beautiful, nice, simple family game. All of a sudden, you had that happening. (Music) An opening ceremony to match every other. This was an India that was buying Corvettes. This was an India that was buying Jaguar. This was an India that was adding more mobile phones per month than New Zealand's population twice over. So, it was a different India. But it was also a slightly more orthodox India that was very happy to be modern, but didn't want to say that to people. And so, they were aghast when the cheerleaders arrived. Everyone secretly watched them, but everyone claimed not to. (Music) (Laughter) The new owners of Indian cricket were not the old princes. They were not bureaucrats who were forced into sport because they didn't actually love it; these were people who ran serious companies. And so they started promoting cricket big time, started promoting clubs big time. And they've started promoting them with huge money behind it. I mean the IPL had 2.3 billion dollars before a ball was bowled, 1.6 billion dollars for television revenue over 10 years, and another 70 million dollars plus from all these franchises that were putting in money. And then they had to appeal to their cities, but they had to do it like the West, right? Because we are setting up leagues. But what they were very good at doing was making it very localized. So, just to give you an example of how they did it -- not Manchester United style promotion, but very Mumbai style promotion. Take a look. (Music) Of course, a lot of people said, "Maybe they dance better than they play." (Laughter) But that's all right. What it did also is it changed the way we looked at cricket. All along, if you wanted a young cricketer, you picked him up from the bylanes of your own little locality, your own city, and you were very proud of the system that produced those cricketers. Now, all of the sudden, if you were to bowl a shot -- if Mumbai were to bowl a shot, for example, they needn't go to Kalbadevi or Shivaji Park or somewhere to source them, they could go to Trinidad. This was the new India, wasn't it? This was the new world, where you can source from anywhere as long as you get the best product at the best price. And all of a sudden, Indian sport had awakened to the reality that you can source the best product for the best price anywhere in the world. So, the Mumbai Indians flew in Dwayne Bravo from Trinidad and Tobago, overnight. And when he had to go back to represent the West Indies, they asked him, "When do you have to reach?" He said, "I have to be there by a certain time, so I have to leave today." We said, "No, no, no. It's not about when you have to leave; it's about when do you have to reach there?" And so he said, "I've got to reach on date X." And they said, "Fine, you play to date X, minus one." So, he played in Hyderabad, went, straight after the game, went from the stadium to Hyderabad airport, sat in a private corporate jet -- first refueling in Portugal, second refueling in Brazil; he was in West Indies in time. (Laughter) Never would India have thought on this scale before. Never would India have said, "I want a player to play one game for me, and I will use a corporate jet to send him all the way back to Kingston, Jamaica to play a game." And I just thought to myself, "Wow, we've arrived somewhere in the world, you know? We have arrived somewhere. We are thinking big." But what this also did was it started marrying the two most important things in Indian cricket, which is cricket and the movies in Indian entertainment. There is cricket and the movies. And they came together because people in the movies now started owning clubs. And so, people started going to the cricket to watch Preity Zinta. They started going to the cricket to watch Shah Rukh Khan. And something very interesting happened. We started getting song and dance in Indian cricket. And so it started resembling the Indian movies more and more. And of course, if you were on Preity Zinta's team -- as you will see on the clip that follows -- if you did well, you got a hug from Preity Zinta. So that was the ultimate reason to do well. Take a look -- everyone's watching Preity Zinta. (Music) And then of course there was Shah Rukh playing the Kolkata crowd. We'd all seen matches in Kolkata, but we'd never seen anything like this: Shah Rukh, with the Bengali song, getting the audiences all worked up for Kolkata -- not for India, but for Kolkata. But take a look at this. (Music) An Indian film star hugging a Pakistani cricketer because they'd won in Kolkata. Can you imagine? And do you know what the Pakistani cricketer said? (Applause) "I wish I was playing for Preity Zinta's team." (Laughter) But I thought I'd take this opportunity -- there's a few people from Pakistan in here. I'm so happy that you're here because I think we can show that we can both be together and be friends, right? We can play cricket together, we can be friends. So thank you very much for coming, all of you from Pakistan. (Applause) There was criticism too because they said, "Players are being bought and sold? Are they grain? Are they cattle?" Because we had this auction, you see. How do you fix a price for a player? And so the auction that followed literally had people saying, "Bang! so many million dollars for so-and-so player." There it is. (Music) Auctioneer: Going at 1,500,000 dollars. Chennai. Shane Warne sold for 450,000 dollars. HB: Suddenly, a game which earned its players 50 rupees a day -- so 250 rupees for a test match, but if you finish in four days you only got 200. The best Indian players who played every test match -- every one of the internationals, the top of the line players -- standard contracts are 220,000 dollars in a whole year. Now they were getting 500,000 for six days' work. Then Andrew Flintoff came by from England, he got one and a half million dollars, and he went back and said, "For four weeks, I'm earning more than Frank Lampard and Steven Gerrard, and I'm earning more than the footballers, wow." And where was he earning it from? From a little club in India. Could you have imagined that day would come? One and a half million dollars for six weeks' work. That's not bad, is it? So, at 2.3 billion dollars before the first ball was bowled. What India was doing, though, was benchmarking itself against the best in the world, and it became a huge brand. Lalit Modi was on the cover of Business Today. IPL became the biggest brand in India and, because our elections, had to be moved to South Africa, and we had to start the tournament in three weeks. Move a whole tournament to South Africa in three weeks. But we did it. You know why? Because no country works as slowly as we do till three weeks before an event, and nobody works fast as we do in the last three weeks. (Applause) Our population, which for a long time we thought was a problem, suddenly became our biggest asset because there were more people watching -- the huge consuming class -- everybody came to watch the cricket. We'd also made cricket the only sport in India, which is a pity, but in India every other sport pushes cricket to become big, which is a bit of a tragedy of our times. Now, this last minute before I go -- there's a couple of side effects of all this. For a long time, India was this country of poverty, dust, beggars, snake charmers, filth, Delhi belly -- people heard Delhi belly stories before they came. And, all of a sudden, India was this land of opportunity. Cricketers all over the world said, "You know, we love India. We love to play in India." And that felt good, you know? We said, "The dollar's quite powerful actually." Can you imagine, you've got the dollar on view and there's no Delhi belly in there anymore. There's no filth, there's no beggars, all the snake charmers have vanished, everybody's gone. This tells you how the capitalist world rules. Right so, finally, an English game that India usurped a little bit, but T20 is going to be the next missionary in the world. If you want to take the game around the world, it's got to be the shortest form of the game. You can't take a timeless test to China and sit through 14 days with no result in the end, or you can't take it all over the world. So that's what T20 is doing. Hopefully, it'll make everyone richer, hopefully it'll make the game bigger and hopefully it'll give cricket commentators more time in the business. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)
I'm going to talk today about the pleasures of everyday life. But I want to begin with a story of an unusual and terrible man. This is Hermann Goering. Goering was Hitler's second in command in World War II, his designated successor. And like Hitler, Goering fancied himself a collector of art. He went through Europe, through World War II, stealing, extorting and occasionally buying various paintings for his collection. And what he really wanted was something by Vermeer. Hitler had two of them, and he didn't have any. So he finally found an art dealer, a Dutch art dealer named Han van Meegeren, who sold him a wonderful Vermeer for the cost of what would now be 10 million dollars. And it was his favorite artwork ever. World War II came to an end, and Goering was captured, tried at Nuremberg and ultimately sentenced to death. Then the Allied forces went through his collections and found the paintings and went after the people who sold it to him. And at some point the Dutch police came into Amsterdam and arrested Van Meegeren. Van Meegeren was charged with the crime of treason, which is itself punishable by death. Six weeks into his prison sentence, van Meegeren confessed. But he didn't confess to treason. He said, "I did not sell a great masterpiece to that Nazi. I painted it myself; I'm a forger." Now nobody believed him. And he said, "I'll prove it. Bring me a canvas and some paint, and I will paint a Vermeer much better than I sold that disgusting Nazi. I also need alcohol and morphine, because it's the only way I can work." (Laughter) So they brought him in. He painted a beautiful Vermeer. And then the charges of treason were dropped. He had a lesser charge of forgery, got a year sentence and died a hero to the Dutch people. There's a lot more to be said about van Meegeren, but I want to turn now to Goering, who's pictured here being interrogated at Nuremberg. Now Goering was, by all accounts, a terrible man. Even for a Nazi, he was a terrible man. His American interrogators described him as an amicable psychopath. But you could feel sympathy for the reaction he had when he was told that his favorite painting was actually a forgery. According to his biographer, "He looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world." (Laughter) And he killed himself soon afterwards. He had discovered after all that the painting he thought was this was actually that. It looked the same, but it had a different origin, it was a different artwork. It wasn't just him who was in for a shock. Once van Meegeren was on trial, he couldn't stop talking. And he boasted about all the great masterpieces that he himself had painted that were attributed to other artists. In particular, "The Supper at Emmaus" which was viewed as Vermeer's finest masterpiece, his best work -- people would come [from] all over the world to see it -- was actually a forgery. It was not that painting, but that painting. And when that was discovered, it lost all its value and was taken away from the museum. Why does this matter? I'm a psychologists -- why do origins matter so much? Why do we respond so much to our knowledge of where something comes from? Well there's an answer that many people would give. Many sociologists like Veblen and Wolfe would argue that the reason why we take origins so seriously is because we're snobs, because we're focused on status. Among other things, if you want to show off how rich you are, how powerful you are, it's always better to own an original than a forgery because there's always going to be fewer originals than forgeries. I don't doubt that that plays some role, but what I want to convince you of today is that there's something else going on. I want to convince you that humans are, to some extent, natural born essentialists. What I mean by this is we don't just respond to things as we see them, or feel them, or hear them. Rather, our response is conditioned on our beliefs, about what they really are, what they came from, what they're made of, what their hidden nature is. I want to suggest that this is true, not just for how we think about things, but how we react to things. So I want to suggest that pleasure is deep -- and that this isn't true just for higher level pleasures like art, but even the most seemingly simple pleasures are affected by our beliefs about hidden essences. So take food. Would you eat this? Well, a good answer is, "It depends. What is it?" Some of you would eat it if it's pork, but not beef. Some of you would eat it if it's beef, but not pork. Few of you would eat it if it's a rat or a human. Some of you would eat it only if it's a strangely colored piece of tofu. That's not so surprising. But what's more interesting is how it tastes to you will depend critically on what you think you're eating. So one demonstration of this was done with young children. How do you make children not just be more likely to eat carrots and drink milk, but to get more pleasure from eating carrots and drinking milk -- to think they taste better? It's simple, you tell them they're from McDonald's. They believe McDonald's food is tastier, and it leads them to experience it as tastier. How do you get adults to really enjoy wine? It's very simple: pour it from an expensive bottle. There are now dozens, perhaps hundreds of studies showing that if you believe you're drinking the expensive stuff, it tastes better to you. This was recently done with a neuroscientific twist. They get people into a fMRI scanner, and while they're lying there, through a tube, they get to sip wine. In front of them on a screen is information about the wine. Everybody, of course, drinks exactly the same wine. But if you believe you're drinking expensive stuff, parts of the brain associated with pleasure and reward light up like a Christmas tree. It's not just that you say it's more pleasurable, you say you like it more, you really experience it in a different way. Or take sex. These are stimuli I've used in some of my studies. And if you simply show people these pictures, they'll say these are fairly attractive people. But how attractive you find them, how sexually or romantically moved you are by them, rests critically on who you think you're looking at. You probably think the picture on the left is male, the one on the right is female. If that belief turns out to be mistaken, it will make a difference. (Laughter) It will make a difference if they turn out to be much younger or much older than you think they are. It will make a difference if you were to discover that the person you're looking at with lust is actually a disguised version of your son or daughter, your mother or father. Knowing somebody's your kin typically kills the libido. Maybe one of the most heartening findings from the psychology of pleasure is there's more to looking good than your physical appearance. If you like somebody, they look better to you. This is why spouses in happy marriages tend to think that their husband or wife looks much better than anyone else thinks that they do. (Laughter) A particularly dramatic example of this comes from a neurological disorder known as Capgras syndrome. So Capgras syndrome is a disorder where you get a specific delusion. Sufferers of Capgras syndrome believe that the people they love most in the world have been replaced by perfect duplicates. Now often, a result of Capgras syndrome is tragic. People have murdered those that they loved, believing that they were murdering an imposter. But there's at least one case where Capgras syndrome had a happy ending. This was recorded in 1931. "Research described a woman with Capgras syndrome who complained about her poorly endowed and sexually inadequate lover." But that was before she got Capgras syndrome. After she got it, "She was happy to report that she has discovered that he possessed a double who was rich, virile, handsome and aristocratic." Of course, it was the same man, but she was seeing him in different ways. As a third example, consider consumer products. So one reason why you might like something is its utility. You can put shoes on your feet; you can play golf with golf clubs; and chewed up bubble gum doesn't do anything at all for you. But each of these three objects has value above and beyond what it can do for you based on its history. The golf clubs were owned by John F. Kennedy and sold for three-quarters of a million dollars at auction. The bubble gum was chewed up by pop star Britney Spears and sold for several hundreds of dollars. And in fact, there's a thriving market in the partially eaten food of beloved people. (Laughter) The shoes are perhaps the most valuable of all. According to an unconfirmed report, a Saudi millionaire offered 10 million dollars for this pair of shoes. They were the ones thrown at George Bush at an Iraqi press conference several years ago. (Applause) Now this attraction to objects doesn't just work for celebrity objects. Each one of us, most people, have something in our life that's literally irreplaceable, in that it has value because of its history -- maybe your wedding ring, maybe your child's baby shoes -- so that if it was lost, you couldn't get it back. You could get something that looked like it or felt like it, but you couldn't get the same object back. With my colleagues George Newman and Gil Diesendruck, we've looked to see what sort of factors, what sort of history, matters for the objects that people like. So in one of our experiments, we asked people to name a famous person who they adored, a living person they adored. So one answer was George Clooney. Then we asked them, "How much would you pay for George Clooney's sweater?" And the answer is a fair amount -- more than you would pay for a brand new sweater or a sweater owned by somebody who you didn't adore. Then we asked other groups of subjects -- we gave them different restrictions and different conditions. So for instance, we told some people, "Look, you can buy the sweater, but you can't tell anybody you own it, and you can't resell it." That drops the value of it, suggesting that that's one reason why we like it. But what really causes an effect is you tell people, "Look, you could resell it, you could boast about it, but before it gets to you, it's thoroughly washed." That causes a huge drop in the value. As my wife put it, "You've washed away the Clooney cooties." (Laughter) So let's go back to art. I would love a Chagall. I love the work of Chagall. If people want to get me something at the end of the conference, you could buy me a Chagall. But I don't want a duplicate, even if I can't tell the difference. That's not because, or it's not simply because, I'm a snob and want to boast about having an original. Rather, it's because I want something that has a specific history. In the case of artwork, the history is special indeed. The philosopher Denis Dutton in his wonderful book "The Art Instinct" makes the case that, "The value of an artwork is rooted in assumptions about the human performance underlying its creation." And that could explain the difference between an original and a forgery. They may look alike, but they have a different history. The original is typically the product of a creative act, the forgery isn't. I think this approach can explain differences in people's taste in art. This is a work by Jackson Pollock. Who here likes the work of Jackson Pollock? Okay. Who here, it does nothing for them? They just don't like it. I'm not going to make a claim about who's right, but I will make an empirical claim about people's intuitions, which is that, if you like the work of Jackson Pollock, you'll tend more so than the people who don't like it to believe that these works are difficult to create, that they require a lot of time and energy and creative energy. I use Jackson Pollock on purpose as an example because there's a young American artist who paints very much in the style of Jackson Pollock, and her work was worth many tens of thousands of dollars -- in large part because she's a very young artist. This is Marla Olmstead who did most of her work when she was three years old. The interesting thing about Marla Olmstead is her family made the mistake of inviting the television program 60 Minutes II into their house to film her painting. And they then reported that her father was coaching her. When this came out on television, the value of her art dropped to nothing. It was the same art, physically, but the history had changed. I've been focusing now on the visual arts, but I want to give two examples from music. This is Joshua Bell, a very famous violinist. And the Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten decided to enlist him for an audacious experiment. The question is: How much would people like Joshua Bell, the music of Joshua Bell, if they didn't know they were listening to Joshua Bell? So he got Joshua Bell to take his million dollar violin down to a Washington D.C. subway station and stand in the corner and see how much money he would make. And here's a brief clip of this. (Violin music) After being there for three-quarters of an hour, he made 32 dollars. Not bad. It's also not good. Apparently to really enjoy the music of Joshua Bell, you have to know you're listening to Joshua Bell. He actually made 20 dollars more than that, but he didn't count it. Because this woman comes up -- you see at the end of the video -- she comes up. She had heard him at the Library of Congress a few weeks before at this extravagant black-tie affair. So she's stunned that he's standing in a subway station. So she's struck with pity. She reaches into her purse and hands him a 20. (Laughter) (Applause) The second example from music is from John Cage's modernist composition, "4'33"." As many of you know, this is the composition where the pianist sits at a bench, opens up the piano and sits and does nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds -- that period of silence. And people have different views on this. But what I want to point out is you can buy this from iTunes. (Laughter) For a dollar 99, you can listen to that silence, which is different than other forms of silence. (Laughter) Now I've been talking so far about pleasure, but what I want to suggest is that everything I've said applies as well to pain. And how you think about what you're experiencing, your beliefs about the essence of it, affect how it hurts. One lovely experiment was done by Kurt Gray and Dan Wegner. What they did was they hooked up Harvard undergraduates to an electric shock machine. And they gave them a series of painful electric shocks. So it was a series of five painful shocks. Half of them are told that they're being given the shocks by somebody in another room, but the person in the other room doesn't know they're giving them shocks. There's no malevolence, they're just pressing a button. The first shock is recorded as very painful. The second shock feels less painful, because you get a bit used to it. The third drops, the fourth, the fifth. The pain gets less. In the other condition, they're told that the person in the next room is shocking them on purpose -- knows they're shocking them. The first shock hurts like hell. The second shock hurts just as much, and the third and the fourth and the fifth. It hurts more if you believe somebody is doing it to you on purpose. The most extreme example of this is that in some cases, pain under the right circumstances can transform into pleasure. Humans have this extraordinarily interesting property that will often seek out low-level doses of pain in controlled circumstances and take pleasure from it -- as in the eating of hot chili peppers and roller coaster rides. The point was nicely summarized by the poet John Milton who wrote, "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven." And I'll end with that. Thank you. (Applause)
Let's talk about billions. Let's talk about past and future billions. We know that about 106 billion people have ever lived. And we know that most of them are dead. And we also know that most of them live or lived in Asia. And we also know that most of them were or are very poor -- did not live for very long. Let's talk about billions. Let's talk about the 195,000 billion dollars of wealth in the world today. We know that most of that wealth was made after the year 1800. And we know that most of it is currently owned by people we might call Westerners: Europeans, North Americans, Australasians. 19 percent of the world's population today, Westerners own two-thirds of its wealth. Economic historians call this "The Great Divergence." And this slide here is the best simplification of the Great Divergence story I can offer you. It's basically two ratios of per capita GDP, per capita gross domestic product, so average income. One, the red line, is the ratio of British to Indian per capita income. And the blue line is the ratio of American to Chinese. And this chart goes back to 1500. And you can see here that there's an exponential Great Divergence. They start off pretty close together. In fact, in 1500, the average Chinese was richer than the average North American. When you get to the 1970s, which is where this chart ends, the average Briton is more than 10 times richer than the average Indian. And that's allowing for differences in the cost of living. It's based on purchasing power parity. The average American is nearly 20 times richer than the average Chinese by the 1970s. So why? This wasn't just an economic story. If you take the 10 countries that went on to become the Western empires, in 1500 they were really quite tiny -- five percent of the world's land surface, 16 percent of its population, maybe 20 percent of its income. By 1913, these 10 countries, plus the United States, controlled vast global empires -- 58 percent of the world's territory, about the same percentage of its population, and a really huge, nearly three-quarters share of global economic output. And notice, most of that went to the motherland, to the imperial metropoles, not to their colonial possessions. Now you can't just blame this on imperialism -- though many people have tried to do so -- for two reasons. One, empire was the least original thing that the West did after 1500. Everybody did empire. They beat preexisting Oriental empires like the Mughals and the Ottomans. So it really doesn't look like empire is a great explanation for the Great Divergence. In any case, as you may remember, the Great Divergence reaches its zenith in the 1970s, some considerable time after decolonization. This is not a new question. Samuel Johnson, the great lexicographer, [posed] it through his character Rasselas in his novel "Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia," published in 1759. "By what means are the Europeans thus powerful; or why, since they can so easily visit Asia and Africa for trade or conquest, cannot the Asiaticks and Africans invade their coasts, plant colonies in their ports, and give laws to their natural princes? The same wind that carries them back would bring us thither?" That's a great question. And you know what, it was also being asked at roughly the same time by the Resterners -- by the people in the rest of the world -- like Ibrahim Muteferrika, an Ottoman official, the man who introduced printing, very belatedly, to the Ottoman Empire -- who said in a book published in 1731, "Why do Christian nations which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?" Unlike Rasselas, Muteferrika had an answer to that question, which was correct. He said it was "because they have laws and rules invented by reason." It's not geography. You may think we can explain the Great Divergence in terms of geography. We know that's wrong, because we conducted two great natural experiments in the 20th century to see if geography mattered more than institutions. We took all the Germans, we divided them roughly in two, and we gave the ones in the East communism, and you see the result. Within an incredibly short period of time, people living in the German Democratic Republic produced Trabants, the Trabbi, one of the world's worst ever cars, while people in the West produced the Mercedes Benz. If you still don't believe me, we conducted the experiment also in the Korean Peninsula. And we decided we'd take Koreans in roughly the same geographical place with, notice, the same basic traditional culture, and we divided them in two, and we gave the Northerners communism. And the result is an even bigger divergence in a very short space of time than happened in Germany. Not a big divergence in terms of uniform design for border guards admittedly, but in almost every other respect, it's a huge divergence. Which leads me to think that neither geography nor national character, popular explanations for this kind of thing, are really significant. It's the ideas. It's the institutions. This must be true because a Scotsman said it. And I think I'm the only Scotsman here at the Edinburgh TED. So let me just explain to you that the smartest man ever was a Scotsman. He was Adam Smith -- not Billy Connolly, not Sean Connery -- though he is very smart indeed. (Laughter) Smith -- and I want you to go and bow down before his statue in the Royal Mile; it's a wonderful statue -- Smith, in the "Wealth of Nations" published in 1776 -- that's the most important thing that happened that year ... (Laughter) You bet. There was a little local difficulty in some of our minor colonies, but ... (Laughter) "China seems to have been long stationary, and probably long ago acquired that full complement of riches which is consistent with the nature of its laws and institutions. But this complement may be much inferior to what, with other laws and institutions, the nature of its soil, climate, and situation might admit of." That is so right and so cool. And he said it such a long time ago. But you know, this is a TED audience, and if I keep talking about institutions, you're going to turn off. So I'm going to translate this into language that you can understand. Let's call them the killer apps. I want to explain to you that there were six killer apps that set the West apart from the rest. And they're kind of like the apps on your phone, in the sense that they look quite simple. They're just icons; you click on them. But behind the icon, there's complex code. It's the same with institutions. There are six which I think explain the Great Divergence. One, competition. Two, the scientific revolution. Three, property rights. Four, modern medicine. Five, the consumer society. And six, the work ethic. You can play a game and try and think of one I've missed at, or try and boil it down to just four, but you'll lose. (Laughter) Let me very briefly tell you what I mean by this, synthesizing the work of many economic historians in the process. Competition means, not only were there a hundred different political units in Europe in 1500, but within each of these units, there was competition between corporations as well as sovereigns. The ancestor of the modern corporation, the City of London Corporation, existed in the 12th century. Nothing like this existed in China, where there was one monolithic state covering a fifth of humanity, and anyone with any ambition had to pass one standardized examination, which took three days and was very difficult and involved memorizing vast numbers of characters and very complex Confucian essay writing. The scientific revolution was different from the science that had been achieved in the Oriental world in a number of crucial ways, the most important being that, through the experimental method, it gave men control over nature in a way that had not been possible before. Example: Benjamin Robins's extraordinary application of Newtonian physics to ballistics. Once you do that, your artillery becomes accurate. Think of what that means. That really was a killer application. (Laughter) Meanwhile, there's no scientific revolution anywhere else. The Ottoman Empire's not that far from Europe, but there's no scientific revolution there. In fact, they demolish Taqi al-Din's observatory, because it's considered blasphemous to inquire into the mind of God. Property rights: It's not the democracy, folks; it's having the rule of law based on private property rights. That's what makes the difference between North America and South America. You could turn up in North America having signed a deed of indenture saying, "I'll work for nothing for five years. You just have to feed me." But at the end of it, you've got a hundred acres of land. That's the land grant on the bottom half of the slide. That's not possible in Latin America where land is held onto by a tiny elite descended from the conquistadors. And you can see here the huge divergence that happens in property ownership between North and South. Most people in rural North America owned some land by 1900. Hardly anyone in South America did. That's another killer app. Modern medicine in the late 19th century began to make major breakthroughs against the infectious diseases that killed a lot of people. And this was another killer app -- the very opposite of a killer, because it doubled, and then more than doubled, human life expectancy. It even did that in the European empires. Even in places like Senegal, beginning in the early 20th century, there were major breakthroughs in public health, and life expectancy began to rise. It doesn't rise any faster after these countries become independent. The empires weren't all bad. The consumer society is what you need for the Industrial Revolution to have a point. You need people to want to wear tons of clothes. You've all bought an article of clothing in the last month; I guarantee it. That's the consumer society, and it propels economic growth more than even technological change itself. Japan was the first non-Western society to embrace it. The alternative, which was proposed by Mahatma Gandhi, was to institutionalize and make poverty permanent. Very few Indians today wish that India had gone down Mahatma Gandhi's road. Finally, the work ethic. Max Weber thought that was peculiarly Protestant. He was wrong. Any culture can get the work ethic if the institutions are there to create the incentive to work. We know this because today the work ethic is no longer a Protestant, Western phenomenon. In fact, the West has lost its work ethic. Today, the average Korean works a thousand hours more a year than the average German -- a thousand. And this is part of a really extraordinary phenomenon, and that is the end of the Great Divergence. Who's got the work ethic now? Take a look at mathematical attainment by 15 year-olds. At the top of the international league table according to the latest PISA study, is the Shanghai district of China. The gap between Shanghai and the United Kingdom and the United States is as big as the gap between the U.K. and the U.S. and Albania and Tunisia. You probably assume that because the iPhone was designed in California but assembled in China that the West still leads in terms of technological innovation. You're wrong. In terms of patents, there's no question that the East is ahead. Not only has Japan been ahead for some time, South Korea has gone into third place, and China is just about to overtake Germany. Why? Because the killer apps can be downloaded. It's open source. Any society can adopt these institutions, and when they do, they achieve what the West achieved after 1500 -- only faster. This is the Great Reconvergence, and it's the biggest story of your lifetime. Because it's on your watch that this is happening. It's our generation that is witnessing the end of Western predominance. The average American used to be more than 20 times richer than the average Chinese. Now it's just five times, and soon it will be 2.5 times. So I want to end with three questions for the future billions, just ahead of 2016, when the United States will lose its place as number one economy to China. The first is, can you delete these apps, and are we in the process of doing so in the Western world? The second question is, does the sequencing of the download matter? And could Africa get that sequencing wrong? One obvious implication of modern economic history is that it's quite hard to transition to democracy before you've established secure private property rights. Warning: that may not work. And third, can China do without killer app number three? That's the one that John Locke systematized when he said that freedom was rooted in private property rights and the protection of law. That's the basis for the Western model of representative government. Now this picture shows the demolition of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's studio in Shanghai earlier this year. He's now free again, having been detained, as you know, for some time. But I don't think his studio has been rebuilt. Winston Churchill once defined civilization in a lecture he gave in the fateful year of 1938. And I think these words really nail it: "It means a society based upon the opinion of civilians. It means that violence, the rule of warriors and despotic chiefs, the conditions of camps and warfare, of riot and tyranny, give place to parliaments where laws are made, and independent courts of justice in which over long periods those laws are maintained. That is civilization -- and in its soil grow continually freedom, comfort and culture," what all TEDsters care about most. "When civilization reigns in any country, a wider and less harassed life is afforded to the masses of the people." That's so true. I don't think the decline of Western civilization is inevitable, because I don't think history operates in this kind of life-cycle model, beautifully illustrated by Thomas Cole's "Course of Empire" paintings. That's not the way history works. That's not the way the West rose, and I don't think it's the way the West will fall. The West may collapse very suddenly. Complex civilizations do that, because they operate, most of the time, on the edge of chaos. That's one of the most profound insights to come out of the historical study of complex institutions like civilizations. No, we may hang on, despite the huge burdens of debt that we've accumulated, despite the evidence that we've lost our work ethic and other parts of our historical mojo. But one thing is for sure, the Great Divergence is over, folks. Thanks very much. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Niall, I am just curious about your take on the other region of the world that's booming, which is Latin America. What's your view on that? Niall Ferguson: Well I really am not just talking about the rise of the East; I'm talking about the rise of the Rest, and that includes South America. I once asked one of my colleagues at Harvard, "Hey, is South America part of the West?" He was an expert in Latin American history. He said, "I don't know; I'll have to think about that." That tells you something really important. I think if you look at what is happening in Brazil in particular, but also Chile, which was in many ways the one that led the way in transforming the institutions of economic life, there's a very bright future indeed. So my story really is as much about that convergence in the Americas as it's a convergence story in Eurasia. BG: And there is this impression that North America and Europe are not really paying attention to these trends. Mostly they're worried about each other. The Americans think that the European model is going to crumble tomorrow. The Europeans think that the American budget is going to explode tomorrow. And that's all we seem to be caring about recently. NF: I think the fiscal crisis that we see in the developed World right now -- both sides of the Atlantic -- is essentially the same thing taking different forms in terms of political culture. And it's a crisis that has its structural facet -- it's partly to do with demographics. But it's also, of course, to do with the massive crisis that followed excessive leverage, excessive borrowing in the private sector. That crisis, which has been the focus of so much attention, including by me, I think is an epiphenomenon. The financial crisis is really a relatively small historic phenomenon, which has just accelerated this huge shift, which ends half a millennium of Western ascendancy. I think that's its real importance. BG: Niall, thank you. (NF: Thank you very much, Bruno.) (Applause)
I'm going to tell you a little bit about my TEDxHouston Talk. I woke up the morning after I gave that Talk with the worst vulnerability hangover of my life. And I actually didn't leave my house for about three days. The first time I left was to meet a friend for lunch. And when I walked in, she was already at the table. And I sat down, and she said, "God, you look like hell." I said, "Thanks. I feel really -- I'm not functioning." And she said, "What's going on?" And I said, "I just told 500 people that I became a researcher to avoid vulnerability. And that when being vulnerable emerged from my data, as absolutely essential to whole-hearted living, I told these 500 people that I had a breakdown. I had a slide that said Breakdown. At what point did I think that was a good idea?" (Laughter) And she said, "I saw your Talk live-streamed. It was not really you. It was a little different than what you usually do. But it was great." And I said, "This can't happen. YouTube, they're putting this thing on YouTube. And we're going to be talking about 600, 700 people." (Laughter) And she said, "Well, I think it's too late." And I said, "Let me ask you something." And she said, "Yeah." And I said, "Do you remember when we were in college and really wild and kind of dumb?" And she said, "Yeah." And I said, "Remember when we'd leave a really bad message on our ex-boyfriend's answering machine? Then we'd have to break into his dorm room and then erase the tape?" (Laughter) And she goes, "Uh ... no." (Laughter) So of course, the only thing I could think of to say at that point was, "Yeah, me neither. That ... me neither." And I'm thinking to myself, "Brene, what are you doing? What are you doing? Why did you bring this up? Have you lost your mind? Your sisters would be perfect for this." So I looked back up and she said, "Are you really going to try to break in and steal the video before they put it on YouTube?" And I said, "I'm just thinking about it a little bit." (Laughter) She said, "You're like the worst vulnerability role model ever." (Laughter) And then I looked at her and I said something that at the time felt a little dramatic, but ended up being more prophetic than dramatic. I said, "If 500 turns into 1,000 or 2,000, my life is over." (Laughter) I had no contingency plan for four million. (Laughter) And my life did end when that happened. And maybe the hardest part about my life ending is that I learned something hard about myself, and that was that, as much as I would frustrated about not being able to get my work out to the world, there was a part of me that was working very hard to engineer staying small, staying right under the radar. But I want to talk about what I've learned. There's two things that I've learned in the last year. The first is vulnerability is not weakness. And that myth is profoundly dangerous. Let me ask you honestly -- and I'll give you this warning, I'm trained as a therapist, so I can out-wait you uncomfortably -- so if you could just raise your hand that would be awesome -- how many of you honestly, when you're thinking about doing something vulnerable or saying something vulnerable, think, "God, vulnerability's weakness. This is weakness?" How many of you think of vulnerability and weakness synonymously? The majority of people. Now let me ask you this question: This past week at TED, how many of you, when you saw vulnerability up here, thought it was pure courage? Vulnerability is not weakness. I define vulnerability as emotional risk, exposure, uncertainty. It fuels our daily lives. And I've come to the belief -- this is my 12th year doing this research -- that vulnerability is our most accurate measurement of courage -- to be vulnerable, to let ourselves be seen, to be honest. One of the weird things that's happened is, after the TED explosion, I got a lot of offers to speak all over the country -- everyone from schools and parent meetings to Fortune 500 companies. And so many of the calls went like this, "Hey, Dr. Brown. We loved your TEDTalk. We'd like you to come in and speak. We'd appreciate it if you wouldn't mention vulnerability or shame." (Laughter) What would you like for me to talk about? There's three big answers. This is mostly, to be honest with you, from the business sector: innovation, creativity and change. So let me go on the record and say, vulnerability is the birthplace of innovation, creativity and change. (Applause) To create is to make something that has never existed before. There's nothing more vulnerable than that. Adaptability to change is all about vulnerability. The second thing, in addition to really finally understanding the relationship between vulnerability and courage, the second thing I learned is this: We have to talk about shame. And I'm going to be really honest with you. When I became a "vulnerability researcher" and that became the focus because of the TEDTalk -- and I'm not kidding. I'll give you an example. About three months ago, I was in a sporting goods store buying goggles and shin guards and all the things that parents buy at the sporting goods store. About from a hundred feet away, this is what I hear: "Vulnerability TED! Vulnerability TED!" (Laughter) I'm a fifth generation Texan. Our family motto is "Lock and load." I am not a natural vulnerability researcher. So I'm like, just keep walking, she's on my six. (Laughter) And then I hear, "Vulnerability TED!" I turn around, I go, "Hi." She's right here and she said, "You're the shame researcher who had the breakdown." (Laughter) At this point parents are, like, pulling their children close. "Look away." And I'm so worn out at this point in my life, I look at her and I actually say, "It was a frickin' spiritual awakening." (Laughter) (Applause) And she looks back and does this, "I know." And she said, "We watched your TEDTalk in my book club. Then we read your book and we renamed ourselves 'The Breakdown Babes.'" And she said, "Our tagline is: 'We're falling apart and it feels fantastic.'" (Laughter) You can only imagine what it's like for me in a faculty meeting. So when I became Vulnerability TED, like an action figure -- like Ninja Barbie, but I'm Vulnerability TED -- I thought, I'm going to leave that shame stuff behind, because I spent six years studying shame before I really started writing and talking about vulnerability. And I thought, thank God, because shame is this horrible topic, no one wants to talk about it. It's the best way to shut people down on an airplane. "What do you do?" "I study shame." "Oh." (Laughter) And I see you. (Laughter) But in surviving this last year, I was reminded of a cardinal rule -- not a research rule, but a moral imperative from my upbringing -- you've got to dance with the one who brung ya. And I did not learn about vulnerability and courage and creativity and innovation from studying vulnerability. I learned about these things from studying shame. And so I want to walk you in to shame. Jungian analysts call shame the swampland of the soul. And we're going to walk in. And the purpose is not to walk in and construct a home and live there. It is to put on some galoshes and walk through and find our way around. Here's why. We heard the most compelling call ever to have a conversation in this country, and I think globally, around race, right? Yes? We heard that. Yes? Cannot have that conversation without shame, because you cannot talk about race without talking about privilege. And when people start talking about privilege, they get paralyzed by shame. We heard a brilliant simple solution to not killing people in surgery, which is have a checklist. You can't fix that problem without addressing shame, because when they teach those folks how to suture, they also teach them how to stitch their self-worth to being all-powerful. And all-powerful folks don't need checklists. And I had to write down the name of this TED Fellow so I didn't mess it up here. Myshkin Ingawale, I hope I did right by you. (Applause) I saw the TED Fellows my first day here. And he got up and he explained how he was driven to create some technology to help test for anemia because people were dying unnecessarily. And he said, "I saw this need. So you know what I did? I made it." And everybody just burst into applause, and they were like "Yes!" And he said, "And it didn't work. And then I made it 32 more times, and then it worked." You know what the big secret about TED is? I can't wait to tell people this. I guess I'm doing it right now. (Laughter) This is like the failure conference. No, it is. (Applause) You know why this place is amazing? Because very few people here are afraid to fail. And no one who gets on the stage, so far that I've seen, has not failed. I've failed miserably, many times. I don't think the world understands that because of shame. There's a great quote that saved me this past year by Theodore Roosevelt. A lot of people refer to it as the "Man in the Arena" quote. And it goes like this: "It is not the critic who counts. It is not the man who sits and points out how the doer of deeds could have done things better and how he falls and stumbles. The credit goes to the man in the arena whose face is marred with dust and blood and sweat. But when he's in the arena, at best he wins, and at worst he loses, but when he fails, when he loses, he does so daring greatly." And that's what this conference, to me, is about. That's what life is about, about daring greatly, about being in the arena. When you walk up to that arena and you put your hand on the door, and you think, "I'm going in and I'm going to try this," shame is the gremlin who says, "Uh, uh. You're not good enough. You never finished that MBA. Your wife left you. I know your dad really wasn't in Luxembourg, he was in Sing Sing. I know those things that happened to you growing up. I know you don't think that you're pretty enough or smart enough or talented enough or powerful enough. I know your dad never paid attention, even when you made CFO." Shame is that thing. And if we can quiet it down and walk in and say, "I'm going to do this," we look up and the critic that we see pointing and laughing, 99 percent of the time is who? Us. Shame drives two big tapes -- "never good enough" and, if you can talk it out of that one, "who do you think you are?" The thing to understand about shame is it's not guilt. Shame is a focus on self, guilt is a focus on behavior. Shame is "I am bad." Guilt is "I did something bad." How many of you, if you did something that was hurtful to me, would be willing to say, "I'm sorry. I made a mistake?" How many of you would be willing to say that? Guilt: I'm sorry. I made a mistake. Shame: I'm sorry. I am a mistake. There's a huge difference between shame and guilt. And here's what you need to know. Shame is highly, highly correlated with addiction, depression, violence, aggression, bullying, suicide, eating disorders. And here's what you even need to know more. Guilt, inversely correlated with those things. The ability to hold something we've done or failed to do up against who we want to be is incredibly adaptive. It's uncomfortable, but it's adaptive. The other thing you need to know about shame is it's absolutely organized by gender. If shame washes over me and washes over Chris, it's going to feel the same. Everyone sitting in here knows the warm wash of shame. We're pretty sure that the only people who don't experience shame are people who have no capacity for connection or empathy. Which means, yes, I have a little shame; no, I'm a sociopath. So I would opt for, yes, you have a little shame. Shame feels the same for men and women, but it's organized by gender. For women, the best example I can give you is Enjoli the commercial: "I can put the wash on the line, pack the lunches, hand out the kisses and be at work at five to nine. I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in the pan and never let you forget you're a man." For women, shame is do it all, do it perfectly and never let them see you sweat. I don't know how much perfume that commercial sold, but I guarantee you, it moved a lot of antidepressants and anti-anxiety meds. (Laughter) Shame, for women, is this web of unobtainable, conflicting, competing expectations about who we're supposed to be. And it's a straight-jacket. For men, shame is not a bunch of competing, conflicting expectations. Shame is one, do not be perceived as what? Weak. I did not interview men for the first four years of my study. And it wasn't until a man looked at me one day after a book signing, said, "I love what you have to say about shame, I'm curious why you didn't mention men." And I said, "I don't study men." And he said, "That's convenient." (Laughter) And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Because you say to reach out, tell our story, be vulnerable. But you see those books you just signed for my wife and my three daughters?" I said, "Yeah." "They'd rather me die on top of my white horse than watch me fall down. When we reach out and be vulnerable we get the shit beat out of us. And don't tell me it's from the guys and the coaches and the dads, because the women in my life are harder on me than anyone else." So I started interviewing men and asking questions. And what I learned is this: You show me a woman who can actually sit with a man in real vulnerability and fear, I'll show you a woman who's done incredible work. You show me a man who can sit with a woman who's just had it, she can't do it all anymore, and his first response is not, "I unloaded the dishwasher," but he really listens -- because that's all we need -- I'll show you a guy who's done a lot of work. Shame is an epidemic in our culture. And to get out from underneath it, to find our way back to each other, we have to understand how it affects us and how it affects the way we're parenting, the way we're working, the way we're looking at each other. Very quickly, some research by Mahalik at Boston College. He asked, what do women need to do to conform to female norms? The top answers in this country: nice, thin, modest and use all available resources for appearance. When he asked about men, what do men in this country need to do to conform with male norms, the answers were: always show emotional control, work is first, pursue status and violence. If we're going to find our way back to each other, we have to understand and know empathy, because empathy's the antidote to shame. If you put shame in a Petri dish, it needs three things to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence and judgment. If you put the same amount of shame in a Petri dish and douse it with empathy, it can't survive. The two most powerful words when we're in struggle: me too. And so I'll leave you with this thought. If we're going to find our way back to each other, vulnerability is going to be that path. And I know it's seductive to stand outside the arena, because I think I did it my whole life, and think to myself, I'm going to go in there and kick some ass when I'm bulletproof and when I'm perfect. And that is seductive. But the truth is that never happens. And even if you got as perfect as you could and as bulletproof as you could possibly muster when you got in there, that's not what we want to see. We want you to go in. We want to be with you and across from you. And we just want, for ourselves and the people we care about and the people we work with, to dare greatly. So thank you all very much. I really appreciate it. (Applause)
A question I'm often asked is, where did I get my passion for human rights and justice? It started early. I grew up in the west of Ireland, wedged between four brothers, two older than me and two younger than me. So of course I had to be interested in human rights, and equality and justice, and using my elbows! (Laughter) And those issues stayed with me and guided me, and in particular, when I was elected the first woman President of Ireland, from 1990 to 1997. I dedicated my presidency to having a space for those who felt marginalized on the island of Ireland, and bringing together communities from Northern Ireland with those from the Republic, trying to build peace. And I went as the first Irish president to the United Kingdom and met with Queen Elizabeth II, and also welcomed to my official residence -- which we call "Áras an Uachtaráin," the house of the president -- members of the royal family, including, notably, the Prince of Wales. And I was aware that at the time of my presidency, Ireland was a country beginning a rapid economic progress. We were a country that was benefiting from the solidarity of the European Union. Indeed, when Ireland first joined the European Union in 1973, there were parts of the country that were considered developing, including my own beloved native county, County Mayo. I led trade delegations here to the United States, to Japan, to India, to encourage investment, to help to create jobs, to build up our economy, to build up our health system, our education -- our development. What I didn't have to do as president was buy land on mainland Europe, so that Irish citizens could go there because our island was going underwater. What I didn't have to think about, either as president or as a constitutional lawyer, was the implications for the sovereignty of the territory because of the impact of climate change. But that is what President Tong, of the Republic of Kiribati, has to wake up every morning thinking about. He has bought land in Fiji as an insurance policy, what he calls, "migration with dignity," because he knows that his people may have to leave their islands. As I listened to President Tong describing the situation, I really felt that this was a problem that no leader should have to face. And as I heard him speak about the pain of his problems, I thought about Eleanor Roosevelt. I thought about her and those who worked with her on the Commission on Human Rights, which she chaired in 1948, and drew up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. For them, it would have been unimaginable that a whole country could go out of existence because of human-induced climate change. I came to climate change not as a scientist or an environmental lawyer, and I wasn't really impressed by the images of polar bears or melting glaciers. It was because of the impact on people, and the impact on their rights -- their rights to food and safe water, health, education and shelter. And I say this with humility, because I came late to the issue of climate change. When I served as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002, climate change wasn't at the front of my mind. I don't remember making a single speech on climate change. I knew that there was another part of the United Nations -- the UN Convention on Climate Change -- that was dealing with the issue of climate change. It was later when I started to work in African countries on issues of development and human rights. And I kept hearing this pervasive sentence: "Oh, but things are so much worse now, things are so much worse." And then I explored what was behind that; it was about changes in the climate -- climate shocks, changes in the weather. I met Constance Okollet, who had formed a women's group in Eastern Uganda, and she told me that when she was growing up, she had a very normal life in her village and they didn't go hungry, they knew that the seasons would come as they were predicted to come, they knew when to sow and they knew when to harvest, and so they had enough food. But, in recent years, at the time of this conversation, they had nothing but long periods of drought, and then flash flooding, and then more drought. The school had been destroyed, livelihoods had been destroyed, their harvest had been destroyed. She forms this women's group to try to keep her community together. And this was a reality that really struck me, because of course, Constance Okollet wasn't responsible for the greenhouse gas emissions that were causing this problem. Indeed, I was very struck about the situation in Malawi in January of this year. There was an unprecedented flooding in the country, it covered about a third of the country, over 300 people were killed, and hundreds of thousands lost their livelihoods. And the average person in Malawi emits about 80 kg of CO2 a year. The average US citizen emits about 17.5 metric tons. So those who are suffering disproportionately don't drive cars, don't have electricity, don't consume very significantly, and yet they are feeling more and more the impacts of the changes in the climate, the changes that are preventing them from knowing how to grow food properly, and knowing how to look after their future. I think it was really the importance of the injustice that really struck me very forcibly. And I know that we're not able to address some of that injustice because we're not on course for a safe world. Governments around the world agreed at the conference in Copenhagen, and have repeated it at every conference on climate, that we have to stay below two degrees Celsius of warming above pre-Industrial standards. But we're on course for about four degrees. So we face an existential threat to the future of our planet. And that made me realize that climate change is the greatest threat to human rights in the 21st century. And that brought me then to climate justice. Climate justice responds to the moral argument -- both sides of the moral argument -- to address climate change. First of all, to be on the side of those who are suffering most and are most effected. And secondly, to make sure that they're not left behind again, when we start to move and start to address climate change with climate action, as we are doing. In our very unequal world today, it's very striking how many people are left behind. In our world of 7.2 billion people, about 3 billion are left behind. 1.3 billion don't have access to electricity, and they light their homes with kerosene and candles, both of which are dangerous. And in fact they spend a lot of their tiny income on that form of lighting. 2.6 billion people cook on open fires -- on coal, wood and animal dung. And this causes about 4 million deaths a year from indoor smoke inhalation, and of course, most of those who die are women. So we have a very unequal world, and we need to change from "business as usual." And we shouldn't underestimate the scale and the transformative nature of the change which will be needed, because we have to go to zero carbon emissions by about 2050, if we're going to stay below two degrees Celsius of warming. And that means we have to leave about two-thirds of the known resources of fossil fuels in the ground. It's a very big change, and it means that obviously, industrialized countries must cut their emissions, must become much more energy-efficient, and must move as quickly as possible to renewable energy. For developing countries and emerging economies, the problem and the challenge is to grow without emissions, because they must develop; they have very poor populations. So they must develop without emissions, and that is a different kind of problem. Indeed, no country in the world has actually grown without emissions. All the countries have developed with fossil fuels, and then may be moving to renewable energy. So it is a very big challenge, and it requires the total support of the international community, with the necessary finance and technology, and systems and support, because no country can make itself safe from the dangers of climate change. This is an issue that requires complete human solidarity. Human solidarity, if you like, based on self-interest -- because we are all in this together, and we have to work together to ensure that we reach zero carbon by 2050. The good news is that change is happening, and it's happening very fast. Here in California, there's a very ambitious emissions target to cut emissions. In Hawaii, they're passing legislation to have 100 percent renewable energy by 2045. And governments are very ambitious around the world. In Costa Rica, they have committed to being carbon-neutral by 2021. In Ethiopia, the commitment is to be carbon-neutral by 2027. Apple have pledged that their factories in China will use renewable energy. And there is a race on at the moment to convert electricity from tidal and wave power, in order that we can leave the coal in the ground. And that change is both welcome and is happening very rapidly. But it's still not enough, and the political will is still not enough. Let me come back to President Tong and his people in Kiribati. They actually could be able to live on their island and have a solution, but it would take a lot of political will. President Tong told me about his ambitious idea to either build up or even float the little islands where his people live. This, of course, is beyond the resources of Kiribati itself. It would require great solidarity and support from other countries, and it would require the kind of imaginative idea that we bring together when we want to have a space station in the air. But wouldn't it be wonderful to have this engineering wonder and to allow a people to remain in their sovereign territory, and be part of the community of nations? That is the kind of idea that we should be thinking about. Yes, the challenges of the transformation we need are big, but they can be solved. We are actually, as a people, very capable of coming together to solve problems. I was very conscious of this as I took part this year in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in 1945. 1945 was an extraordinary year. It was a year when the world faced what must have seemed almost insoluble problems -- the devastation of the world wars, particularly the Second World War; the fragile peace that had been brought about; the need for a whole economic regeneration. But the leaders of that time didn't flinch from this. They had the capacity, they had a sense of being driven by never again must the world have this kind of problem. And they had to build structures for peace and security. And what did we get? What did they achieve? The Charter of the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, as they're called, The World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. A Marshall Plan for Europe, a devastated Europe, to reconstruct it. And indeed a few years later, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 2015 is a year that is similar in its importance to 1945, with similar challenges and similar potential. There will be two big summits this year: the first one, in September in New York, is the summit for the sustainable development goals. And then the summit in Paris in December, to give us a climate agreement. The sustainable development goals are intended to help countries to live sustainably, in tune with Mother Earth, not to take out of Mother Earth and destroy ecosystems, but rather, to live in harmony with Mother Earth, by living under sustainable development. And the sustainable development goals will come into operation for all countries on January 1, 2016. The climate agreement -- a binding climate agreement -- is needed because of the scientific evidence that we're on a trajectory for about a four-degree world and we have to change course to stay below two degrees. So we need to take steps that will be monitored and reviewed, so that we can keep increasing the ambition of how we cut emissions, and how we move more rapidly to renewable energy, so that we have a safe world. The reality is that this issue is much too important to be left to politicians and to the United Nations. (Laughter) It's an issue for all of us, and it's an issue where we need more and more momentum. Indeed, the face of the environmentalist has changed, because of the justice dimension. It's now an issue for faith-based organizations, under very good leadership from Pope Francis, and indeed, the Church of England, which is divesting from fossil fuels. It's an issue for the business community, and the good news is that the business community is changing very rapidly -- except for the fossil fuel industries -- (Laughter) Even they are beginning to slightly change their language -- but only slightly. But business is not only moving rapidly to the benefits of renewable energy, but is urging politicians to give them more signals, so that they can move even more rapidly. It's an issue for the trade union movement. It's an issue for the women's movement. It's an issue for young people. I was very struck when I learned that Jibreel Khazan, one of the Greensboro Four who had taken part in the Woolworth sit-ins, said quite recently that climate change is the lunch counter moment for young people. So, lunch counter moment for young people of the 21st century -- the sort of real human rights issue of the 21st century, because he said it is the greatest challenge to humanity and justice in our world. I recall very much the Climate March last September, and that was a huge momentum, not just in New York, but all around the world. and we have to build on that. I was marching with some of The Elders family, and I saw a placard a little bit away from me, but we were wedged so closely together -- because after all, there were 400,000 people out in the streets of New York -- so I couldn't quite get to that placard, I would have just liked to have been able to step behind it, because it said, "Angry Grannies!" (Laughter) That's what I felt. And I have five grandchildren now, I feel very happy as an Irish grandmother to have five grandchildren, and I think about their world, and what it will be like when they will share that world with about 9 billion other people in 2050. We know that inevitably it will be a climate-constrained world, because of the emissions we've already put up there, but it could be a world that is much more equal and much fairer, and much better for health, and better for jobs and better for energy security, than the world we have now, if we have switched sufficiently and early enough to renewable energy, and no one is left behind. No one is left behind. And just as we've been looking back this year -- in 2015 to 1945, looking back 70 years -- I would like to think that they will look back, that world will look back 35 years from 2050, 35 years to 2015, and that they will say, "Weren't they good to do what they did in 2015? We really appreciate that they took the decisions that made a difference, and that put the world on the right pathway, and we benefit now from that pathway," that they will feel that somehow we took our responsibilities, we did what was done in 1945 in similar terms, we didn't miss the opportunity, we lived up to our responsibilities. That's what this year is about. And somehow for me, it's captured in words of somebody that I admired very much. She was a mentor of mine, she was a friend, she died much too young, she was an extraordinary personality, a great champion of the environment: Wangari Maathai. Wangari said once, "In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called upon to shift to a new level of consciousness, to reach a higher moral ground." And that's what we have to do. We have to reach a new level of consciousness, a higher moral ground. And we have to do it this year in those two big summits. And that won't happen unless we have the momentum from people around the world who say: "We want action now, we want to change course, we want a safe world, a safe world for future generations, a safe world for our children and our grandchildren, and we're all in this together." Thank you. (Applause)
This is a wheat bread, a whole wheat bread, and it's made with a new technique that I've been playing around with, and developing and writing about which, for lack of a better name, we call the epoxy method. And I call it an epoxy method because -- it's not very appetizing. I understand that -- but -- but if you think about epoxy, what's epoxy? It's two resins that are, sort of, in and of themselves -- neither of which can make glue, but when you put the two together, something happens. A bond takes place, and you get this very strong, powerful adhesive. Well, in this technique, what I've tried to do is kind of gather all of the knowledge that the bread-baking world, the artisan bread-baking community, has been trying to accumulate over the last 20 years or so -- since we've been engaged in a bread renaissance in America -- and put it together to come up with a method that would help to take whole-grain breads. And let's face it, everyone's trying to move towards whole grains. We finally, after 40 years of knowing that wholegrain was a healthier option, we're finally getting to the point where we actually are tipping over and attempting to actually eat them. (Laughter) The challenge, though, for a wholegrain baker is, you know, how do you make it taste good? Because whole grain -- it's easy with white flour to make a good-tasting bread. White flour is sweet. It's mainly starch, and starch, when you break it down -- what is starch? It's -- thank you -- sugar, yes. So a baker, and a good baker, knows how to pull or draw forth the inherent sugar trapped in the starch. With whole grain bread, you have other obstacles. You've got bran, which is probably the healthiest part of the bread for us, or the fiber for us because it is just loaded with fiber, for the bran is fiber. It's got germ. Those are the good things, but those aren't the tastiest parts of the wheat. So whole grain breads historically have had sort of this onus of being health food breads, and people don't like to eat, quote, health food. They like to eat healthy and healthily, but when we think of something as a health food, we think of it as something we eat out of obligation, not out of passion and love for the flavor. And ultimately, the challenge of the baker, the challenge of every culinary student, of every chef, is to deliver flavor. Flavor is king. Flavor rules. I call it the flavor rule. Flavor rules. And -- and you can get somebody to eat something that's good for them once, but they won't eat it again if they don't like it, right? So, this is the challenge for this bread. We're going to try this at lunch, and I'll explain a bit more about it, but it's made not only with two types of pre-doughs -- this attempt, again, at bringing out flavor is to make a piece of dough the day before that is not leavened. It's just dough that is wet. It's hydrated dough we call "the soaker" -- that helps to start enzyme activity. And enzymes are the secret, kind of, ingredient in dough that brings out flavor. It starts to release the sugars trapped in the starch. That's what enzymes are doing. And so, if we can release some of those, they become accessible to us in our palate. They become accessible to the yeast as food. They become accessible to the oven for caramelization to give us a beautiful crust. The other pre-dough that we make is fermented -- our pre-ferment. And it's made -- it can be a sourdough starter, or what we call a "biga" or any other kind of pre-fermented dough with a little yeast in it, and that starts to develop flavor also. And on day two, we put those two pieces together. That's the epoxy. And we're hoping that, sort of, the enzyme piece of dough becomes the fuel pack for the leavened piece of dough, and when we put them together and add the final ingredients, we can create a bread that does evoke the full potential of flavor trapped in the grain. That's the challenge. Okay, so, now, what we -- in the journey of wheat, let's go back and look at these 12 stages. I'm going to go through them very quickly and then revisit them. Okay, we're going to start with the first stage. And this is what every student has to begin with. Everyone who works in the culinary world knows that the first stage of cooking is "mise en place," which is just a French way of saying, "get organized." Everything in its place. First stage. So in baking we call it scaling -- weighing out the ingredients. Stage two is mixing. We take the ingredients and we mix them. We have to develop the gluten. There's no gluten in flour. There's only the potential for gluten. Here's another kind of prefiguring of epoxy because we've got glutenin and gliadin, neither of which are strong enough to make a good bread. But when they get hydrated and they bond to each other, they create a stronger molecule, a stronger protein we call gluten. And so we, in the mixing process, have to develop the gluten, we have to activate the leaven or the yeast, and we have to essentially distribute all the ingredients evenly. Then we get into fermentation, the third stage, which is really where the flavor develops. The yeast comes alive and starts eating the sugars, creating carbon dioxide and alcohol -- essentially it's burping and sweating, which is what bread is. It's yeast burps and sweat. And somehow, this is transformed -- the yeast burps and sweats are later transformed -- and this is really getting to the heart of what makes bread so special is that it is a transformational food, and we're going to explore that in a minute. But then, quickly through the next few stages. We, after it's fermented and it's developed, started to develop flavor and character, we divide it into smaller units. And then we take those units and we shape them. We give them a little pre-shape, usually a round or a little torpedo shape, sometimes. That's called "rounding." And there's a short rest period. It can be for a few seconds. It can be for 20 or 30 minutes. We call that resting or benching. Then we go into final shaping, "panning" -- which means putting the shaped loaf on a pan. This takes a second, but it's a distinctive stage. It can be in a basket. It can be in a loaf pan, but we pan it. And then, stage nine. The fermentation which started at stage three is continuing through all these other stages. Again, developing more flavor. The final fermentation takes place in stage nine. We call it "proofing." Proofing means to prove that the dough is alive. And at stage nine we get the dough to the final shape, and it goes into the oven -- stage 10. Three transformations take place in the oven. The sugars in the dough caramelize in the crust. They give us that beautiful brown crust. Only the crust can caramelize. It's the only place that gets hot enough. Inside, the proteins -- this gluten -- coagulates. When it gets to about 160 degrees, the proteins all line up and they create structure, the gluten structure -- what ultimately we will call the crumb of the bread. And the starches, when they reach about 180 degrees, gelatinize. And gelatinization is yet another oven transformation. Coagulation, caramelization and gelatinization -- when the starch is thick and they absorb all the moisture that's around them, they -- they kind of swell, and then they burst. And they burst, and they spill their guts into the bread. So basically now we're eating yeast sweats -- sweat, burps and starch guts. Again, transformed in stage 10 in the oven because what went into the oven as dough comes out in stage 11 as bread. And stage 11, we call it cooling -- because we never really eat the bread right away. There's a little carry-over baking. The proteins have to set up, strengthen and firm up. And then we have stage 12, which the textbooks call "packaging," but my students call "eating." And so, we're going to be on our own journey today from wheat to eat, and in a few minutes we will try this, and see if we have succeeded in fulfilling this baker's mission of pulling out flavor. But I want to go back now and revisit these steps, and talk about it from the standpoint of transformation, because I really believe that all things can be understood -- and this is not my own idea. This goes back to the Scholastics and to the Ancients -- that all things can be understood on four levels: the literal, the metaphoric or poetic level, the political or ethical level. And ultimately, the mystical or sometimes called the "anagogical" level. It's hard to get to those levels unless you go through the literal. In fact, Dante says you can't understand the three deeper levels unless you first understand the literal level, so that's why we're talking literally about bread. But let's kind of look at these stages again from the standpoint of connections to possibly a deeper level -- all in my quest for answering the question, "What is it about bread that's so special?" And fulfilling this mission of evoking the full potential of flavor. Because what happens is, bread begins as wheat or any other grain. But what's wheat? Wheat is a grass that grows in the field. And, like all grasses, at a certain point it puts out seeds. And we harvest those seeds, and those are the wheat kernels. Now, in order to harvest it -- I mean, what's harvesting? It's just a euphemism for killing, right? I mean, that's what's harvest -- we say we harvest the pig, you know? Yes, we slaughter, you know. Yes, that's life. We harvest the wheat, and in harvesting it, we kill it. Now, wheat is alive, and as we harvest it, it gives up its seeds. Now, at least with seeds we have the potential for future life. We can plant those in the ground. And we save some of those for the next generation. But most of those seeds get crushed and turned into flour. And at that point, the wheat has suffered the ultimate indignity. It's not only been killed, but it's been denied any potential for creating future life. So we turn it into flour. So as I said, I think bread is a transformational food. The first transformation -- and, by the way, the definition of transformation for me is a radical change from one thing into something else. O.K.? Radical, not subtle. Not like hot water made cold, or cold water turned hot, but water boiled off and becoming steam. That's a transformation, two different things. Well, in this case, the first transformation is alive to dead. I'd call that radical. So, we've got now this flour. And what do we do? We add some water. In stage one, we weigh it. In stage two, we add water and salt to it, mix it together, and we create something that we call "clay." It's like clay. And we infuse that clay with an ingredient that we call "leaven." In this case, it's yeast, but yeast is leaven. What does leaven mean? Leaven comes from the root word that means enliven -- to vivify, to bring to life. By the way, what's the Hebrew word for clay? Adam. You see, the baker, in this moment, has become, in a sense, sort of, the God of his dough, you know, and his dough, well, while it's not an intelligent life form, is now alive. And we know it's alive because in stage three, it grows. Growth is the proof of life. And while it's growing, all these literal transformations are taking place. Enzymes are breaking forth sugars. Yeast is eating sugar and turning it into carbon dioxide and alcohol. Bacteria is in there, eating the same sugars, turning them into acids. In other words, personality and character's being developed in this dough under the watchful gaze of the baker. And the baker's choices all along the way determine the outcome of the product. A subtle change in temperature -- a subtle change in time -- it's all about a balancing act between time, temperature and ingredients. That's the art of baking. So all these things are determined by the baker, and the bread goes through some stages, and characters develop. And then we divide it, and this one big piece of dough is divided into smaller units, and each of those units are given shape by the baker. And as they're shaped, they're raised again, all along proving that they're alive, and developing character. And at stage 10, we take it to the oven. It's still dough. Nobody eats bread dough -- a few people do, I think, but not too many. I've met some dough eaters, but -- it's not the staff of life, right? Bread is the staff of life. But dough is what we're working with, and we take that dough to the oven, and it goes into the oven. As soon as the interior temperature of that dough crosses the threshold of 140 degrees, it passes what we call the "thermal death point." Students love that TDP. They think it's the name of a video game. But it's the thermal death point -- all life ceases there. The yeast, whose mission it has been up till now to raise the dough, to enliven it, to vivify it, in order to complete its mission, which is also to turn this dough into bread, has to give up its life. So you see the symbolism at work? It's starting to come forth a little bit, you know. It's starting to make sense to me -- what goes in is dough, what comes out is bread -- or it goes in alive, comes out dead. Third transformation. First transformation, alive to dead. Second transformation, dead brought back to life. Third transformation, alive to dead -- but dough to bread. Or another analogy would be, a caterpillar has been turned into a butterfly. And it's what comes out of the oven that is what we call the staff of life. This is the product that everyone in the world eats, that is so difficult to give up. It's so deeply embedded in our psyches that bread is used as a symbol for life. It's used as a symbol for transformation. And so, as we get to stage 12 and we partake of that, again completing the life cycle, you know, we have a chance to essentially ingest that -- it nurtures us, and we continue to carry on and have opportunities to ponder things like this. So this is what I've learned from bread. This is what bread has taught me in my journey. And what we're going to attempt to do with this bread here, again, is to use, in addition to everything we talked about, this bread we're going to call "spent grain bread" because, as you know, bread-making is very similar to beer-making. Beer is basically liquid bread, or bread is solid beer. And -- (Laughter) they -- they're invented around the same time. I think beer came first. And the Egyptian who was tending the beer fell asleep in the hot, Egyptian sun, and it turned into bread. But we've got this bread, and what I did here is to try to, again, evoke even more flavor from this grain, was we've added into it the spent grain from beer-making. And if you make this bread, you can use any kind of spent grain from any type of beer. I like dark spent grain. Today we're using a light spent grain that's actually from, like, some kind of a lager of some sort -- a light lager or an ale -- that is wheat and barley that's been toasted. In other words, the beer-maker knows also how to evoke flavor from the grains by using sprouting and malting and roasting. We're going to take some of that, and put it into the bread. So now we not only have a high-fiber bread, but now fiber on top of fiber. And so this is, again, hopefully not only a healthy bread, but a bread that you will enjoy. So, if I, kind of, break this bread, maybe we can share this now a little bit here. We'll start a little piece here, and I'm going to take a little piece here -- I think I'd better taste it myself before you have it at lunch. I'll leave you with what I call the baker's blessing. May your crust be crisp, and your bread always rise. Thank you.
I need to make a confession at the outset here. A little over 20 years ago I did something that I regret, something that I'm not particularly proud of, something that, in many ways, I wish no one would ever know, but here I feel kind of obliged to reveal. (Laughter) In the late 1980s, in a moment of youthful indiscretion, I went to law school. (Laughter) Now, in America law is a professional degree: you get your university degree, then you go on to law school. And when I got to law school, I didn't do very well. To put it mildly, I didn't do very well. I, in fact, graduated in the part of my law school class that made the top 90 percent possible. (Laughter) Thank you. I never practiced law a day in my life; I pretty much wasn't allowed to. (Laughter) But today, against my better judgment, against the advice of my own wife, I want to try to dust off some of those legal skills -- what's left of those legal skills. I don't want to tell you a story. I want to make a case. I want to make a hard-headed, evidence-based, dare I say lawyerly case, for rethinking how we run our businesses. So, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, take a look at this. This is called the candle problem. Some of you might have seen this before. It's created in 1945 by a psychologist named Karl Duncker. Karl Duncker created this experiment that is used in a whole variety of experiments in behavioral science. And here's how it works. Suppose I'm the experimenter. I bring you into a room. I give you a candle, some thumbtacks and some matches. And I say to you, "Your job is to attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table." Now what would you do? Now many people begin trying to thumbtack the candle to the wall. Doesn't work. Somebody, some people -- and I saw somebody kind of make the motion over here -- some people have a great idea where they light the match, melt the side of the candle, try to adhere it to the wall. It's an awesome idea. Doesn't work. And eventually, after five or 10 minutes, most people figure out the solution, which you can see here. The key is to overcome what's called functional fixedness. You look at that box and you see it only as a receptacle for the tacks. But it can also have this other function, as a platform for the candle. The candle problem. Now I want to tell you about an experiment using the candle problem, done by a scientist named Sam Glucksberg, who is now at Princeton University in the U.S. This shows the power of incentives. Here's what he did. He gathered his participants. And he said, "I'm going to time you. How quickly you can solve this problem?" To one group he said, "I'm going to time you to establish norms, averages for how long it typically takes someone to solve this sort of problem." To the second group he offered rewards. He said, "If you're in the top 25 percent of the fastest times, you get five dollars. If you're the fastest of everyone we're testing here today, you get 20 dollars." Now this is several years ago. Adjusted for inflation, it's a decent sum of money for a few minutes of work. It's a nice motivator. Question: How much faster did this group solve the problem? Answer: It took them, on average, three and a half minutes longer. Three and a half minutes longer. Now this makes no sense right? I mean, I'm an American. I believe in free markets. That's not how it's supposed to work. Right? (Laughter) If you want people to perform better, you reward them. Right? Bonuses, commissions, their own reality show. Incentivize them. That's how business works. But that's not happening here. You've got an incentive designed to sharpen thinking and accelerate creativity, and it does just the opposite. It dulls thinking and blocks creativity. And what's interesting about this experiment is that it's not an aberration. This has been replicated over and over and over again, for nearly 40 years. These contingent motivators -- if you do this, then you get that -- work in some circumstances. But for a lot of tasks, they actually either don't work or, often, they do harm. This is one of the most robust findings in social science, and also one of the most ignored. I spent the last couple of years looking at the science of human motivation, particularly the dynamics of extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators. And I'm telling you, it's not even close. If you look at the science, there is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what's alarming here is that our business operating system -- think of the set of assumptions and protocols beneath our businesses, how we motivate people, how we apply our human resources -- it's built entirely around these extrinsic motivators, around carrots and sticks. That's actually fine for many kinds of 20th century tasks. But for 21st century tasks, that mechanistic, reward-and-punishment approach doesn't work, often doesn't work, and often does harm. Let me show you what I mean. So Glucksberg did another experiment similar to this where he presented the problem in a slightly different way, like this up here. Okay? Attach the candle to the wall so the wax doesn't drip onto the table. Same deal. You: we're timing for norms. You: we're incentivizing. What happened this time? This time, the incentivized group kicked the other group's butt. Why? Because when the tacks are out of the box, it's pretty easy isn't it? (Laughter) If-then rewards work really well for those sorts of tasks, where there is a simple set of rules and a clear destination to go to. Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus, concentrate the mind; that's why they work in so many cases. And so, for tasks like this, a narrow focus, where you just see the goal right there, zoom straight ahead to it, they work really well. But for the real candle problem, you don't want to be looking like this. The solution is not over here. The solution is on the periphery. You want to be looking around. That reward actually narrows our focus and restricts our possibility. Let me tell you why this is so important. In western Europe, in many parts of Asia, in North America, in Australia, white-collar workers are doing less of this kind of work, and more of this kind of work. That routine, rule-based, left-brain work -- certain kinds of accounting, certain kinds of financial analysis, certain kinds of computer programming -- has become fairly easy to outsource, fairly easy to automate. Software can do it faster. Low-cost providers around the world can do it cheaper. So what really matters are the more right-brained creative, conceptual kinds of abilities. Think about your own work. Think about your own work. Are the problems that you face, or even the problems we've been talking about here, are those kinds of problems -- do they have a clear set of rules, and a single solution? No. The rules are mystifying. The solution, if it exists at all, is surprising and not obvious. Everybody in this room is dealing with their own version of the candle problem. And for candle problems of any kind, in any field, those if-then rewards, the things around which we've built so many of our businesses, don't work. Now, I mean it makes me crazy. And this is not -- here's the thing. This is not a feeling. Okay? I'm a lawyer; I don't believe in feelings. This is not a philosophy. I'm an American; I don't believe in philosophy. (Laughter) This is a fact -- or, as we say in my hometown of Washington, D.C., a true fact. (Laughter) (Applause) Let me give you an example of what I mean. Let me marshal the evidence here, because I'm not telling you a story, I'm making a case. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, some evidence: Dan Ariely, one of the great economists of our time, he and three colleagues, did a study of some MIT students. They gave these MIT students a bunch of games, games that involved creativity, and motor skills, and concentration. And the offered them, for performance, three levels of rewards: small reward, medium reward, large reward. Okay? If you do really well you get the large reward, on down. What happened? As long as the task involved only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance. Okay? But one the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward led to poorer performance. Then they said, "Okay let's see if there's any cultural bias here. Lets go to Madurai, India and test this." Standard of living is lower. In Madurai, a reward that is modest in North American standards, is more meaningful there. Same deal. A bunch of games, three levels of rewards. What happens? People offered the medium level of rewards did no better than people offered the small rewards. But this time, people offered the highest rewards, they did the worst of all. In eight of the nine tasks we examined across three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance. Is this some kind of touchy-feely socialist conspiracy going on here? No. These are economists from MIT, from Carnegie Mellon, from the University of Chicago. And do you know who sponsored this research? The Federal Reserve Bank of the United States. That's the American experience. Let's go across the pond to the London School of Economics -- LSE, London School of Economics, alma mater of 11 Nobel Laureates in economics. Training ground for great economic thinkers like George Soros, and Friedrich Hayek, and Mick Jagger. (Laughter) Last month, just last month, economists at LSE looked at 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans, inside of companies. Here's what the economists there said: "We find that financial incentives can result in a negative impact on overall performance." There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And what worries me, as we stand here in the rubble of the economic collapse, is that too many organizations are making their decisions, their policies about talent and people, based on assumptions that are outdated, unexamined, and rooted more in folklore than in science. And if we really want to get out of this economic mess, and if we really want high performance on those definitional tasks of the 21st century, the solution is not to do more of the wrong things, to entice people with a sweeter carrot, or threaten them with a sharper stick. We need a whole new approach. And the good news about all of this is that the scientists who've been studying motivation have given us this new approach. It's an approach built much more around intrinsic motivation. Around the desire to do things because they matter, because we like it, because they're interesting, because they are part of something important. And to my mind, that new operating system for our businesses revolves around three elements: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives. Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters. Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves. These are the building blocks of an entirely new operating system for our businesses. I want to talk today only about autonomy. In the 20th century, we came up with this idea of management. Management did not emanate from nature. Management is like -- it's not a tree, it's a television set. Okay? Somebody invented it. And it doesn't mean it's going to work forever. Management is great. Traditional notions of management are great if you want compliance. But if you want engagement, self-direction works better. Let me give you some examples of some kind of radical notions of self-direction. What this means -- you don't see a lot of it, but you see the first stirrings of something really interesting going on, because what it means is paying people adequately and fairly, absolutely -- getting the issue of money off the table, and then giving people lots of autonomy. Let me give you some examples. How many of you have heard of the company Atlassian? It looks like less than half. (Laughter) Atlassian is an Australian software company. And they do something incredibly cool. A few times a year they tell their engineers, "Go for the next 24 hours and work on anything you want, as long as it's not part of your regular job. Work on anything you want." So that engineers use this time to come up with a cool patch for code, come up with an elegant hack. Then they present all of the stuff that they've developed to their teammates, to the rest of the company, in this wild and wooly all-hands meeting at the end of the day. And then, being Australians, everybody has a beer. They call them FedEx Days. Why? Because you have to deliver something overnight. It's pretty. It's not bad. It's a huge trademark violation, but it's pretty clever. (Laughter) That one day of intense autonomy has produced a whole array of software fixes that might never have existed. And it's worked so well that Atlassian has taken it to the next level with 20 Percent Time -- done, famously, at Google -- where engineers can work, spend 20 percent of their time working on anything they want. They have autonomy over their time, their task, their team, their technique. Okay? Radical amounts of autonomy. And at Google, as many of you know, about half of the new products in a typical year are birthed during that 20 Percent Time: things like Gmail, Orkut, Google News. Let me give you an even more radical example of it: something called the Results Only Work Environment, the ROWE, created by two American consultants, in place in place at about a dozen companies around North America. In a ROWE people don't have schedules. They show up when they want. They don't have to be in the office at a certain time, or any time. They just have to get their work done. How they do it, when they do it, where they do it, is totally up to them. Meetings in these kinds of environments are optional. What happens? Almost across the board, productivity goes up, worker engagement goes up, worker satisfaction goes up, turnover goes down. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, These are the building blocks of a new way of doing things. Now some of you might look at this and say, "Hmm, that sounds nice, but it's Utopian." And I say, "Nope. I have proof." The mid-1990s, Microsoft started an encyclopedia called Encarta. They had deployed all the right incentives, all the right incentives. They paid professionals to write and edit thousands of articles. Well-compensated managers oversaw the whole thing to make sure it came in on budget and on time. A few years later another encyclopedia got started. Different model, right? Do it for fun. No one gets paid a cent, or a Euro or a Yen. Do it because you like to do it. Now if you had, just 10 years ago, if you had gone to an economist, anywhere, and said, "Hey, I've got these two different models for creating an encyclopedia. If they went head to head, who would win?" 10 years ago you could not have found a single sober economist anywhere on planet Earth who would have predicted the Wikipedia model. This is the titanic battle between these two approaches. This is the Ali-Frazier of motivation. Right? This is the Thrilla' in Manila. Alright? Intrinsic motivators versus extrinsic motivators. Autonomy, mastery and purpose, versus carrot and sticks. And who wins? Intrinsic motivation, autonomy, mastery and purpose, in a knockout. Let me wrap up. There is a mismatch between what science knows and what business does. And here is what science knows. One: Those 20th century rewards, those motivators we think are a natural part of business, do work, but only in a surprisingly narrow band of circumstances. Two: Those if-then rewards often destroy creativity. Three: The secret to high performance isn't rewards and punishments, but that unseen intrinsic drive -- the drive to do things for their own sake. The drive to do things cause they matter. And here's the best part. Here's the best part. We already know this. The science confirms what we know in our hearts. So, if we repair this mismatch between what science knows and what business does, if we bring our motivation, notions of motivation into the 21st century, if we get past this lazy, dangerous, ideology of carrots and sticks, we can strengthen our businesses, we can solve a lot of those candle problems, and maybe, maybe, maybe we can change the world. I rest my case. (Applause)
You've heard of your I.Q., your general intelligence, but what's your Psy-Q? How much do you know about what makes you tick, and how good are you at predicting other people's behavior or even your own? And how much of what you think you know about psychology is wrong? Let's find out by counting down the top 10 myths of psychology. You've probably heard it said that when it comes to their psychology, it's almost as if men are from Mars and women are from Venus. But how different are men and women really? To find out, let's start by looking at something on which men and women really do differ and plotting some psychological gender differences on the same scale. One thing men and women do really differ on is how far they can throw a ball. So if we look at the data for men here, we see what is called a normal distribution curve. A few men can throw a ball really far, and a few men not far at all, but most a kind of average distance. And women share the same distribution as well, but actually there's quite a big difference. In fact, the average man can throw a ball further than about 98 percent of all women. So now let's look at what some psychological gender differences look like on the same standardized scale. Any psychologist will tell you that men are better at spatial awareness than women -- so things like map-reading, for example -- and it's true, but let's have a look at the size of this difference. It's tiny; the lines are so close together they almost overlap. In fact, the average woman is better than 33 percent of all men, and of course, if that was 50 percent, then the two genders would be exactly equal. It's worth bearing in mind that this difference and the next one I'll show you are pretty much the biggest psychological gender differences ever discovered in psychology. So here's the next one. Any psychologist will tell you that women are better with language and grammar than men. So here's performance on the standardized grammar test. There go the women. There go the men. Again, yes, women are better on average, but the lines are so close that 33 percent of men are better than the average woman, and again, if it was 50 percent, that would represent complete gender equality. So it's not really a case of Mars and Venus. It's more a case of, if anything, Mars and Snickers: basically the same, but one's maybe slightly nuttier than the other. I won't say which. Now we've got you warmed up. Let's psychoanalyze you using the famous Rorschach inkblot test. So you can probably see two, I dunno, two bears or two people or something. But what do you think they're doing? Put your hand up if you think they're saying hello. Not many people. Okay. Put your hands up if you think they are high-fiving. Okay. What if you think they're fighting? Only a few people there. Okay, so if you think they're saying hello or high-fiving, then that means you're a friendly person. If you think they're fighting, you're a bit more of a nasty, aggressive person. Are you a lover or a fighter, basically. What about this one? This isn't really a voting one, so on three everyone shout out what you see. One, two, three. (Audience shouting) I heard hamster. Who said hamster? That was very worrying. A guy there said hamster. Well, you should see some kind of two-legged animal here, and then the mirror image of them there. If you didn't, then this means that you have difficulty processing complex situations where there's a lot going on. Except, of course, it doesn't mean that at all. Rorschach inkblot tests have basically no validity when it comes to diagnosing people's personality and are not used by modern-day psychologists. In fact, one recent study found that when you do try to diagnose people's personalities using Rorschach inkblot tests, schizophrenia was diagnosed in about one sixth of apparently perfectly normal participants. So if you didn't do that well on this, maybe you are not a very visual type of person. So let's do another quick quiz to find out. When making a cake, do you prefer to -- so hands up for each one again -- do you prefer to use a recipe book with pictures? Yeah, a few people. Have a friend talk you through? Or have a go, making it up as you go along? Quite a few people there. Okay, so if you said A, then this means that you are a visual learner and you learn best when information is presented in a visual style. If you said B, it means you're an auditory learner, that you learn best when information is presented to you in an auditory format. And if you said C, it means that you're a kinesthetic learner, that you learn best when you get stuck in and do things with your hands. Except, of course, as you've probably guessed, that it doesn't, because the whole thing is a complete myth. Learning styles are made up and are not supported by scientific evidence. So we know this because in tightly controlled experimental studies, when learners are given material to learn either in their preferred style or an opposite style, it makes no difference at all to the amount of information that they retain. And if you think about it for just a second, it's just obvious that this has to be true. It's obvious that the best presentation format depends not on you, but on what you're trying to learn. Could you learn to drive a car, for example, just by listening to someone telling you what to do with no kinesthetic experience? Could you solve simultaneous equations by talking them through in your head and without writing them down? Could you revise for your architecture exams using interpretive dance if you're a kinesthetic learner? No. What you need to do is match the material to be learned to the presentation format, not you. I know many of you are A-level students that will have recently gotten your GCSE results. And if you didn't quite get what you were hoping for, then you can't really blame your learning style, but one thing that you might want to think about blaming is your genes. So what this is all about is a recent study at University College London found that 58 percent of the variation between different students and their GCSE results was down to genetic factors. That sounds like a very precise figure, so how can we tell? Well, when we want to unpack the relative contributions of genes and the environment, what we can do is do a twin study. So identical twins share 100 percent of their environment and 100 percent of their genes, whereas non-identical twins share 100 percent of their environment, but just like any brother and sister, share only 50 percent of their genes. So by comparing how similar GCSE results are in identical twins versus non-identical twins, and doing some clever math, we can an idea of how much variation and performance is due to the environment and how much is due to genes. And it turns out that it's about 58 percent due to genes. So this isn't to undermine the hard work that you and your teachers here put in. If you didn't quite get the GCSE results that you were hoping for, then you can always try blaming your parents, or at least their genes. One thing that you shouldn't blame is being a left-brained or right-brained learner, because again, this is a myth. So the myth here is that the left brain is logical, it's good with equations like this, and the right brain is more creative, so the right brain is better at music. But again, this is a myth because nearly everything that you do involves nearly all parts of your brain talking together, even just the most mundane thing like having a normal conversation. However, perhaps one reason why this myth has survived is that there is a slight grain of truth to it. So a related version of the myth is that left-handed people are more creative than right-handed people, which kind of makes sense because your brain controls the opposite hands, so left-handed people, the right side of the brain is slightly more active than the left-hand side of the brain, and the idea is the right-hand side is more creative. Now, it isn't true per se that left-handed people are more creative than right-handed people. What is true that ambidextrous people, or people who use both hands for different tasks, are more creative thinkers than one-handed people, because being ambidextrous involves having both sides of the brain talk to each other a lot, which seems to be involved in creating flexible thinking. The myth of the creative left-hander arises from the fact that being ambidextrous is more common amongst left-handers than right-handers, so a grain of truth in the idea of the creative left-hander, but not much. A related myth that you've probably heard of is that we only use 10 percent of our brains. This is, again, a complete myth. Nearly everything that we do, even the most mundane thing, uses nearly all of our brains. That said, it is of course true that most of us don't use our brainpower quite as well as we could. So what could we do to boost our brainpower? Maybe we could listen to a nice bit of Mozart. Have you heard of the idea of the Mozart effect? So the idea is that listening to Mozart makes you smarter and improves your performance on I.Q. tests. Now again, what's interesting about this myth is that although it's basically a myth, there is a grain of truth to it. So the original study found that participants who were played Mozart music for a few minutes did better on a subsequent I.Q. test than participants who simply sat in silence. But a follow-up study recruited some people who liked Mozart music and then another group of people who were fans of the horror stories of Stephen King. And they played the people the music or the stories. The people who preferred Mozart music to the stories got a bigger I.Q. boost from the Mozart than the stories, but the people who preferred the stories to the Mozart music got a bigger I.Q. boost from listening to the Stephen King stories than the Mozart music. So the truth is that listening to something that you enjoy perks you up a bit and gives you a temporary I.Q. boost on a narrow range of tasks. There's no suggestion that listening to Mozart, or indeed Stephen King stories, is going to make you any smarter in the long run. Another version of the Mozart myth is that listening to Mozart can make you not only cleverer but healthier, too. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be true of someone who listened to the music of Mozart almost every day, Mozart himself, who suffered from gonorrhea, smallpox, arthritis, and, what most people think eventually killed him in the end, syphilis. This suggests that Mozart should have bit more careful, perhaps, when choosing his sexual partners. But how do we choose a partner? So a myth that I have to say is sometimes spread a bit by sociologists is that our preferences in a romantic partner are a product of our culture, that they're very culturally specific. But in fact, the data don't back this up. A famous study surveyed people from [37] different cultures across the globe, from Americans to Zulus, on what they look for in a partner. And in every single culture across the globe, men placed more value on physical attractiveness in a partner than did women, and in every single culture, too, women placed more importance than did men on ambition and high earning power. In every culture, too, men preferred women who were younger than themselves, an average of, I think it was 2.66 years, and in every culture, too, women preferred men who were older than them, so an average of 3.42 years, which is why we've got here "Everybody needs a Sugar Daddy." So moving on from trying to score with a partner to trying to score in basketball or football or whatever your sport is. The myth here is that sportsmen go through hot-hand streaks, Americans call them, or purple patches, we sometimes say in England, where they just can't miss, like this guy here. But in fact, what happens is that if you analyze the pattern of hits and misses statistically, it turns out that it's nearly always at random. Your brain creates patterns from the randomness. If you toss a coin, a streak of heads or tails is going to come out somewhere in the randomness, and because the brain likes to see patterns where there are none, we look at these streaks and attribute meanings to them and say, "Yeah he's really on form today," whereas actually you would get the same pattern if you were just getting hits and misses at random. So an exception to this, however, is penalty shootouts. A recent study looking at penalty shootouts in football shows that players who represent countries with a very bad record in penalty shootouts, like, for example, England, tend to be quicker to take their shots than countries with a better record, and presumably as a result, they're more likely to miss. Which raises the question of if there's any way that we could improve people's performance. And one thing you might think about doing is punishing people for their misses and seeing if that improves them. This idea, the effect that punishment can improve performance, is what participants thought they were testing in Milgram's famous learning and punishment experiment that you've probably heard about if you're a psychology student. The story goes that participants were prepared to give what they believed to be fatal electric shocks to a fellow participant when they got a question wrong, just because someone in a white coat told them to. But this story is a myth for three reasons. Firstly and most crucially, the lab coat wasn't white, it was in fact grey. Secondly, the participants were told before the study and reminded any time they raised a concern, that although the shocks were painful, they were not fatal and indeed caused no permanent damage whatsoever. And thirdly, participants didn't give the shocks just because someone in the coat told them to. When they were interviewed after the study, all the participants said that they firmly believed that the learning and punishment study served a worthy scientific purpose which would have enduring gains for science as opposed to the momentary nonfatal discomfort caused to the participants. Okay, so I've been talking for about 12 minutes now, and you've probably been sitting there listening to me, analyzing my speech patterns and body language and trying to work out if you should take any notice of what I'm saying, whether I'm telling the truth or whether I'm lying, but if so you've probably completely failed, because although we all think we can catch a liar from their body language and speech patterns, hundreds of psychological tests over the years have shown that all of us, including police officers and detectives, are basically at chance when it comes to detecting lies from body language and verbal patterns. Interestingly, there is one exception: TV appeals for missing relatives. It's quite easy to predict when the relatives are missing and when the appealers have in fact murdered the relatives themselves. So hoax appealers are more likely to shake their heads, to look away, and to make errors in their speech, whereas genuine appealers are more likely to express hope that the person will return safely and to avoid brutal language. So, for example, they might say "taken from us" rather than "killed." Speaking of which, it's about time I killed this talk, but before I do, I just want to give you in 30 seconds the overarching myth of psychology. So the myth is that psychology is just a collection of interesting theories, all of which say something useful and all of which have something to offer. What I hope to have shown you in the past few minutes is that this isn't true. What we need to do is assess psychological theories by seeing what predictions they make, whether that is that listening to Mozart makes you smarter, that you learn better when information is presented in your preferred learning style or whatever it is, all of these are testable empirical predictions, and the only way we can make progress is to test these predictions against the data in tightly controlled experimental studies. And it's only by doing so that we can hope to discover which of these theories are well supported, and which, like all the ones I've told you about today, are myths. Thank you. (Applause)
On June 12, 2014, precisely at 3:33 in a balmy winter afternoon in São Paulo, Brazil, a typical South American winter afternoon, this kid, this young man that you see celebrating here like he had scored a goal, Juliano Pinto, 29 years old, accomplished a magnificent deed. Despite being paralyzed and not having any sensation from mid-chest to the tip of his toes as the result of a car crash six years ago that killed his brother and produced a complete spinal cord lesion that left Juliano in a wheelchair, Juliano rose to the occasion, and on this day did something that pretty much everybody that saw him in the six years deemed impossible. Juliano Pinto delivered the opening kick of the 2014 Brazilian World Soccer Cup here just by thinking. He could not move his body, but he could imagine the movements needed to kick a ball. He was an athlete before the lesion. He's a para-athlete right now. He's going to be in the Paralympic Games, I hope, in a couple years. But what the spinal cord lesion did not rob from Juliano was his ability to dream. And dream he did that afternoon, for a stadium of about 75,000 people and an audience of close to a billion watching on TV. And that kick crowned, basically, 30 years of basic research studying how the brain, how this amazing universe that we have between our ears that is only comparable to universe that we have above our head because it has about 100 billion elements talking to each other through electrical brainstorms, what Juliano accomplished took 30 years to imagine in laboratories and about 15 years to plan. When John Chapin and I, 15 years ago, proposed in a paper that we would build something that we called a brain-machine interface, meaning connecting a brain to devices so that animals and humans could just move these devices, no matter how far they are from their own bodies, just by imagining what they want to do, our colleagues told us that we actually needed professional help, of the psychiatry variety. And despite that, a Scot and a Brazilian persevered, because that's how we were raised in our respective countries, and for 12, 15 years, we made demonstration after demonstration suggesting that this was possible. And a brain-machine interface is not rocket science, it's just brain research. It's nothing but using sensors to read the electrical brainstorms that a brain is producing to generate the motor commands that have to be downloaded to the spinal cord, so we projected sensors that can read hundreds and now thousands of these brain cells simultaneously, and extract from these electrical signals the motor planning that the brain is generating to actually make us move into space. And by doing that, we converted these signals into digital commands that any mechanical, electronic, or even a virtual device can understand so that the subject can imagine what he, she or it wants to make move, and the device obeys that brain command. By sensorizing these devices with lots of different types of sensors, as you are going to see in a moment, we actually sent messages back to the brain to confirm that that voluntary motor will was being enacted, no matter where -- next to the subject, next door, or across the planet. And as this message gave feedback back to the brain, the brain realized its goal: to make us move. So this is just one experiment that we published a few years ago, where a monkey, without moving its body, learned to control the movements of an avatar arm, a virtual arm that doesn't exist. What you're listening to is the sound of the brain of this monkey as it explores three different visually identical spheres in virtual space. And to get a reward, a drop of orange juice that monkeys love, this animal has to detect, select one of these objects by touching, not by seeing it, by touching it, because every time this virtual hand touches one of the objects, an electrical pulse goes back to the brain of the animal describing the fine texture of the surface of this object, so the animal can judge what is the correct object that he has to grab, and if he does that, he gets a reward without moving a muscle. The perfect Brazilian lunch: not moving a muscle and getting your orange juice. So as we saw this happening, we actually came and proposed the idea that we had published 15 years ago. We reenacted this paper. We got it out of the drawers, and we proposed that perhaps we could get a human being that is paralyzed to actually use the brain-machine interface to regain mobility. The idea was that if you suffered -- and that can happen to any one of us. Let me tell you, it's very sudden. It's a millisecond of a collision, a car accident that transforms your life completely. If you have a complete lesion of the spinal cord, you cannot move because your brainstorms cannot reach your muscles. However, your brainstorms continue to be generated in your head. Paraplegic, quadriplegic patients dream about moving every night. They have that inside their head. The problem is how to get that code out of it and make the movement be created again. So what we proposed was, let's create a new body. Let's create a robotic vest. And that's exactly why Juliano could kick that ball just by thinking, because he was wearing the first brain-controlled robotic vest that can be used by paraplegic, quadriplegic patients to move and to regain feedback. That was the original idea, 15 years ago. What I'm going to show you is how 156 people from 25 countries all over the five continents of this beautiful Earth, dropped their lives, dropped their patents, dropped their dogs, wives, kids, school, jobs, and congregated to come to Brazil for 18 months to actually get this done. Because a couple years after Brazil was awarded the World Cup, we heard that the Brazilian government wanted to do something meaningful in the opening ceremony in the country that reinvented and perfected soccer until we met the Germans, of course. (Laughter) But that's a different talk, and a different neuroscientist needs to talk about that. But what Brazil wanted to do is to showcase a completely different country, a country that values science and technology, and can give a gift to millions, 25 million people around the world that cannot move any longer because of a spinal cord injury. Well, we went to the Brazilian government and to FIFA and proposed, well, let's have the kickoff of the 2014 World Cup be given by a Brazilian paraplegic using a brain-controlled exoskeleton that allows him to kick the ball and to feel the contact of the ball. They looked at us, thought that we were completely nuts, and said, "Okay, let's try." We had 18 months to do everything from zero, from scratch. We had no exoskeleton, we had no patients, we had nothing done. These people came all together and in 18 months, we got eight patients in a routine of training and basically built from nothing this guy, that we call Bra-Santos Dumont 1. The first brain-controlled exoskeleton to be built was named after the most famous Brazilian scientist ever, Alberto Santos Dumont, who, on October 19, 1901, created and flew himself the first controlled airship on air in Paris for a million people to see. Sorry, my American friends, I live in North Carolina, but it was two years before the Wright Brothers flew on the coast of North Carolina. (Applause) Flight control is Brazilian. (Laughter) So we went together with these guys and we basically put this exoskeleton together, 15 degrees of freedom, hydraulic machine that can be commanded by brain signals recorded by a non-invasive technology called electroencephalography that can basically allow the patient to imagine the movements and send his commands to the controls, the motors, and get it done. This exoskeleton was covered with an artificial skin invented by Gordon Cheng, one of my greatest friends, in Munich, to allow sensation from the joints moving and the foot touching the ground to be delivered back to the patient through a vest, a shirt. It is a smart shirt with micro-vibrating elements that basically delivers the feedback and fools the patient's brain by creating a sensation that it is not a machine that is carrying him, but it is he who is walking again. So we got this going, and what you'll see here is the first time one of our patients, Bruno, actually walked. And he takes a few seconds because we are setting everything, and you are going to see a blue light cutting in front of the helmet because Bruno is going to imagine the movement that needs to be performed, the computer is going to analyze it, Bruno is going to certify it, and when it is certified, the device starts moving under the command of Bruno's brain. And he just got it right, and now he starts walking. After nine years without being able to move, he is walking by himself. And more than that -- (Applause) -- more than just walking, he is feeling the ground, and if the speed of the exo goes up, he tells us that he is walking again on the sand of Santos, the beach resort where he used to go before he had the accident. That's why the brain is creating a new sensation in Bruno's head. So he walks, and at the end of the walk -- I am running out of time already -- he says, "You know, guys, I need to borrow this thing from you when I get married, because I wanted to walk to the priest and see my bride and actually be there by myself. Of course, he will have it whenever he wants. And this is what we wanted to show during the World Cup, and couldn't, because for some mysterious reason, FIFA cut its broadcast in half. What you are going to see very quickly is Juliano Pinto in the exo doing the kick a few minutes before we went to the pitch and did the real thing in front of the entire crowd, and the lights you are going to see just describe the operation. Basically, the blue lights pulsating indicate that the exo is ready to go. It can receive thoughts and it can deliver feedback, and when Juliano makes the decision to kick the ball, you are going to see two streams of green and yellow light coming from the helmet and going to the legs, representing the mental commands that were taken by the exo to actually make that happen. And in basically 13 seconds, Juliano actually did. You can see the commands. He gets ready, the ball is set, and he kicks. And the most amazing thing is, 10 seconds after he did that, and looked at us on the pitch, he told us, celebrating as you saw, "I felt the ball." And that's priceless. (Applause) So where is this going to go? I have two minutes to tell you that it's going to the limits of your imagination. Brain-actuating technology is here. This is the latest: We just published this a year ago, the first brain-to-brain interface that allows two animals to exchange mental messages so that one animal that sees something coming from the environment can send a mental SMS, a torpedo, a neurophysiological torpedo, to the second animal, and the second animal performs the act that he needed to perform without ever knowing what the environment was sending as a message, because the message came from the first animal's brain. So this is the first demo. I'm going to be very quick because I want to show you the latest. But what you see here is the first rat getting informed by a light that is going to show up on the left of the cage that he has to press the left cage to basically get a reward. He goes there and does it. And the same time, he is sending a mental message to the second rat that didn't see any light, and the second rat, in 70 percent of the times is going to press the left lever and get a reward without ever experiencing the light in the retina. Well, we took this to a little higher limit by getting monkeys to collaborate mentally in a brain net, basically to donate their brain activity and combine them to move the virtual arm that I showed you before, and what you see here is the first time the two monkeys combine their brains, synchronize their brains perfectly to get this virtual arm to move. One monkey is controlling the x dimension, the other monkey is controlling the y dimension. But it gets a little more interesting when you get three monkeys in there and you ask one monkey to control x and y, the other monkey to control y and z, and the third one to control x and z, and you make them all play the game together, moving the arm in 3D into a target to get the famous Brazilian orange juice. And they actually do. The black dot is the average of all these brains working in parallel, in real time. That is the definition of a biological computer, interacting by brain activity and achieving a motor goal. Where is this going? We have no idea. We're just scientists. (Laughter) We are paid to be children, to basically go to the edge and discover what is out there. But one thing I know: One day, in a few decades, when our grandchildren surf the Net just by thinking, or a mother donates her eyesight to an autistic kid who cannot see, or somebody speaks because of a brain-to-brain bypass, some of you will remember that it all started on a winter afternoon in a Brazilian soccer field with an impossible kick. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Bruno Giussani: Miguel, thank you for sticking to your time. I actually would have given you a couple more minutes, because there are a couple of points we want to develop, and, of course, clearly it seems that we need connected brains to figure out where this is going. So let's connect all this together. So if I'm understanding correctly, one of the monkeys is actually getting a signal and the other monkey is reacting to that signal just because the first one is receiving it and transmitting the neurological impulse. Miguel Nicolelis: No, it's a little different. No monkey knows of the existence of the other two monkeys. They are getting a visual feedback in 2D, but the task they have to accomplish is 3D. They have to move an arm in three dimensions. But each monkey is only getting the two dimensions on the video screen that the monkey controls. And to get that thing done, you need at least two monkeys to synchronize their brains, but the ideal is three. So what we found out is that when one monkey starts slacking down, the other two monkeys enhance their performance to get the guy to come back, so this adjusts dynamically, but the global synchrony remains the same. Now, if you flip without telling the monkey the dimensions that each brain has to control, like this guy is controlling x and y, but he should be controlling now y and z, instantaneously, that animal's brain forgets about the old dimensions and it starts concentrating on the new dimensions. So what I need to say is that no Turing machine, no computer can predict what a brain net will do. So we will absorb technology as part of us. Technology will never absorb us. It's simply impossible. BG: How many times have you tested this? And how many times have you succeeded versus failed? MN: Oh, tens of times. With the three monkeys? Oh, several times. I wouldn't be able to talk about this here unless I had done it a few times. And I forgot to mention, because of time, that just three weeks ago, a European group just demonstrated the first man-to-man brain-to-brain connection. BG: And how does that play? MN: There was one bit of information -- big ideas start in a humble way -- but basically the brain activity of one subject was transmitted to a second object, all non-invasive technology. So the first subject got a message, like our rats, a visual message, and transmitted it to the second subject. The second subject received a magnetic pulse in the visual cortex, or a different pulse, two different pulses. In one pulse, the subject saw something. On the other pulse, he saw something different. And he was able to verbally indicate what was the message the first subject was sending through the Internet across continents. Moderator: Wow. Okay, that's where we are going. That's the next TED Talk at the next conference. Miguel Nicolelis, thank you. MN: Thank you, Bruno. Thank you.
