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It's hard to believe that it's less than a year since the extraordinary moment when the finance, the credit, which drives our economies froze. A massive cardiac arrest. The effect, the payback, perhaps, for years of vampire predators like Bernie Madoff, whom we saw earlier. Abuse of steroids, binging and so on. And it's only a few months since governments injected enormous sums of money to try and keep the whole system afloat. And we're now in a very strange sort of twilight zone, where no one quite knows what's worked, or what doesn't. We don't have any very clear maps, any compass to guide us. We don't know which experts to believe anymore. What I'm going to try and do is to give some pointers to what I think is the landscape on the other side of the crisis, what things we should be looking out for and how we can actually use the crisis. There's a definition of leadership which says, "It's the ability to use the smallest possible crisis for the biggest possible effect." And I want to talk about how we ensure that this crisis, which is by no means small, really is used to the full. I want to start just by saying a bit about where I'm coming from. I've got a very confused background which perhaps makes me appropriate for confused times. I've got a Ph.D. in Telecoms, as you can see. I trained briefly as a Buddhist monk under this guy. I've been a civil servant, and I've been in charge of policy for this guy as well. But what I want to talk about begins when I was at this city, this university, as a student. And then as now, it was a beautiful place of balls and punts, beautiful people, many of whom took to heart Ronald Reagan's comment that, "even if they say hard work doesn't do you any harm, why risk it?" But when I was here, a lot of my fellow teenagers were in a very different situation, leaving school at a time then of rapidly growing youth unemployment, and essentially hitting a brick wall in terms of their opportunities. And I spent quite a lot of time with them rather than in punts. And they were people who were not short of wit, or grace or energy, but they had no hope, no jobs, no prospects. And when people aren't allowed to be useful, they soon think that they're useless. And although that was great for the music business at the time, it wasn't much good for anything else. And ever since then, I've wondered why it is that capitalism is so amazingly efficient at some things, but so inefficient at others, why it's so innovative in some ways and so un-innovative in others. Now, since that time, we've actually been through an extraordinary boom, the longest boom ever in the history of this country. Unprecedented wealth and prosperity, but that growth hasn't always delivered what we needed. H.L. Mencken once said that, "to every complex problem, there is a simple solution and it's wrong." But I'm not saying growth is wrong, but it's very striking that throughout the years of growth, many things didn't get better. Rates of depression carried on up, right across the Western world. If you look at America, the proportion of Americans with no one to talk to about important things went up from a tenth to a quarter. We commuted longer to work, but as you can see from this graph, the longer you commute the less happy you're likely to be. And it became ever clearer that economic growth doesn't automatically translate into social growth or human growth. We're now at another moment when another wave of teenagers are entering a cruel job market. There will be a million unemployed young people here by the end of the year, thousands losing their jobs everyday in America. We've got to do whatever we can to help them, but we've also got to ask, I think, a more profound question of whether we use this crisis to jump forward to a different kind of economy that's more suited to human needs, to a better balance of economy and society. And I think one of the lessons of history is that even the deepest crises can be moments of opportunity. They bring ideas from the margins into the mainstream. They often lead to the acceleration of much-needed reforms. And you saw that in the '30s, when the Great Depression paved the way for Bretton Woods, welfare states and so on. And I think you can see around us now, some of the green shoots of a very different kind of economy and capitalism which could grow. You can see it in daily life. When times are hard, people have to do things for themselves, and right across the world, Oxford, Omaha, Omsk, you can see an extraordinary explosion of urban farming, people taking over land, taking over roofs, turning barges into temporary farms. And I'm a very small part of this. I have 60,000 of these things in my garden. A few of these. This is Atilla the hen. And I'm a very small part of a very large movement, which for some people is about survival, but is also about values, about a different kind of economy, which isn't so much about consumption and credit, but about things which matter to us. And everywhere too, you can see a proliferation of time banks and parallel currencies, people using smart technologies to link up all the resources freed up by the market -- people, buildings, land -- and linking them to whomever has got the most compelling needs. There's a similar story, I think, for governments. Ronald Reagan, again, said the two funniest sentences in the English language are, "I'm from the government. And I'm here to help." But I think last year when governments did step in, people were quite glad that they were there, that they did act. But now, a few months on, however good politicians are at swallowing frogs without pulling a face, as someone once put it, they can't hide their uncertainty. Because it's already clear how much of the enormous amount of money they put into the economy, really went into fixing the past, bailing out the banks, the car companies, not preparing us for the future. How much of the money is going into concrete and boosting consumption, not into solving the really profound problems we have to solve. And everywhere, as people think about the unprecedented sums which are being spent of our money and our children's money, now, in the depth of this crisis, they're asking: Surely, we should be using this with a longer-term vision to accelerate the shift to a green economy, to prepare for aging, to deal with some of the inequalities which scar countries like this and the United States rather than just giving the money to the incumbents? Surely, we should be giving the money to entrepreneurs, to civil society, for people able to create the new, not to the big, well-connected companies, big, clunky government programs. And, after all this, as the great Chinese sage Lao Tzu said, "Governing a great country is like cooking a small fish. Don't overdo it." And I think more and more people are also asking: Why boost consumption, rather than change what we consume? Like the mayor of São Paulo who's banned advertising billboards, or the many cities like San Francisco putting in infrastructures for electric cars. You can see a bit of the same thing happening in the business world. Some, I think some of the bankers who have appear to have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. But ask yourselves: What will be the biggest sectors of the economy in 10, 20, 30 years time? It won't be the ones lining up for handouts, like cars and aerospace and so on. The biggest sector, by far, will be health -- already 18 percent of the American economy, predicted to grow to 30, even 40 percent by mid-century. Elder care, child care, already much bigger employers than cars. Education: six, seven, eight percent of the economy and growing. Environmental services, energy services, the myriad of green jobs, they're all pointing to a very different kind of economy which isn't just about products, but is using distributed networks, and it's founded above all on care, on relationships, on what people do to other people, often one to one, rather than simply selling them a product. And I think that what connects the challenge for civil society, the challenge for governments and the challenge for business now is, in a way, a very simple one, but quite a difficult one. We know our societies have to radically change. We know we can't go back to where we were before the crisis. But we also know it's only through experiment that we'll discover exactly how to run a low carbon city, how to care for a much older population, how to deal with drug addiction and so on. And here's the problem. In science, we do experiments systematically. Our societies now spend two, three, four percent of GDP to invest systematically in new discovery, in science, in technology, to fuel the pipeline of brilliant inventions which illuminate gatherings like this. It's not that our scientists are necessarily much smarter than they were a hundred years ago, maybe they are, but they have a hell of a lot more backing than they ever did. And what's striking though, is that in society there's almost nothing comparable, no comparable investment, no systematic experiment, in the things capitalism isn't very good at, like compassion, or empathy, or relationships or care. Now, I didn't really understand that until I met this guy who was then an 80-year-old, slightly shambolic man who lived on tomato soup and thought ironing was very overrated. He had helped shape Britain's post-war institutions, its welfare state, its economy, but had sort of reinvented himself as a social entrepreneur, became an inventor of many, many different organizations. Some famous ones like the Open University, which has 110,000 students, the University of the Third Age, which has nearly half a million older people teaching other older people, as well as strange things like DIY garages and language lines and schools for social entrepreneurs. And he ended his life selling companies to venture capitalists. He believed if you see a problem, you shouldn't tell someone to act, you should act on it yourself, and he lived long enough and saw enough of his ideas first scorned and then succeed that he said you should always take no as a question and not as an answer. And his life was a systematic experiment to find better social answers, not from a theory, but from experiment, and experiment involving the people with the best intelligence on social needs, which were usually the people living with those needs. And he believed we live with others, we share the world with others and therefore our innovation must be done with others too, not doing things at people, for them, and so on. Now, what he did didn't used to have a name, but I think it's rapidly becoming quite mainstream. It's what we do in the organization named after him where we try and invent, create, launch new ventures, whether it's schools, web companies, health organizations and so on. And we find ourselves part of a very rapidly growing global movement of institutions working on social innovation, using ideas from design or technology or community organizing to develop the germs of a future world, but through practice and through demonstration and not through theory. And they're spreading from Korea to Brazil to India to the USA and across Europe. And they've been given new momentum by the crisis, by the need for better answers to joblessness, community breakdown and so on. Some of the ideas are strange. These are complaints choirs. People come together to sing about the things that really bug them. (Laughter) Others are much more pragmatic: health coaches, learning mentors, job clubs. And some are quite structural, like social impact bonds where you raise money to invest in diverting teenagers from crime or helping old people keep out of hospital, and you get paid back according to how successful your projects are. Now, the idea that all of this represents, I think, is rapidly becoming a common sense and part of how we respond to the crisis, recognizing the need to invest in innovation for social progress as well as technological progress. There were big health innovation funds launched earlier this year in this country, as well as a public service innovation lab. Across northern Europe, many governments now have innovation laboratories within them. And just a few months ago, President Obama launched the Office of Social Innovation in the White House. And what people are beginning to ask is: Surely, just as we invest in R and D, two, three, four percent, of our GDP, of our economy, what if we put, let's say, one percent of public spending into social innovation, into elder care, new kinds of education, new ways of helping the disabled? Perhaps we'd achieve similar productivity gains in society to those we've had in the economy and in technology. And if, a generation or two ago, the big challenges were ones like getting a man on the moon, perhaps the challenges we need to set ourselves now are ones like eliminating child malnutrition, stopping trafficking, or one, I think closer to home for America or Europe, why don't we set ourselves the goal of achieving a billion extra years of life for today's citizens. Now those are all goals which could be achieved within a decade, but only with radical and systematic experiment, not just with technologies, but also with lifestyles and culture and policies and institutions too. Now, I want to end by saying a little bit about what I think this means for capitalism. I think what this is all about, this whole movement which is growing from the margins, remains quite small. Nothing like the resources of a CERN or a DARPA or an IBM or a Dupont. What it's telling us is that capitalism is going to become more social. It's already immersed in social networks. It will become more involved in social investment, and social care and in industries where the value comes from what you do with others, not just from what you sell to them, and from relationships as well as from consumption. But interestingly too, it implies a future where society learns a few tricks from capitalism about how you embed the DNA of restless continual innovation into society, trying things out and then growing and scaling the ones that work. Now, I think this future will be quite surprising to many people. In recent years, a lot of intelligent people thought that capitalism had basically won. History was over and society would inevitably have to take second place to economy. But I've been struck with a parallel in how people often talk about capitalism today and how they talked about the monarchy 200 years ago, just after the French Revolution and the restoration of the monarchy in France. Then, people said monarchy dominated everywhere because it was rooted in human nature. We were naturally deferential. We needed hierarchy. Just as today, the enthusiasts of unrestrained capitalism say it's rooted in human nature, only now it's individualism, inquisitiveness, and so on. Then monarchy had seen off its big challenger, mass democracy, which was seen as a well-intentioned but doomed experiment, just as capitalism has seen off socialism. Even Fidel Castro now says that the only thing worse than being exploited by multinational capitalism is not being exploited by multinational capitalism. And whereas then monarchies, palaces and forts dominated every city skyline and looked permanent and confident, today it's the gleaming towers of the banks which dominate every big city. I'm not suggesting the crowds are about to storm the barricades and string up every investment banker from the nearest lamppost, though that might be quite tempting. But I do think we're on the verge of a period when, just as happened to the monarchy and, interestingly, the military too, the central position of finance capital is going to come to an end, and it's going to steadily move to the sides, the margins of our society, transformed from being a master into a servant, a servant to the productive economy and of human needs. And as that happens, we will remember something very simple and obvious about capitalism, which is that, unlike what you read in economics textbooks, it's not a self-sufficient system. It depends on other systems, on ecology, on family, on community, and if these aren't replenished, capitalism suffers too. And our human nature isn't just selfish, it's also compassionate. It's not just competitive, it's also caring. Because of the depth of the crisis, I think we are at a moment of choice. The crisis is almost certainly deepening around us. It will be worse at the end of this year, quite possibly worse in a year's time than it is today. But this is one of those very rare moments when we have to choose whether we're just pedaling furiously to get back to where we were a year or two ago, and a very narrow idea of what the economy is for, or whether this is a moment to jump ahead, to reboot and to do some of the things we probably should have been doing anyway. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm here today to start a revolution. Now before you get up in arms, or you break into song, or you pick a favorite color, I want to define what I mean by revolution. By revolution, I mean a drastic and far-reaching change in the way we think and behave -- the way we think and the way we behave. Now why, Steve, why do we need a revolution? We need a revolution because things aren't working; they're just not working. And that makes me really sad because I'm sick and tired of things not working. You know, I'm sick and tired of us not living up to our potential. I'm sick and tired of us being last. And we are last place in so many things -- for example, social factors. We're last place in Europe in innovation. There we are right at the end, right at the bottom, last place as a culture that doesn't value innovation. We're last place in health care, and that's important for a sense of well-being. And there we are, not just last in the E.U., we're last in Europe, at the very bottom. And worst of all, it just came out three weeks ago, many of you have seen it, The Economist. We're the saddest place on Earth, relative to GDP per capita -- the saddest place on Earth. That's social. Let's look at education. Where do we rank three weeks ago in another report by the OECD? Last in reading, math and science. Last. Business: The lowest perception in the E.U. that entrepreneurs provide benefits to society. Why as a result, what happens? The lowest percentage of entrepreneurs starting businesses. And this is despite the fact that everybody knows that small business is the engine of economies. We hire the most people; we create the most taxes. So if our engine's broken, guess what? Last in Europe GDP per capita. Last. So it's no surprise, guys, that 62 percent of Bulgarians are not optimistic about the future. We're unhappy, we have bad education, and we have the worst businesses. And these are facts, guys. This isn't story tale; it's not make-believe. It's not. It's not a conspiracy I have got against Bulgaria. These are facts. So I think it should be really, really clear that our system is broken. The way we think, the way we behave, our operating system of behaving is broken. We need a drastic change in the way we think and behave to transform Bulgaria for the better, for ourselves, for our friends, for our family and for our future. How did this happen? Let's be positive now. We're going to get positive. How did this happen? I think we're last because -- and this is going to be drastic to some of you -- because we are handicapping ourselves. We're holding ourselves back because we don't value play. I said "play," all right. In case some of you forgot what play is, this is what play looks like. Babies play, kids play, adults play. We don't value play. In fact, we devalue play. And we devalue it in three areas. Let's go back to the same three areas. Social: 45 years of what? Of communism -- of valuing the society and the state over the individual and squashing, inadvertently, creativity, individual self-expression and innovation. And instead, what do we value? Because it's shown the way we apply, generate and use knowledge is affected by our social and institutional context, which told us what in communism? To be serious. To be really, really serious. It did. (Applause) Be serious. I can't tell you how many times I've been scolded in the park for letting my kids play on the ground. Heaven forbid they play in the dirt, the kal, or even worse, lokvi, water -- that will kill them. I have been told by babas and dyados that we shouldn't let our kids play so much because life is serious and we need to train them for the seriousness of life. We have a serious meme running through. It's a social gene running through us. It's a serious gene. It's 45 years of it that's created what I call the "baba factor." (Laughter) (Applause) And here's how it works. Step one: woman says, "I want to have a baby. Iskam baby." Step two: we get the baby. Woohoo! But then what happens in step three? I want to go back to work because I need to further my career or I just want to go have coffees. I'm going to give bebko to baba. But we need to remember that baba's been infected by the serious meme for 45 years. So what happens? She passes that virus on to baby, and it takes a really, really, really long time -- as the redwood trees -- for that serious meme to get out of our operating system. What happens then? It goes into education where we have an antiquated education system that has little changed for 100 years, that values rote learning, memorization and standardization, and devalues self-expression, self-exploration, questioning, creativity and play. It's a crap system. True story: I went looking for a school for my kid. We went to this prestigious little school and they say they're going to study math 10 times a week and science eight times a week and reading five times a day and all this stuff. And we said, "Well what about play and recess?" And they said, "Ha. There won't be a single moment in the schedule." (Laughter) And we said, "He's five." What a crime. What a crime. And it's a crime that our education system is so serious because education is serious that we're creating mindless, robotic workers to put bolts in pre-drilled holes. But I'm sorry, the problems of today are not the problems of the Industrial Revolution. We need adaptability, the ability to learn how to be creative and innovative. We don't need mechanized workers. But no, now our meme goes into work where we don't value play. We create robotic workers that we treat like assets, to lever and just throw away. What are qualities of a Bulgarian work? Autocratic -- do what I say because I'm the chef. I'm the boss and I know better than you. Untrusting -- you're obviously a criminal, so I'm going to install cameras. (Laughter) Controlling -- you're obviously an idiot, so I'm going to make a zillion little processes for you to follow so you don't step out of the box. So they're restrictive -- don't use your mobile phone, don't use your laptop, don't search the Internet, don't be on I.M. That's somehow unprofessional and bad. And at the end of the day, it's unfulfilling because you're controlled, you're restricted, you're not valued and you're not having any fun. In social, in education and in our business, don't value play. And that's why we're last, because we don't value play. And you can say, "That's ridiculous, Steve. What a dumb idea. It can't be because of play. Just play, that's a stupid thing." We have the serious meme in us. Well I'm going to say no. And I will prove it to you in the next part of the speech -- that play is the catalyst, it is the revolution, that we can use to transform Bulgaria for the better. Play: our brains are hardwired for play. Evolution has selected, over millions and billions of years, for play in animals and in humans. And you know what? Evolution does a really, really good job of deselecting traits that aren't advantageous to us and selecting traits for competitive advantage. Nature isn't stupid, and it selected for play. Throughout the animal kingdom, for example: ants. Ants play. Maybe you didn't know that. But when they're playing, they're learning the social order and dynamics of things. Rats play, but what you might not have known is that rats that play more have bigger brains and they learn tasks better, skills. Kittens play. We all know kittens play. But what you may not know is that kittens deprived of play are unable to interact socially. They can still hunt, but they can't be social. Bears play. But what you may not know is that bears that play more survive longer. It's not the bears that learn how to fish better. It's the ones that play more. And a final really interesting study -- it's been shown, a correlation between play and brain size. The more you play, the bigger the brains there are. Dolphins, pretty big brains, play a lot. But who do you think with the biggest brains are the biggest players? Yours truly: humans. Kids play, we play -- of every nationality, of every race, of every color, of every religion. It's a universal thing -- we play. And it's not just kids, it's adults too. Really cool term: neoteny -- the retention of play and juvenile traits in adults. And who are the biggest neotenists? Humans. We play sports. We do it for fun, or as Olympians, or as professionals. We play musical instruments. We dance, we kiss, we sing, we just goof around. We're designed by nature to play from birth to old age. We're designed to do that continuously -- to play and play a lot and not stop playing. It is a huge benefit. Just like there's benefits to animals, there's benefits to humans. For example, it's been shown to stimulate neural growth in the amygdala, in the area where it controls emotions. It's been shown to promote pre-frontal cortex development where a lot of cognition is happening. As a result, what happens? We develop more emotional maturity if we play more. We develop better decision-making ability if we play more. These guys are facts. It's not fiction, it's not story tales, it's not make-believe; it's cold, hard science. These are the benefits to play. It is a genetic birthright that we have, like walking or speaking or seeing. And if we handicap ourselves with play, we handicap ourselves as if we would with any other birthright that we have. We hold ourselves back. Little exercise just for a second: close your eyes and try to imagine a world without play. Imagine a world without theater, without the arts, without song, without dancing, without soccer, without football, without laughter. What does this world look like? It's pretty bleak. It's pretty glum. Now imagine your workplace. Is it fun? Is it playful? Or maybe the workplace of your friends -- here we're forward thinking. Is it fun? Is it playful? Or is it crap? Is it autocratic, controlling, restrictive and untrusting and unfulfilling? We have this concept that the opposite of play is work. We even feel guilty if we're seen playing at work. "Oh, my colleagues see me laughing. I must not have enough work," or, "Oh, I've got to hide because my boss might see me. He's going to think I'm not working hard." But I have news for you: our thinking is backwards. The opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression. It's depression. In fact, play improves our work. Just like there's benefits for humans and animals, there's benefits for play at work. For example, it stimulates creativity. It increases our openness to change. It improves our ability to learn. It provides a sense of purpose and mastery -- two key motivational things that increase productivity, through play. So before you start thinking of play as just not serious, play doesn't mean frivolous. You know, the professional athlete that loves skiing, he's serious about it, but he loves it. He's having fun, he's in the groove, he's in the flow. A doctor might be serious, but laughter's still a great medicine. Our thinking is backwards. We shouldn't be feeling guilty. We should be celebrating play. Quick example from the corporate world. FedEx, easy motto: people, service, profit. If you treat your people like people, if you treat them great, they're happier, they're fulfilled, they have a sense of mastery and purpose. What happens? They give better service -- not worse, but better. And when customers call for service and they're dealing with happy people that can make decisions and are fulfilled, how do the customers feel? They feel great. And what do great customers do, great-feeling customers? They buy more of your service and they tell more of their friends, which leads to more profit. People, service, profit. Play increases productivity, not decreases. And you're going to say, "Gee, that can work for FedEx out there in the United States, but it can't work in Bulgaria. No way. We're different." It does work in Bulgaria, you guys. Two reasons. One, play is universal. There's nothing weird about Bulgarians that we can't play, besides the serious meme that we have to kick out. Two, I've tried it. I've tried at Sciant. When I got there, we had zero happy customers. Not one customer would refer us. I asked them all. We had marginal profit -- I did. We had marginal profits, and we had unhappy stakeholders. Through some basic change, change like improving transparency, change like promoting self-direction and collaboration, encouraging collaboration, not autocracy, the things like having a results-focus. I don't care when you get in in the morning. I don't care when you leave. I care that your customer and your team is happy and you're organized with that. Why do I care if you get in at nine o'clock? Basically promoting fun. Through promoting fun and a great environment, we were able to transform Sciant and, in just three short years -- sounds like a long time, but change is slow -- every customer, from zero to every customer referring us, above average profits for the industry and happy stakeholders. And you can say, "Well how do you know they're happy?" Well we did win, every year that we entered, one of the rankings for best employer for small business. Independent analysis from anonymous employees on their surveys. It does, and it can, work in Bulgaria. There's nothing holding us back, except our own mentality about play. So some steps that we can take -- to finish up -- how to make this revolution through play. First of all, you have to believe me. If you don't believe me, well just go home and think about it some more or something. Second of all, if you don't have the feeling of play in you, you need to rediscover play. Whatever it was that as a kid you used to enjoy, that you enjoyed only six months ago, but now that you've got that promotion you can't enjoy, because you feel like you have to be serious, rediscover it. I don't care if it's mountain biking or reading a book or playing a game. Rediscover that because you're the leaders, the innovation leaders, the thought leaders. You're the ones that have to go back to the office or talk to your friends and ignite the fire of change in the play revolution. You guys have to, and if you're not feeling it, your colleagues, your employees, aren't going to feel it. You've got to go back and say, "Hey, I'm going to trust you." Weird concept: I hired you; I should trust you. I'm going to let you make decisions. I'm going to empower you, and I'm going to delegate to the lowest level, rather than the top. I'm going to encourage constructive criticism. I'm going to let you challenge authority. Because it's by challenging the way things are always done is that we are able to break out of the rut that we're in and create innovative solutions to problems of today. We're not always right as leaders. We're going to eradicate fear. Fear is the enemy of play. And we're going to do things like eliminate restrictions. You know what, let them use their mobile phone for personal calls -- heaven forbid. Let them be on the Internet. Let them be on instant messengers. Let them take long lunches. Lunch is like the recess for work. It's when you go out in the world and you recharge your brain, you meet your friends, you have a beer, you have some food, you talk, you get some synergy of ideas that maybe you wouldn't have had before. Let them do it. Give them some freedom, and in general, let them play. Let them have fun at the workplace. We spend so much of our lives at the workplace, and it's supposed to be, what, a miserable grind, so that 20 years from now, we wake up and say, "Is this it? Is that all there was?" Unacceptable. Nepriemliv. (Laughter) So in summary, we need a drastic change in the way we think and behave, but we don't need a workers' revolution. We don't need a workers' revolution. What we need is a players' uprising. What we need is a players' uprising. What we need is a players' uprising. Seriously, we need to band together. Today is the start of the uprising. But what you need to do is fan the flames of the revolution. You need to go and share your ideas and your success stories of what worked about reinvigorating our lives, our schools, and our work with play; about how play promotes a sense of promise and self-fulfillment; of how play promotes innovation and productivity, and, ultimately, how play creates meaning. Because we can't do it alone. We have to do it together, and together, if we do this and share these ideas on play, we can transform Bulgaria for the better. Thank you. (Applause)

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

I want to share some personal friends and stories with you that I've actually never talked about in public before to help illustrate the idea and the need and the hope for us to reinvent our health care system around the world. Twenty-four years ago, I had -- a sophomore in college, I had a series of fainting spells. No alcohol was involved. And I ended up in student health, and they ran some labwork and came back right away, and said, "Kidney problems." And before I knew it, I was involved and thrown into this six months of tests and trials and tribulations with six doctors across two hospitals in this clash of medical titans to figure out which one of them was right about what was wrong with me. And I'm sitting in a waiting room some time later for an ultrasound, and all six of these doctors actually show up in the room at once, and I'm like, "Uh oh, this is bad news." And their diagnosis was this: They said, "You have two rare kidney diseases that are going to actually destroy your kidneys eventually, you have cancer-like cells in your immune system that we need to start treatment right away, and you'll never be eligible for a kidney transplant, and you're not likely to live more than two or three years." Now, with the gravity of this doomsday diagnosis, it just sucked me in immediately, as if I began preparing myself as a patient to die according to the schedule that they had just given to me, until I met a patient named Verna in a waiting room, who became a dear friend, and she grabbed me one day and took me off to the medical library and did a bunch of research on these diagnoses and these diseases, and said, "Eric, these people who get this are normally in their '70s and '80s. They don't know anything about you. Wake up. Take control of your health and get on with your life." And I did. Now, these people making these proclamations to me were not bad people. In fact, these professionals were miracle workers, but they're working in a flawed, expensive system that's set up the wrong way. It's dependent on hospitals and clinics for our every care need. It's dependent on specialists who just look at parts of us. It's dependent on guesswork of diagnoses and drug cocktails, and so something either works or you die. And it's dependent on passive patients who just take it and don't ask any questions. Now the problem with this model is that it's unsustainable globally. It's unaffordable globally. We need to invent what I call a personal health system. So what does this personal health system look like, and what new technologies and roles is it going to entail? Now, I'm going to start by actually sharing with you a new friend of mine, Libby, somebody I've become quite attached to over the last six months. This is Libby, or actually, this is an ultrasound image of Libby. This is the kidney transplant I was never supposed to have. Now, this is an image that we shot a couple of weeks ago for today, and you'll notice, on the edge of this image, there's some dark spots there, which was really concerning to me. So we're going to actually do a live exam to sort of see how Libby's doing. This is not a wardrobe malfunction. I have to take my belt off here. Don't you in the front row worry or anything. (Laughter) I'm going to use a device from a company called Mobisante. This is a portable ultrasound. It can plug into a smartphone. It can plug into a tablet. Mobisante is up in Redmond, Washington, and they kindly trained me to actually do this on myself. They're not approved to do this. Patients are not approved to do this. This is a concept demo, so I want to make that clear. All right, I gotta gel up. Now the people in the front row are very nervous. (Laughter) And I want to actually introduce you to Dr. Batiuk, who's another friend of mine. He's up in Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital in Portland, Oregon. So let me just make sure. Hey, Dr. Batiuk. Can you hear me okay? And actually, can you see Libby? Thomas Batuik: Hi there, Eric. You look busy. How are you? Eric Dishman: I'm good. I'm just taking my clothes off in front of a few hundred people. It's wonderful. So I just wanted to see, is this the image you need to get? And I know you want to look and see if those spots are still there. TB: Okay. Well let's scan around a little bit here, give me a lay of the land. ED: All right.TB: Okay. Turn it a little bit inside, a little bit toward the middle for me. Okay, that's good. How about up a little bit? Okay, freeze that image. That's a good one for me. ED: All right. Now last week, when I did this, you had me measure that spot to the right. Should I do that again? TB: Yeah, let's do that. ED: All right. This is kind of hard to do with one hand on your belly and one hand on measuring, but I've got it, I think, and I'll save that image and send it to you. So tell me a little bit about what this dark spot means. It's not something I was very happy about. TB: Many people after a kidney transplant will develop a little fluid collection around the kidney. Most of the time it doesn't create any kind of mischief, but it does warrant looking at, so I'm happy we've got an opportunity to look at it today, make sure that it's not growing, it's not creating any problems. Based on the other images we have, I'm really happy how it looks today. ED: All right. Well, I guess we'll double check it when I come in. I've got my six month biopsy in a couple of weeks, and I'm going to let you do that in the clinic, because I don't think I can do that one on myself. TB: Good choice.ED: All right, thanks, Dr. Batiuk. All right. So what you're sort of seeing here is an example of disruptive technologies, of mobile, social and analytic technologies. These are the foundations of what's going to make personal health possible. Now there's really three pillars of this personal health I want to talk to you about now, and it's care anywhere, care networking and care customization. And you just saw a little bit of the first two with my interaction with Dr. Batiuk. So let's start with care anywhere. Humans invented the idea of hospitals and clinics in the 1780s. It is time to update our thinking. We have got to untether clinicians and patients from the notion of traveling to a special bricks-and-mortar place for all of our care, because these places are often the wrong tool, and the most expensive tool, for the job. And these are sometimes unsafe places to send our sickest patients, especially in an era of superbugs and hospital-acquired infections. And many countries are going to go brickless from the start because they're never going to be able to afford the mega-medicalplexes that a lot of the rest of the world has built. Now I personally learned that hospitals can be a very dangerous place at a young age. This was me in third grade. I broke my elbow very seriously, had to have surgery, worried that they were going to actually lose the arm. Recovering from the surgery in the hospital, I get bedsores. Those bedsores become infected, and they give me an antibiotic which I end up being allergic to, and now my whole body breaks out, and now all of those become infected. The longer I stayed in the hospital, the sicker I became, and the more expensive it became, and this happens to millions of people around the world every year. The future of personal health that I'm talking about says care must occur at home as the default model, not in a hospital or clinic. You have to earn your way into those places by being sick enough to use that tool for the job. Now the smartphones that we're already carrying can clearly have diagnostic devices like ultrasounds plugged into them, and a whole array of others, today, and as sensing is built into these, we'll be able to do vital signs monitor and behavioral monitoring like we've never had before. Many of us will have implantables that will actually look real-time at what's going on with our blood chemistry and in our proteins right now. Now the software is also getting smarter, right? Think about a coach, an agent online, that's going to help me do safe self-care. That same interaction that we just did with the ultrasound will likely have real-time image processing, and the device will say, "Up, down, left, right, ah, Eric, that's the perfect spot to send that image off to your doctor." Now, if we've got all these networked devices that are helping us to do care anywhere, it stands to reason that we also need a team to be able to interact with all of that stuff, and that leads to the second pillar I want to talk about, care networking. We have got to go beyond this paradigm of isolated specialists doing parts care to multidisciplinary teams doing person care. Uncoordinated care today is expensive at best, and it is deadly at worst. Eighty percent of medical errors are actually caused by communication and coordination problems amongst medical team members. I had my own heart scare years ago in graduate school, when we're under treatment for the kidney, and suddenly, they're like, "Oh, we think you have a heart problem." And I have these palpitations that are showing up. They put me through five weeks of tests -- very expensive, very scary -- before the nurse finally notices the piece of the paper, my meds list that I've been carrying to every single appointment, and says, "Oh my gosh." Three different specialists had prescribed three different versions of the same drug to me. I did not have a heart problem. I had an overdose problem. I had a care coordination problem. And this happens to millions of people every year. I want to use technology that we're all working on and making happen to make health care a coordinated team sport. Now this is the most frightening thing to me. Out of all the care I've had in hospitals and clinics around the world, the first time I've ever had a true team-based care experience was at Legacy Good Sam these last six months for me to go get this. And this is a picture of my graduation team from Legacy. There's a couple of the folks here. You'll recognize Dr. Batiuk. We just talked to him. Here's Jenny, one of the nurses, Allison, who helped manage the transplant list, and a dozen other people who aren't pictured, a pharmacist, a psychologist, a nutritionist, even a financial counselor, Lisa, who helped us deal with all the insurance hassles. I wept the day I graduated. I should have been happy, because I was so well that I could go back to my normal doctors, but I wept because I was so actually connected to this team. And here's the most important part. The other people in this picture are me and my wife, Ashley. Legacy trained us on how to do care for me at home so that they could offload the hospitals and clinics. That's the only way that the model works. My team is actually working in China on one of these self-care models for a project we called Age-Friendly Cities. We're trying to help build a social network that can help track and train the care of seniors caring for themselves as well as the care provided by their family members or volunteer community health workers, as well as have an exchange network online, where, for example, I can donate three hours of care a day to your mom, if somebody else can help me with transportation to meals, and we exchange all of that online. The most important point I want to make to you about this is the sacred and somewhat over-romanticized doctor-patient one-on-one is a relic of the past. The future of health care is smart teams, and you'd better be on that team for yourself. Now, the last thing that I want to talk to you about is care customization, because if you've got care anywhere and you've got care networking, those are going to go a long way towards improving our health care system, but there's still too much guesswork. Randomized clinical trials were actually invented in 1948 to help invent the drugs that cured tuberculosis, and those are important things, don't get me wrong. These population studies that we've done have created tons of miracle drugs that have saved millions of lives, but the problem is that health care is treating us as averages, not unique individuals, because at the end of the day, the patient is not the same thing as the population who are studied. That's what's leading to the guesswork. The technologies that are coming, high-performance computing, analytics, big data that everyone's talking about, will allow us to build predictive models for each of us as individual patients. And the magic here is, experiment on my avatar in software, not my body in suffering. Now, I've had two examples I want to quickly share with you of this kind of care customization on my own journey. The first was quite simple. I finally realized some years ago that all my medical teams were optimizing my treatment for longevity. It's like a badge of honor to see how long they can get the patient to live. I was optimizing my life for quality of life, and quality of life for me means time in snow. So on my chart, I forced them to put, "Patient goal: low doses of drugs over longer periods of time, side effects friendly to skiing." And I think that's why I achieved longevity. I think that time-in-snow therapy was as important as the pharmaceuticals that I had. Now the second example of customization -- and by the way, you can't customize care if you don't know your own goals, so health care can't know those until you know your own health care goals. But the second example I want to give you is, I happened to be an early guinea pig, and I got very lucky to have my whole genome sequenced. Now it took about two weeks of processing on Intel's highest-end servers to make this happen, and another six months of human and computing labor to make sense of all of that data. And at the end of all of that, they said, "Yes, those diagnoses of that clash of medical titans all of those years ago were wrong, and we have a better path forward." The future that Intel's working on now is to figure out how to make that computing for personalized medicine go from months and weeks to even hours, and make this kind of tool available, not just in the mainframes of tier-one research hospitals around the world, but in the mainstream -- every patient, every clinic with access to whole genome sequencing. And I tell you, this kind of care customization for everything from your goals to your genetics will be the most game-changing transformation that we witness in health care during our lifetime. So these three pillars of personal health, care anywhere, care networking, care customization, are happening in pieces now, but this vision will completely fail if we don't step up as caregivers and as patients to take on new roles. It's what my friend Verna said: Wake up and take control of your health. Because at the end of the day these technologies are simply about people caring for other people and ourselves in some powerful new ways. And it's in that spirit that I want to introduce you to one last friend, very quickly. Tracey Gamley stepped up to give me the impossible kidney that I was never supposed to have. (Applause) So Tracey, just tell us a little bit quickly about what the donor experience was like with you. Tracey Gamley: For me, it was really easy. I only had one night in the hospital. The surgery was done laparoscopically, so I have just five very small scars on my abdomen, and I had four weeks away from work and went back to doing everything I'd done before without any changes. ED: Well, I probably will never get a chance to say this to you in such a large audience ever again. So "thank you" feel likes a really trite word, but thank you from the bottom of my heart for saving my life. (Applause) This TED stage and all of the TED stages are often about celebrating innovation and celebrating new technologies, and I've done that here today, and I've seen amazing things coming from TED speakers, I mean, my gosh, artificial kidneys, even printable kidneys, that are coming. But until such time that these amazing technologies are available to all of us, and even when they are, it's up to us to care for, and even save, one another. I hope you will go out and make personal health happen for yourselves and for everyone. Thanks so much. (Applause)

I want to talk about social innovation and social entrepreneurship. I happen to have triplets. They're little. They're five years old. Sometimes I tell people I have triplets. They say, "Really? How many?" Here's a picture of the kids. That's Sage and Annalisa and Rider. Now, I also happen to be gay. Being gay and fathering triplets is by far the most socially innovative, socially entrepreneurial thing I have ever done. (Laughter) (Applause) The real social innovation I want to talk about involves charity. I want to talk about how the things we've been taught to think about giving and about charity and about the nonprofit sector are actually undermining the causes we love and our profound yearning to change the world. But before I do that, I want to ask if we even believe that the nonprofit sector has any serious role to play in changing the world. A lot of people say now that business will lift up the developing economies, and social business will take care of the rest. And I do believe that business will move the great mass of humanity forward. But it always leaves behind that 10 percent or more that is most disadvantaged or unlucky. And social business needs markets, and there are some issues for which you just can't develop the kind of money measures that you need for a market. I sit on the board of a center for the developmentally disabled, and these people want laughter and compassion and they want love. How do you monetize that? And that's where the nonprofit sector and philanthropy come in. Philanthropy is the market for love. It is the market for all those people for whom there is no other market coming. And so if we really want, like Buckminster Fuller said, a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out, then the nonprofit sector has to be a serious part of the conversation. But it doesn't seem to be working. Why have our breast cancer charities not come close to finding a cure for breast cancer, or our homeless charities not come close to ending homelessness in any major city? Why has poverty remained stuck at 12 percent of the U.S. population for 40 years? And the answer is, these social problems are massive in scale, our organizations are tiny up against them, and we have a belief system that keeps them tiny. We have two rulebooks. We have one for the nonprofit sector and one for the rest of the economic world. It's an apartheid, and it discriminates against the [nonprofit] sector in five different areas, the first being compensation. So in the for-profit sector, the more value you produce, the more money you can make. But we don't like nonprofits to use money to incentivize people to produce more in social service. We have a visceral reaction to the idea that anyone would make very much money helping other people. Interesting that we don't have a visceral reaction to the notion that people would make a lot of money not helping other people. You know, you want to make 50 million dollars selling violent video games to kids, go for it. We'll put you on the cover of Wired magazine. But you want to make half a million dollars trying to cure kids of malaria, and you're considered a parasite yourself. (Applause) And we think of this as our system of ethics, but what we don't realize is that this system has a powerful side effect, which is, it gives a really stark, mutually exclusive choice between doing very well for yourself and your family or doing good for the world to the brightest minds coming out of our best universities, and sends tens of thousands of people who could make a huge difference in the nonprofit sector marching every year directly into the for-profit sector because they're not willing to make that kind of lifelong economic sacrifice. Businessweek did a survey, looked at the compensation packages for MBAs 10 years of business school, and the median compensation for a Stanford MBA, with bonus, at the age of 38, was 400,000 dollars. Meanwhile, for the same year, the average salary for the CEO of a $5 million-plus medical charity in the U.S. was 232,000 dollars, and for a hunger charity, 84,000 dollars. Now, there's no way you're going to get a lot of people with $400,000 talent to make a $316,000 sacrifice every year to become the CEO of a hunger charity. Some people say, "Well, that's just because those MBA types are greedy." Not necessarily. They might be smart. It's cheaper for that person to donate 100,000 dollars every year to the hunger charity, save 50,000 dollars on their taxes, so still be roughly 270,000 dollars a year ahead of the game, now be called a philanthropist because they donated 100,000 dollars to charity, probably sit on the board of the hunger charity, indeed, probably supervise the poor SOB who decided to become the CEO of the hunger charity, and have a lifetime of this kind of power and influence and popular praise still ahead of them. The second area of discrimination is advertising and marketing. So we tell the for-profit sector, "Spend, spend, spend on advertising until the last dollar no longer produces a penny of value." But we don't like to see our donations spent on advertising in charity. Our attitude is, "Well, look, if you can get the advertising donated, you know, at four o'clock in the morning, I'm okay with that. But I don't want my donations spent on advertising. I want it go to the needy." As if the money invested in advertising could not bring in dramatically greater sums of money to serve the needy. In the 1990s, my company created the long distance AIDSRide bicycle journeys and the 60-mile-long breast cancer three-day walks, and over the course of nine years, we had 182,000 ordinary heroes participate, and they raised a total of 581 million dollars. They raised more money more quickly for these causes than any events in history, all based on the idea that people are weary of being asked to do the least they can possibly do. People are yearning to measure the full distance of their potential on behalf of the causes that they care about deeply. But they have to be asked. We got that many people to participate by buying full-page ads in The New York Times, in The Boston Globe, in primetime radio and TV advertising. Do you know how many people we would have gotten if we put up flyers in the laundromat? Charitable giving has remained stuck, in the U.S., at two percent of GDP ever since we started measuring it in the 1970s. That's an important fact, because it tells us that in 40 years, the nonprofit sector has not been able to wrestle any market share away from the for-profit sector. And if you think about it, how could one sector possibly take market share away from another sector if it isn't really allowed to market? And if we tell the consumer brands, "You may advertise all the benefits of your product," but we tell charities, "You cannot advertise all the good that you do," where do we think the consumer dollars are going to flow? The third area of discrimination is the taking of risk in pursuit of new ideas for generating revenue. So Disney can make a new $200 million movie that flops, and nobody calls the attorney general. But you do a little $1 million community fundraiser for the poor, and it doesn't produce a 75 percent profit to the cause in the first 12 months, and your character is called into question. So nonprofits are really reluctant to attempt any brave, daring, giant-scale new fundraising endeavors for fear that if the thing fails, their reputations will be dragged through the mud. Well, you and I know when you prohibit failure, you kill innovation. If you kill innovation in fundraising, you can't raise more revenue. If you can't raise more revenue, you can't grow. And if you can't grow, you can't possibly solve large social problems. The fourth area is time. So Amazon went for six years without returning any profit to investors, and people had patience. They knew that there was a long-term objective down the line of building market dominance. But if a nonprofit organization ever had a dream of building magnificent scale that required that for six years, no money was going to go to the needy, it was all going to be invested in building this scale, we would expect a crucifixion. And the last area is profit itself. So the for-profit sector can pay people profits in order to attract their capital for their new ideas, but you can't pay profits in a nonprofit sector, so the for-profit sector has a lock on the multi-trillion-dollar capital markets, and the nonprofit sector is starved for growth and risk and idea capital. Well, you put those five things together -- you can't use money to lure talent away from the for-profit sector, you can't advertise on anywhere near the scale the for-profit sector does for new customers, you can't take the kinds of risks in pursuit of those customers that the for-profit sector takes, you don't have the same amount of time to find them as the for-profit sector, and you don't have a stock market with which to fund any of this, even if you could do it in the first place, and you've just put the nonprofit sector at an extreme disadvantage to the for-profit sector on every level. If we have any doubts about the effects of this separate rule book, this statistic is sobering: From 1970 to 2009, the number of nonprofits that really grew, that crossed the $50 million annual revenue barrier, is 144. In the same time, the number of for-profits that crossed it is 46,136. So we're dealing with social problems that are massive in scale, and our organizations can't generate any scale. All of the scale goes to Coca-Cola and Burger King. So why do we think this way? Well, like most fanatical dogma in America, these ideas come from old Puritan beliefs. The Puritans came here for religious reasons, or so they said, but they also came here because they wanted to make a lot of money. They were pious people but they were also really aggressive capitalists, and they were accused of extreme forms of profit-making tendencies compared to the other colonists. But at the same time, the Puritans were Calvinists, so they were taught literally to hate themselves. They were taught that self-interest was a raging sea that was a sure path to eternal damnation. Well, this created a real problem for these people, right? Here they've come all the way across the Atlantic to make all this money. Making all this money will get you sent directly to Hell. What were they to do about this? Well, charity became their answer. It became this economic sanctuary where they could do penance for their profit-making tendencies at five cents on the dollar. So of course, how could you make money in charity if charity was your penance for making money? Financial incentive was exiled from the realm of helping others so that it could thrive in the area of making money for yourself, and in 400 years, nothing has intervened to say, "That's counterproductive and that's unfair." Now this ideology gets policed by this one very dangerous question, which is, "What percentage of my donation goes to the cause versus overhead?" There are a lot of problems with this question. I'm going to just focus on two. First, it makes us think that overhead is a negative, that it is somehow not part of the cause. But it absolutely is, especially if it's being used for growth. Now, this idea that overhead is somehow an enemy of the cause creates this second, much larger problem, which is, it forces organizations to go without the overhead things they really need to grow in the interest of keeping overhead low. So we've all been taught that charities should spend as little as possible on overhead things like fundraising under the theory that, well, the less money you spend on fundraising, the more money there is available for the cause. Well, that's true if it's a depressing world in which this pie cannot be made any bigger. But if it's a logical world in which investment in fundraising actually raises more funds and makes the pie bigger, then we have it precisely backwards, and we should be investing more money, not less, in fundraising, because fundraising is the one thing that has the potential to multiply the amount of money available for the cause that we care about so deeply. I'll give you two examples. We launched the AIDSRides with an initial investment of 50,000 dollars in risk capital. Within nine years, we had multiplied that 1,982 times into 108 million dollars after all expenses for AIDS services. We launched the breast cancer three-days with an initial investment of 350,000 dollars in risk capital. Within just five years, we had multiplied that 554 times into 194 million dollars after all expenses for breast cancer research. Now, if you were a philanthropist really interested in breast cancer, what would make more sense: go out and find the most innovative researcher in the world and give her 350,000 dollars for research, or give her fundraising department the 350,000 dollars to multiply it into 194 million dollars for breast cancer research? 2002 was our most successful year ever. We netted for breast cancer alone, that year alone, 71 million dollars after all expenses. And then we went out of business, suddenly and traumatically. Why? Well, the short story is, our sponsor split on us. They wanted to distance themselves from us because we were being crucified in the media for investing 40 percent of the gross in recruitment and customer service and the magic of the experience and there is no accounting terminology to describe that kind of investment in growth and in the future, other than this demonic label of overhead. So on one day, all 350 of our great employees lost their jobs because they were labeled overhead. Our sponsor went and tried the events on their own. The overhead went up. Net income for breast cancer research went down by 84 percent, or 60 million dollars in one year. This is what happens when we confuse morality with frugality. We've all been taught that the bake sale with five percent overhead is morally superior to the professional fundraising enterprise with 40 percent overhead, but we're missing the most important piece of information, which is, what is the actual size of these pies? Who cares if the bake sale only has five percent overhead if it's tiny? What if the bake sale only netted 71 dollars for charity because it made no investment in its scale and the professional fundraising enterprise netted 71 million dollars because it did? Now which pie would we prefer, and which pie do we think people who are hungry would prefer? Here's how all of this impacts the big picture. I said that charitable giving is two percent of GDP in the United States. That's about 300 billion dollars a year. But only about 20 percent of that, or 60 billion dollars, goes to health and human services causes. The rest goes to religion and higher education and hospitals and that 60 billion dollars is not nearly enough to tackle these problems. But if we could move charitable giving from two percent of GDP up just one step to three percent of GDP, by investing in that growth, that would be an extra 150 billion dollars a year in contributions, and if that money could go disproportionately to health and human services charities, because those were the ones we encouraged to invest in their growth, that would represent a tripling of contributions to that sector. Now we're talking scale. Now we're talking the potential for real change. But it's never going to happen by forcing these organizations to lower their horizons to the demoralizing objective of keeping their overhead low. Our generation does not want its epitaph to read, "We kept charity overhead low." (Laughter) (Applause) We want it to read that we changed the world, and that part of the way we did that was by changing the way we think about these things. So the next time you're looking at a charity, don't ask about the rate of their overhead. Ask about the scale of their dreams, their Apple-, Google-, Amazon-scale dreams, how they measure their progress toward those dreams, and what resources they need to make them come true regardless of what the overhead is. Who cares what the overhead is if these problems are actually getting solved? If we can have that kind of generosity, a generosity of thought, then the non-profit sector can play a massive role in changing the world for all those citizens most desperately in need of it to change. And if that can be our generation's enduring legacy, that we took responsibility for the thinking that had been handed down to us, that we revisited it, we revised it, and we reinvented the whole way humanity thinks about changing things, forever, for everyone, well, I thought I would let the kids sum up what that would be. Annalisa Smith-Pallotta: That would be -- Sage Smith-Pallotta: -- a real social -- Rider Smith-Pallotta: -- innovation. Dan Pallotta: Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

Radical openness is still a distant future in the field of school education. We have such a hard time figuring out that learning is not a place but an activity. But I want to tell you the story of PISA, OECD's test to measure the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds around the world, and it's really a story of how international comparisons have globalized the field of education that we usually treat as an affair of domestic policy. Look at how the world looked in the 1960s, in terms of the proportion of people who had completed high school. You can see the United States ahead of everyone else, and much of the economic success of the United States draws on its long-standing advantage as the first mover in education. But in the 1970s, some countries caught up. In the 1980s, the global expansion of the talent pool continued. And the world didn't stop in the 1990s. So in the '60s, the U.S. was first. In the '90s, it was 13th, and not because standards had fallen, but because they had risen so much faster elsewhere. Korea shows you what's possible in education. Two generations ago, Korea had the standard of living of Afghanistan today, and was one of the lowest education performers. Today, every young Korean finishes high school. So this tells us that, in a global economy, it is no longer national improvement that's the benchmark for success, but the best performing education systems internationally. The trouble is that measuring how much time people spend in school or what degree they have got is not always a good way of seeing what they can actually do. Look at the toxic mix of unemployed graduates on our streets, while employers say they cannot find the people with the skills they need. And that tells you that better degrees don't automatically translate into better skills and better jobs and better lives. So with PISA, we try to change this by measuring the knowledge and skills of people directly. And we took a very special angle to this. We were less interested in whether students can simply reproduce what they have learned in school, but we wanted to test whether they can extrapolate from what they know and apply their knowledge in novel situations. Now, some people have criticized us for this. They say, you know, such a way of measuring outcomes is terribly unfair to people, because we test students with problems they haven't seen before. But if you take that logic, you know, you should consider life unfair, because the test of truth in life is not whether we can remember what we learned in school, but whether we are prepared for change, whether we are prepared for jobs that haven't been created, to use technologies that haven't been invented, to solve problems we just can't anticipate today. And once hotly contested, our way of measuring outcomes has actually quickly become the standard. In our latest assessment in 2009, we measured 74 school systems that together cover 87 percent of the economy. This chart shows you the performance of countries. In red, sort of below OECD average. Yellow is so-so, and in green are the countries doing really well. You can see Shanghai, Korea, Singapore in Asia; Finland in Europe; Canada in North America doing really well. You can also see that there is a gap of almost three and a half school years between 15-year-olds in Shanghai and 15-year-olds in Chile, and the gap grows to seven school years when you include the countries with really poor performance. There's a world of difference in the way in which young people are prepared for today's economy. But I want to introduce a second important dimension into this picture. Educators like to talk about equity. With PISA, we wanted to measure how they actually deliver equity, in terms of ensuring that people from different social backgrounds have equal chances. And we see that in some countries, the impact of social background on learning outcomes is very, very strong. Opportunities are unequally distributed. A lot of potential of young children is wasted. We see in other countries that it matters much less into which social context you're born. We all want to be there, in the upper right quadrant, where performance is strong and learning opportunities are equally distributed. Nobody, and no country, can afford to be there, where performance is poor and there are large social disparities. And then we can debate, you know, is it better to be there, where performance is strong at the price of large disparities? Or do we want to focus on equity and accept mediocrity? But actually, if you look at how countries come out on this picture, you see there are a lot of countries that actually are combining excellence with equity. In fact, one of the most important lessons from this comparison is that you don't have to compromise equity to achieve excellence. These countries have moved on from providing excellence for just some to providing excellence for all, a very important lesson. And that also challenges the paradigms of many school systems that believe they are mainly there to sort people. And ever since those results came out, policymakers, educators, researchers from around the world have tried to figure out what's behind the success of those systems. But let's step back for a moment and focus on the countries that actually started PISA, and I'm giving them a colored bubble now. And I'm making the size of the bubble proportional to the amount of money that countries spent on students. If money would tell you everything about the quality of learning outcomes, you would find all the large bubbles at the top, no? But that's not what you see. Spending per student only explains about, well, less than 20 percent of the performance variation among countries, and Luxembourg, for example, the most expensive system, doesn't do particularly well. What you see is that two countries with similar spending achieve very different results. You also see -- and I think that's one of the most encouraging findings -- that we no longer live in a world that is neatly divided between rich and well-educated countries, and poor and badly-educated ones, a very, very important lesson. Let's look at this in greater detail. The red dot shows you spending per student relative to a country's wealth. One way you can spend money is by paying teachers well, and you can see Korea investing a lot in attracting the best people into the teaching profession. And Korea also invests into long school days, which drives up costs further. Last but not least, Koreans want their teachers not only to teach but also to develop. They invest in professional development and collaboration and many other things. All that costs money. How can Korea afford all of this? The answer is, students in Korea learn in large classes. This is the blue bar which is driving costs down. You go to the next country on the list, Luxembourg, and you can see the red dot is exactly where it is for Korea, so Luxembourg spends the same per student as Korea does. But, you know, parents and teachers and policymakers in Luxembourg all like small classes. You know, it's very pleasant to walk into a small class. So they have invested all their money into there, and the blue bar, class size, is driving costs up. But even Luxembourg can spend its money only once, and the price for this is that teachers are not paid particularly well. Students don't have long hours of learning. And basically, teachers have little time to do anything else than teaching. So you can see two countries spent their money very differently, and actually how they spent their money matters a lot more than how much they invest in education. Let's go back to the year 2000. Remember, that was the year before the iPod was invented. This is how the world looked then in terms of PISA performance. The first thing you can see is that the bubbles were a lot smaller, no? We spent a lot less on education, about 35 percent less on education. So you ask yourself, if education has become so much more expensive, has it become so much better? And the bitter truth really is that, you know, not in many countries. But there are some countries which have seen impressive improvements. Germany, my own country, in the year 2000, featured in the lower quadrant, below average performance, large social disparities. And remember, Germany, we used to be one of those countries that comes out very well when you just count people who have degrees. Very disappointing results. People were stunned by the results. And for the very first time, the public debate in Germany was dominated for months by education, not tax, not other kinds of issues, but education was the center of the public debate. And then policymakers began to respond to this. The federal government dramatically raised its investment in education. A lot was done to increase the life chances of students with an immigrant background or from social disadvantage. And what's really interesting is that this wasn't just about optimizing existing policies, but data transformed some of the beliefs and paradigms underlying German education. For example, traditionally, the education of the very young children was seen as the business of families, and you would have cases where women were seen as neglecting their family responsibilities when they sent their children to kindergarten. PISA has transformed that debate, and pushed early childhood education right at the center of public policy in Germany. Or traditionally, the German education divides children at the age of 10, very young children, between those deemed to pursue careers of knowledge workers and those who would end up working for the knowledge workers, and that mainly along socioeconomic lines, and that paradigm is being challenged now too. A lot of change. And the good news is, nine years later, you can see improvements in quality and equity. People have taken up the challenge, done something about it. Or take Korea, at the other end of the spectrum. In the year 2000, Korea did already very well, but the Koreans were concerned that only a small share of their students achieved the really high levels of excellence. They took up the challenge, and Korea was able to double the proportion of students achieving excellence in one decade in the field of reading. Well, if you only focus on your brightest students, you know what happens is disparities grow, and you can see this bubble moving slightly to the other direction, but still, an impressive improvement. A major overhaul of Poland's education helped to dramatically reduce between variability among schools, turn around many of the lowest-performing schools, and raise performance by over half a school year. And you can see other countries as well. Portugal was able to consolidate its fragmented school system, raise quality and improve equity, and so did Hungary. So what you can actually see, there's been a lot of change. And even those people who complain and say that the relative standing of countries on something like PISA is just an artifact of culture, of economic factors, of social issues, of homogeneity of societies, and so on, these people must now concede that education improvement is possible. You know, Poland hasn't changed its culture. It didn't change its economy. It didn't change the compositions of its population. It didn't fire its teachers. It changed its education policies and practice. Very impressive. And all that raises, of course, the question: What can we learn from those countries in the green quadrant who have achieved high levels of equity, high levels of performance, and raised outcomes? And, of course, the question is, can what works in one context provide a model elsewhere? Of course, you can't copy and paste education systems wholesale, but these comparisons have identified a range of factors that high-performing systems share. Everybody agrees that education is important. Everybody says that. But the test of truth is, how do you weigh that priority against other priorities? How do countries pay their teachers relative to other highly skilled workers? Would you want your child to become a teacher rather than a lawyer? How do the media talk about schools and teachers? Those are the critical questions, and what we have learned from PISA is that, in high-performing education systems, the leaders have convinced their citizens to make choices that value education, their future, more than consumption today. And you know what's interesting? You won't believe it, but there are countries in which the most attractive place to be is not the shopping center but the school. Those things really exist. But placing a high value on education is just part of the picture. The other part is the belief that all children are capable of success. You have some countries where students are segregated early in their ages. You know, students are divided up, reflecting the belief that only some children can achieve world-class standards. But usually that is linked to very strong social disparities. If you go to Japan in Asia, or Finland in Europe, parents and teachers in those countries expect every student to succeed, and you can see that actually mirrored in student behavior. When we asked students what counts for success in mathematics, students in North America would typically tell us, you know, it's all about talent. If I'm not born as a genius in math, I'd better study something else. Nine out of 10 Japanese students say that it depends on my own investment, on my own effort, and that tells you a lot about the system that is around them. In the past, different students were taught in similar ways. High performers on PISA embrace diversity with differentiated pedagogical practices. They realize that ordinary students have extraordinary talents, and they personalize learning opportunities. High-performing systems also share clear and ambitious standards across the entire spectrum. Every student knows what matters. Every student knows what's required to be successful. And nowhere does the quality of an education system exceed the quality of its teachers. High-performing systems are very careful in how they recruit and select their teachers and how they train them. They watch how they improve the performances of teachers in difficulties who are struggling, and how they structure teacher pay. They provide an environment also in which teachers work together to frame good practice. And they provide intelligent pathways for teachers to grow in their careers. In bureaucratic school systems, teachers are often left alone in classrooms with a lot of prescription on what they should be teaching. High-performing systems are very clear what good performance is. They set very ambitious standards, but then they enable their teachers to figure out, what do I need to teach to my students today? The past was about delivered wisdom in education. Now the challenge is to enable user-generated wisdom. High performers have moved on from professional or from administrative forms of accountability and control -- sort of, how do you check whether people do what they're supposed to do in education -- to professional forms of work organization. They enable their teachers to make innovations in pedagogy. They provide them with the kind of development they need to develop stronger pedagogical practices. The goal of the past was standardization and compliance. High-performing systems have made teachers and school principals inventive. In the past, the policy focus was on outcomes, on provision. The high-performing systems have helped teachers and school principals to look outwards to the next teacher, the next school around their lives. And the most impressive outcomes of world-class systems is that they achieve high performance across the entire system. You've seen Finland doing so well on PISA, but what makes Finland so impressive is that only five percent of the performance variation amongst students lies between schools. Every school succeeds. This is where success is systemic. And how do they do that? They invest resources where they can make the most difference. They attract the strongest principals into the toughest schools, and the most talented teachers into the most challenging classroom. Last but not least, those countries align policies across all areas of public policy. They make them coherent over sustained periods of time, and they ensure that what they do is consistently implemented. Now, knowing what successful systems are doing doesn't yet tell us how to improve. That's also clear, and that's where some of the limits of international comparisons of PISA are. That's where other forms of research need to kick in, and that's also why PISA doesn't venture into telling countries what they should be doing. But its strength lies in telling them what everybody else has been doing. And the example of PISA shows that data can be more powerful than administrative control of financial subsidy through which we usually run education systems. You know, some people argue that changing educational administration is like moving graveyards. You just can't rely on the people out there to help you with this. (Laughter) But PISA has shown what's possible in education. It has helped countries to see that improvement is possible. It has taken away excuses from those who are complacent. And it has helped countries to set meaningful targets in terms of measurable goals achieved by the world's leaders. If we can help every child, every teacher, every school, every principal, every parent see what improvement is possible, that only the sky is the limit to education improvement, we have laid the foundations for better policies and better lives. Thank you. (Applause)

Last year, I told you the story, in seven minutes, of Project Orion, which was this very implausible technology that technically could have worked, but it had this one-year political window where it could have happened. So it didn't happen. It was a dream that did not happen. This year I'm going to tell you the story of the birth of digital computing. This was a perfect introduction. And it's a story that did work. It did happen, and the machines are all around us. And it was a technology that was inevitable. If the people I'm going to tell you the story about, if they hadn't done it, somebody else would have. So, it was sort of the right idea at the right time. This is Barricelli's universe. This is the universe we live in now. It's the universe in which these machines are now doing all these things, including changing biology. I'm starting the story with the first atomic bomb at Trinity, which was the Manhattan Project. It was a little bit like TED: it brought a whole lot of very smart people together. And three of the smartest people were Stan Ulam, Richard Feynman and John von Neumann. And it was Von Neumann who said, after the bomb, he was working on something much more important than bombs: he's thinking about computers. So, he wasn't only thinking about them; he built one. This is the machine he built. (Laughter) He built this machine, and we had a beautiful demonstration of how this thing really works, with these little bits. And it's an idea that goes way back. The first person to really explain that was Thomas Hobbes, who, in 1651, explained how arithmetic and logic are the same thing, and if you want to do artificial thinking and artificial logic, you can do it all with arithmetic. He said you needed addition and subtraction. Leibniz, who came a little bit later -- this is 1679 -- showed that you didn't even need subtraction. You could do the whole thing with addition. Here, we have all the binary arithmetic and logic that drove the computer revolution. And Leibniz was the first person to really talk about building such a machine. He talked about doing it with marbles, having gates and what we now call shift registers, where you shift the gates, drop the marbles down the tracks. And that's what all these machines are doing, except, instead of doing it with marbles, they're doing it with electrons. And then we jump to Von Neumann, 1945, when he sort of reinvents the whole same thing. And 1945, after the war, the electronics existed to actually try and build such a machine. So June 1945 -- actually, the bomb hasn't even been dropped yet -- and Von Neumann is putting together all the theory to actually build this thing, which also goes back to Turing, who, before that, gave the idea that you could do all this with a very brainless, little, finite state machine, just reading a tape in and reading a tape out. The other sort of genesis of what Von Neumann did was the difficulty of how you would predict the weather. Lewis Richardson saw how you could do this with a cellular array of people, giving them each a little chunk, and putting it together. Here, we have an electrical model illustrating a mind having a will, but capable of only two ideas. (Laughter) And that's really the simplest computer. It's basically why you need the qubit, because it only has two ideas. And you put lots of those together, you get the essentials of the modern computer: the arithmetic unit, the central control, the memory, the recording medium, the input and the output. But, there's one catch. This is the fatal -- you know, we saw it in starting these programs up. The instructions which govern this operation must be given in absolutely exhaustive detail. So, the programming has to be perfect, or it won't work. If you look at the origins of this, the classic history sort of takes it all back to the ENIAC here. But actually, the machine I'm going to tell you about, the Institute for Advanced Study machine, which is way up there, really should be down there. So, I'm trying to revise history, and give some of these guys more credit than they've had. Such a computer would open up universes, which are, at the present, outside the range of any instruments. So it opens up a whole new world, and these people saw it. The guy who was supposed to build this machine was the guy in the middle, Vladimir Zworykin, from RCA. RCA, in probably one of the lousiest business decisions of all time, decided not to go into computers. But the first meetings, November 1945, were at RCA's offices. RCA started this whole thing off, and said, you know, televisions are the future, not computers. The essentials were all there -- all the things that make these machines run. Von Neumann, and a logician, and a mathematician from the army put this together. Then, they needed a place to build it. When RCA said no, that's when they decided to build it in Princeton, where Freeman works at the Institute. That's where I grew up as a kid. That's me, that's my sister Esther, who's talked to you before, so we both go back to the birth of this thing. That's Freeman, a long time ago, and that was me. And this is Von Neumann and Morgenstern, who wrote the "Theory of Games." All these forces came together there, in Princeton. Oppenheimer, who had built the bomb. The machine was actually used mainly for doing bomb calculations. And Julian Bigelow, who took Zworkykin's place as the engineer, to actually figure out, using electronics, how you would build this thing. The whole gang of people who came to work on this, and women in front, who actually did most of the coding, were the first programmers. These were the prototype geeks, the nerds. They didn't fit in at the Institute. This is a letter from the director, concerned about -- "especially unfair on the matter of sugar." (Laughter) You can read the text. (Laughter) This is hackers getting in trouble for the first time. (Laughter). These were not theoretical physicists. They were real soldering-gun type guys, and they actually built this thing. And we take it for granted now, that each of these machines has billions of transistors, doing billions of cycles per second without failing. They were using vacuum tubes, very narrow, sloppy techniques to get actually binary behavior out of these radio vacuum tubes. They actually used 6J6, the common radio tube, because they found they were more reliable than the more expensive tubes. And what they did at the Institute was publish every step of the way. Reports were issued, so that this machine was cloned at 15 other places around the world. And it really was. It was the original microprocessor. All the computers now are copies of that machine. The memory was in cathode ray tubes -- a whole bunch of spots on the face of the tube -- very, very sensitive to electromagnetic disturbances. So, there's 40 of these tubes, like a V-40 engine running the memory. (Laughter) The input and the output was by teletype tape at first. This is a wire drive, using bicycle wheels. This is the archetype of the hard disk that's in your machine now. Then they switched to a magnetic drum. This is modifying IBM equipment, which is the origins of the whole data-processing industry, later at IBM. And this is the beginning of computer graphics. The "Graph'g-Beam Turn On." This next slide, that's the -- as far as I know -- the first digital bitmap display, 1954. So, Von Neumann was already off in a theoretical cloud, doing abstract sorts of studies of how you could build reliable machines out of unreliable components. Those guys drinking all the tea with sugar in it were writing in their logbooks, trying to get this thing to work, with all these 2,600 vacuum tubes that failed half the time. And that's what I've been doing, this last six months, is going through the logs. "Running time: two minutes. Input, output: 90 minutes." This includes a large amount of human error. So they are always trying to figure out, what's machine error? What's human error? What's code, what's hardware? That's an engineer gazing at tube number 36, trying to figure out why the memory's not in focus. He had to focus the memory -- seems OK. So, he had to focus each tube just to get the memory up and running, let alone having, you know, software problems. "No use, went home." (Laughter) "Impossible to follow the damn thing, where's a directory?" So, already, they're complaining about the manuals: "before closing down in disgust ... " "The General Arithmetic: Operating Logs." Burning lots of midnight oil. "MANIAC," which became the acronym for the machine, Mathematical and Numerical Integrator and Calculator, "lost its memory." "MANIAC regained its memory, when the power went off." "Machine or human?" "Aha!" So, they figured out it's a code problem. "Found trouble in code, I hope." "Code error, machine not guilty." "Damn it, I can be just as stubborn as this thing." (Laughter) "And the dawn came." So they ran all night. Twenty-four hours a day, this thing was running, mainly running bomb calculations. "Everything up to this point is wasted time." "What's the use? Good night." "Master control off. The hell with it. Way off." (Laughter) "Something's wrong with the air conditioner -- smell of burning V-belts in the air." "A short -- do not turn the machine on." "IBM machine putting a tar-like substance on the cards. The tar is from the roof." So they really were working under tough conditions. (Laughter) Here, "A mouse has climbed into the blower behind the regulator rack, set blower to vibrating. Result: no more mouse." (Laughter) "Here lies mouse. Born: ?. Died: 4:50 a.m., May 1953." (Laughter) There's an inside joke someone has penciled in: "Here lies Marston Mouse." If you're a mathematician, you get that, because Marston was a mathematician who objected to the computer being there. "Picked a lightning bug off the drum." "Running at two kilocycles." That's two thousand cycles per second -- "yes, I'm chicken" -- so two kilocycles was slow speed. The high speed was 16 kilocycles. I don't know if you remember a Mac that was 16 Megahertz, that's slow speed. "I have now duplicated both results. How will I know which is right, assuming one result is correct? This now is the third different output. I know when I'm licked." (Laughter) "We've duplicated errors before." "Machine run, fine. Code isn't." "Only happens when the machine is running." And sometimes things are okay. "Machine a thing of beauty, and a joy forever." "Perfect running." "Parting thought: when there's bigger and better errors, we'll have them." So, nobody was supposed to know they were actually designing bombs. They're designing hydrogen bombs. But someone in the logbook, late one night, finally drew a bomb. So, that was the result. It was Mike, the first thermonuclear bomb, in 1952. That was designed on that machine, in the woods behind the Institute. So Von Neumann invited a whole gang of weirdos from all over the world to work on all these problems. Barricelli, he came to do what we now call, really, artificial life, trying to see if, in this artificial universe -- he was a viral-geneticist, way, way, way ahead of his time. He's still ahead of some of the stuff that's being done now. Trying to start an artificial genetic system running in the computer. Began -- his universe started March 3, '53. So it's almost exactly -- it's 50 years ago next Tuesday, I guess. And he saw everything in terms of -- he could read the binary code straight off the machine. He had a wonderful rapport. Other people couldn't get the machine running. It always worked for him. Even errors were duplicated. (Laughter) "Dr. Barricelli claims machine is wrong, code is right." So he designed this universe, and ran it. When the bomb people went home, he was allowed in there. He would run that thing all night long, running these things, if anybody remembers Stephen Wolfram, who reinvented this stuff. And he published it. It wasn't locked up and disappeared. It was published in the literature. "If it's that easy to create living organisms, why not create a few yourself?" So, he decided to give it a try, to start this artificial biology going in the machines. And he found all these, sort of -- it was like a naturalist coming in and looking at this tiny, 5,000-byte universe, and seeing all these things happening that we see in the outside world, in biology. This is some of the generations of his universe. But they're just going to stay numbers; they're not going to become organisms. They have to have something. You have a genotype and you have to have a phenotype. They have to go out and do something. And he started doing that, started giving these little numerical organisms things they could play with -- playing chess with other machines and so on. And they did start to evolve. And he went around the country after that. Every time there was a new, fast machine, he started using it, and saw exactly what's happening now. That the programs, instead of being turned off -- when you quit the program, you'd keep running and, basically, all the sorts of things like Windows is doing, running as a multi-cellular organism on many machines, he envisioned all that happening. And he saw that evolution itself was an intelligent process. It wasn't any sort of creator intelligence, but the thing itself was a giant parallel computation that would have some intelligence. And he went out of his way to say that he was not saying this was lifelike, or a new kind of life. It just was another version of the same thing happening. And there's really no difference between what he was doing in the computer and what nature did billions of years ago. And could you do it again now? So, when I went into these archives looking at this stuff, lo and behold, the archivist came up one day, saying, "I think we found another box that had been thrown out." And it was his universe on punch cards. So there it is, 50 years later, sitting there -- sort of suspended animation. That's the instructions for running -- this is actually the source code for one of those universes, with a note from the engineers saying they're having some problems. "There must be something about this code that you haven't explained yet." And I think that's really the truth. We still don't understand how these very simple instructions can lead to increasing complexity. What's the dividing line between when that is lifelike and when it really is alive? These cards, now, thanks to me showing up, are being saved. And the question is, should we run them or not? You know, could we get them running? Do you want to let it loose on the Internet? These machines would think they -- these organisms, if they came back to life now -- whether they've died and gone to heaven, there's a universe. My laptop is 10 thousand million times the size of the universe that they lived in when Barricelli quit the project. He was thinking far ahead, to how this would really grow into a new kind of life. And that's what's happening! When Juan Enriquez told us about these 12 trillion bits being transferred back and forth, of all this genomics data going to the proteomics lab, that's what Barricelli imagined: that this digital code in these machines is actually starting to code -- it already is coding from nucleic acids. We've been doing that since, you know, since we started PCR and synthesizing small strings of DNA. And real soon, we're actually going to be synthesizing the proteins, and, like Steve showed us, that just opens an entirely new world. It's a world that Von Neumann himself envisioned. This was published after he died: his sort of unfinished notes on self-reproducing machines, what it takes to get the machines sort of jump-started to where they begin to reproduce. It took really three people: Barricelli had the concept of the code as a living thing; Von Neumann saw how you could build the machines -- that now, last count, four million of these Von Neumann machines is built every 24 hours; and Julian Bigelow, who died 10 days ago -- this is John Markoff's obituary for him -- he was the important missing link, the engineer who came in and knew how to put those vacuum tubes together and make it work. And all our computers have, inside them, the copies of the architecture that he had to just design one day, sort of on pencil and paper. And we owe a tremendous credit to that. And he explained, in a very generous way, the spirit that brought all these different people to the Institute for Advanced Study in the '40s to do this project, and make it freely available with no patents, no restrictions, no intellectual property disputes to the rest of the world. That's the last entry in the logbook when the machine was shut down, July 1958. And it's Julian Bigelow who was running it until midnight when the machine was officially turned off. And that's the end. Thank you very much. (Applause)