I'm a brain scientist, and as a brain scientist, I'm actually interested in how the brain learns, and I'm especially interested in a possibility of making our brains smarter, better and faster. This is in this context I'm going to tell you about video games. When we say video games, most of you think about children. It's true. Ninety percent of children do play video games. But let's be frank. When the kids are in bed, who is in front of the PlayStation? Most of you. The average age of a gamer is 33 years old, not eight years old, and in fact, if we look at the projected demographics of video game play, the video game players of tomorrow are older adults. (Laughter) So video [gaming] is pervasive throughout our society. It is clearly here to stay. It has an amazing impact on our everyday life. Consider these statistics released by Activision. After one month of release of the game "Call Of Duty: Black Ops," it had been played for 68,000 years worldwide, right? Would any of you complain if this was the case about doing linear algebra? So what we are asking in the lab is, how can we leverage that power? Now I want to step back a bit. I know most of you have had the experience of coming back home and finding your kids playing these kinds of games. (Shooting noises) The name of the game is to get after your enemy zombie bad guys before they get to you, right? And I'm almost sure most of you have thought, "Oh, come on, can't you do something more intelligent than shooting at zombies?" I'd like you to put this kind of knee-jerk reaction in the context of what you would have thought if you had found your girl playing sudoku or your boy reading Shakespeare. Right? Most parents would find that great. Well, I'm not going to tell you that playing video games days in and days out is actually good for your health. It's not, and binging is never good. But I'm going to argue that in reasonable doses, actually the very game I showed you at the beginning, those action-packed shooter games have quite powerful effects and positive effects on many different aspects of our behavior. There's not one week that goes without some major headlines in the media about whether video games are good or bad for you, right? You're all bombarded with that. I'd like to put this kind of Friday night bar discussion aside and get you to actually step into the lab. What we do in the lab is actually measure directly, in a quantitative fashion, what is the impact of video games on the brain. And so I'm going to take a few examples from our work. One first saying that I'm sure you all have heard is the fact that too much screen time makes your eyesight worse. That's a statement about vision. There may be vision scientists among you. We actually know how to test that statement. We can step into the lab and measure how good your vision is. Well, guess what? People that don't play a lot of action games, that don't actually spend a lot of time in front of screens, have normal, or what we call corrective-to-normal vision. That's okay. The issue is what happens with these guys that actually indulge into playing video games like five hours per week, 10 hours per week, 15 hours per week. By that statement, their vision should be really bad, right? Guess what? Their vision is really, really good. It's better than those that don't play. And it's better in two different ways. The first way is that they're actually able to resolve small detail in the context of clutter, and though that means being able to read the fine print on a prescription rather than using magnifier glasses, you can actually do it with just your eyesight. The other way that they are better is actually being able to resolve different levels of gray. Imagine you're driving in a fog. That makes a difference between seeing the car in front of you and avoiding the accident, or getting into an accident. So we're actually leveraging that work to develop games for patients with low vision, and to have an impact on retraining their brain to see better. Clearly, when it comes to action video games, screen time doesn't make your eyesight worse. Another saying that I'm sure you have all heard around: Video games lead to attention problems and greater distractability. Okay, we know how to measure attention in the lab. I'm actually going to give you an example of how we do so. I'm going to ask you to participate, so you're going to have to actually play the game with me. I'm going to show you colored words. I want you to shout out the color of the ink. Right? So this is the first example. ["Chair"] Orange, good. ["Table"] Green. ["Board"] Audience: Red.Daphne Bavelier: Red. ["Horse"] DB: Yellow. Audience: Yellow. ["Yellow"] DB: Red. Audience: Yellow. ["Blue"] DB: Yellow. Okay, you get my point, right? (Laughter) You're getting better, but it's hard. Why is it hard? Because I introduced a conflict between the word itself and its color. How good your attention is determines actually how fast you resolve that conflict, so the young guys here at the top of their game probably, like, did a little better than some of us that are older. What we can show is that when you do this kind of task with people that play a lot of action games, they actually resolve the conflict faster. So clearly playing those action games doesn't lead to attention problems. Actually, those action video game players have many other advantages in terms of attention, and one aspect of attention which is also improved for the better is our ability to track objects around in the world. This is something we use all the time. When you're driving, you're tracking, keeping track of the cars around you. You're also keeping track of the pedestrian, the running dog, and that's how you can actually be safe driving, right? In the lab, we get people to come to the lab, sit in front of a computer screen, and we give them little tasks that I'm going to get you to do again. You're going to see yellow happy faces and a few sad blue faces. These are children in the schoolyard in Geneva during a recess during the winter. Most kids are happy. It's actually recess. But a few kids are sad and blue because they've forgotten their coat. Everybody begins to move around, and your task is to keep track of who had a coat at the beginning and who didn't. So I'm just going to show you an example where there is only one sad kid. It's easy because you can actually track it with your eyes. You can track, you can track, and then when it stops, and there is a question mark, and I ask you, did this kid have a coat or not? Was it yellow initially or blue? I hear a few yellow. Good. So most of you have a brain. (Laughter) I'm now going to ask you to do the task, but now with a little more challenging task. There are going to be three of them that are blue. Don't move your eyes. Please don't move your eyes. Keep your eyes fixated and expand, pull your attention. That's the only way you can actually do it. If you move your eyes, you're doomed. Yellow or blue? Audience: Yellow.DB: Good. So your typical normal young adult can have a span of about three or four objects of attention. That's what we just did. Your action video game player has a span of about six to seven objects of attention, which is what is shown in this video here. That's for you guys, action video game players. A bit more challenging, right? (Laughter) Yellow or blue? Blue. We have some people that are serious out there. Yeah. (Laughter) Good. So in the same way that we actually see the effects of video games on people's behavior, we can use brain imaging and look at the impact of video games on the brain, and we do find many changes, but the main changes are actually to the brain networks that control attention. So one part is the parietal cortex which is very well known to control the orientation of attention. The other one is the frontal lobe, which controls how we sustain attention, and another one is the anterior cingulate, which controls how we allocate and regulate attention and resolve conflict. Now, when we do brain imaging, we find that all three of these networks are actually much more efficient in people that play action games. This actually leads me to a rather counterintuitive finding in the literature about technology and the brain. You all know about multitasking. You all have been faulty of multitasking when you're driving and you pick up your cellphone. Bad idea. Very bad idea. Why? Because as your attention shifts to your cell phone, you are actually losing the capacity to react swiftly to the car braking in front of you, and so you're much more likely to get engaged into a car accident. Now, we can measure that kind of skills in the lab. We obviously don't ask people to drive around and see how many car accidents they have. That would be a little costly proposition. But we design tasks on the computer where we can measure, to millisecond accuracy, how good they are at switching from one task to another. When we do that, we actually find that people that play a lot of action games are really, really good. They switch really fast, very swiftly. They pay a very small cost. Now I'd like you to remember that result, and put it in the context of another group of technology users, a group which is actually much revered by society, which are people that engage in multimedia-tasking. What is multimedia-tasking? It's the fact that most of us, most of our children, are engaged with listening to music at the same time as they're doing search on the web at the same time as they're chatting on Facebook with their friends. That's a multimedia-tasker. There was a first study done by colleagues at Stanford and that we replicated that showed that those people that identify as being high multimedia-taskers are absolutely abysmal at multitasking. When we measure them in the lab, they're really bad. Right? So these kinds of results really makes two main points. The first one is that not all media are created equal. You can't compare the effect of multimedia-tasking and the effect of playing action games. They have totally different effects on different aspects of cognition, perception and attention. Even within video games, I'm telling you right now about these action-packed video games. Different video games have a different effect on your brains. So we actually need to step into the lab and really measure what is the effect of each video game. The other lesson is that general wisdom carries no weight. I showed that to you already, like we looked at the fact that despite a lot of screen time, those action gamers have a lot of very good vision, etc. Here, what was really striking is that these undergraduates that actually report engaging in a lot of high multimedia-tasking are convinced they aced the test. So you show them their data, you show them they are bad and they're like, "Not possible." You know, they have this sort of gut feeling that, really, they are doing really, really good. That's another argument for why we need to step into the lab and really measure the impact of technology on the brain. Now in a sense, when we think about the effect of video games on the brain, it's very similar to the effect of wine on the health. There are some very poor uses of wine. There are some very poor uses of video games. But when consumed in reasonable doses, and at the right age, wine can be very good for health. There are actually specific molecules that have been identified in red wine as leading to greater life expectancy. So it's the same way, like those action video games have a number of ingredients that are actually really powerful for brain plasticity, learning, attention, vision, etc., and so we need and we're working on understanding what are those active ingredients so that we can really then leverage them to deliver better games, either for education or for rehabilitation of patients. Now because we are interested in having an impact for education or rehabilitation of patients, we are actually not that interested in how those of you that choose to play video games for many hours on end perform. I'm much more interested in taking any of you and showing that by forcing you to play an action game, I can actually change your vision for the better, whether you want to play that action game or not, right? That's the point of rehabilitation or education. Most of the kids don't go to school saying, "Great, two hours of math!" So that's really the crux of the research, and to do that, we need to go one more step. And one more step is to do training studies. So let me illustrate that step with a task which is called mental rotation. Mental rotation is a task where I'm going to ask you, and again you're going to do the task, to look at this shape. Study it, it's a target shape, and I'm going to present to you four different shapes. One of these four different shapes is actually a rotated version of this shape. I want you to tell me which one: the first one, second one, third one or fourth one? Okay, I'll help you. Fourth one. One more. Get those brains working. Come on. That's our target shape. Third. Good! This is hard, right? Like, the reason that I asked you to do that is because you really feel your brain cringing, right? It doesn't really feel like playing mindless action video games. Well, what we do in these training studies is, people come to the lab, they do tasks like this one, we then force them to play 10 hours of action games. They don't play 10 hours of action games in a row. They do distributed practice, so little shots of 40 minutes several days over a period of two weeks. Then, once they are done with the training, they come back a few days later and they are tested again on a similar type of mental rotation task. So this is work from a colleague in Toronto. What they showed is that, initially, you know, subjects perform where they are expected to perform given their age. After two weeks of training on action video games, they actually perform better, and the improvement is still there five months after having done the training. That's really, really important. Why? Because I told you we want to use these games for education or for rehabilitation. We need to have effects that are going to be long-lasting. Now, at this point, a number of you are probably wondering well, what are you waiting for, to put on the market a game that would be good for the attention of my grandmother and that she would actually enjoy, or a game that would be great to rehabilitate the vision of my grandson who has amblyopia, for example? Well, we're working on it, but here is a challenge. There are brain scientists like me that are beginning to understand what are the good ingredients in games to promote positive effects, and that's what I'm going to call the broccoli side of the equation. There is an entertainment software industry which is extremely deft at coming up with appealing products that you can't resist. That's the chocolate side of the equation. The issue is we need to put the two together, and it's a little bit like with food. Who really wants to eat chocolate-covered broccoli? None of you. (Laughter) And you probably have had that feeling, right, picking up an education game and sort of feeling, hmm, you know, it's not really fun, it's not really engaging. So what we need is really a new brand of chocolate, a brand of chocolate that is irresistible, that you really want to play, but that has all the ingredients, the good ingredients that are extracted from the broccoli that you can't recognize but are still working on your brains. And we're working on it, but it takes brain scientists to come and to get together, people that work in the entertainment software industry, and publishers, so these are not people that usually meet every day, but it's actually doable, and we are on the right track. I'd like to leave you with that thought, and thank you for your attention. (Applause) (Applause)
One year ago, I rented a car in Jerusalem to go find a man I'd never met but who had changed my life. I didn't have a phone number to call to say I was coming. I didn't have an exact address, but I knew his name, Abed, I knew that he lived in a town of 15,000, Kfar Kara, and I knew that, 21 years before, just outside this holy city, he broke my neck. And so, on an overcast morning in January, I headed north off in a silver Chevy to find a man and some peace. The road dropped and I exited Jerusalem. I then rounded the very bend where his blue truck, heavy with four tons of floor tiles, had borne down with great speed onto the back left corner of the minibus where I sat. I was then 19 years old. I'd grown five inches and done some 20,000 pushups in eight months, and the night before the crash, I delighted in my new body, playing basketball with friends into the wee hours of a May morning. I palmed the ball in my large right hand, and when that hand reached the rim, I felt invincible. I was off in the bus to get the pizza I'd won on the court. I didn't see Abed coming. From my seat, I was looking up at a stone town on a hilltop, bright in the noontime sun, when from behind there was a great bang, as loud and violent as a bomb. My head snapped back over my red seat. My eardrum blew. My shoes flew off. I flew too, my head bobbing on broken bones, and when I landed, I was a quadriplegic. Over the coming months, I learned to breathe on my own, then to sit and to stand and to walk, but my body was now divided vertically. I was a hemiplegic, and back home in New York, I used a wheelchair for four years, all through college. College ended and I returned to Jerusalem for a year. There I rose from my chair for good, I leaned on my cane, and I looked back, finding all from my fellow passengers in the bus to photographs of the crash, and when I saw this photograph, I didn't see a bloody and unmoving body. I saw the healthy bulk of a left deltoid, and I mourned that it was lost, mourned all I had not yet done, but was now impossible. It was then I read the testimony that Abed gave the morning after the crash, of driving down the right lane of a highway toward Jerusalem. Reading his words, I welled with anger. It was the first time I'd felt anger toward this man, and it came from magical thinking. On this xeroxed piece of paper, the crash had not yet happened. Abed could still turn his wheel left so that I would see him whoosh by out my window and I would remain whole. "Be careful, Abed, look out. Slow down." But Abed did not slow, and on that xeroxed piece of paper, my neck again broke, and again, I was left without anger. I decided to find Abed, and when I finally did, he responded to my Hebrew hello which such nonchalance, it seemed he'd been awaiting my phone call. And maybe he had. I didn't mention to Abed his prior driving record -- 27 violations by the age of 25, the last, his not shifting his truck into a low gear on that May day — and I didn't mention my prior record -- the quadriplegia and the catheters, the insecurity and the loss — and when Abed went on about how hurt he was in the crash, I didn't say that I knew from the police report that he'd escaped serious injury. I said I wanted to meet. Abed said that I should call back in a few weeks, and when I did, and a recording told me that his number was disconnected, I let Abed and the crash go. Many years passed. I walked with my cane and my ankle brace and a backpack on trips in six continents. I pitched overhand in a weekly softball game that I started in Central Park, and home in New York, I became a journalist and an author, typing hundreds of thousands of words with one finger. A friend pointed out to me that all of my big stories mirrored my own, each centering on a life that had changed in an instant, owing, if not to a crash, then to an inheritance, a swing of the bat, a click of the shutter, an arrest. Each of us had a before and an after. I'd been working through my lot after all. Still, Abed was far from my mind, when last year, I returned to Israel to write of the crash, and the book I then wrote, "Half-Life," was nearly complete when I recognized that I still wanted to meet Abed, and finally I understood why: to hear this man say two words: "I'm sorry." People apologize for less. And so I got a cop to confirm that Abed still lived somewhere in his same town, and I was now driving to it with a potted yellow rose in the back seat, when suddenly flowers seemed a ridiculous offering. But what to get the man who broke your fucking neck? (Laughter) I pulled into the town of Abu Ghosh, and bought a brick of Turkish delight: pistachios glued in rosewater. Better. Back on Highway 1, I envisioned what awaited. Abed would hug me. Abed would spit at me. Abed would say, "I'm sorry." I then began to wonder, as I had many times before, how my life would have been different had this man not injured me, had my genes been fed a different helping of experience. Who was I? Was I who I had been before the crash, before this road divided my life like the spine of an open book? Was I what had been done to me? Were all of us the results of things done to us, done for us, the infidelity of a parent or spouse, money inherited? Were we instead our bodies, their inborn endowments and deficits? It seemed that we could be nothing more than genes and experience, but how to tease out the one from the other? As Yeats put that same universal question, "O body swayed to music, o brightening glance, how can we know the dancer from the dance?" I'd been driving for an hour when I looked in my rearview mirror and saw my own brightening glance. The light my eyes had carried for as long as they had been blue. The predispositions and impulses that had propelled me as a toddler to try and slip over a boat into a Chicago lake, that had propelled me as a teen to jump into wild Cape Cod Bay after a hurricane. But I also saw in my reflection that, had Abed not injured me, I would now, in all likelihood, be a doctor and a husband and a father. I would be less mindful of time and of death, and, oh, I would not be disabled, would not suffer the thousand slings and arrows of my fortune. The frequent furl of five fingers, the chips in my teeth come from biting at all the many things a solitary hand cannot open. The dancer and the dance were hopelessly entwined. It was approaching 11 when I exited right toward Afula, and passed a large quarry and was soon in Kfar Kara. I felt a pang of nerves. But Chopin was on the radio, seven beautiful mazurkas, and I pulled into a lot by a gas station to listen and to calm. I'd been told that in an Arab town, one need only mention the name of a local and it will be recognized. And I was mentioning Abed and myself, noting deliberately that I was here in peace, to the people in this town, when I met Mohamed outside a post office at noon. He listened to me. You know, it was most often when speaking to people that I wondered where I ended and my disability began, for many people told me what they told no one else. Many cried. And one day, after a woman I met on the street did the same and I later asked her why, she told me that, best she could tell, her tears had had something to do with my being happy and strong, but vulnerable too. I listened to her words. I suppose they were true. I was me, but I was now me despite a limp, and that, I suppose, was what now made me, me. Anyway, Mohamed told me what perhaps he would not have told another stranger. He led me to a house of cream stucco, then drove off. And as I sat contemplating what to say, a woman approached in a black shawl and black robe. I stepped from my car and said "Shalom," and identified myself, and she told me that her husband Abed would be home from work in four hours. Her Hebrew was not good, and she later confessed that she thought that I had come to install the Internet. (Laughter) I drove off and returned at 4:30, thankful to the minaret up the road that helped me find my way back. And as I approached the front door, Abed saw me, my jeans and flannel and cane, and I saw Abed, an average-looking man of average size. He wore black and white: slippers over socks, pilling sweatpants, a piebald sweater, a striped ski cap pulled down to his forehead. He'd been expecting me. Mohamed had phoned. And so at once, we shook hands, and smiled, and I gave him my gift, and he told me I was a guest in his home, and we sat beside one another on a fabric couch. It was then that Abed resumed at once the tale of woe he had begun over the phone 16 years before. He'd just had surgery on his eyes, he said. He had problems with his side and his legs too, and, oh, he'd lost his teeth in the crash. Did I wish to see him remove them? Abed then rose and turned on the TV so that I wouldn't be alone when he left the room, and returned with polaroids of the crash and his old driver's license. "I was handsome," he said. We looked down at his laminated mug. Abed had been less handsome than substantial, with thick black hair and a full face and a wide neck. It was this youth who on May 16, 1990, had broken two necks including mine, and bruised one brain and taken one life. Twenty-one years later, he was now thinner than his wife, his skin slack on his face, and looking at Abed looking at his young self, I remembered looking at that photograph of my young self after the crash, and recognized his longing. "The crash changed both of our lives," I said. Abed then showed me a picture of his mashed truck, and said that the crash was the fault of a bus driver in the left lane who did not let him pass. I did not want to recap the crash with Abed. I'd hoped for something simpler: to exchange a Turkish dessert for two words and be on my way. And so I didn't point out that in his own testimony the morning after the crash, Abed did not even mention the bus driver. No, I was quiet. I was quiet because I had not come for truth. I had come for remorse. And so I now went looking for remorse and threw truth under the bus. "I understand," I said, "that the crash was not your fault, but does it make you sad that others suffered?" Abed spoke three quick words. "Yes, I suffered." Abed then told me why he'd suffered. He'd lived an unholy life before the crash, and so God had ordained the crash, but now, he said, he was religious, and God was pleased. It was then that God intervened: news on the TV of a car wreck that hours before had killed three people up north. We looked up at the wreckage. "Strange," I said. "Strange," he agreed. I had the thought that there, on Route 804, there were perpetrators and victims, dyads bound by a crash. Some, as had Abed, would forget the date. Some, as had I, would remember. The report finished and Abed spoke. "It is a pity," he said, "that the police in this country are not tough enough on bad drivers." I was baffled. Abed had said something remarkable. Did it point up the degree to which he'd absolved himself of the crash? Was it evidence of guilt, an assertion that he should have been put away longer? He'd served six months in prison, lost his truck license for a decade. I forgot my discretion. "Um, Abed," I said, "I thought you had a few driving issues before the crash." "Well," he said, "I once went 60 in a 40." And so 27 violations -- driving through a red light, driving at excessive speed, driving on the wrong side of a barrier, and finally, riding his brakes down that hill -- reduced to one. And it was then I understood that no matter how stark the reality, the human being fits it into a narrative that is palatable. The goat becomes the hero. The perpetrator becomes the victim. It was then I understood that Abed would never apologize. Abed and I sat with our coffee. We'd spent 90 minutes together, and he was now known to me. He was not a particularly bad man or a particularly good man. He was a limited man who'd found it within himself to be kind to me. With a nod to Jewish custom, he told me that I should live to be 120 years old. But it was hard for me to relate to one who had so completely washed his hands of his own calamitous doing, to one whose life was so unexamined that he said he thought two people had died in the crash. There was much I wished to say to Abed. I wished to tell him that, were he to acknowledge my disability, it would be okay, for people are wrong to marvel at those like me who smile as we limp. People don't know that they have lived through worse, that problems of the heart hit with a force greater than a runaway truck, that problems of the mind are greater still, more injurious, than a hundred broken necks. I wished to tell him that what makes most of us who we are most of all is not our minds and not our bodies and not what happens to us, but how we respond to what happens to us. "This," wrote the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, "is the last of the human freedoms: to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances." I wished to tell him that not only paralyzers and paralyzees must evolve, reconcile to reality, but we all must -- the aging and the anxious and the divorced and the balding and the bankrupt and everyone. I wished to tell him that one does not have to say that a bad thing is good, that a crash is from God and so a crash is good, a broken neck is good. One can say that a bad thing sucks, but that this natural world still has many glories. I wished to tell him that, in the end, our mandate is clear: We have to rise above bad fortune. We have to be in the good and enjoy the good, study and work and adventure and friendship -- oh, friendship -- and community and love. But most of all, I wished to tell him what Herman Melville wrote, that "truly to enjoy bodily warmth, some small part of you must be cold, for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast." Yes, contrast. If you are mindful of what you do not have, you may be truly mindful of what you do have, and if the gods are kind, you may truly enjoy what you have. That is the one singular gift you may receive if you suffer in any existential way. You know death, and so may wake each morning pulsing with ready life. Some part of you is cold, and so another part may truly enjoy what it is to be warm, or even to be cold. When one morning, years after the crash, I stepped onto stone and the underside of my left foot felt the flash of cold, nerves at last awake, it was exhilarating, a gust of snow. But I didn't say these things to Abed. I told him only that he had killed one man, not two. I told him the name of that man. And then I said, "Goodbye." Thank you. (Applause) Thanks a lot. (Applause)
This was in an area called Wellawatta, a prime residential area in Colombo. We stood on the railroad tracks that ran between my friend's house and the beach. The tracks are elevated about eight feet from the waterline normally, but at that point the water had receded to a level three or four feet below normal. I'd never seen the reef here before. There were fish caught in rock pools left behind by the receding water. Some children jumped down and ran to the rock pools with bags. They were trying to catch fish. No one realized that this was a very bad idea. The people on the tracks just continued to watch them. I turned around to check on my friend's house. Then someone on the tracks screamed. Before I could turn around, everyone on the tracks was screaming and running. The water had started coming back. It was foaming over the reef. The children managed to run back onto the tracks. No one was lost there. But the water continued to climb. In about two minutes, it had reached the level of the railroad tracks and was coming over it. We had run about 100 meters by this time. It continued to rise. I saw an old man standing at his gate, knee-deep in water, refusing to move. He said he'd lived his whole life there by the beach, and that he would rather die there than run. A boy broke away from his mother to run back into his house to get his dog, who was apparently afraid. An old lady, crying, was carried out of her house and up the road by her son. The slum built on the railroad reservation between the sea and the railroad tracks was completely swept away. Since this was a high-risk location, the police had warned the residents, and no one was there when the water rose. But they had not had any time to evacuate any belongings. For hours afterwards, the sea was strewn with bits of wood for miles around -- all of this was from the houses in the slum. When the waters subsided, it was as if it had never existed. This may seem hard to believe -- unless you've been reading lots and lots of news reports -- but in many places, after the tsunami, villagers were still terrified. When what was a tranquil sea swallows up people, homes and long-tail boats -- mercilessly, without warning -- and no one can tell you anything reliable about whether another one is coming, I'm not sure you'd want to calm down either. One of the scariest things about the tsunami that I've not seen mentioned is the complete lack of information. This may seem minor, but it is terrifying to hear rumor after rumor after rumor that another tidal wave, bigger than the last, will be coming at exactly 1 p.m., or perhaps tonight, or perhaps ... You don't even know if it is safe to go back down to the water, to catch a boat to the hospital. We think that Phi Phi hospital was destroyed. We think this boat is going to Phuket hospital, but if it's too dangerous to land at its pier, then perhaps it will go to Krabi instead, which is more protected. We don't think another wave is coming right away. At the Phi Phi Hill Resort, I was tucked into the corner furthest away from the television, but I strained to listen for information. They reported that there was an 8.5 magnitude earthquake in Sumatra, which triggered the massive tsunami. Having this news was comforting in some small way to understand what had just happened to us. However, the report focused on what had already occurred and offered no information on what to expect now. In general, everything was merely hearsay and rumor, and not a single person I spoke to for over 36 hours knew anything with any certainty. Those were two accounts of the Asian tsunami from two Internet blogs that essentially sprang up after it occurred. I'm now going to show you two video segments from the tsunami that also were shown on blogs. I should warn you, they're pretty powerful. One from Thailand, and the second one from Phuket as well. (Screaming) Voice 1: It's coming in. It's coming again. Voice 2: It's coming again? Voice 1: Yeah. It's coming again. Voice 2: Come get inside here. Voice 1: It's coming again. Voice 2: New wave? Voice 1: It's coming again. New wave! [Unclear] (Screaming) They called me out here. James Surowiecki: Phew. Those were both on this site: waveofdestruction.org. In the world of blogs, there's going to be before the tsunami and after the tsunami, because one of the things that happened in the wake of the tsunami was that, although initially -- that is, in that first day -- there was actually a kind of dearth of live reporting, there was a dearth of live video and some people complained about this. They said, "The blogsters let us down." What became very clear was that, within a few days, the outpouring of information was immense, and we got a complete and powerful picture of what had happened in a way that we never had been able to get before. And what you had was a group of essentially unorganized, unconnected writers, video bloggers, etc., who were able to come up with a collective portrait of a disaster that gave us a much better sense of what it was like to actually be there than the mainstream media could give us. And so in some ways the tsunami can be seen as a sort of seminal moment, a moment in which the blogosphere came, to a certain degree, of age. Now, I'm going to move now from this kind of -- the sublime in the traditional sense of the word, that is to say, awe-inspiring, terrifying -- to the somewhat more mundane. Because when we think about blogs, I think for most of us who are concerned about them, we're primarily concerned with things like politics, technology, etc. And I want to ask three questions in this talk, in the 10 minutes that remain, about the blogosphere. The first one is, What does it tell us about our ideas, about what motivates people to do things? The second is, Do blogs genuinely have the possibility of accessing a kind of collective intelligence that has previously remained, for the most part, untapped? And then the third part is, What are the potential problems, or the dark side of blogs as we know them? OK, the first question: What do they tell us about why people do things? One of the fascinating things about the blogosphere specifically, and, of course, the Internet more generally -- and it's going to seem like a very obvious point, but I think it is an important one to think about -- is that the people who are generating these enormous reams of content every day, who are spending enormous amounts of time organizing, linking, commenting on the substance of the Internet, are doing so primarily for free. They are not getting paid for it in any way other than in the attention and, to some extent, the reputational capital that they gain from doing a good job. And this is -- at least, to a traditional economist -- somewhat remarkable, because the traditional account of economic man would say that, basically, you do things for a concrete reward, primarily financial. But instead, what we're finding on the Internet -- and one of the great geniuses of it -- is that people have found a way to work together without any money involved at all. They have come up with, in a sense, a different method for organizing activity. The Yale Law professor Yochai Benkler, in an essay called "Coase's Penguin," talks about this open-source model, which we're familiar with from Linux, as being potentially applicable in a whole host of situations. And, you know, if you think about this with the tsunami, what you have is essentially a kind of an army of local journalists, who are producing enormous amounts of material for no reason other than to tell their stories. That's a very powerful idea, and it's a very powerful reality. And it's one that offers really interesting possibilities for organizing a whole host of activities down the road. So, I think the first thing that the blogosphere tells us is that we need to expand our idea of what counts as rational, and we need to expand our simple equation of value equals money, or, you have to pay for it to be good, but that in fact you can end up with collectively really brilliant products without any money at all changing hands. There are a few bloggers -- somewhere maybe around 20, now -- who do, in fact, make some kind of money, and a few who are actually trying to make a full-time living out of it, but the vast majority of them are doing it because they love it or they love the attention, or whatever it is. So, Howard Rheingold has written a lot about this and, I think, is writing about this more, but this notion of voluntary cooperation is an incredibly powerful one, and one worth thinking about. The second question is, What does the blogosphere actually do for us, in terms of accessing collective intelligence? You know, as Chris mentioned, I wrote a book called "The Wisdom of Crowds." And the premise of "The Wisdom of Crowds" is that, under the right conditions, groups can be remarkably intelligent. And they can actually often be smarter than even the smartest person within them. The simplest example of this is if you ask a group of people to do something like guess how many jellybeans are in a jar. If I had a jar of jellybeans and I asked you all to guess how many jellybeans were in that jar, your average guess would be remarkably good. It would be somewhere probably within three and five percent of the number of beans in the jar, and it would be better than 90 to 95 percent of you. There may be one or two of you who are brilliant jelly bean guessers, but for the most part the group's guess would be better than just about all of you. And what's fascinating is that you can see this phenomenon at work in many more complicated situations. For instance, if you look at the odds on horses at a racetrack, they predict almost perfectly how likely a horse is to win. In a sense, the group of betters at the racetrack is forecasting the future, in probabilistic terms. You know, if you think about something like Google, which essentially is relying on the collective intelligence of the Web to seek out those sites that have the most valuable information -- we know that Google does an exceptionally good job of doing that, and it does that because, collectively, this disorganized thing we call the "World Wide Web" actually has a remarkable order, or a remarkable intelligence in it. And this, I think, is one of the real promises of the blogosphere. Dan Gillmor -- whose book "We the Media" is included in the gift pack -- has talked about it as saying that, as a writer, he's recognized that his readers know more than he does. And this is a very challenging idea. It's a very challenging idea to mainstream media. It's a very challenging idea to anyone who has invested an enormous amount of time and expertise, and who has a lot of energy invested in the notion that he or she knows better than everyone else. But what the blogosphere offers is the possibility of getting at the kind of collective, distributive intelligence that is out there, and that we know is available to us if we can just figure out a way of accessing it. Each blog post, each blog commentary may not, in and of itself, be exactly what we're looking for, but collectively the judgment of those people posting, those people linking, more often than not is going to give you a very interesting and enormously valuable picture of what's going on. So, that's the positive side of it. That's the positive side of what is sometimes called participatory journalism or citizen journalism, etc. -- that, in fact, we are giving people who have never been able to talk before a voice, and we're able to access information that has always been there but has essentially gone untapped. But there is a dark side to this, and that's what I want to spend the last part of my talk on. One of the things that happens if you spend a lot of time on the Internet, and you spend a lot of time thinking about the Internet, is that it is very easy to fall in love with the Internet. It is very easy to fall in love with the decentralized, bottom-up structure of the Internet. It is very easy to think that networks are necessarily good things -- that being linked from one place to another, that being tightly linked in a group, is a very good thing. And much of the time it is. But there's also a downside to this -- a kind of dark side, in fact -- and that is that the more tightly linked we've become to each other, the harder it is for each of us to remain independent. One of the fundamental characteristics of a network is that, once you are linked in the network, the network starts to shape your views and starts to shape your interactions with everybody else. That's one of the things that defines what a network is. A network is not just the product of its component parts. It is something more than that. It is, as Steven Johnson has talked about, an emergent phenomenon. Now, this has all these benefits: it's very beneficial in terms of the efficiency of communicating information; it gives you access to a whole host of people; it allows people to coordinate their activities in very good ways. But the problem is that groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is the paradox of the wisdom of crowds, or the paradox of collective intelligence, that what it requires is actually a form of independent thinking. And networks make it harder for people to do that, because they drive attention to the things that the network values. So, one of the phenomena that's very clear in the blogosphere is that once a meme, once an idea gets going, it is very easy for people to just sort of pile on, because other people have, say, a link. People have linked to it, and so other people in turn link to it, etc., etc. And that phenomenon of piling on the existing links is one that is characteristic of the blogosphere, particularly of the political blogosphere, and it is one that essentially throws off this beautiful, decentralized, bottom-up intelligence that blogs can manifest in the right conditions. The metaphor that I like to use is the metaphor of the circular mill. A lot of people talk about ants. You know, this is a conference inspired by nature. When we talk about bottom-up, decentralized phenomena, the ant colony is the classic metaphor, because, no individual ant knows what it's doing, but collectively ants are able to reach incredibly intelligent decisions. They're able to guide their traffic with remarkable speed. So, the ant colony is a great model: you have all these little parts that collectively add up to a great thing. But we know that occasionally ants go astray, and what happens is that, if army ants are wandering around and they get lost, they start to follow a simple rule -- just do what the ant in front of you does. And what happens is that the ants eventually end up in a circle. And there's this famous example of one that was 1,200 feet long and lasted for two days, and the ants just kept marching around and around in a circle until they died. And that, I think, is a sort of thing to watch out for. That's the thing we have to fear -- is that we're just going to keep marching around and around until we die. Now, I want to connect this back, though, to the tsunami, because one of the great things about the tsunami -- in terms of the blogosphere's coverage, not in terms of the tsunami itself -- is that it really did represent a genuine bottom-up phenomenon. You saw sites that had never existed before getting huge amounts of traffic. You saw people being able to offer up their independent points of view in a way that they hadn't before. There, you really did see the intelligence of the Web manifest itself. So, that's the upside. The circular mill is the downside. And I think that the former is what we really need to strive for. Thank you very much. (Applause)
I was born in Den Bosch, where the painter Hieronymus Bosch named himself after. And so I've always been very fond of this painter who lived and worked in the 15th century. And what is interesting about him in relation to morality is that he lived at a time where religion's influence was waning, and he was sort of wondering, I think, what would happen with society if there was no religion or if there was less religion. And so he painted this famous painting, "The Garden of Earthly Delights," which some have interpreted as being humanity before the Fall, or being humanity without any Fall at all. And so it makes you wonder, what would happen if we hadn't tasted the fruit of knowledge, so to speak, and what kind of morality would we have? Much later, as a student, I went to a very different garden, a zoological garden in Arnhem where we keep chimpanzees. This is me at an early age with a baby chimpanzee. (Laughter) And I discovered there that the chimpanzees are very power hungry and wrote a book about it. And at that time the focus in a lot of animal research was on aggression and competition. I painted a whole picture of the animal kingdom, and humanity included, was that deep down we are competitors, we are aggressive, we're all out for our own profit basically. This is the launch of my book. I'm not sure how well the chimpanzees read it, but they surely seemed interested in the book. Now in the process of doing all this work on power and dominance and aggression and so on, I discovered that chimpanzees reconcile after fights. And so what you see here is two males who have had a fight. They ended up in a tree, and one of them holds out a hand to the other. And about a second after I took the picture, they came together in the fork of the tree and they kissed and embraced each other. Now this is very interesting because at the time everything was about competition and aggression, and so it wouldn't make any sense. The only thing that matters is that you win or that you lose. But why would you reconcile after a fight? That doesn't make any sense. This is the way bonobos do it. Bonobos do everything with sex. And so they also reconcile with sex. But the principle is exactly the same. The principle is that you have a valuable relationship that is damaged by conflict, so you need to do something about it. So my whole picture of the animal kingdom, and including humans also, started to change at that time. So we have this image in political science, economics, the humanities, philosophy for that matter, that man is a wolf to man. And so deep down our nature's actually nasty. I think it's a very unfair image for the wolf. The wolf is, after all, a very cooperative animal. And that's why many of you have a dog at home, which has all these characteristics also. And it's really unfair to humanity, because humanity is actually much more cooperative and empathic than given credit for. So I started getting interested in those issues and studying that in other animals. So these are the pillars of morality. If you ask anyone, "What is morality based on?" these are the two factors that always come out. One is reciprocity, and associated with it is a sense of justice and a sense of fairness. And the other one is empathy and compassion. And human morality is more than this, but if you would remove these two pillars, there would be not much remaining I think. And so they're absolutely essential. So let me give you a few examples here. This is a very old video from the Yerkes Primate Center where they train chimpanzees to cooperate. ["1937"] So this is already about a hundred years ago that we were doing experiments on cooperation. What you have here is two young chimpanzees who have a box, and the box is too heavy for one chimp to pull in. And of course, there's food on the box. Otherwise they wouldn't be pulling so hard. And so they're bringing in the box. And you can see that they're synchronized. You can see that they work together, they pull at the same moment. It's already a big advance over many other animals who wouldn't be able to do that. And now you're going to get a more interesting picture, because now one of the two chimps has been fed. So one of the two is not really interested in the task anymore. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Laughter) [" -- and sometimes appears to convey its wishes and meanings by gestures."] Now look at what happens at the very end of this. (Laughter) He takes basically everything. (Laughter) So there are two interesting parts about this. One is that the chimp on the right has a full understanding he needs the partner -- so a full understanding of the need for cooperation. The second one is that the partner is willing to work even though he's not interested in the food. Why would that be? Well that probably has to do with reciprocity. There's actually a lot of evidence in primates and other animals that they return favors. So he will get a return favor at some point in the future. And so that's how this all operates. We do the same task with elephants. Now with elephants, it's very dangerous to work with elephants. Another problem with elephants is that you cannot make an apparatus that is too heavy for a single elephant. Now you can probably make it, but it's going to be a pretty flimsy apparatus I think. And so what we did in that case -- we do these studies in Thailand for Josh Plotnik -- is we have an apparatus around which there is a rope, a single rope. And if you pull on this side of the rope, the rope disappears on the other side. So two elephants need to pick it up at exactly the same time and pull. Otherwise nothing is going to happen and the rope disappears. And the first tape you're going to see is two elephants who are released together arrive at the apparatus. The apparatus is on the left with food on it. And so they come together, they arrive together, they pick it up together and they pull together. So it's actually fairly simple for them. There they are. And so that's how they bring it in. But now we're going to make it more difficult. Because the whole purpose of this experiment is to see how well they understand cooperation. Do they understand that as well as the chimps, for example? And so what we do in the next step is we release one elephant before the other, and that elephant needs to be smart enough to stay there and wait and not pull at the rope -- because if he pulls at the rope, it disappears and the whole test is over. Now this elephant does something illegal that we did not teach it. But it shows the understanding that he has, because he puts his big foot on the rope, stands on the rope and waits there for the other, and then the other is going to do all the work for him. So it's what we call freeloading. (Laughter) But it shows the intelligence that the elephants have. They develop several of these alternative techniques that we did not approve of necessarily. So the other elephant is now coming and is going to pull it in. Now look at the other. The other doesn't forget to eat, of course. (Laughter) This was the cooperation, reciprocity part. Now something on empathy. Empathy is my main topic at the moment of research. And empathy has sort of two qualities. One is the understanding part of it. This is just a regular definition: the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. And the emotional part. And so empathy has basically two channels. One is the body channel. If you talk with a sad person, you're going to adopt a sad expression and a sad posture, and before you know it you feel sad. And that's sort of the body channel of emotional empathy, which many animals have. Your average dog has that also. That's actually why people keep mammals in the home and not turtles or snakes or something like that who don't have that kind of empathy. And then there's a cognitive channel, which is more that you can take the perspective of somebody else. And that's more limited. There's few animals -- I think elephants and apes can do that kind of thing -- but there are very few animals who can do that. So synchronization, which is part of that whole empathy mechanism is a very old one in the animal kingdom. And in humans, of course, we can study that with yawn contagion. Humans yawn when others yawn. And it's related to empathy. It activates the same areas in the brain. Also, we know that people who have a lot of yawn contagion are highly empathic. People who have problems with empathy, such as autistic children, they don't have yawn contagion. So it is connected. And we study that in our chimpanzees by presenting them with an animated head. So that's what you see on the upper-left, an animated head that yawns. And there's a chimpanzee watching, an actual real chimpanzee watching a computer screen on which we play these animations. (Laughter) So yawn contagion that you're probably all familiar with -- and maybe you're going to start yawning soon now -- is something that we share with other animals. And that's related to that whole body channel of synchronization that underlies empathy and that is universal in the mammals basically. Now we also study more complex expressions. This is consolation. This is a male chimpanzee who has lost a fight and he's screaming, and a juvenile comes over and puts an arm around him and calms him down. That's consolation. It's very similar to human consolation. And consolation behavior, it's empathy driven. Actually the way to study empathy in human children is to instruct a family member to act distressed, and then they see what young children do. And so it is related to empathy, and that's the kind of expressions we look at. We also recently published an experiment you may have heard about. It's on altruism and chimpanzees where the question is, do chimpanzees care about the welfare of somebody else? And for decades it had been assumed that only humans can do that, that only humans worry about the welfare of somebody else. Now we did a very simple experiment. We do that on chimpanzees that live in Lawrenceville, in the field station of Yerkes. And so that's how they live. And we call them into a room and do experiments with them. In this case, we put two chimpanzees side-by-side. and one has a bucket full of tokens, and the tokens have different meanings. One kind of token feeds only the partner who chooses, the other one feeds both of them. So this is a study we did with Vicky Horner. And here you have the two color tokens. So they have a whole bucket full of them. And they have to pick one of the two colors. You will see how that goes. So if this chimp makes the selfish choice, which is the red token in this case, he needs to give it to us. So we pick it up, we put it on a table where there's two food rewards, but in this case only the one on the right gets food. The one on the left walks away because she knows already. that this is not a good test for her. Then the next one is the pro-social token. So the one who makes the choices -- that's the interesting part here -- for the one who makes the choices, it doesn't really matter. So she gives us now a pro-social token and both chimps get fed. So the one who makes the choices always gets a reward. So it doesn't matter whatsoever. And she should actually be choosing blindly. But what we find is that they prefer the pro-social token. So this is the 50 percent line that's the random expectation. And especially if the partner draws attention to itself, they choose more. And if the partner puts pressure on them -- so if the partner starts spitting water and intimidating them -- then the choices go down. It's as if they're saying, "If you're not behaving, I'm not going to be pro-social today." And this is what happens without a partner, when there's no partner sitting there. And so we found that the chimpanzees do care about the well-being of somebody else -- especially, these are other members of their own group. So the final experiment that I want to mention to you is our fairness study. And so this became a very famous study. And there's now many more, because after we did this about 10 years ago, it became very well known. And we did that originally with capuchin monkeys. And I'm going to show you the first experiment that we did. It has now been done with dogs and with birds and with chimpanzees. But with Sarah Brosnan we started out with capuchin monkeys. So what we did is we put two capuchin monkeys side-by-side. Again, these animals, they live in a group, they know each other. We take them out of the group, put them in a test chamber. And there's a very simple task that they need to do. And if you give both of them cucumber for the task, the two monkeys side-by-side, they're perfectly willing to do this 25 times in a row. So cucumber, even though it's only really water in my opinion, but cucumber is perfectly fine for them. Now if you give the partner grapes -- the food preferences of my capuchin monkeys correspond exactly with the prices in the supermarket -- and so if you give them grapes -- it's a far better food -- then you create inequity between them. So that's the experiment we did. Recently we videotaped it with new monkeys who'd never done the task, thinking that maybe they would have a stronger reaction, and that turned out to be right. The one on the left is the monkey who gets cucumber. The one on the right is the one who gets grapes. The one who gets cucumber, note that the first piece of cucumber is perfectly fine. The first piece she eats. Then she sees the other one getting grape, and you will see what happens. So she gives a rock to us. That's the task. And we give her a piece of cucumber and she eats it. The other one needs to give a rock to us. And that's what she does. And she gets a grape and she eats it. The other one sees that. She gives a rock to us now, gets, again, cucumber. (Laughter) She tests a rock now against the wall. She needs to give it to us. And she gets cucumber again. (Laughter) So this is basically the Wall Street protest that you see here. (Laughter) (Applause) Let me tell you -- I still have two minutes left, let me tell you a funny story about this. This study became very famous and we got a lot of comments, especially anthropologists, economists, philosophers. They didn't like this at all. Because they had decided in their minds, I believe, that fairness is a very complex issue and that animals cannot have it. And so one philosopher even wrote us that it was impossible that monkeys had a sense of fairness because fairness was invented during the French Revolution. (Laughter) Now another one wrote a whole chapter saying that he would believe it had something to do with fairness if the one who got grapes would refuse the grapes. Now the funny thing is that Sarah Brosnan, who's been doing this with chimpanzees, had a couple of combinations of chimpanzees where, indeed, the one who would get the grape would refuse the grape until the other guy also got a grape. So we're getting very close to the human sense of fairness. And I think philosophers need to rethink their philosophy for awhile. So let me summarize. I believe there's an evolved morality. I think morality is much more than what I've been talking about, but it would be impossible without these ingredients that we find in other primates, which are empathy and consolation, pro-social tendencies and reciprocity and a sense of fairness. And so we work on these particular issues to see if we can create a morality from the bottom up, so to speak, without necessarily God and religion involved, and to see how we can get to an evolved morality. And I thank you for your attention. (Applause)
A few weeks ago, I had a chance to go to Saudi Arabia. And the first thing I wanted to do as a Muslim was go to Mecca and visit the Kaaba, the holiest shrine of Islam. And I did that; I put on my ritualistic dress; I went to the holy mosque; I did my prayers; I observed all the rituals. And meanwhile, besides all the spirituality, there was one mundane detail in the Kaaba that was pretty interesting for me. There was no separation of sexes. In other words, men and women were worshiping all together. They were together while doing the tawaf, the circular walk around the Kaaba. They were together while praying. And if you wonder why this is interesting at all, you have to see the rest of Saudi Arabia because it's a country which is strictly divided between the sexes. In other words, as men, you are not simply supposed to be in the same physical space with women. And I noticed this in a very funny way. I left the Kaaba to eat something in downtown Mecca. I headed to the nearest Burger King restaurant. And I went there -- I noticed that there was a male section, which was carefully separated from the female section. And I had to pay, order and eat at the male section. "It's funny," I said to myself, "You can mingle with the opposite sex at the holy Kaaba, but not at the Burger King." Quite ironic. Ironic, and it's also, I think, quite telling. Because the Kaaba and the rituals around it are relics from the earliest phase of Islam, that of prophet Muhammad. And if there was a big emphasis at the time to separate men from women, the rituals around the Kaaba could have been designed accordingly. But apparently that was not an issue at the time. So the rituals came that way. This is also, I think, confirmed by the fact that the seclusion of women in creating a divided society is something that you also do not find in the Koran, the very core of Islam -- the divine core of Islam that all Muslims, and equally myself, believe. And I think it's not an accident that you don't find this idea in the very origin of Islam. Because many scholars who study the history of Islamic thought -- Muslim scholars or Westerners -- think that actually the practice of dividing men and women physically came as a later development in Islam, as Muslims adopted some preexisting cultures and traditions of the Middle East. Seclusion of women was actually a Byzantine and Persian practice, and Muslims adopted that and made that a part of their religion. And actually this is just one example of a much larger phenomenon. What we call today Islamic Law, and especially Islamic culture -- and there are many Islamic cultures actually; the one in Saudi Arabia is much different from where I come from in Istanbul or Turkey. But still, if you're going to speak about a Muslim culture, this has a core, the divine message, which began the religion, but then many traditions, perceptions, many practices were added on top of it. And these were traditions of the Middle East -- medieval traditions. And there are two important messages, or two lessons, to take from that reality. First of all, Muslims -- pious, conservative, believing Muslims who want to be loyal to their religion -- should not cling onto everything in their culture, thinking that that's divinely mandated. Maybe some things are bad traditions and they need to be changed. On the other hand, the Westerners who look at Islamic culture and see some troubling aspects should not readily conclude that this is what Islam ordains. Maybe it's a Middle Eastern culture that became confused with Islam. There is a practice called female circumcision. It's something terrible, horrible. It is basically an operation to deprive women of sexual pleasure. And Westerners, Europeans or Americans, who didn't know about this before faced this practice within some of the Muslim communities who migrated from North Africa. And they've thought, "Oh, what a horrible religion that is which ordains something like that." But actually when you look at female circumcision, you see that it has nothing to do with Islam, it's just a North African practice, which predates Islam. It was there for thousands of years. And quite tellingly, some Muslims do practice that. The Muslims in North Africa, not in other places. But also the non-Muslim communities of North Africa -- the Animists, even some Christians and even a Jewish tribe in North Africa is known to practice female circumcision. So what might look like a problem within Islamic faith might turn out to be a tradition that Muslims have subscribed to. The same thing can be said for honor killings, which is a recurrent theme in the Western media -- and which is, of course, a horrible tradition. And we see truly in some Muslim communities that tradition. But in the non-Muslim communities of the Middle East, such as some Christian communities, Eastern communities, you see the same practice. We had a tragic case of an honor killing within Turkey's Armenian community just a few months ago. Now these are things about general culture, but I'm also very much interested in political culture and whether liberty and democracy is appreciated, or whether there's an authoritarian political culture in which the state is supposed to impose things on the citizens. And it is no secret that many Islamic movements in the Middle East tend to be authoritarian, and some of the so-called "Islamic regimes" such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and the worst case was the Taliban in Afghanistan -- they are pretty authoritarian. No doubt about that. For example, in Saudi Arabia there is a phenomenon called the religious police. And the religious police imposes the supposed Islamic way of life on every citizen, by force -- like women are forced to cover their heads -- wear the hijab, the Islamic head cover. Now that is pretty authoritarian, and that's something I'm very much critical of. But when I realized that the non-Muslim, or the non-Islamic-minded actors in the same geography, sometimes behaved similarly, I realized that the problem maybe lies in the political culture of the whole region, not just Islam. Let me give you an example: in Turkey where I come from, which is a very hyper-secular republic, until very recently we used to have what I call secularism police, which would guard the universities against veiled students. In other words, they would force students to uncover their heads, and I think forcing people to uncover their head is as tyrannical as forcing them to cover it. It should be the citizen's decision. But when I saw that, I said, "Maybe the problem is just an authoritarian culture in the region, and some Muslims have been influenced by that. But the secular-minded people can be influenced by that. Maybe it's a problem of the political culture, and we have to think about how to change that political culture." Now these are some of the questions I had in mind a few years ago when I sat down to write a book. I said, "Well I will make a research about how Islam actually came to be what it is today, and what roads were taken and what roads could have been taken." The name of the book is "Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty." And as the subtitle suggests, I looked at Islamic tradition and the history of Islamic thought from the perspective of individual liberty, and I tried to find what are the strengths with regard to individual liberty. And there are strengths in Islamic tradition. Islam actually, as a monotheistic religion, which defined man as a responsible agent by itself, created the idea of the individual in the Middle East and saved it from the communitarianism, the collectivism of the tribe. You can derive many ideas from that. But besides that, I also saw problems within Islamic tradition. But one thing was curious: most of those problems turn out to be problems that emerged later, not from the very divine core of Islam, the Koran, but from, again, traditions and mentalities, or the interpretations of the Koran that Muslims made in the Middle Ages. The Koran, for example, doesn't condone stoning. There is no punishment on apostasy. There is no punishment on personal things like drinking. These things which make Islamic Law, the troubling aspects of Islamic Law, were later developed into later interpretations of Islam. Which means that Muslims can, today, look at those things and say, "Well, the core of our religion is here to stay with us. It's our faith, and we will be loyal to it. But we can change how it was interpreted, because it was interpreted according to the time and milieu in the Middle Ages. Now we are living in a different world with different values and different political systems." That interpretation is quite possible and feasible. Now if I were the only person thinking that way, we would be in trouble. But that's not the case at all. Actually, from the 19th century on, there's a whole revisionist, reformist -- whatever you call it -- tradition, a trend in Islamic thinking. And these were intellectuals or statesmen of the 19th century, and later, 20th century, which looked at Europe basically and saw that Europe has many things to admire, like science and technology. But not just that; also democracy, parliament, the idea of representation, the idea of equal citizenship. These Muslim thinkers and intellectuals and statesmen of the 19th century looked at Europe, saw these things. They said, "Why don't we have these things?" And they looked back at Islamic tradition, they saw that there are problematic aspects, but they're not the core of the religion, so maybe they can be re-understood, and the Koran can be reread in the modern world. That trend is generally called Islamic modernism, and it was advanced by intellectuals and statesmen, not just as an intellectual idea though, but also as a political program. And that's why actually in the 19th century the Ottoman Empire, which then covered the whole Middle East, made very important reforms -- reforms like giving Christians and Jews an equal citizenship status, accepting a constitution, accepting a representative parliament, advancing the idea of freedom of religion. And that's why the Ottoman Empire in its last decades turned into a proto-democracy, a constitutional monarchy, and freedom was a very important political value at the time. Similarly, in the Arab world, there was what the great Arab historian Albert Hourani defines as the Liberal Age. He has a book, "Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age," and the Liberal Age, he defines as 19th century and early 20th century. Quite notably, this was the dominant trend in the early 20th century among Islamic thinkers and statesmen and theologians. But there is a very curious pattern in the rest of the 20th century, because we see a sharp decline in this Islamic modernist line. And in place of that, what happens is that Islamism grows as an ideology which is authoritarian, which is quite strident, which is quite anti-Western, and which wants to shape society based on a utopian vision. So Islamism is the problematic idea that really created a lot of problems in the 20th century Islamic world. And even the very extreme forms of Islamism led to terrorism in the name of Islam -- which is actually a practice that I think is against Islam, but some, obviously, extremists did not think that way. But there is a curious question: If Islamic modernism was so popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries, why did Islamism become so popular in the rest of the 20th century? And this is a question, I think, which needs to be discussed carefully. And in my book, I went into that question as well. And actually you don't need to be a rocket scientist to understand that. You just look at the political history of the 20th century, and you see things have changed a lot. The context has changed. In the 19th century, when Muslims were looking at Europe as an example, they were independent; they were more self-confident. In the early 20th century, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the whole Middle East was colonized. And when you have colonization what do you have? You have anti-colonization. So Europe is not just an example now to emulate; it's an enemy to fight and to resist. So there's a very sharp decline in liberal ideas in the Muslim world, and what you see is more of a defensive, rigid, reactionary strain, which led to Arab socialism, Arab nationalism and ultimately to the Islamist ideology. And when the colonial period ended, what you had in place of that was, generally, secular dictators, which say they're a country, but did not bring democracy to the country, and established their own dictatorship. And I think the West, at least some powers in the West, particularly the United States, made the mistake of supporting those secular dictators, thinking that they were more helpful for their interests. But the fact that those dictators suppressed democracy in their country and suppressed Islamic groups in their country actually made the Islamists much more strident. So in the 20th century, you had this vicious cycle in the Arab world where you have a dictatorship suppressing its own people including the Islamic-pious, and they're reacting in reactionary ways. There was one country, though, which was able to escape or stay away from that vicious cycle. And that's the country where I come from; that's Turkey. Turkey has never been colonized, so it remained as an independent nation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. That's one thing to remember. They did not share the same anti-colonial hype that you can find in some other countries in the region. Secondly, and most importantly, Turkey became a democracy earlier than any of the countries we are talking about. In 1950, Turkey had the first free and fair elections, which ended the more autocratic secular regime, which was the beginning of Turkey. And the pious Muslims in Turkey saw that they can change the political system by voting. And they realize that democracy is something that is compatible with Islam, compatible with their values, and they've been supportive of democracy. That's an experience that not every other Muslim nation in the Middle East had until very recently. Secondly, in the past two decades, thanks to globalization, thanks to the market economy, thanks to the rise of a middle-class, we in Turkey see what I define as a rebirth of Islamic modernism. Now there's the more urban middle-class pious Muslims who, again, look at their tradition and see that there are some problems in the tradition, and they understand that they need to be changed and questioned and reformed. And they look at Europe, and they see an example, again, to follow. They see an example, at least, to take some inspiration from. That's why the E.U. process, Turkey's effort to join the E.U., has been supported inside Turkey by the Islamic-pious, while some secular nations were against that. Well that process has been a little bit blurred by the fact that not all Europeans are that welcoming -- but that's another discussion. But the pro-E.U. sentiment in Turkey in the past decade has become almost an Islamic cause and supported by the Islamic liberals and the secular liberals as well, of course. And thanks to that, Turkey has been able to reasonably create a success story in which Islam and the most pious understandings of Islam have become part of the democratic game, and even contributes to the democratic and economic advance of the country. And this has been an inspiring example right now for some of the Islamic movements or some of the countries in the Arab world. You must have all seen the Arab Spring, which began in Tunis and in Egypt. And Arab masses just revolted against their dictators. They were asking for democracy; they were asking for freedom. And they did not turn out to be the Islamist boogyman that the dictators were always using to justify their regime. They said that "we want freedom; we want democracy. We are Muslim believers, but we want to be living as free people in free societies." Of course, this is a long road. Democracy is not an overnight achievement; it's a process. But this is a promising era in the Muslim world. And I believe that the Islamic modernism which began in the 19th century, but which had a setback in the 20th century because of the political troubles of the Muslim world, is having a rebirth. And I think the getaway message from that would be that Islam, despite some of the skeptics in the West, has the potential in itself to create its own way to democracy, create its own way to liberalism, create its own way to freedom. They just should be allowed to work for that. Thanks so much. (Applause)
I have to say that I'm very glad to be here. I understand we have over 80 countries here, so that's a whole new paradigm for me to speak to all of these countries. In each country, I'm sure you have this thing called the parent-teacher conference. Do you know about the parent-teacher conference? Not the ones for your kids, but the one you had as a child, where your parents come to school and your teacher talks to your parents, and it's a little bit awkward. Well, I remember in third grade, I had this moment where my father, who never takes off from work, he's a classical blue collar, a working-class immigrant person, going to school to see his son, how he's doing, and the teacher said to him, he said, "You know, John is good at math and art." And he kind of nodded, you know? The next day I saw him talking to a customer at our tofu store, and he said, "You know, John's good at math." (Laughter) And that always stuck with me all my life. Why didn't Dad say art? Why wasn't it okay? Why? It became a question my entire life, and that's all right, because being good at math meant he bought me a computer, and some of you remember this computer, this was my first computer. Who had an Apple II? Apple II users, very cool. (Applause) As you remember, the Apple II did nothing at all. (Laughter) You'd plug it in, you'd type in it and green text would come out. It would say you're wrong most of the time. That was the computer we knew. That computer is a computer that I learned about going to MIT, my father's dream. And at MIT, however, I learned about the computer at all levels, and after, I went to art school to get away from computers, and I began to think about the computer as more of a spiritual space of thinking. And I was influenced by performance art -- so this is 20 years ago. I made a computer out of people. It was called the Human Powered Computer Experiment. I have a power manager, mouse driver, memory, etc., and I built this in Kyoto, the old capital of Japan. It's a room broken in two halves. I've turned the computer on, and these assistants are placing a giant floppy disk built out of cardboard, and it's put into the computer. And the floppy disk drive person wears it. (Laughter) She finds the first sector on the disk, and takes data off the disk and passes it off to, of course, the bus. So the bus diligently carries the data into the computer to the memory, to the CPU, the VRAM, etc., and it's an actual working computer. That's a bus, really. (Laughter) And it looks kind of fast. That's a mouse driver, where it's XY. (Laughter) It looks like it's happening kind of quickly, but it's actually a very slow computer, and when I realized how slow this computer was compared to how fast a computer is, it made me wonder about computers and technology in general. And so I'm going to talk today about four things, really. The first three things are about how I've been curious about technology, design and art, and how they intersect, how they overlap, and also a topic that I've taken on since four years ago I became the President of Rhode Island School of Design: leadership. And I'll talk about how I've looked to combine these four areas into a kind of a synthesis, a kind of experiment. So starting from technology, technology is a wonderful thing. When that Apple II came out, it really could do nothing. It could show text and after we waited a bit, we had these things called images. Remember when images were first possible with a computer, those gorgeous, full-color images? And then after a few years, we got CD-quality sound. It was incredible. You could listen to sound on the computer. And then movies, via CD-ROM. It was amazing. Remember that excitement? And then the browser appeared. The browser was great, but the browser was very primitive, very narrow bandwidth. Text first, then images, we waited, CD-quality sound over the Net, then movies over the Internet. Kind of incredible. And then the mobile phone occurred, text, images, audio, video. And now we have iPhone, iPad, Android, with text, video, audio, etc. You see this little pattern here? We're kind of stuck in a loop, perhaps, and this sense of possibility from computing is something I've been questioning for the last 10 or so years, and have looked to design, as we understand most things, and to understand design with our technology has been a passion of mine. And I have a small experiment to give you a quick design lesson. Designers talk about the relationship between form and content, content and form. Now what does that mean? Well, content is the word up there: fear. It's a four-letter word. It's a kind of a bad feeling word, fear. Fear is set in Light Helvetica, so it's not too stressful, and if you set it in Ultra Light Helvetica, it's like, "Oh, fear, who cares?" Right? (Laughter) You take the same Ultra Light Helvetica and make it big, and like, whoa, that hurts. Fear. So you can see how you change the scale, you change the form. Content is the same, but you feel differently. You change the typeface to, like, this typeface, and it's kind of funny. It's like pirate typeface, like Captain Jack Sparrow typeface. Arr! Fear! Like, aww, that's not fearful. That's actually funny. Or fear like this, kind of a nightclub typeface. (Laughter) Like, we gotta go to Fear. (Laughter) It's, like, amazing, right? (Laughter) (Applause) It just changes the same content. Or you make it -- The letters are separated apart, they're huddled together like on the deck of the Titanic, and you feel sorry for the letters, like, I feel the fear. You feel for them. Or you change the typeface to something like this. It's very classy. It's like that expensive restaurant, Fear. I can never get in there. (Laughter) It's just amazing, Fear. But that's form, content. If you just change one letter in that content, you get a much better word, much better content: free. "Free" is a great word. You can serve it almost any way. Free bold feels like Mandela free. It's like, yes, I can be free. Free even light feels kind of like, ah, I can breathe in free. It feels great. Or even free spread out, it's like, ah, I can breathe in free, so easily. And I can add in a blue gradient and a dove, and I have, like, Don Draper free. (Laughter) So you see that -- form, content, design, it works that way. It's a powerful thing. It's like magic, almost, like the magicians we've seen at TED. It's magic. Design does that. And I've been curious about how design and technology intersect, and I'm going to show you some old work I never really show anymore, to give you a sense of what I used to do. So -- yeah. So I made a lot of work in the '90s. This was a square that responds to sound. People ask me why I made that. It's not clear. (Laughter) But I thought it'd be neat for the square to respond to me, and my kids were small then, and my kids would play with these things, like, "Aaah," you know, they would say, "Daddy, aaah, aaah." You know, like that. We'd go to a computer store, and they'd do the same thing. And they'd say, "Daddy, why doesn't the computer respond to sound?" And it was really at the time I was wondering why doesn't the computer respond to sound? So I made this as a kind of an experiment at the time. And then I spent a lot of time in the space of interactive graphics and things like this, and I stopped doing it because my students at MIT got so much better than myself, so I had to hang up my mouse. But in '96, I made my last piece. It was in black and white, monochrome, fully monochrome, all in integer mathematics. It's called "Tap, Type, Write." It's paying a tribute to the wonderful typewriter that my mother used to type on all the time as a legal secretary. It has 10 variations. (Typing noise) (Typing noise) There's a shift. Ten variations. This is, like, spin the letter around. (Typing noises) This is, like, a ring of letters. (Typing noises) This is 20 years old, so it's kind of a -- Let's see, this is — I love the French film "The Red Balloon." Great movie, right? I love that movie. So, this is sort of like a play on that. (Typing noises) (Typewriter bell) It's peaceful, like that. (Laughter) I'll show this last one. This is about balance, you know. It's kind of stressful typing out, so if you type on this keyboard, you can, like, balance it out. (Laughter) If you hit G, life's okay, so I always say, "Hit G, and it's going to be all right. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. So that was 20 years ago, and I was always on the periphery of art. By being President of RISD I've gone deep into art, and art is a wonderful thing, fine art, pure art. You know, when people say, "I don't get art. I don't get it at all." That means art is working, you know? It's like, art is supposed to be enigmatic, so when you say, like, "I don't get it," like, oh, that's great. (Laughter) Art does that, because art is about asking questions, questions that may not be answerable. At RISD, we have this amazing facility called the Edna Lawrence Nature Lab. It has 80,000 samples of animal, bone, mineral, plants. You know, in Rhode Island, if an animal gets hit on the road, they call us up and we pick it up and stuff it. And why do we have this facility? Because at RISD, you have to look at the actual animal, the object, to understand its volume, to perceive it. At RISD, you're not allowed to draw from an image. And many people ask me, John, couldn't you just digitize all this? Make it all digital? Wouldn't it be better? And I often say, well, there's something good to how things used to be done. There's something very different about it, something we should figure out what is good about how we did it, even in this new era. And I have a good friend, he's a new media artist named Tota Hasegawa. He's based in London, no, actually it's in Tokyo, but when he was based in London, he had a game with his wife. He would go to antique shops, and the game was as such: When we look at an antique we want, we'll ask the shopkeeper for the story behind the antique, and if it's a good story, we'll buy it. So they'd go to an antique shop, and they'd look at this cup, and they'd say, "Tell us about this cup." And the shopkeeper would say, "It's old." (Laughter) "Tell us more." "Oh, it's really old." (Laughter) And he saw, over and over, the antique's value was all about it being old. And as a new media artist, he reflected, and said, you know, I've spent my whole career making new media art. People say, "Wow, your art, what is it?" It's new media. And he realized, it isn't about old or new. It's about something in between. It isn't about "old," the dirt, "new," the cloud. It's about what is good. A combination of the cloud and the dirt is where the action is at. You see it in all interesting art today, in all interesting businesses today. How we combine those two together to make good is very interesting. So art makes questions, and leadership is something that is asking a lot of questions. We aren't functioning so easily anymore. We aren't a simple authoritarian regime anymore. As an example of authoritarianism, I was in Russia one time traveling in St. Petersburg, at a national monument, and I saw this sign that says, "Do Not Walk On The Grass," and I thought, oh, I mean, I speak English, and you're trying to single me out. That's not fair. But I found a sign for Russian-speaking people, and it was the best sign ever to say no. It was like, "No swimming, no hiking, no anything." My favorite ones are "no plants." Why would you bring a plant to a national monument? I'm not sure. And also "no love." (Laughter) So that is authoritarianism. And what is that, structurally? It's a hierarchy. We all know that a hierarchy is how we run many systems today, but as we know, it's been disrupted. It is now a network instead of a perfect tree. It's a heterarchy instead of a hierarchy. And that's kind of awkward. And so today, leaders are faced with how to lead differently, I believe. This is work I did with my colleague Becky Bermont on creative leadership. What can we learn from artists and designers for how to lead? Because in many senses, a regular leader loves to avoid mistakes. Someone who's creative actually loves to learn from mistakes. A traditional leader is always wanting to be right, whereas a creative leader hopes to be right. And this frame is important today, in this complex, ambiguous space, and artists and designers have a lot to teach us, I believe. And I had a show in London recently where my friends invited me to come to London for four days to sit in a sandbox, and I said great. And so I sat in a sandbox for four days straight, six hours every day, six-minute appointments with anyone in London, and that was really bad. But I would listen to people, hear their issues, draw in the sand, try to figure things out, and it was kind of hard to figure out what I was doing. You know? It's all these one-on-one meetings for like four days. And it felt kind of like being president, actually. I was like, "Oh, this my job. President. I do a lot of meetings, you know?" And by the end of the experience, I realized why I was doing this. It's because leaders, what we do is we connect improbable connections and hope something will happen, and in that room I found so many connections between people across all of London, and so leadership, connecting people, is the great question today. Whether you're in the hierarchy or the heterarchy, it's a wonderful design challenge. And one thing I've been doing is doing some research on systems that can combine technology and leadership with an art and design perspective. Let me show you something I haven't shown anywhere, actually. So what this is, is a kind of a sketch, an application sketch I wrote in Python. You know how there's Photoshop? This is called Powershop, and the way it works is imagine an organization. You know, the CEO isn't ever at the top. The CEO's at the center of the organization. There may be different subdivisions in the organization, and you might want to look into different areas. For instance, green are areas doing well, red are areas doing poorly. You know, how do you, as the leader, scan, connect, make things happen? So for instance, you might open up a distribution here and find the different subdivisions in there, and know that you know someone in Eco, over here, and these people here are in Eco, the people you might engage with as CEO, people going across the hierarchy. And part of the challenge of the CEO is to find connections across areas, and so you might look in R&D, and here you see one person who crosses the two areas of interest, and it's a person important to engage. So you might want to, for instance, get a heads-up display on how you're interacting with them. How many coffees do you have? How often are you calling them, emailing them? What is the tenor of their email? How is it working out? Leaders might be able to use these systems to better regulate how they work inside the heterarchy. You can also imagine using technology like from Luminoso, the guys from Cambridge who were looking at deep text analysis. What is the tenor of your communications? So these kind of systems, I believe, are important. They're targeted social media systems around leaders. And I believe that this kind of perspective will only begin to grow as more leaders enter the space of art and design, because art and design lets you think like this, find different systems like this, and I've just begun thinking like this, so I'm glad to share that with you. So in closing, I want to thank all of you for your attention. Thanks very much. (Applause) (Applause)
What is bioenergy? Bioenergy is not ethanol. Bioenergy isn't global warming. Bioenergy is something which seems counterintuitive. Bioenergy is oil. It's gas. It's coal. And part of building that bridge to the future, to the point where we can actually see the oceans in a rational way, or put up these geo-spatial orbits that will twirl or do microwaves or stuff, is going to depend on how we understand bioenergy and manage it. And to do that, you really have to look first at agriculture. So we've been planting stuff for 11,000 years. And in the measure that we plant stuff, what we learn from agriculture is you've got to deal with pests, you've got to deal with all types of awful things, you've got to cultivate stuff. In the measure that you learn how to use water to cultivate, then you're going to be able to spread beyond the Nile. You're going to be able to power stuff, so irrigation makes a difference. Irrigation starts to make you be allowed to plant stuff where you want it, as opposed to where the rivers flood. You start getting this organic agriculture; you start putting machinery onto this stuff. Machinery, with a whole bunch of water, leads to very large-scale agriculture. You put together machines and water, and you get landscapes that look like this. And then you get sales that look like this. It's brute force. So what you've been doing in agriculture is you start out with something that's a reasonably natural system. You start taming that natural system. You put a lot of force behind that natural system. You put a whole bunch of pesticides and herbicides -- (Laughter) -- behind that natural system, and you end up with systems that look like this. And it's all brute force. And that's the way we've been approaching energy. So the lesson in agriculture is that you can actually change the system that's based on brute force as you start merging that system and learning that system and actually applying biology. And you move from a discipline of engineering, you move from a discipline of chemistry, into a discipline of biology. And probably one of the most important human beings on the planet is this guy behind me. This is a guy called Norman Borlaug. He won the Nobel Prize. He's got the Congressional Medal of Honor. He deserves all of this stuff. And he deserves this stuff because he probably has fed more people than any other human being alive because he researched how to put biology behind seeds. He did this in Mexico. The reason why India and China no longer have these massive famines is because Norman Borlaug taught them how to grow grains in a more efficient way and launched the Green Revolution. That is something that a lot of people have criticized. But of course, those are people who don't realize that China and India, instead of having huge amounts of starving people, are exporting grains. And the irony of this particular system is the place where he did the research, which was Mexico, didn't adopt this technology, ignored this technology, talked about why this technology should be thought about, but not really applied. And Mexico remains one of the largest grain importers on the planet because it doesn't apply technology that was discovered in Mexico. And in fact, hasn't recognized this man, to the point where there aren't statues of this man all over Mexico. There are in China and India. And the Institute that this guy ran has now moved to India. That is the difference between adopting technologies and discussing technologies. Now, it's not just that this guy fed a huge amount of people in the world. It's that this is the net effect in terms of what technology does, if you understand biology. What happened in agriculture? Well, if you take agriculture over a century, agriculture in about 1900 would have been recognizable to somebody planting a thousand years earlier. Yeah, the plows look different. The machines were tractors or stuff instead of mules, but the farmer would have understood: this is what the guy's doing, this is why he's doing it, this is where he's going. What really started to change in agriculture is when you started moving from this brute force engineering and chemistry into biology, and that's where you get your productivity increases. And as you do that stuff, here's what happens to productivity. Basically, you go from 250 hours to produce 100 bushels, to 40, to 15, to five. Agricultural labor productivity increased seven times, 1950 to 2000, whereas the rest of the economy increased about 2.5 times. This is an absolutely massive increase in how much is produced per person. The effect of this, of course, is it's not just amber waves of grain, it is mountains of stuff. And 50 percent of the EU budget is going to subsidize agriculture from mountains of stuff that people have overproduced. This would be a good outcome for energy. And of course, by now, you're probably saying to yourself, "Self, I thought I came to a talk about energy and here's this guy talking about biology." So where's the link between these two things? One of the ironies of this whole system is we're discussing what to do about a system that we don't understand. We don't even know what oil is. We don't know where oil comes from. I mean, literally, it's still a source of debate what this black river of stuff is and where it comes from. The best assumption, and one of the best guesses in this stuff, is that this stuff comes out of this stuff, that these things absorb sunlight, rot under pressure for millions of years, and you get these black rivers. Now, the interesting thing about that thesis -- if that thesis turns out to be true -- is that oil, and all hydrocarbons, turned out to be concentrated sunlight. And if you think of bioenergy, bioenergy isn't ethanol. Bioenergy is taking the sun, concentrating it in amoebas, concentrating it in plants, and maybe that's why you get these rainbows. And as you're looking at this system, if hydrocarbons are concentrated sunlight, then bioenergy works in a different way. And we've got to start thinking of oil and other hydrocarbons as part of these solar panels. Maybe that's one of the reasons why if you fly over west Texas, the types of wells that you're beginning to see don't look unlike those pictures of Kansas and those irrigated plots. This is how you farm oil. And as you think of farming oil and how oil has evolved, we started with this brute force approach. And then what did we learn? Then we learned we had to go bigger. And then what'd we learn? Then we have to go even bigger. And we are getting really destructive as we're going out and farming this bioenergy. These are the Athabasca tar sands, and there's an enormous amount -- first of mining, the largest trucks in the world are working here, and then you've got to pull out this black sludge, which is basically oil that doesn't flow. It's tied to the sand. And then you've got to use a lot of steam to separate it, which only works at today's oil prices. Coal. Coal turns out to be virtually the same stuff. It is probably plants, except that these have been burned and crushed under pressure. So you take something like this, you burn it, you put it under pressure, and likely as not, you get this. Although, again, I stress: we don't know. Which is curious as we debate all this stuff. But as you think of coal, this is what burned wheat kernels look like. Not entirely unlike coal. And of course, coalmines are very dangerous places because in some of these coalmines, you get gas. When that gas blows up, people die. So you're producing a biogas out of coal in some mines, but not in others. Any place you see a differential, there're some interesting questions. There's some questions as to what you should be doing with this stuff. But again, coal. Maybe the same stuff, maybe the same system, maybe bioenergy, and you're applying exactly the same technology. Here's your brute force approach. Once you get through your brute force approach, then you just rip off whole mountaintops. And you end up with the single largest source of carbon emissions, which are coal-fired gas plants. That is probably not the best use of bioenergy. As you think of what are the alternatives to this system -- it's important to find alternatives because it turns out that the U.S. is dwindling in its petroleum reserves, but it is not dwindling in its coal reserves, nor is China. There are huge coal reserves that are sitting out there, and we've got to start thinking of them as biological energy, because if we keep treating them as chemical energy, or engineering energy, we're going to be in deep doo-doo. Gas is a similar issue. Gas is also a biological product. And as you think of gas, well, you're familiar with gas. And here's a different way of mining coal. This is called coal bed methane. Why is this picture interesting? Because if coal turns out to be concentrated plant life, the reason why you may get a differential in gas output between one mine and another -- the reason why one mine may blow up and another one may not blow up -- may be because there's stuff eating that stuff and producing gas. This is a well-known phenomenon. (Laughter) You eat certain things, you produce a lot of gas. It may turn out that biological processes in coalmines have the same process. If that is true, then one of the ways of getting the energy out of coal may not be to rip whole mountaintops off, and it may not be to burn coal. It may be to have stuff process that coal in a biological fashion as you did in agriculture. That is what bioenergy is. It is not ethanol. It is not subsidies to a few companies. It is not importing corn into Iowa because you've built so many of these ethanol plants. It is beginning to understand the transition that occurred in agriculture, from brute force into biological force. And in the measure that you can do that, you can clean some stuff, and you can clean it pretty quickly. We already have some indicators of productivity on this stuff. OK, if you put steam into coal fields or petroleum fields that have been running for decades, you can get a really substantial increase, like an eight-fold increase, in your output. This is just the beginning stages of this stuff. And as you think of biomaterials, this guy -- who did part of the sequencing of the human genome, who just doubled the databases of genes and proteins known on earth by sailing around the world -- has been thinking about how you structure this. And there's a series of smart people thinking about this. And they've been putting together companies like Synthetic Genomics, like, a Cambria, like Codon, and what those companies are trying to do is to think of, how do you apply biological principles to avoid brute force? Think of it in the following terms. Think of it as beginning to program stuff for specific purposes. Think of the cell as a hardware. Think of the genes as a software. And in the measure that you begin to think of life as code that is interchangeable, that can become energy, that can become food, that can become fiber, that can become human beings, that can become a whole series of things, then you've got to shift your approach as to how you're going to structure and deal and think about energy in a very different way. What are the first principles of this stuff and where are we heading? This is one of the gentle giants on the planet. He's one of the nicest human beings you've ever met. His name is Hamilton Smith. He won the Nobel for figuring out how to cut genes -- something called restriction enzymes. He was at Hopkins when he did this, and he's such a modest guy that the day he won, his mother called him and said, "I didn't realize there was another Ham Smith at Hopkins. Do you know he just won the Nobel?" (Laughter) I mean, that was Mom, but anyway, this guy is just a class act. You find him at the bench every single day, working on a pipette and building stuff. And one of the things this guy just built are these things. What is this? This is the first transplant of naked DNA, where you take an entire DNA operating system out of one cell, insert it into a different cell, and have that cell boot up as a separate species. That's one month old. You will see stuff in the next month that will be just as important as this stuff. And as you think about this stuff and what the implications of this are, we're going to start not just converting ethanol from corn with very high subsidies. We're going to start thinking about biology entering energy. It is very expensive to process this stuff, both in economic terms and in energy terms. This is what accumulates in the tar sands of Alberta. These are sulfur blocks. Because as you separate that petroleum from the sand, and use an enormous amount of energy inside that vapor -- steam to separate this stuff -- you also have to separate out the sulfur. The difference between light crude and heavy crude -- well, it's about 14 bucks a barrel. That's why you're building these pyramids of sulfur blocks. And by the way, the scale on these things is pretty large. Now, if you can take part of the energy content out of doing this, you reduce the system, and you really do start applying biological principles to energy. This has to be a bridge to the point where you can get to wind, to the point where you can get to solar, to the point where you can get to nuclear -- and hopefully you won't build the next nuclear plant on a beautiful seashore next to an earthquake fault. (Laughter) Just a thought. But in the meantime, for the next decade at least, the name of the game is hydrocarbons. And be that oil, be that gas, be that coal, this is what we're dealing with. And before I make this talk too long, here's what's happening in the current energy system. 86 percent of the energy we consume are hydrocarbons. That means 86 percent of the stuff we're consuming are probably processed plants and amoebas and the rest of the stuff. And there's a role in here for conservation. There's a role in here for alternative stuff, but we've also got to get that other portion right. How we deal with that other portion is our bridge to the future. And as we think of this bridge to the future, one of the things you should ponder is: we are leaving about two-thirds of the oil today inside those wells. So we're spending an enormous amount of money and leaving most of the energy down there. Which, of course, requires more energy to go out and get energy. The ratios become idiotic by the time you get to ethanol. It may even be a one-to-one ratio on the energy input and the energy output. That is a stupid way of managing this system. Last point, last graph. One of the things that we've got to do is to stabilize oil prices. This is what oil prices look like, OK? This is a very bad system because what happens is your hurdle rate gets set very low. People come up with really smart ideas for solar panels, or for wind, or for something else, and then guess what? The oil price goes through the floor. That company goes out of business, and then you can bring the oil price back up. So if I had one closing and modest suggestion, let's set a stable oil price in Europe and the United States. How do you do that? Well, let's put a tax on oil that is a non-revenue tax, and it basically says for the next 20 years, the price of oil will be -- whatever you want, 35 bucks, 40 bucks. If the OPEC price falls below that, we tax it. If the OPEC price goes above that, the tax goes away. What does that do for entrepreneurs? What does it do for companies? It tells people, if you can produce energy for less than 35 bucks a barrel, or less than 40 bucks a barrel, or less than 50 bucks a barrel -- let's debate it -- you will have a business. But let's not put people through this cycle where it doesn't pay to research because your company will go out of business as OPEC drives alternatives and keeps bioenergy from happening. Thank you.
What's the scariest thing you've ever done? Or another way to say it is, what's the most dangerous thing that you've ever done? And why did you do it? I know what the most dangerous thing is that I've ever done because NASA does the math. You look back to the first five shuttle launches, the odds of a catastrophic event during the first five shuttle launches was one in nine. And even when I first flew in the shuttle back in 1995, 74 shuttle flight, the odds were still now that we look back about one in 38 or so -- one in 35, one in 40. Not great odds, so it's a really interesting day when you wake up at the Kennedy Space Center and you're going to go to space that day because you realize by the end of the day you're either going to be floating effortlessly, gloriously in space, or you'll be dead. You go into, at the Kennedy Space Center, the suit-up room, the same room that our childhood heroes got dressed in, that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got suited in to go ride the Apollo rocket to the moon. And I got my pressure suit built around me and rode down outside in the van heading out to the launchpad -- in the Astro van -- heading out to the launchpad, and as you come around the corner at the Kennedy Space Center, it's normally predawn, and in the distance, lit up by the huge xenon lights, is your spaceship -- the vehicle that is going to take you off the planet. The crew is sitting in the Astro van sort of hushed, almost holding hands, looking at that as it gets bigger and bigger. We ride the elevator up and we crawl in, on your hands and knees into the spaceship, one at a time, and you worm your way up into your chair and plunk yourself down on your back. And the hatch is closed, and suddenly, what has been a lifetime of both dreams and denial is becoming real, something that I dreamed about, in fact, that I chose to do when I was nine years old, is now suddenly within not too many minutes of actually happening. In the astronaut business -- the shuttle is a very complicated vehicle; it's the most complicated flying machine ever built. And in the astronaut business, we have a saying, which is, there is no problem so bad that you can't make it worse. (Laughter) And so you're very conscious in the cockpit; you're thinking about all of the things that you might have to do, all the switches and all the wickets you have to go through. And as the time gets closer and closer, this excitement is building. And then about three and a half minutes before launch, the huge nozzles on the back, like the size of big church bells, swing back and forth and the mass of them is such that it sways the whole vehicle, like the vehicle is alive underneath you, like an elephant getting up off its knees or something. And then about 30 seconds before launch, the vehicle is completely alive -- it is ready to go -- the APUs are running, the computers are all self-contained, it's ready to leave the planet. And 15 seconds before launch, this happens: (Video) Voice: 12, 11, 10, nine, eight, seven, six -- (Space shuttle preparing for takeoff) -- start, two, one, booster ignition, and liftoff of the space shuttle Discovery, returning to the space station, paving the way ... (Space shuttle taking off) Chris Hadfield: It is incredibly powerful to be on board one of these things. You are in the grip of something that is vastly more powerful than yourself. It's shaking you so hard you can't focus on the instruments in front of you. It's like you're in the jaws of some enormous dog and there's a foot in the small of your back pushing you into space, accelerating wildly straight up, shouldering your way through the air, and you're in a very complex place -- paying attention, watching the vehicle go through each one of its wickets with a steadily increasing smile on your face. After two minutes, those solid rockets explode off and then you just have the liquid engines, the hydrogen and oxygen, and it's as if you're in a dragster with your foot to the floor and accelerating like you've never accelerated. You get lighter and lighter, the force gets on us heavier and heavier. It feels like someone's pouring cement on you or something. Until finally, after about eight minutes and 40 seconds or so, we are finally at exactly the right altitude, exactly the right speed, the right direction, the engine shut off, and we're weightless. And we're alive. It's an amazing experience. But why would we take that risk? Why would you do something that dangerous? In my case the answer is fairly straightforward. I was inspired as a youngster that this was what I wanted to do. I watched the first people walk on the moon and to me, it was just an obvious thing -- I want to somehow turn myself into that. But the real question is, how do you deal with the danger of it and the fear that comes from it? How do you deal with fear versus danger? And having the goal in mind, thinking about where it might lead, directed me to a life of looking at all of the small details to allow this to become possible, to be able to launch and go help build a space station where you are on board a million-pound creation that's going around the world at five miles a second, eight kilometers a second, around the world 16 times a day, with experiments on board that are teaching us what the substance of the universe is made of and running 200 experiments inside. But maybe even more importantly, allowing us to see the world in a way that is impossible through any other means, to be able to look down and have -- if your jaw could drop, it would -- the jaw-dropping gorgeousness of the turning orb like a self-propelled art gallery of fantastic, constantly changing beauty that is the world itself. And you see, because of the speed, a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes for half a year. And the most magnificent part of all that is to go outside on a spacewalk. You are in a one-person spaceship that is your spacesuit, and you're going through space with the world. It's an entirely different perspective, you're not looking up at the universe, you and the Earth are going through the universe together. And you're holding on with one hand, looking at the world turn beside you. It's roaring silently with color and texture as it pours by mesmerizingly next to you. And if you can tear your eyes away from that and you look under your arm down at the rest of everything, it's unfathomable blackness, with a texture you feel like you could stick your hand into. and you are holding on with one hand, one link to the other seven billion people. And I was outside on my first spacewalk when my left eye went blind, and I didn't know why. Suddenly my left eye slammed shut in great pain and I couldn't figure out why my eye wasn't working. I was thinking, what do I do next? I thought, well maybe that's why we have two eyes, so I kept working. But unfortunately, without gravity, tears don't fall. So you just get a bigger and bigger ball of whatever that is mixed with your tears on your eye until eventually, the ball becomes so big that the surface tension takes it across the bridge of your nose like a tiny little waterfall and goes "goosh" into your other eye, and now I was completely blind outside the spaceship. So what's the scariest thing you've ever done? (Laughter) Maybe it's spiders. A lot of people are afraid of spiders. I think you should be afraid of spiders -- spiders are creepy and they've got long, hairy legs, and spiders like this one, the brown recluse -- it's horrible. If a brown recluse bites you, you end with one of these horrible, big necrotic things on your leg and there might be one right now sitting on the chair behind you, in fact. And how do you know? And so a spider lands on you, and you go through this great, spasmy attack because spiders are scary. But then you could say, well is there a brown recluse sitting on the chair beside me or not? I don't know. Are there brown recluses here? So if you actually do the research, you find out that in the world there are about 50,000 different types of spiders, and there are about two dozen that are venomous out of 50,000. And if you're in Canada, because of the cold winters here in B.C., there's about 720, 730 different types of spiders and there's one -- one -- that is venomous, and its venom isn't even fatal, it's just kind of like a nasty sting. And that spider -- not only that, but that spider has beautiful markings on it, it's like "I'm dangerous. I got a big radiation symbol on my back, it's the black widow." So, if you're even slightly careful you can avoid running into the one spider -- and it lives close the ground, you're walking along, you are never going to go through a spider web where a black widow bites you. Spider webs like this, it doesn't build those, it builds them down in the corners. And its a black widow because the female spider eats the male; it doesn't care about you. So in fact, the next time you walk into a spiderweb, you don't need to panic and go with your caveman reaction. The danger is entirely different than the fear. How do you get around it, though? How do you change your behavior? Well, next time you see a spiderweb, have a good look, make sure it's not a black widow spider, and then walk into it. And then you see another spiderweb and walk into that one. It's just a little bit of fluffy stuff. It's not a big deal. And the spider that may come out is no more threat to you than a lady bug or a butterfly. And then I guarantee you if you walk through 100 spiderwebs you will have changed your fundamental human behavior, your caveman reaction, and you will now be able to walk in the park in the morning and not worry about that spiderweb -- or into your grandma's attic or whatever, into your own basement. And you can apply this to anything. If you're outside on a spacewalk and you're blinded, your natural reaction would be to panic, I think. It would make you nervous and worried. But we had considered all the venom, and we had practiced with a whole variety of different spiderwebs. We knew everything there is to know about the spacesuit and we trained underwater thousands of times. And we don't just practice things going right, we practice things going wrong all the time, so that you are constantly walking through those spiderwebs. And not just underwater, but also in virtual reality labs with the helmet and the gloves so you feel like it's realistic. So when you finally actually get outside on a spacewalk, it feels much different than it would if you just went out first time. And even if you're blinded, your natural, panicky reaction doesn't happen. Instead you kind of look around and go, "Okay, I can't see, but I can hear, I can talk, Scott Parazynski is out here with me. He could come over and help me." We actually practiced incapacitated crew rescue, so he could float me like a blimp and stuff me into the airlock if he had to. I could find my own way back. It's not nearly as big a deal. And actually, if you keep on crying for a while, whatever that gunk was that's in your eye starts to dilute and you can start to see again, and Houston, if you negotiate with them, they will let you then keep working. We finished everything on the spacewalk and when we came back inside, Jeff got some cotton batting and took the crusty stuff around my eyes, and it turned out it was just the anti-fog, sort of a mixture of oil and soap, that got in my eye. And now we use Johnson's No More Tears, which we probably should've been using right from the very beginning. (Laughter) But the key to that is by looking at the difference between perceived danger and actual danger, where is the real risk? What is the real thing that you should be afraid of? Not just a generic fear of bad things happening. You can fundamentally change your reaction to things so that it allows you to go places and see things and do things that otherwise would be completely denied to you ... where you could see the hardpan south of the Sahara, or you can see New York City in a way that is almost dreamlike, or the unconscious gingham of Eastern Europe fields or the Great Lakes as a collection of small puddles. You can see the fault lines of San Francisco and the way the water pours out under the bridge, just entirely different than any other way that you could have if you had not found a way to conquer your fear. You see a beauty that otherwise never would have happened. It's time to come home at the end. This is our spaceship, the Soyuz, that little one. Three of us climb in, and then this spaceship detaches from the station and falls into the atmosphere. These two parts here actually melt, we jettison them and they burn up in the atmosphere. The only part that survives is the little bullet that we're riding in, and it falls into the atmosphere, and in essence you are riding a meteorite home, and riding meteorites is scary, and it ought to be. But instead of riding into the atmosphere just screaming, like you would if suddenly you found yourself riding a meteorite back to Earth -- (Laughter) -- instead, 20 years previously we had started studying Russian, and then once you learn Russian, then we learned orbital mechanics in Russian, and then we learned vehicle control theory, and then we got into the simulator and practiced over and over and over again. And in fact, you can fly this meteorite and steer it and land in about a 15-kilometer circle anywhere on the Earth. So in fact, when our crew was coming back into the atmosphere inside the Soyuz, we weren't screaming, we were laughing; it was fun. And when the great big parachute opened, we knew that if it didn't open there's a second parachute, and it runs on a nice little clockwork mechanism. So we came back, we came thundering back to Earth and this is what it looked like to land in a Soyuz, in Kazakhstan. (Video) Reporter: And you can see one of those search and recovery helicopters, once again that helicopter part of dozen such Russian Mi-8 helicopters. Touchdown -- 3:14 and 48 seconds, a.m. Central Time. CH: And you roll to a stop as if someone threw your spaceship at the ground and it tumbles end over end, but you're ready for it you're in a custom-built seat, you know how the shock absorber works. And then eventually the Russians reach in, drag you out, plunk you into a chair, and you can now look back at what was an incredible experience. You have taken the dreams of that nine-year-old boy, which were impossible and dauntingly scary, dauntingly terrifying, and put them into practice, and figured out a way to reprogram yourself, to change your primal fear so that it allowed you to come back with a set of experiences and a level of inspiration for other people that never could have been possible otherwise. Just to finish, they asked me to play that guitar. I know this song, and it's really a tribute to the genius of David Bowie himself, but it's also, I think, a reflection of the fact that we are not machines exploring the universe, we are people, and we're taking that ability to adapt and that ability to understand and the ability to take our own self-perception into a new place. (Music) ♫ This is Major Tom to ground control ♫ ♫ I've left forevermore ♫ ♫ And I'm floating in a most peculiar way ♫ ♫ And the stars look very different today ♫ ♫ For here am I floating in the tin can ♫ ♫ A last glimpse of the world ♫ ♫ Planet Earth is blue and there's so much left to do ♫ (Music) Fear not. (Applause) That's very nice of you. Thank you very much. Thank you.
I was listed on the online biography that said I was a design missionary. That's a bit lofty; I'm really more of something like a street walker. I spend a lot of time in urban areas looking for design, and studying design in the public sector. I take about 5,000 photographs a year, and I thought that I would edit from these, and try to come up with some images that might be appropriate and interesting to you. And I used three criteria: the first was, I thought I'd talk about real design within reach, design that's free, not design not quite within reach, as we're fondly known by our competition and competitors, but stuff that you can find on the streets, stuff that was free, stuff that was available to all people, and stuff that probably contains some other important messages. I'll use these sidewalks in Rio as an example. A very common public design done in the '50s. It's got a nice kind of flowing, organic form, very consistent with the Brazilian culture -- I think good design adds to culture. Wholly inconsistent with San Francisco or New York. But I think these are my sort of information highways: I live in much more of an analog world, where pedestrian traffic and interaction and diversity exchange, and where I think the simple things under our feet have a great amount of meaning to us. How did I get started in this business? I was a ceramic designer for about 10 years, and just loved utilitarian form -- simple things that we use every day, little compositions of color and surface on form. This led me to starting a company called Design Within Reach, a company dealing with simple forms, making good designers available to us, and also selling the personalities and character of the designers as well, and it seems to have worked. A couple of years into the process, I spent a lot of time in Europe traveling around, looking for design. And I had a bit of a wake-up call in Amsterdam: I was there going into the design stores, and mixing with our crowd of designers, and I recognized that a whole lot of stuff pretty much looked the same, and the effect of globalization has had that in our community also. We know a lot about what's going on with design around the world, and it's getting increasingly more difficult to find design that reflects a unique culture. I was walking around on the streets of Amsterdam and I recognized, you know, the big story from Amsterdam isn't what's in the design stores, it's what's out on the streets, and maybe it's self-explanatory, but a city that hasn't been taken over by modernism, that's preserved its kind of architecture and character, and where the bicycle plays an important part of the way in which people get around and where pedestrian rights are protected. And I write a newsletter that goes out every week, and I wrote an article about this, and it got such enormous response that I realized that design, that common design, that's in the public area means a lot to people, and establishes kind of a groundwork and a dialog. I then kind of thought about the other cities in Europe where I spend a lot of time looking for design, like Basel, where Vitra is located, or in northern Italy -- all cities where there are a whole lot of bicycles, and where pedestrian areas -- and I came to the conclusion that perhaps there was something about these important design centers that dealt with bicycles and foot traffic, and I'm sure the skeptic eye would say, no, the correlation there is that there are universities and schools where people can't afford cars, but it did seem that in many of these areas pedestrian traffic was protected. You wouldn't look at this and call this a designer bike: a designer bike is made of titanium or molybdenum. But I began looking at design in a place like Amsterdam and recognized, you know, the first job of design is to serve a social purpose. And so I look at this bike as not being a designer bike, but being a very good example of design. And since that time in Amsterdam, I spent an increasing amount of time in the cities, looking at design for common evidence of design that really isn't under so much of a designer's signature. I was in Buenos Aires very recently, and I went to see this bridge by Santiago Calatrava. He's a Spanish architect and designer. And the tourist brochures pointed me in the direction of this bridge -- I love bridges, metaphorically and symbolically and structurally -- and it was a bit of a disappointment, because of the sludge from the river was encrusted on it; it really wasn't in use. And I recognized that oftentimes design, when you're set up to see design, it can be a bit of a letdown. But there were lots of other things going on in this area: it was a kind of construction zone; a lot of buildings were going up. And, approaching a building from a distance, you don't see too much; you get a little closer, and you arrive at a nice little composition that might remind you of a Mondrian or a Diebenkorn or something. But to me it was an example of industrial materials with a little bit of colors and animation and a nice little still life -- kind of unintended piece of design. And going a little closer, you get a different perspective. I find these little vignettes, these little accidental pieces of design, to be refreshing. They give me, I don't know, a sense of correctness in the world and some visual delight in the knowledge that the building will probably never look as good as this simple industrial scaffolding that is there to serve. Down the road, there was another building, a nice visual structure: horizontal, vertical elements, little decorative lines going across, these magenta squiggles, the workmen being reduced to decorative elements, just a nice, kind of, breakup of the urban place. And, you know, that no longer exists. You've captured it for a moment, and finding this little still life's like listening to little songs or something: it gives me an enormous amount of pleasure. Antoine Predock designed a wonderful ball stadium in San Diego called Petco Park. A terrific use of local materials, but inside you could find some interior compositions. Some people go to baseball stadiums to look at games; I go and see design relationships. Just a wonderful kind of breakup of architecture, and the way that the trees form vertical elements. Red is a color in the landscape that is often on stop signs. It takes your attention; it has a great amount of emotion; it stares back at you the way that a figure might. Just a piece of barrier tape construction stuff in Italy. Construction site in New York: red having this kind of emotional power that's almost an equivalent with the way in which -- cuteness of puppies and such. Side street in Italy. Red drew me into this little composition, optimistic to me in the sense that maybe the public service's mailbox, door service, plumbing. It looks as if these different public services work together to create some nice little compositions. In Italy, you know, almost everything, kind of, looks good. Simple menus put on a board, achieving, kind of, the sort of balance. But I'm convinced that it's because you're walking around the streets and seeing things. Red can be comical: it can draw your attention to the poor little personality of the little fire hydrant suffering from bad civic planning in Havana. Color can animate simple blocks, simple materials: walking in New York, I'll stop. I don't always know why I take photographs of things. A nice visual composition of symmetry. Curves against sharp things. It's a comment on the way in which we deal with public seating in the city of New York. I've come across some other just, kind of, curious relationships of bollards on the street that have different interpretations, but -- these things amuse me. Sometimes a trash can -- this is just in the street in San Francisco -- a trash can that's been left there for 18 months creates a nice 45-degree angle against these other relationships, and turns a common parking spot into a nice little piece of sculpture. So, there's this sort of silent hand of design at work that I see in places that I go. Havana is a wonderful area. It's quite free of commercial clutter: you don't see our logos and brands and names, and therefore you're alert to things physically. And this is a great protection of a pedestrian zone, and the repurposing of some colonial cannons to do that. And Cuba needs to be far more resourceful, because of the blockades and things, but a really wonderful playground. I've often wondered why Italy is really a leader in modern design. In our area, in furnishings, they're sort of way at the top. The Dutch are good also, but the Italians are good. And I came across this little street in Venice, where the communist headquarters were sharing a wall with this Catholic shrine. And I realized that, you know, Italy is a place where they can accept these different ideologies and deal with diversity and not have the problem, or they can choose to ignore them, but these -- you don't have warring factions, and I think that maybe the tolerance of the absurdity which has made Italy so innovative and so tolerant. The past and the present work quite well together in Italy also, and I think that it's recognizable there, and has an important effect on culture, because their public spaces are protected, their sidewalks are protected, and you're actually able to confront these things physically, and I think this helps people get over their fear of modernism and other such things. A change might be a typical street corner in San Francisco. And I use this -- this is, sort of, what I consider to be urban spam. I notice this stuff because I walk a lot, but here, private industry is really kind of making a mess of the public sector. And as I look at it, I sort of say, you know, the publications that report on problems in the urban area also contribute to it, and it's just my call to say to all of us, public policy won't change this at all; private industry has to work to take things like this seriously. The extreme might be in Italy where, again, there's kind of some type of control over what's happening in the environment is very evident, even in the way that they sell and distribute periodicals. I walk to work every day or ride my scooter, and I come down and park in this little spot. And I came down one day, and all the bikes were red. Now, this is not going to impress you guys who Photoshop, and can do stuff, but this was an actual moment when I got off my bike, and I looked and I thought, it's as if all of my biker brethren had kind of gotten together and conspired to make a little statement. And it reminded me that -- to keep in the present, to look out for these kinds of things. It gave me possibilities for wonder -- if maybe it's a yellow day in San Francisco, and we could all agree, and create some installations. But it also reminded me of the power of pattern and repetition to make an effect in our mind. And I don't know if there's a stronger kind of effect than pattern and the way it unites kind of disparate elements. I was at the art show in Miami in December, and spent a couple of hours looking at fine art, and amazed at the prices of art and how expensive it is, but having a great time looking at it. And I came outside, and the valets for this car service had created, you know, quite a nice little collage of these car keys, and my closest equivalent were a group of prayer tags that I had seen in Tokyo. And I thought that if pattern can unite these disparate elements, it can do just about anything. I don't have very many shots of people, because they kind of get in the way of studying pure form. I was in a small restaurant in Spain, having lunch -- one of those nice days where you had the place kind of to yourself, and you have a glass of wine, and enjoying the local area and the culture and the food and the quiet, and feeling very lucky, and a bus load of tourists arrived, emptied out, filled up the restaurant. In a very short period of time, completely changed the atmosphere and character with loud voices and large bodies and such, and we had to get up and leave; it was just that uncomfortable. And at that moment, the sun came out, and through this perforated screen, a pattern was cast over these bodies and they kind of faded into the rear, and we left the restaurant kind of feeling O.K. about stuff. And I do think pattern has the capability of eradicating some of the most evil forces of society, such as bad form in restaurants, but quite seriously, it was a statement to me that one thing that you do, sort of, see is the aggressive nature of the industrial world has produced -- kind of, large masses of things, and when you -- in monoculture, and I think the preservation of diversity in culture is something that's important to us. The last shots that I have deal with -- coming back to this theme of sidewalks, and I wanted to say something here about -- I'm, kind of, optimistic, you know. Post-Second World War, the influence of the automobile has really been devastating in a lot of our cities. A lot of urban areas have been converted into parking lots in a sort of indiscriminate use. A lot of the planning departments became subordinated to the transportation department. It's as easy to rag on cars as it is on Wal-Mart; I'm not going to do that. But they're real examples in urbanization and the change that's occurred in the last number of years, and the heightened sensitivity to the importance of our urban environments as cultural centers. I think that they are, that the statements that we make in this public sector are our contributions to a larger whole. Cities are the place where we're most likely to encounter diversity and to mix with other people. We go there for stimulation in art and all those other things. But I think people have recognized the sanctity of our urban areas. A place like Chicago has really reached kind of a level of international stature. The U.S. is actually becoming a bit of a leader in kind of enlightened urban planning and renewal, and I want to single out a place like Chicago, where I look at some guy like Mayor Daley as a bit of a design hero for being able to work through the political processes and all that to improve an area. You would expect a city like this to have upgraded flower boxes on Michigan Avenue where wealthy people shop, but if you actually go along the street you find the flower boxes change from street to street: there's actual diversity in the plants. And the idea that a city group can maintain different types of foliage is really quite exceptional. There are common elements of this that you'll see throughout Chicago, and then there are your big-D design statements: the Pritzker Pavilion done by Frank Gehry. My measure of this as being an important bit of design is not so much the way that it looks, but the fact that it performs a very important social function. There are a lot of free concerts, for example, that go on in this area; it has a phenomenal acoustic system. But the commitment that the city has made to the public area is significant, and almost an international model. I work on the mayor's council in San Francisco, on the International Design Council for Mayors, and Chicago is looked at as the pinnacle, and I really would like to salute Mayor Daley and the folks there. I thought that I should include at least one shot of technology for you guys. This is also in Millennium Park in Chicago, where the Spanish artist-designer Plensa has created, kind of, a digital readout in this park that reflects back the characters and personalities of the people in this area. And it's a welcoming area, I think, inclusive of diversity, reflective of diversity, and I think this marriage of both technology and art in the public sector is an area where the U.S. can really take a leadership role, and Chicago is one example. Thank you very much.
Have you ever wondered why extremism seems to have been on the rise in Muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decade? Have you ever wondered how such a situation can be turned around? Have you ever looked at the Arab uprisings and thought, "How could we have predicted that?" or "How could we have better prepared for that?" Well my personal story, my personal journey, what brings me to the TED stage here today, is a demonstration of exactly what's been happening in Muslim-majority countries over the course of the last decades, at least, and beyond. I want to share some of that story with you, but also some of my ideas around change and the role of social movements in creating change in Muslim-majority societies. So let me begin by first of all giving a very, very brief history of time, if I may indulge. In medieval societies there were defined allegiances. An identity was defined primarily by religion. And then we moved on into an era in the 19th century with the rise of a European nation-state where identities and allegiances were defined by ethnicity. So identity was primarily defined by ethnicity, and the nation-state reflected that. In the age of globalization, we moved on. I call it the era of citizenship -- where people could be from multi-racial, multi-ethnic backgrounds, but all be equal as citizens in a state. You could be American-Italian; you could be American-Irish; you could be British-Pakistani. But I believe now that we're moving into a new age, and that age The New York Times dubbed recently as "the age of behavior." How I define the age of behavior is a period of transnational allegiances, where identity is defined more so by ideas and narratives. And these ideas and narratives that bump people across borders are increasingly beginning to affect the way in which people behave. Now this is not all necessarily good news, because it's also my belief that hatred has gone global just as much as love. But actually it's my belief that the people who've been truly capitalizing on this age of behavior, up until now, up until recent times, up until the last six months, the people who have been capitalizing most on the age of behavior and the transnational allegiances, using digital activism and other sorts of borderless technologies, those who've been benefiting from this have been extremists. And that's something which I'd like to elaborate on. If we look at Islamists, if we look at the phenomenon of far-right fascists, one thing they've been very good at, one thing that they've actually been exceeding in, is communicating across borders, using technologies to organize themselves, to propagate their message and to create truly global phenomena. Now I should know, because for 13 years of my life, I was involved in an extreme Islamist organization. And I was actually a potent force in spreading ideas across borders, and I witnessed the rise of Islamist extremism as distinct from Islam the faith, and the way in which it influenced my co-religionists across the world. And my story, my personal story, is truly evidence for the age of behavior that I'm attempting to elaborate upon here. I was, by the way -- I'm an Essex lad, born and raised in Essex in the U.K. Anyone who's from England knows the reputation we have from Essex. But having been born in Essex, at the age of 16, I joined an organization. At the age of 17, I was recruiting people from Cambridge University to this organization. At the age of 19, I was on the national leadership of this organization in the U.K. At the age of 21, I was co-founding this organization in Pakistan. At the age of 22, I was co-founding this organization in Denmark. By the age of 24, I found myself convicted in prison in Egypt, being blacklisted from three countries in the world for attempting to overthrow their governments, being subjected to torture in Egyptian jails and sentenced to five years as a prisoner of conscience. Now that journey, and what took me from Essex all the way across the world -- by the way, we were laughing at democratic activists. We felt they were from the age of yesteryear. We felt that they were out of date. I learned how to use email from the extremist organization that I used. I learned how to effectively communicate across borders without being detected. Eventually I was detected, of course, in Egypt. But the way in which I learned to use technology to my advantage was because I was within an extremist organization that was forced to think beyond the confines of the nation-state. The age of behavior: where ideas and narratives were increasingly defining behavior and identity and allegiances. So as I said, we looked to the status quo and ridiculed it. And it's not just Islamist extremists that did this. But even if you look across the mood music in Europe of late, far-right fascism is also on the rise. A form of anti-Islam rhetoric is also on the rise and it's transnational. And the consequences that this is having is that it's affecting the political climate across Europe. What's actually happening is that what were previously localized parochialisms, individual or groupings of extremists who were isolated from one another, have become interconnected in a globalized way and have thus become, or are becoming, mainstream. Because the Internet and connection technologies are connecting them across the world. If you look at the rise of far-right fascism across Europe of late, you will see some things that are happening that are influencing domestic politics, yet the phenomenon is transnational. In certain countries, mosque minarets are being banned. In others, headscarves are being banned. In others, kosher and halal meat are being banned, as we speak. And on the flip side, we have transnational Islamist extremists doing the same thing across their own societies. And so they are pockets of parochialism that are being connected in a way that makes them feel like they are mainstream. Now that never would have been possible before. They would have felt isolated, until these sorts of technologies came around and connected them in a way that made them feel part of a larger phenomenon. Where does that leave democracy aspirants? Well I believe they're getting left far behind. And I'll give you an example here at this stage. If any of you remembers the Christmas Day bomb plot: there's a man called Anwar al-Awlaki. As an American citizen, ethnically a Yemeni, in hiding currently in Yemen, who inspired a Nigerian, son of the head of Nigeria's national bank. This Nigerian student studied in London, trained in Yemen, boarded a flight in Amsterdam to attack America. In the meanwhile, the Old mentality with a capital O, was represented by his father, the head of the Nigerian bank, warning the CIA that his own son was about to attack, and this warning fell on deaf ears. The Old mentality with a capital O, as represented by the nation-state, not yet fully into the age of behavior, not recognizing the power of transnational social movements, got left behind. And the Christmas Day bomber almost succeeded in attacking the United States of America. Again with the example of the far right: that we find, ironically, xenophobic nationalists are utilizing the benefits of globalization. So why are they succeeding? And why are democracy aspirants falling behind? Well we need to understand the power of the social movements who understand this. And a social movement is comprised, in my view, it's comprised of four main characteristics. It's comprised of ideas and narratives and symbols and leaders. I'll talk you through one example, and that's the example that everyone here will be aware of, and that's the example of Al-Qaeda. If I asked you to think of the ideas of Al-Qaeda, that's something that comes to your mind immediately. If I ask you to think of their narratives -- the West being at war with Islam, the need to defend Islam against the West -- these narratives, they come to your mind immediately. Incidentally, the difference between ideas and narratives: the idea is the cause that one believes in; and the narrative is the way to sell that cause -- the propaganda, if you like, of the cause. So the ideas and the narratives of Al-Qaeda come to your mind immediately. If I ask you to think of their symbols and their leaders, they come to your mind immediately. One of their leaders was killed in Pakistan recently. So these symbols and these leaders come to your mind immediately. And that's the power of social movements. They're transnational, and they bond around these ideas and narratives and these symbols and these leaders. However, if I ask your minds to focus currently on Pakistan, and I ask you to think of the symbols and the leaders for democracy in Pakistan today, you'll be hard pressed to think beyond perhaps the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Which means, by definition, that particular leader no longer exists. One of the problems we're facing is, in my view, that there are no globalized, youth-led, grassroots social movements advocating for democratic culture across Muslim-majority societies. There is no equivalent of the Al-Qaeda, without the terrorism, for democracy across Muslim-majority societies. There are no ideas and narratives and leaders and symbols advocating the democratic culture on the ground. So that begs the next question. Why is it that extremist organizations, whether of the far-right or of the Islamist extremism -- Islamism meaning those who wish to impose one version of Islam over the rest of society -- why is it that they are succeeding in organizing in a globalized way, whereas those who aspire to democratic culture are falling behind? And I believe that's for four reasons. I believe, number one, it's complacency. Because those who aspire to democratic culture are in power, or have societies that are leading globalized, powerful societies, powerful countries. And that level of complacency means they don't feel the need to advocate for that culture. The second, I believe, is political correctness. That we have a hesitation in espousing the universality of democratic culture because we are associating that -- we associate believing in the universality of our values -- with extremists. Yet actually, whenever we talk about human rights, we do say that human rights are universal. But actually going out to propagate that view is associated with either neoconservativism or with Islamist extremism. To go around saying that I believe democratic culture is the best that we've arrived at as a form of political organizing is associated with extremism. And the third, democratic choice in Muslim-majority societies has been relegated to a political choice, meaning political parties in many of these societies ask people to vote for them as the democratic party, but then the other parties ask them to vote for them as the military party -- wanting to rule by military dictatorship. And then you have a third party saying, "Vote for us; we'll establish a theocracy." So democracy has become merely one political choice among many other forms of political choices available in those societies. And what happens as a result of this is, when those parties are elected, and inevitably they fail, or inevitably they make political mistakes, democracy takes the blame for their political mistakes. And then people say, "We've tried democracy. It doesn't really work. Let's bring the military back again." And the fourth reason, I believe, is what I've labeled here on the slide as the ideology of resistance. What I mean by that is, if the world superpower today was a communist, it would be much easier for democracy activists to use democracy activism as a form of resistance against colonialism, than it is today with the world superpower being America, occupying certain lands and also espousing democratic ideals. So roughly these four reasons make it a lot more difficult for democratic culture to spread as a civilizational choice, not merely as a political choice. When talking about those reasons, let's break down certain preconceptions. Is it just about grievances? Is it just about a lack of education? Well statistically, the majority of those who join extremist organizations are highly educated. Statistically, they are educated, on average, above the education levels of Western society. Anecdotally, we can demonstrate that if poverty was the only factor, well Bin Laden is from one of the richest families in Saudi Arabia. His deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was a pediatrician -- not an ill-educated man. International aid and development has been going on for years, but extremism in those societies, in many of those societies, has been on the rise. And what I believe is missing is genuine grassroots activism on the ground, in addition to international aid, in addition to education, in addition to health. Not exclusive to these things, but in addition to them, is propagating a genuine demand for democracy on the ground. And this is where I believe neoconservatism had it upside-down. Neoconservatism had the philosophy that you go in with a supply-led approach to impose democratic values from the top down. Whereas Islamists and far-right organizations, for decades, have been building demand for their ideology on the grassroots. They've been building civilizational demand for their values on the grassroots, and we've been seeing those societies slowly transition to societies that are increasingly asking for a form of Islamism. Mass movements in Pakistan have been represented after the Arab uprisings mainly by organizations claiming for some form of theocracy, rather than for a democratic uprising. Because since pre-partition, they've been building demand for their ideology on the ground. And what's needed is a genuine transnational youth-led movement that works to actively advocate for the democratic culture -- which is necessarily more than just elections. But without freedom of speech, you can't have free and fair elections. Without human rights, you don't have the protection granted to you to campaign. Without freedom of belief, you don't have the right to join organizations. So what's needed is those organizations on the ground advocating for the democratic culture itself to create the demand on the ground for this culture. What that will do is avoid the problem I was talking about earlier, where currently we have political parties presenting democracy as merely a political choice in those societies alongside other choices such as military rule and theocracy. Whereas if we start building this demand on the ground on a civilizational level, rather than merely on a political level, a level above politics -- movements that are not political parties, but are rather creating this civilizational demand for this democratic culture. What we'll have in the end is this ideal that you see on the slide here -- the ideal that people should vote in an existing democracy, not for a democracy. But to get to that stage, where democracy builds the fabric of society and the political choices within that fabric, but are certainly not theocratic and military dictatorship -- i.e. you're voting in a democracy, in an existing democracy, and that democracy is not merely one of the choices at the ballot box. To get to that stage, we genuinely need to start building demand in those societies on the ground. Now to conclude, how does that happen? Well, Egypt is a good starting point. The Arab uprisings have demonstrated that this is already beginning. But what happened in the Arab uprisings and what happened in Egypt was particularly cathartic for me. What happened there was a political coalition gathered together for a political goal, and that was to remove the leader. We need to move one step beyond that now. We need to see how we can help those societies move from political coalitions, loosely based political coalitions, to civilizational coalitions that are working for the ideals and narratives of the democratic culture on the ground. Because it's not enough to remove a leader or ruler or dictator. That doesn't guarantee that what comes next will be a society built on democratic values. But generally, the trends that start in Egypt have historically spread across the MENA region, the Middle East and North Africa region. So when Arab socialism started in Egypt, it spread across the region. In the '80s and '90s when Islamism started in the region, it spread across the MENA region as a whole. And the aspiration that we have at the moment -- as young Arabs are proving today and instantly rebranding themselves as being prepared to die for more than just terrorism -- is that there is a chance that democratic culture can start in the region and spread across to the rest of the countries that are surrounding that. But that will require helping these societies transition from having merely political coalitions to building genuinely grassroots-based social movements that advocate for the democratic culture. And we've made a start for that in Pakistan with a movement called Khudi, where we are working on the ground to encourage the youth to create genuine buy-in for the democratic culture. And it's with that thought that I'll end. And my time is up, and thank you for your time. (Applause)
This was in an area called Wellawatta, a prime residential area in Colombo. We stood on the railroad tracks that ran between my friend's house and the beach. The tracks are elevated about eight feet from the waterline normally, but at that point the water had receded to a level three or four feet below normal. I'd never seen the reef here before. There were fish caught in rock pools left behind by the receding water. Some children jumped down and ran to the rock pools with bags. They were trying to catch fish. No one realized that this was a very bad idea. The people on the tracks just continued to watch them. I turned around to check on my friend's house. Then someone on the tracks screamed. Before I could turn around, everyone on the tracks was screaming and running. The water had started coming back. It was foaming over the reef. The children managed to run back onto the tracks. No one was lost there. But the water continued to climb. In about two minutes, it had reached the level of the railroad tracks and was coming over it. We had run about 100 meters by this time. It continued to rise. I saw an old man standing at his gate, knee-deep in water, refusing to move. He said he'd lived his whole life there by the beach, and that he would rather die there than run. A boy broke away from his mother to run back into his house to get his dog, who was apparently afraid. An old lady, crying, was carried out of her house and up the road by her son. The slum built on the railroad reservation between the sea and the railroad tracks was completely swept away. Since this was a high-risk location, the police had warned the residents, and no one was there when the water rose. But they had not had any time to evacuate any belongings. For hours afterwards, the sea was strewn with bits of wood for miles around -- all of this was from the houses in the slum. When the waters subsided, it was as if it had never existed. This may seem hard to believe -- unless you've been reading lots and lots of news reports -- but in many places, after the tsunami, villagers were still terrified. When what was a tranquil sea swallows up people, homes and long-tail boats -- mercilessly, without warning -- and no one can tell you anything reliable about whether another one is coming, I'm not sure you'd want to calm down either. One of the scariest things about the tsunami that I've not seen mentioned is the complete lack of information. This may seem minor, but it is terrifying to hear rumor after rumor after rumor that another tidal wave, bigger than the last, will be coming at exactly 1 p.m., or perhaps tonight, or perhaps ... You don't even know if it is safe to go back down to the water, to catch a boat to the hospital. We think that Phi Phi hospital was destroyed. We think this boat is going to Phuket hospital, but if it's too dangerous to land at its pier, then perhaps it will go to Krabi instead, which is more protected. We don't think another wave is coming right away. At the Phi Phi Hill Resort, I was tucked into the corner furthest away from the television, but I strained to listen for information. They reported that there was an 8.5 magnitude earthquake in Sumatra, which triggered the massive tsunami. Having this news was comforting in some small way to understand what had just happened to us. However, the report focused on what had already occurred and offered no information on what to expect now. In general, everything was merely hearsay and rumor, and not a single person I spoke to for over 36 hours knew anything with any certainty. Those were two accounts of the Asian tsunami from two Internet blogs that essentially sprang up after it occurred. I'm now going to show you two video segments from the tsunami that also were shown on blogs. I should warn you, they're pretty powerful. One from Thailand, and the second one from Phuket as well. (Screaming) Voice 1: It's coming in. It's coming again. Voice 2: It's coming again? Voice 1: Yeah. It's coming again. Voice 2: Come get inside here. Voice 1: It's coming again. Voice 2: New wave? Voice 1: It's coming again. New wave! [Unclear] (Screaming) They called me out here. James Surowiecki: Phew. Those were both on this site: waveofdestruction.org. In the world of blogs, there's going to be before the tsunami and after the tsunami, because one of the things that happened in the wake of the tsunami was that, although initially -- that is, in that first day -- there was actually a kind of dearth of live reporting, there was a dearth of live video and some people complained about this. They said, "The blogsters let us down." What became very clear was that, within a few days, the outpouring of information was immense, and we got a complete and powerful picture of what had happened in a way that we never had been able to get before. And what you had was a group of essentially unorganized, unconnected writers, video bloggers, etc., who were able to come up with a collective portrait of a disaster that gave us a much better sense of what it was like to actually be there than the mainstream media could give us. And so in some ways the tsunami can be seen as a sort of seminal moment, a moment in which the blogosphere came, to a certain degree, of age. Now, I'm going to move now from this kind of -- the sublime in the traditional sense of the word, that is to say, awe-inspiring, terrifying -- to the somewhat more mundane. Because when we think about blogs, I think for most of us who are concerned about them, we're primarily concerned with things like politics, technology, etc. And I want to ask three questions in this talk, in the 10 minutes that remain, about the blogosphere. The first one is, What does it tell us about our ideas, about what motivates people to do things? The second is, Do blogs genuinely have the possibility of accessing a kind of collective intelligence that has previously remained, for the most part, untapped? And then the third part is, What are the potential problems, or the dark side of blogs as we know them? OK, the first question: What do they tell us about why people do things? One of the fascinating things about the blogosphere specifically, and, of course, the Internet more generally -- and it's going to seem like a very obvious point, but I think it is an important one to think about -- is that the people who are generating these enormous reams of content every day, who are spending enormous amounts of time organizing, linking, commenting on the substance of the Internet, are doing so primarily for free. They are not getting paid for it in any way other than in the attention and, to some extent, the reputational capital that they gain from doing a good job. And this is -- at least, to a traditional economist -- somewhat remarkable, because the traditional account of economic man would say that, basically, you do things for a concrete reward, primarily financial. But instead, what we're finding on the Internet -- and one of the great geniuses of it -- is that people have found a way to work together without any money involved at all. They have come up with, in a sense, a different method for organizing activity. The Yale Law professor Yochai Benkler, in an essay called "Coase's Penguin," talks about this open-source model, which we're familiar with from Linux, as being potentially applicable in a whole host of situations. And, you know, if you think about this with the tsunami, what you have is essentially a kind of an army of local journalists, who are producing enormous amounts of material for no reason other than to tell their stories. That's a very powerful idea, and it's a very powerful reality. And it's one that offers really interesting possibilities for organizing a whole host of activities down the road. So, I think the first thing that the blogosphere tells us is that we need to expand our idea of what counts as rational, and we need to expand our simple equation of value equals money, or, you have to pay for it to be good, but that in fact you can end up with collectively really brilliant products without any money at all changing hands. There are a few bloggers -- somewhere maybe around 20, now -- who do, in fact, make some kind of money, and a few who are actually trying to make a full-time living out of it, but the vast majority of them are doing it because they love it or they love the attention, or whatever it is. So, Howard Rheingold has written a lot about this and, I think, is writing about this more, but this notion of voluntary cooperation is an incredibly powerful one, and one worth thinking about. The second question is, What does the blogosphere actually do for us, in terms of accessing collective intelligence? You know, as Chris mentioned, I wrote a book called "The Wisdom of Crowds." And the premise of "The Wisdom of Crowds" is that, under the right conditions, groups can be remarkably intelligent. And they can actually often be smarter than even the smartest person within them. The simplest example of this is if you ask a group of people to do something like guess how many jellybeans are in a jar. If I had a jar of jellybeans and I asked you all to guess how many jellybeans were in that jar, your average guess would be remarkably good. It would be somewhere probably within three and five percent of the number of beans in the jar, and it would be better than 90 to 95 percent of you. There may be one or two of you who are brilliant jelly bean guessers, but for the most part the group's guess would be better than just about all of you. And what's fascinating is that you can see this phenomenon at work in many more complicated situations. For instance, if you look at the odds on horses at a racetrack, they predict almost perfectly how likely a horse is to win. In a sense, the group of betters at the racetrack is forecasting the future, in probabilistic terms. You know, if you think about something like Google, which essentially is relying on the collective intelligence of the Web to seek out those sites that have the most valuable information -- we know that Google does an exceptionally good job of doing that, and it does that because, collectively, this disorganized thing we call the "World Wide Web" actually has a remarkable order, or a remarkable intelligence in it. And this, I think, is one of the real promises of the blogosphere. Dan Gillmor -- whose book "We the Media" is included in the gift pack -- has talked about it as saying that, as a writer, he's recognized that his readers know more than he does. And this is a very challenging idea. It's a very challenging idea to mainstream media. It's a very challenging idea to anyone who has invested an enormous amount of time and expertise, and who has a lot of energy invested in the notion that he or she knows better than everyone else. But what the blogosphere offers is the possibility of getting at the kind of collective, distributive intelligence that is out there, and that we know is available to us if we can just figure out a way of accessing it. Each blog post, each blog commentary may not, in and of itself, be exactly what we're looking for, but collectively the judgment of those people posting, those people linking, more often than not is going to give you a very interesting and enormously valuable picture of what's going on. So, that's the positive side of it. That's the positive side of what is sometimes called participatory journalism or citizen journalism, etc. -- that, in fact, we are giving people who have never been able to talk before a voice, and we're able to access information that has always been there but has essentially gone untapped. But there is a dark side to this, and that's what I want to spend the last part of my talk on. One of the things that happens if you spend a lot of time on the Internet, and you spend a lot of time thinking about the Internet, is that it is very easy to fall in love with the Internet. It is very easy to fall in love with the decentralized, bottom-up structure of the Internet. It is very easy to think that networks are necessarily good things -- that being linked from one place to another, that being tightly linked in a group, is a very good thing. And much of the time it is. But there's also a downside to this -- a kind of dark side, in fact -- and that is that the more tightly linked we've become to each other, the harder it is for each of us to remain independent. One of the fundamental characteristics of a network is that, once you are linked in the network, the network starts to shape your views and starts to shape your interactions with everybody else. That's one of the things that defines what a network is. A network is not just the product of its component parts. It is something more than that. It is, as Steven Johnson has talked about, an emergent phenomenon. Now, this has all these benefits: it's very beneficial in terms of the efficiency of communicating information; it gives you access to a whole host of people; it allows people to coordinate their activities in very good ways. But the problem is that groups are only smart when the people in them are as independent as possible. This is the paradox of the wisdom of crowds, or the paradox of collective intelligence, that what it requires is actually a form of independent thinking. And networks make it harder for people to do that, because they drive attention to the things that the network values. So, one of the phenomena that's very clear in the blogosphere is that once a meme, once an idea gets going, it is very easy for people to just sort of pile on, because other people have, say, a link. People have linked to it, and so other people in turn link to it, etc., etc. And that phenomenon of piling on the existing links is one that is characteristic of the blogosphere, particularly of the political blogosphere, and it is one that essentially throws off this beautiful, decentralized, bottom-up intelligence that blogs can manifest in the right conditions. The metaphor that I like to use is the metaphor of the circular mill. A lot of people talk about ants. You know, this is a conference inspired by nature. When we talk about bottom-up, decentralized phenomena, the ant colony is the classic metaphor, because, no individual ant knows what it's doing, but collectively ants are able to reach incredibly intelligent decisions. They're able to reach food as efficiently as possible, they're able to guide their traffic with remarkable speed. So, the ant colony is a great model: you have all these little parts that collectively add up to a great thing. But we know that occasionally ants go astray, and what happens is that, if army ants are wandering around and they get lost, they start to follow a simple rule -- just do what the ant in front of you does. And what happens is that the ants eventually end up in a circle. And there's this famous example of one that was 1,200 feet long and lasted for two days, and the ants just kept marching around and around in a circle until they died. And that, I think, is a sort of thing to watch out for. That's the thing we have to fear -- is that we're just going to keep marching around and around until we die. Now, I want to connect this back, though, to the tsunami, because one of the great things about the tsunami -- in terms of the blogosphere's coverage, not in terms of the tsunami itself -- is that it really did represent a genuine bottom-up phenomenon. You saw sites that had never existed before getting huge amounts of traffic. You saw people being able to offer up their independent points of view in a way that they hadn't before. There, you really did see the intelligence of the Web manifest itself. So, that's the upside. The circular mill is the downside. And I think that the former is what we really need to strive for. Thank you very much. (Applause)
A great way to start, I think, with my view of simplicity is to take a look at TED. Here you are, understanding why we're here, what's going on with no difficulty at all. The best A.I. in the planet would find it complex and confusing, and my little dog Watson would find it simple and understandable but would miss the point. (Laughter) He would have a great time. And of course, if you're a speaker here, like Hans Rosling, a speaker finds this complex, tricky. But in Hans Rosling's case, he had a secret weapon yesterday, literally, in his sword swallowing act. And I must say, I thought of quite a few objects that I might try to swallow today and finally gave up on, but he just did it and that was a wonderful thing. So Puck meant not only are we fools in the pejorative sense, but that we're easily fooled. In fact, what Shakespeare was pointing out is we go to the theater in order to be fooled, so we're actually looking forward to it. We go to magic shows in order to be fooled. And this makes many things fun, but it makes it difficult to actually get any kind of picture on the world we live in or on ourselves. And our friend, Betty Edwards, the "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" lady, shows these two tables to her drawing class and says, "The problem you have with learning to draw is not that you can't move your hand, but that the way your brain perceives images is faulty. It's trying to perceive images into objects rather than seeing what's there." And to prove it, she says, "The exact size and shape of these tabletops is the same, and I'm going to prove it to you." She does this with cardboard, but since I have an expensive computer here I'll just rotate this little guy around and ... Now having seen that -- and I've seen it hundreds of times, because I use this in every talk I give -- I still can't see that they're the same size and shape, and I doubt that you can either. So what do artists do? Well, what artists do is to measure. They measure very, very carefully. And if you measure very, very carefully with a stiff arm and a straight edge, you'll see that those two shapes are exactly the same size. And the Talmud saw this a long time ago, saying, "We see things not as they are, but as we are." I certainly would like to know what happened to the person who had that insight back then, if they actually followed it to its ultimate conclusion. So if the world is not as it seems and we see things as we are, then what we call reality is a kind of hallucination happening inside here. It's a waking dream, and understanding that that is what we actually exist in is one of the biggest epistemological barriers in human history. And what that means: "simple and understandable" might not be actually simple or understandable, and things we think are "complex" might be made simple and understandable. Somehow we have to understand ourselves to get around our flaws. We can think of ourselves as kind of a noisy channel. The way I think of it is, we can't learn to see until we admit we're blind. Once you start down at this very humble level, then you can start finding ways to see things. And what's happened, over the last 400 years in particular, is that human beings have invented "brainlets" -- little additional parts for our brain -- made out of powerful ideas that help us see the world in different ways. And these are in the form of sensory apparatus -- telescopes, microscopes -- reasoning apparatus -- various ways of thinking -- and, most importantly, in the ability to change perspective on things. I'll talk about that a little bit. It's this change in perspective on what it is we think we're perceiving that has helped us make more progress in the last 400 years than we have in the rest of human history. And yet, it is not taught in any K through 12 curriculum in America that I'm aware of. So one of the things that goes from simple to complex is when we do more. We like more. If we do more in a kind of a stupid way, the simplicity gets complex and, in fact, we can keep on doing it for a very long time. But Murray Gell-Mann yesterday talked about emergent properties; another name for them could be "architecture" as a metaphor for taking the same old material and thinking about non-obvious, non-simple ways of combining it. And in fact, what Murray was talking about yesterday in the fractal beauty of nature -- of having the descriptions at various levels be rather similar -- all goes down to the idea that the elementary particles are both sticky and standoffish, and they're in violent motion. Those three things give rise to all the different levels of what seem to be complexity in our world. But how simple? So, when I saw Roslings' Gapminder stuff a few years ago, I just thought it was the greatest thing I'd seen in conveying complex ideas simply. But then I had a thought of, "Boy, maybe it's too simple." And I put some effort in to try and check to see how well these simple portrayals of trends over time actually matched up with some ideas and investigations from the side, and I found that they matched up very well. So the Roslings have been able to do simplicity without removing what's important about the data. Whereas the film yesterday that we saw of the simulation of the inside of a cell, as a former molecular biologist, I didn't like that at all. Not because it wasn't beautiful or anything, but because it misses the thing that most students fail to understand about molecular biology, and that is: why is there any probability at all of two complex shapes finding each other just the right way so they combine together and be catalyzed? And what we saw yesterday was every reaction was fortuitous; they just swooped in the air and bound, and something happened. But in fact, those molecules are spinning at the rate of about a million revolutions per second; they're agitating back and forth their size every two nanoseconds; they're completely crowded together, they're jammed, they're bashing up against each other. And if you don't understand that in your mental model of this stuff, what happens inside of a cell seems completely mysterious and fortuitous, and I think that's exactly the wrong image for when you're trying to teach science. So, another thing that we do is to confuse adult sophistication with the actual understanding of some principle. So a kid who's 14 in high school gets this version of the Pythagorean theorem, which is a truly subtle and interesting proof, but in fact it's not a good way to start learning about mathematics. So a more direct one, one that gives you more of the feeling of math, is something closer to Pythagoras' own proof, which goes like this: so here we have this triangle, and if we surround that C square with three more triangles and we copy that, notice that we can move those triangles down like this. And that leaves two open areas that are kind of suspicious ... and bingo. That is all you have to do. And this kind of proof is the kind of proof that you need to learn when you're learning mathematics in order to get an idea of what it means before you look into the, literally, 1,200 or 1,500 proofs of Pythagoras' theorem that have been discovered. Now let's go to young children. This is a very unusual teacher who was a kindergarten and first-grade teacher, but was a natural mathematician. So she was like that jazz musician friend you have who never studied music but is a terrific musician; she just had a feeling for math. And here are her six-year-olds, and she's got them making shapes out of a shape. So they pick a shape they like -- like a diamond, or a square, or a triangle, or a trapezoid -- and then they try and make the next larger shape of that same shape, and the next larger shape. You can see the trapezoids are a little challenging there. And what this teacher did on every project was to have the children act like first it was a creative arts project, and then something like science. So they had created these artifacts. Now she had them look at them and do this ... laborious, which I thought for a long time, until she explained to me was to slow them down so they'll think. So they're cutting out the little pieces of cardboard here and pasting them up. But the whole point of this thing is for them to look at this chart and fill it out. "What have you noticed about what you did?" And so six-year-old Lauren there noticed that the first one took one, and the second one took three more and the total was four on that one, the third one took five more and the total was nine on that one, and then the next one. She saw right away that the additional tiles that you had to add around the edges was always going to grow by two, so she was very confident about how she made those numbers there. And she could see that these were the square numbers up until about six, where she wasn't sure what six times six was and what seven times seven was, but then she was confident again. So that's what Lauren did. And then the teacher, Gillian Ishijima, had the kids bring all of their projects up to the front of the room and put them on the floor, and everybody went batshit: "Holy shit! They're the same!" No matter what the shapes were, the growth law is the same. And the mathematicians and scientists in the crowd will recognize these two progressions as a first-order discrete differential equation and a second-order discrete differential equation, derived by six-year-olds. Well, that's pretty amazing. That isn't what we usually try to teach six-year-olds. So, let's take a look now at how we might use the computer for some of this. And so the first idea here is just to show you the kind of things that children do. I'm using the software that we're putting on the $100 laptop. So I'd like to draw a little car here -- I'll just do this very quickly -- and put a big tire on him. And I get a little object here and I can look inside this object, I'll call it a car. And here's a little behavior: car forward. Each time I click it, car turn. If I want to make a little script to do this over and over again, I just drag these guys out and set them going. And I can try steering the car here by ... See the car turn by five here? So what if I click this down to zero? It goes straight. That's a big revelation for nine-year-olds. Make it go in the other direction. But of course, that's a little bit like kissing your sister as far as driving a car, so the kids want to do a steering wheel; so they draw a steering wheel. And we'll call this a wheel. See this wheel's heading here? If I turn this wheel, you can see that number over there going minus and positive. That's kind of an invitation to pick up this name of those numbers coming out there and to just drop it into the script here, and now I can steer the car with the steering wheel. And it's interesting. You know how much trouble the children have with variables, but by learning it this way, in a situated fashion, they never forget from this single trial what a variable is and how to use it. And we can reflect here the way Gillian Ishijima did. So if you look at the little script here, the speed is always going to be 30. We're going to move the car according to that over and over again. And I'm dropping a little dot for each one of these things; they're evenly spaced because they're 30 apart. And what if I do this progression that the six-year-olds did of saying, "OK, I'm going to increase the speed by two each time, and then I'm going to increase the distance by the speed each time? What do I get there?" We get a visual pattern of what these nine-year-olds called acceleration. So how do the children do science? (Video) Teacher: [Choose] objects that you think will fall to the Earth at the same time. Student 1: Ooh, this is nice. Teacher: Do not pay any attention to what anybody else is doing. Who's got the apple? Alan Kay: They've got little stopwatches. Student 2: What did you get? What did you get? AK: Stopwatches aren't accurate enough. Student 3: 0.99 seconds. Teacher: So put "sponge ball" ... Student 4l: [I decided to] do the shot put and the sponge ball because they're two totally different weights, and if you drop them at the same time, maybe they'll drop at the same speed. Teacher: Drop. Class: Whoa! AK: So obviously, Aristotle never asked a child about this particular point because, of course, he didn't bother doing the experiment, and neither did St. Thomas Aquinas. And it was not until Galileo actually did it that an adult thought like a child, only 400 years ago. We get one child like that about every classroom of 30 kids who will actually cut straight to the chase. Now, what if we want to look at this more closely? We can take a movie of what's going on, but even if we single stepped this movie, it's tricky to see what's going on. And so what we can do is we can lay out the frames side by side or stack them up. So when the children see this, they say, "Ah! Acceleration," remembering back four months when they did their cars sideways, and they start measuring to find out what kind of acceleration it is. So what I'm doing is measuring from the bottom of one image to the bottom of the next image, about a fifth of a second later, like that. And they're getting faster and faster each time, and if I stack these guys up, then we see the differences; the increase in the speed is constant. And they say, "Oh, yeah. Constant acceleration. We've done that already." And how shall we look and verify that we actually have it? So you can't tell much from just making the ball drop there, but if we drop the ball and run the movie at the same time, we can see that we have come up with an accurate physical model. Galileo, by the way, did this very cleverly by running a ball backwards down the strings of his lute. I pulled out those apples to remind myself to tell you that this is actually probably a Newton and the apple type story, but it's a great story. And I thought I would do just one thing on the $100 laptop here just to prove that this stuff works here. So once you have gravity, here's this -- increase the speed by something, increase the ship's speed. If I start the little game here that the kids have done, it'll crash the space ship. But if I oppose gravity, here we go ... Oops! (Laughter) One more. Yeah, there we go. Yeah, OK? I guess the best way to end this is with two quotes: Marshall McLuhan said, "Children are the messages that we send to the future," but in fact, if you think of it, children are the future we send to the future. Forget about messages; children are the future, and children in the first and second world and, most especially, in the third world need mentors. And this summer, we're going to build five million of these $100 laptops, and maybe 50 million next year. But we couldn't create 1,000 new teachers this summer to save our life. That means that we, once again, have a thing where we can put technology out, but the mentoring that is required to go from a simple new iChat instant messaging system to something with depth is missing. I believe this has to be done with a new kind of user interface, and this new kind of user interface could be done with an expenditure of about 100 million dollars. It sounds like a lot, but it is literally 18 minutes of what we're spending in Iraq -- we're spending 8 billion dollars a month; 18 minutes is 100 million dollars -- so this is actually cheap. And Einstein said, "Things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler." Thank you.
Well after many years working in trade and economics, four years ago, I found myself working on the front lines of human vulnerability. And I found myself in the places where people are fighting every day to survive and can't even obtain a meal. This red cup comes from Rwanda from a child named Fabian. And I carry this around as a symbol, really, of the challenge and also the hope. Because one cup of food a day changes Fabian's life completely. But what I'd like to talk about today is the fact that this morning, about a billion people on Earth -- or one out of every seven -- woke up and didn't even know how to fill this cup. One out of every seven people. First, I'll ask you: Why should you care? Why should we care? For most people, if they think about hunger, they don't have to go far back on their own family history -- maybe in their own lives, or their parents' lives, or their grandparents' lives -- to remember an experience of hunger. I rarely find an audience where people can go back very far without that experience. Some are driven by compassion, feel it's perhaps one of the fundamental acts of humanity. As Gandhi said, "To a hungry man, a piece of bread is the face of God." Others worry about peace and security, stability in the world. We saw the food riots in 2008, after what I call the silent tsunami of hunger swept the globe when food prices doubled overnight. The destabilizing effects of hunger are known throughout human history. One of the most fundamental acts of civilization is to ensure people can get enough food. Others think about Malthusian nightmares. Will we be able to feed a population that will be nine billion in just a few decades? This is not a negotiable thing, hunger. People have to eat. There's going to be a lot of people. This is jobs and opportunity all the way up and down the value chain. But I actually came to this issue in a different way. This is a picture of me and my three children. In 1987, I was a new mother with my first child and was holding her and feeding her when an image very similar to this came on the television. And this was yet another famine in Ethiopia. One two years earlier had killed more than a million people. But it never struck me as it did that moment, because on that image was a woman trying to nurse her baby, and she had no milk to nurse. And the baby's cry really penetrated me, as a mother. And I thought, there's nothing more haunting than the cry of a child that cannot be returned with food -- the most fundamental expectation of every human being. And it was at that moment that I just was filled with the challenge and the outrage that actually we know how to fix this problem. This isn't one of those rare diseases that we don't have the solution for. We know how to fix hunger. A hundred years ago, we didn't. We actually have the technology and systems. And I was just struck that this is out of place. At our time in history, these images are out of place. Well guess what? This is last week in northern Kenya. Yet again, the face of starvation at large scale with more than nine million people wondering if they can make it to the next day. In fact, what we know now is that every 10 seconds we lose a child to hunger. This is more than HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis combined. And we know that the issue is not just production of food. One of my mentors in life was Norman Borlaug, my hero. But today I'm going to talk about access to food, because actually this year and last year and during the 2008 food crisis, there was enough food on Earth for everyone to have 2,700 kilocalories. So why is it that we have a billion people who can't find food? And I also want to talk about what I call our new burden of knowledge. In 2008, Lancet compiled all the research and put forward the compelling evidence that if a child in its first thousand days -- from conception to two years old -- does not have adequate nutrition, the damage is irreversible. Their brains and bodies will be stunted. And here you see a brain scan of two children -- one who had adequate nutrition, another, neglected and who was deeply malnourished. And we can see brain volumes up to 40 percent less in these children. And in this slide you see the neurons and the synapses of the brain don't form. And what we know now is this has huge impact on economies, which I'll talk about later. But also the earning potential of these children is cut in half in their lifetime due to the stunting that happens in early years. So this burden of knowledge drives me. Because actually we know how to fix it very simply. And yet, in many places, a third of the children, by the time they're three already are facing a life of hardship due to this. I'd like to talk about some of the things I've seen on the front lines of hunger, some of the things I've learned in bringing my economic and trade knowledge and my experience in the private sector. I'd like to talk about where the gap of knowledge is. Well first, I'd like to talk about the oldest nutritional method on Earth, breastfeeding. You may be surprised to know that a child could be saved every 22 seconds if there was breastfeeding in the first six months of life. But in Niger, for example, less than seven percent of the children are breastfed for the first six months of life, exclusively. In Mauritania, less than three percent. This is something that can be transformed with knowledge. This message, this word, can come out that this is not an old-fashioned way of doing business; it's a brilliant way of saving your child's life. And so today we focus on not just passing out food, but making sure the mothers have enough enrichment, and teaching them about breastfeeding. The second thing I'd like to talk about: If you were living in a remote village somewhere, your child was limp, and you were in a drought, or you were in floods, or you were in a situation where there wasn't adequate diversity of diet, what would you do? Do you think you could go to the store and get a choice of power bars, like we can, and pick the right one to match? Well I find parents out on the front lines very aware their children are going down for the count. And I go to those shops, if there are any, or out to the fields to see what they can get, and they cannot obtain the nutrition. Even if they know what they need to do, it's not available. And I'm very excited about this, because one thing we're working on is transforming the technologies that are very available in the food industry to be available for traditional crops. And this is made with chickpeas, dried milk and a host of vitamins, matched to exactly what the brain needs. It costs 17 cents for us to produce this as, what I call, food for humanity. We did this with food technologists in India and Pakistan -- really about three of them. But this is transforming 99 percent of the kids who get this. One package, 17 cents a day -- their malnutrition is overcome. So I am convinced that if we can unlock the technologies that are commonplace in the richer world to be able to transform foods. And this is climate-proof. It doesn't need to be refrigerated, it doesn't need water, which is often lacking. And these types of technologies, I see, have the potential to transform the face of hunger and nutrition, malnutrition out on the front lines. The next thing I want to talk about is school feeding. Eighty percent of the people in the world have no food safety net. When disaster strikes -- the economy gets blown, people lose a job, floods, war, conflict, bad governance, all of those things -- there is nothing to fall back on. And usually the institutions -- churches, temples, other things -- do not have the resources to provide a safety net. What we have found working with the World Bank is that the poor man's safety net, the best investment, is school feeding. And if you fill the cup with local agriculture from small farmers, you have a transformative effect. Many kids in the world can't go to school because they have to go beg and find a meal. But when that food is there, it's transformative. It costs less than 25 cents a day to change a kid's life. But what is most amazing is the effect on girls. In countries where girls don't go to school and you offer a meal to girls in school, we see enrollment rates about 50 percent girls and boys. We see a transformation in attendance by girls. And there was no argument, because it's incentive. Families need the help. And we find that if we keep girls in school later, they'll stay in school until they're 16, and won't get married if there's food in school. Or if they get an extra ration of food at the end of the week -- it costs about 50 cents -- will keep a girl in school, and they'll give birth to a healthier child, because the malnutrition is sent generation to generation. We know that there's boom and bust cycles of hunger. We know this. Right now on the Horn of Africa, we've been through this before. So is this a hopeless cause? Absolutely not. I'd like to talk about what I call our warehouses for hope. Cameroon, northern Cameroon, boom and bust cycles of hunger every year for decades. Food aid coming in every year when people are starving during the lean seasons. Well two years ago, we decided, let's transform the model of fighting hunger, and instead of giving out the food aid, we put it into food banks. And we said, listen, during the lean season, take the food out. You manage, the village manages these warehouses. And during harvest, put it back with interest, food interest. So add in five percent, 10 percent more food. For the past two years, 500 of these villages where these are have not needed any food aid -- they're self-sufficient. And the food banks are growing. And they're starting school feeding programs for their children by the people in the village. But they've never had the ability to build even the basic infrastructure or the resources. I love this idea that came from the village level: three keys to unlock that warehouse. Food is gold there. And simple ideas can transform the face, not of small areas, of big areas of the world. I'd like to talk about what I call digital food. Technology is transforming the face of food vulnerability in places where you see classic famine. Amartya Sen won his Nobel Prize for saying, "Guess what, famines happen in the presence of food because people have no ability to buy it." We certainly saw that in 2008. We're seeing that now in the Horn of Africa where food prices are up 240 percent in some areas over last year. Food can be there and people can't buy it. Well this picture -- I was in Hebron in a small shop, this shop, where instead of bringing in food, we provide digital food, a card. It says "bon appetit" in Arabic. And the women can go in and swipe and get nine food items. They have to be nutritious, and they have to be locally produced. And what's happened in the past year alone is the dairy industry -- where this card's used for milk and yogurt and eggs and hummus -- the dairy industry has gone up 30 percent. The shopkeepers are hiring more people. It is a win-win-win situation that starts the food economy moving. We now deliver food in over 30 countries over cell phones, transforming even the presence of refugees in countries, and other ways. Perhaps most exciting to me is an idea that Bill Gates, Howard Buffett and others have supported boldly, which is to ask the question: What if, instead of looking at the hungry as victims -- and most of them are small farmers who cannot raise enough food or sell food to even support their own families -- what if we view them as the solution, as the value chain to fight hunger? What if from the women in Africa who cannot sell any food -- there's no roads, there's no warehouses, there's not even a tarp to pick the food up with -- what if we give the enabling environment for them to provide the food to feed the hungry children elsewhere? And Purchasing for Progress today is in 21 countries. And guess what? In virtually every case, when poor farmers are given a guaranteed market -- if you say, "We will buy 300 metric tons of this. We'll pick it up. We'll make sure it's stored properly." -- their yields have gone up two-, three-, fourfold and they figure it out, because it's the first guaranteed opportunity they've had in their life. And we're seeing people transform their lives. Today, food aid, our food aid -- huge engine -- 80 percent of it is bought in the developing world. Total transformation that can actually transform the very lives that need the food. Now you'd ask, can this be done at scale? These are great ideas, village-level ideas. Well I'd like to talk about Brazil, because I've taken a journey to Brazil over the past couple of years, when I read that Brazil was defeating hunger faster than any nation on Earth right now. And what I've found is, rather than investing their money in food subsidies and other things, they invested in a school feeding program. And they require that a third of that food come from the smallest farmers who would have no opportunity. And they're doing this at huge scale after President Lula declared his goal of ensuring everyone had three meals a day. And this zero hunger program costs .5 percent of GDP and has lifted many millions of people out of hunger and poverty. It is transforming the face of hunger in Brazil, and it's at scale, and it's creating opportunities. I've gone out there; I've met with the small farmers who have built their livelihoods on the opportunity and platform provided by this. Now if we look at the economic imperative here, this isn't just about compassion. The fact is studies show that the cost of malnutrition and hunger -- the cost to society, the burden it has to bear -- is on average six percent, and in some countries up to 11 percent, of GDP a year. And if you look at the 36 countries with the highest burden of malnutrition, that's 260 billion lost from a productive economy every year. Well, the World Bank estimates it would take about 10 billion dollars -- 10.3 -- to address malnutrition in those countries. You look at the cost-benefit analysis, and my dream is to take this issue, not just from the compassion argument, but to the finance ministers of the world, and say we cannot afford to not invest in the access to adequate, affordable nutrition for all of humanity. The amazing thing I've found is nothing can change on a big scale without the determination of a leader. When a leader says, "Not under my watch," everything begins to change. And the world can come in with enabling environments and opportunities to do this. And the fact that France has put food at the center of the G20 is really important. Because food is one issue that cannot be solved person by person, nation by nation. We have to stand together. And we're seeing nations in Africa. WFP's been able to leave 30 nations because they have transformed the face of hunger in their nations. What I would like to offer here is a challenge. I believe we're living at a time in human history where it's just simply unacceptable that children wake up and don't know where to find a cup of food. Not only that, transforming hunger is an opportunity, but I think we have to change our mindsets. I am so honored to be here with some of the world's top innovators and thinkers. And I would like you to join with all of humanity to draw a line in the sand and say, "No more. No more are we going to accept this." And we want to tell our grandchildren that there was a terrible time in history where up to a third of the children had brains and bodies that were stunted, but that exists no more. Thank you. (Applause)
I always wanted to become a walking laboratory of social engagement, to resonate other people's feelings, thoughts, intentions, motivations, in the act of being with them. As a scientist, I always wanted to measure that resonance, that sense of the other that happens so quickly, in the blink of an eye. We intuit other people's feelings. We know the meaning of their actions even before they happen. We're always in this stance of being the object of somebody else's subjectivity. We do that all the time. We just can't shake it off. It's so important that the very tools that we use to understand ourselves, to understand the world around them, is shaped by that stance. We are social to the core. So my journey in autism really started when I lived in a residential unit for adults with autism. Most of those individuals had spent most of their lives in long-stay hospitals. This is a long time ago. And for them, autism was devastating. They had profound intellectual disabilities. They didn't talk. But most of all, they were extraordinarily isolated from the world around them, from their environment and from the people. In fact, at the time, if you walked into a school for individuals with autism, you'd hear a lot of noise, plenty of commotion, actions, people doing things, but they're always doing things by themselves. So they may be looking at a light in the ceiling, or they may be isolated in the corner, or they might be engaged in these repetitive movements, in self-stimulatory movements that led them nowhere. Extremely, extremely isolated. Well, now we know that autism is this disruption, the disruption of this resonance that I am telling you. These are survival skills. These are survival skills that we inherited over many, many hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. You see, babies are born in a state of utter fragility. Without the caregiver, they wouldn't survive, so it stands to reason that nature would endow them with these mechanisms of survival. They orient to the caregiver. From the first days and weeks of life, babies prefer to hear human sounds rather than just sounds in the environment. They prefer to look at people rather than at things, and even as they're looking at people, they look at people's eyes, because the eye is the window to the other person's experiences, so much so that they even prefer to look at people who are looking at them rather than people who are looking away. Well, they orient to the caregiver. The caregiver seeks the baby. And it's out of this mutually reinforcing choreography that a lot that is of importance to the emergence of mind, the social mind, the social brain, depends on. We always think about autism as something that happens later on in life. It doesn't. It begins with the beginning of life. As babies engage with caregivers, they soon realize that, well, there is something in between the ears that is very important -- it's invisible, you can't see -- but is really critical, and that thing is called attention. And they learn soon enough, even before they can utter one word that they can take that attention and move somewhere in order to get things they want. They also learn to follow other people's gaze, because whatever people are looking at is what they are thinking about. And soon enough, they start to learn about the meaning of things, because when somebody is looking at something or somebody is pointing at something, they're not just getting a directional cue, they are getting the other person's meaning of that thing, the attitude, and soon enough they start building this body of meanings, but meanings that were acquired within the realm of social interaction. Those are meanings that are acquired as part of their shared experiences with others. Well, this is a little 15-month-old little girl, and she has autism. And I am coming so close to her that I am maybe two inches from her face, and she's quite oblivious to me. Imagine if I did that to you, and I came two inches from your face. You'd do probably two things, wouldn't you? You would recoil. You would call the police. (Laughter) You would do something, because it's literally impossible to penetrate somebody's physical space and not get a reaction. We do so, remember, intuitively, effortlessly. This is our body wisdom. It's not something that is mediated by our language. Our body just knows that, and we've known that for a long time. And this is not something that happens to humans only. It happens to some of our phylatic cousins, because if you're a monkey, and you look at another monkey, and that monkey has a higher hierarchy position than you, and that is considered to be a signal or threat, well, you are not going to be alive for long. So something that in other species are survival mechanisms, without them they wouldn't basically live, we bring into the context of human beings, and this is what we need to simply act, act socially. Now, she is oblivious to me, and I am so close to her, and you think, maybe she can see you, maybe she can hear you. Well, a few minutes later, she goes to the corner of the room, and she finds a tiny little piece of candy, an M&M. So I could not attract her attention, but something, a thing, did. Now, most of us make a big dichotomy between the world of things and the world of people. Now, for this girl, that division line is not so clear, and the world of people is not attracting her as much as we would like. Now remember that we learn a great deal by sharing experiences. Now, what she is doing right now is that her path of learning is diverging moment by moment as she is isolating herself further and further. So we feel sometimes that the brain is deterministic, the brain determines who we are going to be. But in fact the brain also becomes who we are, and at the same time that her behaviors are taking away from the realm of social interaction, this is what's happening with her mind and this is what's happening with her brain. Well, autism is the most strongly genetic condition of all developmental disorders, and it's a brain disorder. It's a disorder that begins much prior to the time that the child is born. We now know that there is a very broad spectrum of autism. There are those individuals who are profoundly intellectually disabled, but there are those that are gifted. There are those individuals who don't talk at all. There are those individuals who talk too much. There are those individuals that if you observe them in their school, you see them running the periphery fence of the school all day if you let them, to those individuals who cannot stop coming to you and trying to engage you repeatedly, relentlessly, but often in an awkward fashion, without that immediate resonance. Well, this is much more prevalent than we thought at the time. When I started in this field, we thought that there were four individuals with autism per 10,000, a very rare condition. Well, now we know it's more like one in 100. There are millions of individuals with autism all around us. The societal cost of this condition is huge. In the U.S. alone, maybe 35 to 80 billion dollars, and you know what? Most of those funds are associated with adolescents and particularly adults who are severely disabled, individuals who need wrap-around services, services that are very, very intensive, and those services can cost in excess of 60 to 80,000 dollars a year. Those are individuals who did not benefit from early treatment, because now we know that autism creates itself as they diverge in that pathway of learning that I mentioned to you. Were we to be able to identify this condition at an earlier point, and intervene and treat, I can tell you, and this has been probably something that has changed my life in the past 10 years, this notion that we can absolutely attenuate this condition. Also, we have a window of opportunity, because the brain is malleable for just so long, and that window of opportunity happens in the first three years of life. It's not that that window closes. It doesn't. But it diminishes considerably. And yet, the median age of diagnosis in this country is still about five years, and in disadvantaged populations, the populations that don't have access to clinical services, rural populations, minorities, the age of diagnosis is later still, which is almost as if I were to tell you that we are condemning those communities to have individuals with autism whose condition is going to be more severe. So I feel that we have a bio-ethical imperative. The science is there, but no science is of relevance if it doesn't have an impact on the community, and we just can't afford that missed opportunity, because children with autism become adults with autism, and we feel that those things that we can do for these children, for those families, early on, will have lifetime consequences, for the child, for the family, and for the community at large. So this is our view of autism. There are over a hundred genes that are associated with autism. In fact, we believe that there are going to be something between 300 and 600 genes associated with autism, and genetic anomalies, much more than just genes. And we actually have a bit of a question here, because if there are so many different causes of autism, how do you go from those liabilities to the actual syndrome? Because people like myself, when we walk into a playroom, we recognize a child as having autism. So how do you go from multiple causes to a syndrome that has some homogeneity? And the answer is, what lies in between, which is development. And in fact, we are very interested in those first two years of life, because those liabilities don't necessarily convert into autism. Autism creates itself. Were we to be able to intervene during those years of life, we might attenuate for some, and God knows, maybe even prevent for others. So how do we do that? How do we enter that feeling of resonance, how do we enter another person's being? I remember when I interacted with that 15-month-older, that the thing that came to mind was, "How do you come into her world? Is she thinking about me? Is she thinking about others?" Well, it's hard to do that, so we had to create the technologies. We had to basically step inside a body. We had to see the world through her eyes. And so in the past many years we've been building these new technologies that are based on eye tracking. We can see moment by moment what children are engaging with. Well, this is my colleague Warren Jones, with whom we've been building these methods, these studies, for the past 12 years, and you see there a happy five-month-older, it's a five-month little boy who is going to watch things that are brought from his world, his mom, the caregiver, but also experiences that he would have were he to be in his daycare. What we want is to embrace that world and bring it into our laboratory, but in order for us to do that, we had to create these very sophisticated measures, measures of how people, how little babies, how newborns, engage with the world, moment by moment, what is important, and what is not. Well, we created those measures, and here, what you see is what we call a funnel of attention. You're watching a video. Those frames are separated by about a second through the eyes of 35 typically developing two-year-olds, and we freeze one frame, and this is what the typical children are doing. In this scan pass, in green here, are two-year-olds with autism. So on that frame, the children who are typical are watching this, the emotion of expression of that little boy as he's fighting a little bit with the little girl. What are the children with autism doing? They are focusing on the revolving door, opening and shutting. Well, I can tell you that this divergence that you're seeing here doesn't happen only in our five-minute experiment. It happens moment by moment in their real lives, and their minds are being formed, and their brains are being specialized in something other than what is happening with their typical peers. Well, we took a construct from our pediatrician friends, the concept of growth charts. You know, when you take a child to the pediatrician, and so you have physical height, and weight. Well we decided that we're going to create growth charts of social engagement, and we sought children from the time that they are born, and what you see here on the x-axis is two, three, four, five, six months and nine, until about the age of 24 months, and this is the percent of their viewing time that they are focusing on people's eyes, and this is their growth chart. They start over here, they love people's eyes, and it remains quite stable. It sort of goes up a little bit in those initial months. Now, let's see what's happening with babies who became autistic. It's something very different. It starts way up here, but then it's a free fall. It's very much like they brought into this world the reflex that orients them to people, but it has no traction. It's almost as if that stimulus, you, you're not exerting influence on what happens as they navigate their daily lives. Now, we thought that those data were so powerful in a way, that we wanted to see what happened in the first six months of life, because if you interact with a two- and a three-month-older, you'd be surprised by how social those babies are. And what we see in the first six months of life is that those two groups can be segregated very easily. And using these kinds of measures, and many others, what we found out is that our science could, in fact, identify this condition early on. We didn't have to wait for the behaviors of autism to emerge in the second year of life. If we measured things that are, evolutionarily, highly conserved, and developmentally very early emerging, things that are online from the first weeks of life, we could push the detection of autism all the way to those first months, and that's what we are doing now. Now, we can create the very best technologies and the very best methods to identify the children, but this would be for naught if we didn't have an impact on what happens in their reality in the community. Now we want those devices, of course, to be deployed by those who are in the trenches, our colleagues, the primary care physicians, who see every child, and we need to transform those technologies into something that is going to add value to their practice, because they have to see so many children. And we want to do that universally so that we don't miss any child, but this would be immoral if we also did not have an infrastructure for intervention, for treatment. We need to be able to work with the families, to support the families, to manage those first years with them. We need to be able to really go from universal screening to universal access to treatment, because those treatments are going to change these children's and those families' lives. Now, when we think about what we [can] do in those first years, I can tell you, having been in this field for so long, one feels really rejuvenated. There is a sense that the science that one worked on can actually have an impact on realities, preventing, in fact, those experiences that I really started in my journey in this field. I thought at the time that this was an intractable condition. No longer. We can do a great deal of things. And the idea is not to cure autism. That's not the idea. What we want is to make sure that those individuals with autism can be free from the devastating consequences that come with it at times, the profound intellectual disabilities, the lack of language, the profound, profound isolation. We feel that individuals with autism, in fact, have a very special perspective on the world, and we need diversity, and they can work extremely well in some areas of strength: predictable situations, situations that can be defined. Because after all, they learn about the world almost like about it, rather than learning how to function in it. But this is a strength, if you're working, for example, in technology. And there are those individuals who have incredible artistic abilities. We want them to be free of that. We want that the next generations of individuals with autism will be able not only to express their strengths but to fulfill their promise. Well thank you for listening to me. (Applause)
Today I want to tell you about a project being carried out by scientists all over the world to paint a neural portrait of the human mind. And the central idea of this work is that the human mind and brain is not a single, general-purpose processor, but a collection of highly specialized components, each solving a different specific problem, and yet collectively making up who we are as human beings and thinkers. To give you a feel for this idea, imagine the following scenario: You walk into your child's day care center. As usual, there's a dozen kids there waiting to get picked up, but this time, the children's faces look weirdly similar, and you can't figure out which child is yours. Do you need new glasses? Are you losing your mind? You run through a quick mental checklist. No, you seem to be thinking clearly, and your vision is perfectly sharp. And everything looks normal except the children's faces. You can see the faces, but they don't look distinctive, and none of them looks familiar, and it's only by spotting an orange hair ribbon that you find your daughter. This sudden loss of the ability to recognize faces actually happens to people. It's called prosopagnosia, and it results from damage to a particular part of the brain. The striking thing about it is that only face recognition is impaired; everything else is just fine. Prosopagnosia is one of many surprisingly specific mental deficits that can happen after brain damage. These syndromes collectively have suggested for a long time that the mind is divvied up into distinct components, but the effort to discover those components has jumped to warp speed with the invention of brain imaging technology, especially MRI. So MRI enables you to see internal anatomy at high resolution, so I'm going to show you in a second a set of MRI cross-sectional images through a familiar object, and we're going to fly through them and you're going to try to figure out what the object is. Here we go. It's not that easy. It's an artichoke. Okay, let's try another one, starting from the bottom and going through the top. Broccoli! It's a head of broccoli. Isn't it beautiful? I love that. Okay, here's another one. It's a brain, of course. In fact, it's my brain. We're going through slices through my head like that. That's my nose over on the right, and now we're going over here, right there. So this picture's nice, if I do say so myself, but it shows only anatomy. The really cool advance with functional imaging happened when scientists figured out how to make pictures that show not just anatomy but activity, that is, where neurons are firing. So here's how this works. Brains are like muscles. When they get active, they need increased blood flow to supply that activity, and lucky for us, blood flow control to the brain is local, so if a bunch of neurons, say, right there get active and start firing, then blood flow increases just right there. So functional MRI picks up on that blood flow increase, producing a higher MRI response where neural activity goes up. So to give you a concrete feel for how a functional MRI experiment goes and what you can learn from it and what you can't, let me describe one of the first studies I ever did. We wanted to know if there was a special part of the brain for recognizing faces, and there was already reason to think there might be such a thing based on this phenomenon of prosopagnosia that I described a moment ago, but nobody had ever seen that part of the brain in a normal person, so we set out to look for it. So I was the first subject. I went into the scanner, I lay on my back, I held my head as still as I could while staring at pictures of faces like these and objects like these and faces and objects for hours. So as somebody who has pretty close to the world record of total number of hours spent inside an MRI scanner, I can tell you that one of the skills that's really important for MRI research is bladder control. (Laughter) When I got out of the scanner, I did a quick analysis of the data, looking for any parts of my brain that produced a higher response when I was looking at faces than when I was looking at objects, and here's what I saw. Now this image looks just awful by today's standards, but at the time I thought it was beautiful. What it shows is that region right there, that little blob, it's about the size of an olive and it's on the bottom surface of my brain about an inch straight in from right there. And what that part of my brain is doing is producing a higher MRI response, that is, higher neural activity, when I was looking at faces than when I was looking at objects. So that's pretty cool, but how do we know this isn't a fluke? Well, the easiest way is to just do the experiment again. So I got back in the scanner, I looked at more faces and I looked at more objects and I got a similar blob, and then I did it again and I did it again and again and again, and around about then I decided to believe it was for real. But still, maybe this is something weird about my brain and no one else has one of these things in there, so to find out, we scanned a bunch of other people and found that pretty much everyone has that little face-processing region in a similar neighborhood of the brain. So the next question was, what does this thing really do? Is it really specialized just for face recognition? Well, maybe not, right? Maybe it responds not only to faces but to any body part. Maybe it responds to anything human or anything alive or anything round. The only way to be really sure that that region is specialized for face recognition is to rule out all of those hypotheses. So we spent much of the next couple of years scanning subjects while they looked at lots of different kinds of images, and we showed that that part of the brain responds strongly when you look at any images that are faces of any kind, and it responds much less strongly to any image you show that isn't a face, like some of these. So have we finally nailed the case that this region is necessary for face recognition? No, we haven't. Brain imaging can never tell you if a region is necessary for anything. All you can do with brain imaging is watch regions turn on and off as people think different thoughts. To tell if a part of the brain is necessary for a mental function, you need to mess with it and see what happens, and normally we don't get to do that. But an amazing opportunity came about very recently when a couple of colleagues of mine tested this man who has epilepsy and who is shown here in his hospital bed where he's just had electrodes placed on the surface of his brain to identify the source of his seizures. So it turned out by total chance that two of the electrodes happened to be right on top of his face area. So with the patient's consent, the doctors asked him what happened when they electrically stimulated that part of his brain. Now, the patient doesn't know where those electrodes are, and he's never heard of the face area. So let's watch what happens. It's going to start with a control condition that will say "Sham" nearly invisibly in red in the lower left, when no current is delivered, and you'll hear the neurologist speaking to the patient first. So let's watch. (Video) Neurologist: Okay, just look at my face and tell me what happens when I do this. All right? Patient: Okay. Neurologist: One, two, three. Patient: Nothing. Neurologist: Nothing? Okay. I'm going to do it one more time. Look at my face. One, two, three. Patient: You just turned into somebody else. Your face metamorphosed. Your nose got saggy, it went to the left. You almost looked like somebody I'd seen before, but somebody different. That was a trip. (Laughter) Nancy Kanwisher: So this experiment — (Applause) — this experiment finally nails the case that this region of the brain is not only selectively responsive to faces but causally involved in face perception. So I went through all of these details about the face region to show you what it takes to really establish that a part of the brain is selectively involved in a specific mental process. Next, I'll go through much more quickly some of the other specialized regions of the brain that we and others have found. So to do this, I've spent a lot of time in the scanner over the last month so I can show you these things in my brain. So let's get started. Here's my right hemisphere. So we're oriented like that. You're looking at my head this way. Imagine taking the skull off and looking at the surface of the brain like that. Okay, now as you can see, the surface of the brain is all folded up. So that's not good. Stuff could be hidden in there. We want to see the whole thing, so let's inflate it so we can see the whole thing. Next, let's find that face area I've been talking about that responds to images like these. To see that, let's turn the brain around and look on the inside surface on the bottom, and there it is, that's my face area. Just to the right of that is another region that is shown in purple that responds when you process color information, and near those regions are other regions that are involved in perceiving places, like right now, I'm seeing this layout of space around me and these regions in green right there are really active. There's another one out on the outside surface again where there's a couple more face regions as well. Also in this vicinity is a region that's selectively involved in processing visual motion, like these moving dots here, and that's in yellow at the bottom of the brain, and near that is a region that responds when you look at images of bodies and body parts like these, and that region is shown in lime green at the bottom of the brain. Now all these regions I've shown you so far are involved in specific aspects of visual perception. Do we also have specialized brain regions for other senses, like hearing? Yes, we do. So if we turn the brain around a little bit, here's a region in dark blue that we reported just a couple of months ago, and this region responds strongly when you hear sounds with pitch, like these. (Sirens) (Cello music) (Doorbell) In contrast, that same region does not respond strongly when you hear perfectly familiar sounds that don't have a clear pitch, like these. (Chomping) (Drum roll) (Toilet flushing) Okay. Next to the pitch region is another set of regions that are selectively responsive when you hear the sounds of speech. Okay, now let's look at these same regions. In my left hemisphere, there's a similar arrangement — not identical, but similar — and most of the same regions are in here, albeit sometimes different in size. Now, everything I've shown you so far are regions that are involved in different aspects of perception, vision and hearing. Do we also have specialized brain regions for really fancy, complicated mental processes? Yes, we do. So here in pink are my language regions. So it's been known for a very long time that that general vicinity of the brain is involved in processing language, but we showed very recently that these pink regions respond extremely selectively. They respond when you understand the meaning of a sentence, but not when you do other complex mental things, like mental arithmetic or holding information in memory or appreciating the complex structure in a piece of music. The most amazing region that's been found yet is this one right here in turquoise. This region responds when you think about what another person is thinking. So that may seem crazy, but actually, we humans do this all the time. You're doing this when you realize that your partner is going to be worried if you don't call home to say you're running late. I'm doing this with that region of my brain right now when I realize that you guys are probably now wondering about all that gray, uncharted territory in the brain, and what's up with that? Well, I'm wondering about that too, and we're running a bunch of experiments in my lab right now to try to find a number of other possible specializations in the brain for other very specific mental functions. But importantly, I don't think we have specializations in the brain for every important mental function, even mental functions that may be critical for survival. In fact, a few years ago, there was a scientist in my lab who became quite convinced that he'd found a brain region for detecting food, and it responded really strongly in the scanner when people looked at images like this. And further, he found a similar response in more or less the same location in 10 out of 12 subjects. So he was pretty stoked, and he was running around the lab telling everyone that he was going to go on "Oprah" with his big discovery. But then he devised the critical test: He showed subjects images of food like this and compared them to images with very similar color and shape, but that weren't food, like these. And his region responded the same to both sets of images. So it wasn't a food area, it was just a region that liked colors and shapes. So much for "Oprah." But then the question, of course, is, how do we process all this other stuff that we don't have specialized brain regions for? Well, I think the answer is that in addition to these highly specialized components that I've been describing, we also have a lot of very general- purpose machinery in our heads that enables us to tackle whatever problem comes along. In fact, we've shown recently that these regions here in white respond whenever you do any difficult mental task at all — well, of the seven that we've tested. So each of the brain regions that I've described to you today is present in approximately the same location in every normal subject. I could take any of you, pop you in the scanner, and find each of those regions in your brain, and it would look a lot like my brain, although the regions would be slightly different in their exact location and in their size. What's important to me about this work is not the particular locations of these brain regions, but the simple fact that we have selective, specific components of mind and brain in the first place. I mean, it could have been otherwise. The brain could have been a single, general-purpose processor, more like a kitchen knife than a Swiss Army knife. Instead, what brain imaging has delivered is this rich and interesting picture of the human mind. So we have this picture of very general-purpose machinery in our heads in addition to this surprising array of very specialized components. It's early days in this enterprise. We've painted only the first brushstrokes in our neural portrait of the human mind. The most fundamental questions remain unanswered. So for example, what does each of these regions do exactly? Why do we need three face areas and three place areas, and what's the division of labor between them? Second, how are all these things connected in the brain? With diffusion imaging, you can trace bundles of neurons that connect to different parts of the brain, and with this method shown here, you can trace the connections of individual neurons in the brain, potentially someday giving us a wiring diagram of the entire human brain. Third, how does all of this very systematic structure get built, both over development in childhood and over the evolution of our species? To address questions like that, scientists are now scanning other species of animals, and they're also scanning human infants. Many people justify the high cost of neuroscience research by pointing out that it may help us someday to treat brain disorders like Alzheimer's and autism. That's a hugely important goal, and I'd be thrilled if any of my work contributed to it, but fixing things that are broken in the world is not the only thing that's worth doing. The effort to understand the human mind and brain is worthwhile even if it never led to the treatment of a single disease. What could be more thrilling than to understand the fundamental mechanisms that underlie human experience, to understand, in essence, who we are? This is, I think, the greatest scientific quest of all time. (Applause)
Two weeks ago, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my wife Katya, and we were talking about what I was going to talk about today. We have an 11-year-old son; his name is Lincoln. He was sitting at the same table, doing his math homework. And during a pause in my conversation with Katya, I looked over at Lincoln and I was suddenly thunderstruck by a recollection of a client of mine. My client was a guy named Will. He was from North Texas. He never knew his father very well, because his father left his mom while she was pregnant with him. And so, he was destined to be raised by a single mom, which might have been all right except that this particular single mom was a paranoid schizophrenic, and when Will was five years old, she tried to kill him with a butcher knife. She was taken away by authorities and placed in a psychiatric hospital, and so for the next several years Will lived with his older brother, until he committed suicide by shooting himself through the heart. And after that Will bounced around from one family member to another, until, by the time he was nine years old, he was essentially living on his own. That morning that I was sitting with Katya and Lincoln, I looked at my son, and I realized that when my client, Will, was his age, he'd been living by himself for two years. Will eventually joined a gang and committed a number of very serious crimes, including, most seriously of all, a horrible, tragic murder. And Will was ultimately executed as punishment for that crime. But I don't want to talk today about the morality of capital punishment. I certainly think that my client shouldn't have been executed, but what I would like to do today instead is talk about the death penalty in a way I've never done before, in a way that is entirely noncontroversial. I think that's possible, because there is a corner of the death penalty debate -- maybe the most important corner -- where everybody agrees, where the most ardent death penalty supporters and the most vociferous abolitionists are on exactly the same page. That's the corner I want to explore. Before I do that, though, I want to spend a couple of minutes telling you how a death penalty case unfolds, and then I want to tell you two lessons that I have learned over the last 20 years as a death penalty lawyer from watching well more than a hundred cases unfold in this way. You can think of a death penalty case as a story that has four chapters. The first chapter of every case is exactly the same, and it is tragic. It begins with the murder of an innocent human being, and it's followed by a trial where the murderer is convicted and sent to death row, and that death sentence is ultimately upheld by the state appellate court. The second chapter consists of a complicated legal proceeding known as a state habeas corpus appeal. The third chapter is an even more complicated legal proceeding known as a federal habeas corpus proceeding. And the fourth chapter is one where a variety of things can happen. The lawyers might file a clemency petition, they might initiate even more complex litigation, or they might not do anything at all. But that fourth chapter always ends with an execution. When I started representing death row inmates more than 20 years ago, people on death row did not have a right to a lawyer in either the second or the fourth chapter of this story. They were on their own. In fact, it wasn't until the late 1980s that they acquired a right to a lawyer during the third chapter of the story. So what all of these death row inmates had to do was rely on volunteer lawyers to handle their legal proceedings. The problem is that there were way more guys on death row than there were lawyers who had both the interest and the expertise to work on these cases. And so inevitably, lawyers drifted to cases that were already in chapter four -- that makes sense, of course. Those are the cases that are most urgent; those are the guys who are closest to being executed. Some of these lawyers were successful; they managed to get new trials for their clients. Others of them managed to extend the lives of their clients, sometimes by years, sometimes by months. But the one thing that didn't happen was that there was never a serious and sustained decline in the number of annual executions in Texas. In fact, as you can see from this graph, from the time that the Texas execution apparatus got efficient in the mid- to late 1990s, there have only been a couple of years where the number of annual executions dipped below 20. In a typical year in Texas, we're averaging about two people a month. In some years in Texas, we've executed close to 40 people, and this number has never significantly declined over the last 15 years. And yet, at the same time that we continue to execute about the same number of people every year, the number of people who we're sentencing to death on an annual basis has dropped rather steeply. So we have this paradox, which is that the number of annual executions has remained high but the number of new death sentences has gone down. Why is that? It can't be attributed to a decline in the murder rate, because the murder rate has not declined nearly so steeply as the red line on that graph has gone down. What has happened instead is that juries have started to sentence more and more people to prison for the rest of their lives without the possibility of parole, rather than sending them to the execution chamber. Why has that happened? It hasn't happened because of a dissolution of popular support for the death penalty. Death penalty opponents take great solace in the fact that death penalty support in Texas is at an all-time low. Do you know what all-time low in Texas means? It means that it's in the low 60 percent. Now, that's really good compared to the mid-1980s, when it was in excess of 80 percent, but we can't explain the decline in death sentences and the affinity for life without the possibility of parole by an erosion of support for the death penalty, because people still support the death penalty. What's happened to cause this phenomenon? What's happened is that lawyers who represent death row inmates have shifted their focus to earlier and earlier chapters of the death penalty story. So 25 years ago, they focused on chapter four. And they went from chapter four 25 years ago to chapter three in the late 1980s. And they went from chapter three in the late 1980s to chapter two in the mid-1990s. And beginning in the mid- to late 1990s, they began to focus on chapter one of the story. Now, you might think that this decline in death sentences and the increase in the number of life sentences is a good thing or a bad thing. I don't want to have a conversation about that today. All that I want to tell you is that the reason that this has happened is because death penalty lawyers have understood that the earlier you intervene in a case, the greater the likelihood that you're going to save your client's life. That's the first thing I've learned. Here's the second thing I learned: My client Will was not the exception to the rule; he was the rule. I sometimes say, if you tell me the name of a death row inmate -- doesn't matter what state he's in, doesn't matter if I've ever met him before -- I'll write his biography for you. And eight out of 10 times, the details of that biography will be more or less accurate. And the reason for that is that 80 percent of the people on death row are people who came from the same sort of dysfunctional family that Will did. Eighty percent of the people on death row are people who had exposure to the juvenile justice system. That's the second lesson that I've learned. Now we're right on the cusp of that corner where everybody's going to agree. People in this room might disagree about whether Will should have been executed, but I think everybody would agree that the best possible version of his story would be a story where no murder ever occurs. How do we do that? When our son Lincoln was working on that math problem two weeks ago, it was a big, gnarly problem. And he was learning how, when you have a big old gnarly problem, sometimes the solution is to slice it into smaller problems. That's what we do for most problems -- in math, in physics, even in social policy -- we slice them into smaller, more manageable problems. But every once in a while, as Dwight Eisenhower said, the way you solve a problem is to make it bigger. The way we solve this problem is to make the issue of the death penalty bigger. We have to say, all right. We have these four chapters of a death penalty story, but what happens before that story begins? How can we intervene in the life of a murderer before he's a murderer? What options do we have to nudge that person off of the path that is going to lead to a result that everybody -- death penalty supporters and death penalty opponents -- still think is a bad result: the murder of an innocent human being? You know, sometimes people say that something isn't rocket science. And by that, what they mean is rocket science is really complicated and this problem that we're talking about now is really simple. Well that's rocket science; that's the mathematical expression for the thrust created by a rocket. What we're talking about today is just as complicated. What we're talking about today is also rocket science. My client Will and 80 percent of the people on death row had five chapters in their lives that came before the four chapters of the death penalty story. I think of these five chapters as points of intervention, places in their lives when our society could've intervened in their lives and nudged them off of the path that they were on that created a consequence that we all -- death penalty supporters or death penalty opponents -- say was a bad result. Now, during each of these five chapters: when his mother was pregnant with him; in his early childhood years; when he was in elementary school; when he was in middle school and then high school; and when he was in the juvenile justice system -- during each of those five chapters, there were a wide variety of things that society could have done. In fact, if we just imagine that there are five different modes of intervention, the way that society could intervene in each of those five chapters, and we could mix and match them any way we want, there are 3,000 -- more than 3,000 -- possible strategies that we could embrace in order to nudge kids like Will off of the path that they're on. So I'm not standing here today with the solution. But the fact that we still have a lot to learn, that doesn't mean that we don't know a lot already. We know from experience in other states that there are a wide variety of modes of intervention that we could be using in Texas, and in every other state that isn't using them, in order to prevent a consequence that we all agree is bad. I'll just mention a few. I won't talk today about reforming the legal system. That's probably a topic that is best reserved for a room full of lawyers and judges. Instead, let me talk about a couple of modes of intervention that we can all help accomplish, because they are modes of intervention that will come about when legislators and policymakers, when taxpayers and citizens, agree that that's what we ought to be doing and that's how we ought to be spending our money. We could be providing early childhood care for economically disadvantaged and otherwise troubled kids, and we could be doing it for free. And we could be nudging kids like Will off of the path that we're on. There are other states that do that, but we don't. We could be providing special schools, at both the high school level and the middle school level, but even in K-5, that target economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids, and particularly kids who have had exposure to the juvenile justice system. There are a handful of states that do that; Texas doesn't. There's one other thing we can be doing -- well, there are a bunch of other things -- there's one other thing that I'm going to mention, and this is going to be the only controversial thing that I say today. We could be intervening much more aggressively into dangerously dysfunctional homes, and getting kids out of them before their moms pick up butcher knives and threaten to kill them. If we're going to do that, we need a place to put them. Even if we do all of those things, some kids are going to fall through the cracks and they're going to end up in that last chapter before the murder story begins, they're going to end up in the juvenile justice system. And even if that happens, it's not yet too late. There's still time to nudge them, if we think about nudging them rather than just punishing them. There are two professors in the Northeast -- one at Yale and one at Maryland -- they set up a school that is attached to a juvenile prison. And the kids are in prison, but they go to school from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. Now, it was logistically difficult. They had to recruit teachers who wanted to teach inside a prison, they had to establish strict separation between the people who work at the school and the prison authorities, and most dauntingly of all, they needed to invent a new curriculum because you know what? People don't come into and out of prison on a semester basis. (Laughter) But they did all those things. Now, what do all of these things have in common? What all of these things have in common is that they cost money. Some of the people in the room might be old enough to remember the guy on the old oil filter commercial. He used to say, "Well, you can pay me now or you can pay me later." What we're doing in the death penalty system is we're paying later. But the thing is that for every 15,000 dollars that we spend intervening in the lives of economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids in those earlier chapters, we save 80,000 dollars in crime-related costs down the road. Even if you don't agree that there's a moral imperative that we do it, it just makes economic sense. I want to tell you about the last conversation that I had with Will. It was the day that he was going to be executed, and we were just talking. There was nothing left to do in his case. And we were talking about his life. And he was talking first about his dad, who he hardly knew, who had died, and then about his mom, who he did know, who was still alive. And I said to him, "I know the story. I've read the records. I know that she tried to kill you." I said, "But I've always wondered whether you really actually remember that." I said, "I don't remember anything from when I was five years old. Maybe you just remember somebody telling you." And he looked at me and he leaned forward, and he said, "Professor," -- he'd known me for 12 years, he still called me Professor. He said, "Professor, I don't mean any disrespect by this, but when your mama picks up a butcher knife that looks bigger than you are, and chases you through the house screaming she's going to kill you, and you have to lock yourself in the bathroom and lean against the door and holler for help until the police get there," he looked at me and he said, "that's something you don't forget." I hope there's one thing you all won't forget: In between the time you arrived here this morning and the time we break for lunch, there are going to be four homicides in the United States. We're going to devote enormous social resources to punishing the people who commit those crimes, and that's appropriate because we should punish people who do bad things. But three of those crimes are preventable. If we make the picture bigger and devote our attention to the earlier chapters, then we're never going to write the first sentence that begins the death penalty story. Thank you. (Applause)
Diana Reiss: You may think you're looking through a window at a dolphin spinning playfully, but what you're actually looking through is a two-way mirror at a dolphin looking at itself spinning playfully. This is a dolphin that is self-aware. This dolphin has self-awareness. It's a young dolphin named Bayley. I've been very interested in understanding the nature of the intelligence of dolphins for the past 30 years. How do we explore intelligence in this animal that's so different from us? And what I've used is a very simple research tool, a mirror, and we've gained great information, reflections of these animal minds. Dolphins aren't the only animals, the only non-human animals, to show mirror self-recognition. We used to think this was a uniquely human ability, but we learned that the great apes, our closest relatives, also show this ability. Then we showed it in dolphins, and then later in elephants. We did this work in my lab with the dolphins and elephants, and it's been recently shown in the magpie. Now, it's interesting, because we've embraced this Darwinian view of a continuity in physical evolution, this physical continuity. But we've been much more reticent, much slower at recognizing this continuity in cognition, in emotion, in consciousness in other animals. Other animals are conscious. They're emotional. They're aware. There have been multitudes of studies with many species over the years that have given us exquisite evidence for thinking and consciousness in other animals, other animals that are quite different than we are in form. We are not alone. We are not alone in these abilities. And I hope, and one of my biggest dreams, is that, with our growing awareness about the consciousness of others and our relationship with the rest of the animal world, that we'll give them the respect and protection that they deserve. So that's a wish I'm throwing out here for everybody, and I hope I can really engage you in this idea. Now, I want to return to dolphins, because these are the animals that I feel like I've been working up closely and personal with for over 30 years. And these are real personalities. They are not persons, but they're personalities in every sense of the word. And you can't get more alien than the dolphin. They are very different from us in body form. They're radically different. They come from a radically different environment. In fact, we're separated by 95 million years of divergent evolution. Look at this body. And in every sense of making a pun here, these are true non-terrestrials. I wondered how we might interface with these animals. In the 1980s, I developed an underwater keyboard. This was a custom-made touch-screen keyboard. What I wanted to do was give the dolphins choice and control. These are big brains, highly social animals, and I thought, well, if we give them choice and control, if they can hit a symbol on this keyboard -- and by the way, it was interfaced by fiber optic cables from Hewlett-Packard with an Apple II computer. This seems prehistoric now, but this was where we were with technology. So the dolphins could hit a key, a symbol, they heard a computer-generated whistle, and they got an object or activity. Now here's a little video. This is Delphi and Pan, and you're going to see Delphi hitting a key, he hears a computer-generated whistle -- (Whistle) -- and gets a ball, so they can actually ask for things they want. What was remarkable is, they explored this keyboard on their own. There was no intervention on our part. They explored the keyboard. They played around with it. They figured out how it worked. And they started to quickly imitate the sounds they were hearing on the keyboard. They imitated on their own. Beyond that, though, they started learning associations between the symbols, the sounds and the objects. What we saw was self-organized learning, and now I'm imagining, what can we do with new technologies? How can we create interfaces, new windows into the minds of animals, with the technologies that exist today? So I was thinking about this, and then, one day, I got a call from Peter. Peter Gabriel: I make noises for a living. On a good day, it's music, and I want to talk a little bit about the most amazing music-making experience I ever had. I'm a farm boy. I grew up surrounded by animals, and I would look in these eyes and wonder what was going on there? So as an adult, when I started to read about the amazing breakthroughs with Penny Patterson and Koko, with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Kanzi, Panbanisha, Irene Pepperberg, Alex the parrot, I got all excited. What was amazing to me also was they seemed a lot more adept at getting a handle on our language than we were on getting a handle on theirs. I work with a lot of musicians from around the world, and often we don't have any common language at all, but we sit down behind our instruments, and suddenly there's a way for us to connect and emote. So I started cold-calling, and eventually got through to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, and she invited me down. I went down, and the bonobos had had access to percussion instruments, musical toys, but never before to a keyboard. At first they did what infants do, just bashed it with their fists, and then I asked, through Sue, if Panbanisha could try with one finger only. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh: Can you play a grooming song? I want to hear a grooming song. Play a real quiet grooming song. PG: So groom was the subject of the piece. (Music) So I'm just behind, jamming, yeah, this is what we started with. Sue's encouraging her to continue a little more. (Music) She discovers a note she likes, finds the octave. She'd never sat at a keyboard before. Nice triplets. SSR: You did good. That was very good. PG: She hit good. (Applause) So that night, we began to dream, and we thought, perhaps the most amazing tool that man's created is the Internet, and what would happen if we could somehow find new interfaces, visual-audio interfaces that would allow these remarkable sentient beings that we share the planet with access? And Sue Savage-Rumbaugh got excited about that, called her friend Steve Woodruff, and we began hustling all sorts of people whose work related or was inspiring, which led us to Diana, and led us to Neil. Neil Gershenfeld: Thanks, Peter. PG: Thank you. (Applause) NG: So Peter approached me. I lost it when I saw that clip. He approached me with a vision of doing these things not for people, for animals. And then I was struck in the history of the Internet. This is what the Internet looked like when it was born and you can call that the Internet of middle-aged white men, mostly middle-aged white men. Vint Cerf: (Laughs) (Laughter) NG: Speaking as one. Then, when I first came to TED, which was where I met Peter, I showed this. This is a $1 web server, and at the time that was radical. And the possibility of making a web server for a dollar grew into what became known as the Internet of Things, which is literally an industry now with tremendous implications for health care, energy efficiency. And we were happy with ourselves. And then when Peter showed me that, I realized we had missed something, which is the rest of the planet. So we started up this interspecies Internet project. Now we started talking with TED about how you bring dolphins and great apes and elephants to TED, and we realized that wouldn't work. So we're going to bring you to them. So if we could switch to the audio from this computer, we've been video conferencing with cognitive animals, and we're going to have each of them just briefly introduce them. And so if we could also have this up, great. So the first site we're going to meet is Cameron Park Zoo in Waco, with orangutans. In the daytime they live outside. It's nighttime there now. So can you please go ahead? Terri Cox: Hi, I'm Terri Cox with the Cameron Park Zoo in Waco, Texas, and with me I have KeraJaan and Mei, two of our Bornean orangutans. During the day, they have a beautiful, large outdoor habitat, and at night, they come into this habitat, into their night quarters, where they can have a climate-controlled and secure environment to sleep in. We participate in the Apps for Apes program Orangutan Outreach, and we use iPads to help stimulate and enrich the animals, and also help raise awareness for these critically endangered animals. And they share 97 percent of our DNA and are incredibly intelligent, so it's so exciting to think of all the opportunities that we have via technology and the Internet to really enrich their lives and open up their world. We're really excited about the possibility of an interspecies Internet, and K.J. has been enjoying the conference very much. NG: That's great. When we were rehearsing last night, he had fun watching the elephants. Next user group are the dolphins at the National Aquarium. Please go ahead. Allison Ginsburg: Good evening. Well, my name is Allison Ginsburg, and we're live in Baltimore at the National Aquarium. Joining me are three of our eight Atlantic bottlenose dolphins: 20-year-old Chesapeake, who was our first dolphin born here, her four-year-old daughter Bayley, and her half sister, 11-year-old Maya. Now, here at the National Aquarium we are committed to excellence in animal care, to research, and to conservation. The dolphins are pretty intrigued as to what's going on here tonight. They're not really used to having cameras here at 8 o'clock at night. In addition, we are very committed to doing different types of research. As Diana mentioned, our animals are involved in many different research studies. NG: Those are for you. Okay, that's great, thank you. And the third user group, in Thailand, is Think Elephants. Go ahead, Josh. Josh Plotnik: Hi, my name is Josh Plotnik, and I'm with Think Elephants International, and we're here in the Golden Triangle of Thailand with the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation elephants. And we have 26 elephants here, and our research is focused on the evolution of intelligence with elephants, but our foundation Think Elephants is focused on bringing elephants into classrooms around the world virtually like this and showing people how incredible these animals are. So we're able to bring the camera right up to the elephant, put food into the elephant's mouth, show people what's going on inside their mouths, and show everyone around the world how incredible these animals really are. NG: Okay, that's great. Thanks Josh. And once again, we've been building great relationships among them just since we've been rehearsing. So at that point, if we can go back to the other computer, we were starting to think about how you integrate the rest of the biomass of the planet into the Internet, and we went to the best possible person I can think of, which is Vint Cerf, who is one of the founders who gave us the Internet. Vint? VC: Thank you, Neil. (Applause) A long time ago in a galaxy — oops, wrong script. Forty years ago, Bob Kahn and I did the design of the Internet. Thirty years ago, we turned it on. Just last year, we turned on the production Internet. You've been using the experimental version for the last 30 years. The production version, it uses IP version 6. It has 3.4 times 10 to the 38th possible terminations. That's a number only that Congress can appreciate. But it leads to what is coming next. When Bob and I did this design, we thought we were building a system to connect computers together. What we very quickly discovered is that this was a system for connecting people together. And what you've seen tonight tells you that we should not restrict this network to one species, that these other intelligent, sentient species should be part of the system too. This is the system as it looks today, by the way. This is what the Internet looks like to a computer that's trying to figure out where the traffic is supposed to go. This is generated by a program that's looking at the connectivity of the Internet, and how all the various networks are connected together. There are about 400,000 networks, interconnected, run independently by 400,000 different operating agencies, and the only reason this works is that they all use the same standard TCP/IP protocols. Well, you know where this is headed. The Internet of Things tell us that a lot of computer-enabled appliances and devices are going to become part of this system too: appliances that you use around the house, that you use in your office, that you carry around with yourself or in the car. That's the Internet of Things that's coming. Now, what's important about what these people are doing is that they're beginning to learn how to communicate with species that are not us but share a common sensory environment. We're beginning to explore what it means to communicate with something that isn't just another person. Well, you can see what's coming next. All kinds of possible sentient beings may be interconnected through this system, and I can't wait to see these experiments unfold. What happens after that? Well, let's see. There are machines that need to talk to machines and that we need to talk to, and so as time goes on, we're going to have to learn how to communicate with computers and how to get computers to communicate with us in the way that we're accustomed to, not with keyboards, not with mice, but with speech and gestures and all the natural human language that we're accustomed to. So we'll need something like C3PO to become a translator between ourselves and some of the other machines we live with. Now, there is a project that's underway called the interplanetary Internet. It's in operation between Earth and Mars. It's operating on the International Space Station. It's part of the spacecraft that's in orbit around the Sun that's rendezvoused with two planets. So the interplanetary system is on its way, but there's a last project, which the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which funded the original ARPANET, funded the Internet, funded the interplanetary architecture, is now funding a project to design a spacecraft to get to the nearest star in 100 years' time. What that means is that what we're learning with these interactions with other species will teach us, ultimately, how we might interact with an alien from another world. I can hardly wait. (Applause) June Cohen: So first of all, thank you, and I would like to acknowledge that four people who could talk to us for full four days actually managed to stay to four minutes each, and we thank you for that. I have so many questions, but maybe a few practical things that the audience might want to know. You're launching this idea here at TED — PG: Today. JC: Today. This is the first time you're talking about it. Tell me a little bit about where you're going to take the idea. What's next? PG: I think we want to engage as many people here as possible in helping us think of smart interfaces that will make all this possible. NG: And just mechanically, there's a 501(c)(3) and web infrastructure and all of that, but it's not quite ready to turn on, so we'll roll that out, and contact us if you want the information on it. The idea is this will be -- much like the Internet functions as a network of networks, which is Vint's core contribution, this will be a wrapper around all of these initiatives, that are wonderful individually, to link them globally. JC: Right, and do you have a web address that we might look for yet? NG: Shortly. JC: Shortly. We will come back to you on that. And very quickly, just to clarify. Some people might have looked at the video that you showed and thought, well, that's just a webcam. What's special about it? If you could talk for just a moment about how you want to go past that? NG: So this is scalable video infrastructure, not for a few to a few but many to many, so that it scales to symmetrical video sharing and content sharing across these sites around the planet. So there's a lot of back-end signal processing, not for one to many, but for many to many. JC: Right, and then on a practical level, which technologies are you looking at first? I know you mentioned that a keyboard is a really key part of this. DR: We're trying to develop an interactive touch screen for dolphins. This is sort of a continuation of some of the earlier work, and we just got our first seed money today towards that, so it's our first project. JC: Before the talk, even. DR: Yeah. JC: Wow. Well done. All right, well thank you all so much for joining us. It's such a delight to have you on the stage. DR: Thank you. VC: Thank you. (Applause)