If you'd like to learn how to play the lobster, we have some here. And that's not a joke, we really do. So come up afterwards and I'll show you how to play a lobster. So, actually, I started working on what's called the mantis shrimp a few years ago because they make sound. This is a recording I made of a mantis shrimp that's found off the coast of California. And while that's an absolutely fascinating sound, it actually turns out to be a very difficult project. And while I was struggling to figure out how and why mantis shrimp, or stomatopods, make sound, I started to think about their appendages. And mantis shrimp are called "mantis shrimp" after the praying mantises, which also have a fast feeding appendage. And I started to think, well, maybe it will be interesting, while listening to their sounds, to figure out how these animals generate very fast feeding strikes. And so today I'll talk about the extreme stomatopod strike, work that I've done in collaboration with Wyatt Korff and Roy Caldwell. So, mantis shrimp come in two varieties: there are spearers and smashers. And this is a spearing mantis shrimp, or stomatopod. And he lives in the sand, and he catches things that go by overhead. So, a quick strike like that. And if we slow it down a bit, this is the mantis shrimp -- the same species -- recorded at 1,000 frames a second, played back at 15 frames per second. And you can see it's just a really spectacular extension of the limbs, exploding upward to actually just catch a dead piece of shrimp that I had offered it. Now, the other type of mantis shrimp is the smasher stomatopod, and these guys open up snails for a living. And so this guy gets the snail all set up and gives it a good whack. (Laughter) So, I'll play it one more time. He wiggles it in place, tugs it with his nose, and smash. And a few smashes later, the snail is broken open, and he's got a good dinner. So, the smasher raptorial appendage can stab with a point at the end, or it can smash with the heel. And today I'll talk about the smashing type of strike. And so the first question that came to mind was, well, how fast does this limb move? Because it's moving pretty darn fast on that video. And I immediately came upon a problem. Every single high-speed video system in the biology department at Berkeley wasn't fast enough to catch this movement. We simply couldn't capture it on video. And so this had me stymied for quite a long period of time. And then a BBC crew came cruising through the biology department, looking for a story to do about new technologies in biology. And so we struck up a deal. I said, "Well, if you guys rent the high-speed video system that could capture these movements, you guys can film us collecting the data." And believe it or not, they went for it. (Laughter) So we got this incredible video system. It's very new technology -- it just came out about a year ago -- that allows you to film at extremely high speeds in low light. And low light is a critical issue with filming animals, because if it's too high, you fry them. (Laughter) So this is a mantis shrimp. There are the eyes up here, and there's that raptorial appendage, and there's the heel. And that thing's going to swing around and smash the snail. And the snail's wired to a stick, so he's a little bit easier to set up the shot. And -- yeah. (Laughter) I hope there aren't any snail rights activists around here. (Laughter) So this was filmed at 5,000 frames per second, and I'm playing it back at 15. And so this is slowed down 333 times. And as you'll notice, it's still pretty gosh darn fast slowed down 333 times. It's an incredibly powerful movement. The whole limb extends out. The body flexes backwards -- just a spectacular movement. And so what we did is, we took a look at these videos, and we measured how fast the limb was moving to get back to that original question. And we were in for our first surprise. So what we calculated was that the limbs were moving at the peak speed ranging from 10 meters per second all the way up to 23 meters per second. And for those of you who prefer miles per hour, that's over 45 miles per hour in water. And this is really darn fast. In fact, it's so fast we were able to add a new point on the extreme animal movement spectrum. And mantis shrimp are officially the fastest measured feeding strike of any animal system. So our first surprise. (Applause) So that was really cool and very unexpected. So, you might be wondering, well, how do they do it? And actually, this work was done in the 1960s by a famous biologist named Malcolm Burrows. And what he showed in mantis shrimp is that they use what's called a "catch mechanism," or "click mechanism." And what this basically consists of is a large muscle that takes a good long time to contract, and a latch that prevents anything from moving. So the muscle contracts, and nothing happens. And once the muscle's contracted completely, everything's stored up -- the latch flies upward, and you've got the movement. And that's basically what's called a "power amplification system." It takes a long time for the muscle to contract, and a very short time for the limb to fly out. And so I thought that this was sort of the end of the story. This was how mantis shrimps make these very fast strikes. But then I took a trip to the National Museum of Natural History. And if any of you ever have a chance, backstage of the National Museum of Natural History is one of the world's best collections of preserved mantis shrimp. And what -- (Laughter) this is serious business for me. (Laughter) So, this -- what I saw, on every single mantis shrimp limb, whether it's a spearer or a smasher, is a beautiful saddle-shaped structure right on the top surface of the limb. And you can see it right here. It just looks like a saddle you'd put on a horse. It's a very beautiful structure. And it's surrounded by membranous areas. And those membranous areas suggested to me that maybe this is some kind of dynamically flexible structure. And this really sort of had me scratching my head for a while. And then we did a series of calculations, and what we were able to show is that these mantis shrimp have to have a spring. There needs to be some kind of spring-loaded mechanism in order to generate the amount of force that we observe, and the speed that we observe, and the output of the system. So we thought, OK, this must be a spring -- the saddle could very well be a spring. And we went back to those high-speed videos again, and we could actually visualize the saddle compressing and extending. And I'll just do that one more time. And then if you take a look at the video -- it's a little bit hard to see -- it's outlined in yellow. The saddle is outlined in yellow. You can actually see it extending over the course of the strike, and actually hyperextending. So, we've had very solid evidence showing that that saddle-shaped structure actually compresses and extends, and does, in fact, function as a spring. The saddle-shaped structure is also known as a "hyperbolic paraboloid surface," or an "anticlastic surface." And this is very well known to engineers and architects, because it's a very strong surface in compression. It has curves in two directions, one curve upward and opposite transverse curve down the other, so any kind of perturbation spreads the forces over the surface of this type of shape. So it's very well known to engineers, not as well known to biologists. It's also known to quite a few people who make jewelry, because it requires very little material to build this type of surface, and it's very strong. So if you're going to build a thin gold structure, it's very nice to have it in a shape that's strong. Now, it's also known to architects. One of the most famous architects is Eduardo Catalano, who popularized this structure. And what's shown here is a saddle-shaped roof that he built that's 87 and a half feet spanwise. It's two and a half inches thick, and supported at two points. And one of the reasons why he designed roofs this way is because it's -- he found it fascinating that you could build such a strong structure that's made of so few materials and can be supported by so few points. And all of these are the same principles that apply to the saddle-shaped spring in stomatopods. In biological systems it's important not to have a whole lot of extra material requirements for building it. So, very interesting parallels between the biological and the engineering worlds. And interestingly, this turns out -- the stomatopod saddle turns out to be the first described biological hyperbolic paraboloid spring. That's a bit long, but it is sort of interesting. So the next and final question was, well, how much force does a mantis shrimp produce if they're able to break open snails? And so I wired up what's called a load cell. A load cell measures forces, and this is actually a piezoelectronic load cell that has a little crystal in it. And when this crystal is squeezed, the electrical properties change and it -- which -- in proportion to the forces that go in. So these animals are wonderfully aggressive, and are really hungry all the time. And so all I had to do was actually put a little shrimp paste on the front of the load cell, and they'd smash away at it. And so this is just a regular video of the animal just smashing the heck out of this load cell. And we were able to get some force measurements out. And again, we were in for a surprise. I purchased a 100-pound load cell, thinking, no animal could produce more than 100 pounds at this size of an animal. And what do you know? They immediately overloaded the load cell. So these are actually some old data where I had to find the smallest animals in the lab, and we were able to measure forces of well over 100 pounds generated by an animal about this big. And actually, just last week I got a 300-pound load cell up and running, and I've clocked these animals generating well over 200 pounds of force. And again, I think this will be a world record. I have to do a little bit more background reading, but I think this will be the largest amount of force produced by an animal of a given -- per body mass. So, really incredible forces. And again, that brings us back to the importance of that spring in storing up and releasing so much energy in this system. But that was not the end of the story. Now, things -- I'm making this sound very easy, this is actually a lot of work. And I got all these force measurements, and then I went and looked at the force output of the system. And this is just very simple -- time is on the X-axis and the force is on the Y-axis. And you can see two peaks. And that was what really got me puzzled. The first peak, obviously, is the limb hitting the load cell. But there's a really large second peak half a millisecond later, and I didn't know what that was. So now, you'd expect a second peak for other reasons, but not half a millisecond later. Again, going back to those high-speed videos, there's a pretty good hint of what might be going on. Here's that same orientation that we saw earlier. There's that raptorial appendage -- there's the heel, and it's going to swing around and hit the load cell. And what I'd like you to do in this shot is keep your eye on this, on the surface of the load cell, as the limb comes flying through. And I hope what you are able to see is actually a flash of light. Audience: Wow. Sheila Patek: And so if we just take that one frame, what you can actually see there at the end of that yellow arrow is a vapor bubble. And what that is, is cavitation. And cavitation is an extremely potent fluid dynamic phenomenon which occurs when you have areas of water moving at extremely different speeds. And when this happens, it can cause areas of very low pressure, which results in the water literally vaporizing. And when that vapor bubble collapses, it emits sound, light and heat, and it's a very destructive process. And so here it is in the stomatopod. And again, this is a situation where engineers are very familiar with this phenomenon, because it destroys boat propellers. People have been struggling for years to try and design a very fast rotating boat propeller that doesn't cavitate and literally wear away the metal and put holes in it, just like these pictures show. So this is a potent force in fluid systems, and just to sort of take it one step further, I'm going to show you the mantis shrimp approaching the snail. This is taken at 20,000 frames per second, and I have to give full credit to the BBC cameraman, Tim Green, for setting this shot up, because I could never have done this in a million years -- one of the benefits of working with professional cameramen. You can see it coming in, and an incredible flash of light, and all this cavitation spreading over the surface of the snail. So really, just an amazing image, slowed down extremely, to extremely slow speeds. And again, we can see it in slightly different form there, with the bubble forming and collapsing between those two surfaces. In fact, you might have even seen some cavitation going up the edge of the limb. So to solve this quandary of the two force peaks: what I think was going on is: that first impact is actually the limb hitting the load cell, and the second impact is actually the collapse of the cavitation bubble. And these animals may very well be making use of not only the force and the energy stored with that specialized spring, but the extremes of the fluid dynamics. And they might actually be making use of fluid dynamics as a second force for breaking the snail. So, really fascinating double whammy, so to speak, from these animals. So, one question I often get after this talk -- so I figured I'd answer it now -- is, well, what happens to the animal? Because obviously, if it's breaking snails, the poor limb must be disintegrating. And indeed it does. That's the smashing part of the heel on both these images, and it gets worn away. In fact, I've seen them wear away their heel all the way to the flesh. But one of the convenient things about being an arthropod is that you have to molt. And every three months or so these animals molt, and they build a new limb and it's no problem. Very, very convenient solution to that particular problem. So, I'd like to end on sort of a wacky note. (Laughter) Maybe this is all wacky to folks like you, I don't know. (Laughter) So, the saddles -- that saddle-shaped spring -- has actually been well known to biologists for a long time, not as a spring but as a visual signal. And there's actually a spectacular colored dot in the center of the saddles of many species of stomatopods. And this is quite interesting, to find evolutionary origins of visual signals on what's really, in all species, their spring. And I think one explanation for this could be going back to the molting phenomenon. So these animals go into a molting period where they're unable to strike -- their bodies become very soft. And they're literally unable to strike or they will self-destruct. This is for real. And what they do is, up until that time period when they can't strike, they become really obnoxious and awful, and they strike everything in sight; it doesn't matter who or what. And the second they get into that time point when they can't strike any more, they just signal. They wave their legs around. And it's one of the classic examples in animal behavior of bluffing. It's a well-established fact of these animals that they actually bluff. They can't actually strike, but they pretend to. And so I'm very curious about whether those colored dots in the center of the saddles are conveying some kind of information about their ability to strike, or their strike force, and something about the time period in the molting cycle. So sort of an interesting strange fact to find a visual structure right in the middle of their spring. So to conclude, I mostly want to acknowledge my two collaborators, Wyatt Korff and Roy Caldwell, who worked closely with me on this. And also the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science, which gave me three years of funding to just do science all the time, and for that I'm very grateful. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I want to talk about social innovation and social entrepreneurship. I happen to have triplets. They're little. They're five years old. Sometimes I tell people I have triplets. They say, "Really? How many?" (Laughter) Here's a picture of the kids -- that's Sage, and Annalisa and Rider. Now, I also happen to be gay. Being gay and fathering triplets is by far the most socially innovative, socially entrepreneurial thing I have ever done. (Laughter) (Applause) The real social innovation I want to talk about involves charity. I want to talk about how the things we've been taught to think about giving and about charity and about the nonprofit sector, are actually undermining the causes we love, and our profound yearning to change the world. But before I do that, I want to ask if we even believe that the nonprofit sector has any serious role to play in changing the world. A lot of people say now that business will lift up the developing economies, and social business will take care of the rest. And I do believe that business will move the great mass of humanity forward. But it always leaves behind that 10 percent or more that is most disadvantaged or unlucky. And social business needs markets, and there are some issues for which you just can't develop the kind of money measures that you need for a market. I sit on the board of a center for the developmentally disabled, and these people want laughter and compassion and they want love. How do you monetize that? And that's where the nonprofit sector and philanthropy come in. Philanthropy is the market for love. It is the market for all those people for whom there is no other market coming. And so if we really want, like Buckminster Fuller said, a world that works for everyone, with no one and nothing left out, then the nonprofit sector has to be a serious part of the conversation. But it doesn't seem to be working. Why have our breast cancer charities not come close to finding a cure for breast cancer, or our homeless charities not come close to ending homelessness in any major city? Why has poverty remained stuck at 12 percent of the U.S. population for 40 years? And the answer is, these social problems are massive in scale, our organizations are tiny up against them, and we have a belief system that keeps them tiny. We have two rulebooks. We have one for the nonprofit sector, and one for the rest of the economic world. It's an apartheid, and it discriminates against the nonprofit sector in five different areas, the first being compensation. So in the for-profit sector, the more value you produce, the more money you can make. But we don't like nonprofits to use money to incentivize people to produce more in social service. We have a visceral reaction to the idea that anyone would make very much money helping other people. Interestingly, we don't have a visceral reaction to the notion that people would make a lot of money not helping other people. You know, you want to make 50 million dollars selling violent video games to kids, go for it. We'll put you on the cover of Wired magazine. But you want to make half a million dollars trying to cure kids of malaria, and you're considered a parasite yourself. (Applause) And we think of this as our system of ethics, but what we don't realize is that this system has a powerful side effect, which is: It gives a really stark, mutually exclusive choice between doing very well for yourself and your family or doing good for the world, to the brightest minds coming out of our best universities, and sends tens of thousands of people who could make a huge difference in the nonprofit sector, marching every year directly into the for-profit sector because they're not willing to make that kind of lifelong economic sacrifice. Businessweek did a survey, looked at the compensation packages for MBAs 10 years out of business school. And the median compensation for a Stanford MBA, with bonus, at the age of 38, was 400,000 dollars. Meanwhile, for the same year, the average salary for the CEO of a $5 million-plus medical charity in the U.S. was 232,000 dollars, and for a hunger charity, 84,000 dollars. Now, there's no way you're going to get a lot of people with $400,000 talent to make a $316,000 sacrifice every year to become the CEO of a hunger charity. Some people say, "Well, that's just because those MBA types are greedy." Not necessarily. They might be smart. It's cheaper for that person to donate 100,000 dollars every year to the hunger charity; save 50,000 dollars on their taxes -- so still be roughly 270,000 dollars a year ahead of the game -- now be called a philanthropist because they donated 100,000 dollars to charity; probably sit on the board of the hunger charity; indeed, probably supervise the poor SOB who decided to become the CEO of the hunger charity; (Laughter) and have a lifetime of this kind of power and influence and popular praise still ahead of them. The second area of discrimination is advertising and marketing. So we tell the for-profit sector, "Spend, spend, spend on advertising, until the last dollar no longer produces a penny of value." But we don't like to see our donations spent on advertising in charity. Our attitude is, "Well, look, if you can get the advertising donated, you know, to air at four o'clock in the morning, I'm okay with that. But I don't want my donation spent on advertising, I want it go to the needy." As if the money invested in advertising could not bring in dramatically greater sums of money to serve the needy. In the 1990s, my company created the long-distance AIDSRide bicycle journeys, and the 60 mile-long breast cancer three-day walks, and over the course of nine years, we had 182,000 ordinary heroes participate, and they raised a total of 581 million dollars. (Applause) They raised more money more quickly for these causes than any events in history, all based on the idea that people are weary of being asked to do the least they can possibly do. People are yearning to measure the full distance of their potential on behalf of the causes that they care about deeply. But they have to be asked. We got that many people to participate by buying full-page ads in The New York Times, in The Boston Globe, in prime time radio and TV advertising. Do you know how many people we would've gotten if we put up fliers in the laundromat? Charitable giving has remained stuck in the U.S., at two percent of GDP, ever since we started measuring it in the 1970s. That's an important fact, because it tells us that in 40 years, the nonprofit sector has not been able to wrestle any market share away from the for-profit sector. And if you think about it, how could one sector possibly take market share away from another sector if it isn't really allowed to market? And if we tell the consumer brands, "You may advertise all the benefits of your product," but we tell charities, "You cannot advertise all the good that you do," where do we think the consumer dollars are going to flow? The third area of discrimination is the taking of risk in pursuit of new ideas for generating revenue. So Disney can make a new $200 million movie that flops, and nobody calls the attorney general. But you do a little $1 million community fundraiser for the poor, and it doesn't produce a 75 percent profit to the cause in the first 12 months, and your character is called into question. So nonprofits are really reluctant to attempt any brave, daring, giant-scale new fundraising endeavors, for fear that if the thing fails, their reputations will be dragged through the mud. Well, you and I know when you prohibit failure, you kill innovation. If you kill innovation in fundraising, you can't raise more revenue; if you can't raise more revenue, you can't grow; and if you can't grow, you can't possibly solve large social problems. The fourth area is time. So Amazon went for six years without returning any profit to investors, and people had patience. They knew that there was a long-term objective down the line, of building market dominance. But if a nonprofit organization ever had a dream of building magnificent scale that required that for six years, no money was going to go to the needy, it was all going to be invested in building this scale, we would expect a crucifixion. The last area is profit itself. So the for-profit sector can pay people profits in order to attract their capital for their new ideas, but you can't pay profits in a nonprofit sector, so the for-profit sector has a lock on the multi-trillion-dollar capital markets, and the nonprofit sector is starved for growth and risk and idea capital. Well, you put those five things together -- you can't use money to lure talent away from the for-profit sector; you can't advertise on anywhere near the scale the for-profit sector does for new customers; you can't take the kinds of risks in pursuit of those customers that the for-profit sector takes; you don't have the same amount of time to find them as the for-profit sector; and you don't have a stock market with which to fund any of this, even if you could do it in the first place -- and you've just put the nonprofit sector at an extreme disadvantage to the for-profit sector, on every level. If we have any doubts about the effects of this separate rule book, this statistic is sobering: From 1970 to 2009, the number of nonprofits that really grew, that crossed the $50 million annual revenue barrier, is 144. In the same time, the number of for-profits that crossed it is 46,136. So we're dealing with social problems that are massive in scale, and our organizations can't generate any scale. All of the scale goes to Coca-Cola and Burger King. So why do we think this way? Well, like most fanatical dogma in America, these ideas come from old Puritan beliefs. The Puritans came here for religious reasons, or so they said, but they also came here because they wanted to make a lot of money. They were pious people, but they were also really aggressive capitalists, and they were accused of extreme forms of profit-making tendencies, compared to the other colonists. But at the same time, the Puritans were Calvinists, so they were taught literally to hate themselves. They were taught that self-interest was a raging sea that was a sure path to eternal damnation. This created a real problem for these people. Here they've come all the way across the Atlantic to make all this money, but making all this money will get you sent directly to Hell. What were they to do about this? Well, charity became their answer. It became this economic sanctuary, where they could do penance for their profit-making tendencies -- at five cents on the dollar. So of course, how could you make money in charity if charity was your penance for making money? Financial incentive was exiled from the realm of helping others, so that it could thrive in the area of making money for yourself, and in 400 years, nothing has intervened to say, "That's counterproductive and that's unfair." Now, this ideology gets policed by this one very dangerous question, which is, "What percentage of my donation goes to the cause versus overhead?" There are a lot of problems with this question. I'm going to just focus on two. First, it makes us think that overhead is a negative, that it is somehow not part of the cause. But it absolutely is, especially if it's being used for growth. Now, this idea that overhead is somehow an enemy of the cause creates this second, much larger problem, which is, it forces organizations to go without the overhead things they really need to grow, in the interest of keeping overhead low. So we've all been taught that charities should spend as little as possible on overhead things like fundraising under the theory that, well, the less money you spend on fundraising, the more money there is available for the cause. Well, that's true if it's a depressing world in which this pie cannot be made any bigger. But if it's a logical world in which investment in fundraising actually raises more funds and makes the pie bigger, then we have it precisely backwards, and we should be investing more money, not less, in fundraising, because fundraising is the one thing that has the potential to multiply the amount of money available for the cause that we care about so deeply. I'll give you two examples. We launched the AIDSRides with an initial investment of 50,000 dollars in risk capital. Within nine years, we had multiplied that 1,982 times, into 108 million dollars after all expenses, for AIDS services. We launched the breast cancer three-days with an initial investment of 350,000 dollars in risk capital. Within just five years, we had multiplied that 554 times, into 194 million dollars after all expenses, for breast cancer research. Now, if you were a philanthropist really interested in breast cancer, what would make more sense: go out and find the most innovative researcher in the world and give her 350,000 dollars for research, or give her fundraising department the 350,000 dollars to multiply it into 194 million dollars for breast cancer research? 2002 was our most successful year ever. We netted for breast cancer alone, that year alone, 71 million dollars after all expenses. And then we went out of business, suddenly and traumatically. Why? Well, the short story is, our sponsors split on us. They wanted to distance themselves from us because we were being crucified in the media for investing 40 percent of the gross in recruitment and customer service and the magic of the experience, and there is no accounting terminology to describe that kind of investment in growth and in the future, other than this demonic label of "overhead." So on one day, all 350 of our great employees lost their jobs ... because they were labeled "overhead." Our sponsor went and tried the events on their own. The overhead went up. Net income for breast cancer research went down by 84 percent, or 60 million dollars, in one year. This is what happens when we confuse morality with frugality. We've all been taught that the bake sale with five percent overhead is morally superior to the professional fundraising enterprise with 40 percent overhead, but we're missing the most important piece of information, which is: What is the actual size of these pies? Who cares if the bake sale only has five percent overhead if it's tiny? What if the bake sale only netted 71 dollars for charity because it made no investment in its scale and the professional fundraising enterprise netted 71 million dollars because it did? Now which pie would we prefer, and which pie do we think people who are hungry would prefer? Here's how all of this impacts the big picture. I said that charitable giving is two percent of GDP in the United States. That's about 300 billion dollars a year. But only about 20 percent of that, or 60 billion dollars, goes to health and human services causes. The rest goes to religion and higher education and hospitals, and that 60 billion dollars is not nearly enough to tackle these problems. But if we could move charitable giving from two percent of GDP, up just one step to three percent of GDP, by investing in that growth, that would be an extra 150 billion dollars a year in contributions, and if that money could go disproportionately to health and human services charities, because those were the ones we encouraged to invest in their growth, that would represent a tripling of contributions to that sector. Now we're talking scale. Now we're talking the potential for real change. But it's never going to happen by forcing these organizations to lower their horizons to the demoralizing objective of keeping their overhead low. Our generation does not want its epitaph to read, "We kept charity overhead low." (Laughter) (Applause) We want it to read that we changed the world, and that part of the way we did that was by changing the way we think about these things. So the next time you're looking at a charity, don't ask about the rate of their overhead. Ask about the scale of their dreams, their Apple-, Google-, Amazon-scale dreams, how they measure their progress toward those dreams, and what resources they need to make them come true, regardless of what the overhead is. Who cares what the overhead is if these problems are actually getting solved? If we can have that kind of generosity -- a generosity of thought -- then the non-profit sector can play a massive role in changing the world for all those citizens most desperately in need of it to change. And if that can be our generation's enduring legacy -- that we took responsibility for the thinking that had been handed down to us, that we revisited it, we revised it, and we reinvented the whole way humanity thinks about changing things, forever, for everyone -- well, I thought I would let the kids sum up what that would be. Annalisa Smith-Pallotta: That would be Sage Smith-Pallotta: a real social Rider Smith-Pallotta: innovation. Dan Pallotta: Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

Of the five senses, vision is the one that I appreciate the most, and it's the one that I can least take for granted. I think this is partially due to my father, who was blind. It was a fact that he didn't make much of a fuss about, usually. One time in Nova Scotia, when we went to see a total eclipse of the sun -- yeah, same one as in the Carly Simon song, which may or may not refer to James Taylor, Warren Beatty or Mick Jagger; we're not really sure. They handed out these dark plastic viewers that allowed us to look directly at the sun without damaging our eyes. But Dad got really scared: he didn't want us doing that. He wanted us instead to use these cheap cardboard viewers so that there was no chance at all that our eyes would be damaged. I thought this was a little strange at the time. What I didn't know at the time was that my father had actually been born with perfect eyesight. When he and his sister Martha were just very little, their mom took them out to see a total eclipse -- or actually, a solar eclipse -- and not long after that, both of them started losing their eyesight. Decades later, it turned out that the source of their blindness was most likely some sort of bacterial infection. As near as we can tell, it had nothing whatsoever to do with that solar eclipse, but by then my grandmother had already gone to her grave thinking it was her fault. So, Dad graduated Harvard in 1946, married my mom, and bought a house in Lexington, Massachusetts, where the first shots were fired against the British in 1775, although we didn't actually hit any of them until Concord. He got a job working for Raytheon, designing guidance systems, which was part of the Route 128 high-tech axis in those days -- so the equivalent of Silicone Valley in the '70s. Dad wasn't a real militaristic kind of guy; he just really felt bad that he wasn't able to fight in World War II on account of his handicap, although they did let him get through the several-hour-long army physical exam before they got to the very last test, which was for vision. (Laughter) So, Dad started racking up all of these patents and gaining a reputation as a blind genius, rocket scientist, inventor. But to us he was just Dad, and our home life was pretty normal. As a kid, I watched a lot of television and had lots of nerdy hobbies like mineralogy and microbiology and the space program and a little bit of politics. I played a lot of chess. But at the age of 14, a friend of mine got me interested in comic books, and I decided that was what I wanted to do for a living. So, here's my dad: he's a scientist, he's an engineer and he's a military contractor. So, he has four kids, right? One grows up to become a computer scientist, one grows up to join the Navy, one grows up to become an engineer, and then there's me: the comic book artist. (Laughter) Which, incidentally, makes me the opposite of Dean Kamen, because I'm a comic book artist, son of an inventor, and he's an inventor, son of a comic book artist. (Laughter) Right, it's true. (Applause) The funny thing is, Dad had a lot of faith in me. He had faith in my abilities as a cartoonist, even though he had no direct evidence that I was any good whatsoever: everything he saw was just a blur. Now, this gives a real meaning to the term "blind faith," which doesn't have the same negative connotation for me that it does for other people. Now, faith in things which cannot be seen, which cannot be proved, is not the sort of faith that I've ever really related to all that much. I tend to like science, where what we see and can ascertain are the foundation of what we know. But there's a middle ground, too. A middle ground tread by people like poor old Charles Babbage, and his steam-driven computers that were never built. Nobody really understood what it was that he had in mind, except for Ada Lovelace, and he went to his grave trying to pursue that dream. Vannevar Bush with his Memex -- this idea of all of human knowledge at your fingertips -- he had this vision. And I think a lot of people in his day probably thought he was a bit of a kook. And, yeah, we can look back in retrospect and say, yeah, ha-ha, you know -- it's all microfilm. But that's -- that's not the point. He understood the shape of the future. So did J.C.R. Licklider and his notions for computer-human interaction. Same thing: he understood the shape of the future, even though it was something that would only be implemented by people much later. Or Paul Baran, and his vision for packet switching. Hardly anybody listened to him in his day. Or even the people who actually pulled it off, the people at Bolt, Beranek and Newman in Boston, who just would sketch out these structures of what would eventually become a worldwide network, and sketching things on the back of napkins and on note papers and arguing over dinner at Howard Johnson's -- on Route 128 in Lexington, Massachusetts, just two miles from where I was studying the Queen's Gambit Deferred and listening to Gladys Knight & the Pips singing "Midnight Train to Georgia," while -- (Laughter) -- in my dad's big easy chair, you know? So, three types of vision, right? Vision based on what one cannot see: the vision of that unseen and unknowable. The vision of that which has already been proven or can be ascertained. And this third kind of vision, of something which can be, which may be, based on knowledge, but is as yet unproven. Now, we've seen a lot of examples of people who are pursuing that sort of vision in science, but I think it's also true in the arts, it's true in politics, it's even true in personal endeavors. What it comes down to, really, is four basic principles: learn from everyone, follow no one, watch for patterns, and work like hell. I think these are the four principles that go into this. And it's that third one, especially, where visions of the future begin to manifest themselves. What's interesting is that this particular way of looking at the world, is, I think, only one of four different ways that manifest themselves in different fields of endeavor. In comics, I know that it results in sort of a formalist attitude towards trying to understand how it works. Then there's another, more classical, attitude which embraces beauty and craft. Another one which believes in the pure transparency of content. And then another which emphasizes the authenticity of human experience -- and honesty, and rawness. These are four very different ways of looking at the world. I even gave them names. The classicist, the animist, and formalist and iconoclast. Interestingly, it seemed to correspond more or less to Jung's four subdivisions of human thought. And they reflect a dichotomy of art and delight on left and the right; tradition and revolution on the top and the bottom. And if you go on the diagonal, you get content and form -- and then beauty and truth. And it probably applies just as much to music and to movies and to fine art, which has nothing whatsoever to do with vision at all, or for that matter, nothing to do with our conference theme of "Inspired by Nature" -- except to the extent of the fable of the frog who gives the ride to the scorpion on his back to get across the river because the scorpion promises not to sting him, but then the scorpion does sting him anyway and they both die, but not before the frog asks him why and the scorpion says, "Because it's my nature" -- in that sense, yes. (Laughter) So -- so this was my nature. The thing was, I saw that the route that I took to discovering this focus in my work and who I was, I saw it as just this road to discovery. Actually, it was just me embracing my nature, which means that I didn't actually fall that far from the tree after all. So what does a "scientific mind" do in the arts? Well, I started making comics, but I also started trying to understand them, almost immediately. And one of the most important things about comics, I discovered, was that comics are a visual medium, but they try to embrace all of the senses within it. So, the different elements of comics, like pictures and words, and the different symbols and everything in between that comics presents are all funneled through the single conduit of vision. So you have things like resemblance, where something which resembles the physical world can be abstracted in a couple of different directions: abstracted from resemblance, but still retaining the complete meaning, or abstracted away from both resemblance and meaning towards the picture plan. Put all these three together, and you have a nice little map of the entire boundary of visual iconography which comics can embrace. And if you move to the right you also get language, because that's abstracting even further from resemblance, but still maintaining meaning. Vision is called upon to represent sound and to understand the common properties of those two and their common heritage, as well. Also, to try to represent the texture of sound to capture its essential character through visuals. And there's also a balance between the visible and the invisible in comics. Comics is a kind of call and response in which the artist gives you something to see within the panels, and then gives you something to imagine between the panels. Also, another sense which comics' vision represents, and that's time. Sequence is a very important aspect of comics. Comics presents a kind of temporal map. And this temporal map was something that energizes modern comics, but I was wondering if perhaps it also energizes other sorts of forms, and I found some in history. And you can see this same principle operating in these ancient versions of the same idea. What's happening is, the art form is colliding with the given technology, whether it's paint on stone, like the Tomb of the Scribe in ancient Egypt, or a bas-relief sculpture rising up a stone column, or a 200-foot-long embroidery, or painted deerskin and tree bark running across 88 accordion-folded pages. What's interesting is, once you hit print -- and this is from 1450, by the way -- all of the artifacts of modern comics start to present themselves: rectilinear panel arrangements, simple line drawings without tone and a left-to-right reading sequence. And within 100 years, you already start to see word balloons and captions, and it's really just a hop, skip and a jump from here to here. So I wrote a book about this in '93, but as I was finishing the book, I had to do a little bit of typesetting, and I was tired of going to my local copy shop to do it, so I bought a computer. And it was just a little thing -- it wasn't good for much except text entry -- but my father had told me about Moore's Law, about Moore's Law back in the '70s, and I knew what was coming. And so, I kept my eyes peeled to see if the sort of changes that happened when we went from pre-print comics to print comics would happen when we went beyond, to post-print comics. So, one of the first things that were proposed was that we could mix the visuals of comics with the sound, motion and interactivity of the CD-ROMs that were being made in those days. This was even before the Web. And one of the first things they did was, they tried to take the comics page as-is and transplant it to monitors, which was a classic McLuhanesque mistake of appropriating the shape of the previous technology as the content of the new technology. And so, what they would do is, they'd have these comic pages that resemble print comics pages, and they would introduce all this sound and motion. The problem was, that if you go with this idea -- this basic idea that space equals time in comics -- what happens is that when you introduce sound and motion, which are temporal phenomena that can only be represented through time, then they break with that continuity of presentation. Interactivity was another thing. There were hypertext comics. But the thing about hypertext is that everything in hypertext is either here, not here or connected to here; it's profoundly non-spatial. The distance from Abraham Lincoln to a Lincoln penny, the Penny Marshall to the Marshall Plan to "Plan 9" to nine lives: it's all the same. (Laughter) And -- but in comics, in comics, every aspect of the work, every element of the work has a spatial relationship to every other element at all times. So the question was: was there any way to preserve that spatial relationship while still taking advantage of all of the things that digital had to offer us? And I found my personal answer for this in those ancient comics that I was showing you. Each of them has a single unbroken reading line, whether it's going zigzag across the walls or spiraling up a column or just straight left to right, or even going in a backwards zigzag across those 88 accordion-folded pages. The same thing is happening, and that is that the basic idea that as you move through space you move through time is being carried out without any compromise, but there were compromises when print hit. Adjacent spaces were no longer adjacent moments, so the basic idea of comics was being broken again and again and again and again. And I thought, O.K., well, if that's true, is there any way, when we go beyond today's print, to somehow bring that back? Now, the monitor is just as limited as the page, technically, right? It's a different shape, but other than that it's the same basic limitation. But that's only if you look at the monitor as a page, but not if you look at the monitor as a window. And that's what I proposed: that perhaps we could create these comics on an infinite canvas: along the X axis and the Y axis and staircases. We could do circular narratives that were literally circular. We could do a turn in a story that was literally a turn. Parallel narratives could be literally parallel. X, Y and also Z. So I had all these notions. This was back in the late '90s, and other people in my business thought I was pretty crazy, but a lot of people then went on and actually did it. I'm going to show you a couple now. This was an early collage comic by a fellow named Jason Lex. And notice what's going on here. What I'm searching for is a durable mutation -- that's what all of us are searching for. As media head into this new era, we are looking for mutations that are durable, that have some sort of staying power. Now, we're taking this basic idea of presenting comics in a visual medium, and then we're carrying it through all the way from beginning to end. That's that entire comic you just saw is up on the screen right now. But even though we're only experiencing it one piece at a time, that's just where the technology is right now. As the technology evolves, as you get full immersive displays and whatnot, this sort of thing will only grow. It will adapt. It will adapt to its environment: it's a durable mutation. Here's another one I'll show you. This is by Drew Weing; this is called, "Pup Contemplates the Heat Death of the Universe." See what's going on here as we draw these stories on an infinite canvas is you're creating a more pure expression of what this medium is all about. We'll go by this a little quickly -- you get the idea. I just want to get to the last panel. (Laughter) There we go. (Laughter) (Laughter) Just one more. Talk about your infinite canvas. It's by a guy named Daniel Merlin Goodbrey in Britain. Why is this important? I think this is important because media, all media, provide us a window back into our world. Now, it could be that motion pictures -- and eventually, virtual reality, or something equivalent to it -- some sort of immersive display, is going to provide us with our most efficient escape from the world that we're in. That's why most people turn to storytelling, is to escape. But media provides us with a window back into the world that we live in. And when media evolve so that the identity of the media becomes increasingly unique. Because what you're looking at is, you're looking at comics cubed: you're looking at comics that are more comics-like than they've ever been before. When that happens, you provide people with multiple ways of re-entering the world through different windows, and when you do that, it allows them to triangulate the world that they live in and see its shape. And that's why I think this is important. One of many reasons, but I've got to go now. Thank you for having me.