Two weeks ago, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my wife Katya, and we were talking about what I was gonna talk about today. We have an 11-year-old son; his name is Lincoln. He was sitting at the same table doing his math homework. And during a pause in my conversation with Katya, I looked over at Lincoln and I was suddenly thunderstruck by a recollection of a client of mine. My client was a guy named Will. He was from North Texas. He never knew his father very well, because his father left his mom while she was pregnant with him. And so, he was destined to be raised by a single mom, which might have been all right except that this particular single mom was a paranoid schizophrenic, and when Will was five years old she tried to kill him with a butcher knife. She was taken away by authorities and placed in a psychiatric hospital, and so for the next several years Will lived with his older brother until he committed suicide by shooting himself through the heart. And after that Will bounced around from one family member to another, until, by the time he was nine years old, he was essentially living on his own. That morning that I was sitting with Katya and Lincoln, I looked at my son, and I realized that when my client, Will, was his age, he'd been living by himself for two years. Will eventually joined a gang and committed a number of very serious crimes, including, most seriously of all, a horrible, tragic murder. And Will was ultimately executed as punishment for that crime. But I don't want to talk today about the morality of capital punishment. I certainly think that my client shouldn't have been executed, but what I would like to do today instead is talk about the death penalty in a way I've never done before, in a way that is entirely noncontroversial. I think that's possible, because there is a corner of the death penalty debate -- maybe the most important corner -- where everybody agrees, where the most ardent death penalty supporters and the most vociferous abolitionists are on exactly the same page. That's the corner I want to explore. Before I do that, though, I want to spend a couple of minutes telling you how a death penalty case unfolds, and then I want to tell you two lessons that I have learned over the last 20 years as a death penalty lawyer, from watching well more than a hundred cases unfold in this way. You can think of a death penalty case as a story that has four chapters. The first chapter of every case is exactly the same, and it is tragic. It begins with the murder of an innocent human being, and it's followed by a trial where the murderer is convicted and sent to death row, and that death sentence is ultimately upheld by the state appellate court. The second chapter consists of a complicated legal proceeding known as a state habeas corpus appeal. The third chapter is an even more complicated legal proceeding known as a federal habeas corpus proceeding. And the fourth chapter is one where a variety of things can happen. The lawyers might file a clemency petition, they might initiate even more complex litigation, or they might not do anything at all. But that fourth chapter always ends with an execution. When I started representing death row inmates more than 20 years ago, people on death row did not have a right to a lawyer in either the second or the fourth chapter of this story. They were on their own. In fact, it wasn't until the late 1980s that they acquired a right to a lawyer during the third chapter of the story. So what all of these death row inmates had to do was rely on volunteer lawyers to handle their legal proceedings. The problem is that there were way more guys on death row than there were lawyers who had both the interest and the expertise to work on these cases. And so inevitably, lawyers drifted to cases that were already in chapter four -- that makes sense, of course. Those are the cases that are most urgent; those are the guys who are closest to being executed. Some of these lawyers were successful; they managed to get new trials for their clients. Others of them managed to extend the lives of their clients, sometimes by years, sometimes by months. But the one thing that didn't happen was that there was never a serious and sustained decline in the number of annual executions in Texas. In fact, as you can see from this graph, from the time that the Texas execution apparatus got efficient in the mid- to late-1990s, there've only been a couple of years where the number of annual executions dipped below 20. In a typical year in Texas, we're averaging about two people a month. In some years in Texas, we've executed close to 40 people, and this number has never significantly declined over the last 15 years. And yet, at the same time that we continue to execute about the same number of people every year, the number of people who we're sentencing to death on an annual basis has dropped rather steeply. So we have this paradox, which is that the number of annual executions has remained high but the number of new death sentences has gone down. Why is that? It can't be attributed to a decline in the murder rate, because the murder rate has not declined nearly so steeply as the red line on that graph has gone down. What has happened instead is that juries have started to sentence more and more people to prison for the rest of their lives without the possibility of parole, rather than sending them to the execution chamber. Why has that happened? it hasn't happened because of a dissolution of popular support for the death penalty. Death penalty opponents take great solace in the fact that death penalty support in Texas is at an all-time low. Do you know what all-time low in Texas means? It means that it's in the low 60 percent. Now that's really good compared to the mid 1980s, when it was in excess of 80 percent, but we can't explain the decline in death sentences and the affinity for life without the possibility of parole by an erosion of support for the death penalty, because people still support the death penalty. What's happened to cause this phenomenon? What's happened is that lawyers who represent death row inmates have shifted their focus to earlier and earlier chapters of the death penalty story. So 25 years ago, they focused on chapter four. And they went from chapter four 25 years ago to chapter three in the late 1980s. And they went from chapter three in the late 1980s to chapter two in the mid-1990s. And beginning in the mid- to late-1990s, they began to focus on chapter one of the story. Now you might think that this decline in death sentences and the increase in the number of life sentences is a good thing or a bad thing. I don't want to have a conversation about that today. All that I want to tell you is that the reason that this has happened is because death penalty lawyers have understood that the earlier you intervene in a case, the greater the likelihood that you're going to save your client's life. That's the first thing I've learned. Here's the second thing I learned: My client Will was not the exception to the rule; he was the rule. I sometimes say, if you tell me the name of a death row inmate -- doesn't matter what state he's in, doesn't matter if I've ever met him before -- I'll write his biography for you. And eight out of 10 times, the details of that biography will be more or less accurate. And the reason for that is that 80 percent of the people on death row are people who came from the same sort of dysfunctional family that Will did. Eighty percent of the people on death row are people who had exposure to the juvenile justice system. That's the second lesson that I've learned. Now we're right on the cusp of that corner where everybody's going to agree. People in this room might disagree about whether Will should have been executed, but I think everybody would agree that the best possible version of his story would be a story where no murder ever occurs. How do we do that? When our son Lincoln was working on that math problem two weeks ago, it was a big, gnarly problem. And he was learning how, when you have a big old gnarly problem, sometimes the solution is to slice it into smaller problems. That's what we do for most problems -- in math and physics, even in social policy -- we slice them into smaller, more manageable problems. But every once in a while, as Dwight Eisenhower said, the way you solve a problem is to make it bigger. The way we solve this problem is to make the issue of the death penalty bigger. We have to say, all right. We have these four chapters of a death penalty story, but what happens before that story begins? How can we intervene in the life of a murderer before he's a murderer? What options do we have to nudge that person off of the path that is going to lead to a result that everybody -- death penalty supporters and death penalty opponents -- still think is a bad result: the murder of an innocent human being? You know, sometimes people say that something isn't rocket science. And by that, what they mean is rocket science is really complicated and this problem that we're talking about now is really simple. Well that's rocket science; that's the mathematical expression for the thrust created by a rocket. What we're talking about today is just as complicated. What we're talking about today is also rocket science. My client Will and 80 percent of the people on death row had five chapters in their lives that came before the four chapters of the death penalty story. I think of these five chapters as points of intervention, places in their lives when our society could've intervened in their lives and nudged them off of the path that they were on that created a consequence that we all -- death penalty supporters or death penalty opponents -- say was a bad result. Now, during each of these five chapters: when his mother was pregnant with him; in his early childhood years; when he was in elementary school; when he was in middle school and then high school; and when he was in the juvenile justice system -- during each of those five chapters, there were a wide variety of things that society could have done. In fact, if we just imagine that there are five different modes of intervention, the way that society could intervene in each of those five chapters, and we could mix and match them any way we want, there are 3,000 -- more than 3,000 -- possible strategies that we could embrace in order to nudge kids like Will off of the path that they're on. So I'm not standing here today with the solution. But the fact that we still have a lot to learn, that doesn't mean that we don't know a lot already. We know from experience in other states that there are a wide variety of modes of intervention that we could be using in Texas, and in every other state that isn't using them, in order to prevent a consequence that we all agree is bad. I'll just mention a few. I won't talk today about reforming the legal system. That's probably a topic that is best reserved for a room full of lawyers and judges. Instead, let me talk about a couple of modes of intervention that we can all help accomplish, because they are modes of intervention that will come about when legislators and policymakers, when taxpayers and citizens, agree that that's what we ought to be doing and that's how we ought to be spending our money. We could be providing early childhood care for economically disadvantaged and otherwise troubled kids, and we could be doing it for free. And we could be nudging kids like Will off of the path that we're on. There are other states that do that, but we don't. We could be providing special schools, at both the high school level and the middle school level, but even in K-5, that target economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids, and particularly kids who have had exposure to the juvenile justice system. There are a handful of states that do that; Texas doesn't. There's one other thing we can be doing -- well, there are a bunch of other things that we could be doing -- there's one other thing that we could be doing that I'm going to mention, and this is gonna be the only controversial thing that I say today. We could be intervening much more aggressively into dangerously dysfunctional homes, and getting kids out of them before their moms pick up butcher knives and threaten to kill them. If we're gonna do that, we need a place to put them. Even if we do all of those things, some kids are going to fall through the cracks and they're going to end up in that last chapter before the murder story begins, they're going to end up in the juvenile justice system. And even if that happens, it's not yet too late. There's still time to nudge them, if we think about nudging them rather than just punishing them. There are two professors in the Northeast -- one at Yale and one at Maryland -- they set up a school that is attached to a juvenile prison. And the kids are in prison, but they go to school from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. Now, it was logistically difficult. They had to recruit teachers who wanted to teach inside a prison, they had to establish strict separation between the people who work at the school and the prison authorities, and most dauntingly of all, they needed to invent a new curriculum because you know what? People don't come into and out of prison on a semester basis. But they did all those things. Now what do all of these things have in common? What all of these things have in common is that they cost money. Some of the people in the room might be old enough to remember the guy on the old oil filter commercial. He used to say, "Well, you can pay me now or you can pay me later." What we're doing in the death penalty system is we're paying later. But the thing is that for every 15,000 dollars that we spend intervening in the lives of economically and otherwise disadvantaged kids in those earlier chapters, we save 80,000 dollars in crime-related costs down the road. Even if you don't agree that there's a moral imperative that we do it, it just makes economic sense. I want to tell you about the last conversation that I had with Will. It was the day that he was going to be executed, and we were just talking. There was nothing left to do in his case. And we were talking about his life. And he was talking first about his dad, who he hardly knew, who had died, and then about his mom, who he did know, who is still alive. And I said to him, "I know the story. I've read the records. I know that she tried to kill you." I said, "But I've always wondered whether you really actually remember that." I said, "I don't remember anything from when I was five years old. Maybe you just remember somebody telling you." And he looked at me and he leaned forward, and he said, "Professor," -- he'd known me for 12 years, he still called me Professor. He said, "Professor, I don't mean any disrespect by this, but when your mama picks up a butcher knife that looks bigger than you are, and chases you through the house screaming she's gonna kill you, and you have to lock yourself in the bathroom and lean against the door and holler for help until the police get there," he looked at me and he said, "that's something you don't forget." I hope there's one thing you all won't forget: In between the time you arrived here this morning and the time we break for lunch, there are going to be four homicides in the United States. We're going to devote enormous social resources to punishing the people who commit those crimes, and that's appropriate, because we should punish people who do bad things. But three of those crimes are preventable. If we make the picture bigger and devote our attention to the earlier chapters, then we're never going to write the first sentence that begins the death penalty story. Thank you. (Applause)
My job is to design, build and study robots that communicate with people. But this story doesn't start with robotics at all, it starts with animation. When I first saw Pixar's "Luxo Jr.," I was amazed by how much emotion they could put into something as trivial as a desk lamp. I mean, look at them -- at the end of this movie, you actually feel something for two pieces of furniture. (Laughter) And I said, I have to learn how to do this. So I made a really bad career decision. (Laughter) And that's what my mom was like when I did it. (Laughter) I left a very cozy tech job in Israel at a nice software company and I moved to New York to study animation. And there I lived in a collapsing apartment building in Harlem with roommates. I'm not using this phrase metaphorically -- the ceiling actually collapsed one day in our living room. Whenever they did news stories about building violations in New York, they would put the report in front of our building, as kind of, like, a backdrop to show how bad things are. Anyway, during the day, I went to school and at night I would sit and draw frame by frame of pencil animation. And I learned two surprising lessons. One of them was that when you want to arouse emotions, it doesn't matter so much how something looks; it's all in the motion, in the timing of how the thing moves. And the second was something one of our teachers told us. He actually did the weasel in "Ice Age." And he said, "As an animator, you're not a director -- you're an actor." So, if you want to find the right motion for a character, don't think about it -- go use your body to find it. Stand in front of a mirror, act it out in front of a camera -- whatever you need -- and then put it back in your character. A year later I found myself at MIT in the Robotic Life Group. It was one of the first groups researching the relationships between humans and robots. And I still had this dream to make an actual, physical Luxo Jr. lamp. But I found that robots didn't move at all in this engaging way that I was used to from my animation studies. Instead, they were all -- how should I put it -- they were all kind of robotic. (Laughter) And I thought, what if I took whatever I learned in animation school, and used that to design my robotic desk lamp. So I went and designed frame by frame to try to make this robot as graceful and engaging as possible. And here when you see the robot interacting with me on a desktop -- and I'm actually redesigning the robot, so, unbeknownst to itself, it's kind of digging its own grave by helping me. (Laughter) I wanted it to be less of a mechanical structure giving me light, and more of a helpful, kind of quiet apprentice that's always there when you need it and doesn't really interfere. And when, for example, I'm looking for a battery that I can't find, in a subtle way, it'll show me where the battery is. So you can see my confusion here. I'm not an actor. And I want you to notice how the same mechanical structure can, at one point, just by the way it moves, seem gentle and caring and in the other case, seem violent and confrontational. And it's the same structure, just the motion is different. Actor: "You want to know something? Well, you want to know something? He was already dead! Just laying there, eyes glazed over!" (Laughter) But, moving in a graceful way is just one building block of this whole structure called human-robot interaction. I was, at the time, doing my PhD, I was working on human-robot teamwork, teams of humans and robots working together. I was studying the engineering, the psychology, the philosophy of teamwork, and at the same time, I found myself in my own kind of teamwork situation, with a good friend of mine, who's actually here. And in that situation, we can easily imagine robots in the near future being there with us. It was after a Passover Seder. We were folding up a lot of folding chairs, and I was amazed at how quickly we found our own rhythm. Everybody did their own part, we didn't have to divide our tasks. We didn't have to communicate verbally about this -- it all just happened. And I thought, humans and robots don't look at all like this. When humans and robots interact, it's much more like a chess game: the human does a thing, the robot analyzes whatever the human did, the robot decides what to do next, plans it and does it. Then the human waits, until it's their turn again. So it's much more like a chess game, and that makes sense, because chess is great for mathematicians and computer scientists. It's all about information, analysis, decision-making and planning. But I wanted my robot to be less of a chess player, and more like a doer that just clicks and works together. So I made my second horrible career choice: I decided to study acting for a semester. I took off from the PhD, I went to acting classes. I actually participated in a play -- I hope there’s no video of that around still. (Laughter) And I got every book I could find about acting, including one from the 19th century that I got from the library. And I was really amazed, because my name was the second name on the list -- the previous name was in 1889. (Laughter) And this book was kind of waiting for 100 years to be rediscovered for robotics. And this book shows actors how to move every muscle in the body to match every kind of emotion that they want to express. But the real revelation was when I learned about method acting. It became very popular in the 20th century. And method acting said you don't have to plan every muscle in your body; instead, you have to use your body to find the right movement. You have to use your sense memory to reconstruct the emotions and kind of think with your body to find the right expression -- improvise, play off your scene partner. And this came at the same time as I was reading about this trend in cognitive psychology, called embodied cognition, which also talks about the same ideas. We use our bodies to think; we don't just think with our brains and use our bodies to move, but our bodies feed back into our brain to generate the way that we behave. And it was like a lightning bolt. I went back to my office, I wrote this paper, which I never really published, called "Acting Lessons for Artificial Intelligence." And I even took another month to do what was then the first theater play with a human and a robot acting together. That's what you saw before with the actors. And I thought: How can we make an artificial intelligence model -- a computer, computational model -- that will model some of these ideas of improvisation, of taking risks, of taking chances, even of making mistakes? Maybe it can make for better robotic teammates. So I worked for quite a long time on these models and I implemented them on a number of robots. Here you can see a very early example with the robots trying to use this embodied artificial intelligence to try to match my movements as closely as possible. It's sort of like a game. Let's look at it. You can see when I psych it out, it gets fooled. And it's a little bit like what you might see actors do when they try to mirror each other to find the right synchrony between them. And then, I did another experiment, and I got people off the street to use the robotic desk lamp, and try out this idea of embodied artificial intelligence. So, I actually used two kinds of brains for the same robot. The robot is the same lamp that you saw, and I put two brains in it. For one half of the people, I put in a brain that's kind of the traditional, calculated robotic brain. It waits for its turn, it analyzes everything, it plans. Let's call it the calculated brain. The other got more the stage actor, risk-taker brain. Let's call it the adventurous brain. It sometimes acts without knowing everything it has to know. It sometimes makes mistakes and corrects them. And I had them do this very tedious task that took almost 20 minutes, and they had to work together, somehow simulating, like, a factory job of repetitively doing the same thing. What I found is that people actually loved the adventurous robot. They thought it was more intelligent, more committed, a better member of the team, contributed to the success of the team more. They even called it "he" and "she," whereas people with the calculated brain called it "it," and nobody ever called it "he" or "she." When they talked about it after the task, with the adventurous brain, they said, "By the end, we were good friends and high-fived mentally." Whatever that means. (Laughter) Sounds painful. Whereas the people with the calculated brain said it was just like a lazy apprentice. It only did what it was supposed to do and nothing more, which is almost what people expect robots to do, so I was surprised that people had higher expectations of robots than what anybody in robotics thought robots should be doing. And in a way, I thought, maybe it's time -- just like method acting changed the way people thought about acting in the 19th century, from going from the very calculated, planned way of behaving, to a more intuitive, risk-taking, embodied way of behaving -- maybe it's time for robots to have the same kind of revolution. A few years later, I was at my next research job at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and I was working in a group dealing with robotic musicians. And I thought, music: that's the perfect place to look at teamwork, coordination, timing, improvisation -- and we just got this robot playing marimba. And the marimba, for everybody like me, it was this huge, wooden xylophone. And when I was looking at this, I looked at other works in human-robot improvisation -- yes, there are other works in human-robot improvisation -- and they were also a little bit like a chess game. The human would play, the robot analyzed what was played, and would improvise their own part. So, this is what musicians called a call-and-response interaction, and it also fits very well robots and artificial intelligence. But I thought, if I use the same ideas I used in the theater play and in the teamwork studies, maybe I can make the robots jam together like a band. Everybody's riffing off each other, nobody is stopping for a moment. And so I tried to do the same things, this time with music, where the robot doesn't really know what it's about to play, it just sort of moves its body and uses opportunities to play, and does what my jazz teacher when I was 17 taught me. She said, when you improvise, sometimes you don't know what you're doing, and you still do it. So I tried to make a robot that doesn't actually know what it's doing, but is still doing it. So let's look at a few seconds from this performance, where the robot listens to the human musician and improvises. And then, look how the human musician also responds to what the robot is doing and picking up from its behavior, and at some point can even be surprised by what the robot came up with. (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Being a musician is not just about making notes, otherwise nobody would ever go see a live show. Musicians also communicate with their bodies, with other band members, with the audience, they use their bodies to express the music. And I thought, we already have a robot musician on stage, why not make it be a full-fledged musician? And I started designing a socially expressive head for the robot. The head doesn’t actually touch the marimba, it just expresses what the music is like. These are some napkin sketches from a bar in Atlanta that was dangerously located exactly halfway between my lab and my home. So I spent, I would say, on average, three to four hours a day there. I think. (Laughter) And I went back to my animation tools and tried to figure out not just what a robotic musician would look like, but especially what a robotic musician would move like, to sort of show that it doesn't like what the other person is playing -- and maybe show whatever beat it's feeling at the moment. So we ended up actually getting the money to build this robot, which was nice. I'm going to show you now the same kind of performance, this time with a socially expressive head. And notice one thing -- how the robot is really showing us the beat it's picking up from the human, while also giving the human a sense that the robot knows what it's doing. And also how it changes the way it moves as soon as it starts its own solo. (Music) Now it's looking at me, showing that it's listening. (Music) Now look at the final chord of the piece again. And this time the robot communicates with its body when it's busy doing its own thing, and when it's ready to coordinate the final chord with me. (Music) (Music ending) (Final chord) (Applause) Thanks. I hope you see how much this part of the body that doesn't touch the instrument actually helps with the musical performance. And at some point -- we are in Atlanta, so obviously some rapper will come into our lab at some point -- and we had this rapper come in and do a little jam with the robot. Here you can see the robot basically responding to the beat. Notice two things: one, how irresistible it is to join the robot while it's moving its head. You kind of want to move your own head when it does it. And second, even though the rapper is really focused on his iPhone, as soon as the robot turns to him, he turns back. So even though it's just in the periphery of his vision, in the corner of his eye, it's very powerful. And the reason is that we can't ignore physical things moving in our environment. We are wired for that. So if you have a problem -- maybe your partner is looking at their iPhone or smartphone too much -- you might want to have a robot there to get their attention. (Laughter) (Music) (Music ends) (Applause) Just to introduce the last robot that we've worked on, it came out of something surprising that we found: Some point people didn't care about the robot being intelligent, able to improvise and listen, and do all these embodied intelligence things that I spent years developing. They really liked that the robot was enjoying the music. (Laughter) And they didn't say the robot was moving to the music, they said "enjoying" the music. And we thought, why don't we take this idea, and I designed a new piece of furniture. This time it wasn't a desk lamp, it was a speaker dock, one of those things you plug your smartphone in. And I thought, what would happen if your speaker dock didn't just play the music for you, but would actually enjoy it, too? And so again, here are some animation tests from an early stage. (Laughter) And this is what the final product looked like. (Music) (Music ends) So, a lot of bobbing heads. (Applause) A lot of bobbing heads in the audience, so we can still see robots influence people. And it's not just fun and games. I think one of the reasons I care so much about robots that use their body to communicate and use their body to move is -- I'm going to let you in on a little secret we roboticists are hiding -- is that every one of you is going to be living with a robot at some point in your life. Somewhere in your future, there will be a robot in your life. If not in yours, your children's lives. And I want these robots to be more fluent, more engaging, more graceful than currently they seem to be. And for that I think maybe robots need to be less like chess players and more like stage actors and more like musicians. Maybe they should be able to take chances and improvise. Maybe they should be able to anticipate what you're about to do. Maybe they even need to be able to make mistakes and correct them, because in the end, we are human. And maybe as humans, robots that are a little less than perfect are just perfect for us. Thank you. (Applause)
Good morning. When I was a little boy, I had an experience that changed my life, and is in fact why I'm here today. That one moment profoundly affected how I think about art, design and engineering. As background, I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family of loving and talented artists in one of the world's great cities. My dad, John Ferren, who died when I was 15, was an artist by both passion and profession, as is my mom, Rae. He was one of the New York School abstract expressionists who, together with his contemporaries, invented American modern art, and contributed to moving the American zeitgeist towards modernism in the 20th century. Isn't it remarkable that, after thousands of years of people doing mostly representational art, that modern art, comparatively speaking, is about 15 minutes old, yet now pervasive. As with many other important innovations, those radical ideas required no new technology, just fresh thinking and a willingness to experiment, plus resiliency in the face of near-universal criticism and rejection. In our home, art was everywhere. It was like oxygen, around us and necessary for life. As I watched him paint, Dad taught me that art was not about being decorative, but was a different way of communicating ideas, and in fact one that could bridge the worlds of knowledge and insight. Given this rich artistic environment, you'd assume that I would have been compelled to go into the family business, but no. I followed the path of most kids who are genetically programmed to make their parents crazy. I had no interest in becoming an artist, certainly not a painter. What I did love was electronics and machines -- taking them apart, building new ones, and making them work. Fortunately, my family also had engineers in it, and with my parents, these were my first role models. What they all had in common was they worked very, very hard. My grandpa owned and operated a sheet metal kitchen cabinet factory in Brooklyn. On weekends, we would go together to Cortlandt Street, which was New York City's radio row. There we would explore massive piles of surplus electronics, and for a few bucks bring home treasures like Norden bombsights and parts from the first IBM tube-based computers. I found these objects both useful and fascinating. I learned about engineering and how things worked, not at school but by taking apart and studying these fabulously complex devices. I did this for hours every day, apparently avoiding electrocution. Life was good. However, every summer, sadly, the machines got left behind while my parents and I traveled overseas to experience history, art and design. We visited the great museums and historic buildings of both Europe and the Middle East, but to encourage my growing interest in science and technology, they would simply drop me off in places like the London Science Museum, where I would wander endlessly for hours by myself studying the history of science and technology. Then, when I was about nine years old, we went to Rome. On one particularly hot summer day, we visited a drum-shaped building that from the outside was not particularly interesting. My dad said it was called the Pantheon, a temple for all of the gods. It didn't look all that special from the outside, as I said, but when we walked inside, I was immediately struck by three things: First of all, it was pleasantly cool despite the oppressive heat outside. It was very dark, the only source of light being an big open hole in the roof. Dad explained that this wasn't a big open hole, but it was called the oculus, an eye to the heavens. And there was something about this place, I didn't know why, that just felt special. As we walked to the center of the room, I looked up at the heavens through the oculus. This was the first church that I'd been to that provided an unrestricted view between God and man. But I wondered, what about when it rained? Dad may have called this an oculus, but it was, in fact, a big hole in the roof. I looked down and saw floor drains had been cut into the stone floor. As I became more accustomed to the dark, I was able to make out details of the floor and the surrounding walls. No big deal here, just the same statuary stuff that we'd seen all over Rome. In fact, it looked like the Appian Way marble salesman showed up with his sample book, showed it to Hadrian, and Hadrian said, "We'll take all of it." (Laughter) But the ceiling was amazing. It looked like a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome. I'd seen these before, and Bucky was friends with my dad. It was modern, high-tech, impressive, a huge 142-foot clear span which, not coincidentally, was exactly its height. I loved this place. It was really beautiful and unlike anything I'd ever seen before, so I asked my dad, "When was this built?" He said, "About 2,000 years ago." And I said, "No, I mean, the roof." You see, I assumed that this was a modern roof that had been put on because the original was destroyed in some long-past war. He said, "It's the original roof." That moment changed my life, and I can remember it as if it were yesterday. For the first time, I realized people were smart 2,000 years ago. (Laughter) This had never crossed my mind. I mean, to me, the pyramids at Giza, we visited those the year before, and sure they're impressive, nice enough design, but look, give me an unlimited budget, 20,000 to 40,000 laborers, and about 10 to 20 years to cut and drag stone blocks across the countryside, and I'll build you pyramids too. But no amount of brute force gets you the dome of the Pantheon, not 2,000 years ago, nor today. And incidentally, it is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome that's ever been built. To build the Pantheon took some miracles. By miracles, I mean things that are technically barely possible, very high-risk, and might not be actually accomplishable at this moment in time, certainly not by you. For example, here are some of the Pantheon's miracles. To make it even structurally possible, they had to invent super-strong concrete, and to control weight, varied the density of the aggregate as they worked their way up the dome. For strength and lightness, the dome structure used five rings of coffers, each of diminishing size, which imparts a dramatic forced perspective to the design. It was wonderfully cool inside because of its huge thermal mass, natural convection of air rising up through the oculus, and a Venturi effect when wind blows across the top of the building. I discovered for the first time that light itself has substance. The shaft of light beaming through the oculus was both beautiful and palpable, and I realized for the first time that light could be designed. Further, that of all of the forms of design, visual design, they were all kind of irrelevant without it, because without light, you can't see any of them. I also realized that I wasn't the first person to think that this place was really special. It survived gravity, barbarians, looters, developers and the ravages of time to become what I believe is the longest continuously occupied building in history. Largely because of that visit, I came to understand that, contrary to what I was being told in school, the worlds of art and design were not, in fact, incompatible with science and engineering. I realized, when combined, you could create things that were amazing that couldn't be done in either domain alone. But in school, with few exceptions, they were treated as separate worlds, and they still are. My teachers told me that I had to get serious and focus on one or the other. However, urging me to specialize only caused me to really appreciate those polymaths like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, people who did exactly the opposite. And this led me to embrace and want to be in both worlds. So then how do these projects of unprecedented creative vision and technical complexity like the Pantheon actually happen? Someone themselves, perhaps Hadrian, needed a brilliant creative vision. They also needed the storytelling and leadership skills necessary to fund and execute it, and a mastery of science and technology with the ability and knowhow to push existing innovations even farther. It is my belief that to create these rare game changers requires you to pull off at least five miracles. The problem is, no matter how talented, rich or smart you are, you only get one to one and a half miracles. That's it. That's the quota. Then you run out of time, money, enthusiasm, whatever. Remember, most people can't even imagine one of these technical miracles, and you need at least five to make a Pantheon. In my experience, these rare visionaries who can think across the worlds of art, design and engineering have the ability to notice when others have provided enough of the miracles to bring the goal within reach. Driven by the clarity of their vision, they summon the courage and determination to deliver the remaining miracles and they often take what other people think to be insurmountable obstacles and turn them into features. Take the oculus of the Pantheon. By insisting that it be in the design, it meant you couldn't use much of the structural technology that had been developed for Roman arches. However, by instead embracing it and rethinking weight and stress distribution, they came up with a design that only works if there's a big hole in the roof. That done, you now get the aesthetic and design benefits of light, cooling and that critical direct connection with the heavens. Not bad. These people not only believed that the impossible can be done, but that it must be done. Enough ancient history. What are some recent examples of innovations that combine creative design and technological advances in a way so profound that they will be remembered a thousand years from now? Well, putting a man on the moon was a good one, and returning him safely to Earth wasn't bad either. Talk about one giant leap: It's hard to imagine a more profound moment in human history than when we first left our world to set foot on another. So what came after the moon? One is tempted to say that today's pantheon is the Internet, but I actually think that's quite wrong, or at least it's only part of the story. The Internet isn't a Pantheon. It's more like the invention of concrete: important, absolutely necessary to build the Pantheon, and enduring, but entirely insufficient by itself. However, just as the technology of concrete was critical in realization of the Pantheon, new designers will use the technologies of the Internet to create novel concepts that will endure. The smartphone is a perfect example. Soon the majority of people on the planet will have one, and the idea of connecting everyone to both knowledge and each other will endure. So what's next? What imminent advance will be the equivalent of the Pantheon? Thinking about this, I rejected many very plausible and dramatic breakthroughs to come, such as curing cancer. Why? Because Pantheons are anchored in designed physical objects, ones that inspire by simply seeing and experiencing them, and will continue to do so indefinitely. It is a different kind of language, like art. These other vital contributions that extend life and relieve suffering are, of course, critical, and fantastic, but they're part of the continuum of our overall knowledge and technology, like the Internet. So what is next? Perhaps counterintuitively, I'm guessing it's a visionary idea from the late 1930s that's been revived every decade since: autonomous vehicles. Now you're thinking, give me a break. How can a fancy version of cruise control be profound? Look, much of our world has been designed around roads and transportation. These were as essential to the success of the Roman Empire as the interstate highway system to the prosperity and development of the United States. Today, these roads that interconnect our world are dominated by cars and trucks that have remained largely unchanged for 100 years. Although perhaps not obvious today, autonomous vehicles will be the key technology that enables us to redesign our cities and, by extension, civilization. Here's why: Once they become ubiquitous, each year, these vehicles will save tens of thousands of lives in the United States alone and a million globally. Automotive energy consumption and air pollution will be cut dramatically. Much of the road congestion in and out of our cities will disappear. They will enable compelling new concepts in how we design cities, work, and the way we live. We will get where we're going faster and society will recapture vast amounts of lost productivity now spent sitting in traffic basically polluting. But why now? Why do we think this is ready? Because over the last 30 years, people from outside the automotive industry have spent countless billions creating the needed miracles, but for entirely different purposes. It took folks like DARPA, universities, and companies completely outside of the automotive industry to notice that if you were clever about it, autonomy could be done now. So what are the five miracles needed for autonomous vehicles? One, you need to know where you are and exactly what time it is. This was solved neatly by the GPS system, Global Positioning System, that the U.S. Government put in place. You need to know where all the roads are, what the rules are, and where you're going. The various needs of personal navigation systems, in-car navigation systems, and web-based maps address this. You must have near-continuous communication with high-performance computing networks and with others nearby to understand their intent. The wireless technologies developed for mobile devices, with some minor modifications, are completely suitable to solve this. You'll probably want some restricted roadways to get started that both society and its lawyers agree are safe to use for this. This will start with the HOV lanes and move from there. But finally, you need to recognize people, signs and objects. Machine vision, special sensors, and high-performance computing can do a lot of this, but it turns out a lot is not good enough when your family is on board. Occasionally, humans will need to do sense-making. For this, you might actually have to wake up your passenger and ask them what the hell that big lump is in the middle of the road. Not so bad, and it will give us a sense of purpose in this new world. Besides, once the first drivers explain to their confused car that the giant chicken at the fork in the road is actually a restaurant, and it's okay to keep driving, every other car on the surface of the Earth will know that from that point on. Five miracles, mostly delivered, and now you just need a clear vision of a better world filled with autonomous vehicles with seductively beautiful and new functional designs plus a lot of money and hard work to bring it home. The beginning is now only a handful of years away, and I predict that autonomous vehicles will permanently change our world over the next several decades. In conclusion, I've come to believe that the ingredients for the next Pantheons are all around us, just waiting for visionary people with the broad knowledge, multidisciplinary skills, and intense passion to harness them to make their dreams a reality. But these people don't spontaneously pop into existence. They need to be nurtured and encouraged from when they're little kids. We need to love them and help them discover their passions. We need to encourage them to work hard and help them understand that failure is a necessary ingredient for success, as is perseverance. We need to help them to find their own role models, and give them the confidence to believe in themselves and to believe that anything is possible, and just as my grandpa did when he took me shopping for surplus, and just as my parents did when they took me to science museums, we need to encourage them to find their own path, even if it's very different from our own. But a cautionary note: We also need to periodically pry them away from their modern miracles, the computers, phones, tablets, game machines and TVs, take them out into the sunlight so they can experience both the natural and design wonders of our world, our planet and our civilization. If we don't, they won't understand what these precious things are that someday they will be resopnsible for protecting and improving. We also need them to understand something that doesn't seem adequately appreciated in our increasingly tech-dependent world, that art and design are not luxuries, nor somehow incompatible with science and engineering. They are in fact essential to what makes us special. Someday, if you get the chance, perhaps you can take your kids to the actual Pantheon, as we will our daughter Kira, to experience firsthand the power of that astonishing design, which on one otherwise unremarkable day in Rome, reached 2,000 years into the future to set the course for my life. Thank you. (Applause)
(Video) Nicholas Negroponte: Can we switch to the video disc, which is in play mode? I'm really interested in how you put people and computers together. We will be using the TV screens or their equivalents for electronic books of the future. (Music, crosstalk) Very interested in touch-sensitive displays, high-tech, high-touch, not having to pick up your fingers to use them. There is another way where computers touch people: wearing, physically wearing. Suddenly on September 11th, the world got bigger. NN: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. When I was asked to do this, I was also asked to look at all 14 TED Talks that I had given, chronologically. The first one was actually two hours. The second one was an hour, and then they became half hours, and all I noticed was my bald spot getting bigger. (Laughter) Imagine seeing your life, 30 years of it, go by, and it was, to say the least, for me, quite a shocking experience. So what I'm going to do in my time is try and share with you what happened during the 30 years, and then also make a prediction, and then tell you a little bit about what I'm doing next. And I put on a slide where TED 1 happened in my life. And it's rather important because I had done 15 years of research before it, so I had a backlog, so it was easy. It's not that I was Fidel Castro and I could talk for two hours, or Bucky Fuller. I had 15 years of stuff, and the Media Lab was about to start. So that was easy. But there are a couple of things about that period and about what happened that are really quite important. One is that it was a period when computers weren't yet for people. And the other thing that sort of happened during that time is that we were considered sissy computer scientists. We weren't considered the real thing. So what I'm going to show you is, in retrospect, a lot more interesting and a lot more accepted than it was at the time. So I'm going to characterize the years and I'm even going to go back to some very early work of mine, and this was the kind of stuff I was doing in the '60s: very direct manipulation, very influenced as I studied architecture by the architect Moshe Safdie, and you can see that we even built robotic things that could build habitat-like structures. And this for me was not yet the Media Lab, but was the beginning of what I'll call sensory computing, and I pick fingers partly because everybody thought it was ridiculous. Papers were published about how stupid it was to use fingers. Three reasons: One was they were low-resolution. The other is your hand would occlude what you wanted to see, and the third, which was the winner, was that your fingers would get the screen dirty, and hence, fingers would never be a device that you'd use. And this was a device we built in the '70s, which has never even been picked up. It's not just touch sensitive, it's pressure sensitive. (Video) Voice: Put a yellow circle there. NN: Later work, and again this was before TED 1 — (Video) Voice: Move that west of the diamond. Create a large green circle there. Man: Aw, shit. NN: — was to sort of do interface concurrently, so when you talked and you pointed and you had, if you will, multiple channels. Entebbe happened. 1976, Air France was hijacked, taken to Entebbe, and the Israelis not only did an extraordinary rescue, they did it partly because they had practiced on a physical model of the airport, because they had built the airport, so they built a model in the desert, and when they arrived at Entebbe, they knew where to go because they had actually been there. The U.S. government asked some of us, '76, if we could replicate that computationally, and of course somebody like myself says yes. Immediately, you get a contract, Department of Defense, and we built this truck and this rig. We did sort of a simulation, because you had video discs, and again, this is '76. And then many years later, you get this truck, and so you have Google Maps. Still people thought, no, that was not serious computer science, and it was a man named Jerry Wiesner, who happened to be the president of MIT, who did think it was computer science. And one of the keys for anybody who wants to start something in life: Make sure your president is part of it. So when I was doing the Media Lab, it was like having a gorilla in the front seat. If you were stopped for speeding and the officer looked in the window and saw who was in the passenger seat, then, "Oh, continue on, sir." And so we were able, and this is a cute, actually, device, parenthetically. This was a lenticular photograph of Jerry Wiesner where the only thing that changed in the photograph were the lips. So when you oscillated that little piece of lenticular sheet with his photograph, it would be in lip sync with zero bandwidth. It was a zero-bandwidth teleconferencing system at the time. So this was the Media Lab's — this is what we said we'd do, that the world of computers, publishing, and so on would come together. Again, not generally accepted, but very much part of TED in the early days. And this is really where we were headed. And that created the Media Lab. One of the things about age is that I can tell you with great confidence, I've been to the future. I've been there, actually, many times. And the reason I say that is, how many times in my life have I said, "Oh, in 10 years, this will happen," and then 10 years comes. And then you say, "Oh, in five years, this will happen." And then five years comes. So I say this a little bit with having felt that I'd been there a number of times, and one of the things that is most quoted that I've ever said is that computing is not about computers, and that didn't quite get enough traction, and then it started to. It started to because people caught on that the medium wasn't the message. And the reason I show this car in actually a rather ugly slide is just again to tell you the kind of story that characterized a little bit of my life. This is a student of mine who had done a Ph.D. called "Backseat Driver." It was in the early days of GPS, the car knew where it was, and it would give audio instructions to the driver, when to turn right, when to turn left and so on. Turns out, there are a lot of things in those instructions that back in that period were pretty challenging, like what does it mean, take the next right? Well, if you're coming up on a street, the next right's probably the one after, and there are lots of issues, and the student did a wonderful thesis, and the MIT patent office said "Don't patent it. It'll never be accepted. The liabilities are too large. There will be insurance issues. Don't patent it." So we didn't, but it shows you how people, again, at times, don't really look at what's happening. Some work, and I'll just go through these very quickly, a lot of sensory stuff. You might recognize a young Yo-Yo Ma and tracking his body for playing the cello or the hypercello. These fellows literally walked around like that at the time. It's now a little bit more discreet and more commonplace. And then there are at least three heroes I want to quickly mention. Marvin Minsky, who taught me a lot about common sense, and I will talk briefly about Muriel Cooper, who was very important to Ricky Wurman and to TED, and in fact, when she got onstage, she said, the first thing she said was, "I introduced Ricky to Nicky." And nobody calls me Nicky and nobody calls Richard Ricky, so nobody knew who she was talking about. And then, of course, Seymour Papert, who is the person who said, "You can't think about thinking unless you think about thinking about something." And that's actually — you can unpack that later. It's a pretty profound statement. I'm showing some slides that were from TED 2, a little silly as slides, perhaps. Then I felt television really was about displays. Again, now we're past TED 1, but just around the time of TED 2, and what I'd like to mention here is, even though you could imagine intelligence in the device, I look today at some of the work being done about the Internet of Things, and I think it's kind of tragically pathetic, because what has happened is people take the oven panel and put it on your cell phone, or the door key onto your cell phone, just taking it and bringing it to you, and in fact that's actually what you don't want. You want to put a chicken in the oven, and the oven says, "Aha, it's a chicken," and it cooks the chicken. "Oh, it's cooking the chicken for Nicholas, and he likes it this way and that way." So the intelligence, instead of being in the device, we have started today to move it back onto the cell phone or closer to the user, not a particularly enlightened view of the Internet of Things. Television, again, television what I said today, that was back in 1990, and the television of tomorrow would look something like that. Again, people, but they laughed cynically, they didn't laugh with much appreciation. Telecommunications in the 1990s, George Gilder decided that he would call this diagram the Negroponte switch. I'm probably much less famous than George, so when he called it the Negroponte switch, it stuck, but the idea of things that came in the ground would go in the air and stuff in the air would go into the ground has played itself out. That is the original slide from that year, and it has worked in lockstep obedience. We started Wired magazine. Some people, I remember we shared the reception desk periodically, and some parent called up irate that his son had given up Sports Illustrated to subscribe for Wired, and he said, "Are you some porno magazine or something?" and couldn't understand why his son would be interested in Wired, at any rate. I will go through this a little quicker. This is my favorite, 1995, back page of Newsweek magazine. Okay. Read it. (Laughter) ["Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure." —Clifford Stoll, Newsweek, 1995] You must admit that gives you, at least it gives me pleasure when somebody says how dead wrong you are. "Being Digital" came out. For me, it gave me an opportunity to be more in the trade press and get this out to the public, and it also allowed us to build the new Media Lab, which if you haven't been to, visit, because it's a beautiful piece of architecture aside from being a wonderful place to work. So these are the things we were saying in those TEDs. [Today, multimedia is a desktop or living room experience, because the apparatus is so clunky. This will change dramatically with small, bright, thin, high-resolution displays. — 1995] We came to them. I looked forward to it every year. It was the party that Ricky Wurman never had in the sense that he invited many of his old friends, including myself. And then something for me changed pretty profoundly. I became more involved with computers and learning and influenced by Seymour, but particularly looking at learning as something that is best approximated by computer programming. When you write a computer program, you've got to not just list things out and sort of take an algorithm and translate it into a set of instructions, but when there's a bug, and all programs have bugs, you've got to de-bug it. You've got to go in, change it, and then re-execute, and you iterate, and that iteration is really a very, very good approximation of learning. So that led to my own work with Seymour in places like Cambodia and the starting of One Laptop per Child. Enough TED Talks on One Laptop per Child, so I'll go through it very fast, but it did give us the chance to do something at a relatively large scale in the area of learning, development and computing. Very few people know that One Laptop per Child was a $1 billion project, and it was, at least over the seven years I ran it, but even more important, the World Bank contributed zero, USAID zero. It was mostly the countries using their own treasuries, which is very interesting, at least to me it was very interesting in terms of what I plan to do next. So these are the various places it happened. I then tried an experiment, and the experiment happened in Ethiopia. And here's the experiment. The experiment is, can learning happen where there are no schools. And we dropped off tablets with no instructions and let the children figure it out. And in a short period of time, they not only turned them on and were using 50 apps per child within five days, they were singing "ABC" songs within two weeks, but they hacked Android within six months. And so that seemed sufficiently interesting. This is perhaps the best picture I have. The kid on your right has sort of nominated himself as teacher. Look at the kid on the left, and so on. There are no adults involved in this at all. So I said, well can we do this at a larger scale? And what is it that's missing? The kids are giving a press conference at this point, and sort of writing in the dirt. And the answer is, what is missing? And I'm going to skip over my prediction, actually, because I'm running out of time, and here's the question, is what's going to happen? I think the challenge is to connect the last billion people, and connecting the last billion is very different than connecting the next billion, and the reason it's different is that the next billion are sort of low-hanging fruit, but the last billion are rural. Being rural and being poor are very different. Poverty tends to be created by our society, and the people in that community are not poor in the same way at all. They may be primitive, but the way to approach it and to connect them, the history of One Laptop per Child, and the experiment in Ethiopia, lead me to believe that we can in fact do this in a very short period of time. And so my plan, and unfortunately I haven't been able to get my partners at this point to let me announce them, but is to do this with a stationary satellite. There are many reasons that stationary satellites aren't the best things, but there are a lot of reasons why they are, and for two billion dollars, you can connect a lot more than 100 million people, but the reason I picked two, and I will leave this as my last slide, is two billion dollars is what we were spending in Afghanistan every week. So surely if we can connect Africa and the last billion people for numbers like that, we should be doing it. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Stay up there. Stay up there. NN: You're going to give me extra time? CA: No. That was wickedly clever, wickedly clever. You gamed it beautifully. Nicholas, what is your prediction? (Laughter) NN: Thank you for asking. I'll tell you what my prediction is, and my prediction, and this is a prediction, because it'll be 30 years. I won't be here. But one of the things about learning how to read, we have been doing a lot of consuming of information going through our eyes, and so that may be a very inefficient channel. So my prediction is that we are going to ingest information You're going to swallow a pill and know English. You're going to swallow a pill and know Shakespeare. And the way to do it is through the bloodstream. So once it's in your bloodstream, it basically goes through it and gets into the brain, and when it knows that it's in the brain in the different pieces, it deposits it in the right places. So it's ingesting. CA: Have you been hanging out with Ray Kurzweil by any chance? NN: No, but I've been hanging around with Ed Boyden and hanging around with one of the speakers who is here, Hugh Herr, and there are a number of people. This isn't quite as far-fetched, so 30 years from now. CA: We will check it out. We're going to be back and we're going to play this clip 30 years from now, and then all eat the red pill. Well thank you for that. Nicholas Negroponte. NN: Thank you. (Applause)
As a particle physicist, I study the elementary particles and how they interact on the most fundamental level. For most of my research career, I've been using accelerators, such as the electron accelerator at Stanford University, just up the road, to study things on the smallest scale. But more recently, I've been turning my attention to the universe on the largest scale. Because, as I'll explain to you, the questions on the smallest and the largest scale are actually very connected. So I'm going to tell you about our twenty-first-century view of the universe, what it's made of and what the big questions in the physical sciences are -- at least some of the big questions. So, recently, we have realized that the ordinary matter in the universe -- and by ordinary matter, I mean you, me, the planets, the stars, the galaxies -- the ordinary matter makes up only a few percent of the content of the universe. Almost a quarter, or approximately a quarter of the matter in the universe, is stuff that's invisible. By invisible, I mean it doesn't absorb in the electromagnetic spectrum. It doesn't emit in the electromagnetic spectrum. It doesn't reflect. It doesn't interact with the electromagnetic spectrum, which is what we use to detect things. It doesn't interact at all. So how do we know it's there? We know it's there by its gravitational effects. In fact, this dark matter dominates the gravitational effects in the universe on a large scale, and I'll be telling you about the evidence for that. What about the rest of the pie? The rest of the pie is a very mysterious substance called dark energy. More about that later, OK. So for now, let's turn to the evidence for dark matter. In these galaxies, especially in a spiral galaxy like this, most of the mass of the stars is concentrated in the middle of the galaxy. This huge mass of all these stars keeps stars in circular orbits in the galaxy. So we have these stars going around in circles like this. As you can imagine, even if you know physics, this should be intuitive, OK -- that stars that are closer to the mass in the middle will be rotating at a higher speed than those that are further out here, OK. So what you would expect is that if you measured the orbital speed of the stars, that they should be slower on the edges than on the inside. In other words, if we measured speed as a function of distance -- this is the only time I'm going to show a graph, OK -- we would expect that it goes down as the distance increases from the center of the galaxy. When those measurements are made, instead what we find is that the speed is basically constant, as a function of distance. If it's constant, that means that the stars out here are feeling the gravitational effects of matter that we do not see. In fact, this galaxy and every other galaxy appears to be embedded in a cloud of this invisible dark matter. And this cloud of matter is much more spherical than the galaxy themselves, and it extends over a much wider range than the galaxy. So we see the galaxy and fixate on that, but it's actually a cloud of dark matter that's dominating the structure and the dynamics of this galaxy. Galaxies themselves are not strewn randomly in space; they tend to cluster. And this is an example of a very, actually, famous cluster, the Coma cluster. And there are thousands of galaxies in this cluster. They're the white, fuzzy, elliptical things here. So these galaxy clusters -- we take a snapshot now, we take a snapshot in a decade, it'll look identical. But these galaxies are actually moving at extremely high speeds. They're moving around in this gravitational potential well of this cluster, OK. So all of these galaxies are moving. We can measure the speeds of these galaxies, their orbital velocities, and figure out how much mass is in this cluster. And again, what we find is that there is much more mass there than can be accounted for by the galaxies that we see. Or if we look in other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, we see that there's a lot of gas in this cluster, as well. But that cannot account for the mass either. In fact, there appears to be about ten times as much mass here in the form of this invisible or dark matter as there is in the ordinary matter, OK. It would be nice if we could see this dark matter a little bit more directly. I'm just putting this big, blue blob on there, OK, to try to remind you that it's there. Can we see it more visually? Yes, we can. And so let me lead you through how we can do this. So here's an observer: it could be an eye; it could be a telescope. And suppose there's a galaxy out here in the universe. How do we see that galaxy? A ray of light leaves the galaxy and travels through the universe for perhaps billions of years before it enters the telescope or your eye. Now, how do we deduce where the galaxy is? Well, we deduce it by the direction that the ray is traveling as it enters our eye, right? We say, the ray of light came this way; the galaxy must be there, OK. Now, suppose I put in the middle a cluster of galaxies -- and don't forget the dark matter, OK. Now, if we consider a different ray of light, one going off like this, we now need to take into account what Einstein predicted when he developed general relativity. And that was that the gravitational field, due to mass, will deflect not only the trajectory of particles, but will deflect light itself. So this light ray will not continue in a straight line, but would rather bend and could end up going into our eye. Where will this observer see the galaxy? You can respond. Up, right? We extrapolate backwards and say the galaxy is up here. Is there any other ray of light that could make into the observer's eye from that galaxy? Yes, great. I see people going down like this. So a ray of light could go down, be bent up into the observer's eye, and the observer sees a ray of light here. Now, take into account the fact that we live in a three-dimensional universe, OK, a three-dimensional space. Are there any other rays of light that could make it into the eye? Yes! The rays would lie on a -- I'd like to see -- yeah, on a cone. So there's a whole ray of light -- rays of light on a cone -- that will all be bent by that cluster and make it into the observer's eye. If there is a cone of light coming into my eye, what do I see? A circle, a ring. It's called an Einstein ring. Einstein predicted that, OK. Now, it will only be a perfect ring if the source, the deflector and the eyeball, in this case, are all in a perfectly straight line. If they're slightly skewed, we'll see a different image. Now, you can do an experiment tonight over the reception, OK, to figure out what that image will look like. Because it turns out that there is a kind of lens that we can devise, that has the right shape to produce this kind of effect. We call this gravitational lensing. And so, this is your instrument, OK. (Laughter). But ignore the top part. It's the base that I want you to concentrate, OK. So, actually, at home, whenever we break a wineglass, I save the bottom, take it over to the machine shop. We shave it off, and I have a little gravitational lens, OK. So it's got the right shape to produce the lensing. And so the next thing you need to do in your experiment is grab a napkin. I grabbed a piece of graph paper -- I'm a physicist. (Laughter) So, a napkin. Draw a little model galaxy in the middle. And now put the lens over the galaxy, and what you'll find is that you'll see a ring, an Einstein ring. Now, move the base off to the side, and the ring will split up into arcs, OK. And you can put it on top of any image. On the graph paper, you can see how all the lines on the graph paper have been distorted. And again, this is a kind of an accurate model of what happens with the gravitational lensing. OK, so the question is: do we see this in the sky? Do we see arcs in the sky when we look at, say, a cluster of galaxies? And the answer is yes. And so, here's an image from the Hubble Space Telescope. Many of the images you are seeing are earlier from the Hubble Space Telescope. Well, first of all, for the golden shape galaxies -- those are the galaxies in the cluster. They're the ones that are embedded in that sea of dark matter that are causing the bending of the light to cause these optical illusions, or mirages, practically, of the background galaxies. So the streaks that you see, all these streaks, are actually distorted images of galaxies that are much further away. So what we can do, then, is based on how much distortion we see in those images, we can calculate how much mass there must be in this cluster. And it's an enormous amount of mass. And also, you can tell by eye, by looking at this, that these arcs are not centered on individual galaxies. They are centered on some more spread out structure, and that is the dark matter in which the cluster is embedded, OK. So this is the closest you can get to kind of seeing at least the effects of the dark matter with your naked eye. OK, so, a quick review then, to see that you're following. So the evidence that we have that a quarter of the universe is dark matter -- this gravitationally attracting stuff -- is that galaxies, the speed with which stars orbiting galaxies is much too large; it must be embedded in dark matter. The speed with which galaxies within clusters are orbiting is much too large; it must be embedded in dark matter. And we see these gravitational lensing effects, these distortions that say that, again, clusters are embedded in dark matter. OK. So now, let's turn to dark energy. So to understand the evidence for dark energy, we need to discuss something that Stephen Hawking referred to in the previous session. And that is the fact that space itself is expanding. So if we imagine a section of our infinite universe -- and so I've put down four spiral galaxies, OK -- and imagine that you put down a set of tape measures, so every line on here corresponds to a tape measure, horizontal or vertical, for measuring where things are. If you could do this, what you would find that with each passing day, each passing year, each passing billions of years, OK, the distance between galaxies is getting greater. And it's not because galaxies are moving away from each other through space. They're not necessarily moving through space. They're moving away from each other because space itself is getting bigger, OK. That's what the expansion of the universe or space means. So they're moving further apart. Now, what Stephen Hawking mentioned, as well, is that after the Big Bang, space expanded at a very rapid rate. But because gravitationally attracting matter is embedded in this space, it tends to slow down the expansion of the space, OK. So the expansion slows down with time. So, in the last century, OK, people debated about whether this expansion of space would continue forever; whether it would slow down, you know, will be slowing down, but continue forever; slow down and stop, asymptotically stop; or slow down, stop, and then reverse, so it starts to contract again. So a little over a decade ago, two groups of physicists and astronomers set out to measure the rate at which the expansion of space was slowing down, OK. By how much less is it expanding today, compared to, say, a couple of billion years ago? The startling answer to this question, OK, from these experiments, was that space is expanding at a faster rate today than it was a few billion years ago, OK. So the expansion of space is actually speeding up. This was a completely surprising result. There is no persuasive theoretical argument for why this should happen, OK. No one was predicting ahead of time this is what's going to be found. It was the opposite of what was expected. So we need something to be able to explain that. Now it turns out, in the mathematics, you can put it in as a term that's an energy, but it's a completely different type of energy from anything we've ever seen before. We call it dark energy, and it has this effect of causing space to expand. But we don't have a good motivation for putting it in there at this point, OK. So it's really unexplained as to why we need to put it in. Now, so at this point, then, what I want to really emphasize to you, is that, first of all, dark matter and dark energy are completely different things, OK. There are really two mysteries out there as to what makes up most of the universe, and they have very different effects. Dark matter, because it gravitationally attracts, it tends to encourage the growth of structure, OK. So clusters of galaxies will tend to form, because of all this gravitational attraction. Dark energy, on the other hand, is putting more and more space between the galaxies, makes it, the gravitational attraction between them decrease, and so it impedes the growth of structure. So by looking at things like clusters of galaxies, and how they -- their number density, how many there are as a function of time -- we can learn about how dark matter and dark energy compete against each other in structure forming. In terms of dark matter, I said that we don't have any, you know, really persuasive argument for dark energy. Do we have anything for dark matter? And the answer is yes. We have well-motivated candidates for the dark matter. Now, what do I mean by well motivated? I mean that we have mathematically consistent theories that were actually introduced to explain a completely different phenomenon, OK, things that I haven't even talked about, that each predict the existence of a very weakly interacting, new particle. So, this is exactly what you want in physics: where a prediction comes out of a mathematically consistent theory that was actually developed for something else. But we don't know if either of those are actually the dark matter candidate, OK. One or both, who knows? Or it could be something completely different. Now, we look for these dark matter particles because, after all, they are here in the room, OK, and they didn't come in the door. They just pass through anything. They can come through the building, through the Earth -- they're so non-interacting. So one way to look for them is to build detectors that are extremely sensitive to a dark matter particle coming through and bumping it. So a crystal that will ring if that happens. So one of my colleagues up the road and his collaborators have built such a detector. And they've put it deep down in an iron mine in Minnesota, OK, deep under the ground, and in fact, in the last couple of days announced the most sensitive results so far. They haven't seen anything, OK, but it puts limits on what the mass and the interaction strength of these dark matter particles are. There's going to be a satellite telescope launched later this year and it will look towards the middle of the galaxy, to see if we can see dark matter particles annihilating and producing gamma rays that could be detected with this. The Large Hadron Collider, a particle physics accelerator, that we'll be turning on later this year. It is possible that dark matter particles might be produced at the Large Hadron Collider. Now, because they are so non-interactive, they will actually escape the detector, so their signature will be missing energy, OK. Now, unfortunately, there is a lot of new physics whose signature could be missing energy, so it will be hard to tell the difference. And finally, for future endeavors, there are telescopes being designed specifically to address the questions of dark matter and dark energy -- ground-based telescopes, and there are three space-based telescopes that are in competition right now to be launched to investigate dark matter and dark energy. So in terms of the big questions: what is dark matter? What is dark energy? The big questions facing physics. And I'm sure you have lots of questions, which I very much look forward to addressing over the next 72 hours, while I'm here. Thank you. (Applause)
One of the things I want to establish right from the start is that not all neurosurgeons wear cowboy boots. I just wanted you to know that. So I am indeed a neurosurgeon, and I follow a long tradition of neurosurgery, and what I'm going to tell you about today is adjusting the dials in the circuits in the brain, being able to go anywhere in the brain and turning areas of the brain up or down to help our patients. So as I said, neurosurgery comes from a long tradition. It's been around for about 7,000 years. In Mesoamerica, there used to be neurosurgery, and there were these neurosurgeons that used to treat patients. And they were trying to -- they knew that the brain was involved in neurological and psychiatric disease. They didn't know exactly what they were doing. Not much has changed, by the way. (Laughter) But they thought that, if you had a neurologic or psychiatric disease, it must be because you are possessed by an evil spirit. So if you are possessed by an evil spirit causing neurologic or psychiatric problems, then the way to treat this is, of course, to make a hole in your skull and let the evil spirit escape. So this was the thinking back then, and these individuals made these holes. Sometimes the patients were a little bit reluctant to go through this because, you can tell that the holes are made partially and then, I think, there was some trepanation, and then they left very quickly and it was only a partial hole, and we know they survived these procedures. But this was common. There were some sites where one percent of all the skulls have these holes, and so you can see that neurologic and psychiatric disease is quite common, and it was also quite common about 7,000 years ago. Now, in the course of time, we've come to realize that different parts of the brain do different things. So there are areas of the brain that are dedicated to controlling your movement or your vision or your memory or your appetite, and so on. And when things work well, then the nervous system works well, and everything functions. But once in a while, things don't go so well, and there's trouble in these circuits, and there are some rogue neurons that are misfiring and causing trouble, or sometimes they're underactive and they're not quite working as they should. Now, the manifestation of this depends on where in the brain these neurons are. So when these neurons are in the motor circuit, you get dysfunction in the movement system, and you get things like Parkinson's disease. When the malfunction is in a circuit that regulates your mood, you get things like depression, and when it is in a circuit that controls your memory and cognitive function, then you get things like Alzheimer's disease. So what we've been able to do is to pinpoint where these disturbances are in the brain, and we've been able to intervene within these circuits in the brain to either turn them up or turn them down. So this is very much like choosing the correct station on the radio dial. Once you choose the right station, whether it be jazz or opera, in our case whether it be movement or mood, we can put the dial there, and then we can use a second button to adjust the volume, to turn it up or turn it down. So what I'm going to tell you about is using the circuitry of the brain to implant electrodes and turning areas of the brain up and down to see if we can help our patients. And this is accomplished using this kind of device, and this is called deep brain stimulation. So what we're doing is placing these electrodes throughout the brain. Again, we are making holes in the skull about the size of a dime, putting an electrode in, and then this electrode is completely underneath the skin down to a pacemaker in the chest, and with a remote control very much like a television remote control, we can adjust how much electricity we deliver to these areas of the brain. We can turn it up or down, on or off. Now, about a hundred thousand patients in the world have received deep brain stimulation, and I'm going to show you some examples of using deep brain stimulation to treat disorders of movement, disorders of mood and disorders of cognition. So this looks something like this when it's in the brain. You see the electrode going through the skull into the brain and resting there, and we can place this really anywhere in the brain. I tell my friends that no neuron is safe from a neurosurgeon, because we can really reach just about anywhere in the brain quite safely now. Now the first example I'm going to show you is a patient with Parkinson's disease, and this lady has Parkinson's disease, and she has these electrodes in her brain, and I'm going to show you what she's like when the electrodes are turned off and she has her Parkinson's symptoms, and then we're going to turn it on. So this looks something like this. The electrodes are turned off now, and you can see that she has tremor. (Video) Man: Okay. Woman: I can't. Man: Can you try to touch my finger? (Video) Man: That's a little better. Woman: That side is better. We're now going to turn it on. It's on. Just turned it on. And this works like that, instantly. And the difference between shaking in this way and not -- (Applause) The difference between shaking in this way and not is related to the misbehavior of 25,000 neurons in her subthalamic nucleus. So we now know how to find these troublemakers and tell them, "Gentlemen, that's enough. We want you to stop doing that." And we do that with electricity. So we use electricity to dictate how they fire, and we try to block their misbehavior using electricity. So in this case, we are suppressing the activity of abnormal neurons. We started using this technique in other problems, and I'm going to tell you about a fascinating problem that we encountered, a case of dystonia. So dystonia is a disorder affecting children. It's a genetic disorder, and it involves a twisting motion, and these children get progressively more and more twisting until they can't breathe, until they get sores, urinary infections, and then they die. So back in 1997, I was asked to see this young boy, perfectly normal. He has this genetic form of dystonia. There are eight children in the family. Five of them have dystonia. So here he is. This boy is nine years old, perfectly normal until the age six, and then he started twisting his body, first the right foot, then the left foot, then the right arm, then the left arm, then the trunk, and then by the time he arrived, within the course of one or two years of the disease onset, he could no longer walk, he could no longer stand. He was crippled, and indeed the natural progression as this gets worse is for them to become progressively twisted, progressively disabled, and many of these children do not survive. So he is one of five kids. The only way he could get around was crawling on his belly like this. He did not respond to any drugs. We did not know what to do with this boy. We did not know what operation to do, where to go in the brain, but on the basis of our results in Parkinson's disease, we reasoned, why don't we try to suppress the same area in the brain that we suppressed in Parkinson's disease, and let's see what happens? So here he was. We operated on him hoping that he would get better. We did not know. So here he is now, back in Israel where he lives, three months after the procedure, and here he is. (Applause) On the basis of this result, this is now a procedure that's done throughout the world, and there have been hundreds of children that have been helped with this kind of surgery. This boy is now in university and leads quite a normal life. This has been one of the most satisfying cases that I have ever done in my entire career, to restore movement and walking to this kind of child. (Applause) We realized that perhaps we could use this technology not only in circuits that control your movement but also circuits that control other things, and the next thing that we took on was circuits that control your mood. And we decided to take on depression, and the reason we took on depression is because it's so prevalent, and as you know, there are many treatments for depression, with medication and psychotherapy, even electroconvulsive therapy, but there are millions of people, and there are still 10 or 20 percent of patients with depression that do not respond, and it is these patients that we want to help. And let's see if we can use this technique to help these patients with depression. So the first thing we did was, we compared, what's different in the brain of someone with depression and someone who is normal, and what we did was PET scans to look at the blood flow of the brain, and what we noticed is that in patients with depression compared to normals, areas of the brain are shut down, and those are the areas in blue. So here you really have the blues, and the areas in blue are areas that are involved in motivation, in drive and decision-making, and indeed, if you're severely depressed as these patients were, those are impaired. You lack motivation and drive. The other thing we discovered was an area that was overactive, area 25, seen there in red, and area 25 is the sadness center of the brain. If I make any of you sad, for example, I make you remember the last time you saw your parent before they died or a friend before they died, this area of the brain lights up. It is the sadness center of the brain. And so patients with depression have hyperactivity. The area of the brain for sadness is on red hot. The thermostat is set at 100 degrees, and the other areas of the brain, involved in drive and motivation, are shut down. So we wondered, can we place electrodes in this area of sadness and see if we can turn down the thermostat, can we turn down the activity, and what will be the consequence of that? So we went ahead and implanted electrodes in patients with depression. This is work done with my colleague Helen Mayberg from Emory. And we placed electrodes in area 25, and in the top scan you see before the operation, area 25, the sadness area is red hot, and the frontal lobes are shut down in blue, and then, after three months of continuous stimulation, 24 hours a day, or six months of continuous stimulation, we have a complete reversal of this. We're able to drive down area 25, down to a more normal level, and we're able to turn back online the frontal lobes of the brain, and indeed we're seeing very striking results in these patients with severe depression. So now we are in clinical trials, and are in Phase III clinical trials, and this may become a new procedure, if it's safe and we find that it's effective, to treat patients with severe depression. I've shown you that we can use deep brain stimulation to treat the motor system in cases of Parkinson's disease and dystonia. I've shown you that we can use it to treat a mood circuit in cases of depression. Can we use deep brain stimulation to make you smarter? (Laughter) Anybody interested in that? (Applause) Of course we can, right? So what we've decided to do is we're going to try to turbocharge the memory circuits in the brain. We're going to place electrodes within the circuits that regulate your memory and cognitive function to see if we can turn up their activity. Now we're not going to do this in normal people. We're going to do this in people that have cognitive deficits, and we've chosen to treat patients with Alzheimer's disease who have cognitive and memory deficits. As you know, this is the main symptom of early onset Alzheimer's disease. So we've placed electrodes within this circuit in an area of the brain called the fornix, which is the highway in and out of this memory circuit, with the idea to see if we can turn on this memory circuit, and whether that can, in turn, help these patients with Alzheimer's disease. Now it turns out that in Alzheimer's disease, there's a huge deficit in glucose utilization in the brain. The brain is a bit of a hog when it comes to using glucose. It uses 20 percent of all your -- even though it only weighs two percent -- it uses 10 times more glucose than it should based on its weight. Twenty percent of all the glucose in your body is used by the brain, and as you go from being normal to having mild cognitive impairment, which is a precursor for Alzheimer's, all the way to Alzheimer's disease, then there are areas of the brain that stop using glucose. They shut down. They turn off. And indeed, what we see is that these areas in red around the outside ribbon of the brain are progressively getting more and more blue until they shut down completely. This is analogous to having a power failure in an area of the brain, a regional power failure. So the lights are out in parts of the brain in patients with Alzheimer's disease, and the question is, are the lights out forever, or can we turn the lights back on? Can we get those areas of the brain to use glucose once again? So this is what we did. We implanted electrodes in the fornix of patients with Alzheimer's disease, we turned it on, and we looked at what happens to glucose use in the brain. And indeed, at the top, you'll see before the surgery, the areas in blue are the areas that use less glucose than normal, predominantly the parietal and temporal lobes. These areas of the brain are shut down. The lights are out in these areas of the brain. We then put in the DBS electrodes and we wait for a month or a year, and the areas in red represent the areas where we increase glucose utilization. And indeed, we are able to get these areas of the brain that were not using glucose to use glucose once again. So the message here is that, in Alzheimer's disease, the lights are out, but there is someone home, and we're able to turn the power back on to these areas of the brain, and as we do so, we expect that their functions will return. So this is now in clinical trials. We are going to operate on 50 patients with early Alzheimer's disease to see whether this is safe and effective, whether we can improve their neurologic function. (Applause) So the message I want to leave you with today is that, indeed, there are several circuits in the brain that are malfunctioning across various disease states, whether we're talking about Parkinson's disease, depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's. We are now learning to understand what are the circuits, what are the areas of the brain that are responsible for the clinical signs and the symptoms of those diseases. We can now reach those circuits. We can introduce electrodes within those circuits. We can graduate the activity of those circuits. We can turn them down if they are overactive, if they're causing trouble, trouble that is felt throughout the brain, or we can turn them up if they are underperforming, and in so doing, we think that we may be able to help the overall function of the brain. The implications of this, of course, is that we may be able to modify the symptoms of the disease, but I haven't told you but there's also some evidence that we might be able to help the repair of damaged areas of the brain using electricity, and this is something for the future, to see if, indeed, we not only change the activity but also some of the reparative functions of the brain can be harvested. So I envision that we're going to see a great expansion of indications of this technique. We're going to see electrodes being placed for many disorders of the brain. One of the most exciting things about this is that, indeed, it involves multidisciplinary work. It involves the work of engineers, of imaging scientists, of basic scientists, of neurologists, psychiatrists, neurosurgeons, and certainly at the interface of these multiple disciplines that there's the excitement. And I think that we will see that we will be able to chase more of these evil spirits out from the brain as time goes on, and the consequence of that, of course, will be that we will be able to help many more patients. Thank you very much.
What I thought I would talk about today is the transition from one mode of thinking about nature to another that's tracked by architecture. What's interesting about architects is, we always have tried to justify beauty by looking to nature, and arguably, beautiful architecture has always been looking at a model of nature. So, for roughly 300 years, the hot debate in architecture was whether the number five or the number seven was a better proportion to think about architecture, because the nose was one-fifth of your head, or because your head was one-seventh of your body. And the reason that that was the model of beauty and of nature was because the decimal point had not been invented yet -- it wasn't the 16th century -- and everybody had to dimension a building in terms of fractions, so a room would be dimensioned as one-fourth of a facade; the structural dais of that might be dimensioned as 10 units, and you would get down to the small elements by fractional subdivision: finer and finer and finer. In the 15th century, the decimal point was invented; architects stopped using fractions, and they had a new model of nature. So, what's going on today is that there's a model of natural form which is calculus-based and which is using digital tools, and that has a lot of implications to the way we think about beauty and form, and it has a lot of implications in the way we think about nature. The best example of this would probably be the Gothic, and the Gothic was invented after the invention of calculus, although the Gothic architects weren't really using calculus to define their forms. But what was important is, the Gothic moment in architecture was the first time that force and motion was thought of in terms of form. So, examples like Christopher Wren's King's Cross: you can see that the structural forces of the vaulting get articulated as lines, so you're really actually seeing the expression of structural force and form. Much later, Robert Maillart's bridges, which optimize structural form with a calculus curvature almost like a parabola. The Hanging Chain models of Antonio Gaudi, the Catalan architect. The end of the 19th century, beginning of the 20th century, and how that Hanging Chain model translates into archways and vaulting. So, in all of these examples, structure is the determining force. Frei Otto was starting to use foam bubble diagrams and foam bubble models to generate his Mannheim Concert Hall. Interestingly, in the last 10 years Norman Foster used a similar heat thermal transfer model to generate the roof of the National Gallery, with the structural engineer Chris Williams. In all these examples, there's one ideal form, because these are thought in terms of structure. And as an architect, I've always found these kinds of systems very limiting, because I'm not interested in ideal forms and I'm not interested in optimizing to some perfect moment. So, what I thought I would bring up is another component that needs to be thought of, whenever you think about nature, and that's basically the invention of generic form in genetic evolution. My hero is actually not Darwin; it's a guy named William Bateson, father of Greg Bateson, who was here for a long time in Monterey. And he was what you'd call a teratologist: he looked at all of the monstrosities and mutations to find rules and laws, rather than looking at the norms. So, instead of trying to find the ideal type or the ideal average, he'd always look for the exception. So, in this example, which is an example of what's called Bateson's Rule, he has two kinds of mutations of a human thumb. When I first saw this image, 10 years ago, I actually found it very strange and beautiful at the same time. Beautiful, because it has symmetry. So, what he found is that in all cases of thumb mutations, instead of having a thumb, you would either get another opposable thumb, or you would get four fingers. So, the mutations reverted to symmetry. And Bateson invented the concept of symmetry breaking, which is that wherever you lose information in a system, you revert back to symmetry. So, symmetry wasn't the sign of order and organization -- which is what I was always understanding, and as is an architect -- symmetry was the absence of information. So, whenever you lost information, you'd move to symmetry; whenever you added information to a system, you would break symmetry. So, this whole idea of natural form shifted at that moment from looking for ideal shapes to looking for a combination of information and generic form. You know, literally after seeing that image, and finding out what Bateson was working with, we started to use these rules for symmetry breaking and branching to start to think about architectural form. To just talk for a minute about the digital mediums that we're using now and how they integrate calculus: the fact that they're calculus-based means that we don't have to think about dimension in terms of ideal units or discreet elements. So, in architecture we deal with big assemblies of components, so there might be up to, say, 50,000 pieces of material in this room you're sitting in right now that all need to get organized. Now, typically you'd think that they would all be the same: like, the chairs you're sitting in would all be the same dimension. You know, I haven't verified this, but it's the norm that every chair would be a slightly different dimension, because you'd want to space them all out for everybody's sight lines. The elements that make up the ceiling grid and the lighting, they're all losing their modular quality, and moving more and more to these infinitesimal dimensions. That's because we're all using calculus tools for manufacturing and for design. Calculus is also a mathematics of curves. So, even a straight line, defined with calculus, is a curve. It's just a curve without inflection. So, a new vocabulary of form is now pervading all design fields: whether it's automobiles, architecture, products, etc., it's really being affected by this digital medium of curvature. The intricacies of scale that come out of that -- you know, in the example of the nose to the face, there's a fractional part-to-whole idea. With calculus, the whole idea of subdivision is more complex, because the whole and the parts are one continuous series. It's too early in the morning for a lecture on calculus, so I brought some images to just describe how that works. This is a Korean church that we did in Queens. And in this example, you can see that the components of this stair are repetitive, but they're repetitive without being modular. Each one of the elements in this structure is a unique distance and dimension, and all of the connections are unique angles. Now, the only way we could design that, or possibly construct it, is by using a calculus-based definition of the form. It also is much more dynamic, so that you can see that the same form opens and closes in a very dynamic way as you move across it, because it has this quality of vector in motion built into it. So the same space that appears to be a kind of closed volume, when seen from the other side becomes a kind of open vista. And you also get a sense of visual movement in the space, because every one of the elements is changing in a pattern, so that pattern leads your eye towards the altar. I think that's one of the main changes, also, in architecture: that we're starting to look now not for some ideal form, like a Latin cross for a church, but actually all the traits of a church: so, light that comes from behind from an invisible source, directionality that focuses you towards an altar. It turns out it's not rocket science to design a sacred space. You just need to incorporate a certain number of traits in a very kind of genetic way. So, these are the different perspectives of that interior, which has a very complex set of orientations all in a simple form. In terms of construction and manufacturing, this is a kilometer-long housing block that was built in the '70s in Amsterdam. And here we've broken the 500 apartments up into small neighborhoods, and differentiated those neighborhoods. I won't go into too much description of any of these projects, but what you can see is that the escalators and elevators that circulate people along the face of the building are all held up by 122 structural trusses. Because we're using escalators to move people, all of these trusses are picking up diagonal loads. So, every one of them is a little bit different-shaped as you move down the length of the building. So, working with Bentley and MicroStation, we've written a custom piece of software that networks all of the components together into these chunks of information, so that if we change any element along the length of the building, not only does that change distribute through each one of the trusses, but each one of the trusses then distributes that information down the length of the entire facade of the building. So it's a single calculation for every single component of the building that we're adding onto. So, it's tens of millions of calculations just to design one connection between a piece of structural steel and another piece of structural steel. But what it gives us is a harmonic and synthesized relationship of all these components, one to another. This idea has, kind of, brought me into doing some product design, and it's because design firms that have connections to architects, like, I'm working with Vitra, which is a furniture company, and Alessi, which is a houseware company. They saw this actually solving a problem: this ability to differentiate components but keep them synthetic. So, not to pick on BMW, or to celebrate them, but take BMW as an example. They have to, in 2005, have a distinct identity for all their models of cars. So, the 300 series, or whatever their newest car is, the 100 series that's coming out, has to look like the 700 series, at the other end of their product line, so they need a distinct, coherent identity, which is BMW. At the same time, there's a person paying 30,000 dollars for a 300-series car, and a person paying 70,000 dollars for a 700 series, and that person paying more than double doesn't want their car to look too much like the bottom-of-the-market car. So they have to also discriminate between these products. So, as manufacturing starts to allow more design options, this problem gets exacerbated, of the whole and the parts. Now, as an architect, part-to-whole relationships is all I think about, but in terms of product design it's becoming more and more of an issue for companies. So, the first kind of test product we did was with Alessi, which was for a coffee and tea set. It's an incredibly expensive coffee and tea set; we knew that at the beginning. So, I actually went to some people I knew down south in San Diego, and we used an exploded titanium forming method that's used in the aerospace industry. Basically what we can do, is just cut a graphite mold, put it in an oven, heat it to 1,000 degrees, gently inflate titanium that's soft, and then explode it at the last minute into this form. But what's great about it is, the forms are only a few hundred dollars. The titanium's several thousand dollars, but the forms are very cheap. So, we designed a system here of eight curves that could be swapped, very similar to that housing project I showed you, and we could recombine those together, so that we always had ergonomic shapes that always had the same volume and could always be produced in the same way. That way, each one of these tools we could pay for with a few hundred dollars, and get incredible variation in the components. And this is one of those examples of the sets. So, for me, what was important is that this coffee set -- which is just a coffee pot, a teapot, and those are the pots sitting on a tray -- that they would have a coherence -- so, they would be Greg Lynn Alessi coffee pots -- but that everyone who bought one would have a one-of-a-kind object that was unique in some way. To go back to architecture, what's organic about architecture as a field, unlike product design, is this whole issue of holism and of monumentality is really our realm. Like, we have to design things which are coherent as a single object, but also break down into small rooms and have an identity of both the big scale and the small scale. Architects tend to work with signature, so that an architect needs a signature and that signature has to work across the scale of houses up to, say, skyscrapers, and that problem of signatures is a thing we're very good at maintaining and working with; and intricacy, which is the relationship of, say, the shape of a building, its structure, its windows, its color, its pattern. These are real architectural problems. So, my kind of hero for this in the natural world are these tropical frogs. I got interested in them because they're the most extreme example of a surface where the texture and the -- let's call it the decoration -- I know the frog doesn't think of it as decoration, but that's how it works -- are all intricately connected to one another. So a change in the form indicates a change in the color pattern. So, the pattern and the form aren't the same thing, but they really work together and are fused in some way. So, when doing a center for the national parks in Costa Rica, we tried to use that idea of a gradient color and a change in texture as the structure moves across the surface of the building. We also used a continuity of change from a main exhibition hall to a natural history museum, so it's all one continuous change in the massing, but within that massing are very different kinds of spaces and forms. In a housing project in Valencia, Spain, we're doing, the different towers of housing fused together in shared curves so you get a single mass, like a kind of monolith, but it breaks down into individual elements. And you can see that that change in massing also gives all 48 of the apartments a unique shape and size, but always within a, kind of, controlled limit, an envelope of change. I work with a group of other architects. We have a company called United Architects. We were one of the finalists for the World Trade Center site design. And I think this just shows how we were approaching the problem of incredibly large-scale construction. We wanted to make a kind of Gothic cathedral around the footprints of the World Trade Center site. And to do that, we tried to connect up the five towers into a single system. And we looked at, from the 1950s on, there were numerous examples of other architects trying to do the same thing. We really approached it at the level of the typology of the building, where we could build these five separate towers, but they would all join at the 60th floor and make a kind of single monolithic mass. With United Architects, also, we made a proposal for the European Central Bank headquarters that used the same system, but this time in a much more monolithic mass, like a sphere. But again, you can see this, kind of, organic fusion of multiple building elements to make a thing which is whole, but breaks down into smaller parts, but in an incredibly organic way. Finally, I'd like to just show you some of the effects of using digital fabrication. About six years ago, I bought one of these CNC mills, to just replace, kind of, young people cutting their fingers off all the time building models. And I also bought a laser cutter and started to fabricate within my own shop, kind of, large-scale building elements and models, where we could go directly to the tooling. What I found out is that the tooling, if you intervened in the software, actually produced decorative effects. So, for these interiors, like this shop in Stockholm, Sweden, or this installation wall in the Netherlands at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, we could use the texture that the tool would leave to produce a lot of the spatial effects, and we could integrate the texture of the wall with the form of the wall with the material. So, in vacuum-formed plastic, in fiberglass, and then even at the level of structural steel, which you think of as being linear and modular. The steel industry is so far ahead of the design industry that if you take advantage of it you can even start to think of beams and columns all rolled together into a single system which is highly efficient, but also produces decorative effects and formal effects that are very beautiful and organic. Thanks very much.
So, I guess it is a result of globalization that you can find Coca-Cola tins on top of Everest and a Buddhist monk in Monterey. (Laughter) And so I just came, two days ago, from the Himalayas to your kind invitation. So I would like to invite you, also, for a while, to the Himalayas themselves. And to show the place where meditators, like me, who began with being a molecular biologist in Pasteur Institute, and found their way to the mountains. So these are a few images I was lucky to take and be there. There's Mount Kailash in Eastern Tibet -- wonderful setting. This is from Marlboro country. (Laughter) This is a turquoise lake. A meditator. This is the hottest day of the year somewhere in Eastern Tibet, on August 1. And the night before, we camped, and my Tibetan friends said, "We are going to sleep outside." And I said, "Why? We have enough space in the tent." They said, "Yes, but it's summertime." (Laughter) So now, we are going to speak of happiness. As a Frenchman, I must say that there are a lot of French intellectuals that think happiness is not at all interesting. (Laughter) I just wrote an essay on happiness, and there was a controversy. And someone wrote an article saying, "Don't impose on us the dirty work of happiness." (Laughter) "We don't care about being happy. We need to live with passion. We like the ups and downs of life. We like our suffering because it's so good when it ceases for a while." (Laughter) This is what I see from the balcony of my hermitage in the Himalayas. It's about two meters by three, and you are all welcome any time. (Laughter) Now, let's come to happiness or well-being. And first of all, you know, despite what the French intellectuals say, it seems that no one wakes up in the morning thinking, "May I suffer the whole day?" (Laughter) Which means that somehow, consciously or not, directly or indirectly, in the short or the long term, whatever we do, whatever we hope, whatever we dream -- somehow, is related to a deep, profound desire for well-being or happiness. As Pascal said, even the one who hangs himself, somehow, is looking for cessation of suffering. He finds no other way. But then, if you look in the literature, East and West, you can find incredible diversity of definition of happiness. Some people say, I only believed in remembering the past, imagining the future, never the present. Some people say happiness is right now; it's the quality of the freshness of the present moment. And that led Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, to say, "All the great thinkers of humanity have left happiness in the vague so that each of them could define their own terms." Well, that would be fine if it was just a secondary preoccupation in life. But now, if it is something that is going to determine the quality of every instant of our life, then we better know what it is, have some clearer idea. And probably, the fact that we don't know that is why, so often, although we seek happiness, it seems we turn our back to it. Although we want to avoid suffering, it seems we are running somewhat towards it. And that can also come from some kind of confusions. One of the most common ones is happiness and pleasure. But if you look at the characteristics of those two, pleasure is contingent upon time, upon its object, upon the place. It is something that -- changes of nature. Beautiful chocolate cake: first serving is delicious, second one not so much, then we feel disgust. (Laughter) That's the nature of things. We get tired. I used to be a fan of Bach. I used to play it on the guitar, you know. I can hear it two, three, five times. If I had to hear it 24 hours, non-stop, it might be very tiring. If you are feeling very cold, you come near a fire, it's so wonderful. After some moments, you just go a little back, and then it starts burning. It sort of uses itself as you experience it. And also, again, it can -- also, it's something that you -- it is not something that is radiating outside. Like, you can feel intense pleasure and some others around you can be suffering a lot. Now, what, then, will be happiness? And happiness, of course, is such a vague word, so let's say well-being. And so, I think the best definition, according to the Buddhist view, is that well-being is not just a mere pleasurable sensation. It is a deep sense of serenity and fulfillment. A state that actually pervades and underlies all emotional states, and all the joys and sorrows that can come one's way. For you, that might be surprising. Can we have this kind of well-being while being sad? In a way, why not? Because we are speaking of a different level. Look at the waves coming near the shore. When you are at the bottom of the wave, you hit the bottom. You hit the solid rock. When you are surfing on the top, you are all elated. So you go from elation to depression -- there's no depth. Now, if you look at the high sea, there might be beautiful, calm ocean, like a mirror. There might be storms, but the depth of the ocean is still there, unchanged. So now, how is that? It can only be a state of being, not just a fleeting emotion, sensation. Even joy -- that can be the spring of happiness. But there's also wicked joy, you can rejoice in someone's suffering. So how do we proceed in our quest for happiness? Very often, we look outside. We think that if we could gather this and that, all the conditions, something that we say, "Everything to be happy -- to have everything to be happy." That very sentence already reveals the doom, destruction of happiness. To have everything. If we miss something, it collapses. And also, when things go wrong, we try to fix the outside so much, but our control of the outer world is limited, temporary, and often, illusory. So now, look at inner conditions. Aren't they stronger? Isn't it the mind that translates the outer condition into happiness and suffering? And isn't that stronger? We know, by experience, that we can be what we call "a little paradise," and yet, be completely unhappy within. The Dalai Lama was once in Portugal, and there was a lot of construction going on everywhere. So one evening, he said, "Look, you are doing all these things, but isn't it nice, also, to build something within?" And he said, "[Without] that -- even if you get a high-tech flat on the 100th floor of a super-modern and comfortable building, if you are deeply unhappy within, all you are going to look for is a window from which to jump." So now, at the opposite, we know a lot of people who, in very difficult circumstances, manage to keep serenity, inner strength, inner freedom, confidence. So now, if the inner conditions are stronger -- of course, the outer conditions do influence, and it's wonderful to live longer, healthier, to have access to information, education, to be able to travel, to have freedom. It's highly desirable. However, this is not enough. Those are just auxiliary, help conditions. The experience that translates everything is within the mind. So then, when we ask oneself how to nurture the condition for happiness, the inner conditions, and which are those which will undermine happiness. So then, this just needs to have some experience. We have to know from ourselves, there are certain states of mind that are conducive to this flourishing, to this well-being, what the Greeks called eudaimonia, flourishing. There are some which are adverse to this well-being. And so, if we look from our own experience, anger, hatred, jealousy, arrogance, obsessive desire, strong grasping, they don't leave us in such a good state after we have experienced it. And also, they are detrimental to others' happiness. So we may consider that the more those are invading our mind, and, like a chain reaction, the more we feel miserable, we feel tormented. At the opposite, everyone knows deep within that an act of selfless generosity, if from the distance, without anyone knowing anything about it, we could save a child's life, make someone happy. We don't need the recognition. We don't need any gratitude. Just the mere fact of doing that fills such a sense of adequation with our deep nature. And we would like to be like that all the time. So is that possible, to change our way of being, to transform one's mind? Aren't those negative emotions, or destructive emotions, inherent to the nature of mind? Is change possible in our emotions, in our traits, in our moods? For that we have to ask, what is the nature of mind? And if we look from the experiential point of view, there is a primary quality of consciousness that's just the mere fact to be cognitive, to be aware. Consciousness is like a mirror that allows all images to rise on it. You can have ugly faces, beautiful faces in the mirror. The mirror allows that, but the mirror is not tainted, is not modified, is not altered by those images. Likewise, behind every single thought there is the bare consciousness, pure awareness. This is the nature. It cannot be tainted intrinsically with hatred or jealousy because then, if it was always there -- like a dye that would permeate the whole cloth -- then it would be found all the time, somewhere. We know we're not always angry, always jealous, always generous. So, because the basic fabric of consciousness is this pure cognitive quality that differentiates it from a stone, there is a possibility for change because all emotions are fleeting. That is the ground for mind training. Mind training is based on the idea that two opposite mental factors cannot happen at the same time. You could go from love to hate. But you cannot, at the same time, toward the same object, the same person, want to harm and want to do good. You cannot, in the same gesture, shake hand and give a blow. So, there are natural antidotes to emotions that are destructive to our inner well-being. So that's the way to proceed. Rejoicing compared to jealousy. A kind of sense of inner freedom as opposite to intense grasping and obsession. Benevolence, loving kindness against hatred. But, of course, each emotion then would need a particular antidote. Another way is to try to find a general antidote to all emotions, and that's by looking at the very nature. Usually, when we feel annoyed, hatred or upset with someone, or obsessed with something, the mind goes again and again to that object. Each time it goes to the object, it reinforces that obsession or that annoyance. So then, it's a self-perpetuating process. So what we need to look for now is, instead of looking outward, we look inward. Look at anger itself. It looks very menacing, like a billowing monsoon cloud or thunderstorm. We think we could sit on the cloud, but if you go there, it's just mist. Likewise, if you look at the thought of anger, it will vanish like frost under the morning sun. If you do this again and again, the propensity, the tendencies for anger to arise again will be less and less each time you dissolve it. And, at the end, although it may rise, it will just cross the mind, like a bird crossing the sky without leaving any track. So this is the principal of mind training. Now, it takes time, because it took time for all those faults in our mind, the tendencies, to build up, so it will take time to unfold them as well. But that's the only way to go. Mind transformation -- that is the very meaning of meditation. It means familiarization with a new way of being, new way of perceiving things, which is more in adequation with reality, with interdependence, with the stream and continuous transformation, which our being and our consciousness is. So, the interface with cognitive science, since we need to come to that, it was, I suppose, the subject of -- we have to deal in such a short time -- with brain plasticity. The brain was thought to be more or less fixed. All the nominal connections, in numbers and quantities, were thought, until the last 20 years, to be more or less fixed when we reached adult age. Now, recently, it has been found that it can change a lot. A violinist, as we heard, who has done 10,000 hours of violin practice, some area that controls the movements of fingers in the brain changes a lot, increasing reinforcement of the synaptic connections. So can we do that with human qualities? With loving kindness, with patience, with openness? So that's what those great meditators have been doing. Some of them who came to the labs, like in Madison, Wisconsin, or in Berkeley, did 20 to 40,000 hours of meditation. They do, like, three years' retreat, where they do meditate 12 hours a day. And then, the rest of their life, they will do three or four hours a day. They are real Olympic champions of mind training. (Laughter) This is the place where the meditators -- you can see it's kind of inspiring. Now, here with 256 electrodes. (Laughter) So what did they find? Of course, same thing. The scientific embargo -- if it's ever submitted to "Nature," hopefully, it will be accepted. It deals with the state of compassion, unconditional compassion. We asked meditators, who have been doing that for years and years, to put their mind in a state where there's nothing but loving kindness, total availability to sentient being. Of course, during the training, we do that with objects. We think of people suffering, of people we love, but at some point, it can be a state which is all pervading. Here is the preliminary result, which I can show because it's already been shown. The bell curve shows 150 controls, and what is being looked at is the difference between the right and the left frontal lobe. In very short, people who have more activity in the right side of the prefrontal cortex are more depressed, withdrawn. They don't describe a lot of positive affect. It's the opposite on the left side: more tendency to altruism, to happiness, to express, and curiosity and so forth. So there's a basic line for people. And also, it can be changed. If you see a comic movie, you go off to the left side. If you are happy about something, you'll go more to the left side. If you have a bout of depression, you'll go to the right side. Here, the -0.5 is the full standard deviation of a meditator who meditated on compassion. It's something that is totally out of the bell curve. So, I've no time to go into all the different scientific results. Hopefully, they will come. But they found that -- this is after three and a half hours in an fMRI, it's like coming out of a space ship. Also, it has been shown in other labs -- for instance, Paul Ekman's labs in Berkeley -- that some meditators are able, also, to control their emotional response more than it could be thought. Like the startle experiments, for example. If you sit a guy on a chair with all this apparatus measuring your physiology, and there's kind of a bomb that goes off, it's such an instinctive response that, in 20 years, they never saw anyone who would not jump. Some meditators, without trying to stop it, but simply by being completely open, thinking that that bang is just going to be a small event like a shooting star, they are able not to move at all. So the whole point of that is not, sort of, to make, like, a circus thing of showing exceptional beings who can jump, or whatever. It's more to say that mind training matters. That this is not just a luxury. This is not a supplementary vitamin for the soul. This is something that's going to determine the quality of every instant of our lives. We are ready to spend 15 years achieving education. We love to do jogging, fitness. We do all kinds of things to remain beautiful. Yet, we spend surprisingly little time taking care of what matters most -- the way our mind functions -- which, again, is the ultimate thing that determines the quality of our experience. Now, compassion is supposed to be put in action. That's what we try to do in different places. Just this one example is worth a lot of work. This lady with bone TB, left alone in a tent, was going to die with her only daughter. One year later, how she is. Different schools and clinics we've been doing in Tibet. And just, I leave you with the beauty of those looks that tells more about happiness than I could ever say. (Laughter) And jumping monks of Tibet. (Laughter) Flying monks. Thank you very much.
Chris Anderson: Thank you so much, Prime Minister, that was both fascinating and quite inspiring. So, you're calling for a global ethic. Would you describe that as global citizenship? Is that an idea that you believe in, and how would you define that? Gordon Brown: I think it is about global citizenship. It's about recognizing our responsibilities to others. There is so much to do over the next few years that is obvious to so many of us to build a better world. And there is so much shared sense of what we need to do, that it is vital that we all come together. But we don't necessarily have the means to do so. So there are challenges to be met. I believe the concept of global citizenship will simply grow out of people talking to each other across continents. But then, of course, the task is to create the institutions that make that global society work. But I don't think we should underestimate the extent to which massive changes in technology make possible the linking up of people across the world. CA: But people get excited about this idea of global citizenship, but then they get confused a bit again when they start thinking about patriotism, and how to combine these two. I mean, you're elected as Prime Minister with a brief to bat for Britain. How do you reconcile the two things? GB: Well, of course national identity remains important. But it's not at the expense of people accepting their global responsibilities. And I think one of the problems of a recession is that people become more protectionist, they look in on themselves, they try to protect their own nation, perhaps at the expense of other nations. When you actually look at the motor of the world economy, it cannot move forward unless there is trade between the different countries. And any nation that would become protectionist over the next few years would deprive itself of the chance of getting the benefits of growth in the world economy. So, you've got to have a healthy sense of patriotism; that's absolutely important. But you've got to realize that this world has changed fundamentally, and the problems that we have cannot be solved by one nation and one nation alone. CA: Well, indeed. But what do you do when the two come into conflict and you're forced to make a decision that either is in Britain's interest, or the interest of Britons, or citizens elsewhere in the world? GB: Well I think we can persuade people that what is necessary for Britain's long-term interests, what is necessary for America's long-term interests, is proper engagement with the rest of the world, and taking the action that is necessary. There is a great story, again, told about Richard Nixon. 1958, Ghana becomes independent, so it is just over 50 years ago. Richard Nixon goes to represent the United States government at the celebrations for independence in Ghana. And it's one of his first outings as Vice President to an African country. He doesn't quite know what to do, so he starts going around the crowd and starts talking to people in the crowd and he says to people in this rather unique way, "How does it feel to be free?" And he's going around, "How does it feel to be free?" "How does it feel to be free?" And then someone says, "How should I know? I come from Alabama." (Laughter) And that was the 1950s. Now, what is remarkable is that civil rights in America were achieved in the 1960s. But what is equally remarkable is socioeconomic rights in Africa have not moved forward very fast even since the age of colonialism. And yet, America and Africa have got a common interest. And we have got to realize that if we don't link up with those people who are sensible voices and democratic voices in Africa, to work together for common causes, then the danger of Al Qaeda and related groups making progress in Africa is very big. So, I would say that what seems sometimes to be altruism, in relation to Africa, or in relation to developing countries, is more than that. It is enlightened self-interest for us to work with other countries. And I would say that national interest and, if you like, what is the global interest to tackle poverty and climate change do, in the long run, come together. And whatever the short-run price for taking action on climate change or taking action on security, or taking action to provide opportunities for people for education, these are prices that are worth paying so that you build a stronger global society where people feel able to feel comfortable with each other and are able to communicate with each other in such a way that you can actually build stronger links between different countries. CA: We're in Oxford, which is the home of philosophical thought experiments. And so here is one that kind of goes -- I still just want to draw out on this issue. So, you're on vacation at a nice beach, and word comes through that there's been a massive earthquake and that there is a tsunami advancing on the beach. One end of the beach there is a house containing a family of five Nigerians. And at the other end of the beach there is a single Brit. You have time to -- (Laughter) you have time to alert one house. What do you do? (Laughter) GB: Modern communications. (Applause) Alert both. (Applause) I do agree that my responsibility is first of all to make sure that people in our country are safe. And I wouldn't like anything that is said today to suggest that I am diminishing the importance of the responsibility that each individual leader has for their own country. But I'm trying to suggest that there is a huge opportunity open to us that was never open to us before. But the power to communicate across borders allows us to organize the world in a different way. And I think, look at the tsunami, it's a classic example. Where was the early warning systems? You know? Where was the world acting together to deal with the problems that they knew arose from the potential for earthquakes, as well as the potential for climate change? And when the world starts to work together, with better early warning systems, then you can deal with some of these problems in a far better way. I just think we're not seeing, at the moment, the huge opportunities open to us by the ability of people to cooperate in a world where either there was isolationism before or there was limited alliances based on convenience which never actually took you to deal with some of the central problems. CA: But I think this is the frustration that perhaps a lot people have, like people in the audience here, where we love the kind of language that you're talking about. It is inspiring. A lot of us believe that that has to be the world's future. And yet, when the situation changes, you suddenly hear politicians talking as if, you know, for example, the life of one American soldier is worth countless numbers of Iraqi civilians. When the pedal hits the metal, the idealism can get moved away. I'm just wondering how -- whether you can see that changing over time, whether you see in Britain that there are changing attitudes, and that people are actually more supportive of the kind of global ethic that you talk about. GB: I think every religion, every faith, and I'm not just talking here to people of faith or religion -- it has this global ethic at the center of its credo. And whether it's Jewish or whether it's Muslim or whether it's Hindu, or whether it's Sikh, the same global ethic is at the heart of each of these religions. So, I think you're dealing with something that people instinctively see as part of that moral sense. So you're building on something that is not pure self-interest. You're building on people's ideas and values -- that perhaps they're candles that burn very dimly on certain occasions. But it is a set of values that cannot, in my view, be extinguished. Then the question is, how do you make that change happen? How do you persuade people that it is in their interest to build strong ... After the Second World War, we built institutions, the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the Marshall Plan. There was a period in which people talked about an act of creation, because these institutions were so new. But they are now out of date. They don't deal with the problems. As I said, you can't deal with the environmental problem through existing institutions. You can't deal with the security problem in the way that you need to. You can't deal with the economic and financial problem. So we have got to rebuild our global institutions, build them in a way that is suitable to the challenges of this time. And I believe that if you look at the biggest challenge we face, it is to persuade people to have the confidence that we can build a truly global society with the institutions that are founded on these rules. So, I come back to my initial point. Sometimes you think things are impossible. Nobody would have said 50 years ago that apartheid would have gone in 1990, or that the Berlin wall would have fallen at the turn of the '80s and '90s, or that polio could be eradicated, or that perhaps 60 years ago nobody would have said that a man could have gone to the moon. All these things have happened. By tackling the impossible, you make the impossible possible. CA: And we have had a speaker who said that very thing, and swallowed a sword right after that, which was quite dramatic. (Laughter) GB: Followed my sword will swallow. CA: But, surely a true global ethic is for someone to say, "I believe the life of every human on the planet is worth the same, equal consideration, regardless of nationality and religion." And you have politicians who have -- you're elected. In a way, you can't say that. Even if, as a human being, you believe that, you can't say that. You're elected for Britain's interests. GB: We have a responsibility to protect. I mean look, 1918, the Treaty of Versailles, and all the treaties before that, the Treaty of Westphalia and everything else, were about protecting the sovereign right of individual countries to do what they want. Since then, the world has moved forward, partly as a result of what happened with the Holocaust, and people's concern about the rights of individuals within territories where they need protection, partly because of what we saw in Rwanda, partly because of what we saw in Bosnia. The idea of the responsibility to protect all individuals who are in situations where they are at humanitarian risk is now being established as a principle which governs the world. So, while I can't automatically say that Britain will rush to the aid of any citizen of any country, in danger, I can say that Britain is in a position where we're working with other countries so that this idea that you have a responsibility to protect people who are victims of either genocide or humanitarian attack, is something that is accepted by the whole world. Now, in the end, that can only be achieved if your international institutions work well enough to be able to do so. And that comes back to what the future role of the United Nations, and what it can do, actually is. But, the responsibility to protect is a new idea that is, in a sense, taken over from the idea of self-determination as the principle governing the international community. CA: Can you picture, in our lifetimes, a politician ever going out on a platform of the kind of full-form global ethic, global citizenship? And basically saying that "I believe that all people across the planet have equal consideration, and if in power we will act in that way. And we believe that the people of this country are also now global citizens and will support that ethic ..." GB: Is that not what we're doing in the debate about climate change? We're saying that you cannot solve the problem of climate change in one country; you've got to involve all countries. You're saying that you must, and you have a duty to help those countries that cannot afford to deal with the problems of climate change themselves. You're saying you want a deal with all the different countries of the world where we're all bound together to cutting carbon emissions in a way that is to the benefit of the whole world. We've never had this before because Kyoto didn't work. If you could get a deal at Copenhagen, where people agreed, A, that there was a long-term target for carbon emission cuts, B, that there was short-range targets that had to be met so this wasn't just abstract; it was people actually making decisions now that would make a difference now, and if you could then find a financing mechanism that meant that the poorest countries that had been hurt by our inability to deal with climate change over many, many years and decades are given special help so that they can move to energy-efficient technologies, and they are in a position financially to be able to afford the long-term investment that is associated with cutting carbon emissions, then you are treating the world equally, by giving consideration to every part of the planet and the needs they have. It doesn't mean that everybody does exactly the same thing, because we've actually got to do more financially to help the poorest countries, but it does mean there is equal consideration for the needs of citizens in a single planet. CA: Yes. And then of course the theory is still that those talks get rent apart by different countries fighting over their own individual interests. GB: Yes, but I think Europe has got a position, which is 27 countries have already come together. I mean, the great difficulty in Europe is if you're at a meeting and 27 people speak, it takes a very very long time. But we did get an agreement on climate change. America has made its first disposition on this with the bill that President Obama should be congratulated for getting through Congress. Japan has made an announcement. China and India have signed up to the scientific evidence. And now we've got to move them to accept a long-term target, and then short-term targets. But more progress has been made, I think, in the last few weeks than had been made for some years. And I do believe that there is a strong possibility that if we work together, we can get that agreement to Copenhagen. I certainly have been putting forward proposals that would have allowed the poorest parts of the world to feel that we have taken into account their specific needs. And we would help them adapt. And we would help them make the transition to a low carbon economy. I do think a reform of the international institutions is vital to this. When the IMF was created in the 1940s, it was created with resources that were five percent or so of the world's GDP. The IMF now has limited resources, one percent. It can't really make the difference that ought to be made in a period of crisis. So, we've got to rebuild the world institutions. And that's a big task: persuading all the different countries with the different voting shares in these institutions to do so. There is a story told about the three world leaders of the day getting a chance to get some advice from God. And the story is told that Bill Clinton went to God and he asked when there will be successful climate change and a low carbon economy. And God shook his head and said, "Not this year, not this decade, perhaps not even in your lifetime." And Bill Clinton walked away in tears because he had failed to get what he wanted. And then the story is that Barroso, the president of the European Commission, went to God and he asked, he said, "When will we get a recovery of global growth?" And God said, "Not this year, not in this decade, perhaps not in your lifetime." So Barroso walked away crying and in tears. And then the secretary general of the United Nations came up to speak to God and said, "When will our international institutions work?" And God cried. (Laughter) It is very important to recognize that this reform of institutions is the next stage after agreeing upon ourselves that there is a clear ethic upon which we can build. CA: Prime Minister, I think there are many in the audience who are truly appreciative of the efforts you made in terms of the financial mess we got ourselves into. And there are certainly many people in the audience who will be cheering you on as you seek to advance this global ethic. Thank you so much for coming to TED. GB: Well, thank you. (Applause)
Frank Gehry: I listened to this scientist this morning. Dr. Mullis was talking about his experiments, and I realized that I almost became a scientist. When I was 14 my parents bought me a chemistry set and I decided to make water. (Laughter) So, I made a hydrogen generator and I made an oxygen generator, and I had the two pipes leading into a beaker and I threw a match in. (Laughter) And the glass -- luckily I turned around -- I had it all in my back and I was about 15 feet away. The wall was covered with ... I had an explosion. Richard Saul Wurman: Really? FG: People on the street came and knocked on the door to see if I was okay. RSW: ... huh. (Laughter) I'd like to start this session again. The gentleman to my left is the very famous, perhaps overly famous, Frank Gehry. (Laughter) (Applause) And Frank, you've come to a place in your life, which is astonishing. I mean it is astonishing for an artist, for an architect, to become actually an icon and a legend in their own time. I mean you have become, whether you can giggle at it because it's a funny ... you know, it's a strange thought, but your building is an icon -- you can draw a little picture of that building, it can be used in ads -- and you've had not rock star status, but celebrity status in doing what you wanted to do for most of your life. And I know the road was extremely difficult. And it didn't seem, at least, that your sell outs, whatever they were, were very big. You kept moving ahead in a life where you're dependent on working for somebody. But that's an interesting thing for a creative person. A lot of us work for people; we're in the hands of other people. And that's one of the great dilemmas -- we're in a creativity session -- it's one of the great dilemmas in creativity: how to do work that's big enough and not sell out. And you've achieved that and that makes your win doubly big, triply big. It's not quite a question but you can comment on it. It's a big issue. FG: Well, I've always just ... I've never really gone out looking for work. I always waited for it to sort of hit me on the head. And when I started out, I thought that architecture was a service business and that you had to please the clients and stuff. And I realized when I'd come into the meetings with these corrugated metal and chain link stuff, and people would just look at me like I'd just landed from Mars. But I couldn't do anything else. That was my response to the people in the time. And actually, it was responding to clients that I had who didn't have very much money, so they couldn't afford very much. I think it was circumstantial. Until I got to my house, where the client was my wife. We bought this tiny little bungalow in Santa Monica and for like 50 grand I built a house around it. And a few people got excited about it. I was visiting with an artist, Michael Heizer, out in the desert near Las Vegas somewhere. He's building this huge concrete place. And it was late in the evening. We'd had a lot to drink. We were standing out in the desert all alone and, thinking about my house, he said, "Did it ever occur to you if you built stuff more permanent, somewhere in 2000 years somebody's going to like it?" (Laughter) So, I thought, "Yeah, that's probably a good idea." Luckily I started to get some clients that had a little more money, so the stuff was a little more permanent. But I just found out the world ain't going to last that long, this guy was telling us the other day. So where do we go now? Back to -- everything's so temporary. I don't see it the way you characterized it. For me, every day is a new thing. I approach each project with a new insecurity, almost like the first project I ever did, and I get the sweats, I go in and start working, I'm not sure where I'm going -- if I knew where I was going, I wouldn't do it. When I can predict or plan it, I don't do it. I discard it. So I approach it with the same trepidation. Obviously, over time I have a lot more confidence that it's going to be OK. I do run a kind of a business -- I've got 120 people and you've got to pay them, so there's a lot of responsibility involved -- but the actual work on the project is with, I think, a healthy insecurity. And like the playwright said the other day -- I could relate to him: you're not sure. When Bilbao was finished and I looked at it, I saw all the mistakes, I saw ... They weren't mistakes; I saw everything that I would have changed and I was embarrassed by it. I felt an embarrassment -- "How could I have done that? How could I have made shapes like that or done stuff like that?" It's taken several years to now look at it detached and say -- as you walk around the corner and a piece of it works with the road and the street, and it appears to have a relationship -- that I started to like it. RSW: What's the status of the New York project? FG: I don't really know. Tom Krens came to me with Bilbao and explained it all to me, and I thought he was nuts. I didn't think he knew what he was doing, and he pulled it off. So, I think he's Icarus and Phoenix all in one guy. (Laughter) He gets up there and then he ... comes back up. They're still talking about it. September 11 generated some interest in moving it over to Ground Zero, and I'm totally against that. I just feel uncomfortable talking about or building anything on Ground Zero I think for a long time. RSW: The picture on the screen, is that Disney? FG: Yeah. RSW: How much further along is it than that, and when will that be finished? FG: That will be finished in 2003 -- September, October -- and I'm hoping Kyu, and Herbie, and Yo-Yo and all those guys come play with us at that place. Luckily, today most of the people I'm working with are people I really like. Richard Koshalek is probably one of the main reasons that Disney Hall came to me. He's been a cheerleader for quite a long time. There aren't many people around that are really involved with architecture as clients. If you think about the world, and even just in this audience, most of us are involved with buildings. Nothing that you would call architecture, right? And so to find one, a guy like that, you hang on to him. He's become the head of Art Center, and there's a building by Craig Ellwood there. I knew Craig and respected him. They want to add to it and it's hard to add to a building like that -- it's a beautiful, minimalist, black steel building -- and Richard wants to add a library and more student stuff and it's a lot of acreage. I convinced him to let me bring in another architect from Portugal: Alvaro Siza. RSW: Why did you want that? FG: I knew you'd ask that question. It was intuitive. (Laughter) Alvaro Siza grew up and lived in Portugal and is probably considered the Portuguese main guy in architecture. I visited with him a few years ago and he showed me his early work, and his early work had a resemblance to my early work. When I came out of college, I started to try to do things contextually in Southern California, and you got into the logic of Spanish colonial tile roofs and things like that. I tried to understand that language as a beginning, as a place to jump off, and there was so much of it being done by spec builders and it was trivialized so much that it wasn't ... I just stopped. I mean, Charlie Moore did a bunch of it, but it didn't feel good to me. Siza, on the other hand, continued in Portugal where the real stuff was and evolved a modern language that relates to that historic language. And I always felt that he should come to Southern California and do a building. I tried to get him a couple of jobs and they didn't pan out. I like the idea of collaboration with people like that because it pushes you. I've done it with Claes Oldenburg and with Richard Serra, who doesn't think architecture is art. Did you see that thing? RSW: No. What did he say? FG: He calls architecture "plumbing." (Laughter) FG: Anyway, the Siza thing. It's a richer experience. It must be like that for Kyu doing things with musicians -- it's similar to that I would imagine -- where you ... huh? Audience: Liquid architecture. FG: Liquid architecture. (Laughter) Where you ... It's like jazz: you improvise, you work together, you play off each other, you make something, they make something. And I think for me, it's a way of trying to understand the city and what might happen in the city. RSW: Is it going to be near the current campus? Or is it going to be down near ... FG: No, it's near the current campus. Anyway, he's that kind of patron. It's not his money, of course. (Laughter) RSW: What's his schedule on that? FG: I don't know. What's the schedule, Richard? Richard Koshalek: [Unclear] starts from 2004. FG: 2004. You can come to the opening. I'll invite you. No, but the issue of city building in democracy is interesting because it creates chaos, right? Everybody doing their thing makes a very chaotic environment, and if you can figure out how to work off each other -- if you can get a bunch of people who respect each other's work and play off each other, you might be able to create models for how to build sections of the city without resorting to the one architect. Like the Rockefeller Center model, which is kind of from another era. RSW: I found the most remarkable thing. My preconception of Bilbao was this wonderful building, you go inside and there'd be extraordinary spaces. I'd seen drawings you had presented here at TED. The surprise of Bilbao was in its context to the city. That was the surprise of going across the river, of going on the highway around it, of walking down the street and finding it. That was the real surprise of Bilbao. FG: But you know, Richard, most architects when they present their work -- most of the people we know, you get up and you talk about your work, and it's almost like you tell everybody you're a good guy by saying, "Look, I'm worried about the context, I'm worried about the city, I'm worried about my client, I worry about budget, that I'm on time." Blah, blah, blah and all that stuff. And it's like cleansing yourself so that you can ... by saying all that, it means your work is good somehow. And I think everybody -- I mean that should be a matter of fact, like gravity. You're not going to defy gravity. You've got to work with the building department. If you don't meet the budgets, you're not going to get much work. If it leaks -- Bilbao did not leak. I was so proud. (Laughter) The MIT project -- they were interviewing me for MIT and they sent their facilities people to Bilbao. I met them in Bilbao. They came for three days. RSW: This is the computer building? FG: Yeah, the computer building. They were there three days and it rained every day and they kept walking around -- I noticed they were looking under things and looking for things, and they wanted to know where the buckets were hidden, you know? People put buckets out ... I was clean. There wasn't a bloody leak in the place, it was just fantastic. But you've got to -- yeah, well up until then every building leaked, so this ... (Laughter) RSW: Frank had a sort of ... FG: Ask Miriam! RW: ... sort of had a fame. His fame was built on that in L.A. for a while. (Laughter) FG: You've all heard the Frank Lloyd Wright story, when the woman called and said, "Mr. Wright, I'm sitting on the couch and the water's pouring in on my head." And he said, "Madam, move your chair." (Laughter) So, some years later I was doing a building, a little house on the beach for Norton Simon, and his secretary, who was kind of a hell on wheels type lady, called me and said, "Mr. Simon's sitting at his desk and the water's coming in on his head." And I told her the Frank Lloyd Wright story. RSW: Didn't get a laugh. FG: No. Not now either. (Laughter) But my point is that ... and I call it the "then what?" OK, you solved all the problems, you did all the stuff, you made nice, you loved your clients, you loved the city, you're a good guy, you're a good person ... and then what? What do you bring to it? And I think that's what I've always been interested in, is that -- which is a personal kind of expression. Bilbao, I think, shows that you can have that kind of personal expression and still touch all the bases that are necessary of fitting into the city. That's what reminded me of it. And I think that's the issue, you know; it's the "then what" that most clients who hire architects -- most clients aren't hiring architects for that. They're hiring them to get it done, get it on budget, be polite, and they're missing out on the real value of an architect. RSW: At a certain point a number of years ago, people -- when Michael Graves was a fashion, before teapots ... FG: I did a teapot and nobody bought it. (Laughter) RSW: Did it leak? FG: No. (Laughter) RSW: ... people wanted a Michael Graves building. Is that a curse, that people want a Bilbao building? FG: Yeah. Since Bilbao opened, which is now four, five years, both Krens and I have been called with at least 100 opportunities -- China, Brazil, other parts of Spain -- to come in and do the Bilbao effect. And I've met with some of these people. Usually I say no right away, but some of them come with pedigree and they sound well-intentioned and they get you for at least one or two meetings. In one case, I flew all the way to Malaga with a team because the thing was signed with seals and various very official seals from the city, and that they wanted me to come and do a building in their port. I asked them what kind of building it was. "When you get here we'll explain it." Blah, blah, blah. So four of us went. And they took us -- they put us up in a great hotel and we were looking over the bay, and then they took us in a boat out in the water and showed us all these sights in the harbor. Each one was more beautiful than the other. And then we were going to have lunch with the mayor and we were going to have dinner with the most important people in Malaga. Just before going to lunch with the mayor, we went to the harbor commissioner. It was a table as long as this carpet and the harbor commissioner was here, and I was here, and my guys. We sat down, and we had a drink of water and everybody was quiet. And the guy looked at me and said, "Now what can I do for you, Mr. Gehry?" (Laughter) RSW: Oh, my God. FG: So, I got up. I said to my team, "Let's get out of here." We stood up, we walked out. They followed -- the guy that dragged us there followed us and he said, "You mean you're not going to have lunch with the mayor?" I said, "Nope." "You're not going to have dinner at all?" They just brought us there to hustle this group, you know, to create a project. And we get a lot of that. Luckily, I'm old enough that I can complain I can't travel. (Laughter) I don't have my own plane yet. RSW: Well, I'm going to wind this up and wind up the meeting because it's been very long. But let me just say a couple words. FG: Can I say something? Are you going to talk about me or you? (Laughter) (Applause) RSW: Once a shit, always a shit! FG: Because I want to get a standing ovation like everybody, so ... RSW: You're going to get one! You're going to get one! (Laughter) I'm going to make it for you! FG: No, no. Wait a minute! (Applause)
It's a simple idea about nature. I want to say a word for nature because we haven't talked that much about it the last couple days. I want to say a word for the soil and the bees and the plants and the animals, and tell you about a tool, a very simple tool that I have found. Although it's really nothing more than a literary conceit; it's not a technology. It's very powerful for, I think, changing our relationship to the natural world and to the other species on whom we depend. And that tool is very simply, as Chris suggested, looking at us and the world from the plants' or the animals' point of view. It's not my idea, other people have hit on it, but I've tried to take it to some new places. Let me tell you where I got it. Like a lot of my ideas, like a lot of the tools I use, I found it in the garden; I'm a very devoted gardener. And there was a day about seven years ago: I was planting potatoes, it was the first week of May -- this is New England, when the apple trees are just vibrating with bloom; they're just white clouds above. I was here, planting my chunks, cutting up potatoes and planting it, and the bees were working on this tree; bumblebees, just making this thing vibrate. And one of the things I really like about gardening is that it doesn't take all your concentration, you really can't get hurt -- it's not like woodworking -- and you have plenty of kind of mental space for speculation. And the question I asked myself that afternoon in the garden, working alongside that bumblebee, was: what did I and that bumblebee have in common? How was our role in this garden similar and different? And I realized we actually had quite a bit in common: both of us were disseminating the genes of one species and not another, and both of us -- probably, if I can imagine the bee's point of view -- thought we were calling the shots. I had decided what kind of potato I wanted to plant -- I had picked my Yukon Gold or Yellow Finn, or whatever it was -- and I had summoned those genes from a seed catalog across the country, brought it, and I was planting it. And that bee, no doubt, assumed that it had decided, "I'm going for that apple tree, I'm going for that blossom, I'm going to get the nectar and I'm going to leave." We have a grammar that suggests that's who we are; that we are sovereign subjects in nature, the bee as well as me. I plant the potatoes, I weed the garden, I domesticate the species. But that day, it occurred to me: what if that grammar is nothing more than a self-serving conceit? Because, of course, the bee thinks he's in charge or she's in charge, but we know better. We know that what's going on between the bee and that flower is that bee has been cleverly manipulated by that flower. And when I say manipulated, I'm talking about in a Darwinian sense, right? I mean it has evolved a very specific set of traits -- color, scent, flavor, pattern -- that has lured that bee in. And the bee has been cleverly fooled into taking the nectar, and also picking up some powder on its leg, and going off to the next blossom. The bee is not calling the shots. And I realized then, I wasn't either. I had been seduced by that potato and not another into planting its -- into spreading its genes, giving it a little bit more habitat. And that's when I got the idea, which was, "Well, what would happen if we kind of looked at us from this point of view of these other species who are working on us?" And agriculture suddenly appeared to me not as an invention, not as a human technology, but as a co-evolutionary development in which a group of very clever species, mostly edible grasses, had exploited us, figured out how to get us to basically deforest the world. The competition of grasses, right? And suddenly everything looked different. And suddenly mowing the lawn that day was a completely different experience. I had thought always -- and in fact, had written this in my first book; this was a book about gardening -- that lawns were nature under culture's boot, that they were totalitarian landscapes, and that when we mowed them we were cruelly suppressing the species and never letting it set seed or die or have sex. And that's what the lawn was. But then I realized, "No, this is exactly what the grasses want us to do. I'm a dupe. I'm a dupe of the lawns, whose goal in life is to outcompete the trees, who they compete with for sunlight." And so by getting us to mow the lawn, we keep the trees from coming back, which in New England happens very, very quickly. So I started looking at things this way and wrote a whole book about it called "The Botany of Desire." And I realized that in the same way you can look at a flower and deduce all sorts of interesting things about the taste and the desires of bees -- that they like sweetness, that they like this color and not that color, that they like symmetry -- what could we find out about ourselves by doing the same thing? That a certain kind of potato, a certain kind of drug, a sativa-indica Cannabis cross has something to say about us. And that, wouldn't this be kind of an interesting way to look at the world? Now, the test of any idea -- I said it was a literary conceit -- is what does it get us? And when you're talking about nature, which is really my subject as a writer, how does it meet the Aldo Leopold test? Which is, does it make us better citizens of the biotic community? Get us to do things that leads to the support and perpetuation of the biota, rather than its destruction? And I would submit that this idea does this. So, let me go through what you gain when you look at the world this way, besides some entertaining insights about human desire. As an intellectual matter, looking at the world from other species' points of view helps us deal with this weird anomaly, which is -- and this is in the realm of intellectual history -- which is that we have this Darwinian revolution 150 years ago ... Ugh. Mini-Me. (Laughter) We have this intellectual, this Darwinian revolution in which, thanks to Darwin, we figured out we are just one species among many; evolution is working on us the same way it's working on all the others; we are acted upon as well as acting; we are really in the fiber, the fabric of life. But the weird thing is, we have not absorbed this lesson 150 years later; none of us really believes this. We are still Cartesians -- the children of Descartes -- who believe that subjectivity, consciousness, sets us apart; that the world is divided into subjects and objects; that there is nature on one side, culture on another. As soon as you start seeing things from the plant's point of view or the animal's point of view, you realize that the real literary conceit is that -- is the idea that nature is opposed to culture, the idea that consciousness is everything -- and that's another very important thing it does. Looking at the world from other species' points of view is a cure for the disease of human self-importance. You suddenly realize that consciousness -- which we value and we consider the crowning achievement of nature, human consciousness -- is really just another set of tools for getting along in the world. And it's kind of natural that we would think it was the best tool. But, you know, there's a comedian who said, "Well, who's telling me that consciousness is so good and so important? Well, consciousness." So when you look at the plants, you realize that there are other tools and they're just as interesting. I'll give you two examples, also from the garden: lima beans. You know what a lima bean does when it's attacked by spider mites? It releases this volatile chemical that goes out into the world and summons another species of mite that comes in and attacks the spider mite, defending the lima bean. So what plants have -- while we have consciousness, tool making, language, they have biochemistry. And they have perfected that to a degree far beyond what we can imagine. Their complexity, their sophistication, is something to really marvel at, and I think it's really the scandal of the Human Genome Project. You know, we went into it thinking, 40,000 or 50,000 human genes and we came out with only 23,000. Just to give you grounds for comparison, rice: 35,000 genes. So who's the more sophisticated species? Well, we're all equally sophisticated. We've been evolving just as long, just along different paths. So, cure for self-importance, way to sort of make us feel the Darwinian idea. And that's really what I do as a writer, as a storyteller, is try to make people feel what we know and tell stories that actually help us think ecologically. Now, the other use of this is practical. And I'm going to take you to a farm right now, because I used this idea to develop my understanding of the food system and what I learned, in fact, is that we are all, now, being manipulated by corn. And the talk you heard about ethanol earlier today, to me, is the final triumph of corn over good sense. (Laughter) (Applause) It is part of corn's scheme for world domination. (Laughter) And you will see, the amount of corn planted this year will be up dramatically from last year and there will be that much more habitat because we've decided ethanol is going to help us. So it helped me understand industrial agriculture, which of course is a Cartesian system. It's based on this idea that we bend other species to our will and that we are in charge, and that we create these factories and we have these technological inputs and we get the food out of it or the fuel or whatever we want. Let me take you to a very different kind of farm. This is a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. I went looking for a farm where these ideas about looking at things from the species' point of view are actually implemented, and I found it in a man. The farmer's name is Joel Salatin. And I spent a week as an apprentice on his farm, and I took away from this some of the most hopeful news about our relationship to nature that I've ever come across in 25 years of writing about nature. And that is this: the farm is called Polyface, which means ... the idea is he's got six different species of animals, as well as some plants, growing in this very elaborate symbiotic arrangement. It's permaculture, those of you who know a little bit about this, such that the cows and the pigs and the sheep and the turkeys and the ... what else does he have? All the six different species -- rabbits, actually -- are all performing ecological services for one another, such that the manure of one is the lunch for the other and they take care of pests for one another. It's a very elaborate and beautiful dance, but I'm going to just give you a close-up on one piece of it, and that is the relationship between his cattle and his chickens, his laying hens. And I'll show you, if you take this approach, what you get, OK? And this is a lot more than growing food, as you'll see; this is a different way to think about nature and a way to get away from the zero-sum notion, the Cartesian idea that either nature's winning or we're winning, and that for us to get what we want, nature is diminished. So, one day, cattle in a pen. The only technology involved here is this cheap electric fencing: relatively new, hooked to a car battery; even I could carry a quarter-acre paddock, set it up in 15 minutes. Cows graze one day. They move, OK? They graze everything down, intensive grazing. He waits three days, and then we towed in something called the Eggmobile. The Eggmobile is a very rickety contraption -- it looks like a prairie schooner made out of boards -- but it houses 350 chickens. He tows this into the paddock three days later and opens the gangplank, turns them down, and 350 hens come streaming down the gangplank -- clucking, gossiping as chickens will -- and they make a beeline for the cow patties. And what they're doing is very interesting: they're digging through the cow patties for the maggots, the grubs, the larvae of flies. And the reason he's waited three days is because he knows that on the fourth day or the fifth day, those larvae will hatch and he'll have a huge fly problem. But he waits that long to grow them as big and juicy and tasty as he can because they are the chickens' favorite form of protein. So the chickens do their kind of little breakdance and they're pushing around the manure to get at the grubs, and in the process they're spreading the manure out. Very useful second ecosystem service. And third, while they're in this paddock they are, of course, defecating madly and their very nitrogenous manure is fertilizing this field. They then move out to the next one, and in the course of just a few weeks, the grass just enters this blaze of growth. And within four or five weeks, he can do it again. He can graze again, he can cut, he can bring in another species, like the lambs, or he can make hay for the winter. Now, I want you to just look really close up onto what's happened there. So, it's a very productive system. And what I need to tell you is that on 100 acres he gets 40,000 pounds of beef; 30,000 pounds of pork; 25,000 dozen eggs; 20,000 broilers; 1,000 turkeys; 1,000 rabbits -- an immense amount of food. You know, you hear, "Can organic feed the world?" Well, look how much food you can produce on 100 acres if you do this kind of ... again, give each species what it wants, let it realize its desires, its physiological distinctiveness. Put that in play. But look at it from the point of view of the grass, now. What happens to the grass when you do this? When a ruminant grazes grass, the grass is cut from this height to this height, and it immediately does something very interesting. Any one of you who gardens knows that there is something called the root-shoot ratio, and plants need to keep the root mass in some rough balance with the leaf mass to be happy. So when they lose a lot of leaf mass, they shed roots; they kind of cauterize them and the roots die. And the species in the soil go to work basically chewing through those roots, decomposing them -- the earthworms, the fungi, the bacteria -- and the result is new soil. This is how soil is created. It's created from the bottom up. This is how the prairies were built, the relationship between bison and grasses. And what I realized when I understood this -- and if you ask Joel Salatin what he is, he'll tell you he's not a chicken farmer, he's not a sheep farmer, he's not a cattle rancher; he's a grass farmer, because grass is really the keystone species of such a system -- is that, if you think about it, this completely contradicts the tragic idea of nature we hold in our heads, which is that for us to get what we want, nature is diminished. More for us, less for nature. Here, all this food comes off this farm, and at the end of the season there is actually more soil, more fertility and more biodiversity. It's a remarkably hopeful thing to do. There are a lot of farmers doing this today. This is well beyond organic agriculture, which is still a Cartesian system, more or less. And what it tells you is that if you begin to take account of other species, take account of the soil, that even with nothing more than this perspectival idea -- because there is no technology involved here except for those fences, which are so cheap they could be all over Africa in no time -- that we can take the food we need from the Earth and actually heal the Earth in the process. This is a way to reanimate the world, and that's what's so exciting about this perspective. When we really begin to feel Darwin's insights in our bones, the things we can do with nothing more than these ideas are something to be very hopeful about. Thank you very much.
We live in difficult and challenging economic times, of course. And one of the first victims of difficult economic times, I think, is public spending of any kind, but certainly in the firing line at the moment is public spending for science, and particularly curiosity-led science and exploration. So I want to try and convince you in about 15 minutes that that's a ridiculous and ludicrous thing to do. But I think to set the scene, I want to show -- the next slide is not my attempt to show the worst TED slide in the history of TED, but it is a bit of a mess. (Laughter) But actually, it's not my fault; it's from the Guardian newspaper. And it's actually a beautiful demonstration of how much science costs. Because, if I'm going to make the case for continuing to spend on curiosity-driven science and exploration, I should tell you how much it costs. So this is a game called "spot the science budgets." This is the U.K. government spend. You see there, it's about 620 billion a year. The science budget is actually -- if you look to your left, there's a purple set of blobs and then yellow set of blobs. And it's one of the yellow set of blobs around the big yellow blob. It's about 3.3 billion pounds per year out of 620 billion. That funds everything in the U.K. from medical research, space exploration, where I work, at CERN in Geneva, particle physics, engineering, even arts and humanities, funded from the science budget, which is that 3.3 billion, that little, tiny yellow blob around the orange blob at the top left of the screen. So that's what we're arguing about. That percentage, by the way, is about the same in the U.S. and Germany and France. R&D in total in the economy, publicly funded, is about 0.6 percent of GDP. So that's what we're arguing about. The first thing I want to say, and this is straight from "Wonders of the Solar System," is that our exploration of the solar system and the universe has shown us that it is indescribably beautiful. This is a picture that actually was sent back by the Cassini space probe around Saturn, after we'd finished filming "Wonders of the Solar System." So it isn't in the series. It's of the moon Enceladus. So that big sweeping, white sphere in the corner is Saturn, which is actually in the background of the picture. And that crescent there is the moon Enceladus, which is about as big as the British Isles. It's about 500 kilometers in diameter. So, tiny moon. What's fascinating and beautiful ... this an unprocessed picture, by the way, I should say, it's black and white, straight from Saturnian orbit. What's beautiful is, you can probably see on the limb there some faint, sort of, wisps of almost smoke rising up from the limb. This is how we visualize that in "Wonders of the Solar System." It's a beautiful graphic. What we found out were that those faint wisps are actually fountains of ice rising up from the surface of this tiny moon. That's fascinating and beautiful in itself, but we think that the mechanism for powering those fountains requires there to be lakes of liquid water beneath the surface of this moon. And what's important about that is that, on our planet, on Earth, wherever we find liquid water, we find life. So, to find strong evidence of liquid, pools of liquid, beneath the surface of a moon 750 million miles away from the Earth is really quite astounding. So what we're saying, essentially, is maybe that's a habitat for life in the solar system. Well, let me just say, that was a graphic. I just want to show this picture. That's one more picture of Enceladus. This is when Cassini flew beneath Enceladus. So it made a very low pass, just a few hundred kilometers above the surface. And so this, again, a real picture of the ice fountains rising up into space, absolutely beautiful. But that's not the prime candidate for life in the solar system. That's probably this place, which is a moon of Jupiter, Europa. And again, we had to fly to the Jovian system to get any sense that this moon, as most moons, was anything other than a dead ball of rock. It's actually an ice moon. So what you're looking at is the surface of the moon Europa, which is a thick sheet of ice, probably a hundred kilometers thick. But by measuring the way that Europa interacts with the magnetic field of Jupiter, and looking at how those cracks in the ice that you can see there on that graphic move around, we've inferred very strongly that there's an ocean of liquid surrounding the entire surface of Europa. So below the ice, there's an ocean of liquid around the whole moon. It could be hundreds of kilometers deep, we think. We think it's saltwater, and that would mean that there's more water on that moon of Jupiter than there is in all the oceans of the Earth combined. So that place, a little moon around Jupiter, is probably the prime candidate for finding life on a moon or a body outside the Earth, that we know of. Tremendous and beautiful discovery. Our exploration of the solar system has taught us that the solar system is beautiful. It may also have pointed the way to answering one of the most profound questions that you can possibly ask, which is: "Are we alone in the universe?" Is there any other use to exploration and science, other than just a sense of wonder? Well, there is. This is a very famous picture taken, actually, on my first Christmas Eve, December 24th, 1968, when I was about eight months old. It was taken by Apollo 8 as it went around the back of the moon. Earthrise from Apollo 8. A famous picture; many people have said that it's the picture that saved 1968, which was a turbulent year -- the student riots in Paris, the height of the Vietnam War. The reason many people think that about this picture, and Al Gore has said it many times, actually, on the stage at TED, is that this picture, arguably, was the beginning of the environmental movement. Because, for the first time, we saw our world, not as a solid, immovable, kind of indestructible place, but as a very small, fragile-looking world just hanging against the blackness of space. What's also not often said about the space exploration, about the Apollo program, is the economic contribution it made. I mean while you can make arguments that it was wonderful and a tremendous achievement and delivered pictures like this, it cost a lot, didn't it? Well, actually, many studies have been done about the economic effectiveness, the economic impact of Apollo. The biggest one was in 1975 by Chase Econometrics. And it showed that for every $1 spent on Apollo, 14 came back into the U.S. economy. So the Apollo program paid for itself in inspiration, in engineering, achievement and, I think, in inspiring young scientists and engineers 14 times over. So exploration can pay for itself. What about scientific discovery? What about driving innovation? Well, this looks like a picture of virtually nothing. What it is, is a picture of the spectrum of hydrogen. See, back in the 1880s, 1890s, many scientists, many observers, looked at the light given off from atoms. And they saw strange pictures like this. What you're seeing when you put it through a prism is that you heat hydrogen up and it doesn't just glow like a white light, it just emits light at particular colors, a red one, a light blue one, some dark blue ones. Now that led to an understanding of atomic structure because the way that's explained is atoms are a single nucleus with electrons going around them. And the electrons can only be in particular places. And when they jump up to the next place they can be, and fall back down again, they emit light at particular colors. And so the fact that atoms, when you heat them up, only emit light at very specific colors, was one of the key drivers that led to the development of the quantum theory, the theory of the structure of atoms. I just wanted to show this picture because this is remarkable. This is actually a picture of the spectrum of the Sun. And now, this is a picture of atoms in the Sun's atmosphere absorbing light. And again, they only absorb light at particular colors when electrons jump up and fall down, jump up and fall down. But look at the number of black lines in that spectrum. And the element helium was discovered just by staring at the light from the Sun because some of those black lines were found that corresponded to no known element. And that's why helium's called helium. It's called "helios" -- helios from the Sun. Now, that sounds esoteric, and indeed it was an esoteric pursuit, but the quantum theory quickly led to an understanding of the behaviors of electrons in materials like silicon, for example. The way that silicon behaves, the fact that you can build transistors, is a purely quantum phenomenon. So without that curiosity-driven understanding of the structure of atoms, which led to this rather esoteric theory, quantum mechanics, then we wouldn't have transistors, we wouldn't have silicon chips, we wouldn't have pretty much the basis of our modern economy. There's one more, I think, wonderful twist to that tale. In "Wonders of the Solar System," we kept emphasizing the laws of physics are universal. It's one of the most incredible things about the physics and the understanding of nature that you get on Earth, is you can transport it, not only to the planets, but to the most distant stars and galaxies. And one of the astonishing predictions of quantum mechanics, just by looking at the structure of atoms -- the same theory that describes transistors -- is that there can be no stars in the universe that have reached the end of their life that are bigger than, quite specifically, 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. That's a limit imposed on the mass of stars. You can work it out on a piece of paper in a laboratory, get a telescope, swing it to the sky, and you find that there are no dead stars bigger than 1.4 times the mass of the Sun. That's quite an incredible prediction. What happens when you have a star that's right on the edge of that mass? Well, this is a picture of it. This is the picture of a galaxy, a common "our garden" galaxy with, what, 100 billion stars like our Sun in it. It's just one of billions of galaxies in the universe. There are a billion stars in the galactic core, which is why it's shining out so brightly. This is about 50 million light years away, so one of our neighboring galaxies. But that bright star there is actually one of the stars in the galaxy. So that star is also 50 million light years away. It's part of that galaxy, and it's shining as brightly as the center of the galaxy with a billion suns in it. That's a Type Ia supernova explosion. Now that's an incredible phenomena, because it's a star that sits there. It's called a carbon-oxygen dwarf. It sits there about, say, 1.3 times the mass of the Sun. And it has a binary companion that goes around it, so a big star, a big ball of gas. And what it does is it sucks gas off its companion star, until it gets to this limit called the Chandrasekhar limit, and then it explodes. And it explodes, and it shines as brightly as a billion suns for about two weeks, and releases, not only energy, but a huge amount of chemical elements into the universe. In fact, that one is a carbon-oxygen dwarf. Now, there was no carbon and oxygen in the universe at the Big Bang. And there was no carbon and oxygen in the universe throughout the first generation of stars. It was made in stars like that, locked away and then returned to the universe in explosions like that in order to recondense into planets, stars, new solar systems and, indeed, people like us. I think that's a remarkable demonstration of the power and beauty and universality of the laws of physics, because we understand that process, because we understand the structure of atoms here on Earth. This is a beautiful quote that I found -- we're talking about serendipity there -- from Alexander Fleming: "When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic." Now, the explorers of the world of the atom did not intend to invent the transistor. And they certainly didn't intend to describe the mechanics of supernova explosions, which eventually told us where the building blocks of life were synthesized in the universe. So, I think science can be -- serendipity is important. It can be beautiful. It can reveal quite astonishing things. It can also, I think, finally reveal the most profound ideas to us about our place in the universe and really the value of our home planet. This is a spectacular picture of our home planet. Now, it doesn't look like our home planet. It looks like Saturn because, of course, it is. It was taken by the Cassini space probe. But it's a famous picture, not because of the beauty and majesty of Saturn's rings, but actually because of a tiny, faint blob just hanging underneath one of the rings. And if I blow it up there, you see it. It looks like a moon, but in fact, it's a picture of Earth. It was a picture of Earth captured in that frame of Saturn. That's our planet from 750 million miles away. I think the Earth has got a strange property that the farther away you get from it, the more beautiful it seems. But that is not the most distant or most famous picture of our planet. It was taken by this thing, which is called the Voyager spacecraft. And that's a picture of me in front of it for scale. The Voyager is a tiny machine. It's currently 10 billion miles away from Earth, transmitting with that dish, with the power of 20 watts, and we're still in contact with it. But it visited Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. And after it visited all four of those planets, Carl Sagan, who's one of my great heroes, had the wonderful idea of turning Voyager around and taking a picture of every planet it had visited. And it took this picture of Earth. Now it's very hard to see the Earth there, it's called the "Pale Blue Dot" picture, but Earth is suspended in that red shaft of light. That's Earth from four billion miles away. And I'd like to read you what Sagan wrote about it, just to finish, because I cannot say words as beautiful as this to describe what he saw in that picture that he had taken. He said, "Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you've ever heard of, every human being who ever was lived out their lives. The aggregates of joy and suffering thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there, on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. It's been said that astronomy's a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." Beautiful words about the power of science and exploration. The argument has always been made, and it will always be made, that we know enough about the universe. You could have made it in the 1920s; you wouldn't have had penicillin. You could have made it in the 1890s; you wouldn't have the transistor. And it's made today in these difficult economic times. Surely, we know enough. We don't need to discover anything else about our universe. Let me leave the last words to someone who's rapidly becoming a hero of mine, Humphrey Davy, who did his science at the turn of the 19th century. He was clearly under assault all the time. "We know enough at the turn of the 19th century. Just exploit it; just build things." He said this, he said, "Nothing is more fatal to the progress of the human mind than to presume that our views of science are ultimate, that our triumphs are complete, that there are no mysteries in nature, and that there are no new worlds to conquer." Thank you. (Applause)
You should be nice to nerds. In fact, I'd go so far as to say, if you don't already have a nerd in your life, you should get one. I'm just saying. Scientists and engineers change the world. I'd like to tell you about a magical place called DARPA where scientists and engineers defy the impossible and refuse to fear failure. Now these two ideas are connected more than you may realize, because when you remove the fear of failure, impossible things suddenly become possible. If you want to know how, ask yourself this question: What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? If you really ask yourself this question, you can't help but feel uncomfortable. I feel a little uncomfortable. Because when you ask it, you begin to understand how the fear of failure constrains you, how it keeps us from attempting great things, and life gets dull, amazing things stop happening. Sure, good things happen, but amazing things stop happening. Now I should be clear, I'm not encouraging failure, I'm discouraging fear of failure. Because it's not failure itself that constrains us. The path to truly new, never-been-done-before things always has failure along the way. We're tested. And in part, that testing feels an appropriate part of achieving something great. Clemenceau said, "Life gets interesting when we fail, because it's a sign that we've surpassed ourselves." In 1895, Lord Kelvin declared that heavier-than-air flying machines were impossible. In October of 1903, the prevailing opinion of expert aerodynamicists was that maybe in 10 million years we could build an aircraft that would fly. And two months later on December 17th, Orville Wright powered the first airplane across a beach in North Carolina. The flight lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet. That was 1903. One year later, the next declarations of impossibilities began. Ferdinand Foch, a French army general credited with having one of the most original and subtle minds in the French army, said, "Airplanes are interesting toys, but of no military value." 40 years later, aero experts coined the term transonic. They debated, should it have one S or two? You see, they were having trouble in this flight regime, and it wasn't at all clear that we could fly faster than the speed of sound. In 1947, there was no wind tunnel data beyond Mach 0.85. And yet, on Tuesday, October 14th, 1947, Chuck Yeager climbed into the cockpit of his Bell X-1 and he flew towards an unknown possibility, and in so doing, he became the first pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound. Six of eight Atlas rockets blew up on the pad. After 11 complete mission failures, we got our first images from space. And on that first flight we got more data than in all U-2 missions combined. It took a lot of failures to get there. Since we took to the sky, we have wanted to fly faster and farther. And to do so, we've had to believe in impossible things. And we've had to refuse to fear failure. That's still true today. Today, we don't talk about flying transonically, or even supersonically, we talk about flying hypersonically -- not Mach 2 or Mach 3, Mach 20. At Mach 20, we can fly from New York to Long Beach in 11 minutes and 20 seconds. At that speed, the surface of the airfoil is the temperature of molten steel -- 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit -- like a blast furnace. We are essentially burning the airfoil as we fly it. And we are flying it, or trying to. DARPA's hypersonic test vehicle is the fastest maneuvering aircraft ever built. It's boosted to near-space atop a Minotaur IV rocket. Now the Minotaur IV has too much impulse, so we have to bleed it off by flying the rocket at an 89 degree angle of attack for portions of the trajectory. That's an unnatural act for a rocket. The third stage has a camera. We call it rocketcam. And it's pointed at the hypersonic glider. This is the actual rocketcam footage from flight one. Now to conceal the shape, we changed the aspect ratio a little bit. But this is what it looks like from the third stage of the rocket looking at the unmanned glider as it heads into the atmosphere back towards Earth. We've flown twice. In the first flight, no aerodynamic control of the vehicle. But we collected more hypersonic flight data than in 30 years of ground-based testing combined. And in the second flight, three minutes of fully-controlled, aerodynamic flight at Mach 20. We must fly again, because amazing, never-been-done-before things require that you fly. You can't learn to fly at Mach 20 unless you fly. And while there's no substitute for speed, maneuverability is a very close second. If a Mach 20 glider takes 11 minutes and 20 seconds to get from New York to Long Beach, a hummingbird would take, well, days. You see, hummingbirds are not hypersonic, but they are maneuverable. In fact, the hummingbird is the only bird that can fly backwards. It can fly up, down, forwards, backwards, even upside-down. And so if we wanted to fly in this room or places where humans can't go, we'd need an aircraft small enough and maneuverable enough to do so. This is a hummingbird drone. It can fly in all directions, even backwards. It can hover and rotate. This prototype aircraft is equipped with a video camera. It weighs less than one AA battery. It does not eat nectar. In 2008, it flew for a whopping 20 seconds, a year later, two minutes, then six, eventually 11. Many prototypes crashed -- many. But there's no way to learn to fly like a hummingbird unless you fly. (Applause) It's beautiful, isn't it. Wow. It's great. Matt is the first ever hummingbird pilot. (Applause) Failure is part of creating new and amazing things. We cannot both fear failure and make amazing new things -- like a robot with the stability of a dog on rough terrain, or maybe even ice; a robot that can run like a cheetah, or climb stairs like a human with the occasional clumsiness of a human. Or perhaps, Spider Man will one day be Gecko Man. A gecko can support its entire body weight with one toe. One square millimeter of a gecko's footpad has 14,000 hair-like structures called setae. They are used to help it grip to surfaces using intermolecular forces. Today we can manufacture structures that mimic the hairs of a gecko's foot. The result, a four-by-four-inch artificial nano-gecko adhesive. can support a static load of 660 pounds. That's enough to stick six 42-inch plasma TV's to your wall, no nails. So much for Velcro, right? And it's not just passive structures, it's entire machines. This is a spider mite. It's one millimeter long, but it looks like Godzilla next to these micromachines. In the world of Godzilla spider mites, we can make millions of mirrors, each one-fifth the diameter of a human hair, moving at hundreds of thousands of times per second to make large screen displays, so that we can watch movies like "Godzilla" in high-def. And if we can build machines at that scale, what about Eiffel Tower-like trusses at the microscale? Today we are making metals that are lighter than Styrofoam, so light they can sit atop a dandelion puff and be blown away with a wisp of air -- so light that you can make a car that two people can lift, but so strong that it has the crash-worthiness of an SUV. From the smallest wisp of air to the powerful forces of nature's storms. There are 44 lightning strikes per second around the globe. Each lightning bolt heats the air to 44,000 degrees Fahrenheit -- hotter than the surface of the Sun. What if we could use these electromagnetic pulses as beacons, beacons in a moving network of powerful transmitters? Experiments suggest that lightning could be the next GPS. Electrical pulses form the thoughts in our brains. Using a grid the size of your thumb, with 32 electrodes on the surface of his brain, Tim uses his thoughts to control an advanced prosthetic arm. And his thoughts made him reach for Katie. This is the first time a human has controlled a robot with thought alone. And it is the first time that Tim has held Katie's hand in seven years. That moment mattered to Tim and Katie, and this green goo may someday matter to you. This green goo is perhaps the vaccine that could save your life. It was made in tobacco plants. Tobacco plants can make millions of doses of vaccine in weeks instead of months, and it might just be the first healthy use of tobacco ever. And if it seems far-fetched that tobacco plants could make people healthy, what about gamers that could solve problems that experts can't solve? Last September, the gamers of Foldit solved the three-dimensional structure of the retroviral protease that contributes to AIDS in rhesus monkeys. Now understanding this structure is very important for developing treatments. For 15 years, it was unsolved in the scientific community. The gamers of Foldit solved it in 15 days. Now they were able to do so by working together. They were able to work together because they're connected by the Internet. And others, also connected to the Internet, used it as an instrument of democracy. And together they changed the fate of their nation. The Internet is home to two billion people, or 30 percent of the world's population. It allows us to contribute and to be heard as individuals. It allows us to amplify our voices and our power as a group. But it too had humble beginnings. In 1969, the internet was but a dream, a few sketches on a piece of paper. And then on October 29th, the first packet-switched message was sent from UCLA to SRI. The first two letters of the word "Login," that's all that made it through -- an L and an O -- and then a buffer overflow crashed the system. (Laughter) Two letters, an L and an O, now a worldwide force. So who are these scientists and engineers at a magical place called DARPA? They are nerds, and they are heroes among us. They challenge existing perspectives at the edges of science and under the most demanding of conditions. They remind us that we can change the world if we defy the impossible and we refuse to fear failure. They remind us that we all have nerd power. Sometimes we just forget. You see, there was a time when you weren't afraid of failure, when you were a great artist or a great dancer and you could sing, you were good at math, you could build things, you were an astronaut, an adventurer, Jacques Cousteau, you could jump higher, run faster, kick harder than anyone. You believed in impossible things and you were fearless. You were totally and completely in touch with your inner superhero. Scientists and engineers can indeed change the world. So can you. You were born to. So go ahead, ask yourself, what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail? Now I want to say, this is not easy. It's hard to hold onto this feeling, really hard. I guess in some way, I sort of believe it's supposed to be hard. Doubt and fear always creep in. We think someone else, someone smarter than us, someone more capable, someone with more resources will solve that problem. But there isn't anyone else; there's just you. And if we're lucky, in that moment, someone steps into that doubt and fear, takes a hand and says, "Let me help you believe." Jason Harley did that for me. Jason started at DARPA on March 18th, 2010. He was with our transportation team. I saw Jason nearly every day, sometimes twice a day. And more so than most, he saw the highs and the lows, the celebrations and the disappointments. And on one particularly dark day for me, Jason sat down and he wrote an email. He was encouraging, but firm. And when he hit send, he probably didn't realize what a difference it would make. It mattered to me. In that moment and still today when I doubt, when I feel afraid, when I need to reconnect with that feeling, I remember his words, they were so powerful. Text: "There is only time enough to iron your cape and back to the skies for you." ♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ ♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ ♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ ♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ ♫ Superhero, superhero. ♫ Voice: Because that's what being a superhero is all about. RD: "There is only time enough to iron your cape and back to the skies for you." And remember, be nice to nerds. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Regina, thank you. I have a couple of questions. So that glider of yours, the Mach 20 glider, the first one, no control, it ended up in the Pacific I think somewhere. RD: Yeah, yeah. It did. (CA: What happened on that second flight?) Yeah, it also went into the Pacific. (CA: But this time under control?) We didn't fly it into the Pacific. No, there are multiple portions of the trajectory that are demanding in terms of really flying at that speed. And so in the second flight, we were able to get three minutes of fully aerodynamic control of the vehicle before we lost it. CA: I imagine you're not planning to open up to passenger service from New York to Long Beach anytime soon. RD: It might be a little warm. CA: What do you picture that glider being used for? RD: Well our responsibility is to develop the technology for this. How it's ultimately used will be determined by the military. Now the purpose of the vehicle though, the purpose of the technology, is to be able to reach anywhere in the world in less than 60 minutes. CA: And to carry a payload of more than a few pounds? (RD: Yeah.) Like what's the payload it could carry? RD: Well I don't think we ultimately know what it will be, right. We've got to fly it first. CA: But not necessarily just a camera? RD: No, not necessarily just a camera. CA: It's amazing. The hummingbird? RD: Yeah? CA: I'm curious, you started your beautiful sequence on flight with a plane kind of trying to flap its wings and failing horribly, and there haven't been that many planes built since that flap wings. Why did we think that this was the time to go biomimicry and copy a hummingbird? Isn't that a very expensive solution for a small maneuverable flying object? RD: So I mean, in part, we wondered if it was possible to do it. And you have to revisit these questions over time. The folks at AeroVironment tried 300 or more different wing designs, 12 different forms of the avionics. It took them 10 full prototypes to get something that would actually fly. But there's something really interesting about a flying machine that looks like something you'd recognize. So we often talk about stealth as a means for avoiding any type of sensing, but when things looks just natural, you also don't see them. CA: Ah. So it's not necessarily just the performance. It's partly the look. (RD: Sure.) It's actually, "Look at that cute hummingbird flying into my headquarters." (Laughter) Because I think, as well as the awe of looking at that, I'm sure some people here are thinking, technology catches up so quick, how long is it before some crazed geek with a little remote control flies one through a window of the White House? I mean, do you worry about the Pandora's box issue here? RD: Well look, our singular mission is the creation and prevention of strategic surprise. That's what we do. It would be inconceivable for us to do that work if we didn't make people excited and uncomfortable with the things that we do at the same time. It's just the nature of what we do. Now our responsibility is to push that edge. And we have to be, of course, mindful and responsible of how the technology is developed and ultimately used, but we can't simply close our eyes and pretend that it isn't advancing; it's advancing. CA: I mean, you're clearly a really inspiring leader. And you persuade people to go to these great feats of invention, but at a personal level, in a way I can't imagine doing your job. Do you wake up in the night sometimes, just asking questions about the possibly unintended consequences of your team's brilliance? RD: Sure. I think you couldn't be human if you didn't ask those questions. CA: How do you answer them? RD: Well I don't always have answers for them, right. I think that we learn as time goes on. My job is one of the most exhilarating jobs you could have. I work with some of the most amazing people. And with that exhilaration, comes a really deep sense of responsibility. And so you have on the one hand this tremendous lift of what's possible and this tremendous seriousness of what it means. CA: Regina, that was jaw-dropping, as they say. Thank you so much for coming to TED. (RD: Thank you.) (Applause)
This is actually a painting that hangs at the Countway Library at Harvard Medical School. And it shows the first time an organ was ever transplanted. In the front, you see, actually, Joe Murray getting the patient ready for the transplant, while in the back room you see Hartwell Harrison, the Chief of Urology at Harvard, actually harvesting the kidney. The kidney was indeed the first organ ever to be transplanted to the human. That was back in 1954, 55 years ago. Yet we're still dealing with a lot of the same challenges as many decades ago. Certainly many advances, many lives saved. But we have a major shortage of organs. In the last decade the number of patients waiting for a transplant has doubled. While, at the same time, the actual number of transplants has remained almost entirely flat. That really has to do with our aging population. We're just getting older. Medicine is doing a better job of keeping us alive. But as we age, our organs tend to fail more. So, that's a challenge, not just for organs but also for tissues. Trying to replace pancreas, trying to replace nerves that can help us with Parkinson's. These are major issues. This is actually a very stunning statistic. Every 30 seconds a patient dies from diseases that could be treated with tissue regeneration or replacement. So, what can we do about it? We've talked about stem cells tonight. That's a way to do it. But still ways to go to get stem cells into patients, in terms of actual therapies for organs. Wouldn't it be great if our bodies could regenerate? Wouldn't it be great if we could actually harness the power of our bodies, to actually heal ourselves? It's not really that foreign of a concept, actually; it happens on the Earth every day. This is actually a picture of a salamander. Salamanders have this amazing capacity to regenerate. You see here a little video. This is actually a limb injury in this salamander. And this is actually real photography, timed photography, showing how that limb regenerates in a period of days. You see the scar form. And that scar actually grows out a new limb. So, salamanders can do it. Why can't we? Why can't humans regenerate? Actually, we can regenerate. Your body has many organs and every single organ in your body has a cell population that's ready to take over at the time of injury. It happens every day. As you age, as you get older. Your bones regenerate every 10 years. Your skin regenerates every two weeks. So, your body is constantly regenerating. The challenge occurs when there is an injury. At the time of injury or disease, the body's first reaction is to seal itself off from the rest of the body. It basically wants to fight off infection, and seal itself, whether it's organs inside your body, or your skin, the first reaction is for scar tissue to move in, to seal itself off from the outside. So, how can we harness that power? One of the ways that we do that is actually by using smart biomaterials. How does this work? Well, on the left side here you see a urethra which was injured. This is the channel that connects the bladder to the outside of the body. And you see that it is injured. We basically found out that you can use these smart biomaterials that you can actually use as a bridge. If you build that bridge, and you close off from the outside environment, then you can create that bridge, and cells that regenerate in your body, can then cross that bridge, and take that path. That's exactly what you see here. It's actually a smart biomaterial that we used, to actually treat this patient. This was an injured urethra on the left side. We used that biomaterial in the middle. And then, six months later on the right-hand side you see this reengineered urethra. Turns out your body can regenerate, but only for small distances. The maximum efficient distance for regeneration is only about one centimeter. So, we can use these smart biomaterials but only for about one centimeter to bridge those gaps. So, we do regenerate, but for limited distances. What do we do now, if you have injury for larger organs? What do we do when we have injuries for structures which are much larger than one centimeter? Then we can start to use cells. The strategy here, is if a patient comes in to us with a diseased or injured organ, you can take a very small piece of tissue from that organ, less than half the size of a postage stamp, you can then tease that tissue apart, and look at its basic components, the patient's own cells, you take those cells out, grow and expand those cells outside the body in large quantities, and then we then use scaffold materials. To the naked eye they look like a piece of your blouse, or your shirt, but actually these materials are fairly complex and they are designed to degrade once inside the body. It disintegrates a few months later. It's acting only as a cell delivery vehicle. It's bringing the cells into the body. It's allowing the cells to regenerate new tissue, and once the tissue is regenerated the scaffold goes away. And that's what we did for this piece of muscle. This is actually showing a piece of muscle and how we go through the structures to actually engineer the muscle. We take the cells, we expand them, we place the cells on the scaffold, and we then place the scaffold back into the patient. But actually, before placing the scaffold into the patient, we actually exercise it. We want to make sure that we condition this muscle, so that it knows what to do once we put it into the patient. That's what you're seeing here. You're seeing this muscle bio-reactor actually exercising the muscle back and forth. Okay. These are flat structures that we see here, the muscle. What about other structures? This is actually an engineered blood vessel. Very similar to what we just did, but a little bit more complex. Here we take a scaffold, and we basically -- scaffold can be like a piece of paper here. And we can then tubularize this scaffold. And what we do is we, to make a blood vessel, same strategy. A blood vessel is made up of two different cell types. We take muscle cells, we paste, or coat the outside with these muscle cells, very much like baking a layer cake, if you will. You place the muscle cells on the outside. You place the vascular blood vessel lining cells on the inside. You now have your fully seeded scaffold. You're going to place this in an oven-like device. It has the same conditions as a human body, 37 degrees centigrade, 95 percent oxygen. You then exercise it, as what you saw on that tape. And on the right you actually see a carotid artery that was engineered. This is actually the artery that goes from your neck to your brain. And this is an X-ray showing you the patent, functional blood vessel. More complex structures such as blood vessels, urethras, which I showed you, they're definitely more complex because you're introducing two different cell types. But they are really acting mostly as conduits. You're allowing fluid or air to go through at steady states. They are not nearly as complex as hollow organs. Hollow organs have a much higher degree of complexity, because you're asking these organs to act on demand. So, the bladder is one such organ. Same strategy, we take a very small piece of the bladder, less than half the size of a postage stamp. We then tease the tissue apart into its two individual cell components, muscle, and these bladder specialized cells. We grow the cells outside the body in large quantities. It takes about four weeks to grow these cells from the organ. We then take a scaffold that we shape like a bladder. We coat the inside with these bladder lining cells. We coat the outside with these muscle cells. We place it back into this oven-like device. From the time you take that piece of tissue, six to eight weeks later you can put the organ right back into the patient. This actually shows the scaffold. The material is actually being coated with the cells. When we did the first clinical trial for these patients we actually created the scaffold specifically for each patient. We brought patients in, six to eight weeks prior to their scheduled surgery, did X-rays, and we then composed a scaffold specifically for that patient's size pelvic cavity. For the second phase of the trials we just had different sizes, small, medium, large and extra-large. (Laughter) It's true. And I'm sure everyone here wanted an extra-large. Right? (Laughter) So, bladders are definitely a little bit more complex than the other structures. But there are other hollow organs that have added complexity to it. This is actually a heart valve, which we engineered. And the way you engineer this heart valve is the same strategy. We take the scaffold, we seed it with cells, and you can now see here, the valve leaflets opening and closing. We exercise these prior to implantation. Same strategy. And then the most complex are the solid organs. For solid organs, they're more complex because you're using a lot more cells per centimeter. This is actually a simple solid organ like the ear. It's now being seeded with cartilage. That's the oven-like device; once it's coated it gets placed there. And then a few weeks later we can take out the cartilage scaffold. This is actually digits that we're engineering. These are being layered, one layer at a time, first the bone, we fill in the gaps with cartilage. We then start adding the muscle on top. And you start layering these solid structures. Again, fairly more complex organs, but by far, the most complex solid organs are actually the vascularized, highly vascularized, a lot of blood vessel supply, organs such as the heart, the liver, the kidneys. This is actually an example -- several strategies to engineer solid organs. This is actually one of the strategies. We use a printer. And instead of using ink, we use -- you just saw an inkjet cartridge -- we just use cells. This is actually your typical desktop printer. It's actually printing this two chamber heart, one layer at a time. You see the heart coming out there. It takes about 40 minutes to print, and about four to six hours later you see the muscle cells contract. (Applause) This technology was developed by Tao Ju, who worked at our institute. And this is actually still, of course, experimental, not for use in patients. Another strategy that we have followed is actually to use decellularized organs. We actually take donor organs, organs that are discarded, and we then can use very mild detergents to take all the cell elements out of these organs. So, for example on the left panel, top panel, you see a liver. We actually take the donor liver, we use very mild detergents, and we, by using these mild detergents, we take all the cells out of the liver. Two weeks later, we basically can lift this organ up, it feels like a liver, we can hold it like a liver, it looks like a liver, but it has no cells. All we are left with is the skeleton, if you will, of the liver, all made up of collagen, a material that's in our bodies, that will not reject. We can use it from one patient to the next. We then take this vascular structure and we can prove that we retain the blood vessel supply. You can see, actually that's a fluoroscopy. We're actually injecting contrast into the organ. Now you can see it start. We're injecting the contrast into the organ into this decellularized liver. And you can see the vascular tree that remains intact. We then take the cells, the vascular cells, blood vessel cells, we perfuse the vascular tree with the patient's own cells. We perfuse the outside of the liver with the patient's own liver cells. And we can then create functional livers. And that's actually what you're seeing. This is still experimental. But we are able to actually reproduce the functionality of the liver structure, experimentally. For the kidney, as I talked to you about the first painting that you saw, the first slide I showed you, 90 percent of the patients on the transplant wait list are waiting for a kidney, 90 percent. So, another strategy we're following is actually to create wafers that we stack together, like an accordion, if you will. So, we stack these wafers together, using the kidney cells. And then you can see these miniature kidneys that we've engineered. They are actually making urine. Again, small structures, our challenge is how to make them larger, and that is something we're working on right now at the institute. One of the things that I wanted to summarize for you then is what is a strategy that we're going for in regenerative medicine. If at all possible, we really would like to use smart biomaterials that we can just take off the shelf and regenerate your organs. We are limited with distances right now, but our goal is actually to increase those distances over time. If we cannot use smart biomaterials, then we'd rather use your very own cells. Why? Because they will not reject. We can take cells from you, create the structure, put it right back into you, they will not reject. And if possible, we'd rather use the cells from your very specific organ. If you present with a diseased wind pipe we'd like to take cells from your windpipe. If you present with a diseased pancreas we'd like to take cells from that organ. Why? Because we'd rather take those cells which already know that those are the cell types you want. A windpipe cell already knows it's a windpipe cell. We don't need to teach it to become another cell type. So, we prefer organ-specific cells. And today we can obtain cells from most every organ in your body, except for several which we still need stem cells for, like heart, liver, nerve and pancreas. And for those we still need stem cells. If we cannot use stem cells from your body then we'd like to use donor stem cells. And we prefer cells that will not reject and will not form tumors. And we're working a lot with the stem cells that we published on two years ago, stem cells from the amniotic fluid, and the placenta, which have those properties. So, at this point, I do want to tell you that some of the major challenges we have. You know, I just showed you this presentation, everything looks so good, everything works. Actually no, these technologies really are not that easy. Some of the work you saw today was performed by over 700 researchers at our institute across a 20-year time span. So, these are very tough technologies. Once you get the formula right you can replicate it. But it takes a lot to get there. So, I always like to show this cartoon. This is how to stop a runaway stage. And there you see the stagecoach driver, and he goes, on the top panel, He goes A, B, C, D, E, F. He finally stops the runaway stage. And those are usually the basic scientists, The bottom is usually the surgeons. (Laughter) I'm a surgeon so that's not that funny. (Laughter) But actually method A is the correct approach. And what I mean by that is that anytime we've launched one of these technologies to the clinic, we've made absolutely sure that we do everything we can in the laboratory before we ever launch these technologies to patients. And when we launch these technologies to patients we want to make sure that we ask ourselves a very tough question. Are you ready to place this in your own loved one, your own child, your own family member, and then we proceed. Because our main goal, of course, is first, to do no harm. I'm going to show you now, a very short clip, It's a five second clip of a patient who received one of the engineered organs. We started implanting some of these structures over 14 years ago. So, we have patients now walking around with organs, engineered organs, for over 10 years, as well. I'm going to show a clip of one young lady. She had a spina bifida defect, a spinal cord abnormality. She did not have a normal bladder. This is a segment from CNN. We are just taking five seconds. This is a segment that Sanjay Gupta actually took care of. Video: Kaitlyn M: I'm happy. I was always afraid that I was going to have like, an accident or something. And now I can just go and go out with my friends, go do whatever I want. Anthony Atala: See, at the end of the day, the promise of regenerative medicine is a single promise. And that is really very simple, to make our patients better. Thank you for your attention. (Applause)
I know what you're thinking: "Why does that guy get to sit down?" That's because this is radio. (Music) I tell radio stories about design, and I report on all kinds of stories: buildings and toothbrushes and mascots and wayfinding and fonts. My mission is to get people to engage with the design that they care about so they begin to pay attention to all forms of design. When you decode the world with design intent in mind, the world becomes kind of magical. Instead of seeing the broken things, you see all the little bits of genius that anonymous designers have sweated over to make our lives better. And that's essentially the definition of design: making life better and providing joy. And few things give me greater joy than a well-designed flag. (Laughter) (Applause) Yeah! Happy 50th anniversary on your flag, Canada. It is beautiful, gold standard. Love it. I'm kind of obsessed with flags. Sometimes I bring up the topic of flags, and people are like, "I don't care about flags," and then we start talking about flags, and trust me, 100 percent of people care about flags. There's just something about them that works on our emotions. My family wrapped my Christmas presents as flags this year, including the blue gift bag that's dressed up as the flag of Scotland. I put this picture online, and sure enough, within the first few minutes, someone left a comment that said, "You can take that Scottish Saltire and shove it up your ass." (Laughter) Which -- see, people are passionate about flags, you know? That's the way it is. What I love about flags is that once you understand the design of flags, what makes a good flag, what makes a bad flag, you can understand the design of almost anything. So what I'm going to do here is, I cracked open an episode of my radio show, "99% Invisible," and I'm going to reconstruct it here on stage, so when I press a button over here -- Voice: S for Sound -- Roman Mars: It's going to make a sound, and so whenever you hear a sound or a voice or a piece of music, it's because I pressed a button. Voice: Sssssound. RM: All right, got it? Here we go. Three, two. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Narrator: The five basic principles of flag design. Roman Mars: According to the North American Vexillological Association. Vexillological. Ted Kaye: Vexillology is the study of flags. RM: It's that extra "lol" that makes it sound weird. Narrator: Number one, keep it simple. The flag should be so simple that a child can draw it from memory. RM: Before I moved to Chicago in 2005, I didn't even know cities had their own flags. TK: Most larger cities do have flags. RM: Well, I didn't know that. That's Ted Kaye, by the way. TK: Hello. RM: He's a flag expert. He's a totally awesome guy. TK: I'm Ted Kaye. I have edited a scholarly journal on flag studies, and I am currently involved with the Portland Flag Association and the North American Vexillological Association. RM: Ted literally wrote the book on flag design. Narrator: "Good Flag, Bad Flag." RM: It's more of a pamphlet, really. It's about 16 pages. TK: Yes, it's called "Good Flag, Bad Flag: How to Design a Great Flag." RM: And that first city flag I discovered in Chicago is a beaut: white field, two horizontal blue stripes, and four six-pointed red stars down the middle. Narrator: Number two: use meaningful symbolism. TK: The blue stripes represent the water, the river and the lake. Narrator: The flag's images, colors or pattern should relate to what it symbolizes. TK: The red stars represent significant events in Chicago's history. RM: Namely, the founding of Fort Dearborn on the future site of Chicago, the Great Chicago Fire, the World Columbian Exposition, which everyone remembers because of the White City, and the Century of Progress Exposition, which no one remembers at all. Narrator: Number three, use two to three basic colors. TK: The basic rule for colors is to use two to three colors from the standard color set: red, white, blue, green, yellow and black. RM: The design of the Chicago flag has complete buy-in with an entire cross-section of the city. It is everywhere; every municipal building flies the flag. Whet Moser: Like, there's probably at least one store on every block near where I work that sells some sort of Chicago flag paraphernalia. RM: That's Whet Moser from Chicago magazine. WM: Today, just for example, I went to get a haircut, and when I sat down in the barber's chair, there was a Chicago flag on the box that the barber kept all his tools in, and then in the mirror there was a Chicago flag on the wall behind me. When I left, a guy passed me who had a Chicago flag badge on his backpack. RM: It's adaptable and remixable. The six-pointed stars in particular show up in all kinds of places. WM: The coffee I bought the other day had a Chicago star on it. RM: It's a distinct symbol of Chicago pride. TK: When a police officer or a firefighter dies in Chicago, often it's not the flag of the United States on his casket. It can be the flag of the city of Chicago. That's how deeply the flag has gotten into the civic imagery of Chicago. RM: And it isn't just that people love Chicago and therefore love the flag. I also think that people love Chicago more because the flag is so cool. TK: A positive feedback loop there between great symbolism and civic pride. RM: Okay. So when I moved back to San Francisco in 2008, I researched its flag, because I had never seen it in the previous eight years I lived there. And I found it, I am sorry to say, sadly lacking. (Laughter) I know. It hurts me, too. (Laughter) TK: Well, let me start from the top. Narrator: Number one, keep it simple. TK: Keeping it simple. Narrator: The flag should be so simple that a child can draw it from memory. TK: It's a relatively complex flag. RM: Okay, here we go. Okay. The main component of the San Francisco flag is a phoenix representing the city rising from the ashes after the devastating fires of the 1850s. TK: A powerful symbol for San Francisco. RM: I still don't really dig the phoenix. Design-wise, it manages to both be too crude and have too many details at the same time, which if you were trying for that, you wouldn't be able to do it, and it just looks bad at a distance, but having deep meaning puts that element in the plus column. Behind the phoenix, the background is mostly white, and then it has a substantial gold border around it. TK: Which is a very attractive design element. RM: I think it's okay. But -- (Laughter) -- here come the big no-nos of flag design. Narrator: Number four, no lettering or seals. Never use writing of any kind. RM: Underneath the phoenix, there's a motto on a ribbon that translates to "Gold in peace, iron in war," plus -- and this is the big problem -- it says San Francisco across the bottom. TK: If you need to write the name of what you're representing on your flag, your symbolism has failed. (Laughter) (Applause) RM: The United States flag doesn't say "USA" across the front. In fact, country flags, they tend to behave. Like, hats off to South Africa and Turkey and Israel and Somalia and Japan and Gambia. There's a bunch of really great country flags, but they obey good design principles because the stakes are high. They're on the international stage. But city, state and regional flags are another story. (Laughter) There is a scourge of bad flags, and they must be stopped. (Laughter) (Applause) That is the truth and that is the dare. The first step is to recognize that we have a problem. A lot of people tend to think that good design is just a matter of taste, and quite honestly, sometimes it is, actually, but sometimes it isn't, all right? Here's the full list of NAVA flag design principles. Narrator: The five basic principles of flag design. Number one. TK: Keep it simple. Narrator: Number two. TK: Use meaningful symbolism. Narrator: Number three. TK: Use two to three basic colors. Narrator: Number four. TK: No lettering or seals. Narrator: Never use writing of any kind. TK: Because you can't read that at a distance. Narrator: Number five. TK: And be distinctive. RM: All the best flags tend to stick to these principles. And like I said before, most country flags are okay. But here's the thing: if you showed this list of principles to any designer of almost anything, they would say these principles -- simplicity, deep meaning, having few colors or being thoughtful about colors, uniqueness, don't have writing you can't read -- all those principles apply to them, too. But sadly, good design principles are rarely invoked in U.S. city flags. Our biggest problem seems to be that fourth one. We just can't stop ourselves from putting our names on our flags, or little municipal seals with tiny writing on them. Here's the thing about municipal seals: They were designed to be on pieces of paper where you can read them, not on flags 100 feet away flapping in the breeze. So here's a bunch of flags again. Vexillologists call these SOBs: seals on a bedsheet -- (Laughter) -- and if you can't tell what city they go to, yeah, that's exactly the problem, except for Anaheim, apparently. They fixed it. (Laughter) These flags are everywhere in the U.S. The European equivalent of the municipal seal is the city coat of arms, and this is where we can learn a lesson for how to do things right. So this is the city coat of arms of Amsterdam. Now, if this were a United States city, the flag would probably look like this. You know, yeah. (Laughter) But instead, the flag of Amsterdam looks like this. Rather than plopping the whole coat of arms on a solid background and writing "Amsterdam" below it, they just take the key elements of the escutcheon, the shield, and they turn it into the most badass city flag in the world. (Laughter) (Applause) And because it's so badass, those flags and crosses are found throughout Amsterdam, just like Chicago, they're used. Even though seal-on-a-bedsheet flags are particularly painful and offensive to me, nothing can quite prepare you for one of the biggest train wrecks in vexillological history. Are you ready? It's the flag of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. (Laughter) I mean, it's distinctive, I'll give them that. Steve Kodis: It was adopted in 1955. RM: The city ran a contest and gathered a bunch of submissions with all kinds of designs. SK: And an alderman by the name of Fred Steffan cobbled together parts of the submissions to make what is now the Milwaukee flag. RM: It's a kitchen sink flag. There's a gigantic gear representing industry, there's a ship recognizing the port, a giant stalk of wheat paying homage to the brewing industry. It's a hot mess, and Steve Kodis, a graphic designer from Milwaukee, wants to change it. SK: It's really awful. It's a misstep on the city's behalf, to say the least. RM: But what puts the Milwaukee flag over the top, almost to the point of self-parody, is on it is a picture of the Civil War battle flag of the Milwaukee regiment. SK: So that's the final element in it that just makes it that much more ridiculous, that there is a flag design within the Milwaukee flag. RM: On the flag. Yeah. Yeah. (Laughter) Yeah. (Music) Now, Milwaukee is a fantastic city. I've been there. I love it. The most depressing part of this flag, though, is that there have been two major redesign contests. The last one was held in 2001. One hundred and five entries were received. TK: But in the end, the members of the Milwaukee Arts Board decided that none of the new entries were worthy of flying over the city. RM: They couldn't agree to change that thing! (Laughter) That's discouraging enough to make you think that good design and democracy just simply do not go together. But Steve Kotas is going to try one more time to redesign the Milwaukee flag. SK: I believe Milwaukee is a great city. Every great city deserves a great flag. RM: Steve isn't ready to reveal his design yet. One of the things about proposing one of these things is you have to get people on board, and then you reveal your design. But here's the trick: If you want to design a great flag, a kickass flag like Chicago's or D.C.'s, which also has a great flag, start by drawing a one-by-one-and-a-half- inch rectangle on a piece of paper. Your design has to fit within that tiny rectangle. Here's why. TK: A three-by-five-foot flag on a pole 100 feet away looks about the same size as a one-by-one-and-a-half-inch rectangle seen about 15 inches from your eye. You'd be surprised by how compelling and simple the design can be when you hold yourself to that limitation. RM: Meanwhile, back in San Francisco. Is there anything we can do? TK: I like to say that in every bad flag there's a good flag trying to get out. (Laughter) The way to make San Francisco's flag a good flag is to take the motto off because you can't read that at a distance. Take the name off, and the border might even be made thicker, so it's more a part of the flag. And I would simply take the phoenix and make it a great big element in the middle of the flag. RM: But the current phoenix, that's got to go. TK: I would simplify or stylize the phoenix. Depict a big, wide-winged bird coming out of flames. Emphasize those flames. RM: So this San Francisco flag was designed by Frank Chimero based on Ted Kaye's suggestions. I don't know what he would do if we was completely unfettered and didn't follow those guidelines. Fans of my radio show and podcast, they've heard me complain about bad flags. They've sent me other suggested designs. This one's by Neil Mussett. Both are so much better. And I think if they were adopted, I would see them around the city. In my crusade to make flags of the world more beautiful, many listeners have taken it upon themselves to redesign their flags and look into the feasibility of getting them officially adopted. If you see your city flag and like it, fly it, even if it violates a design rule or two. I don't care. But if you don't see your city flag, maybe it doesn't exist, but maybe it does, and it just sucks, and I dare you to join the effort to try to change that. As we move more and more into cities, the city flag will become not just a symbol of that city as a place, but also it could become a symbol of how that city considers design itself, especially today, as the populace is becoming more design-aware. And I think design awareness is at an all-time high. A well-designed flag could be seen as an indicator of how a city considers all of its design systems: its public transit, its parks, its signage. It might seem frivolous, but it's not. TK: Often when city leaders say, "We have more important things to do than worry about a city flag," my response is, "If you had a great city flag, you would have a banner for people to rally under to face those more important things." RM: I've seen firsthand what a good city flag can do in the case of Chicago. The marriage of good design and civic pride is something that we need in all places. The best part about municipal flags is that we own them. They are an open-source, publicly owned design language of the community. When they are done well, they are remixable, adaptable, and they are powerful. We could control the branding and graphical imagery of our cities with a good flag, but instead, by having bad flags we don't use, we cede that territory to sports teams and chambers of commerce and tourism boards. Sports teams can leave and break our hearts. And besides, some of us don't really care about sports. And tourism campaigns can just be cheesy. But a great city flag is something that represents a city to its people and its people to the world at large. And when that flag is a beautiful thing, that connection is a beautiful thing. So maybe all the city flags can be as inspiring as Hong Kong or Portland or Trondheim, and we can do away with all the bad flags like San Francisco, Milwaukee, Cedar Rapids, and finally, when we're all done, we can do something about Pocatello, Idaho, considered by the North American Vexillological Association as the worst city flag in North America. (Laughter) (Applause) Yeah. That thing has a trademark symbol on it, people. (Laughter) That hurts me just to look at. Thank you so much for listening. (Applause) ["Music by: Melodium (@melodiumbox) and Keegan DeWitt (@keegandewitt)"]
So here it is. You can check: I am short, I'm French, I have a pretty strong French accent, so that's going to be clear in a moment. Maybe a sobering thought and something you all know about. And I suspect many of you gave something to the people of Haiti this year. And there is something else I believe in the back of your mind you also know. That is, every day, 25,000 children die of entirely preventable causes. That's a Haiti earthquake every eight days. And I suspect many of you probably gave something towards that problem as well, but somehow it doesn't happen with the same intensity. So why is that? Well, here is a thought experiment for you. Imagine you have a few million dollars that you've raised -- maybe you're a politician in a developing country and you have a budget to spend. You want to spend it on the poor: How do you go about it? Do you believe the people who tell you that all we need to do is to spend money? That we know how to eradicate poverty, we just need to do more? Or do you believe the people who tell you that aid is not going to help, on the contrary it might hurt, it might exacerbate corruption, dependence, etc.? Or maybe you turn to the past. After all, we have spent billions of dollars on aid. Maybe you look at the past and see. Has it done any good? And, sadly, we don't know. And worst of all, we will never know. And the reason is that -- take Africa for example. Africans have already got a lot of aid. These are the blue bars. And the GDP in Africa is not making much progress. Okay, fine. How do you know what would have happened without the aid? Maybe it would have been much worse, or maybe it would have been better. We have no idea. We don't know what the counterfactual is. There's only one Africa. So what do you do? To give the aid, and hope and pray that something comes out of it? Or do you focus on your everyday life and let the earthquake every eight days continue to happen? The thing is, if we don't know whether we are doing any good, we are not any better than the Medieval doctors and their leeches. Sometimes the patient gets better, sometimes the patient dies. Is it the leeches? Is it something else? We don't know. So here are some other questions. They're smaller questions, but they are not that small. Immunization, that's the cheapest way to save a child's life. And the world has spent a lot of money on it: The GAVI and the Gates Foundations are each pledging a lot of money towards it, and developing countries themselves have been doing a lot of effort. And yet, every year at least 25 million children do not get the immunization they should get. So this is what you call a "last mile problem." The technology is there, the infrastructure is there, and yet it doesn't happen. So you have your million. How do you use your million to solve this last mile problem? And here's another question: Malaria. Malaria kills almost 900,000 people every year, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa, most of them under five. In fact, that is the leading cause of under-five mortality. We already know how to kill malaria, but some people come to you and say, "You have your millions. How about bed nets?" Bed nets are very cheap. For 10 dollars, you can manufacture and ship an insecticide treated bed net and you can teach someone to use them. And, not only do they protect the people who sleep under them, but they have these great contagion benefits. If half of a community sleeps under a net, the other half also benefits because the contagion of the disease spread. And yet, only a quarter of kids at risk sleep under a net. Societies should be willing to go out and subsidize the net, give them for free, or, for that matter, pay people to use them because of those contagion benefits. "Not so fast," say other people. "If you give the nets for free, people are not going to value them. They're not going to use them, or at least they're not going to use them as bed nets, maybe as fishing nets." So, what do you do? Do you give the nets for free to maximize coverage, or do you make people pay in order to make sure that they really value them? How do you know? And a third question: Education. Maybe that's the solution, maybe we should send kids to school. But how do you do that? Do you hire teachers? Do you build more schools? Do you provide school lunch? How do you know? So here is the thing. I cannot answer the big question, whether aid did any good or not. But these three questions, I can answer them. It's not the Middle Ages anymore, it's the 21st century. And in the 20th century, randomized, controlled trials have revolutionized medicine by allowing us to distinguish between drugs that work and drugs that don't work. And you can do the same randomized, controlled trial for social policy. You can put social innovation to the same rigorous, scientific tests that we use for drugs. And in this way, you can take the guesswork out of policy-making by knowing what works, what doesn't work and why. And I'll give you some examples with those three questions. So I start with immunization. Here's Udaipur District, Rajasthan. Beautiful. Well, when I started working there, about one percent of children were fully immunized. That's bad, but there are places like that. Now, it's not because the vaccines are not there -- they are there and they are free -- and it's not because parents do not care about their kids. The same child that is not immunized against measles, if they do get measles, parents will spend thousands of rupees to help them. So you get these empty village subcenters and crowded hospitals. So what is the problem? Well, part of the problem, surely, is people do not fully understand. After all, in this country as well, all sorts of myths and misconceptions go around immunization. So if that's the case, that's difficult, because persuasion is really difficult. But maybe there is another problem as well. It's going from intention to action. Imagine you are a mother in Udaipur District, Rajasthan. You have to walk a few kilometers to get your kids immunized. And maybe when you get there, what you find is this: The subcenter is closed. Ao you have to come back, and you are so busy and you have so many other things to do, you will always tend to postpone and postpone, and eventually it gets too late. Well, if that's the problem, then that's much easier. Because A, we can make it easy, and B, we can maybe give people a reason to act today, rather than wait till tomorrow. So these are simple ideas, but we didn't know. So let's try them. So what we did is we did a randomized, controlled trial in 134 villages in Udaipur Districts. So the blue dots are selected randomly. We made it easy -- I'll tell you how in a moment. In the red dots, we made it easy and gave people a reason to act now. The white dots are comparisons, nothing changed. So we make it easy by organizing this monthly camp where people can get their kids immunized. And then you make it easy and give a reason to act now by adding a kilo of lentils for each immunization. Now, a kilo of lentils is tiny. It's never going to convince anybody to do something that they don't want to do. On the other hand, if your problem is you tend to postpone, then it might give you a reason to act today rather than later. So what do we find? Well, beforehand, everything is the same. That's the beauty of randomization. Afterwards, the camp -- just having the camp -- increases immunization from six percent to 17 percent. That's full immunization. That's not bad, that's a good improvement. Add the lentils and you reach to 38 percent. So here you've got your answer. Make it easy and give a kilo of lentils, you multiply immunization rate by six. Now, you might say, "Well, but it's not sustainable. We cannot keep giving lentils to people." Well, it turns out it's wrong economics, because it is cheaper to give lentils than not to give them. Since you have to pay for the nurse anyway, the cost per immunization ends up being cheaper if you give incentives than if you don't. How about bed nets? Should you give them for free, or should you ask people to pay for them? So the answer hinges on the answer to three simple questions. One is: If people must pay for a bed net, are they going to purchase them? The second one is: If I give bed nets for free, are people going to use them? And the third one is: Do free bed nets discourage future purchase? The third one is important because if we think people get used to handouts, it might destroy markets to distribute free bed nets. Now this is a debate that has generated a lot of emotion and angry rhetoric. It's more ideological than practical, but it turns out it's an easy question. We can know the answer to this question. We can just run an experiment. And many experiments have been run, and they all have the same results, so I'm just going to talk to you about one. And this one that was in Kenya, they went around and distributed to people vouchers, discount vouchers. So people with their voucher could get the bed net in the local pharmacy. And some people get 100 percent discount, and some people get 20 percent discounts, and some people get 50 percent discount, etc. And now we can see what happens. So, how about the purchasing? Well, what you can see is that when people have to pay for their bed nets, the coverage rate really falls down a lot. So even with partial subsidy, three dollars is still not the full cost of a bed net, and now you only have 20 percent of the people with the bed nets, you lose the health immunity, that's not great. Second thing is, how about the use? Well, the good news is, people, if they have the bed nets, will use the bed nets regardless of how they got it. If they get it for free, they use it. If they have to pay for it, they use it. How about the long term? In the long term, people who got the free bed nets, one year later, were offered the option to purchase a bed net at two dollars. And people who got the free one were actually more likely to purchase the second one than people who didn't get a free one. So people do not get used to handouts; they get used to nets. Maybe we need to give them a little bit more credit. So, that's for bed nets. So you will think, "That's great. You know how to immunize kids, you know how to give bed nets." But what politicians need is a range of options. They need to know: Out of all the things I could do, what is the best way to achieve my goals? So suppose your goal is to get kids into school. There are so many things you could do. You could pay for uniforms, you could eliminate fees, you could build latrines, you could give girls sanitary pads, etc., etc. So what's the best? Well, at some level, we think all of these things should work. So, is that sufficient? If we think they should work intuitively, should we go for them? Well, in business, that's certainly not the way we would go about it. Consider for example transporting goods. Before the canals were invented in Britain before the Industrial Revolution, goods used to go on horse carts. And then canals were built, and with the same horseman and the same horse, you could carry ten times as much cargo. So should they have continued to carry the goods on the horse carts, on the ground, that they would eventually get there? Well, if that had been the case, there would have been no Industrial Revolution. So why shouldn't we do the same with social policy? In technology, we spend so much time experimenting, fine-tuning, getting the absolute cheapest way to do something, so why aren't we doing that with social policy? Well, with experiments, what you can do is answer a simple question. Suppose you have 100 dollars to spend on various interventions. How many extra years of education do you get for your hundred dollars? Now I'm going to show you what we get with various education interventions. So the first ones are if you want the usual suspects, hire teachers, school meals, school uniforms, scholarships. And that's not bad. For your hundred dollars, you get between one and three extra years of education. Things that don't work so well is bribing parents, just because so many kids are already going to school that you end up spending a lot of money. And here are the most surprising results. Tell people the benefits of education, that's very cheap to do. So for every hundred dollars you spend doing that, you get 40 extra years of education. And, in places where there are worms, intestinal worms, cure the kids of their worms. And for every hundred dollars, you get almost 30 extra years of education. So this is not your intuition, this is not what people would have gone for, and yet, these are the programs that work. We need that kind of information, we need more of it, and then we need to guide policy. So now, I started from the big problem, and I couldn't answer it. And I cut it into smaller questions, and I have the answer to these smaller questions. And they are good, scientific, robust answers. So let's go back to Haiti for a moment. In Haiti, about 200,000 people died -- actually, a bit more by the latest estimate. And the response of the world was great: Two billion dollars got pledged just last month, so that's about 10,000 dollars per death. That doesn't sound like that much when you think about it. But if we were willing to spend 10,000 dollars for every child under five who dies, that would be 90 billion per year just for that problem. And yet it doesn't happen. So, why is that? Well, I think what part of the problem is that, in Haiti, although the problem is huge, somehow we understand it, it's localized. You give your money to Doctors Without Borders, you give your money to Partners In Health, and they'll send in the doctors, and they'll send in the lumber, and they'll helicopter things out and in. And the problem of poverty is not like that. So, first, it's mostly invisible; second, it's huge; and third, we don't know whether we are doing the right thing. There's no silver bullet. You cannot helicopter people out of poverty. And that's very frustrating. But look what we just did today. I gave you three simple answers to three questions: Give lentils to immunize people, provide free bed nets, deworm children. With immunization or bed nets, you can save a life for 300 dollars per life saved. With deworming, you can get an extra year of education for three dollars. So we cannot eradicate poverty just yet, but we can get started. And maybe we can get started small with things that we know are effective. Here's an example of how this can be powerful. Deworming. Worms have a little bit of a problem grabbing the headlines. They are not beautiful and don't kill anybody. And yet, when the young global leader in Davos showed the numbers I gave you, they started Deworm the World. And thanks to Deworm the World, and the effort of many country governments and foundations, 20 million school-aged children got dewormed in 2009. So this evidence is powerful. It can prompt action. So we should get started now. It's not going to be easy. It's a very slow process. You have to keep experimenting, and sometimes ideology has to be trumped by practicality. And sometimes what works somewhere doesn't work elsewhere. So it's a slow process, but there is no other way. These economics I'm proposing, it's like 20th century medicine. It's a slow, deliberative process of discovery. There is no miracle cure, but modern medicine is saving millions of lives every year, and we can do the same thing. And now, maybe, we can go back to the bigger question that I started with at the beginning. I cannot tell you whether the aid we have spent in the past has made a difference, but can we come back here in 30 years and say, "What we have done, it really prompted a change for the better." I believe we can and I hope we will. Thank you. (Applause)
So sometimes I get invited to give weird talks. I got invited to speak to the people who dress up in big stuffed animal costumes to perform at sporting events. Unfortunately I couldn't go. But it got me thinking about the fact that these guys, at least most of them, know what it is that they do for a living. What they do is they dress up as stuffed animals and entertain people at sporting events. Shortly after that I got invited to speak at the convention of the people who make balloon animals. And again, I couldn't go. But it's a fascinating group. They make balloon animals. There is a big schism between the ones who make gospel animals and porn animals, but -- (Laughter) they do a lot of really cool stuff with balloons. Sometimes they get in trouble, but not often. And the other thing about these guys is, they also know what they do for a living. They make balloon animals. But what do we do for a living? What exactly to the people watching this do every day? And I want to argue that what we do is we try to change everything. That we try to find a piece of the status quo -- something that bothers us, something that needs to be improved, something that is itching to be changed -- and we change it. We try to make big, permanent, important change. But we don't think about it that way. And we haven't spent a lot of time talking about what that process is like. And I've been studying it for a couple years. And I want to share a couple stories with you today. First, about a guy named Nathan Winograd. Nathan was the number two person at the San Francisco SPCA. And what you may not know about the history of the SPCA is, it was founded to kill dogs and cats. Cities gave them a charter to get rid of the stray animals on the street and destroy them. In a typical year four million dogs and cats were killed, most of them within 24 hours of being scooped off of the street. Nathan and his boss saw this, and they could not tolerate it. So they set out to make San Francisco a no-kill city: create an entire city where every dog and cat, unless it was ill or dangerous, would be adopted, not killed. And everyone said it was impossible. Nathan and his boss went to the city council to get a change in the ordinance. And people from SPCAs and humane shelters around the country flew to San Francisco to testify against them -- to say it would hurt the movement and it was inhumane. They persisted. And Nathan went directly to the community. He connected with people who cared about this: nonprofessionals, people with passion. And within just a couple years, San Francisco became the first no-kill city, running no deficit, completely supported by the community. Nathan left and went to Tompkins County, New York -- a place as different from San Francisco as you can be and still be in the United States. And he did it again. He went from being a glorified dogcatcher to completely transforming the community. And then he went to North Carolina and did it again. And he went to Reno and he did it again. And when I think about what Nathan did, and when I think about what people here do, I think about ideas. And I think about the idea that creating an idea, spreading an idea has a lot behind it. I don't know if you've ever been to a Jewish wedding, but what they do is, they take a light bulb and they smash it. Now there is a bunch of reasons for that, and stories about it. But one reason is because it indicates a change, from before to after. It is a moment in time. And I want to argue that we are living through and are right at the key moment of a change in the way ideas are created and spread and implemented. We started with the factory idea: that you could change the whole world if you had an efficient factory that could churn out change. We then went to the TV idea, that said if you had a big enough mouthpiece, if you could get on TV enough times, if you could buy enough ads, you could win. And now we're in this new model of leadership, where the way we make change is not by using money or power to lever a system, but by leading. So let me tell you about the three cycles. The first one is the factory cycle. Henry Ford comes up with a really cool idea. It enables him to hire men who used to get paid 50 cents a day and pay them five dollars a day. Because he's got an efficient enough factory. Well with that sort of advantage you can churn out a lot of cars. You can make a lot of change. You can get roads built. You can change the fabric of an entire country. That the essence of what you're doing is you need ever-cheaper labor, and ever-faster machines. And the problem we've run into is, we're running out of both. Ever-cheaper labor and ever-faster machines. (Laughter) So we shift gears for a minute, and say, "I know: television; advertising. Push push. Take a good idea and push it on the world. I have a better mousetrap. And if I can just get enough money to tell enough people, I'll sell enough." And you can build an entire industry on that. If necessary you can put babies in your ads. If necessary you can use babies to sell other stuff. And if babies don't work, you can use doctors. But be careful. Because you don't want to get an unfortunate juxtaposition, where you're talking about one thing instead of the other. (Laughter) This model requires you to act like the king, like the person in the front of the room throwing things to the peons in the back. That you are in charge, and you're going to tell people what to do next. The quick little diagram of it is, you're up here, and you are pushing it out to the world. This method -- mass marketing -- requires average ideas, because you're going to the masses, and plenty of ads. What we've done as spammers is tried to hypnotize everyone into buying our idea, hypnotize everyone into donating to our cause, hypnotize everyone into voting for our candidate. And, unfortunately, it doesn't work so well anymore either. (Laughter) But there is good news around the corner -- really good news. I call it the idea of tribes. What tribes are, is a very simple concept that goes back 50,000 years. It's about leading and connecting people and ideas. And it's something that people have wanted forever. Lots of people are used to having a spiritual tribe, or a church tribe, having a work tribe, having a community tribe. But now, thanks to the internet, thanks to the explosion of mass media, thanks to a lot of other things that are bubbling through our society around the world, tribes are everywhere. The Internet was supposed to homogenize everyone by connecting us all. Instead what it's allowed is silos of interest. So you've got the red-hat ladies over here. You've got the red-hat triathletes over there. You've got the organized armies over here. You've got the disorganized rebels over here. You've got people in white hats making food. And people in white hats sailing boats. The point is that you can find Ukrainian folk dancers and connect with them, because you want to be connected. That people on the fringes can find each other, connect and go somewhere. Every town that has a volunteer fire department understands this way of thinking. (Laughter) Now it turns out this is a legitimate non-photoshopped photo. People I know who are firemen told me that this is not uncommon. And that what firemen do to train sometimes is they take a house that is going to be torn down, and they burn it down instead, and practice putting it out. But they always stop and take a picture. (Laughter) You know the pirate tribe is a fascinating one. They've got their own flag. They've got the eye patches. You can tell when you're running into someone in a tribe. And it turns out that it's tribes -- not money, not factories -- that can change our world, that can change politics, that can align large numbers of people. Not because you force them to do something against their will, but because they wanted to connect. That what we do for a living now, all of us, I think, is find something worth changing, and then assemble tribes that assemble tribes that spread the idea and spread the idea. And it becomes something far bigger than ourselves, it becomes a movement. So when Al Gore set out to change the world again, he didn't do it by himself. And he didn't do it by buying a lot of ads. He did it by creating a movement. Thousands of people around the country who could give his presentation for him, because he can't be in 100 or 200 or 500 cities in each night. You don't need everyone. What Kevin Kelley has taught us is you just need, I don't know, a thousand true fans -- a thousand people who care enough that they will get you the next round and the next round and the next round. And that means that the idea you create, the product you create, the movement you create isn't for everyone, it's not a mass thing. That's not what this is about. What it's about instead is finding the true believers. It's easy to look at what I've said so far, and say, "Wait a minute, I don't have what it takes to be that kind of leader." So here are two leaders. They don't have a lot in common. They're about the same age. But that's about it. What they did, though, is each in their own way, created a different way of navigating your way through technology. So some people will go out and get people to be on one team. And some people will get people to be on the other team. It also informs the decisions you make when you make products or services. You know, this is one of my favorite devices. But what a shame that it's not organized to help authors create movements. What would happen if, when you're using your Kindle, you could see the comments and quotes and notes from all the other people reading the same book as you in that moment. Or from your book group. Or from your friends, or from the circle you want. What would happen if authors, or people with ideas could use version two, which comes out on Monday, and use it to organize people who want to talk about something. Now there is a million things I could share with you about the mechanics here. But let me just try a couple. The Beatles did not invent teenagers. They merely decided to lead them. That most movements, most leadership that we're doing is about finding a group that's disconnected but already has a yearning -- not persuading people to want something they don't have yet. When Diane Hatz worked on "The Meatrix," her video that spread all across the internet about the way farm animals are treated, she didn't invent the idea of being a vegan. She didn't invent the idea of caring about this issue. But she helped organize people, and helped turn it into a movement. Hugo Chavez did not invent the disaffected middle and lower class of Venezuela. He merely led them. Bob Marley did not invent Rastafarians. He just stepped up and said, "Follow me." Derek Sivers invented CD Baby, which allowed independent musicians to have a place to sell their music without selling out to the man -- to have place to take the mission they already wanted to go to, and connect with each other. What all these people have in common is that they are heretics. That heretics look at the status quo and say, "This will not stand. I can't abide this status quo. I am willing to stand up and be counted and move things forward. I see what the status quo is; I don't like it." That instead of looking at all the little rules and following each one of them, that instead of being what I call a sheepwalker -- somebody who's half asleep, following instructions, keeping their head down, fitting in -- every once in a while someone stands up and says, "Not me." Someone stands up and says, "This one is important. We need to organize around it." And not everyone will. But you don't need everyone. You just need a few people -- (Laughter) -- who will look at the rules, realize they make no sense, and realize how much they want to be connected. So Tony Hsieh does not run a shoe store. Zappos isn't a shoe store. Zappos is the one, the only, the best-there-ever-was place for people who are into shoes to find each other, to talk about their passion, to connect with people who care more about customer service than making a nickel tomorrow. It can be something as prosaic as shoes, and something as complicated as overthrowing a government. It's exactly the same behavior though. What it requires, as Geraldine Carter has discovered, is to be able to say, "I can't do this by myself. But if I can get other people to join my Climb and Ride, then together we can get something that we all want. We're just waiting for someone to lead us." Michelle Kaufman has pioneered new ways of thinking about environmental architecture. She doesn't do it by quietly building one house at a time. She does it by telling a story to people who want to hear it. By connecting a tribe of people who are desperate to be connected to each other. By leading a movement and making change. And around and around and around it goes. So three questions I'd offer you. The first one is, who exactly are you upsetting? Because if you're not upsetting anyone, you're not changing the status quo. The second question is, who are you connecting? Because for a lot of people, that's what they're in it for: the connections that are being made, one to the other. And the third one is, who are you leading? Because focusing on that part of it -- not the mechanics of what you're building, but the who, and the leading part -- is where change comes. So Blake, at Tom's Shoes, had a very simple idea. "What would happen if every time someone bought a pair of these shoes I gave exactly the same pair to someone who doesn't even own a pair of shoes?" This is not the story of how you get shelf space at Neiman Marcus. It's a story of a product that tells a story. And as you walk around with this remarkable pair of shoes and someone says, "What are those?" You get to tell the story on Blake's behalf, on behalf of the people who got the shoes. And suddenly it's not one pair of shoes or 100 pairs of shoes. It's tens of thousands of pairs of shoes. My friend Red Maxwell has spent the last 10 years fighting against juvenile diabetes. Not fighting the organization that's fighting it -- fighting with them, leading them, connecting them, challenging the status quo because it's important to him. And the people he surrounds himself with need the connection. They need the leadership. It makes a difference. You don't need permission from people to lead them. But in case you do, here it is: they're waiting, we're waiting for you to show us where to go next. So here is what leaders have in common. The first thing is, they challenge the status quo. They challenge what's currently there. The second thing is, they build a culture. A secret language, a seven-second handshake, a way of knowing that you're in or out. They have curiosity. Curiosity about people in the tribe, curiosity about outsiders. They're asking questions. They connect people to one another. Do you know what people want more than anything? They want to be missed. They want to be missed the day they don't show up. They want to be missed when they're gone. And tribe leaders can do that. It's fascinating, because all tribe leaders have charisma, but you don't need charisma to become a leader. Being a leader gives you charisma. If you look and study the leaders who have succeeded, that's where charisma comes from -- from the leading. Finally, they commit. They commit to the cause. They commit to the tribe. They commit to the people who are there. So I'd like you to do something for me. And I hope you'll think about it before you reject it out-of-hand. What I want you to do, it only takes 24 hours, is: create a movement. Something that matters. Start. Do it. We need it. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. (Applause)