I want to ask you all to consider for a second the very simple fact that, by far, most of what we know about the universe comes to us from light. We can stand on the Earth and look up at the night sky and see stars with our bare eyes. The Sun burns our peripheral vision. We see light reflected off the Moon. And in the time since Galileo pointed that rudimentary telescope at the celestial bodies, the known universe has come to us through light, across vast eras in cosmic history. And with all of our modern telescopes, we've been able to collect this stunning silent movie of the universe -- these series of snapshots that go all the way back to the Big Bang. And yet, the universe is not a silent movie because the universe isn't silent. I'd like to convince you that the universe has a soundtrack and that soundtrack is played on space itself, because space can wobble like a drum. It can ring out a kind of recording throughout the universe of some of the most dramatic events as they unfold. Now we'd like to be able to add to a kind of glorious visual composition that we have of the universe -- a sonic composition. And while we've never heard the sounds from space, we really should, in the next few years, start to turn up the volume on what's going on out there. So in this ambition to capture songs from the universe, we turn our focus to black holes and the promise they have, because black holes can bang on space-time like mallets on a drum and have a very characteristic song, which I'd like to play for you -- some of our predictions for what that song will be like. Now black holes are dark against a dark sky. We can't see them directly. They're not brought to us with light, at least not directly. We can see them indirectly, because black holes wreak havoc on their environment. They destroy stars around them. They churn up debris in their surroundings. But they won't come to us directly through light. We might one day see a shadow a black hole can cast on a very bright background, but we haven't yet. And yet black holes may be heard even if they're not seen, and that's because they bang on space-time like a drum. Now we owe the idea that space can ring like a drum to Albert Einstein -- to whom we owe so much. Einstein realized that if space were empty, if the universe were empty, it would be like this picture, except for maybe without the helpful grid drawn on it. But if we were freely falling through the space, even without this helpful grid, we might be able to paint it ourselves, because we would notice that we traveled along straight lines, undeflected straight paths through the universe. Einstein also realized -- and this is the real meat of the matter -- that if you put energy or mass in the universe, it would curve space, and a freely falling object would pass by, let's say, the Sun and it would be deflected along the natural curves in the space. It was Einstein's great general theory of relativity. Now even light will be bent by those paths. And you can be bent so much that you're caught in orbit around the Sun, as the Earth is, or the Moon around the Earth. These are the natural curves in space. What Einstein did not realize was that, if you took our Sun and you crushed it down to six kilometers -- so you took a million times the mass of the Earth and you crushed it to six kilometers across, you would make a black hole, an object so dense that if light veered too close, it would never escape -- a dark shadow against the universe. It wasn't Einstein who realized this, it was Karl Schwarzschild who was a German Jew in World War I -- joined the German army already an accomplished scientist, working on the Russian front. I like to imagine Schwarzschild in the war in the trenches calculating ballistic trajectories for cannon fire, and then, in between, calculating Einstein's equations -- as you do in the trenches. And he was reading Einstein's recently published general theory of relativity, and he was thrilled by this theory. And he quickly surmised an exact mathematical solution that described something very extraordinary: curves so strong that space would rain down into them, space itself would curve like a waterfall flowing down the throat of a hole. And even light could not escape this current. Light would be dragged down the hole as everything else would be, and all that would be left would be a shadow. Now he wrote to Einstein, and he said, "As you will see, the war has been kind to me enough. Despite the heavy gunfire, I've been able to get away from it all and walk through the land of your ideas." And Einstein was very impressed with his exact solution, and I should hope also the dedication of the scientist. This is the hardworking scientist under harsh conditions. And he took Schwarzschild's idea to the Prussian Academy of Sciences the next week. But Einstein always thought black holes were a mathematical oddity. He did not believe they existed in nature. He thought nature would protect us from their formation. It was decades before the term "black hole" was coined and people realized that black holes are real astrophysical objects -- in fact they're the death state of very massive stars that collapse catastrophically at the end of their lifetime. Now our Sun will not collapse to a black hole. It's actually not massive enough. But if we did a little thought experiment -- as Einstein was very fond of doing -- we could imagine putting the Sun crushed down to six kilometers, and putting a tiny little Earth around it in orbit, maybe 30 kilometers outside of the black-hole sun. And it would be self-illuminated, because now the Sun's gone, we have no other source of light -- so let's make our little Earth self-illuminated. And you would realize you could put the Earth in a happy orbit even 30 km outside of this crushed black hole. This crushed black hole actually would fit inside Manhattan, more or less. It might spill off into the Hudson a little bit before it destroyed the Earth. But basically that's what we're talking about. We're talking about an object that you could crush down to half the square area of Manhattan. So we move this Earth very close -- 30 kilometers outside -- and we notice it's perfectly fine orbiting around the black hole. There's a sort of myth that black holes devour everything in the universe, but you actually have to get very close to fall in. But what's very impressive is that, from our vantage point, we can always see the Earth. It cannot hide behind the black hole. The light from the Earth, some of it falls in, but some of it gets lensed around and brought back to us. So you can't hide anything behind a black hole. If this were Battlestar Galactica and you're fighting the Cylons, don't hide behind the black hole. They can see you. Now, our Sun will not collapse to a black hole -- it's not massive enough -- but there are tens of thousands of black holes in our galaxy. And if one were to eclipse the Milky Way, this is what it would look like. We would see a shadow of that black hole against the hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy and its luminous dust lanes. And if we were to fall towards this black hole, we would see all of that light lensed around it, and we could even start to cross into that shadow and really not notice that anything dramatic had happened. It would be bad if we tried to fire our rockets and get out of there because we couldn't, anymore than light can escape. But even though the black hole is dark from the outside, it's not dark on the inside, because all of the light from the galaxy can fall in behind us. And even though, due to a relativistic effect known as time dilation, our clocks would seem to slow down relative to galactic time, it would look as though the evolution of the galaxy had been sped up and shot at us, right before we were crushed to death by the black hole. It would be like a near-death experience where you see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it's a total death experience. (Laughter) And there's no way of telling anybody about the light at the end of the tunnel. Now we've never seen a shadow like this of a black hole, but black holes can be heard, even if they're not seen. Imagine now taking an astrophysically realistic situation -- imagine two black holes that have lived a long life together. Maybe they started as stars and collapsed to two black holes -- each one 10 times the mass of the Sun. So now we're going to crush them down to 60 kilometers across. They can be spinning hundreds of times a second. At the end of their lives, they're going around each other very near the speed of light. So they're crossing thousands of kilometers in a fraction of a second, and as they do so, they not only curve space, but they leave behind in their wake a ringing of space, an actual wave on space-time. Space squeezes and stretches as it emanates out from these black holes banging on the universe. And they travel out into the cosmos at the speed of light. This computer simulation is due to a relativity group at NASA Goddard. It took almost 30 years for anyone in the world to crack this problem. This was one of the groups. It shows two black holes in orbit around each other, again, with these helpfully painted curves. And if you can see -- it's kind of faint -- but if you can see the red waves emanating out, those are the gravitational waves. They're literally the sounds of space ringing, and they will travel out from these black holes at the speed of light as they ring down and coalesce to one spinning, quiet black hole at the end of the day. If you were standing near enough, your ear would resonate with the squeezing and stretching of space. You would literally hear the sound. Now of course, your head would be squeezed and stretched unhelpfully, so you might have trouble understanding what's going on. But I'd like to play for you the sound that we predict. This is from my group -- a slightly less glamorous computer modeling. Imagine a lighter black hole falling into a very heavy black hole. The sound you're hearing is the light black hole banging on space each time it gets close. If it gets far away, it's a little too quiet. But it comes in like a mallet, and it literally cracks space, wobbling it like a drum. And we can predict what the sound will be. We know that, as it falls in, it gets faster and it gets louder. And eventually, we're going to hear the little guy just fall into the bigger guy. (Thumping) Then it's gone. Now I've never heard it that loud -- it's actually more dramatic. At home it sounds kind of anticlimactic. It's sort of like ding, ding, ding. This is another sound from my group. No, I'm not showing you any images, because black holes don't leave behind helpful trails of ink, and space is not painted, showing you the curves. But if you were to float by in space on a space holiday and you heard this, you want to get moving. (Laughter) Want to get away from the sound. Both black holes are moving. Both black holes are getting closer together. In this case, they're both wobbling quite a lot. And then they're going to merge. (Thumping) Now it's gone. Now that chirp is very characteristic of black holes merging -- that it chirps up at the end. Now that's our prediction for what we'll see. Luckily we're at this safe distance in Long Beach, California. And surely, somewhere in the universe two black holes have merged. And surely, the space around us is ringing after traveling maybe a million light years, or a million years, at the speed of light to get to us. But the sound is too quiet for any of us to ever hear. There are very industrious experiments being built on Earth -- one called LIGO -- which will detect deviations in the squeezing and stretching of space at less than the fraction of a nucleus of an atom over four kilometers. It's a remarkably ambitious experiment, and it's going to be at advanced sensitivity within the next few years -- to pick this up. There's also a mission proposed for space, which hopefully will launch in the next ten years, called LISA. And LISA will be able to see super-massive black holes -- black holes millions or billions of times the mass of the Sun. In this Hubble image, we see two galaxies. They look like they're frozen in some embrace. And each one probably harbors a super-massive black hole at its core. But they're not frozen; they're actually merging. These two black holes are colliding, and they will merge over a billion-year time scale. It's beyond our human perception to pick up a song of that duration. But LISA could see the final stages of two super-massive black holes earlier in the universe's history, the last 15 minutes before they fall together. And it's not just black holes, but it's also any big disturbance in the universe -- and the biggest of them all is the Big Bang. When that expression was coined, it was derisive -- like, "Oh, who would believe in a Big Bang?" But now it actually might be more technically accurate because it might bang. It might make a sound. This animation from my friends at Proton Studios shows looking at the Big Bang from the outside. We don't ever want to do that actually. We want to be inside the universe because there's no such thing as standing outside the universe. So imagine you're inside the Big Bang. It's everywhere, it's all around you, and the space is wobbling chaotically. Fourteen billion years pass and this song is still ringing all around us. Galaxies form, and generations of stars form in those galaxies, and around one star, at least one star, is a habitable planet. And here we are frantically building these experiments, doing these calculations, writing these computer codes. Imagine a billion years ago, two black holes collided. That song has been ringing through space for all that time. We weren't even here. It gets closer and closer -- 40,000 years ago, we're still doing cave paintings. It's like hurry, build your instruments. It's getting closer and closer, and in 20 ... whatever year it will be when our detectors are finally at advanced sensitivity -- we'll build them, we'll turn on the machines and, bang, we'll catch it -- the first song from space. If it was the Big Bang we were going to pick up, it would sound like this. (Static) It's a terrible sound. It's literally the definition of noise. It's white noise; it's such a chaotic ringing. But it's around us everywhere, presumably, if it hasn't been wiped out by some other process in the universe. And if we pick it up, it will be music to our ears because it will be the quiet echo of that moment of our creation, of our observable universe. So within the next few years, we'll be able to turn up the soundtrack a little bit, render the universe in audio. But if we detect those earliest moments, it'll bring us that much closer to an understanding of the Big Bang, which brings us that much closer to asking some of the hardest, most elusive, questions. If we run the movie of our universe backwards, we know that there was a Big Bang in our past, and we might even hear the cacophonous sound of it, but was our Big Bang the only Big Bang? I mean we have to ask, has it happened before? Will it happen again? I mean, in the spirit of rising to TED's challenge to reignite wonder, we can ask questions, at least for this last minute, that honestly might evade us forever. But we have to ask: Is it possible that our universe is just a plume off of some greater history? Or, is it possible that we're just a branch off of a multiverse -- each branch with its own Big Bang in its past -- maybe some of them with black holes playing drums, maybe some without -- maybe some with sentient life, and maybe some without -- not in our past, not in our future, but somehow fundamentally connected to us? So we have to wonder, if there is a multiverse, in some other patch of that multiverse, are there creatures? Here's my multiverse creatures. Are there other creatures in the multiverse, wondering about us and wondering about their own origins? And if they are, I can imagine them as we are, calculating, writing computer code, building instruments, trying to detect that faintest sound of their origins and wondering who else is out there. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

So I'm a doctor, but I kind of slipped sideways into research, and now I'm an epidemiologist. And nobody really knows what epidemiology is. Epidemiology is the science of how we know in the real world if something is good for you or bad for you. And it's best understood through example as the science of those crazy, wacky newspaper headlines. And these are just some of the examples. These are from the Daily Mail. Every country in the world has a newspaper like this. It has this bizarre, ongoing philosophical project of dividing all the inanimate objects in the world into the ones that either cause or prevent cancer. So here are some of the things they said cause cancer recently: divorce, Wi-Fi, toiletries and coffee. Here are some of the things they say prevents cancer: crusts, red pepper, licorice and coffee. So already you can see there are contradictions. Coffee both causes and prevents cancer. And as you start to read on, you can see that maybe there's some kind of political valence behind some of this. So for women, housework prevents breast cancer, but for men, shopping could make you impotent. So we know that we need to start unpicking the science behind this. And what I hope to show is that unpicking dodgy claims, unpicking the evidence behind dodgy claims, isn't a kind of nasty carping activity; it's socially useful, but it's also an extremely valuable explanatory tool. Because real science is all about critically appraising the evidence for somebody else's position. That's what happens in academic journals. That's what happens at academic conferences. The Q&A session after a post-op presents data is often a blood bath. And nobody minds that. We actively welcome it. It's like a consenting intellectual S&M activity. So what I'm going to show you is all of the main things, all of the main features of my discipline -- evidence-based medicine. And I will talk you through all of these and demonstrate how they work, exclusively using examples of people getting stuff wrong. So we'll start with the absolute weakest form of evidence known to man, and that is authority. In science, we don't care how many letters you have after your name. In science, we want to know what your reasons are for believing something. How do you know that something is good for us or bad for us? But we're also unimpressed by authority, because it's so easy to contrive. This is somebody called Dr. Gillian McKeith Ph.D, or, to give her full medical title, Gillian McKeith. (Laughter) Again, every country has somebody like this. She is our TV diet guru. She has massive five series of prime-time television, giving out very lavish and exotic health advice. She, it turns out, has a non-accredited correspondence course Ph.D. from somewhere in America. She also boasts that she's a certified professional member of the American Association of Nutritional Consultants, which sounds very glamorous and exciting. You get a certificate and everything. This one belongs to my dead cat Hetti. She was a horrible cat. You just go to the website, fill out the form, give them $60, and it arrives in the post. Now that's not the only reason that we think this person is an idiot. She also goes and says things like, you should eat lots of dark green leaves, because they contain lots of chlorophyll, and that will really oxygenate your blood. And anybody who's done school biology remembers that chlorophyll and chloroplasts only make oxygen in sunlight, and it's quite dark in your bowels after you've eaten spinach. Next, we need proper science, proper evidence. So, "Red wine can help prevent breast cancer." This is a headline from the Daily Telegraph in the U.K. "A glass of red wine a day could help prevent breast cancer." So you go and find this paper, and what you find is it is a real piece of science. It is a description of the changes in one enzyme when you drip a chemical extracted from some red grape skin onto some cancer cells in a dish on a bench in a laboratory somewhere. And that's a really useful thing to describe in a scientific paper, but on the question of your own personal risk of getting breast cancer if you drink red wine, it tells you absolutely bugger all. Actually, it turns out that your risk of breast cancer actually increases slightly with every amount of alcohol that you drink. So what we want is studies in real human people. And here's another example. This is from Britain's leading diet and nutritionist in the Daily Mirror, which is our second biggest selling newspaper. "An Australian study in 2001 found that olive oil in combination with fruits, vegetables and pulses offers measurable protection against skin wrinklings." And then they give you advice: "If you eat olive oil and vegetables, you'll have fewer skin wrinkles." And they very helpfully tell you how to go and find the paper. So you go and find the paper, and what you find is an observational study. Obviously nobody has been able to go back to 1930, get all the people born in one maternity unit, and half of them eat lots of fruit and veg and olive oil, and then half of them eat McDonald's, and then we see how many wrinkles you've got later. You have to take a snapshot of how people are now. And what you find is, of course, people who eat veg and olive oil have fewer skin wrinkles. But that's because people who eat fruit and veg and olive oil, they're freaks, they're not normal, they're like you; they come to events like this. They are posh, they're wealthy, they're less likely to have outdoor jobs, they're less likely to do manual labor, they have better social support, they're less likely to smoke -- so for a whole host of fascinating, interlocking social, political and cultural reasons, they are less likely to have skin wrinkles. That doesn't mean that it's the vegetables or the olive oil. (Laughter) So ideally what you want to do is a trial. And everybody thinks they're very familiar with the idea of a trial. Trials are very old. The first trial was in the Bible -- Daniel 1:12. It's very straightforward -- you take a bunch of people, you split them in half, you treat one group one way, you treat the other group the other way, and a little while later, you follow them up and see what happened to each of them. So I'm going to tell you about one trial, which is probably the most well-reported trial in the U.K. news media over the past decade. And this is the trial of fish oil pills. And the claim was fish oil pills improve school performance and behavior in mainstream children. And they said, "We've done a trial. All the previous trials were positive, and we know this one's gonna be too." That should always ring alarm bells. Because if you already know the answer to your trial, you shouldn't be doing one. Either you've rigged it by design, or you've got enough data so there's no need to randomize people anymore. So this is what they were going to do in their trial. They were taking 3,000 children, they were going to give them all these huge fish oil pills, six of them a day, and then a year later, they were going to measure their school exam performance and compare their school exam performance against what they predicted their exam performance would have been if they hadn't had the pills. Now can anybody spot a flaw in this design? And no professors of clinical trial methodology are allowed to answer this question. So there's no control; there's no control group. But that sounds really techie. That's a technical term. The kids got the pills, and then their performance improved. What else could it possibly be if it wasn't the pills? They got older. We all develop over time. And of course, also there's the placebo effect. The placebo effect is one of the most fascinating things in the whole of medicine. It's not just about taking a pill, and your performance and your pain getting better. It's about our beliefs and expectations. It's about the cultural meaning of a treatment. And this has been demonstrated in a whole raft of fascinating studies comparing one kind of placebo against another. So we know, for example, that two sugar pills a day are a more effective treatment for getting rid of gastric ulcers than one sugar pill. Two sugar pills a day beats one sugar pill a day. And that's an outrageous and ridiculous finding, but it's true. We know from three different studies on three different types of pain that a saltwater injection is a more effective treatment for pain than taking a sugar pill, taking a dummy pill that has no medicine in it -- not because the injection or the pills do anything physically to the body, but because an injection feels like a much more dramatic intervention. So we know that our beliefs and expectations can be manipulated, which is why we do trials where we control against a placebo -- where one half of the people get the real treatment and the other half get placebo. But that's not enough. What I've just shown you are examples of the very simple and straightforward ways that journalists and food supplement pill peddlers and naturopaths can distort evidence for their own purposes. What I find really fascinating is that the pharmaceutical industry uses exactly the same kinds of tricks and devices, but slightly more sophisticated versions of them, in order to distort the evidence that they give to doctors and patients, and which we use to make vitally important decisions. So firstly, trials against placebo: everybody thinks they know that a trial should be a comparison of your new drug against placebo. But actually in a lot of situations that's wrong. Because often we already have a very good treatment that is currently available, so we don't want to know that your alternative new treatment is better than nothing. We want to know that it's better than the best currently available treatment that we have. And yet, repeatedly, you consistently see people doing trials still against placebo. And you can get license to bring your drug to market with only data showing that it's better than nothing, which is useless for a doctor like me trying to make a decision. But that's not the only way you can rig your data. You can also rig your data by making the thing you compare your new drug against really rubbish. You can give the competing drug in too low a dose, so that people aren't properly treated. You can give the competing drug in too high a dose, so that people get side effects. And this is exactly what happened which antipsychotic medication for schizophrenia. 20 years ago, a new generation of antipsychotic drugs were brought in and the promise was that they would have fewer side effects. So people set about doing trials of these new drugs against the old drugs, but they gave the old drugs in ridiculously high doses -- 20 milligrams a day of haloperidol. And it's a foregone conclusion, if you give a drug at that high a dose, that it will have more side effects and that your new drug will look better. 10 years ago, history repeated itself, interestingly, when risperidone, which was the first of the new-generation antipscyhotic drugs, came off copyright, so anybody could make copies. Everybody wanted to show that their drug was better than risperidone, so you see a bunch of trials comparing new antipsychotic drugs against risperidone at eight milligrams a day. Again, not an insane dose, not an illegal dose, but very much at the high end of normal. And so you're bound to make your new drug look better. And so it's no surprise that overall, industry-funded trials are four times more likely to give a positive result than independently sponsored trials. But -- and it's a big but -- (Laughter) it turns out, when you look at the methods used by industry-funded trials, that they're actually better than independently sponsored trials. And yet, they always manage to to get the result that they want. So how does this work? How can we explain this strange phenomenon? Well it turns out that what happens is the negative data goes missing in action; it's withheld from doctors and patients. And this is the most important aspect of the whole story. It's at the top of the pyramid of evidence. We need to have all of the data on a particular treatment to know whether or not it really is effective. And there are two different ways that you can spot whether some data has gone missing in action. You can use statistics, or you can use stories. I personally prefer statistics, so that's what I'm going to do first. This is something called funnel plot. And a funnel plot is a very clever way of spotting if small negative trials have disappeared, have gone missing in action. So this is a graph of all of the trials that have been done on a particular treatment. And as you go up towards the top of the graph, what you see is each dot is a trial. And as you go up, those are the bigger trials, so they've got less error in them. So they're less likely to be randomly false positives, randomly false negatives. So they all cluster together. The big trials are closer to the true answer. Then as you go further down at the bottom, what you can see is, over on this side, the spurious false negatives, and over on this side, the spurious false positives. If there is publication bias, if small negative trials have gone missing in action, you can see it on one of these graphs. So you can see here that the small negative trials that should be on the bottom left have disappeared. This is a graph demonstrating the presence of publication bias in studies of publication bias. And I think that's the funniest epidemiology joke that you will ever hear. That's how you can prove it statistically, but what about stories? Well they're heinous, they really are. This is a drug called reboxetine. This is a drug that I myself have prescribed to patients. And I'm a very nerdy doctor. I hope I try to go out of my way to try and read and understand all the literature. I read the trials on this. They were all positive. They were all well-conducted. I found no flaw. Unfortunately, it turned out, that many of these trials were withheld. In fact, 76 percent of all of the trials that were done on this drug were withheld from doctors and patients. Now if you think about it, if I tossed a coin a hundred times, and I'm allowed to withhold from you the answers half the times, then I can convince you that I have a coin with two heads. If we remove half of the data, we can never know what the true effect size of these medicines is. And this is not an isolated story. Around half of all of the trial data on antidepressants has been withheld, but it goes way beyond that. The Nordic Cochrane Group were trying to get a hold of the data on that to bring it all together. The Cochrane Groups are an international nonprofit collaboration that produce systematic reviews of all of the data that has ever been shown. And they need to have access to all of the trial data. But the companies withheld that data from them, and so did the European Medicines Agency for three years. This is a problem that is currently lacking a solution. And to show how big it goes, this is a drug called Tamiflu, which governments around the world have spent billions and billions of dollars on. And they spend that money on the promise that this is a drug which will reduce the rate of complications with flu. We already have the data showing that it reduces the duration of your flu by a few hours. But I don't really care about that. Governments don't care about that. I'm very sorry if you have the flu, I know it's horrible, but we're not going to spend billions of dollars trying to reduce the duration of your flu symptoms by half a day. We prescribe these drugs, we stockpile them for emergencies on the understanding that they will reduce the number of complications, which means pneumonia and which means death. The infectious diseases Cochrane Group, which are based in Italy, has been trying to get the full data in a usable form out of the drug companies so that they can make a full decision about whether this drug is effective or not, and they've not been able to get that information. This is undoubtedly the single biggest ethical problem facing medicine today. We cannot make decisions in the absence of all of the information. So it's a little bit difficult from there to spin in some kind of positive conclusion. But I would say this: I think that sunlight is the best disinfectant. All of these things are happening in plain sight, and they're all protected by a force field of tediousness. And I think, with all of the problems in science, one of the best things that we can do is to lift up the lid, finger around in the mechanics and peer in. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Mark Twain summed up what I take to be one of the fundamental problems of cognitive science with a single witticism. He said, "There's something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment in fact." (Laughter) Twain meant it as a joke, of course, but he's right: There's something fascinating about science. From a few bones, we infer the existence of dinosuars. From spectral lines, the composition of nebulae. From fruit flies, the mechanisms of heredity, and from reconstructed images of blood flowing through the brain, or in my case, from the behavior of very young children, we try to say something about the fundamental mechanisms of human cognition. In particular, in my lab in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, I have spent the past decade trying to understand the mystery of how children learn so much from so little so quickly. Because, it turns out that the fascinating thing about science is also a fascinating thing about children, which, to put a gentler spin on Mark Twain, is precisely their ability to draw rich, abstract inferences rapidly and accurately from sparse, noisy data. I'm going to give you just two examples today. One is about a problem of generalization, and the other is about a problem of causal reasoning. And although I'm going to talk about work in my lab, this work is inspired by and indebted to a field. I'm grateful to mentors, colleagues, and collaborators around the world. Let me start with the problem of generalization. Generalizing from small samples of data is the bread and butter of science. We poll a tiny fraction of the electorate and we predict the outcome of national elections. We see how a handful of patients responds to treatment in a clinical trial, and we bring drugs to a national market. But this only works if our sample is randomly drawn from the population. If our sample is cherry-picked in some way -- say, we poll only urban voters, or say, in our clinical trials for treatments for heart disease, we include only men -- the results may not generalize to the broader population. So scientists care whether evidence is randomly sampled or not, but what does that have to do with babies? Well, babies have to generalize from small samples of data all the time. They see a few rubber ducks and learn that they float, or a few balls and learn that they bounce. And they develop expectations about ducks and balls that they're going to extend to rubber ducks and balls for the rest of their lives. And the kinds of generalizations babies have to make about ducks and balls they have to make about almost everything: shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings. So do babies care whether the tiny bit of evidence they see is plausibly representative of a larger population? Let's find out. I'm going to show you two movies, one from each of two conditions of an experiment, and because you're going to see just two movies, you're going to see just two babies, and any two babies differ from each other in innumerable ways. But these babies, of course, here stand in for groups of babies, and the differences you're going to see represent average group differences in babies' behavior across conditions. In each movie, you're going to see a baby doing maybe just exactly what you might expect a baby to do, and we can hardly make babies more magical than they already are. But to my mind the magical thing, and what I want you to pay attention to, is the contrast between these two conditions, because the only thing that differs between these two movies is the statistical evidence the babies are going to observe. We're going to show babies a box of blue and yellow balls, and my then-graduate student, now colleague at Stanford, Hyowon Gweon, is going to pull three blue balls in a row out of this box, and when she pulls those balls out, she's going to squeeze them, and the balls are going to squeak. And if you're a baby, that's like a TED Talk. It doesn't get better than that. (Laughter) But the important point is it's really easy to pull three blue balls in a row out of a box of mostly blue balls. You could do that with your eyes closed. It's plausibly a random sample from this population. And if you can reach into a box at random and pull out things that squeak, then maybe everything in the box squeaks. So maybe babies should expect those yellow balls to squeak as well. Now, those yellow balls have funny sticks on the end, so babies could do other things with them if they wanted to. They could pound them or whack them. But let's see what the baby does. (Video) Hyowon Gweon: See this? (Ball squeaks) Did you see that? (Ball squeaks) Cool. See this one? (Ball squeaks) Wow. Laura Schulz: Told you. (Laughs) (Video) HG: See this one? (Ball squeaks) Hey Clara, this one's for you. You can go ahead and play. (Laughter) LS: I don't even have to talk, right? All right, it's nice that babies will generalize properties of blue balls to yellow balls, and it's impressive that babies can learn from imitating us, but we've known those things about babies for a very long time. The really interesting question is what happens when we show babies exactly the same thing, and we can ensure it's exactly the same because we have a secret compartment and we actually pull the balls from there, but this time, all we change is the apparent population from which that evidence was drawn. This time, we're going to show babies three blue balls pulled out of a box of mostly yellow balls, and guess what? You [probably won't] randomly draw three blue balls in a row out of a box of mostly yellow balls. That is not plausibly randomly sampled evidence. That evidence suggests that maybe Hyowon was deliberately sampling the blue balls. Maybe there's something special about the blue balls. Maybe only the blue balls squeak. Let's see what the baby does. (Video) HG: See this? (Ball squeaks) See this toy? (Ball squeaks) Oh, that was cool. See? (Ball squeaks) Now this one's for you to play. You can go ahead and play. (Fussing) (Laughter) LS: So you just saw two 15-month-old babies do entirely different things based only on the probability of the sample they observed. Let me show you the experimental results. On the vertical axis, you'll see the percentage of babies who squeezed the ball in each condition, and as you'll see, babies are much more likely to generalize the evidence when it's plausibly representative of the population than when the evidence is clearly cherry-picked. And this leads to a fun prediction: Suppose you pulled just one blue ball out of the mostly yellow box. You [probably won't] pull three blue balls in a row at random out of a yellow box, but you could randomly sample just one blue ball. That's not an improbable sample. And if you could reach into a box at random and pull out something that squeaks, maybe everything in the box squeaks. So even though babies are going to see much less evidence for squeaking, and have many fewer actions to imitate in this one ball condition than in the condition you just saw, we predicted that babies themselves would squeeze more, and that's exactly what we found. So 15-month-old babies, in this respect, like scientists, care whether evidence is randomly sampled or not, and they use this to develop expectations about the world: what squeaks and what doesn't, what to explore and what to ignore. Let me show you another example now, this time about a problem of causal reasoning. And it starts with a problem of confounded evidence that all of us have, which is that we are part of the world. And this might not seem like a problem to you, but like most problems, it's only a problem when things go wrong. Take this baby, for instance. Things are going wrong for him. He would like to make this toy go, and he can't. I'll show you a few-second clip. And there's two possibilities, broadly: Maybe he's doing something wrong, or maybe there's something wrong with the toy. So in this next experiment, we're going to give babies just a tiny bit of statistical data supporting one hypothesis over the other, and we're going to see if babies can use that to make different decisions about what to do. Here's the setup. Hyowon is going to try to make the toy go and succeed. I am then going to try twice and fail both times, and then Hyowon is going to try again and succeed, and this roughly sums up my relationship to my graduate students in technology across the board. But the important point here is it provides a little bit of evidence that the problem isn't with the toy, it's with the person. Some people can make this toy go, and some can't. Now, when the baby gets the toy, he's going to have a choice. His mom is right there, so he can go ahead and hand off the toy and change the person, but there's also going to be another toy at the end of that cloth, and he can pull the cloth towards him and change the toy. So let's see what the baby does. (Video) HG: Two, three. Go! (Music) LS: One, two, three, go! Arthur, I'm going to try again. One, two, three, go! YG: Arthur, let me try again, okay? One, two, three, go! (Music) Look at that. Remember these toys? See these toys? Yeah, I'm going to put this one over here, and I'm going to give this one to you. You can go ahead and play. LS: Okay, Laura, but of course, babies love their mommies. Of course babies give toys to their mommies when they can't make them work. So again, the really important question is what happens when we change the statistical data ever so slightly. This time, babies are going to see the toy work and fail in exactly the same order, but we're changing the distribution of evidence. This time, Hyowon is going to succeed once and fail once, and so am I. And this suggests it doesn't matter who tries this toy, the toy is broken. It doesn't work all the time. Again, the baby's going to have a choice. Her mom is right next to her, so she can change the person, and there's going to be another toy at the end of the cloth. Let's watch what she does. (Video) HG: Two, three, go! (Music) Let me try one more time. One, two, three, go! Hmm. LS: Let me try, Clara. One, two, three, go! Hmm, let me try again. One, two, three, go! (Music) HG: I'm going to put this one over here, and I'm going to give this one to you. You can go ahead and play. (Applause) LS: Let me show you the experimental results. On the vertical axis, you'll see the distribution of children's choices in each condition, and you'll see that the distribution of the choices children make depends on the evidence they observe. So in the second year of life, babies can use a tiny bit of statistical data to decide between two fundamentally different strategies for acting in the world: asking for help and exploring. I've just shown you two laboratory experiments out of literally hundreds in the field that make similar points, because the really critical point is that children's ability to make rich inferences from sparse data underlies all the species-specific cultural learning that we do. Children learn about new tools from just a few examples. They learn new causal relationships from just a few examples. They even learn new words, in this case in American Sign Language. I want to close with just two points. If you've been following my world, the field of brain and cognitive sciences, for the past few years, three big ideas will have come to your attention. The first is that this is the era of the brain. And indeed, there have been staggering discoveries in neuroscience: localizing functionally specialized regions of cortex, turning mouse brains transparent, activating neurons with light. A second big idea is that this is the era of big data and machine learning, and machine learning promises to revolutionize our understanding of everything from social networks to epidemiology. And maybe, as it tackles problems of scene understanding and natural language processing, to tell us something about human cognition. And the final big idea you'll have heard is that maybe it's a good idea we're going to know so much about brains and have so much access to big data, because left to our own devices, humans are fallible, we take shortcuts, we err, we make mistakes, we're biased, and in innumerable ways, we get the world wrong. I think these are all important stories, and they have a lot to tell us about what it means to be human, but I want you to note that today I told you a very different story. It's a story about minds and not brains, and in particular, it's a story about the kinds of computations that uniquely human minds can perform, which involve rich, structured knowledge and the ability to learn from small amounts of data, the evidence of just a few examples. And fundamentally, it's a story about how starting as very small children and continuing out all the way to the greatest accomplishments of our culture, we get the world right. Folks, human minds do not only learn from small amounts of data. Human minds think of altogether new ideas. Human minds generate research and discovery, and human minds generate art and literature and poetry and theater, and human minds take care of other humans: our old, our young, our sick. We even heal them. In the years to come, we're going to see technological innovations beyond anything I can even envision, but we are very unlikely to see anything even approximating the computational power of a human child in my lifetime or in yours. If we invest in these most powerful learners and their development, in babies and children and mothers and fathers and caregivers and teachers the ways we invest in our other most powerful and elegant forms of technology, engineering and design, we will not just be dreaming of a better future, we will be planning for one. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Laura, thank you. I do actually have a question for you. First of all, the research is insane. I mean, who would design an experiment like that? (Laughter) I've seen that a couple of times, and I still don't honestly believe that that can truly be happening, but other people have done similar experiments; it checks out. The babies really are that genius. LS: You know, they look really impressive in our experiments, but think about what they look like in real life, right? It starts out as a baby. Eighteen months later, it's talking to you, and babies' first words aren't just things like balls and ducks, they're things like "all gone," which refer to disappearance, or "uh-oh," which refer to unintentional actions. It has to be that powerful. It has to be much more powerful than anything I showed you. They're figuring out the entire world. A four-year-old can talk to you about almost anything. (Applause) CA: And if I understand you right, the other key point you're making is, we've been through these years where there's all this talk of how quirky and buggy our minds are, that behavioral economics and the whole theories behind that that we're not rational agents. You're really saying that the bigger story is how extraordinary, and there really is genius there that is underappreciated. LS: One of my favorite quotes in psychology comes from the social psychologist Solomon Asch, and he said the fundamental task of psychology is to remove the veil of self-evidence from things. There are orders of magnitude more decisions you make every day that get the world right. You know about objects and their properties. You know them when they're occluded. You know them in the dark. You can walk through rooms. You can figure out what other people are thinking. You can talk to them. You can navigate space. You know about numbers. You know causal relationships. You know about moral reasoning. You do this effortlessly, so we don't see it, but that is how we get the world right, and it's a remarkable and very difficult-to-understand accomplishment. CA: I suspect there are people in the audience who have this view of accelerating technological power who might dispute your statement that never in our lifetimes will a computer do what a three-year-old child can do, but what's clear is that in any scenario, our machines have so much to learn from our toddlers. LS: I think so. You'll have some machine learning folks up here. I mean, you should never bet against babies or chimpanzees or technology as a matter of practice, but it's not just a difference in quantity, it's a difference in kind. We have incredibly powerful computers, and they do do amazingly sophisticated things, often with very big amounts of data. Human minds do, I think, something quite different, and I think it's the structured, hierarchical nature of human knowledge that remains a real challenge. CA: Laura Schulz, wonderful food for thought. Thank you so much. LS: Thank you. (Applause)

Chris Anderson: Julian, welcome. It's been reported that WikiLeaks, your baby, has, in the last few years has released more classified documents than the rest of the world's media combined. Can that possibly be true? Julian Assange: Yeah, can it possibly be true? It's a worry -- isn't it? -- that the rest of the world's media is doing such a bad job that a little group of activists is able to release more of that type of information than the rest of the world press combined. CA: How does it work? How do people release the documents? And how do you secure their privacy? JA: So these are -- as far as we can tell -- classical whistleblowers, and we have a number of ways for them to get information to us. So we use this state-of-the-art encryption to bounce stuff around the Internet, to hide trails, pass it through legal jurisdictions like Sweden and Belgium to enact those legal protections. We get information in the mail, the regular postal mail, encrypted or not, vet it like a regular news organization, format it -- which is sometimes something that's quite hard to do, when you're talking about giant databases of information -- release it to the public and then defend ourselves against the inevitable legal and political attacks. CA: So you make an effort to ensure the documents are legitimate, but you actually almost never know who the identity of the source is? JA: That's right, yeah. Very rarely do we ever know, and if we find out at some stage then we destroy that information as soon as possible. (Phone ring) God damn it. (Laughter) CA: I think that's the CIA asking what the code is for a TED membership. (Laughter) So let's take [an] example, actually. This is something you leaked a few years ago. If we can have this document up ... So this was a story in Kenya a few years ago. Can you tell us what you leaked and what happened? JA: So this is the Kroll Report. This was a secret intelligence report commissioned by the Kenyan government after its election in 2004. Prior to 2004, Kenya was ruled by Daniel arap Moi for about 18 years. He was a soft dictator of Kenya. And when Kibaki got into power -- through a coalition of forces that were trying to clean up corruption in Kenya -- they commissioned this report, spent about two million pounds on this and an associated report. And then the government sat on it and used it for political leverage on Moi, who was the richest man -- still is the richest man -- in Kenya. It's the Holy Grail of Kenyan journalism. So I went there in 2007, and we managed to get hold of this just prior to the election -- the national election, December 28. When we released that report, we did so three days after the new president, Kibaki, had decided to pal up with the man that he was going to clean out, Daniel arap Moi, so this report then became a dead albatross around President Kibaki's neck. CA: And -- I mean, to cut a long story short -- word of the report leaked into Kenya, not from the official media, but indirectly, and in your opinion, it actually shifted the election. JA: Yeah. So this became front page of the Guardian and was then printed in all the surrounding countries of Kenya, in Tanzanian and South African press. And so it came in from the outside. And that, after a couple of days, made the Kenyan press feel safe to talk about it. And it ran for 20 nights straight on Kenyan TV, shifted the vote by 10 percent, according to a Kenyan intelligence report, which changed the result of the election. CA: Wow, so your leak really substantially changed the world? JA: Yep. (Applause) CA: Here's -- We're going to just show a short clip from this Baghdad airstrike video. The video itself is longer, but here's a short clip. This is -- this is intense material, I should warn you. Radio: ... just fuckin', once you get on 'em just open 'em up. I see your element, uh, got about four Humvees, uh, out along ... You're clear. All right. Firing. Let me know when you've got them. Let's shoot. Light 'em all up. C'mon, fire! (Machine gun fire) Keep shoot 'n. Keep shoot 'n. (Machine gun fire) Keep shoot 'n. Hotel ... Bushmaster Two-Six, Bushmaster Two-Six, we need to move, time now! All right, we just engaged all eight individuals. Yeah, we see two birds [helicopters], and we're still firing. Roger. I got 'em. Two-Six, this is Two-Six, we're mobile. Oops, I'm sorry. What was going on? God damn it, Kyle. All right, hahaha. I hit 'em. CA: So, what was the impact of that? JA: The impact on the people who worked on it was severe. We ended up sending two people to Baghdad to further research that story. So this is just the first of three attacks that occurred in that scene. CA: So, I mean, 11 people died in that attack, right, including two Reuters employees? JA: Yeah. Two Reuters employees, two young children were wounded. There were between 18 and 26 people killed all together. CA: And releasing this caused widespread outrage. What was the key element of this that actually caused the outrage, do you think? JA: I don't know. I guess people can see the gross disparity in force. You have guys walking in a relaxed way down the street, and then an Apache helicopter sitting up at one kilometer firing 30-millimeter cannon shells on everyone -- looking for any excuse to do so -- and killing people rescuing the wounded. And there was two journalists involved that clearly weren't insurgents because that's their full-time job. CA: I mean, there's been this U.S. intelligence analyst, Bradley Manning, arrested, and it's alleged that he confessed in a chat room to have leaked this video to you, along with 280,000 classified U.S. embassy cables. I mean, did he? JA: We have denied receiving those cables. He has been charged, about five days ago, with obtaining 150,000 cables and releasing 50. Now, we had released, early in the year, a cable from the Reykjavik U.S. embassy, but this is not necessarily connected. I mean, I was a known visitor of that embassy. CA: I mean, if you did receive thousands of U.S. embassy diplomatic cables ... JA: We would have released them. (CA: You would?) JA: Yeah. (CA: Because?) JA: Well, because these sort of things reveal what the true state of, say, Arab governments are like, the true human-rights abuses in those governments. If you look at declassified cables, that's the sort of material that's there. CA: So let's talk a little more broadly about this. I mean, in general, what's your philosophy? Why is it right to encourage leaking of secret information? JA: Well, there's a question as to what sort of information is important in the world, what sort of information can achieve reform. And there's a lot of information. So information that organizations are spending economic effort into concealing, that's a really good signal that when the information gets out, there's a hope of it doing some good -- because the organizations that know it best, that know it from the inside out, are spending work to conceal it. And that's what we've found in practice, and that's what the history of journalism is. CA: But are there risks with that, either to the individuals concerned or indeed to society at large, where leaking can actually have an unintended consequence? JA: Not that we have seen with anything we have released. I mean, we have a harm immunization policy. We have a way of dealing with information that has sort of personal -- personally identifying information in it. But there are legitimate secrets -- you know, your records with your doctor; that's a legitimate secret -- but we deal with whistleblowers that are coming forward that are really sort of well-motivated. CA: So they are well-motivated. And what would you say to, for example, the, you know, the parent of someone whose son is out serving the U.S. military, and he says, "You know what, you've put up something that someone had an incentive to put out. It shows a U.S. soldier laughing at people dying. That gives the impression, has given the impression, to millions of people around the world that U.S. soldiers are inhuman people. Actually, they're not. My son isn't. How dare you?" What would you say to that? JA: Yeah, we do get a lot of that. But remember, the people in Baghdad, the people in Iraq, the people in Afghanistan -- they don't need to see the video; they see it every day. So it's not going to change their opinion. It's not going to change their perception. That's what they see every day. It will change the perception and opinion of the people who are paying for it all, and that's our hope. CA: So you found a way to shine light into what you see as these sort of dark secrets in companies and in government. Light is good. But do you see any irony in the fact that, in order for you to shine that light, you have to, yourself, create secrecy around your sources? JA: Not really. I mean, we don't have any WikiLeaks dissidents yet. We don't have sources who are dissidents on other sources. Should they come forward, that would be a tricky situation for us, but we're presumably acting in such a way that people feel morally compelled to continue our mission, not to screw it up. CA: I'd actually be interested, just based on what we've heard so far -- I'm curious as to the opinion in the TED audience. You know, there might be a couple of views of WikiLeaks and of Julian. You know, hero -- people's hero -- bringing this important light. Dangerous troublemaker. Who's got the hero view? Who's got the dangerous troublemaker view? JA: Oh, come on. There must be some. CA: It's a soft crowd, Julian, a soft crowd. We have to try better. Let's show them another example. Now here's something that you haven't yet leaked, but I think for TED you are. I mean it's an intriguing story that's just happened, right? What is this? JA: So this is a sample of what we do sort of every day. So late last year -- in November last year -- there was a series of well blowouts in Albania, like the well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico, but not quite as big. And we got a report -- a sort of engineering analysis into what happened -- saying that, in fact, security guards from some rival, various competing oil firms had, in fact, parked trucks there and blown them up. And part of the Albanian government was in this, etc., etc. And the engineering report had nothing on the top of it, so it was an extremely difficult document for us. We couldn't verify it because we didn't know who wrote it and knew what it was about. So we were kind of skeptical that maybe it was a competing oil firm just sort of playing the issue up. So under that basis, we put it out and said, "Look, we're skeptical about this thing. We don't know, but what can we do? The material looks good, it feels right, but we just can't verify it." And we then got a letter just this week from the company who wrote it, wanting to track down the source -- (Laughter) saying, "Hey, we want to track down the source." And we were like, "Oh, tell us more. What document is it, precisely, you're talking about? Can you show that you had legal authority over that document? Is it really yours?" So they sent us this screen shot with the author in the Microsoft Word ID. Yeah. (Applause) That's happened quite a lot though. This is like one of our methods of identifying, of verifying, what a material is, is to try and get these guys to write letters. CA: Yeah. Have you had information from inside BP? JA: Yeah, we have a lot, but I mean, at the moment, we are undergoing a sort of serious fundraising and engineering effort. So our publication rate over the past few months has been sort of minimized while we're re-engineering our back systems for the phenomenal public interest that we have. That's a problem. I mean, like any sort of growing startup organization, we are sort of overwhelmed by our growth, and that means we're getting enormous quantity of whistleblower disclosures of a very high caliber but don't have enough people to actually process and vet this information. CA: So that's the key bottleneck, basically journalistic volunteers and/or the funding of journalistic salaries? JA: Yep. Yeah, and trusted people. I mean, we're an organization that is hard to grow very quickly because of the sort of material we deal with, so we have to restructure in order to have people who will deal with the highest national security stuff, and then lower security cases. CA: So help us understand a bit about you personally and how you came to do this. And I think I read that as a kid you went to 37 different schools. Can that be right? JA: Well, my parents were in the movie business and then on the run from a cult, so the combination between the two ... (Laughter) CA: I mean, a psychologist might say that's a recipe for breeding paranoia. JA: What, the movie business? (Laughter) (Applause) CA: And you were also -- I mean, you were also a hacker at an early age and ran into the authorities early on. JA: Well, I was a journalist. You know, I was a very young journalist activist at an early age. I wrote a magazine, was prosecuted for it when I was a teenager. So you have to be careful with hacker. I mean there's like -- there's a method that can be deployed for various things. Unfortunately, at the moment, it's mostly deployed by the Russian mafia in order to steal your grandmother's bank accounts. So this phrase is not, not as nice as it used to be. CA: Yeah, well, I certainly don't think you're stealing anyone's grandmother's bank account, but what about your core values? Can you give us a sense of what they are and maybe some incident in your life that helped determine them? JA: I'm not sure about the incident. But the core values: well, capable, generous men do not create victims; they nurture victims. And that's something from my father and something from other capable, generous men that have been in my life. CA: Capable, generous men do not create victims; they nurture victims? JA: Yeah. And you know, I'm a combative person, so I'm not actually so big on the nurture, but some way -- there is another way of nurturing victims, which is to police perpetrators of crime. And so that is something that has been in my character for a long time. CA: So just tell us, very quickly in the last minute, the story: what happened in Iceland? You basically published something there, ran into trouble with a bank, then the news service there was injuncted from running the story. Instead, they publicized your side. That made you very high-profile in Iceland. What happened next? JA: Yeah, this is a great case, you know. Iceland went through this financial crisis. It was the hardest hit of any country in the world. Its banking sector was 10 times the GDP of the rest of the economy. Anyway, so we release this report in July last year. And the national TV station was injuncted five minutes before it went on air, like out of a movie: injunction landed on the news desk, and the news reader was like, "This has never happened before. What do we do?" Well, we just show the website instead, for all that time, as a filler, and we became very famous in Iceland, went to Iceland and spoke about this issue. And there was a feeling in the community that that should never happen again, and as a result, working with Icelandic politicians and some other international legal experts, we put together a new sort of package of legislation for Iceland to sort of become an offshore haven for the free press, with the strongest journalistic protections in the world, with a new Nobel Prize for freedom of speech. Iceland's a Nordic country, so, like Norway, it's able to tap into the system. And just a month ago, this was passed by the Icelandic parliament unanimously. CA: Wow. (Applause) Last question, Julian. When you think of the future then, do you think it's more likely to be Big Brother exerting more control, more secrecy, or us watching Big Brother, or it's just all to be played for either way? JA: I'm not sure which way it's going to go. I mean, there's enormous pressures to harmonize freedom of speech legislation and transparency legislation around the world -- within the E.U., between China and the United States. Which way is it going to go? It's hard to see. That's why it's a very interesting time to be in -- because with just a little bit of effort, we can shift it one way or the other. CA: Well, it looks like I'm reflecting the audience's opinion to say, Julian, be careful, and all power to you. JA: Thank you, Chris. (CA: Thank you.) (Applause)