We've got a real problem with math education right now. Basically, no one's very happy. Those learning it think it's disconnected, uninteresting and hard. Those trying to employ them think they don't know enough. Governments realize that it's a big deal for our economies, but don't know how to fix it. And teachers are also frustrated. Yet math is more important to the world than at any point in human history. So at one end we've got falling interest in education in math, and at the other end we've got a more mathematical world, a more quantitative world than we ever have had. So what's the problem, why has this chasm opened up, and what can we do to fix it? Well actually, I think the answer is staring us right in the face: Use computers. I believe that correctly using computers is the silver bullet for making math education work. So to explain that, let me first talk a bit about what math looks like in the real world and what it looks like in education. See, in the real world math isn't necessarily done by mathematicians. It's done by geologists, engineers, biologists, all sorts of different people -- modeling and simulation. It's actually very popular. But in education it looks very different -- dumbed-down problems, lots of calculating, mostly by hand. Lots of things that seem simple and not difficult like in the real world, except if you're learning it. And another thing about math: math sometimes looks like math -- like in this example here -- and sometimes it doesn't -- like "Am I drunk?" And then you get an answer that's quantitative in the modern world. You wouldn't have expected that a few years back. But now you can find out all about -- unfortunately, my weight is a little higher than that, but -- all about what happens. So let's zoom out a bit and ask, why are we teaching people math? What's the point of teaching people math? And in particular, why are we teaching them math in general? Why is it such an important part of education as a sort of compulsory subject? Well, I think there are about three reasons: technical jobs so critical to the development of our economies, what I call "everyday living" -- to function in the world today, you've got to be pretty quantitative, much more so than a few years ago: figure out your mortgages, being skeptical of government statistics, those kinds of things -- and thirdly, what I would call something like logical mind training, logical thinking. Over the years we've put so much in society into being able to process and think logically. It's part of human society. It's very important to learn that math is a great way to do that. So let's ask another question. What is math? What do we mean when we say we're doing math, or educating people to do math? Well, I think it's about four steps, roughly speaking, starting with posing the right question. What is it that we want to ask? What is it we're trying to find out here? And this is the thing most screwed up in the outside world, beyond virtually any other part of doing math. People ask the wrong question, and surprisingly enough, they get the wrong answer, for that reason, if not for others. So the next thing is take that problem and turn it from a real world problem into a math problem. That's stage two. Once you've done that, then there's the computation step. Turn it from that into some answer in a mathematical form. And of course, math is very powerful at doing that. And then finally, turn it back to the real world. Did it answer the question? And also verify it -- crucial step. Now here's the crazy thing right now. In math education, we're spending about perhaps 80 percent of the time teaching people to do step three by hand. Yet, that's the one step computers can do better than any human after years of practice. Instead, we ought to be using computers to do step three and using the students to spend much more effort on learning how to do steps one, two and four -- conceptualizing problems, applying them, getting the teacher to run them through how to do that. See, crucial point here: math is not equal to calculating. Math is a much broader subject than calculating. Now it's understandable that this has all got intertwined over hundreds of years. There was only one way to do calculating and that was by hand. But in the last few decades that has totally changed. We've had the biggest transformation of any ancient subject that I could ever imagine with computers. Calculating was typically the limiting step, and now often it isn't. So I think in terms of the fact that math has been liberated from calculating. But that math liberation didn't get into education yet. See, I think of calculating, in a sense, as the machinery of math. It's the chore. It's the thing you'd like to avoid if you can, like to get a machine to do. It's a means to an end, not an end in itself, and automation allows us to have that machinery. Computers allow us to do that -- and this is not a small problem by any means. I estimated that, just today, across the world, we spent about 106 average world lifetimes teaching people how to calculate by hand. That's an amazing amount of human endeavor. So we better be damn sure -- and by the way, they didn't even have fun doing it, most of them -- so we better be damn sure that we know why we're doing that and it has a real purpose. I think we should be assuming computers for doing the calculating and only doing hand calculations where it really makes sense to teach people that. And I think there are some cases. For example: mental arithmetic. I still do a lot of that, mainly for estimating. People say, "Is such and such true?" And I'll say, "Hmm, not sure." I'll think about it roughly. It's still quicker to do that and more practical. So I think practicality is one case where it's worth teaching people by hand. And then there are certain conceptual things that can also benefit from hand calculating, but I think they're relatively small in number. One thing I often ask about is ancient Greek and how this relates. See, the thing we're doing right now is we're forcing people to learn mathematics. It's a major subject. I'm not for one minute suggesting that, if people are interested in hand calculating or in following their own interests in any subject however bizarre -- they should do that. That's absolutely the right thing, for people to follow their self-interest. I was somewhat interested in ancient Greek, but I don't think that we should force the entire population to learn a subject like ancient Greek. I don't think it's warranted. So I have this distinction between what we're making people do and the subject that's sort of mainstream and the subject that, in a sense, people might follow with their own interest and perhaps even be spiked into doing that. So what are the issues people bring up with this? Well one of them is, they say, you need to get the basics first. You shouldn't use the machine until you get the basics of the subject. So my usual question is, what do you mean by "basics?" Basics of what? Are the basics of driving a car learning how to service it, or design it for that matter? Are the basics of writing learning how to sharpen a quill? I don't think so. I think you need to separate the basics of what you're trying to do from how it gets done and the machinery of how it gets done and automation allows you to make that separation. A hundred years ago, it's certainly true that to drive a car you kind of needed to know a lot about the mechanics of the car and how the ignition timing worked and all sorts of things. But automation in cars allowed that to separate, so driving is now a quite separate subject, so to speak, from engineering of the car or learning how to service it. So automation allows this separation and also allows -- in the case of driving, and I believe also in the future case of maths -- a democratized way of doing that. It can be spread across a much larger number of people who can really work with that. So there's another thing that comes up with basics. People confuse, in my view, the order of the invention of the tools with the order in which they should use them for teaching. So just because paper was invented before computers, it doesn't necessarily mean you get more to the basics of the subject by using paper instead of a computer to teach mathematics. My daughter gave me a rather nice anecdote on this. She enjoys making what she calls "paper laptops." (Laughter) So I asked her one day, "You know, when I was your age, I didn't make these. Why do you think that was?" And after a second or two, carefully reflecting, she said, "No paper?" (Laughter) If you were born after computers and paper, it doesn't really matter which order you're taught with them in, you just want to have the best tool. So another one that comes up is "Computers dumb math down." That somehow, if you use a computer, it's all mindless button-pushing, but if you do it by hand, it's all intellectual. This one kind of annoys me, I must say. Do we really believe that the math that most people are doing in school practically today is more than applying procedures to problems they don't really understand, for reasons they don't get? I don't think so. And what's worse, what they're learning there isn't even practically useful anymore. Might have been 50 years ago, but it isn't anymore. When they're out of education, they do it on a computer. Just to be clear, I think computers can really help with this problem, actually make it more conceptual. Now, of course, like any great tool, they can be used completely mindlessly, like turning everything into a multimedia show, like the example I was shown of solving an equation by hand, where the computer was the teacher -- show the student how to manipulate and solve it by hand. This is just nuts. Why are we using computers to show a student how to solve a problem by hand that the computer should be doing anyway? All backwards. Let me show you that you can also make problems harder to calculate. See, normally in school, you do things like solve quadratic equations. But you see, when you're using a computer, you can just substitute. You can make it a quartic equation. Make it kind of harder, calculating-wise. Same principles applied -- calculations, harder. And problems in the real world look nutty and horrible like this. They've got hair all over them. They're not just simple, dumbed-down things that we see in school math. And think of the outside world. Do we really believe that engineering and biology and all of these other things that have so benefited from computers and maths have somehow conceptually gotten reduced by using computers? I don't think so -- quite the opposite. So the problem we've really got in math education is not that computers might dumb it down, but that we have dumbed-down problems right now. Well, another issue people bring up is somehow that hand calculating procedures teach understanding. So if you go through lots of examples, you can get the answer, you can understand how the basics of the system work better. I think there is one thing that I think very valid here, which is that I think understanding procedures and processes is important. But there's a fantastic way to do that in the modern world. It's called programming. Programming is how most procedures and processes get written down these days, and it's also a great way to engage students much more and to check they really understand. If you really want to check you understand math then write a program to do it. So programming is the way I think we should be doing that. So to be clear, what I really am suggesting here is we have a unique opportunity to make maths both more practical and more conceptual, simultaneously. I can't think of any other subject where that's recently been possible. It's usually some kind of choice between the vocational and the intellectual. But I think we can do both at the same time here. And we open up so many more possibilities. You can do so many more problems. What I really think we gain from this is students getting intuition and experience in far greater quantities than they've ever got before. And experience of harder problems -- being able to play with the math, interact with it, feel it. We want people who can feel the math instinctively. That's what computers allow us to do. Another thing it allows us to do is reorder the curriculum. Traditionally it's been by how difficult it is to calculate, but now we can reorder it by how difficult it is to understand the concepts, however hard the calculating. So calculus has traditionally been taught very late. Why is this? Well, it's damn hard doing the calculations, that's the problem. But actually many of the concepts are amenable to a much younger age group. This was an example I built for my daughter. And very, very simple. We were talking about what happens when you increase the number of sides of a polygon to a very large number. And of course, it turns into a circle. And by the way, she was also very insistent on being able to change the color, an important feature for this demonstration. You can see that this is a very early step into limits and differential calculus and what happens when you take things to an extreme -- and very small sides and a very large number of sides. Very simple example. That's a view of the world that we don't usually give people for many, many years after this. And yet, that's a really important practical view of the world. So one of the roadblocks we have in moving this agenda forward is exams. In the end, if we test everyone by hand in exams, it's kind of hard to get the curricula changed to a point where they can use computers during the semesters. And one of the reasons it's so important -- so it's very important to get computers in exams. And then we can ask questions, real questions, questions like, what's the best life insurance policy to get? -- real questions that people have in their everyday lives. And you see, this isn't some dumbed-down model here. This is an actual model where we can be asked to optimize what happens. How many years of protection do I need? What does that do to the payments and to the interest rates and so forth? Now I'm not for one minute suggesting it's the only kind of question that should be asked in exams, but I think it's a very important type that right now just gets completely ignored and is critical for people's real understanding. So I believe [there is] critical reform we have to do in computer-based math. We have got to make sure that we can move our economies forward, and also our societies, based on the idea that people can really feel mathematics. This isn't some optional extra. And the country that does this first will, in my view, leapfrog others in achieving a new economy even, an improved economy, an improved outlook. In fact, I even talk about us moving from what we often call now the "knowledge economy" to what we might call a "computational knowledge economy," where high-level math is integral to what everyone does in the way that knowledge currently is. We can engage so many more students with this, and they can have a better time doing it. And let's understand: this is not an incremental sort of change. We're trying to cross the chasm here between school math and the real-world math. And you know if you walk across a chasm, you end up making it worse than if you didn't start at all -- bigger disaster. No, what I'm suggesting is that we should leap off, we should increase our velocity so it's high, and we should leap off one side and go the other -- of course, having calculated our differential equation very carefully. (Laughter) So I want to see a completely renewed, changed math curriculum built from the ground up, based on computers being there, computers that are now ubiquitous almost. Calculating machines are everywhere and will be completely everywhere in a small number of years. Now I'm not even sure if we should brand the subject as math, but what I am sure is it's the mainstream subject of the future. Let's go for it, and while we're about it, let's have a bit of fun, for us, for the students and for TED here. Thanks. (Applause)
Probably a lot of you know the story of the two salesmen who went down to Africa in the 1900s. They were sent down to find if there was any opportunity for selling shoes, and they wrote telegrams back to Manchester. And one of them wrote, "Situation hopeless. Stop. They don't wear shoes." And the other one wrote, "Glorious opportunity. They don't have any shoes yet." (Laughter) Now, there's a similar situation in the classical music world, because there are some people who think that classical music is dying. And there are some of us who think you ain't seen nothing yet. And rather than go into statistics and trends, and tell you about all the orchestras that are closing, and the record companies that are folding, I thought we should do an experiment tonight -- an experiment. Actually, it's not really an experiment, because I know the outcome. But it's like an experiment. Now, before we -- (Laughter) -- before we start, I need to do two things. One is I want to remind you of what a seven-year-old child sounds like when he plays the piano. Maybe you have this child at home. He sounds something like this. (Piano) I see some of you recognize this child. Now, if he practices for a year and takes lessons, he's now eight and he sounds like this. (Piano) Then he practices for another year and takes lessons -- now he's nine. (Piano) Then he practices for another and takes lessons -- now he's 10. (Piano) At that point, they usually give up. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, if you'd waited, if you'd waited for one more year, you would have heard this. (Piano) Now, what happened was not maybe what you thought, which is, he suddenly became passionate, engaged, involved, got a new teacher, he hit puberty, or whatever it is. What actually happened was the impulses were reduced. You see, the first time, he was playing with an impulse on every note. (Piano) And the second, with an impulse every other note. (Piano) You can see it by looking at my head. (Laughter) The nine-year-old put an impulse on every four notes. (Piano) And the 10-year-old, on every eight notes. (Piano) And the 11-year-old, one impulse on the whole phrase. (Piano) I know -- I don't know how we got into this position. (Laughter) I didn't say, "I'm going to move my shoulder over, move my body." No, the music pushed me over, which is why I call it one-buttock playing. (Piano) It can be the other buttock. (Piano) You know, a gentleman was once watching a presentation I was doing, when I was working with a young pianist. He was the president of a corporation in Ohio. And I was working with this young pianist and I said, "The trouble with you is you're a two-buttock player. You should be a one-buttock player." And I moved his body like that, while he was playing. And suddenly, the music took off. It took flight. There was a gasp in the audience when they heard the difference. And then I got a letter from this gentleman. He said, "I was so moved. I went back and I transformed my entire company into a one-buttock company." (Laughter) Now, the other thing I wanted to do is to tell you about you. There are 1,600 people, I believe. My estimation is that probably 45 of you are absolutely passionate about classical music. You adore classical music. Your FM is always on that classical dial. And you have CDs in your car, and you go to the symphony. And your children are playing instruments. You can't imagine your life without classical music. That's the first group; it's quite a small group. Then there's another group, bigger group. These are the people who don't mind classical music. (Laughter) You know, you've come home from a long day, and you take a glass of wine, and you put your feet up. A little Vivaldi in the background doesn't do any harm. (Laughter) That's the second group. Now comes the third group. These are the people who never listen to classical music. It's just simply not part of your life. You might hear it like second-hand smoke at the airport, but -- (Laughter) -- and maybe a little bit of a march from "Aida" when you come into the hall. But otherwise, you never hear it. That's probably the largest group of all. And then there's a very small group. These are the people who think they're tone-deaf. Amazing number of people think they're tone-deaf. Actually, I hear a lot, "My husband is tone-deaf." (Laughter) Actually, you cannot be tone-deaf. Nobody is tone-deaf. If you were tone-deaf, you couldn't change the gears on your car, in a stick shift car. You couldn't tell the difference between somebody from Texas and somebody from Rome. And the telephone. The telephone. If your mother calls on the miserable telephone, she calls and says, "Hello," you not only know who it is, you know what mood she's in. You have a fantastic ear. Everybody has a fantastic ear. So nobody is tone-deaf. But I tell you what. It doesn't work for me to go on with this thing, with such a wide gulf between those who understand, love and [are] passionate about classical music, and those who have no relationship to it at all. The tone-deaf people, they're no longer here. But even between those three categories, it's too wide a gulf. So I'm not going to go on until every single person in this room, downstairs and in Aspen, and everybody else looking, will come to love and understand classical music. So that's what we're going to do. Now, you notice that there is not the slightest doubt in my mind that this is going to work if you look at my face, right? It's one of the characteristics of a leader that he not doubt for one moment the capacity of the people he's leading to realize whatever he's dreaming. Imagine if Martin Luther King had said, "I have a dream. Of course, I'm not sure they'll be up to it." (Laughter) All right. So I'm going to take a piece of Chopin. This is a beautiful prelude by Chopin. Some of you will know it. (Music) Do you know what I think probably happened in this room? When I started, you thought, "How beautiful that sounds." (Music) "I don't think we should go to the same place for our summer holidays next year." (Laughter) It's funny, isn't it? It's funny how those thoughts kind of waft into your head. And of course -- (Applause) -- and of course, if the piece is long and you've had a long day, you might actually drift off. Then your companion will dig you in the ribs and say, "Wake up! It's culture!" And then you feel even worse. But has it ever occurred to you that the reason you feel sleepy in classical music is not because of you, but because of us? Did anybody think while I was playing, "Why is he using so many impulses?" If I'd done this with my head you certainly would have thought it. (Music) And for the rest of your life, every time you hear classical music, you'll always be able to know if you hear those impulses. So let's see what's really going on here. We have a B. This is a B. The next note is a C. And the job of the C is to make the B sad. And it does, doesn't it? (Laughter) Composers know that. If they want sad music, they just play those two notes. (Music) But basically, it's just a B, with four sads. (Laughter) Now, it goes down to A. Now to G. And then to F. So we have B, A, G, F. And if we have B, A, G, F, what do we expect next? Oh, that might have been a fluke. Let's try it again. Ooh, the TED choir. (Laughter) And you notice nobody is tone-deaf, right? Nobody is. You know, every village in Bangladesh and every hamlet in China -- everybody knows: da, da, da, da -- da. Everybody knows, who's expecting that E. Now, Chopin didn't want to reach the E there, because what will have happened? It will be over, like Hamlet. Do you remember Hamlet? Act one, scene three, he finds out that his uncle killed his father. You remember, he keeps on going up to his uncle and almost killing him. And then he backs away, and he goes up to him again and almost kills him. And the critics, all of whom are sitting in the back row there, they have to have an opinion, so they say, "Hamlet is a procrastinator." (Laughter) Or they say, "Hamlet has an Oedipus complex." No, otherwise the play would be over, stupid. That's why Shakespeare puts all that stuff in Hamlet -- you know, Ophelia going mad and the play within the play, and Yorick's skull, and the gravediggers. That's in order to delay -- until act five, he can kill him. It's the same with the Chopin. He's just about to reach the E, and he says, "Oops, better go back up and do it again." So he does it again. Now, he gets excited. (Piano) That's excitement, you don't have to worry about it. Now, he gets to F-sharp, and finally he goes down to E, but it's the wrong chord -- because the chord he's looking for is this one, (Piano) and instead he does ... (Piano) Now, we call that a deceptive cadence, because it deceives us. I always tell my students, "If you have a deceptive cadence, be sure to raise your eyebrows. Then everybody will know." (Laughter) (Applause) Right. So, he gets to E, but it's the wrong chord. Now, he tries E again. That chord doesn't work. Now, he tries the E again. That chord doesn't work. Now, he tries E again, and that doesn't work. And then finally ... (Piano) There was a gentleman in the front row who went, "Mmm." It's the same gesture he makes when he comes home after a long day, turns off the key in his car and says, "Aah, I'm home." Because we all know where home is. So this is a piece which goes from away to home. And I'm going to play it all the way through and you're going to follow. B, C, B, C, B, C, B -- down to A, down to G, down to F. Almost goes to E, but otherwise the play would be over. He goes back up to B. He gets very excited. Goes to F-sharp. Goes to E. It's the wrong chord. It's the wrong chord. It's the wrong chord. And finally goes to E, and it's home. And what you're going to see is one-buttock playing. (Laughter) Because for me, to join the B to the E, I have to stop thinking about every single note along the way, and start thinking about the long, long line from B to E. You know, we were just in South Africa, and you can't go to South Africa without thinking of Mandela in jail for 27 years. What was he thinking about? Lunch? No, he was thinking about the vision for South Africa and for human beings. That's what kept -- this is about vision. This is about the long line. Like the bird who flies over the field and doesn't care about the fences underneath, all right? So now, you're going to follow the line all the way from B to E. And I've one last request before I play this piece all the way through. Would you think of somebody who you adore, who's no longer there? A beloved grandmother, a lover -- somebody in your life who you love with all your heart, but that person is no longer with you. Bring that person into your mind, and at the same time follow the line all the way from B to E, and you'll hear everything that Chopin had to say. (Music) (Applause) Now, you may be wondering, you may be wondering why I'm clapping. Well, I did this at a school in Boston with about 70 seventh graders, 12-year-olds. And I did exactly what I did with you, and I told them and explained them and the whole thing. And at the end, they went crazy, clapping. They were clapping. I was clapping. They were clapping. Finally, I said, "Why am I clapping?" And one of the little kids said, "Because we were listening." (Laughter) Think of it. 1,600 people, busy people, involved in all sorts of different things, listening, understanding and being moved by a piece by Chopin. Now that is something. Now, am I sure that every single person followed that, understood it, was moved by it? Of course, I can't be sure. But I tell you what happened to me. I was in Ireland during the Troubles, 10 years ago, and I was working with some Catholic and Protestant kids on conflict resolution. And I did this with them -- a risky thing to do, because they were street kids. And one of them came to me the next morning and he said, "You know, I've never listened to classical music in my life, but when you played that shopping piece ... " (Laughter) He said, "My brother was shot last year and I didn't cry for him. But last night, when you played that piece, he was the one I was thinking about. And I felt the tears streaming down my face. And you know, it felt really good to cry for my brother." So I made up my mind at that moment that classical music is for everybody. Everybody. Now, how would you walk -- because you know, my profession, the music profession doesn't see it that way. They say three percent of the population likes classical music. If only we could move it to four percent, our problems would be over. I say, "How would you walk? How would you talk? How would you be? If you thought, three percent of the population likes classical music, if only we could move it to four percent. How would you walk? How would you talk? How would you be? If you thought, everybody loves classical music -- they just haven't found out about it yet." (Laughter) See, these are totally different worlds. Now, I had an amazing experience. I was 45 years old, I'd been conducting for 20 years, and I suddenly had a realization. The conductor of an orchestra doesn't make a sound. My picture appears on the front of the CD -- (Laughter) -- but the conductor doesn't make a sound. He depends, for his power, on his ability to make other people powerful. And that changed everything for me. It was totally life changing. People in my orchestra came up to me and said, "Ben, what happened?" That's what happened. I realized my job was to awaken possibility in other people. And of course, I wanted to know whether I was doing that. And you know how you find out? You look at their eyes. If their eyes are shining, you know you're doing it. You could light up a village with this guy's eyes. (Laughter) Right. So if the eyes are shining, you know you're doing it. If the eyes are not shining, you get to ask a question. And this is the question: who am I being, that my players' eyes are not shining? We can do that with our children, too. Who am I being, that my children's eyes are not shining? That's a totally different world. Now, we're all about to end this magical, on-the-mountain week, and we're going back into the world. And I say, it's appropriate for us to ask the question, who are we being as we go back out into the world? And you know, I have a definition of success. For me, it's very simple. It's not about wealth and fame and power. It's about how many shining eyes I have around me. So now, I have one last thought, which is that it really makes a difference what we say -- the words that come out of our mouth. I learned this from a woman who survived Auschwitz, one of the rare survivors. She went to Auschwitz when she was 15 years old, and her brother was eight, and the parents were lost. And she told me this, she said, "We were in the train going to Auschwitz, and I looked down and saw my brother's shoes were missing. And I said, 'Why are you so stupid, can't you keep your things together for goodness' sake?' " The way an elder sister might speak to a younger brother. Unfortunately, it was the last thing she ever said to him, because she never saw him again. He did not survive. And so when she came out of Auschwitz, she made a vow. She told me this. She said, "I walked out of Auschwitz into life and I made a vow. And the vow was, I will never say anything that couldn't stand as the last thing I ever say." Now, can we do that? No. And we'll make ourselves wrong and others wrong. But it is a possibility to live into. Thank you. (Applause) Shining eyes, shining eyes. Thank you, thank you. (Music)
Thank you. It's really an honor and a privilege to be here spending my last day as a teenager. Today I want to talk to you about the future, but first I'm going to tell you a bit about the past. My story starts way before I was born. My grandmother was on a train to Auschwitz, the death camp. And she was going along the tracks, and the tracks split. And somehow -- we don't really know exactly the whole story -- but the train took the wrong track and went to a work camp rather than the death camp. My grandmother survived and married my grandfather. They were living in Hungary, and my mother was born. And when my mother was two years old, the Hungarian revolution was raging, and they decided to escape Hungary. They got on a boat, and yet another divergence -- the boat was either going to Canada or to Australia. They got on and didn't know where they were going, and ended up in Canada. So, to make a long story short, they came to Canada. My grandmother was a chemist. She worked at the Banting Institute in Toronto, and at 44 she died of stomach cancer. I never met my grandmother, but I carry on her name -- her exact name, Eva Vertes -- and I like to think I carry on her scientific passion, too. I found this passion not far from here, actually, when I was nine years old. My family was on a road trip and we were in the Grand Canyon. And I had never been a reader when I was young -- my dad had tried me with the Hardy Boys; I tried Nancy Drew; I tried all that -- and I just didn't like reading books. And my mother bought this book when we were at the Grand Canyon called "The Hot Zone." It was all about the outbreak of the Ebola virus. And something about it just kind of drew me towards it. There was this big sort of bumpy-looking virus on the cover, and I just wanted to read it. I picked up that book, and as we drove from the edge of the Grand Canyon to Big Sur, and to, actually, here where we are today, in Monterey, I read that book, and from when I was reading that book, I knew that I wanted to have a life in medicine. I wanted to be like the explorers I'd read about in the book, who went into the jungles of Africa, went into the research labs and just tried to figure out what this deadly virus was. So from that moment on, I read every medical book I could get my hands on, and I just loved it so much. I was a passive observer of the medical world. It wasn't until I entered high school that I thought, "Maybe now, you know -- being a big high school kid -- I can maybe become an active part of this big medical world." I was 14, and I emailed professors at the local university to see if maybe I could go work in their lab. And hardly anyone responded. But I mean, why would they respond to a 14-year-old, anyway? And I got to go talk to one professor, Dr. Jacobs, who accepted me into the lab. At that time, I was really interested in neuroscience and wanted to do a research project in neurology -- specifically looking at the effects of heavy metals on the developing nervous system. So I started that, and worked in his lab for a year, and found the results that I guess you'd expect to find when you feed fruit flies heavy metals -- that it really, really impaired the nervous system. The spinal cord had breaks. The neurons were crossing in every which way. And from then I wanted to look not at impairment, but at prevention of impairment. So that's what led me to Alzheimer's. I started reading about Alzheimer's and tried to familiarize myself with the research, and at the same time when I was in the -- I was reading in the medical library one day, and I read this article about something called "purine derivatives." And they seemed to have cell growth-promoting properties. And being naive about the whole field, I kind of thought, "Oh, you have cell death in Alzheimer's which is causing the memory deficit, and then you have this compound -- purine derivatives -- that are promoting cell growth." And so I thought, "Maybe if it can promote cell growth, it can inhibit cell death, too." And so that's the project that I pursued for that year, and it's continuing now as well, and found that a specific purine derivative called "guanidine" had inhibited the cell growth by approximately 60 percent. So I presented those results at the International Science Fair, which was just one of the most amazing experiences of my life. And there I was awarded "Best in the World in Medicine," which allowed me to get in, or at least get a foot in the door of the big medical world. And from then on, since I was now in this huge exciting world, I wanted to explore it all. I wanted it all at once, but knew I couldn't really get that. And I stumbled across something called "cancer stem cells." And this is really what I want to talk to you about today -- about cancer. At first when I heard of cancer stem cells, I didn't really know how to put the two together. I'd heard of stem cells, and I'd heard of them as the panacea of the future -- the therapy of many diseases to come in the future, perhaps. But I'd heard of cancer as the most feared disease of our time, so how did the good and bad go together? Last summer I worked at Stanford University, doing some research on cancer stem cells. And while I was doing this, I was reading the cancer literature, trying to -- again -- familiarize myself with this new medical field. And it seemed that tumors actually begin from a stem cell. This fascinated me. The more I read, the more I looked at cancer differently and almost became less fearful of it. It seems that cancer is a direct result to injury. If you smoke, you damage your lung tissue, and then lung cancer arises. If you drink, you damage your liver, and then liver cancer occurs. And it was really interesting -- there were articles correlating if you have a bone fracture, and then bone cancer arises. Because what stem cells are -- they're these phenomenal cells that really have the ability to differentiate into any type of tissue. So, if the body is sensing that you have damage to an organ and then it's initiating cancer, it's almost as if this is a repair response. And the cancer, the body is saying the lung tissue is damaged, we need to repair the lung. And cancer is originating in the lung trying to repair -- because you have this excessive proliferation of these remarkable cells that really have the potential to become lung tissue. But it's almost as if the body has originated this ingenious response, but can't quite control it. It hasn't yet become fine-tuned enough to finish what has been initiated. So this really, really fascinated me. And I really think that we can't think about cancer -- let alone any disease -- in such black-and-white terms. If we eliminate cancer the way we're trying to do now, with chemotherapy and radiation, we're bombarding the body or the cancer with toxins, or with radiation, trying to kill it. It's almost as if we're getting back to this starting point. We're removing the cancer cells, but we're revealing the previous damage that the body has tried to fix. Shouldn't we think about manipulation, rather than elimination? If somehow we can cause these cells to differentiate -- to become bone tissue, lung tissue, liver tissue, whatever that cancer has been put there to do -- it would be a repair process. We'd end up better than we were before cancer. So, this really changed my view of looking at cancer. And while I was reading all these articles about cancer, it seemed that the articles -- a lot of them -- focused on, you know, the genetics of breast cancer, and the genesis and the progression of breast cancer -- tracking the cancer through the body, tracing where it is, where it goes. But it struck me that I'd never heard of cancer of the heart, or cancer of any skeletal muscle for that matter. And skeletal muscle constitutes 50 percent of our body, or over 50 percent of our body. And so at first I kind of thought, "Well, maybe there's some obvious explanation why skeletal muscle doesn't get cancer -- at least not that I know of." So, I looked further into it, found as many articles as I could, and it was amazing -- because it turned out that it was very rare. Some articles even went as far as to say that skeletal muscle tissue is resistant to cancer, and furthermore, not only to cancer, but of metastases going to skeletal muscle. And what metastases are is when the tumor -- when a piece -- breaks off and travels through the blood stream and goes to a different organ. That's what a metastasis is. It's the part of cancer that is the most dangerous. If cancer was localized, we could likely remove it, or somehow -- you know, it's contained. It's very contained. But once it starts moving throughout the body, that's when it becomes deadly. So the fact that not only did cancer not seem to originate in skeletal muscles, but cancer didn't seem to go to skeletal muscle -- there seemed to be something here. So these articles were saying, you know, "Skeletal -- metastasis to skeletal muscle -- is very rare." But it was left at that. No one seemed to be asking why. So I decided to ask why. At first -- the first thing I did was I emailed some professors who specialized in skeletal muscle physiology, and pretty much said, "Hey, it seems like cancer doesn't really go to skeletal muscle. Is there a reason for this?" And a lot of the replies I got were that muscle is terminally differentiated tissue. Meaning that you have muscle cells, but they're not dividing, so it doesn't seem like a good target for cancer to hijack. But then again, this fact that the metastases didn't go to skeletal muscle made that seem unlikely. And furthermore, that nervous tissue -- brain -- gets cancer, and brain cells are also terminally differentiated. So I decided to ask why. And here's some of, I guess, my hypotheses that I'll be starting to investigate this May at the Sylvester Cancer Institute in Miami. And I guess I'll keep investigating until I get the answers. But I know that in science, once you get the answers, inevitably you're going to have more questions. So I guess you could say that I'll probably be doing this for the rest of my life. Some of my hypotheses are that when you first think about skeletal muscle, there's a lot of blood vessels going to skeletal muscle. And the first thing that makes me think is that blood vessels are like highways for the tumor cells. Tumor cells can travel through the blood vessels. And you think, the more highways there are in a tissue, the more likely it is to get cancer or to get metastases. So first of all I thought, you know, "Wouldn't it be favorable to cancer getting to skeletal muscle?" And as well, cancer tumors require a process called angiogenesis, which is really, the tumor recruits the blood vessels to itself to supply itself with nutrients so it can grow. Without angiogenesis, the tumor remains the size of a pinpoint and it's not harmful. So angiogenesis is really a central process to the pathogenesis of cancer. And one article that really stood out to me when I was just reading about this, trying to figure out why cancer doesn't go to skeletal muscle, was that it had reported 16 percent of micro-metastases to skeletal muscle upon autopsy. 16 percent! Meaning that there were these pinpoint tumors in skeletal muscle, but only .16 percent of actual metastases -- suggesting that maybe skeletal muscle is able to control the angiogenesis, is able to control the tumors recruiting these blood vessels. We use skeletal muscles so much. It's the one portion of our body -- our heart's always beating. We're always moving our muscles. Is it possible that muscle somehow intuitively knows that it needs this blood supply? It needs to be constantly contracting, so therefore it's almost selfish. It's grabbing its blood vessels for itself. Therefore, when a tumor comes into skeletal muscle tissue, it can't get a blood supply, and can't grow. So this suggests that maybe if there is an anti-angiogenic factor in skeletal muscle -- or perhaps even more, an angiogenic routing factor, so it can actually direct where the blood vessels grow -- this could be a potential future therapy for cancer. And another thing that's really interesting is that there's this whole -- the way tumors move throughout the body, it's a very complex system -- and there's something called the chemokine network. And chemokines are essentially chemical attractants, and they're the stop and go signals for cancer. So a tumor expresses chemokine receptors, and another organ -- a distant organ somewhere in the body -- will have the corresponding chemokines, and the tumor will see these chemokines and migrate towards it. Is it possible that skeletal muscle doesn't express this type of molecules? And the other really interesting thing is that when skeletal muscle -- there's been several reports that when skeletal muscle is injured, that's what correlates with metastases going to skeletal muscle. And, furthermore, when skeletal muscle is injured, that's what causes chemokines -- these signals saying, "Cancer, you can come to me," the "go signs" for the tumors -- it causes them to highly express these chemokines. So, there's so much interplay here. I mean, there are so many possibilities for why tumors don't go to skeletal muscle. But it seems like by investigating, by attacking cancer, by searching where cancer is not, there has got to be something -- there's got to be something -- that's making this tissue resistant to tumors. And can we utilize -- can we take this property, this compound, this receptor, whatever it is that's controlling these anti-tumor properties and apply it to cancer therapy in general? Now, one thing that kind of ties the resistance of skeletal muscle to cancer -- to the cancer as a repair response gone out of control in the body -- is that skeletal muscle has a factor in it called "MyoD." And what MyoD essentially does is, it causes cells to differentiate into muscle cells. So this compound, MyoD, has been tested on a lot of different cell types and been shown to actually convert this variety of cell types into skeletal muscle cells. So, is it possible that the tumor cells are going to the skeletal muscle tissue, but once in contact inside the skeletal muscle tissue, MyoD acts upon these tumor cells and causes them to become skeletal muscle cells? Maybe tumor cells are being disguised as skeletal muscle cells, and this is why it seems as if it is so rare. It's not harmful; it has just repaired the muscle. Muscle is constantly being used -- constantly being damaged. If every time we tore a muscle or every time we stretched a muscle or moved in a wrong way, cancer occurred -- I mean, everybody would have cancer almost. And I hate to say that. But it seems as though muscle cell, possibly because of all its use, has adapted faster than other body tissues to respond to injury, to fine-tune this repair response and actually be able to finish the process which the body wants to finish. I really believe that the human body is very, very smart, and we can't counteract something the body is saying to do. It's different when a bacteria comes into the body -- that's a foreign object -- we want that out. But when the body is actually initiating a process and we're calling it a disease, it doesn't seem as though elimination is the right solution. So even to go from there, it's possible, although far-fetched, that in the future we could almost think of cancer being used as a therapy. If those diseases where tissues are deteriorating -- for example Alzheimer's, where the brain, the brain cells, die and we need to restore new brain cells, new functional brain cells -- what if we could, in the future, use cancer? A tumor -- put it in the brain and cause it to differentiate into brain cells? That's a very far-fetched idea, but I really believe that it may be possible. These cells are so versatile, these cancer cells are so versatile -- we just have to manipulate them in the right way. And again, some of these may be far-fetched, but I figured if there's anywhere to present far-fetched ideas, it's here at TED, so thank you very much. (Applause)
So, I guess it is a result of globalization that you can find Coca-Cola tins on top of Everest and a Buddhist monk in Monterey. (Laughter) And so I just came, two days ago, from the Himalayas to your kind invitation. So I would like to invite you, also, for a while, to the Himalayas themselves. And to show the place where meditators, like me, who began with being a molecular biologist in Pasteur Institute, and found their way to the mountains. So these are a few images I was lucky to take and be there. There's the Mount Kailash in Eastern Tibet -- wonderful setting. This is from Marlboro country. (Laughter) This is a turquoise lake. A meditator. This is the hottest day of the year somewhere in Eastern Tibet, on August 1. And the night before, we camped, and my Tibetan friends said, "We are going to sleep outside." And I said, "Why? We have enough space in the tent." They said, "Yes, but it's summertime." (Laughter) So now, we are going to speak of happiness. As a Frenchman, I must say that there are a lot of French intellectuals that think happiness is not at all interesting. (Laughter) I just wrote an essay on happiness, and there was a controversy. And someone wrote an article saying, "Don't impose on us the dirty work of happiness." (Laughter) "We don't care about being happy. We need to live with passion. We like the ups and downs of life. We like our suffering because it's so good when it ceases for a while." (Laughter) This is what I see from the balcony of my hermitage in the Himalayas. It's about two meters by three, and you are all welcome any time. (Laughter) Now, let's come to happiness or well-being. And first of all, you know, despite what the French intellectuals say, it seems that no one wakes up in the morning thinking, "May I suffer the whole day?" (Laughter) Which means that somehow -- consciously or not, directly or indirectly, in the short or the long term, whatever we do, whatever we hope, whatever we dream -- somehow, is related to a deep, profound desire for well-being or happiness. As Pascal said, even the one who hangs himself, somehow, is looking for cessation of suffering -- he finds no other way. But then, if you look in the literature, East and West, you can find incredible diversity of definition of happiness. Some people say, I only believed in remembering the past, imagining the future, never the present. Some people say happiness is right now; it's the quality of the freshness of the present moment. And that led to Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, to say, "All the great thinkers of humanity have left happiness in the vague so that they could define -- each of them could define their own terms." Well, that would be fine if it was just a secondary preoccupation in life. But now, if it is something that is going to determine the quality of every instant of our life, then we better know what it is, have some clearer idea. And probably, the fact that we don't know that is why, so often, although we seek happiness, it seems we turn our back to it. Although we want to avoid suffering, it seems we are running somewhat towards it. And that can also come from some kind of confusions. One of the most common ones is happiness and pleasure. But, if you look at the characteristics of those two, pleasure is contingent upon time, upon its object, upon the place. It is something that -- changes of nature. Beautiful chocolate cake: first serving is delicious, second one not so much, then we feel disgust. (Laughter) That's the nature of things. We get tired. I used to be a fan of Bach. I used to play it on the guitar, you know. I can hear it two, three, five times. If I had to hear it 24 hours, non-stop, it might be very tiring. If you are feeling very cold, you come near a fire, it's so wonderful. Then, after some moments, you just go a little back, and then it starts burning. It sort of uses itself as you experience it. And also, again, it can -- also, it's something that you -- it is not something that is radiating outside. Like, you can feel intense pleasure and some others around you can be suffering a lot. Now, what, then, will be happiness? And happiness, of course, is such a vague word, so let's say well-being. And so, I think the best definition, according to the Buddhist view, is that well-being is not just a mere pleasurable sensation. It is a deep sense of serenity and fulfillment, a state that actually pervades and underlies all emotional states, and all the joys and sorrows that can come one's way. For you, that might be surprising. Can we have this kind of well-being while being sad? In a way, why not? Because we are speaking of a different level. Look at the waves coming here to shore. When you are at the bottom of the wave, you hit the bottom. You hit the solid rock. When you are surfing on the top, you are all elated. So you go from elation to depression -- there's no depth. Now, if you look at the high sea, there might be beautiful, calm ocean, like a mirror. There might be storms, but the depth of the ocean is still there, unchanged. So now, how is that? It can only be a state of being, not just a fleeting emotion, sensation. Even joy -- that can be the spring of happiness. But there's also wicked joy, you can rejoice in someone's suffering. So how do we proceed in our quest for happiness? Very often, we look outside. We think that if we could gather this and that, all the conditions, something that we say, "Everything to be happy -- to have everything to be happy." That very sentence already reveals the doom of destruction of happiness. To have everything. If we miss something, it collapses. And also, when things go wrong, we try to fix the outside so much, but our control of the outer world is limited, temporary, and often, illusory. So now, look at inner conditions. Aren't they stronger? Isn't it the mind that translates the outer condition into happiness and suffering? And isn't that stronger? We know, by experience, that we can be what we call "a little paradise," and yet, be completely unhappy within. The Dalai Lama was once in Portugal, and there was a lot of construction going on everywhere. So one evening, he said, "Look, you are doing all these things, but isn't it nice, also, to build something within?" And he said, "Unless that -- even you get high-tech flat on the 100th floor of a super-modern and comfortable building, if you are deeply unhappy within, all you are going to look for is a window from which to jump." So now, at the opposite, we know a lot of people who, in very difficult circumstances, manage to keep serenity, inner strength, inner freedom, confidence. So now, if the inner conditions are stronger -- of course, the outer conditions do influence, and it's wonderful to live longer, healthier, to have access to information, education, to be able to travel, to have freedom. It's highly desirable. However, this is not enough. Those are just auxiliary, help conditions. The experience that translates everything is within the mind. So then, when we ask oneself how to nurture the condition for happiness, the inner conditions, and which are those which will undermine happiness. So then, this just needs to have some experience. We have to know from ourselves, there are certain states of mind that are conducive to this flourishing, to this well-being, what the Greeks called eudaimonia, flourishing. There are some which are adverse to this well-being. And so, if we look from our own experience, anger, hatred, jealousy, arrogance, obsessive desire, strong grasping, they don't leave us in such a good state after we have experienced it. And also, they are detrimental to others' happiness. So we may consider that the more those are invading our mind, and, like a chain reaction, the more we feel miserable, we feel tormented. At the opposite, everyone knows deep within that an act of selfless generosity, if from the distance, without anyone knowing anything about it, we could save a child's life, make someone happy. We don't need the recognition. We don't need any gratitude. Just the mere fact of doing that fills such a sense of adequation with our deep nature. And we would like to be like that all the time. So is that possible, to change our way of being, to transform one's mind? Aren't those negative emotions, or destructive emotions, inherent to the nature of mind? Is change possible in our emotions, in our traits, in our moods? For that we have to ask, what is nature of mind? And if we look from the experiential point of view, there is a primary quality of consciousness that's just the mere fact to be cognitive, to be aware. Consciousness is like a mirror that allows all images to rise on it. You can have ugly faces, beautiful faces in the mirror. The mirror allows that, but the mirror is not tainted, is not modified, is not altered by those images. Likewise, behind every single thought there is the bare consciousness, pure awareness. This is the nature. It cannot be tainted intrinsically with hatred or jealousy because, then, if it was always there -- like a dye that would permeate the whole cloth -- then it would be found all the time, somewhere. We know we're not always angry, always jealous, always generous. So, because the basic fabric of consciousness is this pure cognitive quality that differentiates it from a stone, there is a possibility for change because all emotions are fleeting. That is the ground for mind training. Mind training is based on the idea that two opposite mental factors cannot happen at the same time. You could go from love to hate. But you cannot, at the same time, toward the same object, the same person, want to harm and want to do good. You cannot, in the same gesture, shake hand and give a blow. So, there are natural antidotes to emotions that are destructive to our inner well-being. So that's the way to proceed. Rejoicing compared to jealousy. A kind of sense of inner freedom as opposite to intense grasping and obsession. Benevolence, loving kindness against hatred. But, of course, each emotion then would need a particular antidote. Another way is to try to find a general antidote to all emotions, and that's by looking at the very nature. Usually, when we feel annoyed, hatred or upset with someone, or obsessed with something, the mind goes again and again to that object. Each time it goes to the object, it reinforces that obsession or that annoyance. So then, it's a self-perpetuating process. So what we need to look now is, instead of looking outward, we look inward. Look at anger itself. It looks very menacing, like a billowing monsoon cloud or thunderstorm. But we think we could sit on the cloud -- but if you go there, it's just mist. Likewise, if you look at the thought of anger, it will vanish like frost under the morning sun. If you do this again and again, the propensity, the tendencies for anger to arise again will be less and less each time you dissolve it. And, at the end, although it may rise, it will just cross the mind, like a bird crossing the sky without leaving any track. So this is the principal of mind training. Now, it takes time because we -- it took time for all those faults in our mind, the tendencies, to build up, so it will take time to unfold them as well. But that's the only way to go. Mind transformation -- that is the very meaning of meditation. It means familiarization with a new way of being, new way of perceiving things, which is more in adequation with reality, with interdependence, with the stream and continuous transformation, which our being and our consciousness is. So, the interface with cognitive science, since we need to come to that, and it was, I suppose, the subject of -- we have to deal in such a short time with brain plasticity. The brain was thought to be more or less fixed. All the nominal connections, in numbers and quantities, were thought -- until the last 20 years -- thought to be more or less fixed when we reached adult age. Now, recently, it has been found that it can change a lot. A violinist, as we heard, who has done 10,000 hours of violin practice, some area that controls the movements of fingers in the brain change a lot, increasing reinforcement of the synaptic connections. So can we do that with human qualities? With loving kindness, with patience, with openness? So that's what those great meditators have been doing. Some of them who came to the labs, like in Madison, Wisconsin, or in Berkeley, did 20 to 40,000 hours of meditation. They do, like, three years' retreat, where they do meditate 12 hours a day. And then, the rest of their life, they will do that three or four hours a day. They are real Olympic champions of mind training. (Laughter) This is the place where the meditators -- you can see it's kind of inspiring. Now, here with 256 electrodes. (Laughter) So what did they find? Of course, same thing. The scientific embargo -- if ever has been to submitted to "Nature," hopefully, it will be accepted. It deals with the state of compassion, unconditional compassion. We asked meditators, who have been doing that for years and years and years, to put their mind in a state where there's nothing but loving kindness, total availability to sentient being. Of course, during the training, we do that with objects. We think of people suffering, we think of people we love, but at some point, it can be a state which is all pervading. Here is the preliminary result, which I can show because it's already been shown. The bell curve shows 150 controls, and what is being looked at is the difference between the right and the left frontal lobe. In very short, people who have more activity in the right side of the prefrontal cortex are more depressed, withdrawn. They don't describe a lot of positive affect. It's the opposite on the left side: more tendency to altruism, to happiness, to express, and curiosity and so forth. So there's a basic line for people. And also, it can be changed. If you see a comic movie, you go off to the left side. If you are happy about something, you'll go more to the left side. If you have a bout of depression, you'll go to the right side. Here, the -0.5 is the full standard deviation of a meditator who meditated on compassion. It's something that is totally out of the bell curve. So, I've no time to go into all the different scientific results. Hopefully, they will come. But they found that -- this is after three and a half hours in an fMRI, it's like coming out of a space ship. Also, it has been shown in other labs -- for instance, Paul Ekman's labs in Berkeley -- that some meditators are able, also, to control their emotional response more than it could be thought. Like the startle experiments, for example. If you sit a guy on a chair with all this kind of apparatus measuring your physiology, and there's kind of a bomb that goes off, it's so instinctive response that, in 20 years, they never saw anyone who will not jump. Some meditators, without trying to stop it, but simply by being completely open, thinking that that bang is just going to be just a small event like a shooting star, they are able not to move at all. So the whole point of that is not, sort of, to make, like, a circus thing of showing exceptional beings who can jump, or whatever. It's more to say that mind training matters. That this is not just a luxury. This is not a supplementary vitamin for the soul. This is something that's going to determine the quality of every instant of our lives. We are ready to spend 15 years achieving education. We love to do jogging, fitness. We do all kinds of things to remain beautiful. Yet, we spend surprisingly little time taking care of what matters most -- the way our mind functions -- which, again, is the ultimate thing that determines the quality of our experience. Now, our compassion is supposed to be put in action. That's what we try to do in different places. Just this one example is worth a lot of work. This lady with bone TB, left alone in a tent, is going to die with her only daughter. One year later, how she is. Different schools and clinics we've been doing in Tibet. And just, I leave you with the beauty of those looks that tells more about happiness than I could ever say. And jumping monks of Tibet. (Laughter) Flying monks. Thank you very much.
Steve Ramirez: My first year of grad school, I found myself in my bedroom eating lots of Ben & Jerry's watching some trashy TV and maybe, maybe listening to Taylor Swift. I had just gone through a breakup. (Laughter) So for the longest time, all I would do is recall the memory of this person over and over again, wishing that I could get rid of that gut-wrenching, visceral "blah" feeling. Now, as it turns out, I'm a neuroscientist, so I knew that the memory of that person and the awful, emotional undertones that color in that memory, are largely mediated by separate brain systems. And so I thought, what if we could go into the brain and edit out that nauseating feeling but while keeping the memory of that person intact? Then I realized, maybe that's a little bit lofty for now. So what if we could start off by going into the brain and just finding a single memory to begin with? Could we jump-start that memory back to life, maybe even play with the contents of that memory? All that said, there is one person in the entire world right now that I really hope is not watching this talk. (Laughter) So there is a catch. There is a catch. These ideas probably remind you of "Total Recall," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," or of "Inception." But the movie stars that we work with are the celebrities of the lab. Xu Liu: Test mice. (Laughter) As neuroscientists, we work in the lab with mice trying to understand how memory works. And today, we hope to convince you that now we are actually able to activate a memory in the brain at the speed of light. To do this, there's only two simple steps to follow. First, you find and label a memory in the brain, and then you activate it with a switch. As simple as that. (Laughter) SR: Are you convinced? So, turns out finding a memory in the brain isn't all that easy. XL: Indeed. This is way more difficult than, let's say, finding a needle in a haystack, because at least, you know, the needle is still something you can physically put your fingers on. But memory is not. And also, there's way more cells in your brain than the number of straws in a typical haystack. So yeah, this task does seem to be daunting. But luckily, we got help from the brain itself. It turned out that all we need to do is basically to let the brain form a memory, and then the brain will tell us which cells are involved in that particular memory. SR: So what was going on in my brain while I was recalling the memory of an ex? If you were to just completely ignore human ethics for a second and slice up my brain right now, you would see that there was an amazing number of brain regions that were active while recalling that memory. Now one brain region that would be robustly active in particular is called the hippocampus, which for decades has been implicated in processing the kinds of memories that we hold near and dear, which also makes it an ideal target to go into and to try and find and maybe reactivate a memory. XL: When you zoom in into the hippocampus, of course you will see lots of cells, but we are able to find which cells are involved in a particular memory, because whenever a cell is active, like when it's forming a memory, it will also leave a footprint that will later allow us to know these cells are recently active. SR: So the same way that building lights at night let you know that somebody's probably working there at any given moment, in a very real sense, there are biological sensors within a cell that are turned on only when that cell was just working. They're sort of biological windows that light up to let us know that that cell was just active. XL: So we clipped part of this sensor, and attached that to a switch to control the cells, and we packed this switch into an engineered virus and injected that into the brain of the mice. So whenever a memory is being formed, any active cells for that memory will also have this switch installed. SR: So here is what the hippocampus looks like after forming a fear memory, for example. The sea of blue that you see here are densely packed brain cells, but the green brain cells, the green brain cells are the ones that are holding on to a specific fear memory. So you are looking at the crystallization of the fleeting formation of fear. You're actually looking at the cross-section of a memory right now. XL: Now, for the switch we have been talking about, ideally, the switch has to act really fast. It shouldn't take minutes or hours to work. It should act at the speed of the brain, in milliseconds. SR: So what do you think, Xu? Could we use, let's say, pharmacological drugs to activate or inactivate brain cells? XL: Nah. Drugs are pretty messy. They spread everywhere. And also it takes them forever to act on cells. So it will not allow us to control a memory in real time. So Steve, how about let's zap the brain with electricity? SR: So electricity is pretty fast, but we probably wouldn't be able to target it to just the specific cells that hold onto a memory, and we'd probably fry the brain. XL: Oh. That's true. So it looks like, hmm, indeed we need to find a better way to impact the brain at the speed of light. SR: So it just so happens that light travels at the speed of light. So maybe we could activate or inactive memories by just using light -- XL: That's pretty fast. SR: -- and because normally brain cells don't respond to pulses of light, so those that would respond to pulses of light are those that contain a light-sensitive switch. Now to do that, first we need to trick brain cells to respond to laser beams. XL: Yep. You heard it right. We are trying to shoot lasers into the brain. (Laughter) SR: And the technique that lets us do that is optogenetics. Optogenetics gave us this light switch that we can use to turn brain cells on or off, and the name of that switch is channelrhodopsin, seen here as these green dots attached to this brain cell. You can think of channelrhodopsin as a sort of light-sensitive switch that can be artificially installed in brain cells so that now we can use that switch to activate or inactivate the brain cell simply by clicking it, and in this case we click it on with pulses of light. XL: So we attach this light-sensitive switch of channelrhodopsin to the sensor we've been talking about and inject this into the brain. So whenever a memory is being formed, any active cell for that particular memory will also have this light-sensitive switch installed in it so that we can control these cells by the flipping of a laser just like this one you see. SR: So let's put all of this to the test now. What we can do is we can take our mice and then we can put them in a box that looks exactly like this box here, and then we can give them a very mild foot shock so that they form a fear memory of this box. They learn that something bad happened here. Now with our system, the cells that are active in the hippocampus in the making of this memory, only those cells will now contain channelrhodopsin. XL: When you are as small as a mouse, it feels as if the whole world is trying to get you. So your best response of defense is trying to be undetected. Whenever a mouse is in fear, it will show this very typical behavior by staying at one corner of the box, trying to not move any part of its body, and this posture is called freezing. So if a mouse remembers that something bad happened in this box, and when we put them back into the same box, it will basically show freezing because it doesn't want to be detected by any potential threats in this box. SR: So you can think of freezing as, you're walking down the street minding your own business, and then out of nowhere you almost run into an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend, and now those terrifying two seconds where you start thinking, "What do I do? Do I say hi? Do I shake their hand? Do I turn around and run away? Do I sit here and pretend like I don't exist?" Those kinds of fleeting thoughts that physically incapacitate you, that temporarily give you that deer-in-headlights look. XL: However, if you put the mouse in a completely different new box, like the next one, it will not be afraid of this box because there's no reason that it will be afraid of this new environment. But what if we put the mouse in this new box but at the same time, we activate the fear memory using lasers just like we did before? Are we going to bring back the fear memory for the first box into this completely new environment? SR: All right, and here's the million-dollar experiment. Now to bring back to life the memory of that day, I remember that the Red Sox had just won, it was a green spring day, perfect for going up and down the river and then maybe going to the North End to get some cannolis, #justsaying. Now Xu and I, on the other hand, were in a completely windowless black room not making any ocular movement that even remotely resembles an eye blink because our eyes were fixed onto a computer screen. We were looking at this mouse here trying to activate a memory for the first time using our technique. XL: And this is what we saw. When we first put the mouse into this box, it's exploring, sniffing around, walking around, minding its own business, because actually by nature, mice are pretty curious animals. They want to know, what's going on in this new box? It's interesting. But the moment we turned on the laser, like you see now, all of a sudden the mouse entered this freezing mode. It stayed here and tried not to move any part of its body. Clearly it's freezing. So indeed, it looks like we are able to bring back the fear memory for the first box in this completely new environment. While watching this, Steve and I are as shocked as the mouse itself. (Laughter) So after the experiment, the two of us just left the room without saying anything. After a kind of long, awkward period of time, Steve broke the silence. SR: "Did that just work?" XL: "Yes," I said. "Indeed it worked!" We're really excited about this. And then we published our findings in the journal Nature. Ever since the publication of our work, we've been receiving numerous comments from all over the Internet. Maybe we can take a look at some of those. ["OMGGGGG FINALLY... so much more to come, virtual reality, neural manipulation, visual dream emulation... neural coding, 'writing and re-writing of memories', mental illnesses. Ahhh the future is awesome"] SR: So the first thing that you'll notice is that people have really strong opinions about this kind of work. Now I happen to completely agree with the optimism of this first quote, because on a scale of zero to Morgan Freeman's voice, it happens to be one of the most evocative accolades that I've heard come our way. (Laughter) But as you'll see, it's not the only opinion that's out there. ["This scares the hell out of me... What if they could do that easily in humans in a couple of years?! OH MY GOD WE'RE DOOMED"] XL: Indeed, if we take a look at the second one, I think we can all agree that it's, meh, probably not as positive. But this also reminds us that, although we are still working with mice, it's probably a good idea to start thinking and discussing about the possible ethical ramifications of memory control. SR: Now, in the spirit of the third quote, we want to tell you about a recent project that we've been working on in lab that we've called Project Inception. ["They should make a movie about this. Where they plant ideas into peoples minds, so they can control them for their own personal gain. We'll call it: Inception."] So we reasoned that now that we can reactivate a memory, what if we do so but then begin to tinker with that memory? Could we possibly even turn it into a false memory? XL: So all memory is sophisticated and dynamic, but if just for simplicity, let's imagine memory as a movie clip. So far what we've told you is basically we can control this "play" button of the clip so that we can play this video clip any time, anywhere. But is there a possibility that we can actually get inside the brain and edit this movie clip so that we can make it different from the original? Yes we can. Turned out that all we need to do is basically reactivate a memory using lasers just like we did before, but at the same time, if we present new information and allow this new information to incorporate into this old memory, this will change the memory. It's sort of like making a remix tape. SR: So how do we do this? Rather than finding a fear memory in the brain, we can start by taking our animals, and let's say we put them in a blue box like this blue box here and we find the brain cells that represent that blue box and we trick them to respond to pulses of light exactly like we had said before. Now the next day, we can take our animals and place them in a red box that they've never experienced before. We can shoot light into the brain to reactivate the memory of the blue box. So what would happen here if, while the animal is recalling the memory of the blue box, we gave it a couple of mild foot shocks? So here we're trying to artificially make an association between the memory of the blue box and the foot shocks themselves. We're just trying to connect the two. So to test if we had done so, we can take our animals once again and place them back in the blue box. Again, we had just reactivated the memory of the blue box while the animal got a couple of mild foot shocks, and now the animal suddenly freezes. It's as though it's recalling being mildly shocked in this environment even though that never actually happened. So it formed a false memory, because it's falsely fearing an environment where, technically speaking, nothing bad actually happened to it. XL: So, so far we are only talking about this light-controlled "on" switch. In fact, we also have a light-controlled "off" switch, and it's very easy to imagine that by installing this light-controlled "off" switch, we can also turn off a memory, any time, anywhere. So everything we've been talking about today is based on this philosophically charged principle of neuroscience that the mind, with its seemingly mysterious properties, is actually made of physical stuff that we can tinker with. SR: And for me personally, I see a world where we can reactivate any kind of memory that we'd like. I also see a world where we can erase unwanted memories. Now, I even see a world where editing memories is something of a reality, because we're living in a time where it's possible to pluck questions from the tree of science fiction and to ground them in experimental reality. XL: Nowadays, people in the lab and people in other groups all over the world are using similar methods to activate or edit memories, whether that's old or new, positive or negative, all sorts of memories so that we can understand how memory works. SR: For example, one group in our lab was able to find the brain cells that make up a fear memory and converted them into a pleasurable memory, just like that. That's exactly what I mean about editing these kinds of processes. Now one dude in lab was even able to reactivate memories of female mice in male mice, which rumor has it is a pleasurable experience. XL: Indeed, we are living in a very exciting moment where science doesn't have any arbitrary speed limits but is only bound by our own imagination. SR: And finally, what do we make of all this? How do we push this technology forward? These are the questions that should not remain just inside the lab, and so one goal of today's talk was to bring everybody up to speed with the kind of stuff that's possible in modern neuroscience, but now, just as importantly, to actively engage everybody in this conversation. So let's think together as a team about what this all means and where we can and should go from here, because Xu and I think we all have some really big decisions ahead of us. Thank you. XL: Thank you. (Applause)
I'm here to talk about the wonder and the mystery of conscious minds. The wonder is about the fact that we all woke up this morning and we had with it the amazing return of our conscious mind. We recovered minds with a complete sense of self and a complete sense of our own existence, yet we hardly ever pause to consider this wonder. We should, in fact, because without having this possibility of conscious minds, we would have no knowledge whatsoever about our humanity; we would have no knowledge whatsoever about the world. We would have no pains, but also no joys. We would have no access to love or to the ability to create. And of course, Scott Fitzgerald said famously that "he who invented consciousness would have a lot to be blamed for." But he also forgot that without consciousness, he would have no access to true happiness and even the possibility of transcendence. So much for the wonder, now for the mystery. This is a mystery that has really been extremely hard to elucidate. All the way back into early philosophy and certainly throughout the history of neuroscience, this has been one mystery that has always resisted elucidation, has got major controversies. And there are actually many people that think we should not even touch it; we should just leave it alone, it's not to be solved. I don't believe that, and I think the situation is changing. It would be ridiculous to claim that we know how we make consciousness in our brains, but we certainly can begin to approach the question, and we can begin to see the shape of a solution. And one more wonder to celebrate is the fact that we have imaging technologies that now allow us to go inside the human brain and be able to do, for example, what you're seeing right now. These are images that come from Hanna Damasio's lab, and which show you, in a living brain, the reconstruction of that brain. And this is a person who is alive. This is not a person that is being studied at autopsy. And even more -- and this is something that one can be really amazed about -- is what I'm going to show you next, which is going underneath the surface of the brain and actually looking in the living brain at real connections, real pathways. So all of those colored lines correspond to bunches of axons, the fibers that join cell bodies to synapses. And I'm sorry to disappoint you, they don't come in color. But at any rate, they are there. The colors are codes for the direction, from whether it is back to front or vice versa. At any rate, what is consciousness? What is a conscious mind? And we could take a very simple view and say, well, it is that which we lose when we fall into deep sleep without dreams, or when we go under anesthesia, and it is what we regain when we recover from sleep or from anesthesia. But what is exactly that stuff that we lose under anesthesia, or when we are in deep, dreamless sleep? Well first of all, it is a mind, which is a flow of mental images. And of course consider images that can be sensory patterns, visual, such as you're having right now in relation to the stage and me, or auditory images, as you are having now in relation to my words. That flow of mental images is mind. But there is something else that we are all experiencing in this room. We are not passive exhibitors of visual or auditory or tactile images. We have selves. We have a Me that is automatically present in our minds right now. We own our minds. And we have a sense that it's everyone of us that is experiencing this -- not the person who is sitting next to you. So in order to have a conscious mind, you have a self within the conscious mind. So a conscious mind is a mind with a self in it. The self introduces the subjective perspective in the mind, and we are only fully conscious when self comes to mind. So what we need to know to even address this mystery is, number one, how are minds are put together in the brain, and, number two, how selves are constructed. Now the first part, the first problem, is relatively easy -- it's not easy at all -- but it is something that has been approached gradually in neuroscience. And it's quite clear that, in order to make minds, we need to construct neural maps. So imagine a grid, like the one I'm showing you right now, and now imagine, within that grid, that two-dimensional sheet, imagine neurons. And picture, if you will, a billboard, a digital billboard, where you have elements that can be either lit or not. And depending on how you create the pattern of lighting or not lighting, the digital elements, or, for that matter, the neurons in the sheet, you're going to be able to construct a map. This, of course, is a visual map that I'm showing you, but this applies to any kind of map -- auditory, for example, in relation to sound frequencies, or to the maps that we construct with our skin in relation to an object that we palpate. Now to bring home the point of how close it is -- the relationship between the grid of neurons and the topographical arrangement of the activity of the neurons and our mental experience -- I'm going to tell you a personal story. So if I cover my left eye -- I'm talking about me personally, not all of you -- if I cover my left eye, I look at the grid -- pretty much like the one I'm showing you. Everything is nice and fine and perpendicular. But sometime ago, I discovered that if I cover my left eye, instead what I get is this. I look at the grid and I see a warping at the edge of my central-left field. Very odd -- I've analyzed this for a while. But sometime ago, through the help of an opthamologist colleague of mine, Carmen Puliafito, who developed a laser scanner of the retina, I found out the the following. If I scan my retina through the horizontal plane that you see there in the little corner, what I get is the following. On the right side, my retina is perfectly symmetrical. You see the going down towards the fovea where the optic nerve begins. But on my left retina there is a bump, which is marked there by the red arrow. And it corresponds to a little cyst that is located below. And that is exactly what causes the warping of my visual image. So just think of this: you have a grid of neurons, and now you have a plane mechanical change in the position of the grid, and you get a warping of your mental experience. So this is how close your mental experience and the activity of the neurons in the retina, which is a part of the brain located in the eyeball, or, for that matter, a sheet of visual cortex. So from the retina you go onto visual cortex. And of course, the brain adds on a lot of information to what is going on in the signals that come from the retina. And in that image there, you see a variety of islands of what I call image-making regions in the brain. You have the green for example, that corresponds to tactile information, or the blue that corresponds to auditory information. And something else that happens is that those image-making regions where you have the plotting of all these neural maps, can then provide signals to this ocean of purple that you see around, which is the association cortex, where you can make records of what went on in those islands of image-making. And the great beauty is that you can then go from memory, out of those association cortices, and produce back images in the very same regions that have perception. So think about how wonderfully convenient and lazy the brain is. So it provides certain areas for perception and image-making. And those are exactly the same that are going to be used for image-making when we recall information. So far the mystery of the conscious mind is diminishing a little bit because we have a general sense of how we make these images. But what about the self? The self is really the elusive problem. And for a long time, people did not even want to touch it, because they'd say, "How can you have this reference point, this stability, that is required to maintain the continuity of selves day after day?" And I thought about a solution to this problem. It's the following. We generate brain maps of the body's interior and use them as the reference for all other maps. So let me tell you just a little bit about how I came to this. I came to this because, if you're going to have a reference that we know as self -- the Me, the I in our own processing -- we need to have something that is stable, something that does not deviate much from day to day. Well it so happens that we have a singular body. We have one body, not two, not three. And so that is a beginning. There is just one reference point, which is the body. But then, of course, the body has many parts, and things grow at different rates, and they have different sizes and different people; however, not so with the interior. The things that have to do with what is known as our internal milieu -- for example, the whole management of the chemistries within our body are, in fact, extremely maintained day after day for one very good reason. If you deviate too much in the parameters that are close to the midline of that life-permitting survival range, you go into disease or death. So we have an in-built system within our own lives that ensures some kind of continuity. I like to call it an almost infinite sameness from day to day. Because if you don't have that sameness, physiologically, you're going to be sick or you're going to die. So that's one more element for this continuity. And the final thing is that there is a very tight coupling between the regulation of our body within the brain and the body itself, unlike any other coupling. So for example, I'm making images of you, but there's no physiological bond between the images I have of you as an audience and my brain. However, there is a close, permanently maintained bond between the body regulating parts of my brain and my own body. So here's how it looks. Look at the region there. There is the brain stem in between the cerebral cortex and the spinal cord. And it is within that region that I'm going to highlight now that we have this housing of all the life-regulation devices of the body. This is so specific that, for example, if you look at the part that is covered in red in the upper part of the brain stem, if you damage that as a result of a stroke, for example, what you get is coma or vegetative state, which is a state, of course, in which your mind disappears, your consciousness disappears. What happens then actually is that you lose the grounding of the self, you have no longer access to any feeling of your own existence, and, in fact, there can be images going on, being formed in the cerebral cortex, except you don't know they're there. You have, in effect, lost consciousness when you have damage to that red section of the brain stem. But if you consider the green part of the brain stem, nothing like that happens. It is that specific. So in that green component of the brain stem, if you damage it, and often it happens, what you get is complete paralysis, but your conscious mind is maintained. You feel, you know, you have a fully conscious mind that you can report very indirectly. This is a horrific condition. You don't want to see it. And people are, in fact, imprisoned within their own bodies, but they do have a mind. There was a very interesting film, one of the rare good films done about a situation like this, by Julian Schnabel some years ago about a patient that was in that condition. So now I'm going to show you a picture. I promise not to say anything about this, except this is to frighten you. It's just to tell you that in that red section of the brain stem, there are, to make it simple, all those little squares that correspond to modules that actually make brain maps of different aspects of our interior, different aspects of our body. They are exquisitely topographic and they are exquisitely interconnected in a recursive pattern. And it is out of this and out of this tight coupling between the brain stem and the body that I believe -- and I could be wrong, but I don't think I am -- that you generate this mapping of the body that provides the grounding for the self and that comes in the form of feelings -- primordial feelings, by the way. So what is the picture that we get here? Look at "cerebral cortex," look at "brain stem," look at "body," and you get the picture of the interconnectivity in which you have the brain stem providing the grounding for the self in a very tight interconnection with the body. And you have the cerebral cortex providing the great spectacle of our minds with the profusion of images that are, in fact, the contents of our minds and that we normally pay most attention to, as we should, because that's really the film that is rolling in our minds. But look at the arrows. They're not there for looks. They're there because there's this very close interaction. You cannot have a conscious mind if you don't have the interaction between cerebral cortex and brain stem. You cannot have a conscious mind if you don't have the interaction between the brain stem and the body. Another thing that is interesting is that the brain stem that we have is shared with a variety of other species. So throughout vertebrates, the design of the brain stem is very similar to ours, which is one of the reasons why I think those other species have conscious minds like we do. Except that they're not as rich as ours, because they don't have a cerebral cortex like we do. That's where the difference is. And I strongly disagree with the idea that consciousness should be considered as the great product of the cerebral cortex. Only the wealth of our minds is, not the very fact that we have a self that we can refer to our own existence, and that we have any sense of person. Now there are three levels of self to consider -- the proto, the core and the autobiographical. The first two are shared with many, many other species, and they are really coming out largely of the brain stem and whatever there is of cortex in those species. It's the autobiographical self which some species have, I think. Cetaceans and primates have also an autobiographical self to a certain degree. And everybody's dogs at home have an autobiographical self to a certain degree. But the novelty is here. The autobiographical self is built on the basis of past memories and memories of the plans that we have made; it's the lived past and the anticipated future. And the autobiographical self has prompted extended memory, reasoning, imagination, creativity and language. And out of that came the instruments of culture -- religions, justice, trade, the arts, science, technology. And it is within that culture that we really can get -- and this is the novelty -- something that is not entirely set by our biology. It is developed in the cultures. It developed in collectives of human beings. And this is, of course, the culture where we have developed something that I like to call socio-cultural regulation. And finally, you could rightly ask, why care about this? Why care if it is the brain stem or the cerebral cortex and how this is made? Three reasons. First, curiosity. Primates are extremely curious -- and humans most of all. And if we are interested, for example, in the fact that anti-gravity is pulling galaxies away from the Earth, why should we not be interested in what is going on inside of human beings? Second, understanding society and culture. We should look at how society and culture in this socio-cultural regulation are a work in progress. And finally, medicine. Let's not forget that some of the worst diseases of humankind are diseases such as depression, Alzheimer's disease, drug addiction. Think of strokes that can devastate your mind or render you unconscious. You have no prayer of treating those diseases effectively and in a non-serendipitous way if you do not know how this works. So that's a very good reason beyond curiosity to justify what we're doing, and to justify having some interest in what is going on in our brains. Thank you for your attention. (Applause)
So if someone asked you for the three words that would sum up your reputation, what would you say? How would people describe your judgment, your knowledge, your behaviors, in different situations? Today I'd like to explore with you why the answer to this question will become profoundly important in an age where reputation will be your most valuable asset. I'd like to start by introducing you to someone whose life has been changed by a marketplace fueled by reputation. Sebastian Sandys has been a bed and breakfast host on Airbnb since 2008. I caught up with him recently, where, over the course of several cups of tea, he told me how hosting guests from all over the world has enriched his life. More than 50 people have come to stay in the 18th-century watchhouse he lives in with his cat, Squeak. Now, I mention Squeak because Sebastian's first guest happened to see a rather large mouse run across the kitchen, and she promised that she would refrain from leaving a bad review on one condition: he got a cat. And so Sebastian bought Squeak to protect his reputation. Now, as many of you know, Airbnb is a peer-to-peer marketplace that matches people who have space to rent with people who are looking for a place to stay in over 192 countries. The places being rented out are things that you might expect, like spare rooms and holiday homes, but part of the magic is the unique places that you can now access: treehouses, teepees, airplane hangars, igloos. If you don't like the hotel, there's a castle down the road that you can rent for 5,000 dollars a night. It's a fantastic example of how technology is creating a market for things that never had a marketplace before. Now let me show you these heat maps of Paris to see how insanely fast it's growing. This image here is from 2008. The pink dots represent host properties. Even four years ago, letting strangers stay in your home seemed like a crazy idea. Now the same view in 2010. And now, 2012. There is an Airbnb host on almost every main street in Paris. Now, what's happening here is people are realizing the power of technology to unlock the idling capacity and value of all kinds of assets, from skills to spaces to material possessions, in ways and on a scale never possible before. It's an economy and culture called collaborative consumption, and, through it, people like Sebastian are becoming micro-entrepreneurs. They're empowered to make money and save money from their existing assets. But the real magic and the secret source behind collaborative consumption marketplaces like Airbnb isn't the inventory or the money. It's using the power of technology to build trust between strangers. This side of Airbnb really hit home to Sebastian last summer during the London riots. He woke up around 9, and he checked his email and he saw a bunch of messages all asking him if he was okay. Former guests from around the world had seen that the riots were happening just down the street, and wanted to check if he needed anything. Sebastian actually said to me, he said, "Thirteen former guests contacted me before my own mother rang." (Laughter) Now, this little anecdote gets to the heart of why I'm really passionate about collaborative consumption, and why, after I finished my book, I decided I'm going to try and spread this into a global movement. Because at its core, it's about empowerment. It's about empowering people to make meaningful connections, connections that are enabling us to rediscover a humanness that we've lost somewhere along the way, by engaging in marketplaces like Airbnb, like Kickstarter, like Etsy, that are built on personal relationships versus empty transactions. Now the irony is that these ideas are actually taking us back to old market principles and collaborative behaviors that are hard-wired in all of us. They're just being reinvented in ways that are relevant for the Facebook age. We're literally beginning to realize that we have wired our world to share, swap, rent, barter or trade just about anything. We're sharing our cars on WhipCar, our bikes on Spinlister, our offices on Loosecubes, our gardens on Landshare. We're lending and borrowing money from strangers on Zopa and Lending Club. We are trading lessons on everything from sushi-making to coding on Skillshare, and we're even sharing our pets on DogVacay. Now welcome to the wonderful world of collaborative consumption that's enabling us to match wants with haves in more democratic ways. Now, collaborative consumption is creating the start of a transformation in the way we think about supply and demand, but it's also a part of a massive value shift underway, where instead of consuming to keep up with the Joneses, people are consuming to get to know the Joneses. But the key reason why it's taking off now so fast is because every new advancement of technology increases the efficiency and the social glue of trust to make sharing easier and easier. Now, I've looked at thousands of these marketplaces, and trust and efficiency are always the critical ingredients. Let me give you an example. Meet 46-year-old Chris Mok, who has, I bet, the best job title here of SuperRabbit. Now, four years ago, Chris lost his job, unfortunately, as an art buyer at Macy's, and like so many people, he struggled to find a new one during the recession. And then he happened to stumble across a post about TaskRabbit. Now, the story behind TaskRabbit starts like so many great stories with a very cute dog by the name of Kobe. Now what happened was, in February 2008, Leah and her husband were waiting for a cab to take them out for dinner, when Kobe came trotting up to them and he was salivating with saliva. They realized they'd run out of dog food. Kevin had to cancel the cab and trudge out in the snow. Now, later that evening, the two self-confessed tech geeks starting talking about how cool it would be if some kind of eBay for errands existed. Six months later, Leah quit her job, and TaskRabbit was born. At the time, she didn't realize that she was actually hitting on a bigger idea she later called service networking. It's essentially about how we use our online relationships to get things done in the real world. Now the way TaskRabbit works is, people outsource the tasks that they want doing, name the price they're willing to pay, and then vetted Rabbits bid to run the errand. Yes, there's actually a four-stage, rigorous interview process that's designed to find the people that would make great personal assistants and weed out the dodgy Rabbits. Now, there's over 4,000 Rabbits across the United States and 5,000 more on the waiting list. Now the tasks being posted are things that you might expect, like help with household chores or doing some supermarket runs. I actually learned the other day that 12 and a half thousand loads of laundry have been cleaned and folded through TaskRabbit. But I love that the number one task posted, over a hundred times a day, is something that many of us have felt the pain of doing: yes, assembling Ikea furniture. (Laughter) (Applause) It's brilliant. Now, we may laugh, but Chris here is actually making up to 5,000 dollars a month running errands around his life. And 70 percent of this new labor force were previously unemployed or underemployed. I think TaskRabbit and other examples of collaborative consumption are like lemonade stands on steroids. They're just brilliant. Now, when you think about it, it's amazing, right, that over the past 20 years, we've evolved from trusting people online to share information to trusting to handing over our credit card information, and now we're entering the third trust wave: connecting trustworthy strangers to create all kinds of people-powered marketplaces. I actually came across this fascinating study by the Pew Center this week that revealed that an active Facebook user is three times as likely as a non-Internet user to believe that most people are trustworthy. Virtual trust will transform the way we trust one another face to face. Now, with all of my optimism, and I am an optimist, comes a healthy dose of caution, or rather, an urgent need to address some pressing, complex questions. How to ensure our digital identities reflect our real world identities? Do we want them to be the same? How do we mimic the way trust is built face-to-face online? How do we stop people who've behaved badly in one community doing so under a different guise? In a similar way that companies often use some kind of credit rating to decide whether to give you a mobile plan, or the rate of a mortgage, marketplaces that depend on transactions between relative strangers need some kind of device to let you know that Sebastian and Chris are good eggs, and that device is reputation. Reputation is the measurement of how much a community trusts you. Let's just take a look at Chris. You can see that over 200 people have given him an average rating over 4.99 out of 5. There are over 20 pages of reviews of his work describing him as super-friendly and fast, and he's reached level 25, the highest level, making him a SuperRabbit. Now — (Laughter) -- I love that word, SuperRabbit. And interestingly, what Chris has noted is that as his reputation has gone up, so has his chances of winning a bid and how much he can charge. In other words, for SuperRabbits, reputation has a real world value. Now, I know what you might be thinking. Well, this isn't anything new. Just think of power sellers on eBay or star ratings on Amazon. The difference today is that, with every trade we make, comment we leave, person we flag, badge we earn, we leave a reputation trail of how well we can and can't be trusted. And it's not just the breadth but the volume of reputation data out there that is staggering. Just consider this: Five million nights have been booked on Airbnb in the past six months alone. 30 million rides have been shared on Carpooling.com. This year, two billion dollars worth of loans will go through peer-to-peer lending platforms. This adds up to millions of pieces of reputation data on how well we behave or misbehave. Now, capturing and correlating the trails of information that we leave in different places is a massive challenge, but one we're being asked to figure out. What the likes of Sebastian are starting to rightfully ask is, shouldn't they own their reputation data? Shouldn't the reputation that he's personally invested on building on Airbnb mean that it should travel with him from one community to another? What I mean by this is, say he started selling second-hand books on Amazon. Why should he have to start from scratch? It's a bit like when I moved from New York to Sydney. It was ridiculous. I couldn't get a mobile phone plan because my credit history didn't travel with me. I was essentially a ghost in the system. Now I'm not suggesting that the next stage of the reputation economy is about adding up multiple ratings into some kind of empty score. People's lives are too complex, and who wants to do that? I also want to be clear that this isn't about adding up tweets and likes and friends in a clout-like fashion. Those guys are measuring influence, not behaviors that indicate our trustworthiness. But the most important thing that we have to keep in mind is that reputation is largely contextual. Just because Sebastian is a wonderful host does not mean that he can assemble Ikea furniture. The big challenge is figuring out what data makes sense to pull, because the future's going to be driven by a smart aggregation of reputation, not a single algorithm. It's only a matter of time before we'll be able to perform a Facebook- or Google-like search and see a complete picture of someone's behaviors in different contexts over time. I envision a realtime stream of who has trusted you, when, where and why, your reliability on TaskRabbit, your cleanliness as a guest on Airbnb, the knowledge that you display on Quora or [unclear], they'll all live together in one place, and this will live in some kind of reputation dashboard that will paint a picture of your reputation capital. Now this is a concept that I'm currently researching and writing my next book on, and currently define as the worth of your reputation, your intentions, capabilities and values across communities and marketplaces. This isn't some far-off frontier. There are actually a wave of startups like Connect.Me and Legit and TrustCloud that are figuring out how you can aggregate, monitor and use your online reputation. Now, I realize that this concept may sound a little Big Brother to some of you, and yes, there are some enormous transparency and privacy issues to solve, but ultimately, if we can collect our personal reputation, we can actually control it more, and extract the immense value that will flow from it. Also, more so than our credit history, we can actually shape our reputation. Just think of Sebastian and how he bought the cat to influence his. Now privacy issues aside, the other really interesting issue I'm looking at is how do we empower digital ghosts, people [who] for whatever reason, are not active online, but are some of the most trustworthy people in the world? How do we take their contributions to their jobs, their communities and their families, and convert that value into reputation capital? Ultimately, when we get it right, reputation capital could create a massive positive disruption in who has power, trust and influence. A three-digit score, your traditional credit history, that only 30 percent of us actually know what it is, will no longer be the determining factor in how much things cost, what we can access, and, in many instances, limit what we can do in the world. Indeed, reputation is a currency that I believe will become more powerful than our credit history in the 21st century. Reputation will be the currency that says that you can trust me. Now the interesting thing is, reputation is the socioeconomic lubricant that makes collaborative consumption work and scale, but the sources it will be generated from, and its applications, are far bigger than this space alone. Let me give you one example from the world of recruiting, where reputation data will make the résumé seem like an archaic relic of the past. Four years ago, tech bloggers and entrepreneurs Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, decided to start something called Stack Overflow. Now, Stack Overflow is basically a platform where experienced programmers can ask other good programmers highly detailed technical questions on things like tiny pixels and chrome extensions. This site receives five and a half thousand questions a day, and 80 percent of these receive accurate answers. Now users earn reputation in a whole range of ways, but it's basically by convincing their peers they know what they're talking about. Now a few months after this site launched, the founders heard about something interesting, and it actually didn't surprise them. What they heard was that users were putting their reputation scores on the top of their résumés, and that recruiters were searching the platform to find people with unique talents. Now thousands of programmers today are finding better jobs this way, because Stack Overflow and the reputation dashboards provide a priceless window into how someone really behaves, and what their peers think of them. But the bigger principle of what's happening behind Stack Overflow, I think, is incredibly exciting. People are starting to realize that the reputation they generate in one place has value beyond the environments from which it was built. You know, it's very interesting. When you talk to super-users, whether that's SuperRabbits or super-people on Stack Overflow, or Uberhosts, they all talk about how having a high reputation unlocks a sense of their own power. On Stack Overflow, it creates a level playing field, enabling the people with the real talent to rise to the top. On Airbnb, the people often become more important than the spaces. On TaskRabbit, it gives people control of their economic activity. Now at the end of my tea with Sebastian, he told me how, on a bad, rainy day, when he hasn't had a customer in his bookstore, he thinks of all the people around the world who've said something wonderful about him, and what that says about him as a person. He's turning 50 this year, and he's convinced that the rich tapestry of reputation he's built on Airbnb will lead him to doing something interesting with the rest of his life. You know, there are only a few windows in history where the opportunity exists to reinvent part of how our socioeconomic system works. We're living through one of those moments. I believe that we are at the start of a collaborative revolution that will be as significant as the Industrial Revolution. In the 20th century, the invention of traditional credit transformed our consumer system, and in many ways controlled who had access to what. In the 21st century, new trust networks, and the reputation capital they generate, will reinvent the way we think about wealth, markets, power and personal identity, in ways we can't yet even imagine. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Applause)
What I'd like you to do is, just really quickly, is just, sort of, nod to the person on your right, and then nod to the person on your left. (Laughter) Now, chances are that over the last winter, if you had been a beehive, either you or one of the two people you just nodded at would have died. Now, that's an awful lot of bees. And this is the second year in a row we have lost over 30 percent of the colonies, or we estimate we've lost 30 percent of the colonies over the winter. Now, that's a lot, a lot of bees, and that's really important. And most of those losses are because of things we know. We know that there are these varroa mites that have introduced and caused a lot of losses, and we also have this new phenomenon, which I talked about last year, Colony Collapse Disorder. And here we see a picture on top of a hill in Central Valley last December. And below, you can see all these out yards, or temporary yards, where the colonies are brought in until February, and then they're shipped out to the almonds. And one documentary writer, who was here and looked at this two months after I was here, described this not as beehives but as a graveyard, with these empty white boxes with no bees left in them. Now, I'm going to sum up a year's worth of work in two sentences to say that we have been trying to figure out what the cause of this is. And what we know is that it's as if the bees have caught a flu. And this flu has wiped through the population of bees. In some cases, and in fact in most cases in one year, this flu was caused by a new virus to us, or newly identified by us, called Israeli Acute Paralysis virus. It was called that because a guy in Israel first found it, and he now regrets profoundly calling it that disease, because, of course, there's the implication. But we think this virus is pretty ubiquitous. It's also pretty clear that the bees sometimes catch other viruses or other flus, and so the question we're still struggling with, and the question that keeps us up at night, is why have the bees suddenly become so susceptible to this flu, and why are they so susceptible to these other diseases? And we don't have the answer to that yet, and we spend a lot of time trying to figure that out. We think perhaps it's a combination of factors. We know from the work of a very large and dynamic working team that, you know, we're finding a lot of different pesticides in the hive, and surprisingly, sometimes the healthiest hives have the most pesticides. And so we discover all these very strange things that we can't begin to understand. And so this opens up the whole idea of looking at colony health. Now of course, if you lose a lot of colonies, beekeepers can replace them very quickly. And that's why we've been able to recover from a lot of loss. If we lost one in every three cows in the winter, you know, the National Guard would be out. But what beekeepers can do is, if they have one surviving colony, they can split that colony in two. And then the one half that doesn't have a queen, they can buy a queen. It comes in the mail; it can come from Australia or Hawaii or Florida, and you can introduce that queen. And in fact, America was the first country that ever did mail-delivery queens and in fact, it's part of the postal code that you have to deliver queens by mail in order to make sure that we have enough bees in this country. If you don't just want a queen, you can buy, actually, a three-pound package of bees, which comes in the mail, and of course, the Postal Office is always very concerned when they get, you know, your three-pound packages of bees. And you can install this in your hive and replace that dead-out. So it means that beekeepers are very good at replacing dead-outs, and so they've been able to cover those losses. So even though we've lost 30 percent of the colonies every year, the same number of colonies have existed in the country, at about 2.4 million colonies. Now, those losses are tragic on many fronts, and one of those fronts is for the beekeeper. And it's really important to talk about beekeepers first, because beekeepers are among the most fascinating people you'll ever meet. If this was a group of beekeepers, you would have everyone from the card-carrying NRA member who's, you know, live free or die, to the, you know, the self-expressed quirky San Francisco backyard pig farmer. (Laughter) And you get all of these people in the same room, and they're all engaged and they're getting along, and they're all there because of the passion for bees. Now, there's another part of that community which are the commercial beekeepers, the ones who make their livelihood from beekeeping alone. And these tend to be some of the most independent, tenacious, intuitive, you know, inventive people you will ever meet. They're just fascinating. And they're like that all over the world. I had the privilege of working in Haiti just for two weeks earlier this year. And Haiti, if you've ever been there, is just a tragedy. I mean, there may be 100 explanations for why Haiti is the impoverished nation it is, but there is no excuse to see that sort of squalor. But you meet this beekeeper, and I met this beekeeper here, and he is one of the most knowledgeable beekeepers I've ever met. No formal education, but very knowledgeable. We needed beeswax for a project we were working on; he was so capable, he was able to render the nicest block of beeswax I have ever seen from cow dung, tin cans and his veil, which he used as a screening, right in this meadow. And so that ingenuity is inspiring. We also have Dave Hackenberg, who is the poster child of CCD. He's the one who first identified this condition and raised the alarm bells. And he has a history of these trucks, and he's moved these bees up and down the coast. And a lot of people talk about trucks and moving bees, and that being bad, but we've done that for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians used to move bees up and down the Nile on rafts, so this idea of a movable bee force is not new at all. And one of our real worries with Colony Collapse Disorder is the fact that it costs so much money to replace those dead-out colonies. And you can do that one year in a row, you may be able to do it two years in a row. But if you're losing 50 percent to 80 percent of your colonies, you can't survive three years in a row. And we're really worried about losing this segment of our industry. And that's important for many fronts, and one of them is because of that culture that's in agriculture. And these migratory beekeepers are the last nomads of America. You know, they pick up their hives; they move their families once or twice in a year. And if you look at Florida, in Dade City, Florida, that's where all the Pennsylvania beekeepers go. And then 20 miles down the road is Groveland, and that's where all the Wisconsin beekeepers go. And if you're ever in Central Valley in February, you go to this café at 10 o'clock in the morning, Kathy and Kate's. And that's where all the beekeepers come after a night of moving bees into the almond groves. They all have their breakfast and complain about everyone right there. And it's a great experience, and I really encourage you to drop in at that diner during that time, because that's quite essential American experience. And we see these families, these nomadic families, you know, father to son, father to son, and these guys are hurting. And they're not people who like to ask for help, although they are the most helpful people ever. If there's one guy who loses all his bees because of a truck overhaul, everyone pitches in and gives 20 hives to help him replace those lost colonies. And so, it's a very dynamic, and I think, historic and exciting community to be involved with. Of course, the real importance for bees is not the honey. And although I highly encourage you, all use honey. I mean, it's the most ethical sweetener, and you know, it's a dynamic and fun sweetener. But we estimate that about one in three bites of food we eat is directly or indirectly pollinated by honeybees. Now, I want to just illustrate that in the fact that if we look at the breakfast I had yesterday morning -- a little cranberry juice, some fruits, some granola, I should have had whole wheat bread, I realized, but you know, jam on my Wonderbread, and some coffee -- and had we taken out all those ingredients, -- except for the almonds I wasn't going to pick out from the granola -- if we had taken out all those ingredients the bees had indirectly or directly pollinated, we wouldn't have much on our plate. So if we did not have bees, it's not like we would starve, but clearly our diet would be diminished. It's said that for bees, the flower is the fountain of life, and for flowers bees are the messengers of love. And that's a really great expression, because really, bees are the sex workers for flowers. They are, you know -- they get paid for their services. They get paid by pollen and nectar, to move that male sperm, the pollen, from flower to flower. And there are flowers that are self-infertile. That means they can't -- the pollen in their bloom can't fertilize themselves. So in an apple orchard, for instance, you'll have rows of 10 apples of one variety, and then you have another apple tree that's a different type of pollen. And bees are very faithful. When they're out pollinating or gathering pollen from one flower, they stay to that crop exclusively, in order to help generate. And of course, they're made to carry this pollen. They build up a static electric charge and the pollen jumps on them and helps spread that pollen from bloom to bloom. However, honeybees are a minority. Honeybees are not native to America; they were introduced with the colonialists. And there are actually more species of bees than there are mammals and birds combined. In Pennsylvania alone, we have been surveying bees for 150 years, and very intensely in the last three years. We have identified over 400 species of bees in Pennsylvania. Thirty-two species have not been identified or found in the state since 1950. Now, that could be because we haven't been sampling right, but it does, I think, suggest that something's wrong with the pollinator force. And these bees are fascinating. We have bumblebees on the top. And bumblebees are what we call eusocial: they're not truly social, because only the queen is, over winter. We also have the sweat bees, and these are little gems flying around. They're like tiny little flies and they fly around. And then you have another type of bee, which we call kleptoparasites, which is a very fancy way of saying, bad-minded, murdering -- what's the word I'm looking for? Murdering -- Audience: Bee? Dennis vanEngelsdorp: Bee. Okay, thanks. (Laughter) What these bees do is, they sit there. These solitary bees, they drill a hole in the ground or drill a hole in a branch, and they collect pollen and make it into a ball, and they lay an egg on it. Well, these bees hang out at that hole, and they wait for that mother to fly away, they go in, eat the egg, and lay their own egg there. So they don't do any work. And so, in fact, if you know you have these kleptoparasitic bees, you know that your environment is healthy, because they're top-of-the-food-chain bees. And in fact, there is now a red list of pollinators that we're worried have disappeared, and on top of that list are a lot of these kleptoparasites, but also these bumblebees. And in fact, if you guys live on the West Coast, go to these websites here, and they're really looking for people to look for some of these bumblebees, because we think some have gone extinct. Or some, the population has declined. And so it's not just honeybees that are in trouble, but we don't understand these native pollinators or all those other parts of our community. And of course, bees are not the only important factor here. There are other animals that pollinate, like bats, and bats are in trouble too. And I'm glad I'm a bee man and not a bat man, because there's no money to research the bat problems. And bats are dying at an extraordinary rate. White-nose syndrome has wiped out populations of bats. If there's a cave in New York that had 15,000 bats in it, and there are 1,000 left. That's like San Francisco becoming the population of half of this county in three years. And so that's incredible. And there's no money to do that. But I'm glad to say that I think we know the cause of all these conditions, and that cause is NDD: Nature Deficit Disorder. And that is that I think that what we have in our society is, we forgot our connection with nature. And I think if we reconnect to nature, we'll be able to have the resources and that interest to solve these problems. And I think that there is an easy cure for NDD. And that is, make meadows and not lawns. And I think we have lost our connection, and this is a wonderful way of reconnecting to our environment. I've had the privilege of living by a meadow for the last little while, and it is terribly engaging. And if we look at the history of lawns, it's actually rather tragic. It used to be, two, three hundred years ago, that a lawn was a symbol of prestige, and so it was only the very rich that could keep these green actually, deserts: they're totally sterile. Americans spent, in 2001 -- 11 percent of all pesticide use was done on lawns. Five percent of our greenhouse gases are produced by mowing our lawns. And so it's incredible the amount of resources we've spent keeping our lawns, which are these useless biosystems. And so we need to rethink this idea. In fact, you know, the White House used to have sheep in front in order to help fund the war effort in World War I, which probably is not a bad idea; it wouldn't be a bad idea. I want to say this not because I'm opposed completely to mowing lawns. I think that there is perhaps some advantage to keeping lawns at a limited scale, and I think we're encouraged to do that. But I also want to reinforce some of the ideas we've heard here, because having a meadow or living by a meadow is transformational. That it is amazing that connection we can have with what's there. These milkweed plants have grown up in my meadow over the last four years. Add to watch the different plants, or insects, that come to these flowers, to watch that -- and we've heard about, you know, this relationship you can have with wine, this companion you can have as it matures and as it has these different fragrances. And this is a companion, and this is a relationship that never dries up. You never run out of that companion as you drink this wine, too. And I encourage you to look at that. Now, not all of us have meadows, or lawns that we can convert, and so you can always, of course, grow a meadow in a pot. Bees apparently, can be the gateway to, you know, other things. So I'm not saying that you should plant a meadow of pot, but a pot in a meadow. But you can also have this great community of city or building-top beekeepers, these beekeepers that live -- This is in Paris where these beekeepers live. And everyone should open a beehive, because it is the most amazing, incredible thing. And if we want to cure ourselves of NDD, or Nature Deficit Disorder, I think this is a great way of doing it. Get a beehive and grow a meadow, and watch that life come back into your life. And so with that, I think that what we can do, if we do this, we can make sure that our future -- our more perfect future -- includes beekeepers and it includes bees and it includes those meadows. And that journey -- that journey of transformation that occurs as you grow your meadow and as you keep your bees or you watch those native bees there -- is an extremely exciting one. And I hope that you experience it and I hope you tell me about it one day. So thank you very much for being here. Thank you very much.
I'm going to talk about the simple truth in leadership in the 21st century. In the 21st century, we need to actually look at -- and what I'm actually going to encourage you to consider today -- is to go back to our school days when we learned how to count. But I think it's time for us to think about what we count. Because what we actually count truly counts. Let me start by telling you a little story. This is Van Quach. She came to this country in 1986 from Vietnam. She changed her name to Vivian because she wanted to fit in here in America. Her first job was at an inner-city motel in San Francisco as a maid. I happened to buy that motel about three months after Vivian started working there. So Vivian and I have been working together for 23 years. With the youthful idealism of a 26-year-old, in 1987, I started my company and I called it Joie de Vivre, a very impractical name, because I actually was looking to create joy of life. And this first hotel that I bought, motel, was a pay-by-the-hour, no-tell motel in the inner-city of San Francisco. As I spent time with Vivian, I saw that she had sort of a joie de vivre in how she did her work. It made me question and curious: How could someone actually find joy in cleaning toilets for a living? So I spent time with Vivian, and I saw that she didn't find joy in cleaning toilets. Her job, her goal and her calling was not to become the world's greatest toilet scrubber. What counts for Vivian was the emotional connection she created with her fellow employees and our guests. And what gave her inspiration and meaning was the fact that she was taking care of people who were far away from home. Because Vivian knew what it was like to be far away from home. That very human lesson, more than 20 years ago, served me well during the last economic downturn we had. In the wake of the dotcom crash and 9/11, San Francisco Bay Area hotels went through the largest percentage revenue drop in the history of American hotels. We were the largest operator of hotels in the Bay Area, so we were particularly vulnerable. But also back then, remember we stopped eating French fries in this country. Well, not exactly, of course not. We started eating "freedom fries," and we started boycotting anything that was French. Well, my name of my company, Joie de Vivre -- so I started getting these letters from places like Alabama and Orange County saying to me that they were going to boycott my company because they thought we were a French company. And I'd write them back, and I'd say, "What a minute. We're not French. We're an American company. We're based in San Francisco." And I'd get a terse response: "Oh, that's worse." (Laughter) So one particular day when I was feeling a little depressed and not a lot of joie de vivre, I ended up in the local bookstore around the corner from our offices. And I initially ended up in the business section of the bookstore looking for a business solution. But given my befuddled state of mind, I ended up in the self-help section very quickly. That's where I got reacquainted with Abraham Maslow's "hierarchy of needs." I took one psychology class in college, and I learned about this guy, Abraham Maslow, as many of us are familiar with his hierarchy of needs. But as I sat there for four hours, the full afternoon, reading Maslow, I recognized something that is true of most leaders. One of the simplest facts in business is something that we often neglect, and that is that we're all human. Each of us, no matter what our role is in business, has some hierarchy of needs in the workplace. So as I started reading more Maslow, what I started to realize is that Maslow, later in his life, wanted to take this hierarchy for the individual and apply it to the collective, to organizations and specifically to business. But unfortunately, he died prematurely in 1970, and so he wasn't really able to live that dream completely. So I realized in that dotcom crash that my role in life was to channel Abe Maslow. And that's what I did a few years ago when I took that five-level hierarchy of needs pyramid and turned it into what I call the transformation pyramid, which is survival, success and transformation. It's not just fundamental in business, it's fundamental in life. And we started asking ourselves the questions about how we were actually addressing the higher needs, these transformational needs for our key employees in the company. These three levels of the hierarchy needs relate to the five levels of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But as we started asking ourselves about how we were addressing the higher needs of our employees and our customers, I realized we had no metrics. We had nothing that actually could tell us whether we were actually getting it right. So we started asking ourselves: What kind of less obvious metrics could we use to actually evaluate our employees' sense of meaning, or our customers' sense of emotional connection with us? For example, we actually started asking our employees, do they understand the mission of our company, and do they feel like they believe in it, can they actually influence it, and do they feel that their work actually has an impact on it? We started asking our customers, did they feel an emotional connection with us, in one of seven different kinds of ways. Miraculously, as we asked these questions and started giving attention higher up the pyramid, what we found is we created more loyalty. Our customer loyalty skyrocketed. Our employee turnover dropped to one-third of the industry average, and during that five year dotcom bust, we tripled in size. As I went out and started spending time with other leaders out there and asking them how they were getting through that time, what they told me over and over again was that they just manage what they can measure. What we can measure is that tangible stuff at the bottom of the pyramid. They didn't even see the intangible stuff higher up the pyramid. So I started asking myself the question: How can we get leaders to start valuing the intangible? If we're taught as leaders to just manage what we can measure, and all we can measure is the tangible in life, we're missing a whole lot of things at the top of the pyramid. So I went out and studied a bunch of things, and I found a survey that showed that 94 percent of business leaders worldwide believe that the intangibles are important in their business, things like intellectual property, their corporate culture, their brand loyalty, and yet, only five percent of those same leaders actually had a means of measuring the intangibles in their business. So as leaders, we understand that intangibles are important, but we don't have a clue how to measure them. So here's another Einstein quote: "Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted." I hate to argue with Einstein, but if that which is most valuable in our life and our business actually can't be counted or valued, aren't we going to spend our lives just mired in measuring the mundane? It was that sort of heady question about what counts that led me to take my CEO hat off for a week and fly off to the Himalayan peaks. I flew off to a place that's been shrouded in mystery for centuries, a place some folks call Shangri-La. It's actually moved from the survival base of the pyramid to becoming a transformational role model for the world. I went to Bhutan. The teenage king of Bhutan was also a curious man, but this was back in 1972, when he ascended to the throne two days after his father passed away. At age 17, he started asking the kinds of questions that you'd expect of someone with a beginner's mind. On a trip through India, early in his reign as king, he was asked by an Indian journalist about the Bhutanese GDP, the size of the Bhutanese GDP. The king responded in a fashion that actually has transformed us four decades later. He said the following, he said: "Why are we so obsessed and focused with gross domestic product? Why don't we care more about gross national happiness?" Now, in essence, the king was asking us to consider an alternative definition of success, what has come to be known as GNH, or gross national happiness. Most world leaders didn't take notice, and those that did thought this was just "Buddhist economics." But the king was serious. This was a notable moment, because this was the first time a world leader in almost 200 years had suggested that intangible of happiness -- that leader 200 years ago, Thomas Jefferson with the Declaration of Independence -- 200 years later, this king was suggesting that intangible of happiness is something that we should measure, and it's something we should actually value as government officials. For the next three dozen years as king, this king actually started measuring and managing around happiness in Bhutan -- including, just recently, taking his country from being an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy with no bloodshed, no coup. Bhutan, for those of you who don't know it, is the newest democracy in the world, just two years ago. So as I spent time with leaders in the GNH movement, I got to really understand what they're doing. And I got to spend some time with the prime minister. Over dinner, I asked him an impertinent question. I asked him, "How can you create and measure something which evaporates -- in other words, happiness?" And he's a very wise man, and he said, "Listen, Bhutan's goal is not to create happiness. We create the conditions for happiness to occur. In other words, we create a habitat of happiness." Wow, that's interesting. He said that they have a science behind that art, and they've actually created four essential pillars, nine key indicators and 72 different metrics that help them to measure their GNH. One of those key indicators is: How do the Bhutanese feel about how they spend their time each day? It's a good question. How do you feel about how you spend your time each day? Time is one of the scarcest resources in the modern world. And yet, of course, that little intangible piece of data doesn't factor into our GDP calculations. As I spent my week up in the Himalayas, I started to imagine what I call an emotional equation. And it focuses on something I read long ago from a guy named Rabbi Hyman Schachtel. How many know him? Anybody? 1954, he wrote a book called "The Real Enjoyment of Living," and he suggested that happiness is not about having what you want; instead, it's about wanting what you have. Or in other words, I think the Bhutanese believe happiness equals wanting what you have -- imagine gratitude -- divided by having what you want -- gratification. The Bhutanese aren't on some aspirational treadmill, constantly focused on what they don't have. Their religion, their isolation, their deep respect for their culture and now the principles of their GNH movement all have fostered a sense of gratitude about what they do have. How many of us here, as TEDsters in the audience, spend more of our time in the bottom half of this equation, in the denominator? We are a bottom-heavy culture in more ways than one. (Laughter) The reality is, in Western countries, quite often we do focus on the pursuit of happiness as if happiness is something that we have to go out -- an object that we're supposed to get, or maybe many objects. Actually, in fact, if you look in the dictionary, many dictionaries define pursuit as to "chase with hostility." Do we pursue happiness with hostility? Good question. But back to Bhutan. Bhutan's bordered on its north and south by 38 percent of the world's population. Could this little country, like a startup in a mature industry, be the spark plug that influences a 21st century of middle-class in China and India? Bhutan's created the ultimate export, a new global currency of well-being, and there are 40 countries around the world today that are studying their own GNH. You may have heard, this last fall Nicolas Sarkozy in France announcing the results of an 18-month study by two Nobel economists, focusing on happiness and wellness in France. Sarkozy suggested that world leaders should stop myopically focusing on GDP and consider a new index, what some French are calling a "joie de vivre index." I like it. Co-branding opportunities. Just three days ago, three days ago here at TED, we had a simulcast of David Cameron, potentially the next prime minister of the UK, quoting one of my favorite speeches of all-time, Robert Kennedy's poetic speech from 1968 when he suggested that we're myopically focused on the wrong thing and that GDP is a misplaced metric. So it suggests that the momentum is shifting. I've taken that Robert Kennedy quote, and I've turned it into a new balance sheet for just a moment here. This is a collection of things that Robert Kennedy said in that quote. GDP counts everything from air pollution to the destruction of our redwoods. But it doesn't count the health of our children or the integrity of our public officials. As you look at these two columns here, doesn't it make you feel like it's time for us to start figuring out a new way to count, a new way to imagine what's important to us in life? (Applause) Certainly Robert Kennedy suggested at the end of the speech exactly that. He said GDP "measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile." Wow. So how do we do that? Let me say one thing we can just start doing ten years from now, at least in this country. Why in the heck in America are we doing a census in 2010? We're spending 10 billion dollars on the census. We're asking 10 simple questions -- it is simplicity. But all of those questions are tangible. They're about demographics. They're about where you live, how many people you live with, and whether you own your home or not. That's about it. We're not asking meaningful metrics. We're not asking important questions. We're not asking anything that's intangible. Abe Maslow said long ago something you've heard before, but you didn't realize it was him. He said, "If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail." We've been fooled by our tool. Excuse that expression. (Laughter) We've been fooled by our tool. GDP has been our hammer. And our nail has been a 19th- and 20th-century industrial-era model of success. And yet, 64 percent of the world's GDP today is in that intangible industry we call service, the service industry, the industry I'm in. And only 36 percent is in the tangible industries of manufacturing and agriculture. So maybe it's time that we get a bigger toolbox, right? Maybe it's time we get a toolbox that doesn't just count what's easily counted, the tangible in life, but actually counts what we most value, the things that are intangible. I guess I'm sort of a curious CEO. I was also a curious economics major as an undergrad. I learned that economists measure everything in tangible units of production and consumption as if each of those tangible units is exactly the same. They aren't the same. In fact, as leaders, what we need to learn is that we can influence the quality of that unit of production by creating the conditions for our employees to live their calling. In Vivian's case, her unit of production isn't the tangible hours she works, it's the intangible difference she makes during that one hour of work. This is Dave Arringdale who's actually been a longtime guest at Vivian's motel. He stayed there a hundred times in the last 20 years, and he's loyal to the property because of the relationship that Vivian and her fellow employees have created with him. They've created a habitat of happiness for Dave. He tells me that he can always count on Vivian and the staff there to make him feel at home. Why is it that business leaders and investors quite often don't see the connection between creating the intangible of employee happiness with creating the tangible of financial profits in their business? We don't have to choose between inspired employees and sizable profits, we can have both. In fact, inspired employees quite often help make sizable profits, right? So what the world needs now, in my opinion, is business leaders and political leaders who know what to count. We count numbers. We count on people. What really counts is when we actually use our numbers to truly take into account our people. I learned that from a maid in a motel and a king of a country. What can you start counting today? What one thing can you start counting today that actually would be meaningful in your life, whether it's your work life or your business life? Thank you very much. (Applause)
First of all, for those of you who are not familiar with my work, I create multicultural characters, so characters from lots of different backgrounds. So before the present is the new future, a bit about the past is that I grew up in a family that was multi-everything -- multi-racial, multi-cultural, black and white, Caribbean, Irish-American, German-American. There was Dominican music blasting from stereos. There were Christians and Jews. That's a long story filled with intrigue and interfaith guilt and shame. But I was totally immersed in this world that was filled with everybody, and then I went on to the United Nations school, and that just completely — So I began sort of developing these voices and these people, all of whom were loosely based on people I really know, and so, for example, in performing them, I would really try to inhabit them. And for example, I don't really talk like that, but that was one of my people, and I'm going to bring a few of my friends -- I think of them as my friends — to this stage, in this spirit of the idea that the present is the new future, in sort of a meta way, because I thought about it, and the future, for me, what can be so frightening is that I don't know what's coming. I don't know if that's true for other people, but that notion of thinking about how we can understand the future and predict outcomes, for me, it's terrifying to not know what might be coming. And so the idea that there are questions that I've never seen that my people are going to answer, and some of these characters have been with me for ages, some of them don't even have names, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what's coming, and all I can do is remind myself that I told Chris I'd fly by the seat of my pants, and now that I'm up here it sort of feels like that dream where you don't have any pants on, and so I suppose I'm going to be flying by the seat of my ass. That said, let's just see who comes out. May we have the first question: "Do you ever get headaches from the microchips implanted in your brain?" Right. Okay. Well first of all, I'll just say that I hope you can hear me okay. My name is Lorraine Levine, and the idea of microchips implanted in my brain, frankly, just putting on my glasses reminds me of thank God I'm not wearing the Google Glasses. No offense to them. I'm glad that you all enjoy them, but at my age, just putting on the regular ones I have already gives me too much information. Do you understand what I'm saying to you? I don't need to know more. I don't want to know. That's it. That's enough. I love you all. You're wonderful. It's fabulous to be here with such big machers again this year. Mwah! Okay, next question. (Applause) Next, please. "Is dating boring, now that humans reproduce asexually?" Who do we got? Hi, um, okay, hi everybody. My name is Nereida. I just want to say first of all that dating is never boring under any circumstance. But I am very excited to be here right now, so I am just trying to remind myself that, you know, like, the purpose of being here and everything, I mean, trying to answer these questions, it is very exciting. But I also, I just need to acknowledge that TED is an incredible experience right now in the present, like, I just need to say, like, Isabel Allende. Isabel Allende! Okay, maybe it doesn't mean, of course it means something to you, but to me, it's like, another level, okay? Because I'm Latina and I really appreciate the fact that there are role models here that I can really, I don't know, I just need to say that. That's incredible to me, and sometimes when I'm nervous and everything like that, I just need to, like, say some affirmations that can help me. I usually just try to use, like, the three little words that always make me feel better: Sotomayor, Sotomayor, Sotomayor. (Laughter) Just, it really helps me to get grounded. Now I can use Allende, Allende, Allende, and, you know, I just need to say it, like, it's so incredible to be here, and I knew that we were going to have these questions. I was so nervous and I was thinking just, like, oh my God, oh my God, and reminding me, because I've had, like, some very, especially since the last time we were here at TED, it was, like, unbelievable, and then right after that, like, so many crazy things happened, like, we ended up going to the White House to perform. That was, like, amazing, and I'm standing there, and I was just like, please don't say, "Oh my God." Don't say, "Oh my God." And I just kept saying it: "Oh my God. Oh my God." And, you know, I kept thinking to myself, like, President Obama has to come up here at the same podium, and I'm standing here saying, "Oh my God." It's like, the separation of church and state. It's just, I couldn't, like, I couldn't process. It was really too much. So I think I've lost my way. But what I wanted to say is that dating, for me, you know, as far as I'm concerned, however you reproduce, as long as you're enjoying yourself and it's with another consenting asexual -- I don't know. You know where I'm going with that. Okay, ciao, gracias. Okay, next question. (Applause) What are your top five favorite songs right now? All right, well first of all, I'mma say, you know what I'm saying, I'm the only dude up here right now. My name is Rashid, and I never been at TED before, you know what I'm saying. I think, Sarah Jones, maybe she didn't want me to come out last time. I don't know why. You know what I'm saying. Obviously I would be like a perfect fit for TED. You know what I'm saying. First of all, that I'm in hip hop, you know what I'm saying. I know some of y'all may be not really as much into the music, but the first way y'all can always know, you know what I'm saying, that I'm in hip hop, is 'cos I hold the microphone in an official emcee posture. Y'all can see that right there. That's how you hold it. All right, so you get your little tutorial right there. But when Sarah Jones told me we was gonna come up here, I was like, betch, you know what I'm saying, TED is real fly, I got a whole lot of dope, you know what I'm saying, shit going on and everything, but she was like, yeah, we're going to have to answer, like, some random questions, just like, and I was like, what the hell is that? You know what I'm saying, just stand up there and answer some random questions? I don't want to, I mean, it's like an intellectual stop-and-frisk. You know what I'm saying? (Laughter) I don't want to be standing up there just all getting interrogated and whatnot. That's what I'm trying to leave behind in New York. You know what I'm saying? So anyway, I would have to say my top five songs right now is all out of my own personal catalogue, you know what I mean? So if you want to know more about that, you know what I'm saying, we could talk about the anti-piracy and all that, but as far as I'm concerned, you know, I believe in creative commons, and I think it's really important that, you know, that needs to be sustainable and everything, and I mean, as far as I'm concerned, I mean, this right here, this environment, I would like to sustain. You know what I mean? But I'm just saying, if y'all are interested in the top five songs, you need to holler at me. You know what I'm saying? Aight? In the future or the present. Yeah. Enjoy the rest of it. Okay, next question. What do you got? "How many of your organs have been 3D printed?" (Laughter) Well I have to say that I don't know about how many of my organs have been 3-D printed as such, but I can tell you that it is so challenging to me, kind of thinking about this concept of the future and that, you know, all around the world parents are kind of telling their small children, please, you have to eat that, you know, I have slaved over a hot 3D printer all day so that you can have this meal. You know, that kind of thing. And of course now that we have changed, you know, from the global South, there is this total kind of perspective shift that is happening around the -- You can't just say to them, well, there are starving children. Well, it is the future. Nobody is starving anymore, thank God. But as you can tell I have kind of that optimism, and I do hope that we can continue to kind of 3D print, well, let us just say I like to think that even in the future we will have the publication, kind of, you know, all the food that's fit to print. But everybody, please do enjoy that, and again, I think that you do throw a cracking good party here at TED. Thank you. Next question. (Applause) What has changed? Okay, it's like, I have to think about that. "What has changed now that women run the world?" First of all, I really, like, I just want to say, and my name is Bella, I just want to, like, identify myself, that, like, as a feminist, I, like, I really find that, like, because I was born in the '90s, and, like, there were a lot of women who were as far as feminism was concerned, like, maybe they didn't understand that, like, a feminist like me, like, I don't think it's required that you have to have a certain kind of voice, or, like, a certain way of presenting yourself to be feminist, because I think that, like, feminism can be really hot, and I think actually that it's really vital and important. Like, the quotation I'm wearing is from, like, Gloria Steinem, and, like, I'm named Bella for, like, Bella Abzug, who's, like, obviously, like, a really important feminist from, like, history, and like, I just think that those women, like, really represent, like, that you can, like, be vital and, like, amazing, like, a-mazing, and you don't have to wear, like, an Eileen Fisher caftan, just to, like, prove that you are a feminist. Like, not that there's anything wrong with that, but my mom, she's like, like, why do you have to wear pants that, like, objectify your body? I like my pants. Like, I like my voice. Like, she's like, why do you have to talk like — Talk like what? Like, I'm expressing myself, and I think that we have to, like, reach out, like, not only across, like, the different generations of feminists, but also across the, like, vocal ranges, so that, like, we, because otherwise it's just, like, restriculous within feminism, which is just, like, a word that I created that means, like, so strict it's ridiculous. So that's my feeling about that. You guys are a-mazing, by the way. Okay. Next question. (Applause) ["They've discovered a cure for cancer, but not baldness? What's up with that?"] Yeah, you know what, so my name is Joseph Mancuso. First of all, I just want to say that I appreciate that TED in general has been a pretty orderly crowd, a pretty orderly group. And, you know, I just have to say, the whole thing with baldness, and, you know, here's the thing. As long as the woman, in my case -- because it's a modern world, do whatever you want to do, I don't have any problem with anybody, enjoy yourself, LGBTQLMNOP. All right? But as far as I'm concerned, attractiveness, women don't really care as much as you think they do about the, you know. I mean, I remember hearing this woman. She loved her husband, it was the sweetest thing. It's a pretty young girl, you know? And this guy's older. And, you know, she said she would love him even if he had snow on the roof or even if melted and disappeared altogether. As far as I'm concerned, it's about the love. Am I right, or am I right? So that's it. That's it. That's it. I don't got nothing more to say. Keep your noses clean. All right, next question. "Have you ever tasted meat that's not lab grown?" Um, well, I, I want to start by saying that this is a very difficult experience for a Chinese-American. I don't know what to call myself now, because I have really my Chinese identity, but my kids, they are American-Chinese, but it's difficult to try to express myself in front of audience of people like this. But if had to give my opinion about meat, I think first, the most important thing is to say that we don't have to have perfect food, but maybe it can also not be poison. Maybe we can have some middle ground for that. But I will continue to consider this idea, and I will report back maybe next year. Next. Next. Next. (Applause) "Will there ever be a post-racial world?" Thank you for having me. My name is Gary Weaselhead. Enjoy that. I'm a member of the Blackfeet Nation. I'm also half Lakota, but that is my given name, and no, even though it would have seemed like an obvious choice, no, I did not go into politics. Tough crowd. (Laughter) But I always like to just let people know when they ask about race or those kinds of things, you know, as a member of the First Nations community, you know, I'm probably not your typical guy. For example, in addition to being an activist, I'm also a professional stand-up comedian. (Laughter) And, you know, I'm most popular on college and university campuses. You know, whenever they want to do a diversity day, or hey-we're-not-all-white week, then I'm there. (Laughter) Do I think there will ever be a post-racial world? I think, really, I can't talk about race without remembering that it is a construct in certain respects, but also that, you know, until we redress the wrongs of the past, we're going to be turned around. I don't care if the present is the new future. I think there's a lot of great people here at TED who are working to address that, so with that, if anything I've said today makes you feel uncomfortable, you're welcome. (Applause) I think we have time for one more. "What's the most popular diet these days?" Who's here? Okay, well, I'm just gonna answer this really fast, as, like, three or four different people. I mean really fast. I'm just gonna let y'all know that, as far as diet is concerned, if you don't love yourself inside, there is no diet on this Earth that is going to make your behind small enough for you to feel good, so just stop wasting your time. I would just like to say as an African woman that I believe the diet that we need is really to remove the crazy belief that there is anything wrong with a nice backside. No, I am teasing about that. There is nothing wrong with a woman of size. That is what I am trying to say. Women, celebrate your body, for God's sake. Stop running around starving. You are making yourselves and other people miserable. Last answer. So we're talking about what's the most popular diet? I'm gonna start off by telling y'all that this is my first time here at TED. I might not be your typical person you find on this stage. My dental work not as nice as some people. But I made Sarah Jones promise she gonna bring me this time, 'cause she didn't bring me before, but you know, I just want to say, there's a lot of things more important than counting calories, and as somebody living on the streets in New York, and getting to come here, hear y'all ideas worth spreading, I want to tell y'all I believe in this idea that the present is the new future, that where you sit, you create everything that's gonna come, for better or worse. And for me, I think homeless is the wrong word for it anyway. You know, I might not have me no place to lay my head at night, but that just makes me houseless. I have me a home. You do too. Find it and try to find yourself in there. Make sure you know, it's not just about virtual reality in space. That's wonderful, but it's also about the actual reality here on Earth. How are people living today? How can you be part of the solution? Thank y'all for thinking about that right now in the present moment to influence the future. I appreciate it. Bye-bye. (Applause) Thank you all very, very much. Thank you for trusting me, Chris. (Applause)
Aside from keeping the rain out and producing some usable space, architecture is nothing but a special-effects machine that delights and disturbs the senses. Our work is across media. The work comes in all shapes and sizes. It's small and large. This is an ashtray, a water glass. From urban planning and master planning to theater and all sorts of stuff. The thing that all the work has in common is that it challenges the assumptions about conventions of space. And these are everyday conventions, conventions that are so obvious that we are blinded by their familiarity. And I've assembled a sampling of work that all share a kind of productive nihilism that's used in the service of creating a particular special effect. And that is something like nothing, or something next to nothing. It's done through a form of subtraction or obstruction or interference in a world that we naturally sleepwalk through. This is an image that won us a competition for an exhibition pavilion for the Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchatel, near Geneva. And we wanted to use the water not only as a context, but as a primary building material. We wanted to make an architecture of atmosphere. So, no walls, no roof, no purpose -- just a mass of atomized water, a big cloud. And this proposal was a reaction to the over-saturation of emergent technologies in recent national and world expositions, which feeds, or has been feeding, our insatiable appetite for visual stimulation with an ever greater digital virtuosity. High definition, in our opinion, has become the new orthodoxy. And we ask the question, can we use technology, high technology, to make an expo pavilion that's decidedly low definition, that also challenges the conventions of space and skin, and rethinks our dependence on vision? So this is how we sought to do it. Water's pumped from the lake and is filtered and shot as a fine mist through an array of high-pressure fog nozzles, 35,000 of them. And a weather station is on the structure. It reads the shifting conditions of temperature, humidity, wind direction, wind speed, dew point, and it processes this data in a central computer that calibrates the degree of water pressure and distribution of water throughout. And it's a responsive system that's trained on actual weather. So, this is just in construction, and there's a tensegrity structure. It's about 300 feet wide, the size of a football field, and it sits on just four very delicate columns. These are the fog nozzles, the interface, and basically the system is kind of reading the real weather, and producing kind of semi-artificial and real weather. So, we're very interested in creating weather. I don't know why. Now, here we go, one side, the outside and then from the inside of the space you can see what the quality of the space was. Unlike entering any normal space, entering Blur is like stepping into a habitable medium. It's formless, featureless, depthless, scaleless, massless, purposeless and dimensionless. All references are erased, leaving only an optical whiteout and white noise of the pulsing nozzles. So, this is an exhibition pavilion where there is absolutely nothing to see and nothing to do. And we pride ourselves -- it's a spectacular anti-spectacle in which all the conventions of spectacle are turned on their head. So, the audience is dispersed, focused attention and dramatic build-up and climax are all replaced by a kind of attenuated attention that's sustained by a sense of apprehension caused by the fog. And this is very much like how the Victorian novel used fog in this way. So here the world is put out of focus, while our visual dependence is put into focus. The public, you know, once disoriented can actually ascend to the angel deck above and then just come down under those lips into the water bar. So, all the waters of the world are served there, so we thought that, you know, after being at the water and moving through the water and breathing the water, you could also drink this building. And so it is sort of a theme, but it goes a little bit, you know, deeper than that. We really wanted to bring out our absolute dependence on this master sense, and maybe share our kind of sensibility with our other senses. You know, when we did this project it was a kind of tough sell, because the Swiss said, "Well, why are we going to spend, you know, 10 million dollars producing an effect that we already have in natural abundance that we hate?" And, you know, we thought -- well, we tried to convince them. And in the end, you know, they adapted this as a national icon that came to represent Swiss doubt, which we -- you know, it was kind of a meaning machine that everybody kind of laid on their own meanings off of. Anyway, it's a temporary structure that was ultimately destroyed, and so it's now a memory of an apparition, actually, but it continues to live in edible form. And this is the highest honor to be bestowed upon an architect in Switzerland -- to have a chocolate bar. Anyway, moving along. So in the '80s and '90s, we were mostly known for independent work, such as installation artist, architect, commissioned projects by museums and non-for-profit organizations. And we did a lot of media work, also a lot of experimental theater projects. In 2003, the Whitney mounted a retrospective of our work that featured a lot of this work from the '80s and '90s. However, the work itself resisted the very nature of a retrospective, and this is just some of the stuff that was in the show. This was a piece on tourism in the United States. This is "Soft Sell" for 42nd Street. This was something done at the Cartier Foundation. "Master/Slave" at the MOMA, the project series, a piece called "Parasite." And so there were many, many of these kinds of projects. Anyway, they gave us the whole fourth floor, and, you know, the problem of the retrospective was something we were very uncomfortable with. It's a kind of invention of the museum that's supposed to bring a kind of cohesive understanding to the public of a body of work. And our work doesn't really resolve itself into a body in any way at all. And one of the recurring themes, by the way, that in the work was a kind of hostility toward the museum itself, and asking about the conventions of the museum, like the wall, the white wall. So, what you see here is basically a plan of many installations that were put there. And we actually had to install white walls to separate these pieces, which didn't belong together. But these white walls became a kind of target and weapon at the same time. We used the wall to partition the 13 installations of the project and produce a kind of acoustic and visual separation. And what you see is -- actually, the red dotted line shows the track of this performing element, which was a new piece that created -- that we created for the -- which was a robotic drill, basically, that went all the way around, cruised the museum, went all around the walls and did a lot of damage. So, the drill was mounted on this robotic arm. We worked with, by the way, Honeybee Robotics. This is the brain. Honeybee Robotics designed the Mars Driller, and it was really very much fun to work with them. They weren't doing their primary work, which was for the government, while they were helping us with this. In any case, the way it works is that an intelligent navigator basically maps the entire surface of these walls. So, unfolded it's about 300 linear feet. And it randomly generates points within a three-dimensional matrix. It selects a point, it guides the drill to that point, it pierces the dry wall, leaving a half-inch hole before traveling to the next location. Initially these holes were lone blemishes, and as the exhibition continued the walls became increasingly perforated. So eventually holes on both sides of the wall aligned, opening views from gallery to gallery. Clusters of holes randomly opened up sections of wall. And so this was a three-month performance piece in which the wall was made into kind of an increasingly unstable element. And also the acoustic separation was destroyed. Also the visual separation. And there was also this constant background groan, which was very annoying. And this is one of the blackout spaces where there's a video piece that became totally not useful. So rather than securing a neutral background for the artworks on display, the wall now actively competed for attention. And this acoustical nuisance and visual nuisance basically exposed the discomfort of the work to this encompassing nature of the retrospective. It was really great when it started to break up all of the curatorial text. Moving along to a project that we finished about a year ago. It's the ICA -- the Institute of Contemporary Art -- in Boston, which is on the waterfront. And there's not enough time to really introduce the building, but I'll simply say that the building negotiates between this outwardly focused nature of the site -- you know, it's a really great waterfront site in Boston -- and this contradictory other desire to have an inwardly focused museum. So, the nature of the building is that it looks at looking -- I mean that's its primary objective, both its program and its architectural conceit. The building incorporates the site, but it dispenses it in very small doses in the way that the museum is choreographed. So, you come in and you're basically squeezed by the theater, by the belly of the theater, into this very compressed space where the view is turned off. Then you come up in this glass elevator right near the curtain wall. This elevator's about the size of a New York City studio apartment. And then, this is a view going up, and then you could come into the theater, which can actually deny the view or open it up and become a backdrop. And many musicians choose to use the theater glass walls totally open. The view is denied in the galleries where we receive just natural light, and then exposed again in the north gallery with a panoramic view. The original intention of this space, which was unfortunately never realized, was to use lenticular glass which allowed only a kind of perpendicular view out. In this very narrow space that connects east and west galleries the intention was really to not get a climax, but to have the view stalk you, so the view would open up as you walked from one end to the other. This was eliminated because the view was too good, and the mayor said, "No, we just want this open." The architect lost here. But culminating -- and that's where this hooks into the theme of my little talk -- is this Mediatheque, which is suspended from the cantilevered portion of the building. So this is an 80-foot cantilever -- it's quite substantial. So, it's already sticking out into space enough, and then from that is this, is this small area called the Mediatheque. The Mediatheque has something like 16 stations where the public can get onto the server and look at digital artworks or also curated artworks off the web. And this was really a kind of very important part of this building, and here is a point where architecture -- this is like technology-free -- architecture is only a framing device, it only edits the harbor view, the industrial harbor just through its walls, its floors and its ceiling, to only expose the water itself, the texture of water, much like a hypnotic effect created by electronic snow or a lava lamp or something like that. And here is where we really felt that there was a great convergence of the technological and the natural in the project. But there is just no information, it's just -- it's just hypnosis. Moving along to Lincoln Center. These are the guys that did the project in the first place, 50 years ago. We're taking over now, doing work that ranges in scale from small-scale repairs to major renovations and major facility expansions. But we're doing it with a lot less testosterone. This is the extent of the work that's to be completed by 2010. And for the purposes of this talk, I wanted to isolate just a part of a project that's even a part of a project that touches a little bit on this theme of architectural special effects, and it happens to be our current obsession, and it plays a little bit with the purging and adding of distraction. It's Alice Tully Hall, and it's tucked under the Juilliard Building and descends several levels under the street. So, this is the entrance to Tully Hall as it used to be, before the renovation, which we just started. And we asked ourselves, why couldn't it be exhibitionistic, like the Met, or like some of the other buildings at Lincoln Center? And one of the things that we were asked to do was give it a street identity, expand the lobbies and make it visually accessible. And this building, which is just naturally hermetic, we stripped. We basically did a striptease, architectural striptease, where we're framing with this kind of canopy -- the underside of three levels of expansion of Juilliard, about 45,000 square feet -- cutting it to the angle of Broadway, and then exposing, using that canopy to frame Tully Hall. Before and after shot. (Applause) Wait a minute, it's just in that state, we have a long way to go. But what I wanted to do was take a couple of seconds that I have left to just talk about the hall itself, which is kind of where we're really doing a massive amount of work. So, the hall is a multi-purpose hall. The clients have asked us to produce a great chamber music hall. Now, that's really tough to do with a hall that has 1,100 seats. Chamber and the notion of chamber has to do with salons and small-scale performances. They asked us to bring an intimacy. How do you bring an intimacy into a hall? Intimacy for us means a lot of different things. It means acoustic intimacy and it means visual intimacy. One thing is that the subway is running and rumbling right under the hall. Another thing that could be fixed is the shape of the hall. It's like a coffin, it basically sends all the sound, like a gutter-ball effect, down the aisles. The walls are made of absorptive surface, half absorptive, half reflective, which is not very good for concert sound. This is Avery Fisher Hall, but the notion of junk -- visual junk -- was very, very important to us, to get rid of visual noise. Because we can't eliminate a single seat, the architecture is restricted to 18 inches. So it's a very, very thin architecture. First we do a kind of partial box and box separation, to take away the distraction of the subway noise. Next we wrap the entire hall -- almost like this Olivetti keyboard -- with a material, with a wood material that basically covers all the surfaces: wall, ceiling, floor, stage, steps, everything, boxes. But it's acoustically engineered to focus the sound into the house and back to the stage. And here's an acoustic shelf. Looking up the hall. Just a section of the stage. Just everything is lined, it incorporates -- every single thing that you could possibly imagine is tucked into this high-performance skin. But one more added feature. So now that we've stripped the hall of all visual distraction, everything that prevents this intimacy which is supposed to connect the house, the audience, with the performers, we add one little detail, one piece of architectural excess, a special effect: lighting. We very strongly believe that the theatrics of a concert hall is as much in the space of intermission and the space of arrival as it is when the concert starts. So what we wanted to do was produce this effect, this lighting effect, which made us have to bioengineer the wood walls. And what it entails is the use of resin, of this very thick resin with a veneer of the same kind of wood that's used throughout the hall, in a kind of seamless continuity that wraps the hall in light, like a belt of light: rather than separating, like a proscenium would separate the audience from performers, it connects audience with players. And this is a mockup that is in Salt Lake City that gives you a sense of what this is going to look like in full-scale. And this is a guy from Salt Lake City, this is what they look like out there. (Laughter) And for us, I mean it's really kind of a very strange thing, but the moments in the hall that the buzz kind of dies down when the audience is waiting for the performance to begin, very similar to the parting of curtains or the raising of a chandelier, the walls will just exude this glow, temporarily stealing attention from the stage. And this is Tully in construction now. I have no ending to say, except that I'm a couple of minutes over. Thank you very much. (Applause)
Let's pretend right here we have a machine. A big machine, a cool, TED-ish machine, and it's a time machine. And everyone in this room has to get into it. And you can go backwards, you can go forwards; you cannot stay where you are. And I wonder what you'd choose, because I've been asking my friends this question a lot lately and they all want to go back. I don't know. They want to go back before there were automobiles or Twitter or "American Idol." I don't know. I'm convinced that there's some sort of pull to nostalgia, to wishful thinking. And I understand that. I'm not part of that crowd, I have to say. I don't want to go back, and it's not because I'm adventurous. It's because possibilities on this planet, they don't go back, they go forward. So I want to get in the machine, and I want to go forward. This is the greatest time there's ever been on this planet by any measure that you wish to choose: health, wealth, mobility, opportunity, declining rates of disease ... There's never been a time like this. My great-grandparents died, all of them, by the time they were 60. My grandparents pushed that number to 70. My parents are closing in on 80. So there better be a nine at the beginning of my death number. But it's not even about people like us, because this is a bigger deal than that. A kid born in New Delhi today can expect to live as long as the richest man in the world did 100 years ago. Think about that, it's an incredible fact. And why is it true? Smallpox. Smallpox killed billions of people on this planet. It reshaped the demography of the globe in a way that no war ever has. It's gone. It's vanished. We vanquished it. Puff. In the rich world, diseases that threatened millions of us just a generation ago no longer exist, hardly. Diphtheria, rubella, polio ... does anyone even know what those things are? Vaccines, modern medicine, our ability to feed billions of people, those are triumphs of the scientific method. And to my mind, the scientific method -- trying stuff out, seeing if it works, changing it when it doesn't -- is one of the great accomplishments of humanity. So that's the good news. Unfortunately, that's all the good news because there are some other problems, and they've been mentioned many times. And one of them is that despite all our accomplishments, a billion people go to bed hungry in this world every day. That number's rising, and it's rising really rapidly, and it's disgraceful. And not only that, we've used our imagination to thoroughly trash this globe. Potable water, arable land, rainforests, oil, gas: they're going away, and they're going away soon, and unless we innovate our way out of this mess, we're going away too. So the question is: Can we do that? And I think we can. I think it's clear that we can make food that will feed billions of people without raping the land that they live on. I think we can power this world with energy that doesn't also destroy it. I really do believe that, and, no, it ain't wishful thinking. But here's the thing that keeps me up at night -- one of the things that keeps me up at night: We've never needed progress in science more than we need it right now. Never. And we've also never been in a position to deploy it properly in the way that we can today. We're on the verge of amazing, amazing events in many fields, and yet I actually think we'd have to go back hundreds, 300 years, before the Enlightenment, to find a time when we battled progress, when we fought about these things more vigorously, on more fronts, than we do now. People wrap themselves in their beliefs, and they do it so tightly that you can't set them free. Not even the truth will set them free. And, listen, everyone's entitled to their opinion; they're even entitled to their opinion about progress. But you know what you're not entitled to? You're not entitled to your own facts. Sorry, you're not. And this took me awhile to figure out. About a decade ago, I wrote a story about vaccines for The New Yorker. A little story. And I was amazed to find opposition: opposition to what is, after all, the most effective public health measure in human history. I didn't know what to do, so I just did what I do: I wrote a story and I moved on. And soon after that, I wrote a story about genetically engineered food. Same thing, only bigger. People were going crazy. So I wrote a story about that too, and I couldn't understand why people thought this was "Frankenfoods," why they thought moving molecules around in a specific, rather than a haphazard way, was trespassing on nature's ground. But, you know, I do what I do. I wrote the story, I moved on. I mean, I'm a journalist. We type, we file, we go to dinner. It's fine. (Laughter) But these stories bothered me, and I couldn't figure out why, and eventually I did. And that's because those fanatics that were driving me crazy weren't actually fanatics at all. They were thoughtful people, educated people, decent people. They were exactly like the people in this room. And it just disturbed me so much. But then I thought, you know, let's be honest. We're at a point in this world where we don't have the same relationship to progress that we used to. We talk about it ambivalently. We talk about it in ironic terms with little quotes around it: "progress." Okay, there are reasons for that, and I think we know what those reasons are. We've lost faith in institutions, in authority, and sometimes in science itself, and there's no reason we shouldn't have. You can just say a few names and people will understand. Chernobyl, Bhopal, the Challenger, Vioxx, weapons of mass destruction, hanging chads. You know, you can choose your list. There are questions and problems with the people we used to believe were always right, so be skeptical. Ask questions, demand proof, demand evidence. Don't take anything for granted. But here's the thing: When you get proof, you need to accept the proof, and we're not that good at doing that. And the reason that I can say that is because we're now in an epidemic of fear like one I've never seen and hope never to see again. About 12 years ago, there was a story published, a horrible story, that linked the epidemic of autism to the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine shot. Very scary. Tons of studies were done to see if this was true. Tons of studies should have been done; it's a serious issue. The data came back. The data came back from the United States, from England, from Sweden, from Canada, and it was all the same: no correlation, no connection, none at all. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter because we believe anecdotes, we believe what we see, what we think we see, what makes us feel real. We don't believe a bunch of documents from a government official giving us data, and I do understand that, I think we all do. But you know what? The result of that has been disastrous. Disastrous because here's a fact: The United States is one of the only countries in the world where the vaccine rate for measles is going down. That is disgraceful, and we should be ashamed of ourselves. It's horrible. What kind of a thing happened that we could do that? Now, I understand it. I do understand it. Because, did anyone have measles here? Has one person in this audience ever seen someone die of measles? Doesn't happen very much. Doesn't happen in this country at all, but it happened 160,000 times in the world last year. That's a lot of death of measles -- 20 an hour. But since it didn't happen here, we can put it out of our minds, and people like Jenny McCarthy can go around preaching messages of fear and illiteracy from platforms like "Oprah" and "Larry King Live." And they can do it because they don't link causation and correlation. They don't understand that these things seem the same, but they're almost never the same. And it's something we need to learn, and we need to learn it really soon. This guy was a hero, Jonas Salk. He took one of the worst scourges of mankind away from us. No fear, no agony. Polio -- puff, gone. That guy in the middle, not so much. His name is Paul Offit. He just developed a rotavirus vaccine with a bunch of other people. It'll save the lives of 400 to 500,000 kids in the developing world every year. Pretty good, right? Well, it's good, except that Paul goes around talking about vaccines and says how valuable they are and that people ought to just stop the whining. And he actually says it that way. So, Paul's a terrorist. When Paul speaks in a public hearing, he can't testify without armed guards. He gets called at home because people like to tell him that they remember where his kids go to school. And why? Because Paul made a vaccine. I don't need to say this, but vaccines are essential. You take them away, disease comes back, horrible diseases. And that's happening. We have measles in this country now. And it's getting worse, and pretty soon kids are going to die of it again because it's just a numbers game. And they're not just going to die of measles. What about polio? Let's have that. Why not? A college classmate of mine wrote me a couple weeks ago and said she thought I was a little strident. No one's ever said that before. She wasn't going to vaccinate her kid against polio, no way. Fine. Why? Because we don't have polio. And you know what? We didn't have polio in this country yesterday. Today, I don't know, maybe a guy got on a plane in Lagos this morning, and he's flying to LAX, right now he's over Ohio. And he's going to land in a couple of hours, he's going to rent a car, and he's going to come to Long Beach, and he's going to attend one of these fabulous TED dinners tonight. And he doesn't know that he's infected with a paralytic disease, and we don't either because that's the way the world works. That's the planet we live on. Don't pretend it isn't. Now, we love to wrap ourselves in lies. We love to do it. Everyone take their vitamins this morning? Echinacea, a little antioxidant to get you going. I know you did because half of Americans do every day. They take the stuff, and they take alternative medicines, and it doesn't matter how often we find out that they're useless. The data says it all the time. They darken your urine. They almost never do more than that. (Laughter) It's okay, you want to pay 28 billion dollars for dark urine? I'm totally with you. (Laughter) Dark urine. Dark. Why do we do that? Why do we do that? Well, I think I understand, we hate Big Pharma. We hate Big Government. We don't trust the Man. And we shouldn't: Our health care system sucks. It's cruel to millions of people. It's absolutely astonishingly cold and soul-bending to those of us who can even afford it. So we run away from it, and where do we run? We leap into the arms of Big Placebo. (Laughter) That's fantastic. I love Big Placebo. (Applause) But, you know, it's really a serious thing because this stuff is crap, and we spend billions of dollars on it. And I have all sorts of little props here. None of it ... ginkgo, fraud; echinacea, fraud; acai -- I don't even know what that is but we're spending billions of dollars on it -- it's fraud. And you know what? When I say this stuff, people scream at me, and they say, "What do you care? Let people do what they want to do. It makes them feel good." And you know what? You're wrong. Because I don't care if it's the secretary of HHS who's saying, "Hmm, I'm not going to take the evidence of my experts on mammograms," or some cancer quack who wants to treat his patient with coffee enemas. When you start down the road where belief and magic replace evidence and science, you end up in a place you don't want to be. You end up in Thabo Mbeki South Africa. He killed 400,000 of his people by insisting that beetroot, garlic and lemon oil were much more effective than the antiretroviral drugs we know can slow the course of AIDS. Hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in a country that has been plagued worse than any other by this disease. Please, don't tell me there are no consequences to these things. There are. There always are. Now, the most mindless epidemic we're in the middle of right now is this absurd battle between proponents of genetically engineered food and the organic elite. It's an idiotic debate. It has to stop. It's a debate about words, about metaphors. It's ideology, it's not science. Every single thing we eat, every grain of rice, every sprig of parsley, every Brussels sprout has been modified by man. You know, there weren't tangerines in the garden of Eden. There wasn't any cantaloupe. (Laughter) There weren't Christmas trees. We made it all. We made it over the last 11,000 years. And some of it worked, and some of it didn't. We got rid of the stuff that didn't. Now we can do it in a more precise way -- and there are risks, absolutely -- but we can put something like vitamin A into rice, and that stuff can help millions of people, millions of people, prolong their lives. You don't want to do that? I have to say, I don't understand it. We object to genetically engineered food. Why do we do that? Well, the things I constantly hear are: Too many chemicals, pesticides, hormones, monoculture, we don't want giant fields of the same thing, that's wrong. We don't companies patenting life. We don't want companies owning seeds. And you know what my response to all of that is? Yes, you're right. Let's fix it. It's true, we've got a huge food problem, but this isn't science. This has nothing to do with science. It's law, it's morality, it's patent stuff. You know science isn't a company. It's not a country. It's not even an idea; it's a process. It's a process, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but the idea that we should not allow science to do its job because we're afraid, is really very deadening, and it's preventing millions of people from prospering. You know, in the next 50 years we're going to have to grow 70 percent more food than we do right now, 70 percent. This investment in Africa over the last 30 years. Disgraceful. Disgraceful. They need it, and we're not giving it to them. And why? Genetically engineered food. We don't want to encourage people to eat that rotten stuff, like cassava for instance. Cassava's something that half a billion people eat. It's kind of like a potato. It's just a bunch of calories. It sucks. It doesn't have nutrients, it doesn't have protein, and scientists are engineering all of that into it right now. And then people would be able to eat it and they'd be able to not go blind. They wouldn't starve, and you know what? That would be nice. It wouldn't be Chez Panisse, but it would be nice. And all I can say about this is: Why are we fighting it? I mean, let's ask ourselves: Why are we fighting it? Because we don't want to move genes around? This is about moving genes around. It's not about chemicals. It's not about our ridiculous passion for hormones, our insistence on having bigger food, better food, singular food. This isn't about Rice Krispies, this is about keeping people alive, and it's about time we started to understand what that meant. Because, you know something? If we don't, if we continue to act the way we're acting, we're guilty of something that I don't think we want to be guilty of: high-tech colonialism. There's no other way to describe what's going on here. It's selfish, it's ugly, it's beneath us, and we really have to stop it. So after this amazingly fun conversation, (Laughter) you might want to say, "So, you still want to get in this ridiculous time machine and go forward?" Absolutely. Absolutely, I do. It's stuck in the present right now, but we have an amazing opportunity. We can set that time machine on anything we want. We can move it where we want to move it, and we're going to move it where we want to move it. We have to have these conversations and we have to think, but when we get in the time machine and we go ahead, we're going to be happy we do. I know that we can, and as far as I'm concerned, that's something the world needs right now. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Imagine if you could record your life -- everything you said, everything you did, available in a perfect memory store at your fingertips, so you could go back and find memorable moments and relive them, or sift through traces of time and discover patterns in your own life that previously had gone undiscovered. Well that's exactly the journey that my family began five and a half years ago. This is my wife and collaborator, Rupal. And on this day, at this moment, we walked into the house with our first child, our beautiful baby boy. And we walked into a house with a very special home video recording system. (Video) Man: Okay. Deb Roy: This moment and thousands of other moments special for us were captured in our home because in every room in the house, if you looked up, you'd see a camera and a microphone, and if you looked down, you'd get this bird's-eye view of the room. Here's our living room, the baby bedroom, kitchen, dining room and the rest of the house. And all of these fed into a disc array that was designed for a continuous capture. So here we are flying through a day in our home as we move from sunlit morning through incandescent evening and, finally, lights out for the day. Over the course of three years, we recorded eight to 10 hours a day, amassing roughly a quarter-million hours of multi-track audio and video. So you're looking at a piece of what is by far the largest home video collection ever made. (Laughter) And what this data represents for our family at a personal level, the impact has already been immense, and we're still learning its value. Countless moments of unsolicited natural moments, not posed moments, are captured there, and we're starting to learn how to discover them and find them. But there's also a scientific reason that drove this project, which was to use this natural longitudinal data to understand the process of how a child learns language -- that child being my son. And so with many privacy provisions put in place to protect everyone who was recorded in the data, we made elements of the data available to my trusted research team at MIT so we could start teasing apart patterns in this massive data set, trying to understand the influence of social environments on language acquisition. So we're looking here at one of the first things we started to do. This is my wife and I cooking breakfast in the kitchen, and as we move through space and through time, a very everyday pattern of life in the kitchen. In order to convert this opaque, 90,000 hours of video into something that we could start to see, we use motion analysis to pull out, as we move through space and through time, what we call space-time worms. And this has become part of our toolkit for being able to look and see where the activities are in the data, and with it, trace the pattern of, in particular, where my son moved throughout the home, so that we could focus our transcription efforts, all of the speech environment around my son -- all of the words that he heard from myself, my wife, our nanny, and over time, the words he began to produce. So with that technology and that data and the ability to, with machine assistance, transcribe speech, we've now transcribed well over seven million words of our home transcripts. And with that, let me take you now for a first tour into the data. So you've all, I'm sure, seen time-lapse videos where a flower will blossom as you accelerate time. I'd like you to now experience the blossoming of a speech form. My son, soon after his first birthday, would say "gaga" to mean water. And over the course of the next half-year, he slowly learned to approximate the proper adult form, "water." So we're going to cruise through half a year in about 40 seconds. No video here, so you can focus on the sound, the acoustics, of a new kind of trajectory: gaga to water. (Audio) Baby: Gagagagagaga Gaga gaga gaga guga guga guga wada gaga gaga guga gaga wader guga guga water water water water water water water water water. DR: He sure nailed it, didn't he. (Applause) So he didn't just learn water. Over the course of the 24 months, the first two years that we really focused on, this is a map of every word he learned in chronological order. And because we have full transcripts, we've identified each of the 503 words that he learned to produce by his second birthday. He was an early talker. And so we started to analyze why. Why were certain words born before others? This is one of the first results that came out of our study a little over a year ago that really surprised us. The way to interpret this apparently simple graph is, on the vertical is an indication of how complex caregiver utterances are based on the length of utterances. And the [horizontal] axis is time. And all of the data, we aligned based on the following idea: Every time my son would learn a word, we would trace back and look at all of the language he heard that contained that word. And we would plot the relative length of the utterances. And what we found was this curious phenomena, that caregiver speech would systematically dip to a minimum, making language as simple as possible, and then slowly ascend back up in complexity. And the amazing thing was that bounce, that dip, lined up almost precisely with when each word was born -- word after word, systematically. So it appears that all three primary caregivers -- myself, my wife and our nanny -- were systematically and, I would think, subconsciously restructuring our language to meet him at the birth of a word and bring him gently into more complex language. And the implications of this -- there are many, but one I just want to point out, is that there must be amazing feedback loops. Of course, my son is learning from his linguistic environment, but the environment is learning from him. That environment, people, are in these tight feedback loops and creating a kind of scaffolding that has not been noticed until now. But that's looking at the speech context. What about the visual context? We're not looking at -- think of this as a dollhouse cutaway of our house. We've taken those circular fish-eye lens cameras, and we've done some optical correction, and then we can bring it into three-dimensional life. So welcome to my home. This is a moment, one moment captured across multiple cameras. The reason we did this is to create the ultimate memory machine, where you can go back and interactively fly around and then breathe video-life into this system. What I'm going to do is give you an accelerated view of 30 minutes, again, of just life in the living room. That's me and my son on the floor. And there's video analytics that are tracking our movements. My son is leaving red ink. I am leaving green ink. We're now on the couch, looking out through the window at cars passing by. And finally, my son playing in a walking toy by himself. Now we freeze the action, 30 minutes, we turn time into the vertical axis, and we open up for a view of these interaction traces we've just left behind. And we see these amazing structures -- these little knots of two colors of thread we call "social hot spots." The spiral thread we call a "solo hot spot." And we think that these affect the way language is learned. What we'd like to do is start understanding the interaction between these patterns and the language that my son is exposed to to see if we can predict how the structure of when words are heard affects when they're learned -- so in other words, the relationship between words and what they're about in the world. So here's how we're approaching this. In this video, again, my son is being traced out. He's leaving red ink behind. And there's our nanny by the door. (Video) Nanny: You want water? (Baby: Aaaa.) Nanny: All right. (Baby: Aaaa.) DR: She offers water, and off go the two worms over to the kitchen to get water. And what we've done is use the word "water" to tag that moment, that bit of activity. And now we take the power of data and take every time my son ever heard the word water and the context he saw it in, and we use it to penetrate through the video and find every activity trace that co-occurred with an instance of water. And what this data leaves in its wake is a landscape. We call these wordscapes. This is the wordscape for the word water, and you can see most of the action is in the kitchen. That's where those big peaks are over to the left. And just for contrast, we can do this with any word. We can take the word "bye" as in "good bye." And we're now zoomed in over the entrance to the house. And we look, and we find, as you would expect, a contrast in the landscape where the word "bye" occurs much more in a structured way. So we're using these structures to start predicting the order of language acquisition, and that's ongoing work now. In my lab, which we're peering into now, at MIT -- this is at the media lab. This has become my favorite way of videographing just about any space. Three of the key people in this project, Philip DeCamp, Rony Kubat and Brandon Roy are pictured here. Philip has been a close collaborator on all the visualizations you're seeing. And Michael Fleischman was another Ph.D. student in my lab who worked with me on this home video analysis, and he made the following observation: that "just the way that we're analyzing how language connects to events which provide common ground for language, that same idea we can take out of your home, Deb, and we can apply it to the world of public media." And so our effort took an unexpected turn. Think of mass media as providing common ground and you have the recipe for taking this idea to a whole new place. We've started analyzing television content using the same principles -- analyzing event structure of a TV signal -- episodes of shows, commercials, all of the components that make up the event structure. And we're now, with satellite dishes, pulling and analyzing a good part of all the TV being watched in the United States. And you don't have to now go and instrument living rooms with microphones to get people's conversations, you just tune into publicly available social media feeds. So we're pulling in about three billion comments a month, and then the magic happens. You have the event structure, the common ground that the words are about, coming out of the television feeds; you've got the conversations that are about those topics; and through semantic analysis -- and this is actually real data you're looking at from our data processing -- each yellow line is showing a link being made between a comment in the wild and a piece of event structure coming out of the television signal. And the same idea now can be built up. And we get this wordscape, except now words are not assembled in my living room. Instead, the context, the common ground activities, are the content on television that's driving the conversations. And what we're seeing here, these skyscrapers now, are commentary that are linked to content on television. Same concept, but looking at communication dynamics in a very different sphere. And so fundamentally, rather than, for example, measuring content based on how many people are watching, this gives us the basic data for looking at engagement properties of content. And just like we can look at feedback cycles and dynamics in a family, we can now open up the same concepts and look at much larger groups of people. This is a subset of data from our database -- just 50,000 out of several million -- and the social graph that connects them through publicly available sources. And if you put them on one plain, a second plain is where the content lives. So we have the programs and the sporting events and the commercials, and all of the link structures that tie them together make a content graph. And then the important third dimension. Each of the links that you're seeing rendered here is an actual connection made between something someone said and a piece of content. And there are, again, now tens of millions of these links that give us the connective tissue of social graphs and how they relate to content. And we can now start to probe the structure in interesting ways. So if we, for example, trace the path of one piece of content that drives someone to comment on it, and then we follow where that comment goes, and then look at the entire social graph that becomes activated and then trace back to see the relationship between that social graph and content, a very interesting structure becomes visible. We call this a co-viewing clique, a virtual living room if you will. And there are fascinating dynamics at play. It's not one way. A piece of content, an event, causes someone to talk. They talk to other people. That drives tune-in behavior back into mass media, and you have these cycles that drive the overall behavior. Another example -- very different -- another actual person in our database -- and we're finding at least hundreds, if not thousands, of these. We've given this person a name. This is a pro-amateur, or pro-am media critic who has this high fan-out rate. So a lot of people are following this person -- very influential -- and they have a propensity to talk about what's on TV. So this person is a key link in connecting mass media and social media together. One last example from this data: Sometimes it's actually a piece of content that is special. So if we go and look at this piece of content, President Obama's State of the Union address from just a few weeks ago, and look at what we find in this same data set, at the same scale, the engagement properties of this piece of content are truly remarkable. A nation exploding in conversation in real time in response to what's on the broadcast. And of course, through all of these lines are flowing unstructured language. We can X-ray and get a real-time pulse of a nation, real-time sense of the social reactions in the different circuits in the social graph being activated by content. So, to summarize, the idea is this: As our world becomes increasingly instrumented and we have the capabilities to collect and connect the dots between what people are saying and the context they're saying it in, what's emerging is an ability to see new social structures and dynamics that have previously not been seen. It's like building a microscope or telescope and revealing new structures about our own behavior around communication. And I think the implications here are profound, whether it's for science, for commerce, for government, or perhaps most of all, for us as individuals. And so just to return to my son, when I was preparing this talk, he was looking over my shoulder, and I showed him the clips I was going to show to you today, and I asked him for permission -- granted. And then I went on to reflect, "Isn't it amazing, this entire database, all these recordings, I'm going to hand off to you and to your sister" -- who arrived two years later -- "and you guys are going to be able to go back and re-experience moments that you could never, with your biological memory, possibly remember the way you can now?" And he was quiet for a moment. And I thought, "What am I thinking? He's five years old. He's not going to understand this." And just as I was having that thought, he looked up at me and said, "So that when I grow up, I can show this to my kids?" And I thought, "Wow, this is powerful stuff." So I want to leave you with one last memorable moment from our family. This is the first time our son took more than two steps at once -- captured on film. And I really want you to focus on something as I take you through. It's a cluttered environment; it's natural life. My mother's in the kitchen, cooking, and, of all places, in the hallway, I realize he's about to do it, about to take more than two steps. And so you hear me encouraging him, realizing what's happening, and then the magic happens. Listen very carefully. About three steps in, he realizes something magic is happening, and the most amazing feedback loop of all kicks in, and he takes a breath in, and he whispers "wow" and instinctively I echo back the same. And so let's fly back in time to that memorable moment. (Video) DR: Hey. Come here. Can you do it? Oh, boy. Can you do it? Baby: Yeah. DR: Ma, he's walking. (Laughter) (Applause) DR: Thank you. (Applause)
This is a picture of Maurice Druon, the Honorary Perpetual Secretary of L'Academie francaise, the French Academy. He is splendidly attired in his 68,000-dollar uniform, befitting the role of the French Academy as legislating the correct usage in French and perpetuating the language. The French Academy has two main tasks: it compiles a dictionary of official French. They're now working on their ninth edition, which they began in 1930, and they've reached the letter P. They also legislate on correct usage, such as the proper term for what the French call "email," which ought to be "courriel." The World Wide Web, the French are told, ought to be referred to as "la toile d'araignee mondiale" -- the Global Spider Web -- recommendations that the French gaily ignore. Now, this is one model of how language comes to be: namely, it's legislated by an academy. But anyone who looks at language realizes that this is a rather silly conceit, that language, rather, emerges from human minds interacting from one another. And this is visible in the unstoppable change in language -- the fact that by the time the Academy finishes their dictionary, it will already be well out of date. We see it in the constant appearance of slang and jargon, of the historical change in languages, in divergence of dialects and the formation of new languages. So language is not so much a creator or shaper of human nature, so much as a window onto human nature. In a book that I'm currently working on, I hope to use language to shed light on a number of aspects of human nature, including the cognitive machinery with which humans conceptualize the world and the relationship types that govern human interaction. And I'm going to say a few words about each one this morning. Let me start off with a technical problem in language that I've worried about for quite some time -- and indulge me in my passion for verbs and how they're used. The problem is, which verbs go in which constructions? The verb is the chassis of the sentence. It's the framework onto which the other parts are bolted. Let me give you a quick reminder of something that you've long forgotten. An intransitive verb, such as "dine," for example, can't take a direct object. You have to say, "Sam dined," not, "Sam dined the pizza." A transitive verb mandates that there has to be an object there: "Sam devoured the pizza." You can't just say, "Sam devoured." There are dozens or scores of verbs of this type, each of which shapes its sentence. So, a problem in explaining how children learn language, a problem in teaching language to adults so that they don't make grammatical errors, and a problem in programming computers to use language is which verbs go in which constructions. For example, the dative construction in English. You can say, "Give a muffin to a mouse," the prepositional dative. Or, "Give a mouse a muffin," the double-object dative. "Promise anything to her," "Promise her anything," and so on. Hundreds of verbs can go both ways. So a tempting generalization for a child, for an adult, for a computer is that any verb that can appear in the construction, "subject-verb-thing-to-a-recipient" can also be expressed as "subject-verb-recipient-thing." A handy thing to have, because language is infinite, and you can't just parrot back the sentences that you've heard. You've got to extract generalizations so you can produce and understand new sentences. This would be an example of how to do that. Unfortunately, there appear to be idiosyncratic exceptions. You can say, "Biff drove the car to Chicago," but not, "Biff drove Chicago the car." You can say, "Sal gave Jason a headache," but it's a bit odd to say, "Sal gave a headache to Jason." The solution is that these constructions, despite initial appearance, are not synonymous, that when you crank up the microscope on human cognition, you see that there's a subtle difference in meaning between them. So, "give the X to the Y," that construction corresponds to the thought "cause X to go to Y." Whereas "give the Y the X" corresponds to the thought "cause Y to have X." Now, many events can be subject to either construal, kind of like the classic figure-ground reversal illusions, in which you can either pay attention to the particular object, in which case the space around it recedes from attention, or you can see the faces in the empty space, in which case the object recedes out of consciousness. How are these construals reflected in language? Well, in both cases, the thing that is construed as being affected is expressed as the direct object, the noun after the verb. So, when you think of the event as causing the muffin to go somewhere -- where you're doing something to the muffin -- you say, "Give the muffin to the mouse." When you construe it as "cause the mouse to have something," you're doing something to the mouse, and therefore you express it as, "Give the mouse the muffin." So which verbs go in which construction -- the problem with which I began -- depends on whether the verb specifies a kind of motion or a kind of possession change. To give something involves both causing something to go and causing someone to have. To drive the car only causes something to go, because Chicago's not the kind of thing that can possess something. Only humans can possess things. And to give someone a headache causes them to have the headache, but it's not as if you're taking the headache out of your head and causing it to go to the other person, and implanting it in them. You may just be loud or obnoxious, or some other way causing them to have the headache. So, that's an example of the kind of thing that I do in my day job. So why should anyone care? Well, there are a number of interesting conclusions, I think, from this and many similar kinds of analyses of hundreds of English verbs. First, there's a level of fine-grained conceptual structure, which we automatically and unconsciously compute every time we produce or utter a sentence, that governs our use of language. You can think of this as the language of thought, or "mentalese." It seems to be based on a fixed set of concepts, which govern dozens of constructions and thousands of verbs -- not only in English, but in all other languages -- fundamental concepts such as space, time, causation and human intention, such as, what is the means and what is the ends? These are reminiscent of the kinds of categories that Immanuel Kant argued are the basic framework for human thought, and it's interesting that our unconscious use of language seems to reflect these Kantian categories. Doesn't care about perceptual qualities, such as color, texture, weight and speed, which virtually never differentiate the use of verbs in different constructions. An additional twist is that all of the constructions in English are used not only literally, but in a quasi-metaphorical way. For example, this construction, the dative, is used not only to transfer things, but also for the metaphorical transfer of ideas, as when we say, "She told a story to me" or "told me a story," "Max taught Spanish to the students" or "taught the students Spanish." It's exactly the same construction, but no muffins, no mice, nothing moving at all. It evokes the container metaphor of communication, in which we conceive of ideas as objects, sentences as containers, and communication as a kind of sending. As when we say we "gather" our ideas, to "put" them "into" words, and if our words aren't "empty" or "hollow," we might get these ideas "across" to a listener, who can "unpack" our words to "extract" their "content." And indeed, this kind of verbiage is not the exception, but the rule. It's very hard to find any example of abstract language that is not based on some concrete metaphor. For example, you can use the verb "go" and the prepositions "to" and "from" in a literal, spatial sense. "The messenger went from Paris to Istanbul." You can also say, "Biff went from sick to well." He needn't go anywhere. He could have been in bed the whole time, but it's as if his health is a point in state space that you conceptualize as moving. Or, "The meeting went from three to four," in which we conceive of time as stretched along a line. Likewise, we use "force" to indicate not only physical force, as in, "Rose forced the door to open," but also interpersonal force, as in, "Rose forced Sadie to go," not necessarily by manhandling her, but by issuing a threat. Or, "Rose forced herself to go," as if there were two entities inside Rose's head, engaged in a tug of a war. Second conclusion is that the ability to conceive of a given event in two different ways, such as "cause something to go to someone" and "causing someone to have something," I think is a fundamental feature of human thought, and it's the basis for much human argumentation, in which people don't differ so much on the facts as on how they ought to be construed. Just to give you a few examples: "ending a pregnancy" versus "killing a fetus;" "a ball of cells" versus "an unborn child;" "invading Iraq" versus "liberating Iraq;" "redistributing wealth" versus "confiscating earnings." And I think the biggest picture of all would take seriously the fact that so much of our verbiage about abstract events is based on a concrete metaphor and see human intelligence itself as consisting of a repertoire of concepts -- such as objects, space, time, causation and intention -- which are useful in a social, knowledge-intensive species, whose evolution you can well imagine, and a process of metaphorical abstraction that allows us to bleach these concepts of their original conceptual content -- space, time and force -- and apply them to new abstract domains, therefore allowing a species that evolved to deal with rocks and tools and animals, to conceptualize mathematics, physics, law and other abstract domains. Well, I said I'd talk about two windows on human nature -- the cognitive machinery with which we conceptualize the world, and now I'm going to say a few words about the relationship types that govern human social interaction, again, as reflected in language. And I'll start out with a puzzle, the puzzle of indirect speech acts. Now, I'm sure most of you have seen the movie "Fargo." And you might remember the scene in which the kidnapper is pulled over by a police officer, is asked to show his driver's license and holds his wallet out with a 50-dollar bill extending at a slight angle out of the wallet. And he says, "I was just thinking that maybe we could take care of it here in Fargo," which everyone, including the audience, interprets as a veiled bribe. This kind of indirect speech is rampant in language. For example, in polite requests, if someone says, "If you could pass the guacamole, that would be awesome," we know exactly what he means, even though that's a rather bizarre concept being expressed. (Laughter) "Would you like to come up and see my etchings?" I think most people understand the intent behind that. And likewise, if someone says, "Nice store you've got there. It would be a real shame if something happened to it" -- (Laughter) -- we understand that as a veiled threat, rather than a musing of hypothetical possibilities. So the puzzle is, why are bribes, polite requests, solicitations and threats so often veiled? No one's fooled. Both parties know exactly what the speaker means, and the speaker knows the listener knows that the speaker knows that the listener knows, etc., etc. So what's going on? I think the key idea is that language is a way of negotiating relationships, and human relationships fall into a number of types. There's an influential taxonomy by the anthropologist Alan Fiske, in which relationships can be categorized, more or less, into communality, which works on the principle "what's mine is thine, what's thine is mine," the kind of mindset that operates within a family, for example; dominance, whose principle is "don't mess with me;" reciprocity, "you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours;" and sexuality, in the immortal words of Cole Porter, "Let's do it." Now, relationship types can be negotiated. Even though there are default situations in which one of these mindsets can be applied, they can be stretched and extended. For example, communality applies most naturally within family or friends, but it can be used to try to transfer the mentality of sharing to groups that ordinarily would not be disposed to exercise it. For example, in brotherhoods, fraternal organizations, sororities, locutions like "the family of man," you try to get people who are not related to use the relationship type that would ordinarily be appropriate to close kin. Now, mismatches -- when one person assumes one relationship type, and another assumes a different one -- can be awkward. If you went over and you helped yourself to a shrimp off your boss' plate, for example, that would be an awkward situation. Or if a dinner guest after the meal pulled out his wallet and offered to pay you for the meal, that would be rather awkward as well. In less blatant cases, there's still a kind of negotiation that often goes on. In the workplace, for example, there's often a tension over whether an employee can socialize with the boss, or refer to him or her on a first-name basis. If two friends have a reciprocal transaction, like selling a car, it's well known that this can be a source of tension or awkwardness. In dating, the transition from friendship to sex can lead to, notoriously, various forms of awkwardness, and as can sex in the workplace, in which we call the conflict between a dominant and a sexual relationship "sexual harassment." Well, what does this have to do with language? Well, language, as a social interaction, has to satisfy two conditions. You have to convey the actual content -- here we get back to the container metaphor. You want to express the bribe, the command, the promise, the solicitation and so on, but you also have to negotiate and maintain the kind of relationship you have with the other person. The solution, I think, is that we use language at two levels: the literal form signals the safest relationship with the listener, whereas the implicated content -- the reading between the lines that we count on the listener to perform -- allows the listener to derive the interpretation which is most relevant in context, which possibly initiates a changed relationship. The simplest example of this is in the polite request. If you express your request as a conditional -- "if you could open the window, that would be great" -- even though the content is an imperative, the fact that you're not using the imperative voice means that you're not acting as if you're in a relationship of dominance, where you could presuppose the compliance of the other person. On the other hand, you want the damn guacamole. By expressing it as an if-then statement, you can get the message across without appearing to boss another person around. And in a more subtle way, I think, this works for all of the veiled speech acts involving plausible deniability: the bribes, threats, propositions, solicitations and so on. One way of thinking about it is to imagine what it would be like if language -- where it could only be used literally. And you can think of it in terms of a game-theoretic payoff matrix. Put yourself in the position of the kidnapper wanting to bribe the officer. There's a high stakes in the two possibilities of having a dishonest officer or an honest officer. If you don't bribe the officer, then you will get a traffic ticket -- or, as is the case of "Fargo," worse -- whether the honest officer is honest or dishonest. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. In that case, the consequences are rather severe. On the other hand, if you extend the bribe, if the officer is dishonest, you get a huge payoff of going free. If the officer is honest, you get a huge penalty of being arrested for bribery. So this is a rather fraught situation. On the other hand, with indirect language, if you issue a veiled bribe, then the dishonest officer could interpret it as a bribe, in which case you get the payoff of going free. The honest officer can't hold you to it as being a bribe, and therefore, you get the nuisance of the traffic ticket. So you get the best of both worlds. And a similar analysis, I think, can apply to the potential awkwardness of a sexual solicitation, and other cases where plausible deniability is an asset. I think this affirms something that's long been known by diplomats -- namely, that the vagueness of language, far from being a bug or an imperfection, actually might be a feature of language, one that we use to our advantage in social interactions. So to sum up: language is a collective human creation, reflecting human nature, how we conceptualize reality, how we relate to one another. And then by analyzing the various quirks and complexities of language, I think we can get a window onto what makes us tick. Thank you very much. (Applause)
The substance of things unseen. Cities, past and future. In Oxford, perhaps we can use Lewis Carroll and look in the looking glass that is New York City to try and see our true selves, or perhaps pass through to another world. Or, in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, "As the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that once flowered for Dutch sailors' eyes, a fresh green breast of the new world." My colleagues and I have been working for 10 years to rediscover this lost world in a project we call The Mannahatta Project. We're trying to discover what Henry Hudson would have seen on the afternoon of September 12th, 1609, when he sailed into New York harbor. And I'd like to tell you the story in three acts, and if I have time still, an epilogue. So, Act I: A Map Found. So, I didn't grow up in New York. I grew up out west in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, like you see here, in the Red Rock Canyon. And from these early experiences as a child I learned to love landscapes. And so when it became time for me to do my graduate studies, I studied this emerging field of landscape ecology. Landscape ecology concerns itself with how the stream and the meadow and the forest and the cliffs make habitats for plants and animals. This experience and this training lead me to get a wonderful job with the Wildlife Conservation Society, which works to save wildlife and wild places all over the world. And over the last decade, I traveled to over 40 countries to see jaguars and bears and elephants and tigers and rhinos. But every time I would return from my trips I'd return back to New York City. And on my weekends I would go up, just like all the other tourists, to the top of the Empire State Building, and I'd look down on this landscape, on these ecosystems, and I'd wonder, "How does this landscape work to make habitat for plants and animals? How does it work to make habitat for animals like me?" I'd go to Times Square and I'd look at the amazing ladies on the wall, and wonder why nobody is looking at the historical figures just behind them. I'd go to Central Park and see the rolling topography of Central Park come up against the abrupt and sheer topography of midtown Manhattan. I started reading about the history and the geography in New York City. I read that New York City was the first mega-city, a city of 10 million people or more, in 1950. I started seeing paintings like this. For those of you who are from New York, this is 125th street under the West Side Highway. (Laughter) It was once a beach. And this painting has John James Audubon, the painter, sitting on the rock. And it's looking up on the wooded heights of Washington Heights to Jeffrey's Hook, where the George Washington Bridge goes across today. Or this painting, from the 1740s, from Greenwich Village. Those are two students at King's College -- later Columbia University -- sitting on a hill, overlooking a valley. And so I'd go down to Greenwich Village and I'd look for this hill, and I couldn't find it. And I couldn't find that palm tree. What's that palm tree doing there? (Laughter) So, it was in the course of these investigations that I ran into a map. And it's this map you see here. It's held in a geographic information system which allows me to zoom in. This map isn't from Hudson's time, but from the American Revolution, 170 years later, made by British military cartographers during the occupation of New York City. And it's a remarkable map. It's in the National Archives here in Kew. And it's 10 feet long and three and a half feet wide. And if I zoom in to lower Manhattan you can see the extent of New York City as it was, right at the end of the American Revolution. Here's Bowling Green. And here's Broadway. And this is City Hall Park. So the city basically extended to City Hall Park. And just beyond it you can see features that have vanished, things that have disappeared. This is the Collect Pond, which was the fresh water source for New York City for its first 200 years, and for the Native Americans for thousands of years before that. You can see the Lispenard Meadows draining down through here, through what is TriBeCa now, and the beaches that come up from the Battery, all the way to 42nd St. This map was made for military reasons. They're mapping the roads, the buildings, these fortifications that they built. But they're also mapping things of ecological interest, also military interest: the hills, the marshes, the streams. This is Richmond Hill, and Minetta Water, which used to run its way through Greenwich Village. Or the swamp at Gramercy Park, right here. Or Murray Hill. And this is the Murrays' house on Murray Hill, 200 years ago. Here is Times Square, the two streams that came together to make a wetland in Times Square, as it was at the end of the American Revolution. So I saw this remarkable map in a book. And I thought to myself, "You know, if I could georeference this map, if I could place this map in the grid of the city today, I could find these lost features of the city, in the block-by-block geography that people know, the geography of where people go to work, and where they go to live, and where they like to eat." So, after some work we were able to georeference it, which allows us to put the modern streets on the city, and the buildings, and the open spaces, so that we can zoom in to where the Collect Pond is. We can digitize the Collect Pond and the streams, and see where they actually are in the geography of the city today. So this is fun for finding where things are relative to the old topography. But I had another idea about this map. If we take away the streets, and if we take away the buildings, and if we take away the open spaces, then we could take this map. If we pull off the 18th century features we could drive it back in time. We could drive it back to its ecological fundamentals: to the hills, to the streams, to the basic hydrology and shoreline, to the beaches, the basic aspects that make the ecological landscape. Then, if we added maps like the geology, the bedrock geology, and the surface geology, what the glaciers leave, if we make the soil map, with the 17 soil classes, that are defined by the National Conservation Service, if we make a digital elevation model of the topography that tells us how high the hills were, then we can calculate the slopes. We can calculate the aspect. We can calculate the winter wind exposure -- so, which way the winter winds blow across the landscape. The white areas on this map are the places protected from the winter winds. We compiled all the information about where the Native Americans were, the Lenape. And we built a probability map about where they might have been. So, the red areas on this map indicate the places that are best for human sustainability on Manhattan, places that are close to water, places that are near the harbor to fish, places protected from the winter winds. We know that there was a Lenape settlement down here by the Collect Pond. And we knew that they planted a kind of horticulture, that they grew these beautiful gardens of corn, beans, and squash, the "Three Sisters" garden. So, we built a model that explains where those fields might have been. And the old fields, the successional fields that go. And we might think of these as abandoned. But, in fact, they're grassland habitats for grassland birds and plants. And they have become successional shrub lands, and these then mix in to a map of all the ecological communities. And it turns out that Manhattan had 55 different ecosystem types. You can think of these as neighborhoods, as distinctive as TriBeCa and the Upper East Side and Inwood -- that these are the forest and the wetlands and the marine communities, the beaches. And 55 is a lot. On a per-area basis, Manhattan had more ecological communities per acre than Yosemite does, than Yellowstone, than Amboseli. It was really an extraordinary landscape that was capable of supporting an extraordinary biodiversity. So, Act II: A Home Reconstructed. So, we studied the fish and the frogs and the birds and the bees, the 85 different kinds of fish that were on Manhattan, the Heath hens, the species that aren't there anymore, the beavers on all the streams, the black bears, and the Native Americans, to study how they used and thought about their landscape. We wanted to try and map these. And to do that what we did was we mapped their habitat needs. Where do they get their food? Where do they get their water? Where do they get their shelter? Where do they get their reproductive resources? To an ecologist, the intersection of these is habitat, but to most people, the intersection of these is their home. So, we would read in field guides, the standard field guides that maybe you have on your shelves, you know, what beavers need is "A slowly meandering stream with aspen trees and alders and willows, near the water." That's the best thing for a beaver. So we just started making a list. Here is the beaver. And here is the stream, and the aspen and the alder and the willow. As if these were the maps that we would need to predict where you would find the beaver. Or the bog turtle, needing wet meadows and insects and sunny places. Or the bobcat, needing rabbits and beavers and den sites. And rapidly we started to realize that beavers can be something that a bobcat needs. But a beaver also needs things. And that having it on either side means that we can link it together, that we can create the network of the habitat relationships for these species. Moreover, we realized that you can start out as being a beaver specialist, but you can look up what an aspen needs. An aspen needs fire and dry soils. And you can look at what a wet meadow needs. And it need beavers to create the wetlands, and maybe some other things. But you can also talk about sunny places. So, what does a sunny place need? Not habitat per se. But what are the conditions that make it possible? Or fire. Or dry soils. And that you can put these on a grid that's 1,000 columns long across the top and 1,000 rows down the other way. And then we can visualize this data like a network, like a social network. And this is the network of all the habitat relationships of all the plants and animals on Manhattan, and everything they needed, going back to the geology, going back to time and space at the very core of the web. We call this the Muir Web. And if you zoom in on it it looks like this. Each point is a different species or a different stream or a different soil type. And those little gray lines are the connections that connect them together. They are the connections that actually make nature resilient. And the structure of this is what makes nature work, seen with all its parts. We call these Muir Webs after the Scottish-American naturalist John Muir, who said, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find that it's bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe." So then we took the Muir webs and we took them back to the maps. So if we wanted to go between 85th and 86th, and Lex and Third, maybe there was a stream in that block. And these would be the kind of trees that might have been there, and the flowers and the lichens and the mosses, the butterflies, the fish in the stream, the birds in the trees. Maybe a timber rattlesnake lived there. And perhaps a black bear walked by. And maybe Native Americans were there. And then we took this data. You can see this for yourself on our website. You can zoom into any block on Manhattan, and see what might have been there 400 years ago. And we used it to try and reveal a landscape here in Act III. We used the tools they use in Hollywood to make these fantastic landscapes that we all see in the movies. And we tried to use it to visualize Third Avenue. So we would take the landscape and we would build up the topography. We'd lay on top of that the soils and the waters, and illuminate the landscape. We would lay on top of that the map of the ecological communities. And feed into that the map of the species. So that we would actually take a photograph, flying above Times Square, looking toward the Hudson River, waiting for Hudson to come. Using this technology, we can make these fantastic georeferenced views. We can basically take a picture out of any window on Manhattan and see what that landscape looked like 400 years ago. This is the view from the East River, looking up Murray Hill at where the United Nations is today. This is the view looking down the Hudson River, with Manhattan on the left, and New Jersey out on the right, looking out toward the Atlantic Ocean. This is the view over Times Square, with the beaver pond there, looking out toward the east. So we can see the Collect Pond, and Lispenard Marshes back behind. We can see the fields that the Native Americans made. And we can see this in the geography of the city today. So when you're watching "Law and Order," and the lawyers walk up the steps they could have walked back down those steps of the New York Court House, right into the Collect Pond, 400 years ago. So these images are the work of my friend and colleague, Mark Boyer, who is here in the audience today. And I'd just like, if you would give him a hand, to call out for his fine work. (Applause) There is such power in bringing science and visualization together, that we can create images like this, perhaps looking on either side of a looking glass. And even though I've only had a brief time to speak, I hope you appreciate that Mannahatta was a very special place. The place that you see here on the left side was interconnected. It was based on this diversity. It had this resilience that is what we need in our modern world. But I wouldn't have you think that I don't like the place on the right, which I quite do. I've come to love the city and its kind of diversity, and its resilience, and its dependence on density and how we're connected together. In fact, that I see them as reflections of each other, much as Lewis Carroll did in "Through the Looking Glass." We can compare these two and hold them in our minds at the same time, that they really are the same place, that there is no way that cities can escape from nature. And I think this is what we're learning about building cities in the future. So if you'll allow me a brief epilogue, not about the past, but about 400 years from now, what we're realizing is that cities are habitats for people, and need to supply what people need: a sense of home, food, water, shelter, reproductive resources, and a sense of meaning. This is the particular additional habitat requirement of humanity. And so many of the talks here at TED are about meaning, about bringing meaning to our lives in all kinds of different ways, through technology, through art, through science, so much so that I think we focus so much on that side of our lives, that we haven't given enough attention to the food and the water and the shelter, and what we need to raise the kids. So, how can we envision the city of the future? Well, what if we go to Madison Square Park, and we imagine it without all the cars, and bicycles instead and large forests, and streams instead of sewers and storm drains? What if we imagined the Upper East Side with green roofs, and streams winding through the city, and windmills supplying the power we need? Or if we imagine the New York City metropolitan area, currently home to 12 million people, but 12 million people in the future, perhaps living at the density of Manhattan, in only 36 percent of the area, with the areas in between covered by farmland, covered by wetlands, covered by the marshes we need. This is the kind of future I think we need, is a future that has the same diversity and abundance and dynamism of Manhattan, but that learns from the sustainability of the past, of the ecology, the original ecology, of nature with all its parts. Thank you very much. (Applause)
The substance of things unseen. Cities, past and future. In Oxford, perhaps we can use Lewis Carroll and look in the looking glass that is New York City to try and see our true selves, or perhaps pass through to another world. Or, in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald, "As the moon rose higher, the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that once flowered for Dutch sailors' eyes, a fresh green breast of the new world." My colleagues and I have been working for 10 years to rediscover this lost world in a project we call The Mannahatta Project. We're trying to discover what Henry Hudson would have seen on the afternoon of September 12th, 1609, when he sailed into New York harbor. And I'd like to tell you the story in three acts, and if I have time still, an epilogue. So, Act I: A Map Found. So, I didn't grow up in New York. I grew up out west in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, like you see here, in the Red Rock Canyon. And from these early experiences as a child I learned to love landscapes. And so when it became time for me to do my graduate studies, I studied this emerging field of landscape ecology. Landscape ecology concerns itself with how the stream and the meadow and the forest and the cliffs make habitats for plants and animals. This experience and this training lead me to get a wonderful job with the Wildlife Conservation Society, which works to save wildlife and wild places all over the world. And over the last decade, I traveled to over 40 countries to see jaguars and bears and elephants and tigers and rhinos. But every time I would return from my trips I'd return back to New York City. And on my weekends I would go up, just like all the other tourists, to the top of the Empire State Building, and I'd look down on this landscape, on these ecosystems, and I'd wonder, "How does this landscape work to make habitat for plants and animals? How does it work to make habitat for animals like me?" I'd go to Times Square and I'd look at the amazing ladies on the wall, and wonder why nobody is looking at the historical figures just behind them. I'd go to Central Park and see the rolling topography of Central Park come up against the abrupt and sheer topography of midtown Manhattan. I started reading about the history and the geography in New York City. I read that New York City was the first mega-city, a city of 10 million people or more, in 1950. I started seeing paintings like this. For those of you who are from New York, this is 125th street under the West Side Highway. (Laughter) It was once a beach. And this painting has John James Audubon, the painter, sitting on the rock. And it's looking up on the wooded heights of Washington Heights to Jeffrey's Hook, where the George Washington Bridge goes across today. Or this painting, from the 1740s, from Greenwich Village. Those are two students at King's College -- later Columbia University -- sitting on a hill, overlooking a valley. And so I'd go down to Greenwich Village and I'd look for this hill, and I couldn't find it. And I couldn't find that palm tree. What's that palm tree doing there? (Laughter) So, it was in the course of these investigations that I ran into a map. And it's this map you see here. It's held in a geographic information system which allows me to zoom in. This map isn't from Hudson's time, but from the American Revolution, 170 years later, made by British military cartographers during the occupation of New York City. And it's a remarkable map. It's in the National Archives here in Kew. And it's 10 feet long and three and a half feet wide. And if I zoom in to lower Manhattan you can see the extent of New York City as it was, right at the end of the American Revolution. Here's Bowling Green. And here's Broadway. And this is City Hall Park. So the city basically extended to City Hall Park. And just beyond it you can see features that have vanished, things that have disappeared. This is the Collect Pond, which was the fresh water source for New York City for its first 200 years, and for the Native Americans for thousands of years before that. You can see the Lispenard Meadows draining down through here, through what is TriBeCa now, and the beaches that come up from the Battery, all the way to 42nd St. This map was made for military reasons. They're mapping the roads, the buildings, these fortifications that they built. But they're also mapping things of ecological interest, also military interest: the hills, the marshes, the streams. This is Richmond Hill, and Minetta Water, which used to run its way through Greenwich Village. Or the swamp at Gramercy Park, right here. Or Murray Hill. And this is the Murrays' house on Murray Hill, 200 years ago. Here is Times Square, the two streams that came together to make a wetland in Times Square, as it was at the end of the American Revolution. So I saw this remarkable map in a book. And I thought to myself, "You know, if I could georeference this map, if I could place this map in the grid of the city today, I could find these lost features of the city, in the block-by-block geography that people know, the geography of where people go to work, and where they go to live, and where they like to eat." So, after some work we were able to georeference it, which allows us to put the modern streets on the city, and the buildings, and the open spaces, so that we can zoom in to where the Collect Pond is. We can digitize the Collect Pond and the streams, and see where they actually are in the geography of the city today. So this is fun for finding where things are relative to the old topography. But I had another idea about this map. If we take away the streets, and if we take away the buildings, and if we take away the open spaces, then we could take this map. If we pull off the 18th century features we could drive it back in time. We could drive it back to its ecological fundamentals: to the hills, to the streams, to the basic hydrology and shoreline, to the beaches, the basic aspects that make the ecological landscape. Then, if we added maps like the geology, the bedrock geology, and the surface geology, what the glaciers leave, if we make the soil map, with the 17 soil classes, that are defined by the National Conservation Service, if we make a digital elevation model of the topography that tells us how high the hills were, then we can calculate the slopes. We can calculate the aspect. We can calculate the winter wind exposure -- so, which way the winter winds blow across the landscape. The white areas on this map are the places protected from the winter winds. We compiled all the information about where the Native Americans were, the Lenape. And we built a probability map of where they might have been. So, the red areas on this map indicate the places that are best for human sustainability on Manhattan, places that are close to water, places that are near the harbor to fish, places protected from the winter winds. We know that there was a Lenape settlement down here by the Collect Pond. And we knew that they planted a kind of horticulture, that they grew these beautiful gardens of corn, beans, and squash, the "Three Sisters" garden. So, we built a model that explains where those fields might have been. And the old fields, the successional fields that go. And we might think of these as abandoned. But, in fact, they're grassland habitats for grassland birds and plants. And they have become successional shrub lands, and these then mix in to a map of all the ecological communities. And it turns out that Manhattan had 55 different ecosystem types. You can think of these as neighborhoods, as distinctive as TriBeCa and the Upper East Side and Inwood -- that these are the forest and the wetlands and the marine communities, the beaches. And 55 is a lot. On a per-area basis, Manhattan had more ecological communities per acre than Yosemite does, than Yellowstone, than Amboseli. It was really an extraordinary landscape that was capable of supporting an extraordinary biodiversity. So, Act II: A Home Reconstructed. So, we studied the fish and the frogs and the birds and the bees, the 85 different kinds of fish that were on Manhattan, the Heath hens, the species that aren't there anymore, the beavers on all the streams, the black bears, and the Native Americans, to study how they used and thought about their landscape. We wanted to try and map these. And to do that what we did was we mapped their habitat needs. Where do they get their food? Where do they get their water? Where do they get their shelter? Where do they get their reproductive resources? To an ecologist, the intersection of these is habitat, but to most people, the intersection of these is their home. So, we would read in field guides, the standard field guides that maybe you have on your shelves, you know, what beavers need is, "A slowly meandering stream with aspen trees and alders and willows, near the water." That's the best thing for a beaver. So we just started making a list. Here is the beaver. And here is the stream, and the aspen and the alder and the willow. As if these were the maps that we would need to predict where you would find the beaver. Or the bog turtle, needing wet meadows and insects and sunny places. Or the bobcat, needing rabbits and beavers and den sites. And rapidly we started to realize that beavers can be something that a bobcat needs. But a beaver also needs things. And that having it on either side means that we can link it together, that we can create the network of the habitat relationships for these species. Moreover, we realized that you can start out as being a beaver specialist, but you can look up what an aspen needs. An aspen needs fire and dry soils. And you can look at what a wet meadow needs. And it need beavers to create the wetlands, and maybe some other things. But you can also talk about sunny places. So, what does a sunny place need? Not habitat per se. But what are the conditions that make it possible? Or fire. Or dry soils. And that you can put these on a grid that's 1,000 columns long across the top and 1,000 rows down the other way. And then we can visualize this data like a network, like a social network. And this is the network of all the habitat relationships of all the plants and animals on Manhattan, and everything they needed, going back to the geology, going back to time and space at the very core of the web. We call this the Muir Web. And if you zoom in on it it looks like this. Each point is a different species or a different stream or a different soil type. And those little gray lines are the connections that connect them together. They are the connections that actually make nature resilient. And the structure of this is what makes nature work, seen with all its parts. We call these Muir Webs after the Scottish-American naturalist John Muir, who said, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find that it's bound fast by a thousand invisible cords that cannot be broken, to everything in the universe." So then we took the Muir webs and we took them back to the maps. So if we wanted to go between 85th and 86th, and Lex and Third, maybe there was a stream in that block. And these would be the kind of trees that might have been there, and the flowers and the lichens and the mosses, the butterflies, the fish in the stream, the birds in the trees. Maybe a timber rattlesnake lived there. And perhaps a black bear walked by. And maybe Native Americans were there. And then we took this data. You can see this for yourself on our website. You can zoom into any block on Manhattan, and see what might have been there 400 years ago. And we used it to try and reveal a landscape here in Act III. We used the tools they use in Hollywood to make these fantastic landscapes that we all see in the movies. And we tried to use it to visualize Third Avenue. So we would take the landscape and we would build up the topography. We'd lay on top of that the soils and the waters, and illuminate the landscape. We would lay on top of that the map of the ecological communities. And feed into that the map of the species. So that we would actually take a photograph, flying above Times Square, looking toward the Hudson River, waiting for Hudson to come. Using this technology, we can make these fantastic georeferenced views. We can basically take a picture out of any window on Manhattan and see what that landscape looked like 400 years ago. This is the view from the East River, looking up Murray Hill at where the United Nations is today. This is the view looking down the Hudson River, with Manhattan on the left, and New Jersey out on the right, looking out toward the Atlantic Ocean. This is the view over Times Square, with the beaver pond there, looking out toward the east. So we can see the Collect Pond, and Lispenard Marshes back behind. We can see the fields that the Native Americans made. And we can see this in the geography of the city today. So when you're watching "Law and Order," and the lawyers walk up the steps they could have walked back down those steps of the New York Court House, right into the Collect Pond, 400 years ago. So these images are the work of my friend and colleague, Mark Boyer, who is here in the audience today. And I'd just like, if you would give him a hand, to call out for his fine work. (Applause) There is such power in bringing science and visualization together, that we can create images like this, perhaps looking on either side of a looking glass. And even though I've only had a brief time to speak, I hope you appreciate that Mannahatta was a very special place. The place that you see here on the left side was interconnected. It was based on this diversity. It had this resilience that is what we need in our modern world. But I wouldn't have you think that I don't like the place on the right, which I quite do. I've come to love the city and its kind of diversity, and its resilience, and its dependence on density and how we're connected together. In fact, that I see them as reflections of each other, much as Lewis Carroll did in "Through the Looking Glass." We can compare these two and hold them in our minds at the same time, that they really are the same place, that there is no way that cities can escape from nature. And I think this is what we're learning about building cities in the future. So if you'll allow me a brief epilogue, not about the past, but about 400 years from now, what we're realizing is that cities are habitats for people, and need to supply what people need: a sense of home, food, water, shelter, reproductive resources, and a sense of meaning. This is the particular additional habitat requirement of humanity. And so many of the talks here at TED are about meaning, about bringing meaning to our lives in all kinds of different ways, through technology, through art, through science, so much so that I think we focus so much on that side of our lives, that we haven't given enough attention to the food and the water and the shelter, and what we need to raise the kids. So, how can we envision the city of the future? Well, what if we go to Madison Square Park, and we imagine it without all the cars, and bicycles instead and large forests, and streams instead of sewers and storm drains? What if we imagined the Upper East Side with green roofs, and streams winding through the city, and windmills supplying the power we need? Or if we imagine the New York City metropolitan area, currently home to 12 million people, but 12 million people in the future, perhaps living at the density of Manhattan, in only 36 percent of the area, with the areas in between covered by farmland, covered by wetlands, covered by the marshes we need. This is the kind of future I think we need, is a future that has the same diversity and abundance and dynamism of Manhattan, but that learns from the sustainability of the past, of the ecology, the original ecology, of nature with all its parts. Thank you very much. (Applause)