On September 10, the morning of my seventh birthday, I came downstairs to the kitchen, where my mother was washing the dishes and my father was reading the paper or something, and I sort of presented myself to them in the doorway, and they said, "Hey, happy birthday!" And I said, "I'm seven." And my father smiled and said, "Well, you know what that means, don't you?" And I said, "Yeah, that I'm going to have a party and a cake and get a lot of presents?" And my dad said, "Well, yes. But more importantly, being seven means that you've reached the age of reason, and you're now capable of committing any and all sins against God and man." (Laughter) Now, I had heard this phrase, "age of reason," before. Sister Mary Kevin had been bandying it about my second-grade class at school. But when she said it, the phrase seemed all caught up in the excitement of preparations for our first communion and our first confession, and everybody knew that was really all about the white dress and the white veil. And anyway, I hadn't really paid all that much attention to that phrase, "age of reason." So, I said, "Yeah, yeah, age of reason. What does that mean again?" And my dad said, "Well, we believe, in the Catholic Church, that God knows that little kids don't know the difference between right and wrong, but when you're seven, you're old enough to know better. So, you've grown up and reached the age of reason, and now God will start keeping notes on you, and begin your permanent record." (Laughter) And I said, "Oh ... Wait a minute. You mean all that time, up till today, all that time I was so good, God didn't notice it?" And my mom said, "Well, I noticed it." (Laughter) And I thought, "How could I not have known this before? How could it not have sunk in when they'd been telling me? All that being good and no real credit for it. And worst of all, how could I not have realized this very important information until the very day that it was basically useless to me?" So I said, "Well, Mom and Dad, what about Santa Claus? I mean, Santa Claus knows if you're naughty or nice, right?" And my dad said, "Yeah, but, honey, I think that's technically just between Thanksgiving and Christmas." And my mother said, "Oh, Bob, stop it. Let's just tell her. I mean, she's seven. Julie, there is no Santa Claus." (Laughter) Now, this was actually not that upsetting to me. My parents had this whole elaborate story about Santa Claus: how they had talked to Santa Claus himself and agreed that instead of Santa delivering our presents over the night of Christmas Eve, like he did for every other family who got to open their surprises first thing Christmas morning, our family would give Santa more time. Santa would come to our house while we were at nine o'clock high mass on Christmas morning, but only if all of us kids did not make a fuss. Which made me very suspicious. It was pretty obvious that it was really our parents giving us the presents. I mean, my dad had a very distinctive wrapping style, and my mother's handwriting was so close to Santa's. (Laughter) Plus, why would Santa save time by having to loop back to our house after he'd gone to everybody else's? There was only one obvious conclusion to reach from this mountain of evidence: our family was too strange and weird for even Santa Claus to come visit, and my poor parents were trying to protect us from the embarrassment, this humiliation of rejection by Santa, who was jolly -- but let's face it, he was also very judgmental. So to find out that there was no Santa Claus at all was actually sort of a relief. I left the kitchen not really in shock about Santa, but rather, I was just dumbfounded about how I could have missed this whole age of reason thing. It was too late for me, but maybe I could help someone else, someone who could use the information. They had to fit two criteria: they had to be old enough to be able to understand the whole concept of the age of reason, and not yet seven. The answer was clear: my brother Bill. He was six. Well, I finally found Bill about a block away from our house at this public school playground. It was a Saturday, and he was all by himself, just kicking a ball against the side of a wall. I ran up to him and said, "Bill! I just realized that the age of reason starts when you turn seven, and then you're capable of committing any and all sins against God and man." And Bill said, "So?" And I said, "So, you're six. You have a whole year to do anything you want to and God won't notice it." And he said, "So?" And I said, "So? So everything!" And I turned to run. I was so angry with him. But when I got to the top of the steps, I turned around dramatically and said, "Oh, by the way, Bill -- there is no Santa Claus." (Laughter) Now, I didn't know it at the time, but I really wasn't turning seven on September 10th. For my 13th birthday, I planned a slumber party with all of my girlfriends, but a couple of weeks beforehand my mother took me aside and said, "I need to speak to you privately. September 10th is not your birthday. It's October 10th." And I said, "What?" (Laughter) And she said ... (Laughter) "Listen. The cut-off date to start kindergarten was September 15th." (Laughter) "So I told them that your birthday was September 10th, and then I wasn't sure that you weren't just going to go blab it all over the place, so I started to tell you your birthday was September 10th. But, Julie, you were so ready to start school, honey. You were so ready." I thought about it, and when I was four, I was already the oldest of four children, and my mother even had another child to come, so what I think she -- understandably -- really meant was that she was so ready, she was so ready. Then she said, "Don't worry, Julie. Every year on October 10th, when it was your birthday but you didn't realize it, I made sure that you ate a piece of cake that day." (Laughter) Which was comforting, but troubling. My mother had been celebrating my birthday with me, without me. (Laughter) What was so upsetting about this new piece of information was not that I had to change the date of my slumber party with all of my girlfriends. What was most upsetting was that this meant I was not a Virgo. I had a huge Virgo poster in my bedroom. And I read my horoscope every single day, and it was so totally me. (Laughter) And this meant that I was a Libra? So, I took the bus downtown to get the new Libra poster. The Virgo poster is a picture of a beautiful woman with long hair, sort of lounging by some water, but the Libra poster is just a huge scale. This was around the time that I started filling out physically, and I was filling out a lot more than a lot of the other girls, and frankly, the whole idea that my astrological sign was a scale just seemed ominous and depressing. (Laughter) But I got the new Libra poster, and I started to read my new Libra horoscope, and I was astonished to find that it was also totally me. (Laughter) It wasn't until years later, looking back on this whole age-of-reason, change-of-birthday thing, that it dawned on me: I wasn't turning seven when I thought I turned seven. I had a whole other month to do anything I wanted to before God started keeping tabs on me. Oh, life can be so cruel. One day, two Mormon missionaries came to my door. Now, I just live off a main thoroughfare in Los Angeles, and my block is -- well, it's a natural beginning for people who are peddling things door to door. Sometimes I get little old ladies from the Seventh Day Adventist Church showing me these cartoon pictures of heaven. And sometimes I get teenagers who promise me that they won't join a gang and just start robbing people, if I only buy some magazine subscriptions from them. So normally, I just ignore the doorbell, but on this day, I answered. And there stood two boys, each about 19, in white, starched short-sleeved shirts, and they had little name tags that identified them as official representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and they said they had a message for me, from God. I said, "A message for me? From God?" And they said, "Yes." Now, I was raised in the Pacific Northwest, around a lot of Church of Latter-day Saints people and, you know, I've worked with them and even dated them, but I never really knew the doctrine, or what they said to people when they were out on a mission, and I guess I was sort of curious, so I said, "Well, please, come in." And they looked really happy, because I don't think this happens to them all that often. (Laughter) And I sat them down, and I got them glasses of water -- Ok, I got it, I got it. I got them glasses of water. Don't touch my hair, that's the thing. (Laughter) You can't put a video of myself in front of me and expect me not to fix my hair. Ok. (Laughter) So I sat them down and I got them glasses of water, and after niceties, they said, "Do you believe that God loves you with all his heart?" And I thought, "Well, of course I believe in God, but you know, I don't like that word 'heart,' because it anthropomorphizes God, and I don't like the word, 'his,' either, because that sexualizes God." But I didn't want to argue semantics with these boys, so after a very long, uncomfortable pause, I said, "Yes, yes, I do. I feel very loved." And they looked at each other and smiled, like that was the right answer. And then they said, "Do you believe that we're all brothers and sisters on this planet?" And I said, "Yes, I do." And I was so relieved that it was a question I could answer so quickly. And they said, "Well, then we have a story to tell you." And they told me this story all about this guy named Lehi, who lived in Jerusalem in 600 BC. Now, apparently in Jerusalem in 600 BC, everyone was completely bad and evil. Every single one of them: man, woman, child, infant, fetus. And God came to Lehi and said to him, "Put your family on a boat and I will lead you out of here." And God did lead them. He led them to America. I said, "America? (Laughter) From Jerusalem to America by boat in 600 BC?" And they said, "Yes." (Laughter) Then they told me how Lehi and his descendants reproduced and reproduced, and over the course of 600 years, there were two great races of them, the Nephites and the Lamanites, and the Nephites were totally good -- each and every one of them -- and the Lamanites were totally bad and evil -- every single one of them just bad to the bone. Then, after Jesus died on the cross for our sins, on his way up to heaven, he stopped by America and visited the Nephites. (Laughter) And he told them that if they all remained totally, totally good -- each and every one of them -- they would win the war against the evil Lamanites. But apparently somebody blew it, because the Lamanites were able to kill all the Nephites. All but one guy, this guy named Mormon, who managed to survive by hiding in the woods. And he made sure this whole story was written down in reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics chiseled onto gold plates, which he then buried near Palmyra, New York. (Laughter) Well, I was just on the edge of my seat. (Laughter) I said, "What happened to the Lamanites?" And they said, "Well, they became our Native Americans, here in the U.S." And I said, "So, you believe the Native Americans are descended from a people who were totally evil?" And they said, "Yes." Then they told me how this guy named Joseph Smith found those buried gold plates right in his backyard, and he also found this magic stone back there that he put into his hat and then buried his face into, and this allowed him to translate the gold plates from the reformed Egyptian into English. Well, at this point I just wanted to give these two boys some advice about their pitch. (Laughter) I wanted to say -- (Applause) "Ok, don't start with this story." (Laughter) I mean, even the Scientologists know to start with a personality test before they start -- (Applause) telling people all about Xenu, the evil intergalactic overlord. Then, they said, "Do you believe that God speaks to us through his righteous prophets?" And I said, "No, I don't," because I was sort of upset about this Lamanite story and this crazy gold plate story, but the truth was, I hadn't really thought this through, so I backpedaled a little and I said, "Well, what exactly do you mean by 'righteous'? And what do you mean by prophets? Like, could the prophets be women?" And they said, "No." And I said, "Why?" And they said, "Well, it's because God gave women a gift that is so spectacular, it is so wonderful, that the only gift he had left over to give men was the gift of prophecy." What is this wonderful gift God gave women, I wondered? Maybe their greater ability to cooperate and adapt? (Laughter) Women's longer lifespan? The fact that women tend to be much less violent than men? But no -- it wasn't any of these gifts. They said, "Well, it's her ability to bear children." I said, "Oh, come on. I mean, even if women tried to have a baby every single year from the time they were 15 to the time they were 45, assuming they didn't die from exhaustion, it still seems like some women would have some time left over to hear the word of God." And they said, "No." (Laughter) Well, then they didn't look so fresh-faced and cute to me any more, but they had more to say. They said, "Well, we also believe that if you're a Mormon, and if you're in good standing with the church, when you die, you get to go to heaven and be with your family for all eternity." And I said, "Oh, dear. (Laughter) That wouldn't be such a good incentive for me." (Laughter) And they said, "Oh. (Laughter) Hey! Well, we also believe that when you go to heaven, you get your body restored to you in its best original state. Like, if you'd lost a leg, well, you get it back. Or, if you'd gone blind, you could see." I said, "Oh. Now, I don't have a uterus, because I had cancer a few years ago. So does this mean that if I went to heaven, I would get my old uterus back?" And they said, "Sure." And I said, "I don't want it back. I'm happy without it." Gosh. What if you had a nose job and you liked it? (Laughter) Would God force you to get your old nose back? Then they gave me this Book of Mormon, told me to read this chapter and that chapter, and said they'd come back and check in on me, and I think I said something like, "Please don't hurry," or maybe just, "Please don't," and they were gone. Ok, so I initially felt really superior to these boys, and smug in my more conventional faith. But then the more I thought about it, the more I had to be honest with myself. If someone came to my door and I was hearing Catholic theology and dogma for the very first time, and they said, "We believe that God impregnated a very young girl without the use of intercourse, and the fact that she was a virgin is maniacally important to us." (Laughter) "And she had a baby, and that's the son of God," I mean, I would think that's equally ridiculous. I'm just so used to that story. (Laughter) So, I couldn't let myself feel condescending towards these boys. But the question they asked me when they first arrived really stuck in my head: Did I believe that God loved me with all his heart? Because I wasn't exactly sure how I felt about that question. Now, if they had asked me, "Do you feel that God loves you with all his heart?" Well, that would have been much different, I think I would have instantly answered, "Yes, yes, I feel it all the time. I feel God's love when I'm hurt and confused, and I feel consoled and cared for. I take shelter in God's love when I don't understand why tragedy hits, and I feel God's love when I look with gratitude at all the beauty I see." But since they asked me that question with the word "believe" in it, somehow it was all different, because I wasn't exactly sure if I believed what I so clearly felt.

I think it was in my second grade that I was caught drawing the bust of a nude by Michelangelo. I was sent straight away to my school principal, and my school principal, a sweet nun, looked at my book with disgust, flipped through the pages, saw all the nudes -- you know, I'd been seeing my mother draw nudes and I'd copy her -- and the nun slapped me on my face and said, "Sweet Jesus, this kid has already begun." I had no clue what she was talking about, but it was convincing enough for me never to draw again until the ninth grade. Thanks to a really boring lecture, I started caricaturing my teachers in school. And, you know, I got a lot of popularity. I don't play sports. I'm really bad at sports. I don't have the fanciest gadgets at home. I'm not on top of the class. So for me, cartooning gave me a sense of identity. I got popular, but I was scared I'd get caught again. So what I did was I quickly put together a collage of all the teachers I had drawn, glorified my school principal, put him right on top, and gifted it to him. He had a good laugh at the other teachers and put it up on the notice board. (Laughter) This is a part of that. And I became a school hero. All my seniors knew me. I felt really special. I have to tell you a little bit about my family. That's my mother. I love her to bits. She's the one who taught me how to draw and, more importantly, how to love. She's a bit of a hippie. She said, "Don't say that," but I'm saying it anyway. The rest of my family are boring academics, busy collecting Ivy League decals for our classic Ambassador car. My father's a little different. My father believed in a holistic approach to living, and, you know, every time he taught us, he'd say, "I hate these books, because these books are hijacked by Industrial Revolution." While he still held that worldview, I was 16, I got the best lawyer in town, my older brother Karthik, and I sat him down, and I said, "Pa, from today onwards I've decided I'm going to be disciplined, I'm going to be curious, I'm going to learn something new every day, I'm going to be very hard working, and I'm not going to depend on you emotionally or financially." And he was very impressed. He was all tearing up. Ready to hug me. And I said, "Hold that thought." I said, "Can I quit school then?" But, to cut a long story short, I quit school to pursue a career as a cartoonist. I must have done about 30,000 caricatures. I would do birthday parties, weddings, divorces, anything for anyone who wanted to use my services. But, most importantly, while I was traveling, I taught children cartooning, and in exchange, I learned how to be spontaneous. And mad and crazy and fun. When I started teaching them, I said let me start doing this professionally. When I was 18 I started my own school. However, an 18 year-old trying to start a school is not easy unless you have a big patron or a big supporter. So I was flipping through the pages of the Times of India when I saw that the Prime Minister of India was visiting my home town, Bangalore. And, you know, just like how every cartoonist knows Bush here, and if you had to meet Bush, it would be the funnest thing because his face was a cartoonist's delight. I had to meet my Prime Minister. I went to the place where his helicopter was about to land. I saw layers of security. I caricatured my way through three layers by just impressing the guards, but I got stuck. I got stuck at the third. And what happened was, to my luck, I saw a nuclear scientist at whose party I had done cartoons. I ran up to him, and said, "Hello, sir. How do you do?" He said, "What are you doing here, Raghava?" I said, "I'm here to meet the Prime Minister." He said, "Oh, so am I." I hopped into his car, and off we went through the remaining layers of security. (Applause) Thank you. I sat him down, I caricatured him, and since then I've caricatured hundreds of celebrities. This is one I remember fondly. Salman Rushdie was pissed-off I think because I altered the map of New York, if you notice. (Laughter) Anyway, the next slide I'm about to show you -- (Laughter) Should I just turn that off? The next slide I'm about to show you, is a little more serious. I was hesitant to include this in my presentation because this cartoon was published soon after 9/11. What was, for me, a very naive observation, turned out to be a disaster. That evening, I came home to hundreds of hate mails, hundreds of people telling me how they could have lived another day without seeing this. I was also asked to leave the organization, a cartoonists' organization in America, that for me was my lifeline. That's when I realized, you know, cartoons are really powerful, art comes with responsibility. Anyway, what I did was I decided that I need to take a break. I quit my job at the papers, I closed my school, and I wrapped up my pencils and my brushes and inks, and I decided to go traveling. When I went traveling, I remember, I met this fabulous old man, who I met when I was caricaturing, who turned out to be an artist, in Italy. He invited me to his studio. He said, "Come and visit." When I went, I saw the ghastliest thing ever. I saw this dead, naked effigy of himself hanging from the ceiling. I said, "Oh, my God. What is that?" And I asked him, and he said, "Oh, that thing? In the night, I die. In the morning, I am born again." I thought he was koo koo, but something about that really stuck. I loved it. I thought there was something really beautiful about that. So I said, "I am dead, so I need to be born again." So, I wanted to be a painter like him, except, I don't know how to paint. So, I tried going to the art store. You know, there are a hundred types of brushes. Forget it, they will confuse you even if you know how to draw. So I decided, I'm going to learn to paint by myself. I'm going to show you a very quick clip to show you how I painted and a little bit about my city, Bangalore. (Music) They had to be larger than life. Everything had to be larger. The next painting was even bigger. And even bigger. And for me it was, I had to dance while I painted. It was so exciting. Except, I even started painting dancers. Here for example is a Flamenco dancer, except there was one problem. I didn't know the dance form, so I started following them, and I made some money, sold my paintings and would rush off to France or Spain and work with them. That's Pepe Linares, the renowned Flamenco singer. But I had one problem, my paintings never danced. As much energy as I put into them while making them, they never danced. So I decided -- I had this crazy epiphany at two in the morning. I called my friends, painted on their bodies, and had them dance in front of a painting. And, all of a sudden, my paintings came alive. And then I was fortunate enough to actually perform this in California with Velocity Circus. And I sat like you guys there in the audience. And I saw my work come alive. You know, normally you work in isolation, and you show at a gallery, but here, the work was coming alive, and it had some other artists working with me. The collaborative effort was fabulous. I said, I'm going to collaborate with anybody and everybody I meet. I started doing fashion. This is a fashion show we held in London. The best collaboration, of course, is with children. They are ruthless, they are honest, but they're full of energy and fun. This is a work, a library I designed for the Robin Hood Foundation. And I must say, I spent time in the Bronx working with these kids. And, in exchange for me working with them, they taught me how to be cool. I don't think I've succeeded, but they've taught me. They said, "Stop saying sorry. Say, my bad." (Laughter) Then I said, all this is good, but I want to paint like a real painter. American education is so expensive. I was in India, and I was walking down the streets, and I saw a billboard painter. And these guys paint humongous paintings, and they look really good. And I wondered how they did it from so close. So, one day I had the opportunity to meet one of these guys, and I said, "How do you paint like that? Who taught you?" And he said, "Oh, it's very easy. I can teach you, but we're leaving the city, because billboard painters are a dying, extinct bunch of artists, because digital printing has totally replaced them and hijacked them." I said, in exchange for education in how to paint, I will support them, and I started a company. And since then, I've been painting all over the place. This is a painting I did of my wife in my apartment. This is another painting. And, in fact, I started painting on anything, and started sending them around town. Since I mentioned my wife, the most important collaboration has been with her, Netra. Netra and I met when she was 18. I must have been 19 and a half then, and it was love at first sight. I lived in India. She lived in America. She'd come every two months to visit me, and then I said I'm the man, I'm the man, and I have to reciprocate. I have to travel seven oceans, and I have to come and see you. I did that twice, and I went broke. So then I said, "Nets, what do I do?" She said, "Why don't you send me your paintings? My dad knows a bunch of rich guys. We'll try and con them into buying it, and then..." But it turned out, after I sent the works to her, that her dad's friends, like most of you, are geeks. I'm joking. (Laughter) No, they were really big geeks, and they didn't know much about art. So Netra was stuck with 30 paintings of mine. So what we did was we rented a little van and we drove all over the east coast trying to sell it. She contacted anyone and everyone who was willing to buy my work. She made enough money, she sold off the whole collection and made enough money to move me for four years with lawyers, a company, everything, and she became my manager. That's us in New York. Notice one thing, we're equal here. Something happened along the line. (Laughter) But this brought me -- with Netra managing my career -- it brought me a lot of success. I was really happy. I thought of myself as a bit of a rockstar. I loved the attention. This is all the press we got, and we said, it's time to celebrate. And I said that the best way to celebrate is to marry Netra. I said, "Let's get married." And I said, "Not just married. Let's invite everyone who's helped us, all the people who bought our work." And you won't believe it, we put together a list of 7,000 people, who had made a difference -- a ridiculous list, but I was determined to bring them to India, so -- a lot of them were in India. 150 artists volunteered to help me with my wedding. We had fashion designers, installation artists, models, we had makeup artists, jewelry designers, all kinds of people working with me to make my wedding an art installation. And I had a special installation in tribute to my in-laws. I had the vegetable carvers work on that for me. But all this excitement led to the press writing about us. We were in the papers, we're still in the news three years later, but, unfortunately, something tragic happened right after. My mother fell very ill. I love my mother and I was told all of a sudden that she was going to die. And they said you have to say bye to her, you have to do what you have to do. And I was devastated. I had shows booked up for another year. I was on a high. And I couldn't. I could not. My life was not exuberant. I could not live this larger than life person. I started exploring the darker abscesses of the human mind. Of course, my work turned ugly, but another thing happened. I lost all my audiences. The Bollywood stars who I would party with and buy my work disappeared. The collectors, the friends, the press, everyone said, "Nice, but thank you." "No thank you," was more like it. But I wanted people to actually feel my work from their gut, because I was painting it from my gut. If they wanted beauty, I said, this is the beauty I'm willing to give you. It's politicized. Of course, none of them liked it. My works also turned autobiographical. At this point, something else happened. A very, very dear friend of mine came out of the closet, and in India at that time, it was illegal to be gay, and it's disgusting to see how people respond to a gay person. I was very upset. I remember the time when my mother used to dress me up as a little girl -- that's me there -- because she wanted a girl, and she has only boys. (Laughter) Anyway, I don't know what my friends are going to say after this talk. It's a secret. So, after this, my works turned a little violent. I talked about this masculinity that one need not perform. And I talked about the weakness of male sexuality. This time, not only did my collectors disappear, the political activists decided to ban me and to threaten me and to forbid me from showing. It turned nasty, and I'm a bit of a chicken. I can't deal with any threat. This was a big threat. So, I decided it was time to end and go back home. This time I said let's try something different. I need to be reborn again. And I thought the best way, as most of you know who have children, the best way to have a new lease on life, is to have a child. I decided to have a child, and before I did that, I quickly studied what can go wrong. How can a family get dysfunctional? And Rudra was born. That's my little son. And two magical things happened after he was born. My mother miraculously recovered after a serious operation, and this man was elected president of this country. You know I sat at home and I watched. I teared up and I said that's where I want to be. So Netra and I wound up our life, closed up everything we had, and we decided to move to New York. And this was just eight months ago. I moved back to New York, my work has changed. Everything about my work has become more whimsical. This one is called "What the Fuck Was I Thinking?" It talks about mental incest. You know, I may appear to be a very nice, clean, sweet boy. But I'm not. I'm capable of thinking anything. But I'm very civil in my action, I assure you. (Laughter) These are just different cartoons. And, before I go, I want to tell you a little story. I was talking to mother and father this morning, and my dad said, "I know you have so much you want to say, but you have to talk about your work with children." So I said, okay. I work with children all over the world, and that's an entirely different talk, but I want to leave you with one story that really, really inspired me. I met Belinda when she was 16. I was 17. I was in Australia, and Belinda had cancer, and I was told she's not going to live very long. They, in fact, told me three weeks. I walk into her room, and there was a shy girl, and she was bald, and she was trying to hide her baldness. I whipped out my pen, and I started drawing on her head and I drew a crown for her. And then, we started talking, and we spent a lovely time -- I told her how I ended up in Australia, how I backpacked and who I conned, and how I got a ticket, and all the stories. And I drew it out for her. And then I left. Belinda died and within a few days of her death, they published a book for her, and she used my cartoon on the cover. And she wrote a little note, she said, "Hey Rags, thank you for the magic carpet ride around the world." For me, my art is my magic carpet ride. I hope you will join me in this magic carpet ride, and touch children and be honest. Thank you so much. (Applause)

Life is about opportunities, creating them and embracing them, and for me, that was the Olympic dream. That's what defined me. That was my bliss. As a cross-country skier and member of the Australian ski team, headed towards the Winter Olympics, I was on a training bike ride with my fellow teammates. As we made our way up towards the spectacular Blue Mountains west of Sydney, it was the perfect autumn day: sunshine, the smell of eucalypt and a dream. Life was good. We'd been on our bikes for around five and half hours when we got to the part of the ride that I loved, and that was the hills, because I loved the hills. And I got up off the seat of my bike, and I started pumping my legs, and as I sucked in the cold mountain air, I could feel it burning my lungs, and I looked up to see the sun shining in my face. And then everything went black. Where was I? What was happening? My body was consumed by pain. I'd been hit by a speeding utility truck with only 10 minutes to go on the bike ride. I was airlifted from the scene of the accident by a rescue helicopter to a large spinal unit in Sydney. I had extensive and life-threatening injuries. I'd broken my neck and my back in six places. I broke five ribs on my left side. I broke my right arm. I broke my collarbone. I broke some bones in my feet. My whole right side was ripped open, filled with gravel. My head was cut open across the front, lifted back, exposing the skull underneath. I had head injures. I had internal injuries. I had massive blood loss. In fact, I lost about five liters of blood, which is all someone my size would actually hold. By the time the helicopter arrived at Prince Henry Hospital in Sydney, my blood pressure was 40 over nothing. I was having a really bad day. (Laughter) For over 10 days, I drifted between two dimensions. I had an awareness of being in my body, but also being out of my body, somewhere else, watching from above as if it was happening to someone else. Why would I want to go back to a body that was so broken? But this voice kept calling me: "Come on, stay with me." "No. It's too hard." "Come on. This is our opportunity." "No. That body is broken. It can no longer serve me." "Come on. Stay with me. We can do it. We can do it together." I was at a crossroads. I knew if I didn't return to my body, I'd have to leave this world forever. It was the fight of my life. After 10 days, I made the decision to return to my body, and the internal bleeding stopped. The next concern was whether I would walk again, because I was paralyzed from the waist down. They said to my parents, the neck break was a stable fracture, but the back was completely crushed. The vertebra at L1 was like you'd dropped a peanut, stepped on it, smashed it into thousands of pieces. They'd have to operate. They went in. They put me on a beanbag. They cut me, literally cut me in half, I have a scar that wraps around my entire body. They picked as much broken bone as they could that had lodged in my spinal cord. They took out two of my broken ribs, and they rebuilt my back, L1, they rebuilt it, they took out another broken rib, they fused T12, L1 and L2 together. Then they stitched me up. They took an entire hour to stitch me up. I woke up in intensive care, and the doctors were really excited that the operation had been a success because at that stage I had a little bit of movement in one of my big toes, and I thought, "Great, because I'm going to the Olympics!" (Laughter) I had no idea. That's the sort of thing that happens to someone else, not me, surely. But then the doctor came over to me, and she said, "Janine, the operation was a success, and we've picked as much bone out of your spinal cord as we could, but the damage is permanent. The central nervous system nerves, there is no cure. You're what we call a partial paraplegic, and you'll have all of the injuries that go along with that. You have no feeling from the waist down, and at most, you might get 10- or 20-percent return. You'll have internal injuries for the rest of your life. You'll have to use a catheter for the rest of your life. And if you walk again, it will be with calipers and a walking frame." And then she said, "Janine, you'll have to rethink everything you do in your life, because you're never going to be able to do the things you did before." I tried to grasp what she was saying. I was an athlete. That's all I knew. That's all I'd done. If I couldn't do that, then what could I do? And the question I asked myself is, if I couldn't do that, then who was I? They moved me from intensive care to acute spinal. I was lying on a thin, hard spinal bed. I had no movement in my legs. I had tight stockings on to protect from blood clots. I had one arm in plaster, one arm tied down by drips. I had a neck brace and sandbags on either side of my head and I saw my world through a mirror that was suspended above my head. I shared the ward with five other people, and the amazing thing is that because we were all lying paralyzed in a spinal ward, we didn't know what each other looked like. How amazing is that? How often in life do you get to make friendships, judgment-free, purely based on spirit? And there were no superficial conversations as we shared our innermost thoughts, our fears, and our hopes for life after the spinal ward. I remember one night, one of the nurses came in, Jonathan, with a whole lot of plastic straws. He put a pile on top of each of us, and he said, "Start threading them together." Well, there wasn't much else to do in the spinal ward, so we did. And when we'd finished, he went around silently and he joined all of the straws up till it looped around the whole ward, and then he said, "Okay, everybody, hold on to your straws." And we did. And he said, "Right. Now we're all connected." And as we held on, and we breathed as one, we knew we weren't on this journey alone. And even lying paralyzed in the spinal ward, there were moments of incredible depth and richness, of authenticity and connection that I had never experienced before. And each of us knew that when we left the spinal ward we would never be the same. After six months, it was time to go home. I remember Dad pushing me outside in my wheelchair, wrapped in a plaster body cast, and feeling the sun on my face for the first time. I soaked it up and I thought, how could I ever have taken this for granted? I felt so incredibly grateful for my life. But before I left the hospital, the head nurse had said to me, "Janine, I want you to be ready, because when you get home, something's going to happen." And I said, "What?" And she said, "You're going to get depressed." And I said, "Not me, not Janine the Machine," which was my nickname. She said, "You are, because, see, it happens to everyone. In the spinal ward, that's normal. You're in a wheelchair. That's normal. But you're going to get home and realize how different life is." And I got home and something happened. I realized Sister Sam was right. I did get depressed. I was in my wheelchair. I had no feeling from the waist down, attached to a catheter bottle. I couldn't walk. I'd lost so much weight in the hospital I now weighed about 80 pounds. And I wanted to give up. All I wanted to do was put my running shoes on and run out the door. I wanted my old life back. I wanted my body back. And I can remember Mom sitting on the end of my bed, and saying, "I wonder if life will ever be good again." And I thought, "How could it? Because I've lost everything that I valued, everything that I'd worked towards. Gone." And the question I asked was, "Why me? Why me?" And then I remembered my friends that were still in the spinal ward, particularly Maria. Maria was in a car accident, and she woke up on her 16th birthday to the news that she was a complete quadriplegic, had no movement from the neck down, had damage to her vocal chords, and she couldn't talk. They told me, "We're going to move you next to her because we think it will be good for her." I was worried. I didn't know how I'd react to being next to her. I knew it would be challenging, but it was actually a blessing, because Maria always smiled. She was always happy, and even when she began to talk again, albeit difficult to understand, she never complained, not once. And I wondered how had she ever found that level of acceptance. And I realized that this wasn't just my life. It was life itself. I realized that this wasn't just my pain. It was everybody's pain. And then I knew, just like before, that I had a choice. I could keep fighting this or I could let go and accept not only my body but the circumstances of my life. And then I stopped asking, "Why me?" And I started to ask, "Why not me?" And then I thought to myself, maybe being at rock bottom is actually the perfect place to start. I had never before thought of myself as a creative person. I was an athlete. My body was a machine. But now I was about to embark on the most creative project that any of us could ever do: that of rebuilding a life. And even though I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do, in that uncertainty came a sense of freedom. I was no longer tied to a set path. I was free to explore life's infinite possibilities. And that realization was about to change my life. Sitting at home in my wheelchair and my plaster body cast, an airplane flew overhead, and I looked up, and I thought to myself, "That's it! If I can't walk, then I might as well fly." I said, "Mom, I'm going to learn how to fly." She said, "That's nice, dear." (Laughter) I said, "Pass me the yellow pages." She passed me the phone book, I rang up the flying school, I made a booking, said I'd like to make a booking to come out for a flight. They said, "You know, when do you want to come out?" I said, "Well, I have to get a friend to drive me out because I can't drive. Sort of can't walk either. Is that a problem?" I made a booking, and weeks later my friend Chris and my mom drove me out to the airport, all 80 pounds of me covered in a plaster body cast in a baggy pair of overalls. (Laughter) I can tell you, I did not look like the ideal candidate to get a pilot's license. (Laughter) I'm holding on to the counter because I can't stand. I said, "Hi, I'm here for a flying lesson." And they took one look and ran out the back to draw short straws. "You get her.""No, no, you take her." Finally this guy comes out. He goes, "Hi, I'm Andrew, and I'm going to take you flying." I go, "Great." And so they drive me down, they get me out on the tarmac, and there was this red, white and blue airplane. It was beautiful. They lifted me into the cockpit. They had to slide me up on the wing, put me in the cockpit. They sat me down. There are buttons and dials everywhere. I'm going, "Wow, how do you ever know what all these buttons and dials do?" Andrew the instructor got in the front, started the airplane up. He said, "Would you like to have a go at taxiing?" That's when you use your feet to control the rudder pedals to control the airplane on the ground. I said, "No, I can't use my legs." He went, "Oh." I said, "But I can use my hands," and he said, "Okay." So he got over to the runway, and he applied the power. And as we took off down the runway, and the wheels lifted up off the tarmac, and we became airborne, I had the most incredible sense of freedom. And Andrew said to me, as we got over the training area, "You see that mountain over there?" And I said, "Yeah." And he said, "Well, you take the controls, and you fly towards that mountain." And as I looked up, I realized that he was pointing towards the Blue Mountains where the journey had begun. And I took the controls, and I was flying. And I was a long, long way from that spinal ward, and I knew right then that I was going to be a pilot. Didn't know how on Earth I'd ever pass a medical. But I'd worry about that later, because right now I had a dream. So I went home, I got a training diary out, and I had a plan. And I practiced my walking as much as I could, and I went from the point of two people holding me up to one person holding me up to the point where I could walk around the furniture as long as it wasn't too far apart. And then I made great progression to the point where I could walk around the house, holding onto the walls, like this, and Mom said she was forever following me, wiping off my fingerprints. (Laughter) But at least she always knew where I was. So while the doctors continued to operate and put my body back together again, I went on with my theory study, and then eventually, and amazingly, I passed my pilot's medical, and that was my green light to fly. And I spent every moment I could out at that flying school, way out of my comfort zone, all these young guys that wanted to be Qantas pilots, you know, and little old hop-along me in first my plaster cast, and then my steel brace, my baggy overalls, my bag of medication and catheters and my limp, and they used to look at me and think, "Oh, who is she kidding? She's never going to be able to do this." And sometimes I thought that too. But that didn't matter, because now there was something inside that burned that far outweighed my injuries. And little goals kept me going along the way, and eventually I got my private pilot's license, and then I learned to navigate, and I flew my friends around Australia. And then I learned to fly an airplane with two engines and I got my twin engine rating. And then I learned to fly in bad weather as well as fine weather and got my instrument rating. And then I got my commercial pilot's license. And then I got my instructor rating. And then I found myself back at that same school where I'd gone for that very first flight, teaching other people how to fly, just under 18 months after I'd left the spinal ward. (Applause) And then I thought, "Why stop there? Why not learn to fly upside down?" And I did, and I learned to fly upside down and became an aerobatics flying instructor. And Mom and Dad? Never been up. But then I knew for certain that although my body might be limited, it was my spirit that was unstoppable. The philosopher Lao Tzu once said, "When you let go of what you are, you become what you might be." I now know that it wasn't until I let go of who I thought I was that I was able to create a completely new life. It wasn't until I let go of the life I thought I should have that I was able to embrace the life that was waiting for me. I now know that my real strength never came from my body, and although my physical capabilities have changed dramatically, who I am is unchanged. The pilot light inside of me was still a light, just as it is in each and every one of us. I know that I'm not my body, and I also know that you're not yours. And then it no longer matters what you look like, where you come from, or what you do for a living. All that matters is that we continue to fan the flame of humanity by living our lives as the ultimate creative expression of who we really are, because we are all connected by millions and millions of straws, and it's time to join those up and to hang on. And if we are to move towards our collective bliss, it's time we shed our focus on the physical and instead embrace the virtues of the heart. So raise your straws if you'll join me. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you.