The future of life, where the unraveling of our biology -- and bring up the lights a little bit. I don't have any slides. I'm just going to talk -- about where that's likely to carry us. And you know, I saw all the visions of the first couple of sessions. It almost made me feel a little bit guilty about having an uplifting talk about the future. It felt wrong to do that in some way. And yet, I don't really think it is because when it comes down to it, it's this larger trajectory that is really what is going to remain -- what people in the future are going to remember about this period. I want to talk to you a little bit about why the visions of Jeremy Rivkins, who would like to ban these sorts of technologies, or of the Bill Joys who would like to relinquish them, are actually -- to follow those paths would be such a tragedy for us. I'm focusing on biology, the biological sciences. The reason I'm doing that is because those are going to be the areas that are the most significant to us. The reason for that is really very simple. It's because we're flesh and blood. We're biological creatures. And what we can do with our biology is going to shape our future and that of our children and that of their children -- whether we gain control over aging, whether we learn to protect ourselves from Alzheimer's, and heart disease, and cancer. I think that Shakespeare really put it very nicely. And I'm actually going to use his words in the same order that he did. (Laughter) He said, "And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe. And then from hour to hour we rot and rot. And thereby hangs a tale." Life is short, you know. And we need to think about planning a little bit. We're all going to eventually, even in the developed world, going to have to lose everything that we love. When you're beginning to rot a little bit, all of the videos crammed into your head, all of the extensions that extend your various powers, are going to being to seem a little secondary. And you know, I'm getting a little bit gray -- so is Ray Kurzweil, so is Eric Drexler. This is where it's really central to our lives. Now I know there's been a whole lot of hype about our power to control biology. You just have to look at the Human Genome Project. It wasn't two years ago that everybody was talking about -- we've found the Holy Grail of biology. We're deciphering the code of codes. We're reading the book of life. It's a little bit reminiscent of 1969 when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and everybody was about to race out toward the stars. And we've all seen "2001: A Space Odyssey." You know it's 2003, and there is no HAL. And there is no odyssey to our own moon, much less the moons of Jupiter. And we're still picking up pieces of the Challenger. So it's not surprising that some people would wonder whether maybe 30 or 40 years from now, we'll look back at this instant in time, and all of the sort of talk about the Human Genome Project, and what all this is going to mean to us -- well, it will really mean precious little. And I just want to say that that is absolutely not going to be the case. Because when we talk about our genetics and our biology, and modifying and altering and adjusting these things, we're talking about changing ourselves. And this is very critical stuff. If you have any doubts about how technology affects our lives, you just have to go to any major city. This is not the stomping ground of our Pleistocene ancestors. What's happening is we're taking this technology -- it's becoming more precise, more potent -- and we're turning it back upon ourselves. Before it's all done we are going to alter ourselves every bit as much as we have changed the world around us. It's going to happen a lot sooner than people imagine. On the way there it's going to completely revolutionize medicine and health care; that's obvious. It's going to change the way we have children. It's going to change the way we manage and alter our emotions. It's going to probably change the human lifespan. It will really make us question what it is to be a human being. The larger context of this is that are two unprecedented revolutions that are going on today. The first of them is the obvious one, the silicon revolution, which you all are very, very familiar with. It's changing our lives in so many ways, and it will continue to do that. What the essence of that is, is that we're taking the sand at our feet, the inert silicon at our feet, and we're breathing a level of complexity into it that rivals that of life itself, and may even surpass it. As an outgrowth of that, as a child of that revolution, is the revolution in biology. The genomics revolution, proteomics, metabolomics, all of these "omics" that sound so terrific on grants and on business plans. What we're doing is we are seizing control of our evolutionary future. I mean we're essentially using technology to just jam evolution into fast-forward. It's not at all clear where it's going to take us. But in five to ten years we're going to start see some very profound changes. The most immediate changes that we'll see are things like in medicine. There is going to be a big shift towards preventative medicine as we start to be able to identify all of the risk factors that we have as individuals. But who is going to pay for all this? And how are we going to understand all this complex information? That is going to be the IT challenge of the next generation, is communicating all this information. There's pharmacogenomics, the combination of pharmacology and genetics: tailoring drugs to our individual constitutions that Juan talked about a little bit earlier. That's going to have amazing impacts. And it's going to be used for diet as well, and nutritional supplements and such. But it's going to have a big impact because we're going to have niche drugs. And we aren't going to be able to support the kinds of expenses that we have to create blockbuster drugs today. The approval process is going to fall apart, actually. It's too slow. It's too risk-averse. And it is really not suited for the future that we're moving into. Another thing is that we're just going to have to deal with this knowledge. It's really wonderful when we hear, "Oh, 99.9 percent of the letters in the code are the same. We're all identical to each other. Isn't it wonderful?" And look around you and know that what we really care about is that little bit of difference. We look the same to a visitor from another planet, maybe, but not to each other because we compete with each other all time. And we're going to have to come to grips with the fact that there are differences between us as individuals that we will know about, and between subpopulations of humans as well. To deny that that's the case is not a very good start on that. A generation or so away there are going to be even more profound things that are going to happen. That's when we're going to begin to use this knowledge to modify ourselves. Now I don't mean extra gills or something -- something we care about, like aging. What if we could unravel aging and understand it -- begin to retard the process or even reverse it? It would change absolutely everything. And it's obvious to anyone, that if we can do this, we absolutely will do this, whatever the consequences are. The second is modifying our emotions. I mean Ritalin, Viagra, things of that sort, Prozac. You know, this is just clumsy little baby steps. What if you could take a little concoction of pharmaceuticals that would make you feel really contented, just happy to be you. Are you going to be able to resist that if it doesn't have any overt side effects? Probably not. And if you don't, who are you going to be? Why do you do what you do? We're sort of circumventing evolutionary programs that guide our behavior. It's going to be very challenging to deal with. The third area is reproduction. The idea that we're going to chose our children's genes, as we begin to understand what genes say about who we are. That's the focus of my book "Redesigning Humans," where I talk about the kinds of choices we'll make, and the challenges it's going to present to society. There are three obvious ways of doing this. The first is cloning. It didn't happen. It's a total media circus. It will happen in five to 10 years. And when it does it's not going to be that big a deal. The birth of a delayed identical twin is not going to shake western civilization. But there are more important things that are already occurring: embryo screening. You take a six to eight cell embryo, you tease out one of the cells, you run a genetic test on that cell, and depending on the results of that test you either implant that embryo or you discard it. It's already done to avoid rare diseases today. And pretty soon it's going to be possible to avoid virtually all genetic diseases in that way. As that becomes possible this is going to move from something that is used by those who have infertility problems and are already doing in vitro fertilization, to the wealthy who want to protect their children, to just about everybody else. And in that process that's going to morph from being just for diseases, to being for lesser vulnerabilities, like risk of manic depression or something, to picking personalities, temperaments, traits, these sorts of things. Of course there is going to be genetic engineering. Directly going in -- it's a little bit further away, but not that far away -- going in and altering the genes in the first cell in an embryo. The way I suspect it will happen is using artificial chromosomes and extra chromosomes, so we go from 46 to 47 or 48. And one that is not heritable because who would want to pass on to their children the archaic enhancement modules that they got 25 years earlier from their parents? It's a joke; of course they wouldn't want to do that. They'll want the new release. Those kinds of loose analogies with (Laughter) computers, and with programming, are actually much deeper than that. They are really going to come to operate in this realm. Now not everything that can be done should be done. And it won't be done. But when something is feasible in thousands of laboratories all over the world, which is going to be the case with these technologies, when there are large numbers of people who see them as beneficial, which is already the case, and when they're almost impossible to police, it's not a question of if this is going to happen, it's when and where and how it's going to happen. Humanity is going to go down this path. And it's going to do so for two reasons. The first is that all these technologies are just a spin-off of mainstream medical research that everybody wants to see happen. It is being funded very very -- in a big way. The second is, we're human. That's what we do. We try and use our technology to improve our lives in one way or another. To imagine that we're not going to use these technologies when they become available, is as much a denial of who we are as to imagine that we'll use these technologies and not fret and worry about it a great deal. The lines are going to blur. And they already are between therapy and enhancement, between treatment and prevention, between need and desire. That's really the central one, I believe. People can try and ban these things. They undoubtedly will. They have. But ultimately all this is going to do is just shift development elsewhere. It's going to drive these things from view. It's going to reserve the technology for the wealthy because they are in the best position to circumvent any of these sorts of laws. And it's going to deny us the information that we need to make wise decisions about how to use these technologies. So, sure, we need to debate these things. And I think it's wonderful that we do. But we shouldn't kid ourselves and think that we're going to reach a consensus about these things. That is simply not going to happen. They touch us too deeply. And they depend too much upon history, upon philosophy, upon religion, upon culture, upon politics. Some people are going to see this as an abomination, as the worst thing, as just awful. Other people are going to say, "This is great. This is the flowering of human endeavor." The one thing though that is really dangerous about these sorts of technologies, is that it's easy to become seduced by them. And to focus too much on all the high-technology possibilities that exist. And to lose touch with the basic rhythms of our biology and our health. There are too many people that think that high-technology medicine is going to keep them, save them, from overeating, from eating a lot of fast foods, from not getting any exercise. It's not going to happen. In the midst of all this amazing technology, and all these things that are occurring, it's really interesting because there is sort of a counter-revolution that is going on: a resurgence of interest in remedies from the past, in nutraceuticals, in all of these sorts of things that some people, in the pharmaceutical industry particularly, like to brand as non-science. But this whole effort is generated, is driven, by IT as well because that is how we're gathering all this information, and linking it, and integrating it together. There is a lot in this rich biota that is going to serve us well. And that's where about half of our drugs come. So we shouldn't dismiss this because it's an enormous opportunity to use these sorts of results, or these random loose trials from the last thousand years about what has impacts on our health. And to use our advanced technologies to pull out what is beneficial from this sea of noise, basically. In fact this isn't just abstract. I just formed a biotechnology company that is using this sort of an approach to develop therapeutics for Alzheimer's and other diseases of aging, and we're making some real progress. So here we are. It's the beginning of a new millennium. If you look forward, I mean future humans, far before the end of this millennium, in a few hundred years, they are going to look back at this moment. And from the beginning of today's sessions you'd think that they're going to see this as this horrible difficult, painful period that we struggled through. And I don't think that's what's going to happen. They're going to do like everybody does. They are going to forget about all that stuff. And they are actually going to romanticize this moment in time. They are going to think about it as this glorious instant when we laid down the very foundations of their lives, of their society, of their future. You know it's a little bit like a birth. Where there is this bloody, awful mess happens. And then what comes out of it? New life. Actually as was pointed out earlier, we forget about all the struggle there was in getting there. So to me, it's clear that one of the foundations of that future is going to be the reworking of our biology. It's going to come gradually at first. It's going to pick up speed. We're going to make lots of errors. That's the way these things work. To me it's an incredible privilege to be alive now and to be able to witness this thing. It is something that is a unique instant in the history of all of life. It will always be remembered. And what's extraordinary is that we're not just observing this, we are the architects of this. I think that we should be proud of it. What is so difficult and challenging is that we are also the objects of these changes. It's our health, it's our lives, it's our future, it's our children. And that is why they are so very troubling to so many people who would pull back in fear. I think that our choice in the choice of life, is not whether we're going to go down this path. We are, definitely. It's how we hold it in our hearts. It's how we look at it. I think Thucydides really spoke to us very clearly in 430 B.C. He put it nicely. Again, I'll use the words in the same order he did. "The bravest are surely those who have the clearest vision of what is before them, both glory and danger alike. And yet notwithstanding, they go out and they meet it." Thank you. (Applause)
Human beings start putting each other into boxes the second that they see each other -- Is that person dangerous? Are they attractive? Are they a potential mate? Are they a potential networking opportunity? We do this little interrogation when we meet people to make a mental resume for them. What's your name? Where are you from? How old are you? What do you do? Then we get more personal with it. Have you ever had any diseases? Have you ever been divorced? Does your breath smell bad while you're answering my interrogation right now? What are you into? Who are you into? What gender do you like to sleep with? I get it. We are neurologically hardwired to seek out people like ourselves. We start forming cliques as soon as we're old enough to know what acceptance feels like. We bond together based on anything that we can -- music preference, race, gender, the block that we grew up on. We seek out environments that reinforce our personal choices. Sometimes, though, just the question "what do you do?" can feel like somebody's opening a tiny little box and asking you to squeeze yourself inside of it. Because the categories, I've found, are too limiting. The boxes are too narrow. And this can get really dangerous. So here's a disclaimer about me, though, before we get too deep into this. I grew up in a very sheltered environment. I was raised in downtown Manhattan in the early 1980s, two blocks from the epicenter of punk music. I was shielded from the pains of bigotry and the social restrictions of a religiously-based upbringing. Where I come from, if you weren't a drag queen or a radical thinker or a performance artist of some kind, you were the weirdo. (Laughter) It was an unorthodox upbringing, but as a kid on the streets of New York, you learn how to trust your own instincts, you learn how to go with your own ideas. So when I was six, I decided that I wanted to be a boy. I went to school one day and the kids wouldn't let me play basketball with them. They said they wouldn't let girls play. So I went home, and I shaved my head, and I came back the next day and I said, "I'm a boy." I mean, who knows, right? When you're six, maybe you can do that. I didn't want anyone to know that I was a girl, and they didn't. I kept up the charade for eight years. So this is me when I was 11. I was playing a kid named Walter in a movie called "Julian Po." I was a little street tough that followed Christian Slater around and badgered him. See, I was also a child actor, which doubled up the layers of the performance of my identity, because no one knew that I was actually a girl really playing a boy. In fact, no one in my life knew that I was a girl -- not my teachers at school, not my friends, not the directors that I worked with. Kids would often come up to me in class and grab me by the throat to check for an Adam's apple or grab my crotch to check what I was working with. When I would go to the bathroom, I would turn my shoes around in the stalls so that it looked like I was peeing standing up. At sleepovers I would have panic attacks trying to break it to girls that they didn't want to kiss me without outing myself. It's worth mentioning though that I didn't hate my body or my genitalia. I didn't feel like I was in the wrong body. I felt like I was performing this elaborate act. I wouldn't have qualified as transgender. If my family, though, had been the kind of people to believe in therapy, they probably would have diagnosed me as something like gender dysmorphic and put me on hormones to stave off puberty. But in my particular case, I just woke up one day when I was 14, and I decided that I wanted to be a girl again. Puberty had hit, and I had no idea what being a girl meant, and I was ready to figure out who I actually was. When a kid behaves like I did, they don't exactly have to come out, right? No one is exactly shocked. (Laughter) But I wasn't asked to define myself by my parents. When I was 15, and I called my father to tell him that I had fallen in love, it was the last thing on either of our minds to discuss what the consequences were of the fact that my first love was a girl. Three years later, when I fell in love with a man, neither of my parents batted an eyelash either. See, it's one of the great blessings of my very unorthodox childhood that I wasn't ever asked to define myself as any one thing at any point. I was just allowed to be me, growing and changing in every moment. So four, almost five years ago, Proposition 8, the great marriage equality debate, was raising a lot of dust around this country. And at the time, getting married wasn't really something I spent a lot of time thinking about. But I was struck by the fact that America, a country with such a tarnished civil rights record, could be repeating its mistakes so blatantly. And I remember watching the discussion on television and thinking how interesting it was that the separation of church and state was essentially drawing geographical boundaries throughout this country, between places where people believed in it and places where people didn't. And then, that this discussion was drawing geographical boundaries around me. If this was a war with two disparate sides, I, by default, fell on team gay, because I certainly wasn't 100 percent straight. At the time I was just beginning to emerge from this eight-year personal identity crisis zigzag that saw me go from being a boy to being this awkward girl that looked like a boy in girl's clothes to the opposite extreme of this super skimpy, over-compensating, boy-chasing girly-girl to finally just a hesitant exploration of what I actually was, a tomboyish girl who liked both boys and girls depending on the person. I had spent a year photographing this new generation of girls, much like myself, who fell kind of between-the-lines -- girls who skateboarded but did it in lacy underwear, girls who had boys' haircuts but wore girly nail polish, girls who had eyeshadow to match their scraped knees, girls who liked girls and boys who all liked boys and girls who all hated being boxed in to anything. I loved these people, and I admired their freedom, but I watched as the world outside of our utopian bubble exploded into these raging debates where pundits started likening our love to bestiality on national television. And this powerful awareness rolled in over me that I was a minority, and in my own home country, based on one facet of my character. I was legally and indisputably a second-class citizen. I was not an activist. I wave no flags in my own life. But I was plagued by this question: How could anyone vote to strip the rights of the vast variety of people that I knew based on one element of their character? How could they say that we as a group were not deserving of equal rights as somebody else? Were we even a group? What group? And had these people ever even consciously met a victim of their discrimination? Did they know who they were voting against and what the impact was? And then it occurred to me, perhaps if they could look into the eyes of the people that they were casting into second-class citizenship it might make it harder for them to do. It might give them pause. Obviously I couldn't get 20 million people to the same dinner party, so I figured out a way where I could introduce them to each other photographically without any artifice, without any lighting, or without any manipulation of any kind on my part. Because in a photograph you can examine a lion's whiskers without the fear of him ripping your face off. For me, photography is not just about exposing film, it's about exposing the viewer to something new, a place they haven't gone before, but most importantly, to people that they might be afraid of. Life magazine introduced generations of people to distant, far-off cultures they never knew existed through pictures. So I decided to make a series of very simple portraits, mugshots if you will. And I basically decided to photograph anyone in this country that was not 100 percent straight, which, if you don't know, is a limitless number of people. (Laughter) So this was a very large undertaking, and to do it we needed some help. So I ran out in the freezing cold, and I photographed every single person that I knew that I could get to in February of about two years ago. And I took those photographs, and I went to the HRC and I asked them for some help. And they funded two weeks of shooting in New York. And then we made this. (Music) Video: I'm iO Tillett Wright, and I'm an artist born and raised in New York City. (Music) Self Evident Truths is a photographic record of LGBTQ America today. My aim is to take a simple portrait of anyone who's anything other than 100 percent straight or feels like they fall in the LGBTQ spectrum in any way. My goal is to show the humanity that exists in every one of us through the simplicity of a face. (Music) "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal." It's written in the Declaration of Independence. We are failing as a nation to uphold the morals upon which we were founded. There is no equality in the United States. ["What does equality mean to you?"] ["Marriage"] ["Freedom"] ["Civil rights"] ["Treat every person as you'd treat yourself"] It's when you don't have to think about it, simple as that. The fight for equal rights is not just about gay marriage. Today in 29 states, more than half of this country, you can legally be fired just for your sexuality. ["Who is responsible for equality?"] I've heard hundreds of people give the same answer: "We are all responsible for equality." So far we've shot 300 faces in New York City. And we wouldn't have been able to do any of it without the generous support of the Human Rights Campaign. I want to take the project across the country. I want to visit 25 American cities, and I want to shoot 4,000 or 5,000 people. This is my contribution to the civil rights fight of my generation. I challenge you to look into the faces of these people and tell them that they deserve less than any other human being. (Music) ["Self evident truths"] ["4,000 faces across America"] (Music) (Applause) iO Tillett Wright: Absolutely nothing could have prepared us for what happened after that. Almost 85,000 people watched that video, and then they started emailing us from all over the country, asking us to come to their towns and help them to show their faces. And a lot more people wanted to show their faces than I had anticipated. So I changed my immediate goal to 10,000 faces. That video was made in the spring of 2011, and as of today I have traveled to almost 20 cities and photographed almost 2,000 people. I know that this is a talk, but I'd like to have a minute of just quiet and have you just look at these faces because there is nothing that I can say that will add to them. Because if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a picture of a face needs a whole new vocabulary. So after traveling and talking to people in places like Oklahoma or small-town Texas, we found evidence that the initial premise was dead on. Visibility really is key. Familiarity really is the gateway drug to empathy. Once an issue pops up in your own backyard or amongst your own family, you're far more likely to explore sympathy for it or explore a new perspective on it. Of course, in my travels I met people who legally divorced their children for being other than straight, but I also met people who were Southern Baptists who switched churches because their child was a lesbian. Sparking empathy had become the backbone of Self Evident Truths. But here's what I was starting to learn that was really interesting: Self Evident Truths doesn't erase the differences between us. In fact, on the contrary, it highlights them. It presents, not just the complexities found in a procession of different human beings, but the complexities found within each individual person. It wasn't that we had too many boxes, it was that we had too few. At some point I realized that my mission to photograph "gays" was inherently flawed, because there were a million different shades of gay. Here I was trying to help, and I had perpetuated the very thing I had spent my life trying to avoid -- yet another box. At some point I added a question to the release form that asked people to quantify themselves on a scale of one to 100 percent gay. And I watched so many existential crises unfold in front of me. (Laughter) People didn't know what to do because they had never been presented with the option before. Can you quantify your openness? Once they got over the shock, though, by and large people opted for somewhere between 70 to 95 percent or the 3 to 20 percent marks. Of course, there were lots of people who opted for a 100 percent one or the other, but I found that a much larger proportion of people identified as something that was much more nuanced. I found that most people fall on a spectrum of what I have come to refer to as "Grey." Let me be clear though -- and this is very important -- in no way am I saying that preference doesn't exist. And I am not even going to address the issue of choice versus biological imperative, because if any of you happen to be of the belief that sexual orientation is a choice, I invite you to go out and try to be grey. I'll take your picture just for trying. (Laughter) What I am saying though is that human beings are not one-dimensional. The most important thing to take from the percentage system is this: If you have gay people over here and you have straight people over here, and while we recognize that most people identify as somewhere closer to one binary or another, there is this vast spectrum of people that exist in between. And the reality that this presents is a complicated one. Because, for example, if you pass a law that allows a boss to fire an employee for homosexual behavior, where exactly do you draw the line? Is it over here, by the people who have had one or two heterosexual experiences so far? Or is it over here by the people who have only had one or two homosexual experiences thus far? Where exactly does one become a second-class citizen? Another interesting thing that I learned from my project and my travels is just what a poor binding agent sexual orientation is. After traveling so much and meeting so many people, let me tell you, there are just as many jerks and sweethearts and Democrats and Republicans and jocks and queens and every other polarization you can possibly think of within the LGBT community as there are within the human race. Aside from the fact that we play with one legal hand tied behind our backs, and once you get past the shared narrative of prejudice and struggle, just being other than straight doesn't necessarily mean that we have anything in common. So in the endless proliferation of faces that Self Evident Truths is always becoming, as it hopefully appears across more and more platforms, bus shelters, billboards, Facebook pages, screen savers, perhaps in watching this procession of humanity, something interesting and useful will begin to happen. Hopefully these categories, these binaries, these over-simplified boxes will begin to become useless and they'll begin to fall away. Because really, they describe nothing that we see and no one that we know and nothing that we are. What we see are human beings in all their multiplicity. And seeing them makes it harder to deny their humanity. At the very least I hope it makes it harder to deny their human rights. So is it me particularly that you would choose to deny the right to housing, the right to adopt children, the right to marriage, the freedom to shop here, live here, buy here? Am I the one that you choose to disown as your child or your brother or your sister or your mother or your father, your neighbor, your cousin, your uncle, the president, your police woman or the fireman? It's too late. Because I already am all of those things. We already are all of those things, and we always have been. So please don't greet us as strangers, greet us as your fellow human beings, period. Thank you. (Applause)
In the early days of Twitter, it was like a place of radical de-shaming. People would admit shameful secrets about themselves, and other people would say, "Oh my God, I'm exactly the same." Voiceless people realized that they had a voice, and it was powerful and eloquent. If a newspaper ran some racist or homophobic column, we realized we could do something about it. We could get them. We could hit them with a weapon that we understood but they didn't -- a social media shaming. Advertisers would withdraw their advertising. When powerful people misused their privilege, we were going to get them. This was like the democratization of justice. Hierarchies were being leveled out. We were going to do things better. Soon after that, a disgraced pop science writer called Jonah Lehrer -- he'd been caught plagiarizing and faking quotes, and he was drenched in shame and regret, he told me. And he had the opportunity to publicly apologize at a foundation lunch. This was going to be the most important speech of his life. Maybe it would win him some salvation. He knew before he arrived that the foundation was going to be live-streaming his event, but what he didn't know until he turned up, was that they'd erected a giant screen Twitter feed right next to his head. (Laughter) Another one in a monitor screen in his eye line. I don't think the foundation did this because they were monstrous. I think they were clueless: I think this was a unique moment when the beautiful naivety of Twitter was hitting the increasingly horrific reality. And here were some of the Tweets that were cascading into his eye line, as he was trying to apologize: "Jonah Lehrer, boring us into forgiving him." (Laughter) And, "Jonah Lehrer has not proven that he is capable of feeling shame." That one must have been written by the best psychiatrist ever, to know that about such a tiny figure behind a lectern. And, "Jonah Lehrer is just a frigging sociopath." That last word is a very human thing to do, to dehumanize the people we hurt. It's because we want to destroy people but not feel bad about it. Imagine if this was an actual court, and the accused was in the dark, begging for another chance, and the jury was yelling out, "Bored! Sociopath!" (Laughter) You know, when we watch courtroom dramas, we tend to identify with the kindhearted defense attorney, but give us the power, and we become like hanging judges. Power shifts fast. We were getting Jonah because he was perceived to have misused his privilege, but Jonah was on the floor then, and we were still kicking, and congratulating ourselves for punching up. And it began to feel weird and empty when there wasn't a powerful person who had misused their privilege that we could get. A day without a shaming began to feel like a day picking fingernails and treading water. Let me tell you a story. It's about a woman called Justine Sacco. She was a PR woman from New York with 170 Twitter followers, and she'd Tweet little acerbic jokes to them, like this one on a plane from New York to London: [Weird German Dude: You're in first class. It's 2014. Get some deodorant." -Inner monologue as inhale BO. Thank god for pharmaceuticals.] So Justine chuckled to herself, and pressed send, and got no replies, and felt that sad feeling that we all feel when the Internet doesn't congratulate us for being funny. (Laughter) Black silence when the Internet doesn't talk back. And then she got to Heathrow, and she had a little time to spare before her final leg, so she thought up another funny little acerbic joke: [Going to Africa. Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding. I'm white!] And she chuckled to herself, pressed send, got on the plane, got no replies, turned off her phone, fell asleep, woke up 11 hours later, turned on her phone while the plane was taxiing on the runway, and straightaway there was a message from somebody that she hadn't spoken to since high school, that said, "I am so sorry to see what's happening to you." And then another message from a best friend, "You need to call me right now. You are the worldwide number one trending topic on Twitter." (Laughter) What had happened is that one of her 170 followers had sent the Tweet to a Gawker journalist, and he retweeted it to his 15,000 followers: [And now, a funny holiday joke from IAC's PR boss] And then it was like a bolt of lightning. A few weeks later, I talked to the Gawker journalist. I emailed him and asked him how it felt, and he said, "It felt delicious." And then he said, "But I'm sure she's fine." But she wasn't fine, because while she slept, Twitter took control of her life and dismantled it piece by piece. First there were the philanthropists: [If @JustineSacco's unfortunate words ... bother you, join me in supporting @CARE's work in Africa.] [In light of ... disgusting, racist tweet, I'm donating to @care today] Then came the beyond horrified: [... no words for that horribly disgusting racist as fuck tweet from Justine Sacco. I am beyond horrified.] Was anybody on Twitter that night? A few of you. Did Justine's joke overwhelm your Twitter feed the way it did mine? It did mine, and I thought what everybody thought that night, which was, "Wow, somebody's screwed! Somebody's life is about to get terrible!" And I sat up in my bed, and I put the pillow behind my head, and then I thought, I'm not entirely sure that joke was intended to be racist. Maybe instead of gleefully flaunting her privilege, she was mocking the gleeful flaunting of privilege. There's a comedy tradition of this, like South Park or Colbert or Randy Newman. Maybe Justine Sacco's crime was not being as good at it as Randy Newman. In fact, when I met Justine a couple of weeks later in a bar, she was just crushed, and I asked her to explain the joke, and she said, "Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the Third World. I was making of fun of that bubble." You know, another woman on Twitter that night, a New Statesman writer Helen Lewis, she reviewed my book on public shaming and wrote that she Tweeted that night, "I'm not sure that her joke was intended to be racist," and she said straightaway she got a fury of Tweets saying, "Well, you're just a privileged bitch, too." And so to her shame, she wrote, she shut up and watched as Justine's life got torn apart. It started to get darker: [Everyone go report this cunt @JustineSacco] Then came the calls for her to be fired. [Good luck with the job hunt in the new year. #GettingFired] Thousands of people around the world decided it was their duty to get her fired. [@JustineSacco last tweet of your career. #SorryNotSorry Corporations got involved, hoping to sell their products on the back of Justine's annihilation: [Next time you plan to tweet something stupid before you take off, make sure you are getting on a @Gogo flight!] (Laughter) A lot of companies were making good money that night. You know, Justine's name was normally Googled 40 times a month. That month, between December the 20th and the end of December, her name was Googled 1,220,000 times. And one Internet economist told me that that meant that Google made somewhere between 120,000 dollars and 468,000 dollars from Justine's annihilation, whereas those of us doing the actual shaming -- we got nothing. (Laughter) We were like unpaid shaming interns for Google. (Laughter) And then came the trolls: [I'm actually kind of hoping Justine Sacco gets aids? lol] Somebody else on that wrote, "Somebody HIV-positive should rape this bitch and then we'll find out if her skin color protects her from AIDS." And that person got a free pass. Nobody went after that person. We were all so excited about destroying Justine, and our shaming brains are so simple-minded, that we couldn't also handle destroying somebody who was inappropriately destroying Justine. Justine was really uniting a lot of disparate groups that night, from philanthropists to "rape the bitch." [@JustineSacco I hope you get fired! You demented bitch... Just let the world know you're planning to ride bare back while in Africa.] Women always have it worse than men. When a man gets shamed, it's, "I'm going to get you fired." When a woman gets shamed, it's, "I'm going to get you fired and raped and cut out your uterus." And then Justine's employers got involved: [IAC on @JustineSacco tweet: This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question currently unreachable on an intl flight.] And that's when the anger turned to excitement: [All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco's face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail. #fired] [Oh man, @justinesacco is going to have the most painful phone-turning-on moment ever when her plane lands.] [We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she's getting fired.] What we had was a delightful narrative arc. We knew something that Justine didn't. Can you think of anything less judicial than this? Justine was asleep on a plane and unable to explain herself, and her inability was a huge part of the hilarity. On Twitter that night, we were like toddlers crawling towards a gun. Somebody worked out exactly which plane she was on, so they linked to a flight tracker website. [British Airways Flight 43 On-time - arrives in 1 hour 34 minutes] A hashtag began trending worldwide: # hasJustineLandedYet? [It is kinda wild to see someone self-destruct without them even being aware of it. #hasJustineLandedYet] [Seriously. I just want to go home to go to bed, but everyone at the bar is SO into #HasJustineLandedYet. Can't look away. Can't leave.] [#HasJustineLandedYet may be the best thing to happen to my Friday night.] [Is no one in Cape Town going to the airport to tweet her arrival? Come on, twitter! I'd like pictures] And guess what? Yes there was. [@JustineSacco HAS in fact landed at Cape Town international. And if you want to know what it looks like to discover that you've just been torn to shreds because of a misconstrued liberal joke, not by trolls, but by nice people like us, this is what it looks like: [... She's decided to wear sunnies as a disguise.] So why did we do it? I think some people were genuinely upset, but I think for other people, it's because Twitter is basically a mutual approval machine. We surround ourselves with people who feel the same way we do, and we approve each other, and that's a really good feeling. And if somebody gets in the way, we screen them out. And do you know what that's the opposite of? It's the opposite of democracy. We wanted to show that we cared about people dying of AIDS in Africa. Our desire to be seen to be compassionate is what led us to commit this profoundly un-compassionate act. As Meghan O'Gieblyn wrote in the Boston Review, "This isn't social justice. It's a cathartic alternative." For the past three years, I've been going around the world meeting people like Justine Sacco -- and believe me, there's a lot of people like Justine Sacco. There's more every day. And we want to think they're fine, but they're not fine. The people I met were mangled. They talked to me about depression, and anxiety and insomnia and suicidal thoughts. One woman I talked to, who also told a joke that landed badly, she stayed home for a year and a half. Before that, she worked with adults with learning difficulties, and was apparently really good at her job. Justine was fired, of course, because social media demanded it. But it was worse than that. She was losing herself. She was waking up in the middle of the night, forgetting who she was. She was got because she was perceived to have misused her privilege. And of course, that's a much better thing to get people for than the things we used to get people for, like having children out of wedlock. But the phrase "misuse of privilege" is becoming a free pass to tear apart pretty much anybody we choose to. It's becoming a devalued term, and it's making us lose our capacity for empathy and for distinguishing between serious and unserious transgressions. Justine had 170 Twitter followers, and so to make it work, she had to be fictionalized. Word got around that she was the daughter the mining billionaire Desmond Sacco. [Let us not be fooled by #JustineSacco her father is a SA mining billionaire. She's not sorry. And neither is her father.] I thought that was true about Justine, until I met her at a bar, and I asked her about her billionaire father, and she said, "My father sells carpets." And I think back on the early days of Twitter, when people would admit shameful secrets about themselves, and other people would say, "Oh my God, I'm exactly the same." These days, the hunt is on for people's shameful secrets. You can lead a good, ethical life, but some bad phraseology in a Tweet can overwhelm it all, become a clue to your secret inner evil. Maybe there's two types of people in the world: those people who favor humans over ideology, and those people who favor ideology over humans. I favor humans over ideology, but right now, the ideologues are winning, and they're creating a stage for constant artificial high dramas where everybody's either a magnificent hero or a sickening villain, even though we know that's not true about our fellow humans. What's true is that we are clever and stupid; what's true is that we're grey areas. The great thing about social media was how it gave a voice to voiceless people, but we're now creating a surveillance society, where the smartest way to survive is to go back to being voiceless. Let's not do that. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you, Jon. Jon Ronson: Thanks, Bruno. BG: Don't go away. What strikes me about Justine's story is also the fact that if you Google her name today, this story covers the first 100 pages of Google results -- there is nothing else about her. In your book, you mention another story of another victim who actually got taken on by a reputation management firm, and by creating blogs and posting nice, innocuous stories about her love for cats and holidays and stuff, managed to get the story off the first couple pages of Google results, but it didn't last long. A couple of weeks later, they started creeping back up to the top result. Is this a totally lost battle? Jon Ronson: You know, I think the very best thing we can do, if you see a kind of unfair or an ambiguous shaming, is to speak up, because I think the worst thing that happened to Justine was that nobody supported her -- like, everyone was against her, and that is profoundly traumatizing, to be told by tens of thousands of people that you need to get out. But if a shaming happens and there's a babble of voices, like in a democracy, where people are discussing it, I think that's much less damaging. So I think that's the way forward, but it's hard, because if you do stand up for somebody, it's incredibly unpleasant. BG: So let's talk about your experience, because you stood up by writing this book. By the way, it's mandatory reading for everybody, okay? You stood up because the book actually puts the spotlight on shamers. And I assume you didn't only have friendly reactions on Twitter. JR: It didn't go down that well with some people. (Laughter) I mean, you don't want to just concentrate -- because lots of people understood, and were really nice about the book. But yeah, for 30 years I've been writing stories about abuses of power, and when I say the powerful people over there in the military, or in the pharmaceutical industry, everybody applauds me. As soon as I say, "We are the powerful people abusing our power now," I get people saying, "Well you must be a racist too." BG: So the other night -- yesterday -- we were at dinner, and there were two discussions going on. On one side you were talking with people around the table -- and that was a nice, constructive discussion. On the other, every time you turned to your phone, there is this deluge of insults. JR: Yeah. This happened last night. We had like a TED dinner last night. We were chatting and it was lovely and nice, and I decided to check Twitter. Somebody said, "You are a white supremacist." And then I went back and had a nice conversation with somebody, and then I went back to Twitter, somebody said my very existence made the world a worse place. My friend Adam Curtis says that maybe the Internet is like a John Carpenter movie from the 1980s, when eventually everyone will start screaming at each other and shooting each other, and then eventually everybody would flee to somewhere safer, and I'm starting to think of that as a really nice option. BG: Jon, thank you. JR: Thank you, Bruno. (Applause)
The global challenge that I want to talk to you about today rarely makes the front pages. It, however, is enormous in both scale and importance. Look, you all are very well traveled; this is TEDGlobal after all. But I do hope to take you to some places you've never been to before. So, let's start off in China. This photo was taken two weeks ago. Actually, one indication is that little boy on my husband's shoulders has just graduated from high school. (Laughter) But this is Tiananmen Square. Many of you have been there. It's not the real China. Let me take you to the real China. This is in the Dabian Mountains in the remote part of Hubei province in central China. Dai Manju is 13 years old at the time the story starts. She lives with her parents, her two brothers and her great-aunt. They have a hut that has no electricity, no running water, no wristwatch, no bicycle. And they share this great splendor with a very large pig. Dai Manju was in sixth grade when her parents said, "We're going to pull you out of school because the 13-dollar school fees are too much for us. You're going to be spending the rest of your life in the rice paddies. Why would we waste this money on you?" This is what happens to girls in remote areas. Turns out that Dai Manju was the best pupil in her grade. She still made the two-hour trek to the schoolhouse and tried to catch every little bit of information that seeped out of the doors. We wrote about her in The New York Times. We got a flood of donations -- mostly 13-dollar checks because New York Times readers are very generous in tiny amounts (Laughter) but then, we got a money transfer for $10,000 -- really nice guy. We turned the money over to that man there, the principal of the school. He was delighted. He thought, "Oh, I can renovate the school. I can give scholarships to all the girls, you know, if they work hard and stay in school. So Dai Manju basically finished out middle school. She went to high school. She went to vocational school for accounting. She scouted for jobs down in Guangdong province in the south. She found a job, she scouted for jobs for her classmates and her friends. She sent money back to her family. They built a new house, this time with running water, electricity, a bicycle, no pig. What we saw was a natural experiment. It is rare to get an exogenous investment in girls' education. And over the years, as we followed Dai Manju, we were able to see that she was able to move out of a vicious cycle and into a virtuous cycle. She not only changed her own dynamic, she changed her household, she changed her family, her village. The village became a real standout. Of course, most of China was flourishing at the time, but they were able to get a road built to link them up to the rest of China. And that brings me to my first major of two tenets of "Half the Sky." And that is that the central moral challenge of this century is gender inequity. In the 19th century, it was slavery. In the 20th century, it was totalitarianism. The cause of our time is the brutality that so many people face around the world because of their gender. So some of you may be thinking, "Gosh, that's hyperbole. She's exaggerating." Well, let me ask you this question. How many of you think there are more males or more females in the world? Let me take a poll. How many of you think there are more males in the world? Hands up, please. How many of you think -- a few -- how many of you there are more females in the world? Okay, most of you. Well, you know this latter group, you're wrong. There are, true enough, in Europe and the West, when women and men have equal access to food and health care, there are more women, we live longer. But in most of the rest of the world, that's not the case. In fact, demographers have shown that there are anywhere between 60 million and 100 million missing females in the current population. And, you know, it happens for several reasons. For instance, in the last half-century, more girls were discriminated to death than all the people killed on all the battlefields in the 20th century. Sometimes it's also because of the sonogram. Girls get aborted before they're even born when there are scarce resources. This girl here, for instance, is in a feeding center in Ethiopia. The entire center was filled with girls like her. What's remarkable is that her brothers, in the same family, were totally fine. In India, in the first year of life, from zero to one, boy and girl babies basically survive at the same rate because they depend upon the breast, and the breast shows no son preference. From one to five, girls die at a 50 percent higher mortality rate than boys, in all of India. The second tenet of "Half the Sky" is that, let's put aside the morality of all the right and wrong of it all, and just on a purely practical level, we think that one of the best ways to fight poverty and to fight terrorism is to educate girls and to bring women into the formal labor force. Poverty, for instance. There are three reasons why this is the case. For one, overpopulation is one of the persistent causes of poverty. And you know, when you educate a boy, his family tends to have fewer kids, but only slightly. When you educate a girl, she tends to have significantly fewer kids. The second reason is it has to do with spending. It's kind of like the dirty, little secret of poverty, which is that, not only do poor people take in very little income, but also, the income that they take in, they don't spend it very wisely, and unfortunately, most of that spending is done by men. So research has shown, if you look at people who live under two dollars a day -- one metric of poverty -- two percent of that take-home pay goes to this basket here, in education. 20 percent goes to a basket that is a combination of alcohol, tobacco, sugary drinks -- and prostitution and festivals. If you just take four percentage points and put it into this basket, you would have a transformative effect. The last reason has to do with women being part of the solution, not the problem. You need to use scarce resources. It's a waste of resources if you don't use someone like Dai Manju. Bill Gates put it very well when he was traveling through Saudi Arabia. He was speaking to an audience much like yourselves. However, two-thirds of the way there was a barrier. On this side was men, and then the barrier, and this side was women. And someone from this side of the room got up and said, "Mr. Gates, we have here as our goal in Saudi Arabia to be one of the top 10 countries when it comes to technology. Do you think we'll make it?" So Bill Gates, as he was staring out at the audience, he said, "If you're not fully utilizing half the resources in your country, there is no way you will get anywhere near the top 10." So here is Bill of Arabia. (Laughter) So what would some of the specific challenges look like? I would say, on the top of the agenda is sex trafficking. And I'll just say two things about this. The slavery at the peak of the slave trade in the 1780s: there were about 80,000 slaves transported from Africa to the New World. Now, modern slavery: according to State Department rough statistics, there are about 800,000 -- 10 times the number -- that are trafficked across international borders. And that does not even include those that are trafficked within country borders, which is a substantial portion. And if you look at another factor, another contrast, a slave back then is worth about $40,000 in today's money. Today, you can buy a girl trafficked for a few hundred dollars, which means she's actually more disposable. But you know, there is progress being made in places like Cambodia and Thailand. We don't have to expect a world where girls are bought and sold or killed. The second item on the agenda is maternal mortality. You know, childbirth in this part of the world is a wonderful event. In Niger, one in seven women can expect to die during childbirth. Around the world, one woman dies every minute and a half from childbirth. You know, it's not as though we don't have the technological solution, but these women have three strikes against them: they are poor, they are rural and they are female. You know, for every woman who does die, there are 20 who survive but end up with an injury. And the most devastating injury is obstetric fistula. It's a tearing during obstructed labor that leaves a woman incontinent. Let me tell you about Mahabuba. She lives in Ethiopia. She was married against her will at age 13. She got pregnant, ran to the bush to have the baby, but you know, her body was very immature, and she ended up having obstructed labor. The baby died, and she ended up with a fistula. So that meant she was incontinent; she couldn't control her wastes. In a word, she stank. The villagers thought she was cursed; they didn't know what to do with her. So finally, they put her at the edge of the village in a hut. They ripped off the door so that the hyenas would get her at night. That night, there was a stick in the hut. She fought off the hyenas with that stick. And the next morning, she knew if she could get to a nearby village where there was a foreign missionary, she would be saved. Because she had some damage to her nerves, she crawled all the way -- 30 miles -- to that doorstep, half dead. The foreign missionary opened the door, knew exactly what had happened, took her to a nearby fistula hospital in Addis Ababa, and she was repaired with a 350-dollar operation. The doctors and nurses there noticed that she was not only a survivor, she was really clever, and they made her a nurse. So now, Mahabuba, she is saving the lives of hundreds, thousands, of women. She has become part of the solution, not the problem. She's moved out of a vicious cycle and into a virtuous cycle. I've talked about some of the challenges, let me talk about some of the solutions, and there are predictable solutions. I've hinted at them: education and also economic opportunity. So of course, when you educate a girl, she tends to get married later on in life, she tends to have kids later on in life, she tends to have fewer kids, and those kids that she does have, she educates them in a more enlightened fashion. With economic opportunity, it can be transformative. Let me tell you about Saima. She lives in a small village outside Lahore, Pakistan. And at the time, she was miserable. She was beaten every single day by her husband, who was unemployed. He was kind of a gambler type -- and unemployable, therefore -- and took his frustrations out on her. Well, when she had her second daughter, her mother in-law told her son, "I think you'd better get a second wife. Saima's not going to produce you a son." This is when she had her second daughter. At the time, there was a microlending group in the village that gave her a 65-dollar loan. Saima took that money, and she started an embroidery business. The merchants liked her embroidery; it sold very well, and they kept asking for more. And when she couldn't produce enough, she hired other women in the village. Pretty soon she had 30 women in the village working for her embroidery business. And then, when she had to transport all of the embroidery goods from the village to the marketplace, she needed someone to help her do the transport, so she hired her husband. So now they're in it together. He does the transportation and distribution, and she does the production and sourcing. And now they have a third daughter, and the daughters, all of them, are being tutored in education because Saima knows what's really important. Which brings me to the final element, which is education. Larry Summers, when he was chief economist at the World Bank, once said that, "It may well be that the highest return on investment in the developing world is in girls' education." Let me tell you about Beatrice Biira. Beatrice was living in Uganda near the Congo border, and like Dai Manju, she didn't go to school. Actually, she had never been to school, not to a lick, one day. Her parents, again, said, "Why should we spend the money on her? She's going to spend most of her life lugging water back and forth." Well, it just so happens, at that time, there was a group in Connecticut called the Niantic Community Church Group in Connecticut. They made a donation to an organization based in Arkansas called Heifer International. Heifer sent two goats to Africa. One of them ended up with Beatrice's parents, and that goat had twins. The twins started producing milk. They sold the milk for cash. The cash started accumulating, and pretty soon the parents said, "You know, we've got enough money. Let's send Beatrice to school." So at nine years of age, Beatrice started in first grade -- after all, she'd never been to a lick of school -- with a six year-old. No matter, she was just delighted to be in school. She rocketed to the top of her class. She stayed at the top of her class through elementary school, middle school, and then in high school, she scored brilliantly on the national examinations so that she became the first person in her village, ever, to come to the United States on scholarship. Two years ago, she graduated from Connecticut College. On the day of her graduation, she said, "I am the luckiest girl alive because of a goat." (Laughter) And that goat was $120. So you see how transformative little bits of help can be. But I want to give you a reality check. Look: U.S. aid, helping people is not easy, and there have been books that have criticized U.S. aid. There's Bill Easterly's book. There's a book called "Dead Aid." You know, the criticism is fair; it isn't easy. You know, people say how half of all water well projects, a year later, are failed. When I was in Zimbabwe, we were touring a place with the village chief -- he wanted to raise money for a secondary school -- and there was some construction a few yards away, and I said, "What's that?" He sort of mumbled. Turns out that it's a failed irrigation project. A few yards away was a failed chicken coop. One year, all the chickens died, and no one wanted to put the chickens in there. It's true, but we think that you don't through the baby out with the bathwater; you actually improve. You learn from your mistakes, and you continuously improve. We also think that individuals can make a difference, and they should, because individuals, together, we can all help create a movement. And a movement of men and women is what's needed to bring about social change, change that will address this great moral challenge. So then, I ask, what's in it for you? You're probably asking that. Why should you care? I will just leave you with two things. One is that research shows that once you have all of your material needs taken care of -- which most of us, all of us, here in this room do -- research shows that there are very few things in life that can actually elevate your level of happiness. One of those things is contributing to a cause larger than yourself. And the second thing, it's an anecdote that I'll leave you with. And that is the story of an aid worker in Darfur. Here was a woman who had worked in Darfur, seeing things that no human being should see. Throughout her time there, she was strong, she was steadfast. She never broke down. And then she came back to the United States and was on break, Christmas break. She was in her grandmother's backyard, and she saw something that made her break down in tears. What that was was a bird feeder. And she realized that she had the great fortune to be born in a country where we take security for granted, where we not only can feed, clothe and house ourselves, but also provide for wild birds so they don't go hungry in the winter. And she realized that with that great fortune comes great responsibility. And so, like her, you, me, we have all won the lottery of life. And so the question becomes: how do we discharge that responsibility? So, here's the cause. Join the movement. Feel happier and help save the world. Thank you very much. (Applause)
My job is to design, build and study robots that communicate with people. But this story doesn't start with robotics at all, it starts with animation. When I first saw Pixar's "Luxo Jr.," I was amazed by how much emotion they could put into something as trivial as a desk lamp. I mean, look at them -- at the end of this movie, you actually feel something for two pieces of furniture. (Laughter) And I said, I have to learn how to do this. So I made a really bad career decision. And that's what my mom was like when I did it. (Laughter) I left a very cozy tech job in Israel at a nice software company and I moved to New York to study animation. And there I lived in a collapsing apartment building in Harlem with roommates. I'm not using this phrase metaphorically, the ceiling actually collapsed one day in our living room. Whenever they did those news stories about building violations in New York, they would put the report in front of our building. As kind of like a backdrop to show how bad things are. Anyway, during the day I went to school and at night I would sit and draw frame by frame of pencil animation. And I learned two surprising lessons -- one of them was that when you want to arouse emotions, it doesn't matter so much how something looks, it's all in the motion -- it's in the timing of how the thing moves. And the second, was something one of our teachers told us. He actually did the weasel in Ice Age. And he said: "As an animator you are not a director, you're an actor." So, if you want to find the right motion for a character, don't think about it, go use your body to find it -- stand in front of a mirror, act it out in front of a camera -- whatever you need. And then put it back in your character. A year later I found myself at MIT in the robotic life group, it was one of the first groups researching the relationships between humans and robots. And I still had this dream to make an actual, physical Luxo Jr. lamp. But I found that robots didn't move at all in this engaging way that I was used to for my animation studies. Instead, they were all -- how should I put it, they were all kind of robotic. (Laughter) And I thought, what if I took whatever I learned in animation school, and used that to design my robotic desk lamp. So I went and designed frame by frame to try to make this robot as graceful and engaging as possible. And here when you see the robot interacting with me on a desktop. And I'm actually redesigning the robot so, unbeknownst to itself, it's kind of digging its own grave by helping me. (Laughter) I wanted it to be less of a mechanical structure giving me light, and more of a helpful, kind of quiet apprentice that's always there when you need it and doesn't really interfere. And when, for example, I'm looking for a battery that I can't find, in a subtle way, it will show me where the battery is. So you can see my confusion here. I'm not an actor. And I want you to notice how the same mechanical structure can at one point, just by the way it moves seem gentle and caring -- and in the other case, seem violent and confrontational. And it's the same structure, just the motion is different. Actor: "You want to know something? Well, you want to know something? He was already dead! Just laying there, eyes glazed over!" (Laughter) But, moving in graceful ways is just one building block of this whole structure called human-robot interaction. I was at the time doing my Ph.D., I was working on human robot teamwork; teams of humans and robots working together. I was studying the engineering, the psychology, the philosophy of teamwork. And at the same time I found myself in my own kind of teamwork situation with a good friend of mine who is actually here. And in that situation we can easily imagine robots in the near future being there with us. It was after a Passover seder. We were folding up a lot of folding chairs, and I was amazed at how quickly we found our own rhythm. Everybody did their own part. We didn't have to divide our tasks. We didn't have to communicate verbally about this. It all just happened. And I thought, humans and robots don't look at all like this. When humans and robots interact, it's much more like a chess game. The human does a thing, the robot analyzes whatever the human did, then the robot decides what to do next, plans it and does it. And then the human waits, until it's their turn again. So, it's much more like a chess game and that makes sense because chess is great for mathematicians and computer scientists. It's all about information analysis, decision making and planning. But I wanted my robot to be less of a chess player, and more like a doer that just clicks and works together. So I made my second horrible career choice: I decided to study acting for a semester. I took off from a Ph.D. I went to acting classes. I actually participated in a play, I hope theres no video of that around still. And I got every book I could find about acting, including one from the 19th century that I got from the library. And I was really amazed because my name was the second name on the list -- the previous name was in 1889. (Laughter) And this book was kind of waiting for 100 years to be rediscovered for robotics. And this book shows actors how to move every muscle in the body to match every kind of emotion that they want to express. But the real revelation was when I learned about method acting. It became very popular in the 20th century. And method acting said, you don't have to plan every muscle in your body. Instead you have to use your body to find the right movement. You have to use your sense memory to reconstruct the emotions and kind of think with your body to find the right expression. Improvise, play off yor scene partner. And this came at the same time as I was reading about this trend in cognitive psychology called embodied cognition. Which also talks about the same ideas -- We use our bodies to think, we don't just think with our brains and use our bodies to move. but our bodies feed back into our brain to generate the way that we behave. And it was like a lightning bolt. I went back to my office. I wrote this paper -- which I never really published called "Acting Lessons for Artificial Intelligence." And I even took another month to do what was then the first theater play with a human and a robot acting together. That's what you saw before with the actors. And I thought: How can we make an artificial intelligence model -- computer, computational model -- that will model some of these ideas of improvisation, of taking risks, of taking chances, even of making mistakes. Maybe it can make for better robotic teammates. So I worked for quite a long time on these models and I implemented them on a number of robots. Here you can see a very early example with the robots trying to use this embodied artificial intelligence, to try to match my movements as closely as possible, sort of like a game. Let's look at it. You can see when I psych it out, it gets fooled. And it's a little bit like what you might see actors do when they try to mirror each other to find the right synchrony between them. And then, I did another experiment, and I got people off the street to use the robotic desk lamp, and try out this idea of embodied artificial intelligence. So, I actually used two kinds of brains for the same robot. The robot is the same lamp that you saw, and I put in it two brains. For one half of the people, I put in a brain that's kind of the traditional, calculated robotic brain. It waits for its turn, it analyzes everything, it plans. Let's call it the calculated brain. The other got more the stage actor, risk taker brain. Let's call it the adventurous brain. It sometimes acts without knowing everything it has to know. It sometimes makes mistakes and corrects them. And I had them do this very tedious task that took almost 20 minutes and they had to work together. Somehow simulating like a factory job of repetitively doing the same thing. And what I found was that people actually loved the adventurous robot. And they thought it was more intelligent, more committed, a better member of the team, contributed to the success of the team more. They even called it 'he' and 'she,' whereas people with the calculated brain called it 'it.' And nobody ever called it 'he' or 'she'. When they talked about it after the task with the adventurous brain, they said, "By the end, we were good friends and high-fived mentally." Whatever that means. (Laughter) Sounds painful. Whereas the people with the calculated brain said it was just like a lazy apprentice. It only did what it was supposed to do and nothing more. Which is almost what people expect robots to do, so I was surprised that people had higher expectations of robots, than what anybody in robotics thought robots should be doing. And in a way, I thought, maybe it's time -- just like method acting changed the way people thought about acting in the 19th century, from going from the very calculated, planned way of behaving, to a more intuitive, risk-taking, embodied way of behaving. Maybe it's time for robots to have the same kind of revolution. A few years later, I was at my next research job at Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and I was working in a group dealing with robotic musicians. And I thought, music, that's the perfect place to look at teamwork, coordination, timing, improvisation -- and we just got this robot playing marimba. Marimba, for everybody who was like me, it was this huge, wooden xylophone. And, when I was looking at this, I looked at other works in human-robot improvisation -- yes, there are other works in human-robot improvisation -- and they were also a little bit like a chess game. The human would play, the robot would analyze what was played, would improvise their own part. So, this is what musicians called a call and response interaction, and it also fits very well, robots and artificial intelligence. But I thought, if I use the same ideas I used in the theater play and in the teamwork studies, maybe I can make the robots jam together like a band. Everybody's riffing off each other, nobody is stopping it for a moment. And so, I tried to do the same things, this time with music, where the robot doesn't really know what it's about to play. It just sort of moves its body and uses opportunities to play, And does what my jazz teacher when I was 17 taught me. She said, when you improvise, sometimes you don't know what you're doing and you're still doing it. And so I tried to make a robot that doesn't actually know what it's doing, but it's still doing it. So let's look at a few seconds from this performance. Where the robot listens to the human musician and improvises. And then, look at how the human musician also responds to what the robot is doing, and picking up from its behavior. And at some point can even be surprised by what the robot came up with. (Music) (Applause) Being a musician is not just about making notes, otherwise nobody would ever go see a live show. Musicians also communicate with their bodies, with other band members, with the audience, they use their bodies to express the music. And I thought, we already have a robot musician on stage, why not make it be a full-fledged musician. And I started designing a socially expressive head for the robot. The head does't actually touch the marimba, it just expresses what the music is like. These are some napkin sketches from a bar in Atlanta, that was dangerously located exactly halfway between my lab and my home. (Laughter) So I spent, I would say on average, three to four hours a day there. I think. (Laughter) And I went back to my animation tools and tried to figure out not just what a robotic musician would look like, but especially what a robotic musician would move like. To sort of show that it doesn't like what the other person is playing -- and maybe show whatever beat it's feeling at the moment. So we ended up actually getting the money to build this robot, which was nice. I'm going to show you now the same kind of performance, this time with a socially expressive head. And notice one thing -- how the robot is really showing us the beat it's picking up from the human. We're also giving the human a sense that the robot knows what it's doing. And also how it changes the way it moves as soon as it starts its own solo. (Music) Now it's looking at me to make sure I'm listening. (Music) And now look at the final chord of the piece again, and this time the robot communicates with its body when it's busy doing its own thing. And when it's ready to coordinate the final chord with me. (Music) (Applause) Thanks. I hope you see how much this totally not -- how much this part of the body that doesn't touch the instrument actually helps with the musical performance. And at some point, we are in Atlanta, so obviously some rapper will come into our lab at some point. And we had this rapper come in and do a little jam with the robot. And here you can see the robot basically responding to the beat and -- notice two things. One, how irresistible it is to join the robot while it's moving its head. and you kind of want to move your own head when it does it. And second, even though the rapper is really focused on his iPhone, as soon as the robot turns to him, he turns back. So even though it's just in the periphery of his vision -- it's just in the corner of his eye -- it's very powerful. And the reason is that we can't ignore physical things moving in our environment. We are wired for that. So, if you have a problem with maybe your partners looking at the iPhone too much or their smartphone too much, you might want to have a robot there to get their attention. (Laughter) (Music) (Applause) Just to introduce the last robot that we've worked on, that came out of something kind of surprising that we found: At some point people didn't care anymore about the robot being so intelligent, and can improvise and listen, and do all these embodied intelligence things that I spent years on developing. They really liked that the robot was enjoying the music. (Laughter) And they didn't say that the robot was moving to the music, they said that the robot was enjoying the music. And we thought, why don't we take this idea, and I designed a new piece of furniture. This time it wasn't a desk lamp; it was a speaker dock. It was one of those things you plug your smartphone in. And I thought, what would happen if your speaker dock didn't just play the music for you, but it would actually enjoy it too. (Laughter) And so again, here are some animation tests from an early stage. (Laughter) And this is what the final product looked like. ("Drop It Like It's Hot") So, a lot of bobbing head. (Applause) A lot of bobbing heads in the audience, so we can still see robots influence people. And it's not just fun and games. I think one of the reasons I care so much about robots that use their body to communicate and use their body to move -- and I'm going to let you in on a little secret we roboticists are hiding -- is that every one of you is going to be living with a robot at some point in their life. Somewhere in your future there's going to be a robot in your life. And if not in yours, then in your children's lives. And I want these robots to be -- to be more fluent, more engaging, more graceful than currently they seem to be. And for that I think that maybe robots need to be less like chess players and more like stage actors and more like musicians. Maybe they should be able to take chances and improvise. And maybe they should be able to anticipate what you're about to do. And maybe they need to be able to make mistakes and correct them, because in the end we are human. And maybe as humans, robots that are a little less than perfect are just perfect for us. Thank you. (Applause)
Today I want to talk about design, but not design as we usually think about it. I want to talk about what is happening now in our scientific, biotechnological culture, where, for really the first time in history, we have the power to design bodies, to design animal bodies, to design human bodies. In the history of our planet, there have been three great waves of evolution. The first wave of evolution is what we think of as Darwinian evolution. So, as you all know, species lived in particular ecological niches and particular environments, and the pressures of those environments selected which changes, through random mutation in species, were going to be preserved. Then human beings stepped out of the Darwinian flow of evolutionary history and created the second great wave of evolution, which was we changed the environment in which we evolved. We altered our ecological niche by creating civilization. And that has been the second great -- couple 100,000 years, 150,000 years -- flow of our evolution. By changing our environment, we put new pressures on our bodies to evolve. Whether it was through settling down in agricultural communities, all the way through modern medicine, we have changed our own evolution. Now we're entering a third great wave of evolutionary history, which has been called many things: "intentional evolution," "evolution by design" -- very different than intelligent design -- whereby we are actually now intentionally designing and altering the physiological forms that inhabit our planet. So I want to take you through a kind of whirlwind tour of that and then at the end talk a little bit about what some of the implications are for us and for our species, as well as our cultures, because of this change. Now we actually have been doing it for a long time. We started selectively breeding animals many, many thousands of years ago. And if you think of dogs for example, dogs are now intentionally-designed creatures. There isn't a dog on this earth that's a natural creature. Dogs are the result of selectively breeding traits that we like. But we had to do it the hard way in the old days by choosing offspring that looked a particular way and then breeding them. We don't have to do it that way anymore. This is a beefalo. A beefalo is a buffalo-cattle hybrid. And they are now making them, and someday, perhaps pretty soon, you will have beefalo patties in your local supermarket. This is a geep, a goat-sheep hybrid. The scientists that made this cute little creature ended up slaughtering it and eating it afterwards. I think they said it tasted like chicken. This is a cama. A cama is a camel-llama hybrid, created to try to get the hardiness of a camel with some of the personality traits of a llama. And they are now using these in certain cultures. Then there's the liger. This is the largest cat in the world -- the lion-tiger hybrid. It's bigger than a tiger. And in the case of the liger, there actually have been one or two that have been seen in the wild. But these were created by scientists using both selective breeding and genetic technology. And then finally, everybody's favorite, the zorse. None of this is Photoshopped. These are real creatures. And so one of the things we've been doing is using genetic enhancement, or genetic manipulation, of normal selective breeding pushed a little bit through genetics. And if that were all this was about, then it would be an interesting thing. But something much, much more powerful is happening now. These are normal mammalian cells genetically engineered with a bioluminescent gene taken out of deep-sea jellyfish. We all know that some deep-sea creatures glow. Well, they've now taken that gene, that bioluminescent gene, and put it into mammal cells. These are normal cells. And what you see here is these cells glowing in the dark under certain wavelengths of light. Once they could do that with cells, they could do it with organisms. So they did it with mouse pups, kittens. And by the way, the reason the kittens here are orange and these are green is because that's a bioluminescent gene from coral, while this is from jellyfish. They did it with pigs. They did it with puppies. And, in fact, they did it with monkeys. And if you can do it with monkeys -- though the great leap in trying to genetically manipulate is actually between monkeys and apes -- if they can do it in monkeys, they can probably figure out how to do it in apes, which means they can do it in human beings. In other words, it is theoretically possible that before too long we will be biotechnologically capable of creating human beings that glow in the dark. Be easier to find us at night. And in fact, right now in many states, you can go out and you can buy bioluminescent pets. These are zebra fish. They're normally black and silver. These are zebra fish that have been genetically engineered to be yellow, green, red, and they are actually available now in certain states. Other states have banned them. Nobody knows what to do with these kinds of creatures. There is no area of the government -- not the EPA or the FDA -- that controls genetically-engineered pets. And so some states have decided to allow them, some states have decided to ban them. Some of you may have read about the FDA's consideration right now of genetically-engineered salmon. The salmon on top is a genetically engineered Chinook salmon, using a gene from these salmon and from one other fish that we eat, to make it grow much faster using a lot less feed. And right now the FDA is trying to make a final decision on whether, pretty soon, you could be eating this fish -- it'll be sold in the stores. And before you get too worried about it, here in the United States, the majority of food you buy in the supermarket already has genetically-modified components to it. So even as we worry about it, we have allowed it to go on in this country -- much different in Europe -- without any regulation, and even without any identification on the package. These are all the first cloned animals of their type. So in the lower right here, you have Dolly, the first cloned sheep -- now happily stuffed in a museum in Edinburgh; Ralph the rat, the first cloned rat; CC the cat, for cloned cat; Snuppy, the first cloned dog -- Snuppy for Seoul National University puppy -- created in South Korea by the very same man that some of you may remember had to end up resigning in disgrace because he claimed he had cloned a human embryo, which he had not. He actually was the first person to clone a dog, which is a very difficult thing to do, because dog genomes are very plastic. This is Prometea, the first cloned horse. It's a Haflinger horse cloned in Italy, a real "gold ring" of cloning, because there are many horses that win important races who are geldings. In other words, the equipment to put them out to stud has been removed. But if you can clone that horse, you can have both the advantage of having a gelding run in the race and his identical genetic duplicate can then be put out to stud. These were the first cloned calves, the first cloned grey wolves, and then, finally, the first cloned piglets: Alexis, Chista, Carrel, Janie and Dotcom. (Laughter) In addition, we've started to use cloning technology to try to save endangered species. This is the use of animals now to create drugs and other things in their bodies that we want to create. So with antithrombin in that goat -- that goat has been genetically modified so that the molecules of its milk actually include the molecule of antithrombin that GTC Genetics wants to create. And then in addition, transgenic pigs, knockout pigs, from the National Institute of Animal Science in South Korea, are pigs that they are going to use, in fact, to try to create all kinds of drugs and other industrial types of chemicals that they want the blood and the milk of these animals to produce for them, instead of producing them in an industrial way. These are two creatures that were created in order to save endangered species. The guar is an endangered Southeast Asian ungulate. A somatic cell, a body cell, was taken from its body, gestated in the ovum of a cow, and then that cow gave birth to a guar. Same thing happened with the mouflon, where it's an endangered species of sheep. It was gestated in a regular sheep body, which actually raises an interesting biological problem. We have two kinds of DNA in our bodies. We have our nucleic DNA that everybody thinks of as our DNA, but we also have DNA in our mitochondria, which are the energy packets of the cell. That DNA is passed down through our mothers. So really, what you end up having here is not a guar and not a mouflon, but a guar with cow mitochondria, and therefore cow mitochondrial DNA, and a mouflon with another species of sheep's mitochondrial DNA. These are really hybrids, not pure animals. And it raises the question of how we're going to define animal species in the age of biotechnology -- a question that we're not really sure yet how to solve. This lovely creature is an Asian cockroach. And what they've done here is they've put electrodes in its ganglia and its brain and then a transmitter on top, and it's on a big computer tracking ball. And now, using a joystick, they can send this creature around the lab and control whether it goes left or right, forwards or backwards. They've created a kind of insect bot, or bugbot. It gets worse than that -- or perhaps better than that. This actually is one of DARPA's very important -- DARPA is the Defense Research Agency -- one of their projects. These goliath beetles are wired in their wings. They have a computer chip strapped to their backs, and they can fly these creatures around the lab. They can make them go left, right. They can make them take off. They can't actually make them land. They put them about one inch above the ground, and then they shut everything off and they go pfft. But it's the closest they can get to a landing. And in fact, this technology has gotten so developed that this creature -- this is a moth -- this is the moth in its pupa stage, and that's when they put the wires in and they put in the computer technology, so that when the moth actually emerges as a moth, it is already prewired. The wires are already in its body, and they can just hook it up to their technology, and now they've got these bugbots that they can send out for surveillance. They can put little cameras on them and perhaps someday deliver other kinds of ordinance to warzones. It's not just insects. This is the ratbot, or the robo-rat by Sanjiv Talwar at SUNY Downstate. Again, it's got technology -- it's got electrodes going into its left and right hemispheres; it's got a camera on top of its head. The scientists can make this creature go left, right. They have it running through mazes, controlling where it's going. They've now created an organic robot. The graduate students in Sanjiv Talwar's lab said, "Is this ethical? We've taken away the autonomy of this animal." I'll get back to that in a minute. There's also been work done with monkeys. This is Miguel Nicolelis of Duke. He took owl monkeys, wired them up so that a computer watched their brains while they moved, especially looking at the movement of their right arm. The computer learned what the monkey brain did to move its arm in various ways. They then hooked it up to a prosthetic arm, which you see here in the picture, put the arm in another room. Pretty soon, the computer learned, by reading the monkey's brainwaves, to make that arm in the other room do whatever the monkey's arm did. Then he put a video monitor in the monkey's cage that showed the monkey this prosthetic arm, and the monkey got fascinated. The monkey recognized that whatever she did with her arm, this prosthetic arm would do. And eventually she was moving it and moving it, and eventually stopped moving her right arm and, staring at the screen, could move the prosthetic arm in the other room only with her brainwaves -- which means that monkey became the first primate in the history of the world to have three independent functional arms. And it's not just technology that we're putting into animals. This is Thomas DeMarse at the University of Florida. He took 20,000 and then 60,000 disaggregated rat neurons -- so these are just individual neurons from rats -- put them on a chip. They self-aggregated into a network, became an integrated chip. And he used that as the IT piece of a mechanism which ran a flight simulator. So now we have organic computer chips made out of living, self-aggregating neurons. Finally, Mussa-Ivaldi of Northwestern took a completely intact, independent lamprey eel brain. This is a brain from a lamprey eel. It is living -- fully-intact brain in a nutrient medium with these electrodes going off to the sides, attached photosensitive sensors to the brain, put it into a cart -- here's the cart, the brain is sitting there in the middle -- and using this brain as the sole processor for this cart, when you turn on a light and shine it at the cart, the cart moves toward the light; when you turn it off, it moves away. It's photophilic. So now we have a complete living lamprey eel brain. Is it thinking lamprey eel thoughts, sitting there in its nutrient medium? I don't know, but in fact it is a fully living brain that we have managed to keep alive to do our bidding. So, we are now at the stage where we are creating creatures for our own purposes. This is a mouse created by Charles Vacanti of the University of Massachusetts. He altered this mouse so that it was genetically engineered to have skin that was less immunoreactive to human skin, put a polymer scaffolding of an ear under it and created an ear that could then be taken off the mouse and transplanted onto a human being. Genetic engineering coupled with polymer physiotechnology coupled with xenotransplantation. This is where we are in this process. Finally, not that long ago, Craig Venter created the first artificial cell, where he took a cell, took a DNA synthesizer, which is a machine, created an artificial genome, put it in a different cell -- the genome was not of the cell he put it in -- and that cell then reproduced as the other cell. In other words, that was the first creature in the history of the world that had a computer as its parent -- it did not have an organic parent. And so, asks The Economist: "The first artificial organism and its consequences." So you may have thought that the creation of life was going to happen in something that looked like that. (Laughter) But in fact, that's not what Frankenstein's lab looks like. This is what Frankenstein's lab looks like. This is a DNA synthesizer, and here at the bottom are just bottles of A, T, C and G -- the four chemicals that make up our DNA chain. And so, we need to ask ourselves some questions. For the first time in the history of this planet, we are able to directly design organisms. We can manipulate the plasmas of life with unprecedented power, and it confers on us a responsibility. Is everything okay? Is it okay to manipulate and create whatever creatures we want? Do we have free reign to design animals? Do we get to go someday to Pets 'R' Us and say, "Look, I want a dog. I'd like it to have the head of a Dachshund, the body of a retriever, maybe some pink fur, and let's make it glow in the dark"? Does industry get to create creatures who, in their milk, in their blood, and in their saliva and other bodily fluids, create the drugs and industrial molecules we want and then warehouse them as organic manufacturing machines? Do we get to create organic robots, where we remove the autonomy from these animals and turn them just into our playthings? And then the final step of this, once we perfect these technologies in animals and we start using them in human beings, what are the ethical guidelines that we will use then? It's already happening. It's not science fiction. We are not only already using these things in animals, some of them we're already beginning to use on our own bodies. We are now taking control of our own evolution. We are directly designing the future of the species of this planet. It confers upon us an enormous responsibility that is not just the responsibility of the scientists and the ethicists who are thinking about it and writing about it now. It is the responsibility of everybody because it will determine what kind of planet and what kind of bodies we will have in the future. Thanks. (Applause)
This is Charley Williams. He was 94 when this photograph was taken. In the 1930s, Roosevelt put thousands and thousands of Americans back to work by building bridges and infrastructure and tunnels, but he also did something interesting, which was to hire a few hundred writers to scour America to capture the stories of ordinary Americans. Charley Williams, a poor sharecropper, wouldn't ordinarily be the subject of a big interview, but Charley had actually been a slave until he was 22 years old. And the stories that were captured of his life make up one of the crown jewels of histories, of human-lived experiences filled with ex-slaves. Anna Deavere Smith famously said that there's a literature inside of each of us, and three generations later, I was part of a project called StoryCorps, which set out to capture the stories of ordinary Americans by setting up a soundproof booth in public spaces. The idea is very, very simple. You go into these booths, you interview your grandmother or relative, you leave with a copy of the interview and an interview goes into the Library of Congress. It's essentially a way to make a national oral histories archive one conversation at a time. And the question is, who do you want to remember -- if you had just 45 minutes with your grandmother? What's interesting, in conversations with the founder, Dave Isay, we always actually talked about this as a little bit of a subversive project, because when you think about it, it's actually not really about the stories that are being told, it's about listening, and it's about the questions that you get to ask, questions that you may not have permission to on any other day. I'm going to play you just a couple of quick excerpts from the project. [Jesus Melendez talking about poet Pedro Pietri's final moments] Jesus Melendez: We took off, and as we were ascending, before we had leveled off, our level-off point was 45,000 feet, so before we had leveled off, Pedro began leaving us, and the beauty about it is that I believe that there's something after life. You can see it in Pedro. [Danny Perasa to his wife Annie Perasa married 26 years] Danny Perasa: See, the thing of it is, I always feel guilty when I say "I love you" to you, and I say it so often. I say it to remind you that as dumpy as I am, it's coming from me, it's like hearing a beautiful song from a busted old radio, and it's nice of you to keep the radio around the house. (Laughter) [Michael Wolmetz with his girlfriend Debora Brakarz] Michael Wolmetz: So this is the ring that my father gave to my mother, and we can leave it there. And he saved up and he purchased this, and he proposed to my mother with this, and so I thought that I would give it to you so that he could be with us for this also. So I'm going to share a mic with you right now, Debora. Where's the right finger? Debora Brakarz: (Crying) MW: Debora, will you please marry me? DB: Yes. Of course. I love you. (Kissing) MW: So kids, this is how your mother and I got married, in a booth in Grand Central Station with my father's ring. My grandfather was a cab driver for 40 years. He used to pick people up here every day. So it seems right. Jake Barton: So I have to say I did not actually choose those individual samples to make you cry because they all make you cry. The entire project is predicated on this act of love which is listening itself. And that motion of building an institution out of a moment of conversation and listening is actually a lot of what my firm, Local Projects, is doing with our engagements in general. So we're a media design firm, and we're working with a broad array of different institutions building media installations for museums and public spaces. Our latest engagement is the Cleveland Museum of Art, which we've created an engagement called Gallery One for. And Gallery One is an interesting project because it started with this massive, $350 million expansion for the Cleveland Museum of Art, and we actually brought in this piece specifically to grow new capacity, new audiences, at the same time that the museum itself is growing. Glenn Lowry, the head of MoMA, put it best when he said, "We want visitors to actually cease being visitors. Visitors are transient. We want people who live here, people who have ownership." And so what we're doing is making a broad array of different ways for people to actually engage with the material inside of these galleries, so you can still have a traditional gallery experience, but if you're interested, you can actually engage with any individual artwork and see the original context from where it's from, or manipulate the work itself. So, for example, you can click on this individual lion head, and this is where it originated from, 1300 B.C. Or this individual piece here, you can see the actual bedroom. It really changes the way you think about this type of a tempera painting. This is one of my favorites because you see the studio itself. This is Rodin's bust. You get the sense of this incredible factory for creativity. And it makes you think about literally the hundreds or thousands of years of human creativity and how each individual artwork stands in for part of that story. This is Picasso, of course embodying so much of it from the 20th century. And so our next interface, which I'll show you, actually leverages that idea of this lineage of creativity. It's an algorithm that actually allows you to browse the actual museum's collection using facial recognition. So this person's making different faces, and it's actually drawing forth different objects from the collection that connect with exactly how she's looking. And so you can imagine that, as people are performing inside of the museum itself, you get this sense of this emotional connection, this way in which our face connects with the thousands and tens of thousands of years. This is an interface that actually allows you to draw and then draws forth objects using those same shapes. So more and more we're trying to find ways for people to actually author things inside of the museums themselves, to be creative even as they're looking at other people's creativity and understanding them. So in this wall, the collections wall, you can actually see all 3,000 artworks all at the same time, and you can actually author your own individual walking tours of the museum, so you can share them, and someone can take a tour with the museum director or a tour with their little cousin. But all the while that we've been working on this engagement for Cleveland, we've also been working in the background on really our largest engagement to date, and that's the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. So we started in 2006 as part of a team with Thinc Design to create the original master plan for the museum, and then we've done all the media design both for the museum and the memorial and then the media production. So the memorial opened in 2011, and the museum's going to open next year in 2014. And you can see from these images, the site is so raw and almost archaeological. And of course the event itself is so recent, somewhere between history and current events, it was a huge challenge to imagine how do you actually live up to a space like this, an event like this, to actually tell that story. And so what we started with was really a new way of thinking about building an institution, through a project called Make History, which we launched in 2009. So it's estimated that a third of the world watched 9/11 live, and a third of the world heard about it within 24 hours, making it really by nature of when it happened, this unprecedented moment of global awareness. And so we launched this to capture the stories from all around the world, through video, through photos, through written history, and so people's experiences on that day, which was, in fact, this huge risk for the institution to make its first move this open platform. But that was coupled together with this oral histories booth, really the simplest we've ever made, where you locate yourself on a map. It's in six languages, and you can tell your own story about what happened to you on that day. And when we started seeing the incredible images and stories that came forth from all around the world -- this is obviously part of the landing gear -- we really started to understand that there was this amazing symmetry between the event itself, between the way that people were telling the stories of the event, and how we ourselves needed to tell that story. This image in particular really captured our attention at the time, because it so much sums up that event. This is a shot from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. There's a firefighter that's stuck, actually, in traffic, and so the firefighters themselves are running a mile and a half to the site itself with upwards of 70 pounds of gear on their back. And we got this amazing email that said, "While viewing the thousands of photos on the site, I unexpectedly found a photo of my son. It was a shock emotionally, yet a blessing to find this photo," and he was writing because he said, "I'd like to personally thank the photographer for posting the photo, as it meant more than words can describe to me to have access to what is probably the last photo ever taken of my son." And it really made us recognize what this institution needed to be in order to actually tell that story. We can't have just a historian or a curator narrating objectively in the third person about an event like that, when you have the witnesses to history who are going to make their way through the actual museum itself. And so we started imagining the museum, along with the creative team at the museum and the curators, thinking about how the first voice that you would hear inside the museum would actually be of other visitors. And so we created this idea of an opening gallery called We Remember. And I'll just play you part of a mockup of it, but you get a sense of what it's like to actually enter into that moment in time and be transported back in history. (Video) Voice 1: I was in Honolulu, Hawaii. Voice 2: I was in Cairo, Egypt. Voice 3: Sur les Champs-Élysées, à Paris. Voice 4: In college, at U.C. Berkeley. Voice 5: I was in Times Square. Voice 6: São Paolo, Brazil. (Multiple voices) Voice 7: It was probably about 11 o'clock at night. Voice 8: I was driving to work at 5:45 local time in the morning. Voice 9: We were actually in a meeting when someone barged in and said, "Oh my God, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center." Voice 10: Trying to frantically get to a radio. Voice 11: When I heard it over the radio -- Voice 12: Heard it on the radio. (Multiple voices) Voice 13: I got a call from my father. Voice 14: The phone rang, it woke me up. My business partner told me to turn on the television. Voice 15: So I switched on the television. Voice 16: All channels in Italy were displaying the same thing. Voice 17: The Twin Towers. Voice 18: The Twin Towers. JB: And you move from there into that open, cavernous space. This is the so-called slurry wall. It's the original, excavated wall at the base of the World Trade Center that withstood the actual pressure from the Hudson River for a full year after the event itself. And so we thought about carrying that sense of authenticity, of presence of that moment into the actual exhibition itself. And we tell the stories of being inside the towers through that same audio collage, so you're hearing people literally talking about seeing the planes as they make their way into the building, or making their way down the stairwells. And as you make your way into the exhibition where it talks about the recovery, we actually project directly onto these moments of twisted steel all of the experiences from people who literally excavated on top of the pile itself. And so you can hear oral histories -- so people who were actually working the so-called bucket brigades as you're seeing literally the thousands of experiences from that moment. And as you leave that storytelling moment understanding about 9/11, we then turn the museum back into a moment of listening and actually talk to the individual visitors and ask them their own experiences about 9/11. And we ask them questions that are actually not really answerable, the types of questions that 9/11 itself draws forth for all of us. And so these are questions like, "How can a democracy balance freedom and security?" "How could 9/11 have happened?" "And how did the world change after 9/11?" And so these oral histories, which we've actually been capturing already for years, are then mixed together with interviews that we're doing with people like Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, and you mix together these different players and these different experiences, these different reflection points about 9/11. And suddenly the institution, once again, turns into a listening experience. So I'll play you just a short excerpt of a mockup that we made of a couple of these voices, but you really get a sense of the poetry of everyone's reflection on the event. (Video) Voice 1: 9/11 was not just a New York experience. Voice 2: It's something that we shared, and it's something that united us. Voice 3: And I knew when I saw that, people who were there that day who immediately went to help people known and unknown to them was something that would pull us through. Voice 4: All the outpouring of affection and emotion that came from our country was something really that will forever, ever stay with me. Voice 5: Still today I pray and think about those who lost their lives, and those who gave their lives to help others, but I'm also reminded of the fabric of this country, the love, the compassIon, the strength, and I watched a nation come together in the middle of a terrible tragedy. JB: And so as people make their way out of the museum, reflecting on the experience, reflecting on their own thoughts of it, they then move into the actual space of the memorial itself, because they've gone back up to grade, and we actually got involved in the memorial after we'd done the museum for a few years. The original designer of the memorial, Michael Arad, had this image in his mind of all the names appearing undifferentiated, almost random, really a poetic reflection on top of the nature of a terrorism event itself, but it was a huge challenge for the families, for the foundation, certainly for the first responders, and there was a negotiation that went forth and a solution was found to actually create not an order in terms of chronology, or in terms of alphabetical, but through what's called meaningful adjacency. So these are groupings of the names themselves which appear undifferentiated but actually have an order, and we, along with Jer Thorp, created an algorithm to take massive amounts of data to actually start to connect together all these different names themselves. So this is an image of the actual algorithm itself with the names scrambled for privacy, but you can see that these blocks of color are actually the four different flights, the two different towers, the first responders, and you can actually see within that different floors, and then the green lines are the interpersonal connections that were requested by the families themselves. And so when you go to the memorial, you can actually see the overarching organization inside of the individual pools themselves. You can see the way that the geography of the event is reflected inside of the memorial, and you can search for an individual name, or in this case an employer, Cantor Fitzgerald, and see the way in which all of those names, those hundreds of names, are actually organized onto the memorial itself, and use that to navigate the memorial. And more importantly, when you're actually at the site of the memorial, you can see those connections. You can see the relationships between the different names themselves. So suddenly what is this undifferentiated, anonymous group of names springs into reality as an individual life. In this case, Harry Ramos, who was the head trader at an investment bank, who stopped to aid Victor Wald on the 55th floor of the South Tower. And Ramos told Wald, according to witnesses, "I'm not going to leave you." And Wald's widow requested that they be listed next to each other. Three generations ago, we had to actually get people to go out and capture the stories for common people. Today, of course, there's an unprecedented amount of stories for all of us that are being captured for future generations. And this is our hope, that's there's poetry inside of each of our stories. Thank you very much. (Applause)
Thank you very much, Chris. Everybody who came up here said they were scared. I don't know if I'm scared, but this is my first time of addressing an audience like this. And I don't have any smart technology for you to look at. There are no slides, so you'll just have to be content with me. (Laughter) What I want to do this morning is share with you a couple of stories and talk about a different Africa. Already this morning there were some allusions to the Africa that you hear about all the time: the Africa of HIV/AIDS, the Africa of malaria, the Africa of poverty, the Africa of conflict, and the Africa of disasters. While it is true that those things are going on, there's an Africa that you don't hear about very much. And sometimes I'm puzzled, and I ask myself why. This is the Africa that is changing, that Chris alluded to. This is the Africa of opportunity. This is the Africa where people want to take charge of their own futures and their own destinies. And this is the Africa where people are looking for partnerships to do this. That's what I want to talk about today. And I want to start by telling you a story about that change in Africa. On 15th of September 2005, Mr. Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, a governor of one of the oil-rich states of Nigeria, was arrested by the London Metropolitan Police on a visit to London. He was arrested because there were transfers of eight million dollars that went into some dormant accounts that belonged to him and his family. This arrest occurred because there was cooperation between the London Metropolitan Police and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission of Nigeria -- led by one of our most able and courageous people: Mr. Nuhu Ribadu. Alamieyeseigha was arraigned in London. Due to some slip-ups, he managed to escape dressed as a woman and ran from London back to Nigeria where, according to our constitution, those in office as governors, president -- as in many countries -- have immunity and cannot be prosecuted. But what happened: people were so outraged by this behavior that it was possible for his state legislature to impeach him and get him out of office. Today, Alams -- as we call him for short -- is in jail. This is a story about the fact that people in Africa are no longer willing to tolerate corruption from their leaders. This is a story about the fact that people want their resources managed properly for their good, and not taken out to places where they'll benefit just a few of the elite. And therefore, when you hear about the corrupt Africa -- corruption all the time -- I want you to know that the people and the governments are trying hard to fight this in some of the countries, and that some successes are emerging. Does it mean the problem is over? The answer is no. There's still a long way to go, but that there's a will there. And that successes are being chalked up on this very important fight. So when you hear about corruption, don't just feel that nothing is being done about this -- that you can't operate in any African country because of the overwhelming corruption. That is not the case. There's a will to fight, and in many countries, that fight is ongoing and is being won. In others, like mine, where there has been a long history of dictatorship in Nigeria, the fight is ongoing and we have a long way to go. But the truth of the matter is that this is going on. The results are showing: independent monitoring by the World Bank and other organizations show that in many instances the trend is downwards in terms of corruption, and governance is improving. A study by the Economic Commission for Africa showed a clear trend upwards in governance in 28 African countries. And let me say just one more thing before I leave this area of governance. That is that people talk about corruption, corruption. All the time when they talk about it you immediately think about Africa. That's the image: African countries. But let me say this: if Alams was able to export eight million dollars into an account in London -- if the other people who had taken money, estimated at 20 to 40 billion now of developing countries' monies sitting abroad in the developed countries -- if they're able to do this, what is that? Is that not corruption? In this country, if you receive stolen goods, are you not prosecuted? So when we talk about this kind of corruption, let us also think about what is happening on the other side of the globe -- where the money's going and what can be done to stop it. I'm working on an initiative now, along with the World Bank, on asset recovery, trying to do what we can to get the monies that have been taken abroad -- developing countries' moneys -- to get that sent back. Because if we can get the 20 billion dollars sitting out there back, it may be far more for some of these countries than all the aid that is being put together. (Applause) The second thing I want to talk about is the will for reform. Africans, after -- they're tired, we're tired of being the subject of everybody's charity and care. We are grateful, but we know that we can take charge of our own destinies if we have the will to reform. And what is happening in many African countries now is a realization that no one can do it but us. We have to do it. We can invite partners who can support us, but we have to start. We have to reform our economies, change our leadership, become more democratic, be more open to change and to information. And this is what we started to do in one of the largest countries on the continent, Nigeria. In fact, if you're not in Nigeria, you're not in Africa. I want to tell you that. (Laughter) One in four sub-Saharan Africans is Nigerian, and it has 140 million dynamic people -- chaotic people -- but very interesting people. You'll never be bored. (Laughter) What we started to do was to realize that we had to take charge and reform ourselves. And with the support of a leader who was willing, at the time, to do the reforms, we put forward a comprehensive reform program, which we developed ourselves. Not the International Monetary Fund. Not the World Bank, where I worked for 21 years and rose to be a vice president. No one can do it for you. You have to do it for yourself. We put together a program that would, one: get the state out of businesses it had nothing -- it had no business being in. The state should not be in the business of producing goods and services because it's inefficient and incompetent. So we decided to privatize many of our enterprises. (Applause) We -- as a result, we decided to liberalize many of our markets. Can you believe that prior to this reform -- which started at the end of 2003, when I left Washington to go and take up the post of Finance Minister -- we had a telecommunications company that was only able to develop 4,500 landlines in its entire 30-year history? (Laughter) Having a telephone in my country was a huge luxury. You couldn't get it. You had to bribe. You had to do everything to get your phone. When President Obasanjo supported and launched the liberalization of the telecommunications sector, we went from 4,500 landlines to 32 million GSM lines, and counting. Nigeria's telecoms market is the second-fastest growing in the world, after China. We are getting investments of about a billion dollars a year in telecoms. And nobody knows, except a few smart people. (Laughter) The smartest one, first to come in, was the MTN company of South Africa. And in the three years that I was Finance Minister, they made an average of 360 million dollars profit per year. 360 million in a market -- in a country that is a poor country, with an average per capita income just under 500 dollars per capita. So the market is there. When they kept this under wraps, but soon others got to know. Nigerians themselves began to develop some wireless telecommunications companies, and three or four others have come in. But there's a huge market out there, and people don't know about it, or they don't want to know. So privatization is one of the things we've done. The other thing we've also done is to manage our finances better. Because nobody's going to help you and support you if you're not managing your own finances well. And Nigeria, with the oil sector, had the reputation of being corrupt and not managing its own public finances well. So what did we try to do? We introduced a fiscal rule that de-linked our budget from the oil price. Before we used to just budget on whatever oil we bring in, because oil is the biggest, most revenue-earning sector in the economy: 70 percent of our revenues come from oil. We de-linked that, and once we did it, we began to budget at a price slightly lower than the oil price and save whatever was above that price. We didn't know we could pull it off; it was very controversial. But what it immediately did was that the volatility that had been present in terms of our economic development -- where, even if oil prices were high, we would grow very fast. When they crashed, we crashed. And we could hardly even pay anything, any salaries, in the economy. That smoothened out. We were able to save, just before I left, 27 billion dollars. Whereas -- and this went to our reserves -- when I arrived in 2003, we had seven billion dollars in reserves. By the time I left, we had gone up to almost 30 billion dollars. And as we speak now, we have about 40 billion dollars in reserves due to proper management of our finances. And that shores up our economy, makes it stable. Our exchange rate that used to fluctuate all the time is now fairly stable and being managed so that business people have a predictability of prices in the economy. We brought inflation down from 28 percent to about 11 percent. And we had GDP grow from an average of 2.3 percent the previous decade to about 6.5 percent now. So all the changes and reforms we were able to make have shown up in results that are measurable in the economy. And what is more important, because we want to get away from oil and diversify -- and there are so many opportunities in this one big country, as in many countries in Africa -- what was remarkable is that much of this growth came not from the oil sector alone, but from non-oil. Agriculture grew at better than eight percent. As telecoms sector grew, housing and construction, and I could go on and on. And this is to illustrate to you that once you get the macro-economy straightened out, the opportunities in various other sectors are enormous. We have opportunities in agriculture, like I said. We have opportunities in solid minerals. We have a lot of minerals that no one has even invested in or explored. And we realized that without the proper legislation to make that possible, that wouldn't happen. So we've now got a mining code that is comparable with some of the best in the world. We have opportunities in housing and real estate. There was nothing in a country of 140 million people -- no shopping malls as you know them here. This was an investment opportunity for someone that excited the imagination of people. And now, we have a situation in which the businesses in this mall are doing four times the turnover that they had projected. So, huge things in construction, real estate, mortgage markets. Financial services: we had 89 banks. Too many not doing their real business. We consolidated them from 89 to 25 banks by requiring that they increase their capital -- share capital. And it went from about 25 million dollars to 150 million dollars. The banks -- these banks are now consolidated, and that strengthening of the banking system has attracted a lot of investment from outside. Barclays Bank of the U.K. is bringing in 500 million. Standard Chartered has brought in 140 million. And I can go on. Dollars, on and on, into the system. We are doing the same with the insurance sector. So in financial services, a great deal of opportunity. In tourism, in many African countries, a great opportunity. And that's what many people know East Africa for: the wildlife, the elephants, and so on. But managing the tourism market in a way that can really benefit the people is very important. So what am I trying to say? I'm trying to tell you that there's a new wave on the continent. A new wave of openness and democratization in which, since 2000, more than two-thirds of African countries have had multi-party democratic elections. Not all of them have been perfect, or will be, but the trend is very clear. I'm trying to tell you that since the past three years, the average rate of growth on the continent has moved from about 2.5 percent to about five percent per annum. This is better than the performance of many OECD countries. So it's clear that things are changing. Conflicts are down on the continent; from about 12 conflicts a decade ago, we are down to three or four conflicts -- one of the most terrible, of course, of which is Darfur. And, you know, you have the neighborhood effect where if something is going on in one part of the continent, it looks like the entire continent is affected. But you should know that this continent is not -- is a continent of many countries, not one country. And if we are down to three or four conflicts, it means that there are plenty of opportunities to invest in stable, growing, exciting economies where there's plenty of opportunity. And I want to just make one point about this investment. The best way to help Africans today is to help them to stand on their own feet. And the best way to do that is by helping create jobs. There's no issue with fighting malaria and putting money in that and saving children's lives. That's not what I'm saying. That is fine. But imagine the impact on a family: if the parents can be employed and make sure that their children go to school, that they can buy the drugs to fight the disease themselves. If we can invest in places where you yourselves make money whilst creating jobs and helping people stand on their own feet, isn't that a wonderful opportunity? Isn't that the way to go? And I want to say that some of the best people to invest in on the continent are the women. (Applause) I have a CD here. I'm sorry that I didn't say anything on time. Otherwise, I would have liked you to have seen this. It says, "Africa: Open for Business." And this is a video that has actually won an award as the best documentary of the year. Understand that the woman who made it is going to be in Tanzania, where they're having the session in June. But it shows you Africans, and particularly African women, who against all odds have developed businesses, some of them world-class. One of the women in this video, Adenike Ogunlesi, making children's clothes -- which she started as a hobby and grew into a business. Mixing African materials, such as we have, with materials from elsewhere. So, she'll make a little pair of dungarees with corduroys, with African material mixed in. Very creative designs, has reached a stage where she even had an order from Wal-Mart. (Laughter) For 10,000 pieces. So that shows you that we have people who are capable of doing. And the women are diligent. They are focused; they work hard. I could go on giving examples: Beatrice Gakuba of Rwanda, who opened up a flower business and is now exporting to the Dutch auction in Amsterdam each morning and is employing 200 other women and men to work with her. However, many of these are starved for capital to expand, because nobody believes outside of our countries that we can do what is necessary. Nobody thinks in terms of a market. Nobody thinks there's opportunity. But I'm standing here saying that those who miss the boat now, will miss it forever. So if you want to be in Africa, think about investing. Think about the Beatrices, think about the Adenikes of this world, who are doing incredible things, that are bringing them into the global economy, whilst at the same time making sure that their fellow men and women are employed, and that the children in those households get educated because their parents are earning adequate income. So I invite you to explore the opportunities. When you go to Tanzania, listen carefully, because I'm sure you will hear of the various openings that there will be for you to get involved in something that will do good for the continent, for the people and for yourselves. Thank you very much. (Applause)
So I am a surgeon who studies creativity, and I have never had a patient tell me that "I really want you to be creative during surgery," and so I guess there's a little bit of irony to it. I will say though that, after having done surgery a lot, it's somewhat similar to playing a musical instrument. And for me, this sort of deep and enduring fascination with sound is what led me to both be a surgeon and also to study the science of sound, particularly music. And so I'm going to try to talk to you over the next few minutes about my career in terms of how I'm able to actually try to study music and really try to grapple with all these questions of how the brain is able to be creative. I've done most of this work at Johns Hopkins University, but also at the National Institute of Health where I was previously. I'm going to go over some science experiments and try to cover three musical experiments. I'm going to start off by playing a video for you. And this video is a video of Keith Jarrett, who's a well-known jazz improviser and probably the most well-known, iconic example of someone who takes improvisation to a really higher level. And he'll improvise entire concerts off the top of his head, and he'll never play it exactly the same way again, and so, as a form of intense creativity, I think this is a great example. And so why don't we go and click the video. (Music) It's really a remarkable, awesome thing that happens there. I've always -- just as a listener, as just a fan -- I listen to that, and I'm just astounded. I think -- how can this possibly be? How can the brain generate that much information, that much music, spontaneously? And so I set out with this concept, scientifically, that artistic creativity, it's magical, but it's not magic, meaning that it's a product of the brain. There's not too many brain-dead people creating art. And so with this notion that artistic creativity is in fact a neurologic product, I took this thesis that we could study it just like we study any other complex neurologic process. And I think there's some sub-questions there that I put there. Is it truly possible to study creativity scientifically? And I think that's a good question. And I'll tell you that most scientific studies of music, they're very dense, and when you actually go through them, it's very hard to recognize the music in it. In fact, they seem to be very unmusical entirely and to miss the whole point of the music. And so it brings the second question: Why should scientists study creativity? Maybe we're not the right people to do it. Well it may be, but I will say that, from a scientific perspective -- we talked a lot about innovation today -- the science of innovation, how much we understand about how the brain is able to innovate is in its infancy, and truly, we know very little about how we are able to be creative. And so I think that we're going to see over the next 10, 20, 30 years a real science of creativity that's burgeoning and is going to flourish. Because we now have new methods that can enable us to take this process of something like this, complex jazz improvisation, and study it rigorously. And so it gets down to the brain. And so all of us have this remarkable brain, which is poorly understood to say the least. I think that neuroscientists have many more questions than answers, and I myself, I'm not going to give you many answers today, just ask a lot of questions. And fundamentally that's what I do in my lab. I ask questions about what is this brain doing to enable us to do this. This is the main method that I use. This is called functional MRI. If you've been in an MRI scanner, it's very much the same, but this one is outfitted in a special way to not just take pictures of your brain, but to also take pictures of active areas of the brain. Now the way that's done is by the following. There's something called BOLD imaging, which is Blood Oxygen Level Dependent imaging. Now when you're in an fMRI scanner, you're in a big magnet that's aligning your molecules in certain areas. When an area of the brain is active, meaning a neural area is active, it gets blood flow shunted to that area. That blood flow causes an increase in local blood to that area with a deoxyhemoglobin change in concentration. Deoxyhemoglobin can be detected by MRI, whereas oxyhemoglobin can't. So through this method of inference -- and we're measuring blood flow, not neural activity -- we say that an area of the brain that's getting more blood was active during a particular task, and that's the crux of how fMRI works. And it's been used since the '90s to study really complex processes. Now I'm going to review a study that I did, which was jazz in an fMRI scanner. And this was done with a colleague of mine, Alan Braun, at the NIH. This is a short video of how we did this project. (Video) Charles Limb: This is a plastic MIDI piano keyboard that we use for the jazz experiments. And it's a 35-key keyboard that is designed to fit both inside the scanner, be magnetically safe, have minimal interference that would contribute to any artifact and have this cushion so that it can rest on the players' legs while they're lying down in the scanner, playing on their back. And it works like this -- this doesn't actually produce any sound. It sends out what's called a MIDI signal -- or a Musical Instrument Digital Interface -- through these wires into the box and then the computer, which then trigger high-quality piano samples like this. (Music) (Music) CL: Okay, so it works. And so through this piano keyboard, we now have the means to take a musical process and study it. So what do you do now that you have this cool piano keyboard? You can't just sort of -- "It's great we've got this keyboard." We actually have to come up with a scientific experiment. And so the experiment really rests on the following: What happens in the brain during something that's memorized and over-learned, and what happens in the brain during something that is spontaneously generated, or improvised, in a way that's matched motorically and in terms of lower-level sensory motor features? And so, I have here what we call the "paradigms." There's a scale paradigm, which is just playing a scale up and down, memorized. And then there's improvising on a scale -- quarter notes, metronome, right hand -- scientifically very safe, but musically really boring. And then there's the bottom one, which is called the jazz paradigm. And so what we did was we brought professional jazz players to the NIH, and we had them memorize this piece of music on the left, the lower-left -- which is what you heard me playing -- and then we had them improvise to the same exact chord changes. And if you can hit that lower-right sound icon, that's an example of what was recorded in the scanner. (Music) So in the end, it's not the most natural environment, but they're able to play real music. And I've listened to that solo 200 times, and I still like it. And the musicians, they were comfortable in the end. And so we first measured the number of notes. Were they in fact just playing a lot more notes when they were improvising? That was not what was going on. And then we looked at the brain activity. I'm going to try to condense this for you. These are contrast maps that are showing subtractions between what changes when you're improvising versus when you're doing something memorized. In red is an area that active in the prefrontal cortex, the frontal lobe of the brain, and in blue is this area that was deactivated. And so we had this focal area called the medial prefrontal cortex that went way up in activity. We had this broad patch of area called the lateral prefrontal cortex that went way down in activity, and I'll summarize that for you here. Now these are multifunctional areas of the brain. As I like to say, these are not the "jazz areas" of the brain. They do a whole host of things that have to do with self-reflection, introspection, working memory and so forth. Really, consciousness is seated in the frontal lobe. But we have this combination of an area that's thought to be involved in self-monitoring, turning off, and this area that's thought to be autobiographical, or self-expressive, turning on. And we think, at least in this preliminary -- it's one study; it's probably wrong, but it's one study -- we think that at least a reasonable hypothesis is that, to be creative, you have to have this weird dissociation in your frontal lobe. One area turns on, and a big area shuts off, so that you're not inhibited, so that you're willing to make mistakes, so that you're not constantly shutting down all of these new generative impulses. Now a lot of people know that music is not always a solo activity -- sometimes it's done communicatively. And so the next question was: What happens when musicians are trading back and forth, something called "trading fours," which is something they do normally in a jazz experiment? So this is a twelve-bar blues. And I've broken it down into four-bar groups here, so you would know how you would trade. Now what we did was we brought a musician into the scanner -- same way -- had them memorize this melody and then had another musician out in the control room trading back and forth interactively. So this is a musician, Mike Pope, one of the world's best bassists and a fantastic piano player. So he's now playing the piece that we just saw just a little better than I wrote it. (Video) CL: Mike, come on in. Mike Pope: May the force be with you. Nurse: Nothing's in your pockets, right Mike? MP: Nope. Nothing's in my pockets. Nurse: Okay. CL: You have to have the right attitude to agree to it. (Laughter) It's kind of fun actually. And so now we're playing back and forth. He's in there. You can see his legs up there. And then I'm in the control room here, playing back and forth. (Music) (Video) Mike Pope: This is a pretty good representation of what it's like. And it's good that it's not too quick. The fact that we do it over and over again lets you acclimate to your surroundings. So the hardest thing for me was the kinesthetic thing, of looking at my hands through two mirrors, laying on my back and not able to move at all except for my hand. That was challenging. But again, there were moments, for sure, there were moments of real, honest-to-God musical interplay, for sure. CL: At this point, I'll take a few moments. And so what you're seeing here -- and I'm doing a cardinal sin in science, which is to show you preliminary data. This is one subject's data. This is, in fact, Mike Pope's data. So what am I showing you here? When he was trading fours with me, improvising versus memorized, his language areas lit up, his Broca's area, which is inferior frontal gyrus on the left. He actually had it also homologous on the right. This is an area thought to be involved in expressive communication. This whole notion that music is a language -- well maybe there's a neurologic basis to it in fact after all, and we can see it when two musicians are having a musical conversation. And so we've done this actually on eight subjects now, and we're just getting all the data together, so hopefully we'll have something to say about it meaningfully. Now when I think about improvisation and the language, well what's next? Rap, of course, rap -- free-style. And so I've always been fascinated by free-style. And let's go ahead and play this video here. (Video) Mos Def: ♫ ... brown skin I be, standing five-ten I be ♫ ♫ Rockin' it when I be, in your vicinity ♫ ♫ Whole-style synergy, recognize symmetry ♫ ♫ Go and try to injure me, broke 'em down chemically ♫ ♫ Ain't the number 10 MC, talk about how been I be ♫ ♫ Styled it like Kennedy, late like a 10 to three ♫ ♫ When I say when I be, girls say bend that key cut ♫ CL: And so there's a lot of analogy between what takes place in free-style rap and jazz. There are, in fact, a lot of correlations between the two forms of music I think in different time periods. In a lot a ways, rap serves the same social function that jazz used to serve. So how do you study rap scientifically? And my colleagues kind of think I'm crazy, but I think it's very viable. And so this is what you do: you have a free-style artist come in and memorize a rap that you write for them, that they've never heard before, and then you have them free-style. So I told my lab members that I would rap for TED, and they said, "No, you won't." And then I thought -- (Applause) But here's the thing. With this big screen, you can all rap with me. Okay? So what we had them do was memorize this lower-left sound icon, please. This is the control condition. This is what they memorized. Computer: ♫ Memory, thump. ♫ CL: ♫ Thump of the beat in a known repeat ♫ ♫ Rhythm and rhyme, they make me complete ♫ ♫ The climb is sublime when I'm on the mic ♫ ♫ Spittin' rhymes that hit you like a lightning strike ♫ ♫ I search for the truth in this eternal quest ♫ ♫ My passion's not fashion, you can see how I'm dressed ♫ ♫ Psychopathic words in my head appear ♫ ♫ Whisper these lyrics only I can hear ♫ ♫ The art of discovering and that which is hovering ♫ ♫ Inside the mind of those unconfined ♫ ♫ All of these words keep pouring out like rain ♫ ♫ I need a mad scientist to check my brain ♫ (Applause) I guarantee you that will never happen again. (Laughter) So now, what's great about these free-stylers, they will get cued different words. They don't know what's coming, but they'll hear something off the cuff. Go ahead and hit that right sound icon. They are going to be cued these three square words: "like," "not" and "head." He doesn't know what's coming. Free-styler: ♫ I'm like some kind of [unclear] ♫ ♫ [unclear] extraterrestrial, celestial scene ♫ ♫ Back in the days, I used to sit in pyramids and meditate ♫ ♫ With two microphones hovering over my head ♫ ♫ See if I could still listen, spittin' off the sound ♫ ♫ See what you grinning ♫ ♫ I teach the children in the back of the classroom ♫ ♫ About the message of apocalyptical ♫ ♫ Not really though, 'cause I've got to keep it simple ♫ ♫ [unclear] instrumental ♫ ♫ Detrimental playing Super Mario ♫ ♫ [unclear] boxes [unclear] hip hop ♫ CL: So again, it's an incredible thing that's taking place. It's doing something that, neurologically, is remarkable. Whether or not you like the music is irrelevant. Creatively speaking, it's just a phenomenal thing. This is a short video of how we actually do this in a scanner. (Laughter) (Video) CL: We're here with Emmanuel. CL: That was recorded in the scanner, by the way. (Video) CL: That's Emmanuel in the scanner. He's just memorized a rhyme for us. Emmanuel: ♫ Top of the beat with no repeat ♫ ♫ Rhythm and rhyme make me complete ♫ ♫ Climb is sublime when I'm on the mic ♫ ♫ Spittin' rhymes that'll hit you like a lightning strike ♫ ♫ I search for the truth in this eternal quest ♫ ♫ I'm passing on fashion; you can see how I'm dressed ♫ CL: Okay. So I'm going to stop that there. So what do we see in his brain? Well, this is actually four rappers' brains. And what we see, we do see language areas lighting up, but then -- eyes closed -- when you are free-styling versus memorizing, you've got major visual areas lighting up. You've got major cerebellar activity, which is involved in motor coordination. You have heightened brain activity when you're doing a comparable task, when that one task is creative and the other task is memorized. It's very preliminary, but I think it's kind of cool. So just to conclude, we've got a lot of questions to ask, and like I said, we'll ask questions here, not answer them. But we want to get at the root of what is creative genius, neurologically, and I think, with these methods, we're getting close to being there. And I think hopefully in the next 10, 20 years you'll actually see real, meaningful studies that say science has to catch up to art, and maybe we're starting now to get there. And so I want to thank you for your time. I appreciate it. (Applause)