When I was a student here in Oxford in the 1970s, the future of the world was bleak. The population explosion was unstoppable. Global famine was inevitable. A cancer epidemic caused by chemicals in the environment was going to shorten our lives. The acid rain was falling on the forests. The desert was advancing by a mile or two a year. The oil was running out, and a nuclear winter would finish us off. None of those things happened, (Laughter) and astonishingly, if you look at what actually happened in my lifetime, the average per-capita income of the average person on the planet, in real terms, adjusted for inflation, has tripled. Lifespan is up by 30 percent in my lifetime. Child mortality is down by two-thirds. Per-capita food production is up by a third. And all this at a time when the population has doubled. How did we achieve that, whether you think it's a good thing or not? How did we achieve that? How did we become the only species that becomes more prosperous as it becomes more populous? The size of the blob in this graph represents the size of the population, and the level of the graph represents GDP per capita. I think to answer that question you need to understand how human beings bring together their brains and enable their ideas to combine and recombine, to meet and, indeed, to mate. In other words, you need to understand how ideas have sex. I want you to imagine how we got from making objects like this to making objects like this. These are both real objects. One is an Acheulean hand axe from half a million years ago of the kind made by Homo erectus. The other is obviously a computer mouse. They're both exactly the same size and shape to an uncanny degree. I've tried to work out which is bigger, and it's almost impossible. And that's because they're both designed to fit the human hand. They're both technologies. In the end, their similarity is not that interesting. It just tells you they were both designed to fit the human hand. The differences are what interest me, because the one on the left was made to a pretty unvarying design for about a million years -- from one-and-a-half million years ago to half a million years ago. Homo erectus made the same tool for 30,000 generations. Of course there were a few changes, but tools changed slower than skeletons in those days. There was no progress, no innovation. It's an extraordinary phenomenon, but it's true. Whereas the object on the right is obsolete after five years. And there's another difference too, which is the object on the left is made from one substance. The object on the right is made from a confection of different substances, from silicon and metal and plastic and so on. And more than that, it's a confection of different ideas, the idea of plastic, the idea of a laser, the idea of transistors. They've all been combined together in this technology. And it's this combination, this cumulative technology, that intrigues me, because I think it's the secret to understanding what's happening in the world. My body's an accumulation of ideas too: the idea of skin cells, the idea of brain cells, the idea of liver cells. They've come together. How does evolution do cumulative, combinatorial things? Well, it uses sexual reproduction. In an asexual species, if you get two different mutations in different creatures, a green one and a red one, then one has to be better than the other. One goes extinct for the other to survive. But if you have a sexual species, then it's possible for an individual to inherit both mutations from different lineages. So what sex does is it enables the individual to draw upon the genetic innovations of the whole species. It's not confined to its own lineage. What's the process that's having the same effect in cultural evolution as sex is having in biological evolution? And I think the answer is exchange, the habit of exchanging one thing for another. It's a unique human feature. No other animal does it. You can teach them in the laboratory to do a little bit of exchange -- and indeed there's reciprocity in other animals -- But the exchange of one object for another never happens. As Adam Smith said, "No man ever saw a dog make a fair exchange of a bone with another dog." (Laughter) You can have culture without exchange. You can have, as it were, asexual culture. Chimpanzees, killer whales, these kinds of creatures, they have culture. They teach each other traditions which are handed down from parent to offspring. In this case, chimpanzees teaching each other how to crack nuts with rocks. But the difference is that these cultures never expand, never grow, never accumulate, never become combinatorial, and the reason is because there is no sex, as it were, there is no exchange of ideas. Chimpanzee troops have different cultures in different troops. There's no exchange of ideas between them. And why does exchange raise living standards? Well, the answer came from David Ricardo in 1817. And here is a Stone Age version of his story, although he told it in terms of trade between countries. Adam takes four hours to make a spear and three hours to make an axe. Oz takes one hour to make a spear and two hours to make an axe. So Oz is better at both spears and axes than Adam. He doesn't need Adam. He can make his own spears and axes. Well no, because if you think about it, if Oz makes two spears and Adam make two axes, and then they trade, then they will each have saved an hour of work. And the more they do this, the more true it's going to be, because the more they do this, the better Adam is going to get at making axes and the better Oz is going to get at making spears. So the gains from trade are only going to grow. And this is one of the beauties of exchange, is it actually creates the momentum for more specialization, which creates the momentum for more exchange and so on. Adam and Oz both saved an hour of time. That is prosperity, the saving of time in satisfying your needs. Ask yourself how long you would have to work to provide for yourself an hour of reading light this evening to read a book by. If you had to start from scratch, let's say you go out into the countryside. You find a sheep. You kill it. You get the fat out of it. You render it down. You make a candle, etc. etc. How long is it going to take you? Quite a long time. How long do you actually have to work to earn an hour of reading light if you're on the average wage in Britain today? And the answer is about half a second. Back in 1950, you would have had to work for eight seconds on the average wage to acquire that much light. And that's seven and a half seconds of prosperity that you've gained since 1950, as it were, because that's seven and a half seconds in which you can do something else, or you can acquire another good or service. And back in 1880, it would have been 15 minutes to earn that amount of light on the average wage. Back in 1800, you'd have had to work six hours to earn a candle that could burn for an hour. In other words, the average person on the average wage could not afford a candle in 1800. Go back to this image of the axe and the mouse, and ask yourself: "Who made them and for who?" The stone axe was made by someone for himself. It was self-sufficiency. We call that poverty these days. But the object on the right was made for me by other people. How many other people? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? You know, I think it's probably millions. Because you've got to include the man who grew the coffee, which was brewed for the man who was on the oil rig, who was drilling for oil, which was going to be made into the plastic, etc. They were all working for me, to make a mouse for me. And that's the way society works. That's what we've achieved as a species. In the old days, if you were rich, you literally had people working for you. That's how you got to be rich; you employed them. Louis XIV had a lot of people working for him. They made his silly outfits, like this, (Laughter) and they did his silly hairstyles, or whatever. He had 498 people to prepare his dinner every night. But a modern tourist going around the palace of Versailles and looking at Louis XIV's pictures, he has 498 people doing his dinner tonight too. They're in bistros and cafes and restaurants and shops all over Paris, and they're all ready to serve you at an hour's notice with an excellent meal that's probably got higher quality than Louis XIV even had. And that's what we've done, because we're all working for each other. We're able to draw upon specialization and exchange to raise each other's living standards. Now, you do get other animals working for each other too. Ants are a classic example; workers work for queens and queens work for workers. But there's a big difference, which is that it only happens within the colony. There's no working for each other across the colonies. And the reason for that is because there's a reproductive division of labor. That is to say, they specialize with respect to reproduction. The queen does it all. In our species, we don't like doing that. It's the one thing we insist on doing for ourselves, is reproduction. (Laughter) Even in England, we don't leave reproduction to the Queen. (Applause) So when did this habit start? And how long has it been going on? And what does it mean? Well, I think, probably, the oldest version of this is probably the sexual division of labor. But I've got no evidence for that. It just looks like the first thing we did was work male for female and female for male. In all hunter-gatherer societies today, there's a foraging division of labor between, on the whole, hunting males and gathering females. It isn't always quite that simple, but there's a distinction between specialized roles for males and females. And the beauty of this system is that it benefits both sides. The woman knows that, in the Hadzas' case here -- digging roots to share with men in exchange for meat -- she knows that all she has to do to get access to protein is to dig some extra roots and trade them for meat. And she doesn't have to go on an exhausting hunt and try and kill a warthog. And the man knows that he doesn't have to do any digging to get roots. All he has to do is make sure that when he kills a warthog it's big enough to share some. And so both sides raise each other's standards of living through the sexual division of labor. When did this happen? We don't know, but it's possible that Neanderthals didn't do this. They were a highly cooperative species. They were a highly intelligent species. Their brains on average, by the end, were bigger than yours and mine in this room today. They were imaginative. They buried their dead. They had language, probably, because we know they had the FOXP2 gene of the same kind as us, which was discovered here in Oxford. And so it looks like they probably had linguistic skills. They were brilliant people. I'm not dissing the Neanderthals. But there's no evidence of a sexual division of labor. There's no evidence of gathering behavior by females. It looks like the females were cooperative hunters with the men. And the other thing there's no evidence for is exchange between groups, because the objects that you find in Neanderthal remains, the tools they made, are always made from local materials. For example, in the Caucasus there's a site where you find local Neanderthal tools. They're always made from local chert. In the same valley there are modern human remains from about the same date, 30,000 years ago, and some of those are from local chert, but more -- but many of them are made from obsidian from a long way away. And when human beings began moving objects around like this, it was evidence that they were exchanging between groups. Trade is 10 times as old as farming. People forget that. People think of trade as a modern thing. Exchange between groups has been going on for a hundred thousand years. And the earliest evidence for it crops up somewhere between 80 and 120,000 years ago in Africa, when you see obsidian and jasper and other things moving long distances in Ethiopia. You also see seashells -- as discovered by a team here in Oxford -- moving 125 miles inland from the Mediterranean in Algeria. And that's evidence that people have started exchanging between groups. And that will have led to specialization. How do you know that long-distance movement means trade rather than migration? Well, you look at modern hunter gatherers like aboriginals, who quarried for stone axes at a place called Mount Isa, which was a quarry owned by the Kalkadoon tribe. They traded them with their neighbors for things like stingray barbs, and the consequence was that stone axes ended up over a large part of Australia. So long-distance movement of tools is a sign of trade, not migration. What happens when you cut people off from exchange, from the ability to exchange and specialize? And the answer is that not only do you slow down technological progress, you can actually throw it into reverse. An example is Tasmania. When the sea level rose and Tasmania became an island 10,000 years ago, the people on it not only experienced slower progress than people on the mainland, they actually experienced regress. They gave up the ability to make stone tools and fishing equipment and clothing because the population of about 4,000 people was simply not large enough to maintain the specialized skills necessary to keep the technology they had. It's as if the people in this room were plonked on a desert island. How many of the things in our pockets could we continue to make after 10,000 years? It didn't happen in Tierra del Fuego -- similar island, similar people. The reason: because Tierra del Fuego is separated from South America by a much narrower straight, and there was trading contact across that straight throughout 10,000 years. The Tasmanians were isolated. Go back to this image again and ask yourself, not only who made it and for who, but who knew how to make it. In the case of the stone axe, the man who made it knew how to make it. But who knows how to make a computer mouse? Nobody, literally nobody. There is nobody on the planet who knows how to make a computer mouse. I mean this quite seriously. The president of the computer mouse company doesn't know. He just knows how to run a company. The person on the assembly line doesn't know because he doesn't know how to drill an oil well to get oil out to make plastic, and so on. We all know little bits, but none of us knows the whole. I am of course quoting from a famous essay by Leonard Read, the economist in the 1950s, called "I, Pencil" in which he wrote about how a pencil came to be made, and how nobody knows even how to make a pencil, because the people who assemble it don't know how to mine graphite, and they don't know how to fell trees and that kind of thing. And what we've done in human society, through exchange and specialization, is we've created the ability to do things that we don't even understand. It's not the same with language. With language we have to transfer ideas that we understand with each other. But with technology, we can actually do things that are beyond our capabilities. We've gone beyond the capacity of the human mind to an extraordinary degree. And by the way, that's one of the reasons that I'm not interested in the debate about I.Q., about whether some groups have higher I.Q.s than other groups. It's completely irrelevant. What's relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas, and how well they're cooperating, not how clever the individuals are. So we've created something called the collective brain. We're just the nodes in the network. We're the neurons in this brain. It's the interchange of ideas, the meeting and mating of ideas between them, that is causing technological progress, incrementally, bit by bit. However, bad things happen. And in the future, as we go forward, we will, of course, experience terrible things. There will be wars; there will be depressions; there will be natural disasters. Awful things will happen in this century, I'm absolutely sure. But I'm also sure that, because of the connections people are making, and the ability of ideas to meet and to mate as never before, I'm also sure that technology will advance, and therefore living standards will advance. Because through the cloud, through crowd sourcing, through the bottom-up world that we've created, where not just the elites but everybody is able to have their ideas and make them meet and mate, we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation. Thank you. (Applause)

On September 10, the morning of my seventh birthday, I came downstairs to the kitchen, where my mother was washing the dishes and my father was reading the paper or something, and I sort of presented myself to them in the doorway, and they said, "Hey, happy birthday!" And I said, "I'm seven." And my father smiled and said, "Well, you know what that means, don't you?" And I said, "Yeah, that I'm going to have a party and a cake and get a lot of presents?" And my dad said, "Well, yes. But, more importantly, being seven means that you've reached the age of reason, and you're now capable of committing any and all sins against God and man." (Laughter) Now, I had heard this phrase, "age of reason," before. Sister Mary Kevin had been bandying it about my second-grade class at school. But when she said it, the phrase seemed all caught up in the excitement of preparations for our first communion and our first confession, and everybody knew that was really all about the white dress and the white veil, and anyway, I hadn't really paid all that much attention to that phrase, "age of reason." So, I said, "Yeah, yeah, age of reason. What does that mean again?" And my dad said, "Well, we believe in the Catholic Church that God knows that little kids don't know the difference between right and wrong, but when you're seven, you're old enough to know better. So, you've grown up, and reached the age of reason, and now God will start keeping notes on you and begin your permanent record." (Laughter) And I said, "Oh. Wait a minute. You mean all that time, up till today, all that time I was so good, God didn't notice it?" And my mom said, "Well, I noticed it." (Laughter) And I thought, "How could I not have known this before? How could it not have sunk in when they'd been telling me? All that being good and no real credit for it. And, worst of all, how could I not have realized this very important information until the very day that it was basically useless to me?" So I said, "Well, Mom and Dad, what about Santa Claus? I mean, Santa Claus knows if you're naughty or nice, right?" And my dad said, "Yeah, but, honey, I think that's technically just between Thanksgiving and Christmas." And my mother said, "Oh, Bob, stop it. Let's just tell her. I mean, she's seven. Julie, there is no Santa Claus." (Laughter) Now, this was actually not that upsetting to me. My parents had this whole elaborate story about Santa Claus: how they had talked to Santa Claus himself and agreed that instead of Santa delivering our presents over the night of Christmas Eve, like he did for every other family who got to open their surprises first thing Christmas morning, our family would give Santa more time. Santa would come to our house while we were at nine o'clock high mass on Christmas morning, but only if all of us kids did not make a fuss. Which made me very suspicious. It was pretty obvious that it was really our parents giving us the presents. I mean, my dad had a very distinctive wrapping style, and my mother's handwriting was so close to Santa's. Plus, why would Santa save time by having to loop back to our house after he'd gone to everybody else's? There's only one obvious conclusion to reach from this mountain of evidence: our family was too strange and weird for even Santa Claus to come visit, and my poor parents were trying to protect us from the embarrassment, this humiliation of rejection by Santa, who was jolly -- but, let's face it, he was also very judgmental. So, to find out that there was no Santa Claus at all was actually sort of a relief. I left the kitchen not really in shock about Santa, but rather I was just dumbfounded about how I could have missed this whole age of reason thing. It was too late for me, but maybe I could help someone else, someone who could use the information. They had to fit two criteria: they had to be old enough to be able to understand the whole concept of the age of reason, and not yet seven. The answer was clear: my brother Bill. He was six. Well, I finally found Bill about a block away from our house at this public school playground. It was a Saturday, and he was all by himself, just kicking a ball against the side of a wall. I ran up to him and said, "Bill! I just realized that the age of reason starts when you turn seven, and then you're capable of committing any and all sins against God and man." And Bill said, "So?" And then I said, "So, you're six. You have a whole year to do anything you want to and God won't notice it." And he said, "So?" And I said, "So? So everything!" And I turned to run. I was so angry with him. But when I got to the top of the steps, I turned around dramatically and said, "Oh, by the way, Bill, there is no Santa Claus." (Laughter) Now, I didn't know it at the time, but I really wasn't turning seven on September 10. For my 13th birthday, I planned a slumber party with all of my girlfriends, but a couple of weeks beforehand my mother took me aside and said, "I need to speak to you privately. September 10 is not your birthday. It's October 10." And I said, "What?" (Laughter) And she said, "Listen. The cut-off date to start kindergarten was September 15." (Laughter) "So, I told them that your birthday was on September 10, and then I wasn't sure that you weren't just going to go blab it all over the place, so I started to tell you your birthday was September 10. But, Julie, you were so ready to start school, honey. You were so ready." I thought about it, and when I was four, I was already the oldest of four children, and my mother even had another child to come, so what I think she understandably really meant was that she was so ready, she was so ready. Then she said, "Don't worry, Julie, every year on October 10 when it was your birthday but you didn't realize it, I made sure that you ate a piece of cake that day." (Laughter) Which was comforting, but troubling. My mother had been celebrating my birthday with me, without me. What was so upsetting about this new piece of information was not that I was going to have to change the date of my slumber party with all of my girlfriends, what was most upsetting was that this meant that I was not a Virgo. I had a huge Virgo poster in my bedroom, and I read my horoscope every single day, and it was so totally me. (Laughter) And this meant that I was a Libra? So, I took the bus downtown to get the new Libra poster. The Virgo poster is a picture of a beautiful woman with long hair, sort of lounging by some water, but the Libra poster is just a huge scale. This was around the time that I started filling out physically, and I was filling out a lot more than a lot of the other girls, and, frankly, the whole idea that my astrological sign was a scale just seemed ominous and depressing. (Laughter) But I got the new Libra poster, and I started to read my new Libra horoscope, and I was astonished to find that it was also totally me. It wasn't until years later, looking back on this whole age-of-reason/change-of-birthday thing, that it dawned on me: I wasn't turning seven when I thought I turned seven. I had a whole other month to do anything I wanted to before God started keeping tabs on me. Oh, life can be so cruel. One day, two Mormon missionaries came to my door. Now, I just live off a main thoroughfare in Los Angeles, and my block is -- well, it's a natural beginning for people who are peddling things door to door. Sometimes I get little old ladies from the Seventh Day Adventist Church showing me these cartoon pictures of heaven. And sometimes I get teenagers who promise me that they won't join a gang and just start robbing people if I only buy some magazine subscriptions from them. So, normally I just ignore the doorbell, but on this day I answered. And there stood two boys, each about 19, in white starched short-sleeved shirts, and they had little name tags that identified them as official representatives of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and they said they had a message for me from God. I said, "A message for me? From God?" And they said, "Yes." Now, I was raised in the Pacific Northwest, around a lot of Church of Latter-day Saints people and, you know, I've worked with them and even dated them, but I never really knew the doctrine or what they said to people when they were out on a mission, and I guess I was, sort of, curious, so I said, "Well, please, come in." And they looked really happy, because I don't think this happens to them all that often. (Laughter) And I sat them down, and I got them glasses of water -- OK, I got it. I got them glasses of water. Don't touch my hair, that's the thing. (Laughter) You can't put a video of myself in front of me and expect me not to fix my hair. (Laughter) OK. So I sat them down and I got them glasses of water, and after niceties they said, "Do you believe that God loves you with all his heart?" And I thought, "Well, of course I believe in God, but, you know, I don't like that word, heart, because it anthropomorphizes God, and I don't like the word, 'his,' either, because that sexualizes God." But I didn't want to argue semantics with these boys, so after a very long, uncomfortable pause, I said "Yes, yes, I do. I feel very loved." And they looked at each other and smiled, like that was the right answer. And then they said, "Do you believe that we're all brothers and sisters on this planet?" And I said, "Yes, I do. Yes, I do." And I was so relieved that it was a question I could answer so quickly. And they said, "Well, then we have a story to tell you." And they told me this story all about this guy named Lehi, who lived in Jerusalem in 600 BC. Now, apparently in Jerusalem in 600 BC, everyone was completely bad and evil. Every single one of them: man, woman, child, infant, fetus. And God came to Lehi and said to him, "Put your family on a boat and I will lead you out of here." And God did lead them. He led them to America. I said, "America? From Jerusalem to America by boat in 600 BC?" And they said, "Yes." (Laughter) Then they told me how Lehi and his descendants reproduced and reproduced, and over the course of 600 years there were two great races of them, the Nephites and the Lamanites, and the Nephites were totally, totally good -- each and every one of them -- and the Lamanites were totally bad and evil -- every single one of them just bad to the bone. (Laughter) Then, after Jesus died on the cross for our sins, on his way up to heaven he stopped by America and visited the Nephites. (Laughter) And he told them that if they all remained totally, totally good -- each and every one of them -- they would win the war against the evil Lamanites. But apparently somebody blew it, because the Lamanites were able to kill all the Nephites. All but one guy, this guy named Mormon, who managed to survive by hiding in the woods. And he made sure this whole story was written down in reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics chiseled onto gold plates, which he then buried near Palmyra, New York. (Laughter) Well, I was just on the edge of my seat. (Laughter) I said, "What happened to the Lamanites?" And they said, "Well, they became our Native Americans here in the U.S." And I said, "So, you believe the Native Americans are descended from a people who were totally evil?" And they said, "Yes." Then they told me how this guy named Joseph Smith found those buried gold plates right in his backyard, and he also found this magic stone back there that he put into his hat and then buried his face into, and this allowed him to translate the gold plates from the reformed Egyptian into English. Well, at this point I just wanted to give these two boys some advice about their pitch. (Laughter) I wanted to say, "OK, don't start with this story." I mean, even the Scientologists know to start with a personality test before they start -- (Applause) -- telling people all about Xenu, the evil intergalactic overlord. Well, then they said, "Do you believe that God speaks to us through his righteous prophets?" And I said, "No, I don't." Because I was, sort of, upset about this Lamanite story and this crazy gold plate story, but the truth was, I hadn't really thought this through, so I backpedaled a little and I said, "Well, what exactly do you mean by righteous? And what do you mean by prophets? Like, could the prophets be women?" And they said, "No." And I said, "Why?" And they said, "Well, it's because God gave women a gift that is so spectacular, it is so wonderful, that the only gift he had left over to give men was the gift of prophecy." What is this wonderful gift God gave women, I wondered? Maybe their greater ability to cooperate and adapt? Women's longer lifespan? The fact that women tend to be much less violent than men? But, no, it wasn't any of these gifts. They said, "Well, it's her ability to bear children." I said, "Oh, come on. I mean, even if women tried to have a baby every single year from the time they were 15 to the time they were 45, assuming they didn't die from exhaustion, it still seems like some women would have some time left over to hear the word of God." And they said, "No." (Laughter) Well, then they didn't look so fresh-faced and cute to me any more, but they had more to say. They said, "Well, we also believe that if you're a Mormon and if you're in good standing with the church, when you die you get to go to heaven and be with your family for all eternity." And I said, "Oh, dear -- (Laughter) -- that wouldn't be such a good incentive for me." (Laughter) And they said, "Oh -- hey, well, we also believe that when you go to heaven you get your body restored to you in its best original state. Like, if you'd lost a leg, well, you get it back. Or, if you'd gone blind, you could see." I said, "Oh -- now, I don't have a uterus because I had cancer a few years ago. So, does this mean that if I went to heaven I would get my old uterus back?" And they said, "Sure." And I said, "I don't want it back. I'm happy without it." Gosh. What if you had a nose job and you liked it? (Laughter) Would God force you to get your old nose back? Well, then they gave me this Book of Mormon, and they told me to read this chapter and that chapter, and they said they'd come back some day and check in on me, and I think I said something like, "Please don't hurry," or maybe it was just, "Please don't," and they were gone. OK, so, I initially felt really superior to these boys, and smug in my more conventional faith. But then, the more I thought about it, the more I had to be honest with myself. If someone came to my door and I was hearing Catholic theology and dogma for the very first time, and they said, "We believe that God impregnated a very young girl without the use of intercourse, and the fact that she was a virgin is maniacally important to us -- (Laughter) -- and she had a baby, and that's the son of God," I mean, I would think that's equally ridiculous. I'm just so used to that story. (Laughter) So, I couldn't let myself feel condescending towards these boys. But the question they asked me when they first arrived really stuck in my head: Did I believe that God loved me with all his heart? Because I wasn't exactly sure how I felt about that question. Now, if they'd asked me, Do you feel that God loves you with all his heart? Well, that would have been much different, I think I would have instantly answered, "Yes, yes, I feel it all the time. I feel God's love when I'm hurt and confused, and I feel consoled and cared for. I take shelter in God's love when I don't understand why tragedy hits, and I feel God's love when I look with gratitude at all the beauty I see." But since they asked me that question with the word believe in it, somehow it was all different, because I wasn't exactly sure if I believed what I so clearly felt.

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

Most of the time, art and science stare at each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension. There is great confusion when the two look at each other. Art, of course, looks at the world through the psyche, the emotions -- the unconscious at times -- and of course the aesthetic. Science tends to look at the world through the rational, the quantitative -- things that can be measured and described -- but it gives art a terrific context of understanding. In the Extreme Ice Survey, we're dedicated to bringing those two parts of human understanding together, to merging the art and science to the end of helping us understand nature and humanity's relationship with nature better. Specifically, I as a person who's been a professional nature photographer my whole adult life, am firmly of the belief that photography, video, film have tremendous powers for helping us understand and shape the way we think about nature and about ourselves in relationship to nature. In this project, we're specifically interested, of course, in ice. I'm fascinated by the beauty of it, the mutability of it, the malleability of it, and the fabulous shapes in which it can carve itself. These first images are from Greenland. But ice has another meaning. Ice is the canary in the global coal mine. It's the place where we can see and touch and hear and feel climate change in action. Climate change is a really abstract thing in most of the world. Whether or not you believe in it is based on your sense of is it raining more or is it raining less? Is it getting hotter or is it getting colder? What do the computer models say about this, that and the other thing? All of that, strip it away. In the world of the arctic and alpine environments, where the ice is, it's real and it's present. The changes are happening. They're very visible. They're photographable. They're measurable. 95 percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking. That's outside Antarctica. 95 percent of the glaciers in the world are retreating or shrinking, and that's because the precipitation patterns and the temperature patterns are changing. There is no significant scientific dispute about that. It's been observed, it's measured, it's bomb-proof information. And the great irony and tragedy of our time is that a lot of the general public thinks that science is still arguing about that. Science is not arguing about that. In these images we see ice from enormous glaciers, ice sheets that are hundreds of thousands of years old breaking up into chunks, and chunk by chunk by chunk, iceberg by iceberg, turning into global sea level rise. So, having seen all of this in the course of a 30-year career, I was still a skeptic about climate change until about 10 years ago, because I thought the story of climate change was based on computer models. I hadn't realized it was based on concrete measurements of what the paleoclimates -- the ancient climates -- were, as recorded in the ice sheets, as recorded in deep ocean sediments, as recorded in lake sediments, tree rings, and a lot of other ways of measuring temperature. When I realized that climate change was real, and it was not based on computer models, I decided that one day I would do a project looking at trying to manifest climate change photographically. And that led me to this project. Initially, I was working on a National Geographic assignment -- conventional, single frame, still photography. And one crazy day, I got the idea that I should -- after that assignment was finished -- I got the idea that I should shoot in time-lapse photography, that I should station a camera or two at a glacier and let it shoot every 15 minutes, or every hour or whatever and watch the progression of the landscape over time. Well, within about three weeks, I incautiously turned that idea of a couple of time-lapse cameras into 25 time-lapse cameras. And the next six months of my life were the hardest time in my career, trying to design, build and deploy out in the field these 25 time-lapse cameras. They are powered by the sun. Solar panels power them. Power goes into a battery. There is a custom made computer that tells the camera when to fire. And these cameras are positioned on rocks on the sides of the glaciers, and they look in on the glacier from permanent, bedrock positions, and they watch the evolution of the landscape. We just had a number of cameras out on the Greenland Ice Sheet. We actually drilled holes into the ice, way deep down below the thawing level, and had some cameras out there for the past month and a half or so. Actually, there's still a camera out there right now. In any case, the cameras shoot roughly every hour. Some of them shoot every half hour, every 15 minutes, every five minutes. Here's a time lapse of one of the time-lapse units being made. (Laughter) I personally obsessed about every nut, bolt and washer in these crazy things. I spent half my life at our local hardware store during the months when we built these units originally. We're working in most of the major glaciated regions of the northern hemisphere. Our time-lapse units are in Alaska, the Rockies, Greenland and Iceland, and we have repeat photography positions, that is places we just visit on an annual basis, in British Columbia, the Alps and Bolivia. It's a big undertaking. I stand here before you tonight as an ambassador for my whole team. There's a lot of people working on this right now. We've got 33 cameras out this moment. We just had 33 cameras shoot about half an hour ago all across the northern hemisphere, watching what's happened. And we've spent a lot of time in the field. It's been a fantastic amount of work. We've been out for two and a half years, and we've got about another two and a half years yet to go. That's only half our job. The other half of our job is to tell the story to the global public. You know, scientists have collected this kind of information off and on over the years, but a lot of it stays within the science community. Similarly, a lot of art projects stay in the art community, and I feel very much a responsibility through mechanisms like TED, and like our relationship with the Obama White House, with the Senate, with John Kerry, to influence policy as much as possible with these pictures as well. We've done films. We've done books. We have more coming. We have a site on Google Earth that Google Earth was generous enough to give us, and so forth, because we feel very much the need to tell this story, because it is such an immediate evidence of ongoing climate change right now. Now, one bit of science before we get into the visuals. If everybody in the developed world understood this graph, and emblazoned it on the inside of their foreheads, there would be no further societal argument about climate change because this is the story that counts. Everything else you hear is just propaganda and confusion. Key issues: this is a 400,000 year record. This exact same pattern is seen going back now almost a million years before our current time. And several things are important. Number one: temperature and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere go up and down basically in sync. You can see that from the orange line and the blue line. Nature naturally has allowed carbon dioxide to go up to 280 parts per million. That's the natural cycle. Goes up to 280 and then drops for various reasons that aren't important to discuss right here. But 280 is the peak. Right now, if you look at the top right part of that graph, we're at 385 parts per million. We are way, way outside the normal, natural variability. Earth is having a fever. In the past hundred years, the temperature of the Earth has gone up 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit, .75 degrees Celsius, and it's going to keep going up because we keep dumping fossil fuels into the atmosphere. At the rate of about two and a half parts per million per year. It's been a remorseless, steady increase. We have to turn that around. That's the crux, and someday I hope to emblazon that across Times Square in New York and a lot of other places. But anyway, off to the world of ice. We're now at the Columbia Glacier in Alaska. This is a view of what's called the calving face. This is what one of our cameras saw over the course of a few months. You see the glacier flowing in from the right, dropping off into the sea, camera shooting every hour. If you look in the middle background, you can see the calving face bobbing up and down like a yo-yo. That means that glacier's floating and it's unstable, and you're about to see the consequences of that floating. To give you a little bit of a sense of scale, that calving face in this picture is about 325 feet tall. That's 32 stories. This is not a little cliff. This is like a major office building in an urban center. The calving face is the wall where the visible ice breaks off, but in fact, it goes down below sea level another couple thousand feet. So there's a wall of ice a couple thousand feet deep going down to bedrock if the glacier's grounded on bedrock, and floating if it isn't. Here's what Columbia's done. This is in south central Alaska. This was an aerial picture I did one day in June three years ago. This is an aerial picture we did this year. That's the retreat of this glacier. The main stem, the main flow of the glacier is coming from the right and it's going very rapidly up that stem. We're going to be up there in just a few more weeks, and we expect that it's probably retreated another half a mile, but if I got there and discovered that it had collapsed and it was five miles further back, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised. Now it's really hard to grasp the scale of these places, because as the glaciers -- one of the things is that places like Alaska and Greenland are huge, they're not normal landscapes -- but as the glaciers are retreating, they're also deflating, like air is being let out of a balloon. And so, there are features on this landscape. There's a ridge right in the middle of the picture, up above where that arrow comes in, that shows you that a little bit. There's a marker line called the trim line above our little red illustration there. This is something no self-respecting photographer would ever do -- you put some cheesy illustration on your shot, right? -- and yet you have to do it sometimes to narrate these points. But, in any case, the deflation of this glacier since 1984 has been higher than the Eiffel Tower, higher than the Empire State Building. A tremendous amount of ice has been let out of these valleys as it's retreated and deflated, gone back up valley. These changes in the alpine world are accelerating. It's not static. Particularly in the world of sea ice, the rate of natural change is outstripping predictions of just a few years ago, and the processes either are accelerating or the predictions were too low to begin with. But in any case, there are big, big changes happening as we speak. So, here's another time-lapse shot of Columbia. And you see where it ended in these various spring days, June, May, then October. Now we turn on our time lapse. This camera was shooting every hour. Geologic process in action here. And everybody says, well don't they advance in the winter time? No. It was retreating through the winter because it's an unhealthy glacier. Finally catches up to itself, it advances. And you can look at these pictures over and over again because there's such a strange, bizarre fascination in seeing these things you don't normally get to see come alive. We've been talking about "seeing is believing " and seeing the unseen at TED Global. That's what you see with these cameras. The images make the invisible visible. These huge crevasses open up. These great ice islands break off -- and now watch this. This has been the springtime this year -- a huge collapse. That happened in about a month, the loss of all that ice. So that's where we started three years ago, way out on the left, and that's where we were a few months ago, the last time we went into Columbia. To give you a feeling for the scale of the retreat, we did another cheesy illustration, with British double-decker buses. If you line up 295 of those nose to tail, that's about how far back that was. It's a long way. On up to Iceland. One of my favorite glaciers, the Sólheimajökull. And here, if you watch, you can see the terminus retreating. You can see this river being formed. You can see it deflating. Without the photographic process, you would never see this. This is invisible. You can stand up there your whole life and you would never see this, but the camera records it. So we wind time backwards now. We go back a couple years in time. That's where it started. That's where it ended a few months ago. And on up to Greenland. The smaller the ice mass, the faster it responds to climate. Greenland took a little while to start reacting to the warming climate of the past century, but it really started galloping along about 20 years ago. And there's been a tremendous increase in the temperature up there. It's a big place. That's all ice. All those colors are ice and it goes up to about two miles thick, just a gigantic dome that comes in from the coast and rises in the middle. The one glacier up in Greenland that puts more ice into the global ocean than all the other glaciers in the northern hemisphere combined is the Ilulissat Glacier. We have some cameras on the south edge of the Ilulissat, watching the calving face as it goes through this dramatic retreat. Here's a two-year record of what that looks like. Helicopter in front of the calving face for scale, quickly dwarfed. The calving face is four and a half miles across, and in this shot, as we pull back, you're only seeing about a mile and a half. So, imagine how big this is and how much ice is charging out. The interior of Greenland is to the right. It's flowing out to the Atlantic Ocean on the left. Icebergs, many, many, many, many times the size of this building, are roaring out to sea. We just downloaded these pictures a couple weeks ago, as you can see. June 25th, monster calving events happened. I'll show you one of those in a second. This glacier has doubled its flow speed in the past 15 years. It now goes at 125 feet a day, dumping all this ice into the ocean. It tends to go in these pulses, about every three days, but on average, 125 feet a day, twice the rate it did 20 years ago. Okay. We had a team out watching this glacier, and we recorded the biggest calving event that's ever been put on film. We had nine cameras going. This is what a couple of the cameras saw. A 400-foot-tall calving face breaking off. Huge icebergs rolling over. Okay, how big was that? It's hard to get it. So an illustration again, gives you a feeling for scale. A mile of retreat in 75 minutes across the calving face, in that particular event, three miles wide. The block was three-fifths of a mile deep, and if you compare the expanse of the calving face to the Tower Bridge in London, about 20 bridges wide. Or if you take an American reference, to the U.S. Capitol Building and you pack 3,000 Capitol Buildings into that block, it would be equivalent to how large that block was. 75 minutes. Now I've come to the conclusion after spending a lot of time in this climate change world that we don't have a problem of economics, technology and public policy. We have a problem of perception. The policy and the economics and the technology are serious enough issues, but we actually can deal with them. I'm certain that we can. But what we have is a perception problem because not enough people really get it yet. You're an elite audience. You get it. Fortunately, a lot of the political leaders in the major countries of the world are an elite audience that for the most part gets it now. But we still need to bring a lot of people along with us. And that's where I think organizations like TED, like the Extreme Ice Survey can have a terrific impact on human perception and bring us along. Because I believe we have an opportunity right now. We are nearly on the edge of a crisis, but we still have an opportunity to face the greatest challenge of our generation and, in fact, of our century. This is a terrific, terrific call to arms to do the right thing for ourselves and for the future. I hope that we have the wisdom to let the angels of our better nature rise to the occasion and do what needs to be done. Thank you. (Applause)

It feels like we're all suffering from information overload or data glut. And the good news is there might be an easy solution to that, and that's using our eyes more. So, visualizing information, so that we can see the patterns and connections that matter and then designing that information so it makes more sense, or it tells a story, or allows us to focus only on the information that's important. Failing that, visualized information can just look really cool. So, let's see. This is the $Billion Dollar o-Gram, and this image arose out of frustration I had with the reporting of billion-dollar amounts in the press. That is, they're meaningless without context: 500 billion for this pipeline, 20 billion for this war. It doesn't make any sense, so the only way to understand it is visually and relatively. So I scraped a load of reported figures from various news outlets and then scaled the boxes according to those amounts. And the colors here represent the motivation behind the money. So purple is "fighting," and red is "giving money away," and green is "profiteering." And what you can see straight away is you start to have a different relationship to the numbers. You can literally see them. But more importantly, you start to see patterns and connections between numbers that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports. Let me point out some that I really like. This is OPEC's revenue, this green box here -- 780 billion a year. And this little pixel in the corner -- three billion -- that's their climate change fund. Americans, incredibly generous people -- over 300 billion a year, donated to charity every year, compared with the amount of foreign aid given by the top 17 industrialized nations at 120 billion. Then of course, the Iraq War, predicted to cost just 60 billion back in 2003. And it mushroomed slightly. Afghanistan and Iraq mushroomed now to 3,000 billion. So now it's great because now we have this texture, and we can add numbers to it as well. So we could say, well, a new figure comes out ... let's see African debt. How much of this diagram do you think might be taken up by the debt that Africa owes to the West? Let's take a look. So there it is: 227 billion is what Africa owes. And the recent financial crisis, how much of this diagram might that figure take up? What has that cost the world? Let's take a look at that. Dooosh -- Which I think is the appropriate sound effect for that much money: 11,900 billion. So, by visualizing this information, we turned it into a landscape that you can explore with your eyes, a kind of map really, a sort of information map. And when you're lost in information, an information map is kind of useful. So I want to show you another landscape now. We need to imagine what a landscape of the world's fears might look like. Let's take a look. This is Mountains Out of Molehills, a timeline of global media panic. (Laughter) So, I'll label this for you in a second. But the height here, I want to point out, is the intensity of certain fears as reported in the media. Let me point them out. So this, swine flu -- pink. Bird flu. SARS -- brownish here. Remember that one? The millennium bug, terrible disaster. These little green peaks are asteroid collisions. (Laughter) And in summer, here, killer wasps. (Laughter) So these are what our fears look like over time in our media. But what I love -- and I'm a journalist -- and what I love is finding hidden patterns; I love being a data detective. And there's a very interesting and odd pattern hidden in this data that you can only see when you visualize it. Let me highlight it for you. See this line, this is a landscape for violent video games. As you can see, there's a kind of odd, regular pattern in the data, twin peaks every year. If we look closer, we see those peaks occur at the same month every year. Why? Well, November, Christmas video games come out, and there may well be an upsurge in the concern about their content. But April isn't a particularly massive month for video games. Why April? Well, in April 1999 was the Columbine shooting, and since then, that fear has been remembered by the media and echoes through the group mind gradually through the year. You have retrospectives, anniversaries, court cases, even copy-cat shootings, all pushing that fear into the agenda. And there's another pattern here as well. Can you spot it? See that gap there? There's a gap, and it affects all the other stories. Why is there a gap there? You see where it starts? September 2001, when we had something very real to be scared about. So, I've been working as a data journalist for about a year, and I keep hearing a phrase all the time, which is this: "Data is the new oil." Data is the kind of ubiquitous resource that we can shape to provide new innovations and new insights, and it's all around us, and it can be mined very easily. It's not a particularly great metaphor in these times, especially if you live around the Gulf of Mexico, but I would, perhaps, adapt this metaphor slightly, and I would say that data is the new soil. Because for me, it feels like a fertile, creative medium. Over the years, online, we've laid down a huge amount of information and data, and we irrigate it with networks and connectivity, and it's been worked and tilled by unpaid workers and governments. And, all right, I'm kind of milking the metaphor a little bit. But it's a really fertile medium, and it feels like visualizations, infographics, data visualizations, they feel like flowers blooming from this medium. But if you look at it directly, it's just a lot of numbers and disconnected facts. But if you start working with it and playing with it in a certain way, interesting things can appear and different patterns can be revealed. Let me show you this. Can you guess what this data set is? What rises twice a year, once in Easter and then two weeks before Christmas, has a mini peak every Monday, and then flattens out over the summer? I'll take answers. (Audience: Chocolate.) David McCandless: Chocolate. You might want to get some chocolate in. Any other guesses? (Audience: Shopping.) DM: Shopping. Yeah, retail therapy might help. (Audience: Sick leave.) DM: Sick leave. Yeah, you'll definitely want to take some time off. Shall we see? (Laughter) (Applause) So, the information guru Lee Byron and myself, we scraped 10,000 status Facebook updates for the phrase "break-up" and "broken-up" and this is the pattern we found -- people clearing out for Spring Break, (Laughter) coming out of very bad weekends on a Monday, being single over the summer, and then the lowest day of the year, of course: Christmas Day. Who would do that? So there's a titanic amount of data out there now, unprecedented. But if you ask the right kind of question, or you work it in the right kind of way, interesting things can emerge. So information is beautiful. Data is beautiful. I wonder if I could make my life beautiful. And here's my visual C.V. I'm not quite sure I've succeeded. Pretty blocky, the colors aren't that great. But I wanted to convey something to you. I started as a programmer, and then I worked as a writer for many years, about 20 years, in print, online and then in advertising, and only recently have I started designing. And I've never been to design school. I've never studied art or anything. I just kind of learned through doing. And when I started designing, I discovered an odd thing about myself. I already knew how to design, but it wasn't like I was amazingly brilliant at it, but more like I was sensitive to the ideas of grids and space and alignment and typography. It's almost like being exposed to all this media over the years had instilled a kind of dormant design literacy in me. And I don't feel like I'm unique. I feel that everyday, all of us now are being blasted by information design. It's being poured into our eyes through the Web, and we're all visualizers now; we're all demanding a visual aspect to our information. There's something almost quite magical about visual information. It's effortless, it literally pours in. And if you're navigating a dense information jungle, coming across a beautiful graphic or a lovely data visualization, it's a relief, it's like coming across a clearing in the jungle. I was curious about this, so it led me to the work of a Danish physicist called Tor Norretranders, and he converted the bandwidth of the senses into computer terms. So here we go. This is your senses, pouring into your senses every second. Your sense of sight is the fastest. It has the same bandwidth as a computer network. Then you have touch, which is about the speed of a USB key. And then you have hearing and smell, which has the throughput of a hard disk. And then you have poor old taste, which is like barely the throughput of a pocket calculator. And that little square in the corner, a naught .7 percent, that's the amount we're actually aware of. So a lot of your vision -- the bulk of it is visual, and it's pouring in. It's unconscious. The eye is exquisitely sensitive to patterns in variations in color, shape and pattern. It loves them, and it calls them beautiful. It's the language of the eye. If you combine the language of the eye with the language of the mind, which is about words and numbers and concepts, you start speaking two languages simultaneously, each enhancing the other. So, you have the eye, and then you drop in the concepts. And that whole thing -- it's two languages both working at the same time. So we can use this new kind of language, if you like, to alter our perspective or change our views. Let me ask you a simple question with a really simple answer: Who has the biggest military budget? It's got to be America, right? Massive. 609 billion in 2008 -- 607, rather. So massive, in fact, that it can contain all the other military budgets in the world inside itself. Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble. Now, you can see Africa's total debt there and the U.K. budget deficit for reference. So that might well chime with your view that America is a sort of warmongering military machine, out to overpower the world with its huge industrial-military complex. But is it true that America has the biggest military budget? Because America is an incredibly rich country. In fact, it's so massively rich that it can contain the four other top industrialized nations' economies inside itself, it's so vastly rich. So its military budget is bound to be enormous. So, to be fair and to alter our perspective, we have to bring in another data set, and that data set is GDP, or the country's earnings. Who has the biggest budget as a proportion of GDP? Let's have a look. That changes the picture considerably. Other countries pop into view that you, perhaps, weren't considering, and American drops into eighth. Now you can also do this with soldiers. Who has the most soldiers? It's got to be China. Of course, 2.1 million. Again, chiming with your view that China has a militarized regime ready to, you know, mobilize its enormous forces. But of course, China has an enormous population. So if we do the same, we see a radically different picture. China drops to 124th. It actually has a tiny army when you take other data into consideration. So, absolute figures, like the military budget, in a connected world, don't give you the whole picture. They're not as true as they could be. We need relative figures that are connected to other data so that we can see a fuller picture, and then that can lead to us changing our perspective. As Hans Rosling, the master, my master, said, "Let the dataset change your mindset." And if it can do that, maybe it can also change your behavior. Take a look at this one. I'm a bit of a health nut. I love taking supplements and being fit, but I can never understand what's going on in terms of evidence. There's always conflicting evidence. Should I take vitamin C? Should I be taking wheatgrass? This is a visualization of all the evidence for nutritional supplements. This kind of diagram is called a balloon race. So the higher up the image, the more evidence there is for each supplement. And the bubbles correspond to popularity as regards to Google hits. So you can immediately apprehend the relationship between efficacy and popularity, but you can also, if you grade the evidence, do a "worth it" line. So supplements above this line are worth investigating, but only for the conditions listed below, and then the supplements below the line are perhaps not worth investigating. Now this image constitutes a huge amount of work. We scraped like 1,000 studies from PubMed, the biomedical database, and we compiled them and graded them all. And it was incredibly frustrating for me because I had a book of 250 visualizations to do for my book, and I spent a month doing this, and I only filled two pages. But what it points to is that visualizing information like this is a form of knowledge compression. It's a way of squeezing an enormous amount of information and understanding into a small space. And once you've curated that data, and once you've cleaned that data, and once it's there, you can do cool stuff like this. So I converted this into an interactive app, so I can now generate this application online -- this is the visualization online -- and I can say, "Yeah, brilliant." So it spawns itself. And then I can say, "Well, just show me the stuff that affects heart health." So let's filter that out. So heart is filtered out, so I can see if I'm curious about that. I think, "No, no. I don't want to take any synthetics, I just want to see plants and -- just show me herbs and plants. I've got all the natural ingredients." Now this app is spawning itself from the data. The data is all stored in a Google Doc, and it's literally generating itself from that data. So the data is now alive; this is a living image, and I can update it in a second. New evidence comes out. I just change a row on a spreadsheet. Doosh! Again, the image recreates itself. So it's cool. It's kind of living. But it can go beyond data, and it can go beyond numbers. I like to apply information visualization to ideas and concepts. This is a visualization of the political spectrum, an attempt for me to try and understand how it works and how the ideas percolate down from government into society and culture, into families, into individuals, into their beliefs and back around again in a cycle. What I love about this image is it's made up of concepts, it explores our worldviews and it helps us -- it helps me anyway -- to see what others think, to see where they're coming from. And it feels just incredibly cool to do that. What was most exciting for me designing this was that, when I was designing this image, I desperately wanted this side, the left side, to be better than the right side -- being a journalist, a Left-leaning person -- but I couldn't, because I would have created a lopsided, biased diagram. So, in order to really create a full image, I had to honor the perspectives on the right-hand side and at the same time, uncomfortably recognize how many of those qualities were actually in me, which was very, very annoying and uncomfortable. (Laughter) But not too uncomfortable, because there's something unthreatening about seeing a political perspective, versus being told or forced to listen to one. You're capable of holding conflicting viewpoints joyously when you can see them. It's even fun to engage with them because it's visual. So that's what's exciting to me, seeing how data can change my perspective and change my mind midstream -- beautiful, lovely data. So, just to wrap up, I wanted to say that it feels to me that design is about solving problems and providing elegant solutions, and information design is about solving information problems. It feels like we have a lot of information problems in our society at the moment, from the overload and the saturation to the breakdown of trust and reliability and runaway skepticism and lack of transparency, or even just interestingness. I mean, I find information just too interesting. It has a magnetic quality that draws me in. So, visualizing information can give us a very quick solution to those kinds of problems. Even when the information is terrible, the visual can be quite beautiful. Often we can get clarity or the answer to a simple question very quickly, like this one, the recent Icelandic volcano. Which was emitting the most CO2? Was it the planes or the volcano, the grounded planes or the volcano? So we can have a look. We look at the data and we see: Yep, the volcano emitted 150,000 tons; the grounded planes would have emitted 345,000 if they were in the sky. So essentially, we had our first carbon-neutral volcano. (Laughter) (Applause) And that is beautiful. Thank you. (Applause)

In his inaugural address, Barack Obama appealed to each of us to give our best as we try to extricate ourselves from this current financial crisis. But what did he appeal to? He did not, happily, follow in the footsteps of his predecessor, and tell us to just go shopping. Nor did he tell us, "Trust us. Trust your country. Invest, invest, invest." Instead, what he told us was to put aside childish things. And he appealed to virtue. Virtue is an old-fashioned word. It seems a little out of place in a cutting-edge environment like this one. And besides, some of you might be wondering, what the hell does it mean? Let me begin with an example. This is the job description of a hospital janitor that is scrolling up on the screen. And all of the items on it are unremarkable. They're the things you would expect: mop the floors, sweep them, empty the trash, restock the cabinets. It may be a little surprising how many things there are, but it's not surprising what they are. But the one thing I want you to notice about them is this: even though this is a very long list, there isn't a single thing on it that involves other human beings. Not one. The janitor's job could just as well be done in a mortuary as in a hospital. And yet, when some psychologists interviewed hospital janitors to get a sense of what they thought their jobs were like, they encountered Mike, who told them about how he stopped mopping the floor because Mr. Jones was out of his bed getting a little exercise, trying to build up his strength, walking slowly up and down the hall. And Charlene told them about how she ignored her supervisor's admonition and didn't vacuum the visitor's lounge because there were some family members who were there all day, every day who, at this moment, happened to be taking a nap. And then there was Luke, who washed the floor in a comatose young man's room twice because the man's father, who had been keeping a vigil for six months, didn't see Luke do it the first time, and his father was angry. And behavior like this from janitors, from technicians, from nurses and, if we're lucky now and then, from doctors, doesn't just make people feel a little better, it actually improves the quality of patient care and enables hospitals to run well. Now, not all janitors are like this, of course. But the ones who are think that these sorts of human interactions involving kindness, care and empathy are an essential part of the job. And yet their job description contains not one word about other human beings. These janitors have the moral will to do right by other people. And beyond this, they have the moral skill to figure out what "doing right" means. "Practical wisdom," Aristotle told us, "is the combination of moral will and moral skill." A wise person knows when and how to make the exception to every rule, as the janitors knew when to ignore the job duties in the service of other objectives. A wise person knows how to improvise, as Luke did when he re-washed the floor. Real-world problems are often ambiguous and ill-defined and the context is always changing. A wise person is like a jazz musician -- using the notes on the page, but dancing around them, inventing combinations that are appropriate for the situation and the people at hand. A wise person knows how to use these moral skills in the service of the right aims. To serve other people, not to manipulate other people. And finally, perhaps most important, a wise person is made, not born. Wisdom depends on experience, and not just any experience. You need the time to get to know the people that you're serving. You need permission to be allowed to improvise, try new things, occasionally to fail and to learn from your failures. And you need to be mentored by wise teachers. When you ask the janitors who behaved like the ones I described how hard it is to learn to do their job, they tell you that it takes lots of experience. And they don't mean it takes lots of experience to learn how to mop floors and empty trash cans. It takes lots of experience to learn how to care for people. At TED, brilliance is rampant. It's scary. The good news is you don't need to be brilliant to be wise. The bad news is that without wisdom, brilliance isn't enough. It's as likely to get you and other people into trouble as anything else. (Applause) Now, I hope that we all know this. There's a sense in which it's obvious, and yet, let me tell you a little story. It's a story about lemonade. A dad and his seven-year-old son were watching a Detroit Tigers game at the ballpark. His son asked him for some lemonade and Dad went to the concession stand to buy it. All they had was Mike's Hard Lemonade, which was five percent alcohol. Dad, being an academic, had no idea that Mike's Hard Lemonade contained alcohol. So he brought it back. And the kid was drinking it, and a security guard spotted it, and called the police, who called an ambulance that rushed to the ballpark, whisked the kid to the hospital. The emergency room ascertained that the kid had no alcohol in his blood. And they were ready to let the kid go. But not so fast. The Wayne County Child Welfare Protection Agency said no. And the child was sent to a foster home for three days. At that point, can the child go home? Well, a judge said yes, but only if the dad leaves the house and checks into a motel. After two weeks, I'm happy to report, the family was reunited. But the welfare workers and the ambulance people and the judge all said the same thing: "We hate to do it but we have to follow procedure." How do things like this happen? Scott Simon, who told this story on NPR, said, "Rules and procedures may be dumb, but they spare you from thinking." And, to be fair, rules are often imposed because previous officials have been lax and they let a child go back to an abusive household. Fair enough. When things go wrong, as of course they do, we reach for two tools to try to fix them. One tool we reach for is rules. Better ones, more of them. The second tool we reach for is incentives. Better ones, more of them. What else, after all, is there? We can certainly see this in response to the current financial crisis. Regulate, regulate, regulate. Fix the incentives, fix the incentives, fix the incentives ... The truth is that neither rules nor incentives are enough to do the job. How could you even write a rule that got the janitors to do what they did? And would you pay them a bonus for being empathic? It's preposterous on its face. And what happens is that as we turn increasingly to rules, rules and incentives may make things better in the short run, but they create a downward spiral that makes them worse in the long run. Moral skill is chipped away by an over-reliance on rules that deprives us of the opportunity to improvise and learn from our improvisations. And moral will is undermined by an incessant appeal to incentives that destroy our desire to do the right thing. And without intending it, by appealing to rules and incentives, we are engaging in a war on wisdom. Let me just give you a few examples, first of rules and the war on moral skill. The lemonade story is one. Second, no doubt more familiar to you, is the nature of modern American education: scripted, lock-step curricula. Here's an example from Chicago kindergarten. Reading and enjoying literature and words that begin with 'B.' "The Bath:" Assemble students on a rug and give students a warning about the dangers of hot water. Say 75 items in this script to teach a 25-page picture book. All over Chicago in every kindergarten class in the city, every teacher is saying the same words in the same way on the same day. We know why these scripts are there. We don't trust the judgment of teachers enough to let them loose on their own. Scripts like these are insurance policies against disaster. And they prevent disaster. But what they assure in its place is mediocrity. (Applause) Don't get me wrong. We need rules! Jazz musicians need some notes -- most of them need some notes on the page. We need more rules for the bankers, God knows. But too many rules prevent accomplished jazz musicians from improvising. And as a result, they lose their gifts, or worse, they stop playing altogether. Now, how about incentives? They seem cleverer. If you have one reason for doing something and I give you a second reason for doing the same thing, it seems only logical that two reasons are better than one and you're more likely to do it. Right? Well, not always. Sometimes two reasons to do the same thing seem to compete with one another instead of complimenting, and they make people less likely to do it. I'll just give you one example because time is racing. In Switzerland, back about 15 years ago, they were trying to decide where to site nuclear waste dumps. There was going to be a national referendum. Some psychologists went around and polled citizens who were very well informed. And they said, "Would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your community?" Astonishingly, 50 percent of the citizens said yes. They knew it was dangerous. They thought it would reduce their property values. But it had to go somewhere and they had responsibilities as citizens. The psychologists asked other people a slightly different question. They said, "If we paid you six weeks' salary every year would you be willing to have a nuclear waste dump in your community?" Two reasons. It's my responsibility and I'm getting paid. Instead of 50 percent saying yes, 25 percent said yes. What happens is that the second this introduction of incentive gets us so that instead of asking, "What is my responsibility?" all we ask is, "What serves my interests?" When incentives don't work, when CEOs ignore the long-term health of their companies in pursuit of short-term gains that will lead to massive bonuses, the response is always the same. Get smarter incentives. The truth is that there are no incentives that you can devise that are ever going to be smart enough. Any incentive system can be subverted by bad will. We need incentives. People have to make a living. But excessive reliance on incentives demoralizes professional activity in two senses of that word. It causes people who engage in that activity to lose morale and it causes the activity itself to lose morality. Barack Obama said, before he was inaugurated, "We must ask not just 'Is it profitable?' but 'Is it right?'" And when professions are demoralized, everyone in them becomes dependent on -- addicted to -- incentives and they stop asking "Is it right?" We see this in medicine. ("Although it's nothing serious, let's keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn't turn into a major lawsuit.") And we certainly see it in the world of business. ("In order to remain competitive in today's marketplace, I'm afraid we're going to have to replace you with a sleezeball.") ("I sold my soul for about a tenth of what the damn things are going for now.") It is obvious that this is not the way people want to do their work. So what can we do? A few sources of hope: we ought to try to re-moralize work. One way not to do it: teach more ethics courses. (Applause) There is no better way to show people that you're not serious than to tie up everything you have to say about ethics into a little package with a bow and consign it to the margins as an ethics course. What to do instead? One: Celebrate moral exemplars. Acknowledge, when you go to law school, that a little voice is whispering in your ear about Atticus Finch. No 10-year-old goes to law school to do mergers and acquisitions. People are inspired by moral heroes. But we learn that with sophistication comes the understanding that you can't acknowledge that you have moral heroes. Well, acknowledge them. Be proud that you have them. Celebrate them. And demand that the people who teach you acknowledge them and celebrate them too. That's one thing we can do. I don't know how many of you remember this: another moral hero, 15 years ago, Aaron Feuerstein, who was the head of Malden Mills in Massachusetts -- they made Polartec -- The factory burned down. 3,000 employees. He kept every one of them on the payroll. Why? Because it would have been a disaster for them and for the community if he had let them go. "Maybe on paper our company is worth less to Wall Street, but I can tell you it's worth more. We're doing fine." Just at this TED we heard talks from several moral heroes. Two were particularly inspiring to me. One was Ray Anderson, who turned -- (Applause) -- turned, you know, a part of the evil empire into a zero-footprint, or almost zero-footprint business. Why? Because it was the right thing to do. And a bonus he's discovering is he's actually going to make even more money. His employees are inspired by the effort. Why? Because there happy to be doing something that's the right thing to do. Yesterday we heard Willie Smits talk about re-foresting in Indonesia. (Applause) In many ways this is the perfect example. Because it took the will to do the right thing. God knows it took a huge amount of technical skill. I'm boggled at how much he and his associates needed to know in order to plot this out. But most important to make it work -- and he emphasized this -- is that it took knowing the people in the communities. Unless the people you're working with are behind you, this will fail. And there isn't a formula to tell you how to get the people behind you, because different people in different communities organize their lives in different ways. So there's a lot here at TED, and at other places, to celebrate. And you don't have to be a mega-hero. There are ordinary heroes. Ordinary heroes like the janitors who are worth celebrating too. As practitioners each and every one of us should strive to be ordinary, if not extraordinary heroes. As heads of organizations, we should strive to create environments that encourage and nurture both moral skill and moral will. Even the wisest and most well-meaning people will give up if they have to swim against the current in the organizations in which they work. If you run an organization, you should be sure that none of the jobs -- none of the jobs -- have job descriptions like the job descriptions of the janitors. Because the truth is that any work that you do that involves interaction with other people is moral work. And any moral work depends upon practical wisdom. And, perhaps most important, as teachers, we should strive to be the ordinary heroes, the moral exemplars, to the people we mentor. And there are a few things that we have to remember as teachers. One is that we are always teaching. Someone is always watching. The camera is always on. Bill Gates talked about the importance of education and, in particular, the model that KIPP was providing: "Knowledge is power." And he talked about a lot of the wonderful things that KIPP is doing to take inner-city kids and turn them in the direction of college. I want to focus on one particular thing KIPP is doing that Bill didn't mention. That is that they have come to the realization that the single most important thing kids need to learn is character. They need to learn to respect themselves. They need to learn to respect their schoolmates. They need to learn to respect their teachers. And, most important, they need to learn to respect learning. That's the principle objective. If you do that, the rest is just pretty much a coast downhill. And the teachers: the way you teach these things to the kids is by having the teachers and all the other staff embody it every minute of every day. Obama appealed to virtue. And I think he was right. And the virtue I think we need above all others is practical wisdom, because it's what allows other virtues -- honesty, kindness, courage and so on -- to be displayed at the right time and in the right way. He also appealed to hope. Right again. I think there is reason for hope. I think people want to be allowed to be virtuous. In many ways, it's what TED is all about. Wanting to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. This kind of wisdom is within the grasp of each and every one of us if only we start paying attention. Paying attention to what we do, to how we do it, and, perhaps most importantly, to the structure of the organizations within which we work, so as to make sure that it enables us and other people to develop wisdom rather than having it suppressed. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: You have to go and stand out here a sec. Barry Schwartz: Thank you very much. (Applause)

While preparing for my talk I was reflecting on my life and trying to figure out where exactly was that moment when my journey began. A long time passed by, and I simply couldn't figure out the beginning or the middle or the end of my story. I always used to think that my beginning was one afternoon in my community when my mother had told me that I had escaped three arranged marriages by the time I was two. Or one evening when electricity had failed for eight hours in our community, and my dad sat, surrounded by all of us, telling us stories of when he was a little kid struggling to go to school while his father, who was a farmer, wanted him to work in the fields with him. Or that dark night when I was 16 when three little kids had come to me and they whispered in my ear that my friend was murdered in something called the honor killings. But then I realized that, as much as I know that these moments have contributed on my journey, they have influenced my journey but they have not been the beginning of it, but the true beginning of my journey was in front of a mud house in upper Sindh of Pakistan, where my father held the hand of my 14-year-old mother and they decided to walk out of the village to go to a town where they could send their kids to school. In a way, I feel like my life is kind of a result of some wise choices and decisions they've made. And just like that, another of their decisions was to keep me and my siblings connected to our roots. While we were living in a community I fondly remember as called Ribabad, which means community of the poor, my dad made sure that we also had a house in our rural homeland. I come from an indigenous tribe in the mountains of Balochistan called Brahui. Brahui, or Brohi, means mountain dweller, and it is also my language. Thanks to my father's very strict rules about connecting to our customs, I had to live a beautiful life of songs, cultures, traditions, stories, mountains, and a lot of sheep. But then, living in two extremes between the traditions of my culture, of my village, and then modern education in my school wasn't easy. I was aware that I was the only girl who got to have such freedom, and I was guilty of it. While going to school in Karachi and Hyderabad, a lot of my cousins and childhood friends were getting married off, some to older men, some in exchange, some even as second wives. I got to see the beautiful tradition and its magic fade in front of me when I saw that the birth of a girl child was celebrated with sadness, when women were told to have patience as their main virtue. Up until I was 16, I healed my sadness by crying, mostly at nights when everyone would sleep and I would sob in my pillow, until that one night when I found out my friend was killed in the name of honor. Honor killings is a custom where men and women are suspected of having relationships before or outside of the marriage, and they're killed by their family for it. Usually the killer is the brother or father or the uncle in the family. The U.N. reports there are about 1,000 honor murders every year in Pakistan, and these are only the reported cases. A custom that kills did not make any sense to me, and I knew I had to do something about it this time. I was not going to cry myself to sleep. I was going to do something, anything, to stop it. I was 16 -- I started writing poetry and going door to door telling everybody about honor killings and why it happens, why it should be stopped, and raising awareness about it until I actually found a much, much better way to handle this issue. In those days, we were living in a very small, one-roomed house in Karachi. Every year, during the monsoon seasons, our house would flood up with water -- rainwater and sewage -- and my mom and dad would be taking the water out. In those days, my dad brought home a huge machine, a computer. It was so big it looked as if it was going to take up half of the only room we had, and had so many pieces and wires that needed to be connected. But it was still the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me and my sisters. My oldest brother Ali got to be in charge of taking care of the computer, and all of us were given 10 to 15 minutes every day to use it. Being the oldest of eight kids, I got to use it the last, and that was after I had washed the dishes, cleaned the house, made dinner with my mom, and put blankets on the floor for everyone to sleep, and after that, I would run to the computer, connect it to the Internet, and have pure joy and wonder for 10 to 15 minutes. In those days, I had discovered a website called Joogle. [Google] (Laughter) In my frantic wish to do something about this custom, I made use of Google and discovered Facebook, a website where people can connect to anyone around the world, and so, from my very tiny, cement-roofed room in Karachi, I connected with people in the U.K., the U.S., Australia and Canada, and created a campaign called WAKE UP Campaign against Honor Killings. It became enormous in just a few months. I got a lot of support from all around the world. Media was connecting to us. A lot of people were reaching out trying to raise awareness with us. It became so big that it went from online to the streets of my hometown, where we would do rallies and strikes trying to change the policies in Pakistan for women's support. And while I thought everything was perfect, my team -- which was basically my friends and neighbors at that time -- thought everything was going so well, we had no idea a big opposition was coming to us. My community stood up against us, saying we were spreading un-Islamic behavior. We were challenging centuries-old customs in those communities. I remember my father receiving anonymous letters saying, "Your daughter is spreading Western culture in the honorable societies." Our car was stoned at one point. One day I went to the office and found our metal signboard wrinkled and broken as if a lot of people had been hitting it with something heavy. Things got so bad that I had to hide myself in many ways. I would put up the windows of the car, veil my face, not speak while I was in public, but eventually situations got worse when my life was threatened, and I had to leave, back to Karachi, and our actions stopped. Back in Karachi, as an 18-year-old, I thought this was the biggest failure of my entire life. I was devastated. As a teenager, I was blaming myself for everything that happened. And it turns out, when we started reflecting, we did realize that it was actually me and my team's fault. There were two big reasons why our campaign had failed big time. One of those, the first reason, is we were standing against core values of people. We were saying no to something that was very important to them, challenging their code of honor, and hurting them deeply in the process. And number two, which was very important for me to learn, and amazing, and surprising for me to learn, was that we were not including the true heroes who should be fighting for themselves. The women in the villages had no idea we were fighting for them in the streets. Every time I would go back, I would find my cousins and friends with scarves on their faces, and I would ask, "What happened?" And they'd be like, "Our husbands beat us." But we are working in the streets for you! We are changing the policies. How is that not impacting their life? So then we found out something which was very amazing for us. The policies of a country do not necessarily always affect the tribal and rural communities. It was devastating -- like, oh, we can't actually do something about this? And we found out there's a huge gap when it comes to official policies and the real truth on the ground. So this time, we were like, we are going to do something different. We are going to use strategy, and we are going to go back and apologize. Yes, apologize. We went back to the communities and we said we are very ashamed of what we did. We are here to apologize, and in fact, we are here to make it up to you. How do we do that? We are going to promote three of your main cultures. We know that it's music, language, and embroidery. Nobody believed us. Nobody wanted to work with us. It took a lot of convincing and discussions with these communities until they agreed that we are going to promote their language by making a booklet of their stories, fables and old tales in the tribe, and we would promote their music by making a CD of the songs from the tribe, and some drumbeating. And the third, which was my favorite, was we would promote their embroidery by making a center in the village where women would come every day to make embroidery. And so it began. We worked with one village, and we started our first center. It was a beautiful day. We started the center. Women were coming to make embroidery, and going through a life-changing process of education, learning about their rights, what Islam says about their rights, and enterprise development, how they can create money, and then how they can create money from money, how they can fight the customs that have been destroying their lives from so many centuries, because in Islam, in reality, women are supposed to be shoulder to shoulder with men. Women have so much status that we have not been hearing, that they have not been hearing, and we needed to tell them that they need to know where their rights are and how to take them by themselves, because they can do it and we can't. So this was the model which actually came out -- very amazing. Through embroidery we were promoting their traditions. We went into the village. We would mobilize the community. We would make a center inside where 30 women will come for six months to learn about value addition of traditional embroidery, enterprise development, life skills and basic education, and about their rights and how to say no to those customs and how to stand as leaders for themselves and the society. After six months, we would connect these women to loans and to markets where they can become local entrepreneurs in their communities. We soon called this project Sughar. Sughar is a local word used in many, many languages in Pakistan. It means skilled and confident women. I truly believe, to create women leaders, there's only one thing you have to do: Just let them know that they have what it takes to be a leader. These women you see here, they have strong skills and potential to be leaders. All we had to do was remove the barriers that surrounded them, and that's what we decided to do. But then while we were thinking everything was going well, once again everything was fantastic, we found our next setback: A lot of men started seeing the visible changes in their wife. She's speaking more, she's making decisions -- oh my gosh, she's handling everything in the house. They stopped them from coming to the centers, and this time, we were like, okay, time for strategy two. We went to the fashion industry in Pakistan and decided to do research about what happens there. Turns out the fashion industry in Pakistan is very strong and growing day by day, but there is less contribution from the tribal areas and to the tribal areas, especially women. So we decided to launch our first ever tribal women's very own fashion brand, which is now called Nomads. And so women started earning more, they started contributing more financially to the house, and men had to think again before saying no to them when they were coming to the centers. (Applause) Thank you, thank you. In 2013, we launched our first Sughar Hub instead of a center. We partnered with TripAdvisor and created a cement hall in the middle of a village and invited so many other organizations to work over there. We created this platform for the nonprofits so they can touch and work on the other issues that Sughar is not working on, which would be an easy place for them to give trainings, use it as a farmer school, even as a marketplace, and anything they want to use it for, and they have been doing really amazingly. And so far, we have been able to support 900 women in 24 villages around Pakistan. (Applause) But that's actually not what I want. My dream is to reach out to one million women in the next 10 years, and to make sure that happens, this year we launched Sughar Foundation in the U.S. It is not just going to fund Sughar but many other organizations in Pakistan to replicate the idea and to find even more innovative ways to unleash the rural women's potential in Pakistan. Thank you so much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Chris Anderson: Khalida, you are quite the force of nature. I mean, this story, in many ways, just seems beyond belief. It's incredible that someone so young could do achieve this much through so much force and ingenuity. So I guess one question: This is a spectacular dream to reach out and empower a million women -- how much of the current success depends on you, the force of this magnetic personality? How does it scale? Khalida Brohi: I think my job is to give the inspiration out, give my dream out. I can't teach how to do it, because there are so many different ways. We have been experimenting with three ways only. There are a hundred different ways to unleash potential in women. I would just give the inspiration and that's my job. I will keep doing it. Sughar will still be growing. We are planning to reach out to two more villages, and soon I believe we will be scaling out of Pakistan into South Asia and beyond. CA: I love that when you talked about your team in the talk, I mean, you were all 18 at the time. What did this team look like? This was school friends, right? KB: Do people here believe that I'm at an age where I'm supposed to be a grandmother in my village? My mom was married at nine, and I am the oldest woman not married and not doing anything in my life in my village. CA: Wait, wait, wait, not doing anything? KB: No. CA: You're right. KB: People feel sorry for me, a lot of times. CA: But how much time are you spending now actually back in Balochistan? KB: I live over there. We live between, still, Karachi and Balochistan. My siblings are all going to school. I am still the oldest of eight siblings. CA: But what you're doing is definitely threatening to some people there. How do you handle safety? Do you feel safe? Are there issues there? KB: This question has come to me a lot of times before, and I feel like the word "fear" just comes to me and then drops, but there is one fear that I have that is different from that. The fear is that if I get killed, what would happen to the people who love me so much? My mom waits for me till late at night that I should come home. My sisters want to learn so much from me, and there are many, many girls in my community who want to talk to me and ask me different things, and I recently got engaged. (Laughs) (Applause) CA: Is he here? You've got to stand up. (Applause) KB: Escaping arranged marriages, I chose my own husband across the world in L.A., a really different world. I had to fight for a whole year. That's totally a different story. But I think that's the only thing that I'm afraid of, and I don't want my mom to not see anyone when she waits in the night. CA: So people who want to help you on their way, they can go on, they can maybe buy some of these clothes that you're bringing over that are actually made, the embroidery is done back in Balochistan? KB: Yeah. CA: Or they can get involved in the foundation. KB: Definitely. We are looking for as many people as we can, because now that the foundation's in the beginning process, I am trying to learn a lot about how to operate, how to get funding or reach out to more organizations, and especially in the e-commerce, which is very new for me. I mean, I am not a fashion person, believe me. CA: Well, it's been incredible to have you here. Please go on being courageous, go on being smart, and please stay safe. KB: Thank you so much. CA: Thank you, Khalida. (Applause)

I want you to imagine that you're a student in my lab. What I want you to do is to create a biologically inspired design. And so here's the challenge: I want you to help me create a fully 3D, dynamic, parameterized contact model. The translation of that is, could you help me build a foot? And it is a true challenge, and I do want you to help me. Of course, in the challenge there is a prize. It's not quite the TED Prize, but it is an exclusive t-shirt from our lab. So please send me your ideas about how to design a foot. Now if we want to design a foot, what do we have to do? We have to first know what a foot is. If we go to the dictionary, it says, "It's the lower extremity of a leg that is in direct contact with the ground in standing or walking" That's the traditional definition. But if you wanted to really do research, what do you have to do? You have to go to the literature and look up what's known about feet. So you go to the literature. (Laughter) Maybe you're familiar with this literature. The problem is, there are many, many feet. How do you do this? You need to survey all feet and extract the principles of how they work. And I want you to help me do that in this next clip. As you see this clip, look for principles, and also think about experiments that you might design in order to understand how a foot works. See any common themes? Principles? What would you do? What experiments would you run? Wow. (Applause) Our research on the biomechanics of animal locomotion has allowed us to make a blueprint for a foot. It's a design inspired by nature, but it's not a copy of any specific foot you just looked at, but it's a synthesis of the secrets of many, many feet. Now it turns out that animals can go anywhere. They can locomote on substrates that vary as you saw -- in the probability of contact, the movement of that surface and the type of footholds that are present. If you want to study how a foot works, we're going to have to simulate those surfaces, or simulate that debris. When we did that, here's a new experiment that we did: we put an animal and had it run -- this grass spider -- on a surface with 99 percent of the contact area removed. But it didn't even slow down the animal. It's still running at the human equivalent of 300 miles per hour. Now how could it do that? Well, look more carefully. When we slow it down 50 times we see how the leg is hitting that simulated debris. The leg is acting as a foot. And in fact, the animal contacts other parts of its leg more frequently than the traditionally defined foot. The foot is distributed along the whole leg. You can do another experiment where you can take a cockroach with a foot, and you can remove its foot. I'm passing some cockroaches around. Take a look at their feet. Without a foot, here's what it does. It doesn't even slow down. It can run the same speed without even that segment. No problem for the cockroach -- they can grow them back, if you care. How do they do it? Look carefully: this is slowed down 100 times, and watch what it's doing with the rest of its leg. It's acting, again, as a distributed foot -- very effective. Now, the question we had is, how general is a distributed foot? And the next behavior I'll show you of this animal just stunned us the first time that we saw it. Journalists, this is off the record; it's embargoed. Take a look at what that is! That's a bipedal octopus that's disguised as a rolling coconut. It was discovered by Christina Huffard and filmed by Sea Studios, right here from Monterey. We've also described another species of bipedal octopus. This one disguises itself as floating algae. It walks on two legs and it holds the other arms up in the air so that it can't be seen. (Applause) And look what it does with its foot to get over challenging terrain. It uses that beautiful distributed foot to make it as if those obstacles are not even there -- truly extraordinary. In 1951, Escher made this drawing. He thought he created an animal fantasy. But we know that art imitates life, and it turns out nature, three million years ago, evolved the next animal. It's a shrimp-like animal called the stomatopod, and here's how it moves on the beaches of Panama: it actually rolls, and it can even roll uphill. It's the ultimate distributed foot: its whole body in this case is acting like its foot. So, if we want to then, to our blueprint, add the first important feature, we want to add distributed foot contact. Not just with the traditional foot, but also the leg, and even of the body. Can this help us inspire the design of novel robots? We biologically inspired this robot, named RHex, built by these extraordinary engineers over the last few years. RHex's foot started off to be quite simple, then it got tuned over time, and ultimately resulted in this half circle. Why is that? The video will show you. Watch where the robot, now, contacts its leg in order to deal with this very difficult terrain. What you'll see, in fact, is that it's using that half circle leg as a distributed foot. Watch it go over this. You can see it here well on this debris. Extraordinary. No sensing, all the control is built right into the tuned legs. Really simple, but beautiful. Now, you might have noticed something else about the animals when they were running over the rough terrain. And my assistant's going to help me here. When you touched the cockroach leg -- can you get the microphone for him? When you touched the cockroach leg, what did it feel like? Did you notice something? Boy: Spiny. Robert Full: It's spiny, right? It's really spiny, isn't it? It sort of hurts. Maybe we could give it to our curator and see if he'd be brave enough to touch the cockroach. (Laughter) Chris Anderson: Did you touch it? RF: So if you look carefully at this, what you see is that they have spines and until a few weeks ago, no one knew what they did. They assumed that they were for protection and for sensory structures. We found that they're for something else -- here's a segment of that spine. They're tuned such that they easily collapse in one direction to pull the leg out from debris, but they're stiff in the other direction so they capture disparities in the surface. Now crabs don't miss footholds, because they normally move on sand -- until they come to our lab. And where they have a problem with this kind of mesh, because they don't have spines. The crabs are missing spines, so they have a problem in this kind of rough terrain. But of course, we can deal with that because we can produce artificial spines. We can make spines that catch on simulated debris and collapse on removal to easily pull them out. We did that by putting these artificial spines on crabs, as you see here, and then we tested them. Do we really understand that principle of tuning? The answer is, yes! This is slowed down 20-fold, and the crab just zooms across that simulated debris. (Laughter) (Applause) A little better than nature. So to our blueprint, we need to add tuned spines. Now will this help us think about the design of more effective climbing robots? Well, here's RHex: RHex has trouble on rails -- on smooth rails, as you see here. So why not add a spine? My colleagues did this at U. Penn. Dan Koditschek put some steel nails -- very simple version -- on the robot, and here's RHex, now, going over those steel -- those rails. No problem! How does it do it? Let's slow it down and you can see the spines in action. Watch the leg come around, and you'll see it grab on right there. It couldn't do that before; it would just slip and get stuck and tip over. And watch again, right there -- successful. Now just because we have a distributed foot and spines doesn't mean you can climb vertical surfaces. This is really, really difficult. But look at this animal do it! One of the ones I'm passing around is climbing up this vertical surface that's a smooth metal plate. It's extraordinary how fast it can do it -- but if you slow it down, you see something that's quite extraordinary. It's a secret. The animal effectively climbs by slipping and look -- and doing, actually, terribly, with respect to grabbing on the surface. It looks, in fact, like it's swimming up the surface. We can actually model that behavior better as a fluid, if you look at it. The distributed foot, actually, is working more like a paddle. The same is true when we looked at this lizard running on fluidized sand. Watch its feet. It's actually functioning as a paddle even though it's interacting with a surface that we normally think of as a solid. This is not different from what my former undergraduate discovered when she figured out how lizards can run on water itself. Can you use this to make a better robot? Martin Buehler did -- who's now at Boston Dynamics -- he took this idea and made RHex to be Aqua RHex. So here's RHex with paddles, now converted into an incredibly maneuverable swimming robot. For rough surfaces, though, animals add claws. And you probably feel them if you grabbed it. Did you touch it? CA: I did. RF: And they do really well at grabbing onto surfaces with these claws. Mark Cutkosky at Stanford University, one of my collaborators, is an extraordinary engineer who developed this technique called Shape Deposition Manufacturing, where he can imbed claws right into an artificial foot. And here's the simple version of a foot for a new robot that I'll show you in a bit. So to our blueprint, let's attach claws. Now if we look at animals, though, to be really maneuverable in all surfaces, the animals use hybrid mechanisms that include claws, and spines, and hairs, and pads, and glue, and capillary adhesion and a whole bunch of other things. These are all from different insects. There's an ant crawling up a vertical surface. Let's look at that ant. This is the foot of an ant. You see the hairs and the claws and this thing here. This is when its foot's in the air. Watch what happens when the foot goes onto your sandwich. You see what happens? That pad comes out. And that's where the glue is. Here from underneath is an ant foot, and when the claws don't dig in, that pad automatically comes out without the ant doing anything. It just extrudes. And this was a hard shot to get -- I think this is the shot of the ant foot on the superstrings. So it's pretty tough to do. This is what it looks like close up -- here's the ant foot, and there's the glue. And we discovered this glue may be an interesting two-phase mixture. It certainly helps it to hold on. So to our blueprint, we stick on some sticky pads. Now you might think for smooth surfaces we get inspiration here. Now we have something better here. The gecko's a really great example of nanotechnology in nature. These are its feet. They're -- almost look alien. And the secret, which they stick on with, involves their hairy toes. They can run up a surface at a meter per second, take 30 steps in that one second -- you can hardly see them. If we slow it down, they attach their feet at eight milliseconds, and detach them in 16 milliseconds. And when you watch how they detach it, it is bizarre. They peel away from the surface like you'd peel away a piece of tape. Very strange. How do they stick? If you look at their feet, they have leaf-like structures called linalae with millions of hairs. And each hair has the worst case of split ends possible. It has a hundred to a thousand split ends, and that's the secret, because it allows intimate contact. The gecko has a billion of these 200-nanometer-sized split ends. And they don't stick by glue, or they don't work like Velcro, or they don't work with suction. We discovered they work by intermolecular forces alone. So to our blueprint, we split some hairs. This has inspired the design of the first self-cleaning dry adhesive -- the patent issued, we're happy to say. And here's the simplest version in nature, and here's my collaborator Ron Fearing's attempt at an artificial version of this dry adhesive made from polyurethane. And here's the first attempt to have it work on some load. There's enormous interest in this in a variety of different fields. You could think of a thousand possible uses, I'm sure. Lots of people have, and we're excited about realizing this as a product. We have imagined products; for example, this one: we imagined a bio-inspired Band-Aid, where we took the glue off the Band-Aid. We took some hairs from a molting gecko; put three rolls of them on here, and then made this Band-Aid. This is an undergraduate volunteer -- we have 30,000 undergraduates so we can choose among them -- that's actually just a red pen mark. But it makes an incredible Band-Aid. It's aerated, it can be peeled off easily, it doesn't cause any irritation, it works underwater. I think this is an extraordinary example of how curiosity-based research -- we just wondered how they climbed up something -- can lead to things that you could never imagine. It's just an example of why we need to support curiosity-based research. Here you are, pulling off the Band-Aid. So we've redefined, now, what a foot is. The question is, can we use these secrets, then, to inspire the design of a better foot, better than one that we see in nature? Here's the new project: we're trying to create the first climbing search-and-rescue robot -- no suction or magnets -- that can only move on limited kinds of surfaces. I call the new robot RiSE, for "Robot in Scansorial Environment" -- that's a climbing environment -- and we have an extraordinary team of biologists and engineers creating this robot. And here is RiSE. It's six-legged and has a tail. Here it is on a fence and a tree. And here are RiSE's first steps on an incline. You have the audio? You can hear it go up. And here it is coming up at you, in its first steps up a wall. Now it's only using its simplest feet here, so this is very new. But we think we got the dynamics right of the robot. Mark Cutkosky, though, is taking it a step further. He's the one able to build this shape-deposition manufactured feet and toes. The next step is to make compliant toes, and try to add spines and claws and set it for dry adhesives. So the idea is to first get the toes and a foot right, attempt to make that climb, and ultimately put it on the robot. And that's exactly what he's done. He's built, in fact, a climbing foot-bot inspired by nature. And here's Cutkosky's and his amazing students' design. So these are tuned toes -- there are six of them, and they use the principles that I just talked about collectively for the blueprint. So this is not using any suction, any glue, and it will ultimately, when it's attached to the robot -- it's as biologically inspired as the animal -- hopefully be able to climb any kind of a surface. Here you see it, next, going up the side of a building at Stanford. It's sped up -- again, it's a foot climbing. It's not the whole robot yet, we're working on it -- now you can see how it's attaching. These tuned structures allow the spines, friction pads and ultimately the adhesive hairs to grab onto very challenging, difficult surfaces. And so they were able to get this thing -- this is now sped up 20 times -- can you imagine it trying to go up and rescue somebody at that upper floor? OK? You can visualize this now; it's not impossible. It's a very challenging task. But more to come later. To finish: we've gotten design secrets from nature by looking at how feet are built. We've learned we should distribute control to smart parts. Don't put it all in the brain, but put some of the control in tuned feet, legs and even body. That nature uses hybrid solutions, not a single solution, to these problems, and they're integrated and beautifully robust. And third, we believe strongly that we do not want to mimic nature but instead be inspired by biology, and use these novel principles with the best engineering solutions that are out there to make -- potentially -- something better than nature. So there's a clear message: whether you care about a fundamental, basic research of really interesting, bizarre, wonderful animals, or you want to build a search-and-rescue robot that can help you in an earthquake, or to save someone in a fire, or you care about medicine, we must preserve nature's designs. Otherwise these secrets will be lost forever. Thank you.

When you think about resilience and technology it's actually much easier. You're going to see some other speakers today, I already know, who are going to talk about breaking-bones stuff, and, of course, with technology it never is. So it's very easy, comparatively speaking, to be resilient. I think that, if we look at what happened on the Internet, with such an incredible last half a dozen years, that it's hard to even get the right analogy for it. A lot of how we decide, how we're supposed to react to things and what we're supposed to expect about the future depends on how we bucket things and how we categorize them. And so I think the tempting analogy for the boom-bust that we just went through with the Internet is a gold rush. It's easy to think of this analogy as very different from some of the other things you might pick. For one thing, both were very real. In 1849, in that Gold Rush, they took over $700 million worth of gold out of California. It was very real. The Internet was also very real. This is a real way for humans to communicate with each other. It's a big deal. Huge boom. Huge boom. Huge bust. Huge bust. You keep going, and both things are lots of hype. I don't have to remind you of all the hype that was involved with the Internet -- like GetRich.com. But you had the same thing with the Gold Rush. "Gold. Gold. Gold." Sixty-eight rich men on the Steamer Portland. Stacks of yellow metal. Some have 5,000. Many have more. A few bring out 100,000 dollars each. People would get very excited about this when they read these articles. "The Eldorado of the United States of America: the discovery of inexhaustible gold mines in California." And the parallels between the Gold Rush and the Internet Rush continue very strongly. So many people left what they were doing. And what would happen is -- and the Gold Rush went on for years. People on the East Coast in 1849, when they first started to get the news, they thought, "Ah, this isn't real." But they keep hearing about people getting rich, and then in 1850 they still hear that. And they think it's not real. By about 1852, they're thinking, "Am I the stupidest person on Earth by not rushing to California?" And they start to decide they are. These are community affairs, by the way. Local communities on the East Coast would get together and whole teams of 10, 20 people would caravan across the United States, and they would form companies. These were typically not solitary efforts. But no matter what, if you were a lawyer or a banker, people dropped what they were doing, no matter what skill set they had, to go pan for gold. This guy on the left, Dr. Richard Beverley Cole, he lived in Philadelphia and he took the Panama route. They would take a ship down to Panama, across the isthmus, and then take another ship north. This guy, Dr. Toland, went by covered wagon to California. This has its parallels, too. Doctors leaving their practices. These are both very successful -- a physician in one case, a surgeon in the other. Same thing happened on the Internet. You get DrKoop.com. (Laughter) In the Gold Rush, people literally jumped ship. The San Francisco harbor was clogged with 600 ships at the peak because the ships would get there and the crews would abandon to go search for gold. So there were literally 600 captains and 600 ships. They turned the ships into hotels, because they couldn't sail them anywhere. You had dotcom fever. And you had gold fever. And you saw some of the excesses that the dotcom fever created and the same thing happened. The fort in San Francisco at the time had about 1,300 soldiers. Half of them deserted to go look for gold. And they wouldn't let the other half out to go look for the first half because they were afraid they wouldn't come back. (Laughter) And one of the soldiers wrote home, and this is the sentence that he put: "The struggle between right and six dollars a month and wrong and 75 dollars a day is a rather severe one." They had bad burn rate in the Gold Rush. A very bad burn rate. This is actually from the Klondike Gold Rush. This is the White Pass Trail. They loaded up their mules and their horses. And they didn't plan right. And they didn't know how far they would really have to go, and they overloaded the horses with hundreds and hundreds of pounds of stuff. In fact it was so bad that most of the horses died before they could get where they were going. It got renamed the "Dead Horse Trail." And the Canadian Minister of the Interior wrote this at the time: "Thousands of pack horses lie dead along the way, sometimes in bunches under the cliffs, with pack saddles and packs where they've fallen from the rock above, sometimes in tangled masses, filling the mud holes and furnishing the only footing for our poor pack animals on the march, often, I regret to say, exhausted, but still alive, a fact we were unaware of, until after the miserable wretches turned beneath the hooves of our cavalcade. The eyeless sockets of the pack animals everywhere account for the myriads of ravens along the road. The inhumanity which this trail has been witness to, the heartbreak and suffering which so many have undergone, cannot be imagined. They certainly cannot be described." And you know, without the smell that would have accompanied that, we had the same thing on the Internet: very bad burn rate calculations. I'll just play one of these and you'll remember it. This is a commercial that was played on the Super Bowl in the year 2000. (Video): Bride #1: You said you had a large selection of invitations. Clerk: But we do. Bride #2: Then why does she have my invitation? Announcer: What may be a little thing to some ... Bride #3: You are mine, little man. Announcer: Could be a really big deal to you. Husband #1: Is that your wife? Husband #2: Not for another 15 minutes. Announcer: After all, it's your special day. OurBeginning.com. Life's an event. Announce it to the world. Jeff Bezos: It's very difficult to figure out what that ad is for. (Laughter) But they spent three and a half million dollars in the 2000 Super Bowl to air that ad, even though, at the time, they only had a million dollars in annual revenue. Now, here's where our analogy with the Gold Rush starts to diverge, and I think rather severely. And that is, in a gold rush, when it's over, it's over. Here's this guy: "There are many men in Dawson at the present time who feel keenly disappointed. They've come thousands of miles on a perilous trip, risked life, health and property, spent months of the most arduous labor a man can perform and at length with expectations raised to the highest pitch have reached the coveted goal only to discover the fact that there is nothing here for them." And that was, of course, the very common story. Because when you take out that last piece of gold -- and they did incredibly quickly. I mean, if you look at the 1849 Gold Rush -- the entire American river region, within two years -- every stone had been turned. And after that, only big companies who used more sophisticated mining technologies started to take gold out of there. So there's a much better analogy that allows you to be incredibly optimistic and that analogy is the electric industry. And there are a lot of similarities between the Internet and the electric industry. With the electric industry you actually have to -- one of them is that they're both sort of thin, horizontal, enabling layers that go across lots of different industries. It's not a specific thing. But electricity is also very, very broad, so you have to sort of narrow it down. You know, it can be used as an incredible means of transmitting power. It's an incredible means of coordinating, in a very fine-grained way, information flows. There's a bunch of things that are interesting about electricity. And the part of the electric revolution that I want to focus on is sort of the golden age of appliances. The killer app that got the world ready for appliances was the light bulb. So the light bulb is what wired the world. And they weren't thinking about appliances when they wired the world. They were really thinking about -- they weren't putting electricity into the home; they were putting lighting into the home. And, but it really -- it got the electricity. It took a long time. This was a huge -- as you would expect -- a huge capital build out. All the streets had to be torn up. This is work going on down in lower Manhattan where they built some of the first electric power generating stations. And they're tearing up all the streets. The Edison Electric Company, which became Edison General Electric, which became General Electric, paid for all of this digging up of the streets. It was incredibly expensive. But that is not the -- and that's not the part that's really most similar to the Web. Because, remember, the Web got to stand on top of all this heavy infrastructure that had been put in place because of the long-distance phone network. So all of the cabling and all of the heavy infrastructure -- I'm going back now to, sort of, the explosive part of the Web in 1994, when it was growing 2,300 percent a year. How could it grow at 2,300 percent a year in 1994 when people weren't really investing in the Web? Well, it was because that heavy infrastructure had already been laid down. So the light bulb laid down the heavy infrastructure, and then home appliances started coming into being. And this was huge. The first one was the electric fan -- this was the 1890 electric fan. And the appliances, the golden age of appliances really lasted -- it depends how you want to measure it -- but it's anywhere from 40 to 60 years. It goes on a long time. It starts about 1890. And the electric fan was a big success. The electric iron, also very big. By the way, this is the beginning of the asbestos lawsuit. (Laughter) There's asbestos under that handle there. This is the first vacuum cleaner, the 1905 Skinner Vacuum, from the Hoover Company. And this one weighed 92 pounds and took two people to operate and cost a quarter of a car. So it wasn't a big seller. This was truly, truly an early-adopter product -- (Laughter) the 1905 Skinner Vacuum. But three years later, by 1908, it weighed 40 pounds. Now, not all these things were highly successful. (Laughter) This is the electric tie press, which never really did catch on. People, I guess, decided that they would not wrinkle their ties. These never really caught on either: the electric shoe warmer and drier. Never a big seller. This came in, like, six different colors. (Laughter) I don't know why. But I thought, you know, sometimes it's just not the right time for an invention; maybe it's time to give this one another shot. So I thought we could build a Super Bowl ad for this. We'd need the right partner. And I thought that really -- (Laughter) I thought that would really work, to give that another shot. Now, the toaster was huge because they used to make toast on open fires, and it took a lot of time and attention. I want to point out one thing. This is -- you guys know what this is. They hadn't invented the electric socket yet. So this was -- remember, they didn't wire the houses for electricity. They wired them for lighting. So your -- your appliances would plug in. They would -- each room typically had a light bulb socket at the top. And you'd plug it in there. In fact, if you've seen the Carousel of Progress at Disney World, you've seen this. Here are the cables coming up into this light fixture. All the appliances plug in there. And you would just unscrew your light bulb if you wanted to plug in an appliance. The next thing that really was a big, big deal was the washing machine. Now, this was an object of much envy and lust. Everybody wanted one of these electric washing machines. On the left-hand side, this was the soapy water. And there's a rotor there -- that this motor is spinning. And it would clean your clothes. This is the clean rinse-water. So you'd take the clothes out of here, put them in here, and then you'd run the clothes through this electric ringer. And this was a big deal. You'd keep this on your porch. It was a little bit messy and kind of a pain. And you'd run a long cord into the house where you could screw it into your light socket. (Laughter) And that's actually kind of an important point in my presentation, because they hadn't invented the off switch. That was to come much later -- the off switch on appliances -- because it didn't make any sense. I mean, you didn't want this thing clogging up a light socket. So you know, when you were done with it, you unscrewed it. That's what you did. You didn't turn it off. And as I said before, they hadn't invented the electric outlet either, so the washing machine was a particularly dangerous device. And there are -- when you research this, there are gruesome descriptions of people getting their hair and clothes caught in these devices. And they couldn't yank the cord out because it was screwed into a light socket inside the house. (Laughter) And there was no off switch, so it wasn't very good. And you might think that that was incredibly stupid of our ancestors to be plugging things into a light socket like this. But, you know, before I get too far into condemning our ancestors, I thought I'd show you: this is my conference room. This is a total kludge, if you ask me. First of all, this got installed upside down. This light socket -- (Laughter) and so the cord keeps falling out, so I taped it in. (Laughter) This is supposed -- don't even get me started. But that's not the worst one. This is what it looks like under my desk. I took this picture just two days ago. So we really haven't progressed that much since 1908. (Laughter) It's a total, total mess. And, you know, we think it's getting better, but have you tried to install 802.11 yourself? (Laughter) I challenge you to try. It's very hard. I know Ph.D.s in Computer Science -- this process has brought them to tears, absolute tears. (Laughter) And that's assuming you already have DSL in your house. Try to get DSL installed in your house. The engineers who do it everyday can't do it. They have to -- typically, they come three times. And one friend of mine was telling me a story: not only did they get there and have to wait, but then the engineers, when they finally did get there, for the third time, they had to call somebody. And they were really happy that the guy had a speakerphone because then they had to wait on hold for an hour to talk to somebody to give them an access code after they got there. So we're not -- we're pretty kludge-y ourselves. By the way, DSL is a kludge. I mean, this is a twisted pair of copper that was never designed for the purpose it's being put to -- you know it's the whole thing -- we're very, very primitive. And that's kind of the point. Because, you know, resilience -- if you think of it in terms of the Gold Rush, then you'd be pretty depressed right now because the last nugget of gold would be gone. But the good thing is, with innovation, there isn't a last nugget. Every new thing creates two new questions and two new opportunities. And if you believe that, then you believe that where we are -- this is what I think -- I believe that where we are with the incredible kludge -- and I haven't even talked about user interfaces on the Web -- but there's so much kludge, so much terrible stuff -- we are at the 1908 Hurley washing machine stage with the Internet. That's where we are. We don't get our hair caught in it, but that's the level of primitiveness of where we are. We're in 1908. And if you believe that, then stuff like this doesn't bother you. This is 1996: "All the negatives add up to making the online experience not worth the trouble." 1998: "Amazon.toast." In 1999: "Amazon.bomb." My mom hates this picture. (Laughter) She -- but you know, if you really do believe that it's the very, very beginning, if you believe it's the 1908 Hurley washing machine, then you're incredibly optimistic. And I do think that that's where we are. And I do think there's more innovation ahead of us than there is behind us. And in 1917, Sears -- I want to get this exactly right. This was the advertisement that they ran in 1917. It says: "Use your electricity for more than light." And I think that's where we are. We're very, very early. Thank you very much.

So today, I'm going to tell you about some people who didn't move out of their neighborhoods. The first one is happening right here in Chicago. Brenda Palms-Farber was hired to help ex-convicts reenter society and keep them from going back into prison. Currently, taxpayers spend about 60,000 dollars per year sending a person to jail. We know that two-thirds of them are going to go back. I find it interesting that, for every one dollar we spend, however, on early childhood education, like Head Start, we save 17 dollars on stuff like incarceration in the future. Or -- think about it -- that 60,000 dollars is more than what it costs to send one person to Harvard as well. But Brenda, not being phased by stuff like that, took a look at her challenge and came up with a not-so-obvious solution: create a business that produces skin care products from honey. Okay, it might be obvious to some of you; it wasn't to me. It's the basis of growing a form of social innovation that has real potential. She hired seemingly unemployable men and women to care for the bees, harvest the honey and make value-added products that they marketed themselves, and that were later sold at Whole Foods. She combined employment experience and training with life skills they needed, like anger-management and teamwork, and also how to talk to future employers about how their experiences actually demonstrated the lessons that they had learned and their eagerness to learn more. Less than four percent of the folks that went through her program actually go back to jail. So these young men and women learned job-readiness and life skills through bee keeping and became productive citizens in the process. Talk about a sweet beginning. Now, I'm going to take you to Los Angeles, and lots of people know that L.A. has its issues. But I'm going to talk about L.A.'s water issues right now. They have not enough water on most days and too much to handle when it rains. Currently, 20 percent of California's energy consumption is used to pump water into mostly Southern California. Their spending loads, loads, to channel that rainwater out into the ocean when it rains and floods as well. Now Andy Lipkis is working to help L.A. cut infrastructure costs associated with water management and urban heat island -- linking trees, people and technology to create a more livable city. All that green stuff actually naturally absorbs storm water, also helps cool our cities. Because, come to think about it, do you really want air-conditioning, or is it a cooler room that you want? How you get it shouldn't make that much of a difference. So a few years ago, L.A. County decided that they needed to spend 2.5 billion dollars to repair the city schools. And Andy and his team discovered that they were going to spend 200 million of those dollars on asphalt to surround the schools themselves. And by presenting a really strong economic case, they convinced the L.A. government that replacing that asphalt with trees and other greenery, that the schools themselves would save the system more on energy than they spend on horticultural infrastructure. So ultimately, 20 million square feet of asphalt was replaced or avoided, and electrical consumption for air-conditioning went down, while employment for people to maintain those grounds went up, resulting in a net-savings to the system, but also healthier students and schools system employees as well. Now Judy Bonds is a coal miner's daughter. Her family has eight generations in a town called Whitesville, West Virginia. And if anyone should be clinging to the former glory of the coal mining history, and of the town, it should be Judy. But the way coal is mined right now is different from the deep mines that her father and her father's father would go down into and that employed essentially thousands and thousands of people. Now, two dozen men can tear down a mountain in several months, and only for about a few years' worth of coal. That kind of technology is called "mountaintop removal." It can make a mountain go from this to this in a few short months. Just imagine that the air surrounding these places -- it's filled with the residue of explosives and coal. When we visited, it gave some of the people we were with this strange little cough after being only there for just a few hours or so -- not just miners, but everybody. And Judy saw her landscape being destroyed and her water poisoned. And the coal companies just move on after the mountain was emptied, leaving even more unemployment in their wake. But she also saw the difference in potential wind energy on an intact mountain, and one that was reduced in elevation by over 2,000 feet. Three years of dirty energy with not many jobs, or centuries of clean energy with the potential for developing expertise and improvements in efficiency based on technical skills, and developing local knowledge about how to get the most out of that region's wind. She calculated the up-front cost and the payback over time, and it's a net-plus on so many levels for the local, national and global economy. It's a longer payback than mountaintop removal, but the wind energy actually pays back forever. Now mountaintop removal pays very little money to the locals, and it gives them a lot of misery. The water is turned into goo. Most people are still unemployed, leading to most of the same kinds of social problems that unemployed people in inner cities also experience -- drug and alcohol abuse, domestic abuse, teen pregnancy and poor heath, as well. Now Judy and I -- I have to say -- totally related to each other. Not quite an obvious alliance. I mean, literally, her hometown is called Whitesville, West Virginia. I mean, they are not -- they ain't competing for the birthplace of hip hop title or anything like that. But the back of my T-shirt, the one that she gave me, says, "Save the endangered hillbillies." So homegirls and hillbillies we got it together and totally understand that this is what it's all about. But just a few months ago, Judy was diagnosed with stage-three lung cancer. Yeah. And it has since moved to her bones and her brain. And I just find it so bizarre that she's suffering from the same thing that she tried so hard to protect people from. But her dream of Coal River Mountain Wind is her legacy. And she might not get to see that mountaintop. But rather than writing yet some kind of manifesto or something, she's leaving behind a business plan to make it happen. That's what my homegirl is doing. So I'm so proud of that. (Applause) But these three people don't know each other, but they do have an awful lot in common. They're all problem solvers, and they're just some of the many examples that I really am privileged to see, meet and learn from in the examples of the work that I do now. I was really lucky to have them all featured on my Corporation for Public Radio radio show called ThePromisedLand.org. Now they're all very practical visionaries. They take a look at the demands that are out there -- beauty products, healthy schools, electricity -- and how the money's flowing to meet those demands. And when the cheapest solutions involve reducing the number of jobs, you're left with unemployed people, and those people aren't cheap. In fact, they make up some of what I call the most expensive citizens, and they include generationally impoverished, traumatized vets returning from the Middle East, people coming out of jail. And for the veterans in particular, the V.A. said there's a six-fold increase in mental health pharmaceuticals by vets since 2003. I think that number's probably going to go up. They're not the largest number of people, but they are some of the most expensive -- and in terms of the likelihood for domestic abuse, drug and alcohol abuse, poor performance by their kids in schools and also poor health as a result of stress. So these three guys all understand how to productively channel dollars through our local economies to meet existing market demands, reduce the social problems that we have now and prevent new problems in the future. And there are plenty of other examples like that. One problem: waste handling and unemployment. Even when we think or talk about recycling, lots of recyclable stuff ends up getting incinerated or in landfills and leaving many municipalities, diversion rates -- they leave much to be recycled. And where is this waste handled? Usually in poor communities. And we know that eco-industrial business, these kinds of business models -- there's a model in Europe called the eco-industrial park, where either the waste of one company is the raw material for another, or you use recycled materials to make goods that you can actually use and sell. We can create these local markets and incentives for recycled materials to be used as raw materials for manufacturing. And in my hometown, we actually tried to do one of these in the Bronx, but our mayor decided what he wanted to see was a jail on that same spot. Fortunately -- because we wanted to create hundreds of jobs -- but after many years, the city wanted to build a jail. They've since abandoned that project, thank goodness. Another problem: unhealthy food systems and unemployment. Working-class and poor urban Americans are not benefiting economically from our current food system. It relies too much on transportation, chemical fertilization, big use of water and also refrigeration. Mega agricultural operations often are responsible for poisoning our waterways and our land, and it produces this incredibly unhealthy product that costs us billions in healthcare and lost productivity. And so we know "urban ag" is a big buzz topic this time of the year, but it's mostly gardening, which has some value in community building -- lots of it -- but it's not in terms of creating jobs or for food production. The numbers just aren't there. Part of my work now is really laying the groundwork to integrate urban ag and rural food systems to hasten the demise of the 3,000-mile salad by creating a national brand of urban-grown produce in every city, that uses regional growing power and augments it with indoor growing facilities, owned and operated by small growers, where now there are only consumers. This can support seasonal farmers around metro areas who are losing out because they really can't meet the year-round demand for produce. It's not a competition with rural farm; it's actually reinforcements. It allies in a really positive and economically viable food system. The goal is to meet the cities' institutional demands for hospitals, senior centers, schools, daycare centers, and produce a network of regional jobs, as well. This is smart infrastructure. And how we manage our built environment affects the health and well-being of people every single day. Our municipalities, rural and urban, play the operational course of infrastructure -- things like waste disposal, energy demand, as well as social costs of unemployment, drop-out rates, incarceration rates and the impacts of various public health costs. Smart infrastructure can provide cost-saving ways for municipalities to handle both infrastructure and social needs. And we want to shift the systems that open the doors for people who were formerly tax burdens to become part of the tax base. And imagine a national business model that creates local jobs and smart infrastructure to improve local economic stability. So I'm hoping you can see a little theme here. These examples indicate a trend. I haven't created it, and it's not happening by accident. I'm noticing that it's happening all over the country, and the good news is that it's growing. And we all need to be invested in it. It is an essential pillar to this country's recovery. And I call it "hometown security." The recession has us reeling and fearful, and there's something in the air these days that is also very empowering. It's a realization that we are the key to our own recovery. Now is the time for us to act in our own communities where we think local and we act local. And when we do that, our neighbors -- be they next-door, or in the next state, or in the next country -- will be just fine. The sum of the local is the global. Hometown security means rebuilding our natural defenses, putting people to work, restoring our natural systems. Hometown security means creating wealth here at home, instead of destroying it overseas. Tackling social and environmental problems at the same time with the same solution yields great cost savings, wealth generation and national security. Many great and inspiring solutions have been generated across America. The challenge for us now is to identify and support countless more. Now, hometown security is about taking care of your own, but it's not like the old saying, "charity begins at home." I recently read a book called "Love Leadership" by John Hope Bryant. And it's about leading in a world that really does seem to be operating on the basis of fear. And reading that book made me reexamine that theory because I need to explain what I mean by that. See, my dad was a great, great man in many ways. He grew up in the segregated South, escaped lynching and all that during some really hard times, and he provided a really stable home for me and my siblings and a whole bunch of other people that fell on hard times. But, like all of us, he had some problems. (Laughter) And his was gambling, compulsively. To him that phrase, "Charity begins at home," meant that my payday -- or someone else's -- would just happen to coincide with his lucky day. So you need to help him out. And sometimes I would loan him money from my after-school or summer jobs, and he always had the great intention of paying me back with interest, of course, after he hit it big. And he did sometimes, believe it or not, at a racetrack in Los Angeles -- one reason to love L.A. -- back in the 1940s. He made 15,000 dollars cash and bought the house that I grew up in. So I'm not that unhappy about that. But listen, I did feel obligated to him, and I grew up -- then I grew up. And I'm a grown woman now, and I have learned a few things along the way. To me, charity often is just about giving, because you're supposed to, or because it's what you've always done, or it's about giving until it hurts. I'm about providing the means to build something that will grow and intensify its original investment and not just require greater giving next year -- I'm not trying to feed the habit. I spent some years watching how good intentions for community empowerment, that were supposed to be there to support the community and empower it, actually left people in the same, if not worse, position that they were in before. And over the past 20 years, we've spent record amounts of philanthropic dollars on social problems, yet educational outcomes, malnutrition, incarceration, obesity, diabetes, income disparity, they've all gone up with some exceptions -- in particular, infant mortality among people in poverty -- but it's a great world that we're bringing them into as well. And I know a little bit about these issues, because, for many years, I spent a long time in the non-profit industrial complex, and I'm a recovering executive director, two years clean. (Laughter) But during that time, I realized that it was about projects and developing them on the local level that really was going to do the right thing for our communities. But I really did struggle for financial support. The greater our success, the less money came in from foundations. And I tell you, being on the TED stage and winning a MacArthur in the same exact year gave everyone the impression that I had arrived. And by the time I'd moved on, I was actually covering a third of my agency's budget deficit with speaking fees. And I think because early on, frankly, my programs were just a little bit ahead of their time. But since then, the park that was just a dump and was featured at a TED2006 Talk became this little thing. But I did in fact get married in it. Over here. There goes my dog who led me to the park in my wedding. The South Bronx Greenway was also just a drawing on the stage back in 2006. Since then, we got about 50 million dollars in stimulus package money to come and get here. And we love this, because I love construction now, because we're watching these things actually happen. So I want everyone to understand the critical importance of shifting charity into enterprise. I started my firm to help communities across the country realize their own potential to improve everything about the quality of life for their people. Hometown security is next on my to-do list. What we need are people who see the value in investing in these types of local enterprises, who will partner with folks like me to identify the growth trends and climate adaptation as well as understand the growing social costs of business as usual. We need to work together to embrace and repair our land, repair our power systems and repair ourselves. It's time to stop building the shopping malls, the prisons, the stadiums and other tributes to all of our collective failures. It is time that we start building living monuments to hope and possibility. Thank you very much. (Applause)

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

I worked on a film called "Apollo 13," and when I worked on this film, I discovered something about how our brains work, and how our brains work is that, when we're sort of infused with either enthusiasm or awe or fondness or whatever, it changes and alters our perception of things. It changes what we see. It changes what we remember. And as an experiment, because I dauntingly create a task for myself of recreating a Saturn V launch for this particular movie, because I put it out there, I felt a little nervous about it, so I need to do an experiment and bring a group of people like this in a projection room and play this stock footage, and when I played this stock footage, I simply wanted to find out what people remembered, what was memorable about it? What should I actually try to replicate? What should I try to emulate to some degree? So this is the footage that I was showing everybody. And what I discovered is, because of the nature of the footage and the fact that we're doing this film, there was an emotion that was built into it and our collective memories of what this launch meant to us and all these various things. When I showed it, and I asked, immediately after the screening was over, what they thought of it, what was your memorable shots, they changed them. They were -- had camera moves on them. They had all kinds of things. Shots were combined, and I was just really curious, I mean, what the hell were you looking at just a few minutes ago and how come, how'd you come up with this sort of description? And what I discovered is, what I should do is not actually replicate what they saw, is replicate what they remembered. So this is our footage of the launch, based on, basically, taking notes, asking people what they thought, and then the combination of all the different shots and all the different things put together created their sort of collective consciousness of what they remembered it looked like, but not what it really looked like. So this is what we created for "Apollo 13." (Launch noises) So literally what you're seeing now is the confluence of a bunch of different people, a bunch of different memories, including my own, of taking a little bit of liberty with the subject matter. I basically shot everything with short lenses, which means that you're very close to the action, but framed it very similarly to the long lens shots which gives you a sense of distance, so I was basically was setting up something that would remind you of something you haven't really quite seen before. (Music) And then I'm going to show you exactly what it is that you were reacting to when you were reacting to it. (Music) Tom Hanks: Hello, Houston, this is Odyssey. It's good to see you again. (Cheers) (Music) Rob Legato: I pretend they're clapping for me. (Laughter) So now I'm in a parking lot. Basically it's a tin can, and I'm basically recreating the launch with fire extinguishers, fire, I have wax that I threw in front of the lens to look like ice, and so basically if you believed any of the stuff that I just showed you, what you were reacting to, what you're emoting to, is something that's a total falsehood, and I found that really kind of fascinating. And in this particular case, this is the climax of the movie, and, you know, the weight of achieving it was simply take a model, throw it out of a helicopter, and shoot it. And that's simply what I did. That's me shooting, and I'm a fairly mediocre operator, so I got that nice sense of verisimilitude, of a kind of, you know, following the rocket all the way down, and giving that little sort of edge, I was desperately trying to keep it in frame. So then I come up to the next thing. We had a NASA consultant who was actually an astronaut, who was actually on some of the missions, of Apollo 15, and he was there to basically double check my science. And, I guess somebody thought they needed to do that. (Laughter) I don't know why, but they thought they did. So we were, he's a hero, he's an astronaut, and we're all sort of excited, and, you know, I gave myself the liberty of saying, you know, some of the shots I did didn't really suck that bad. And so maybe, you know, we were feeling kind of a little good about it, so I brought him in here, and he needed to really check and see what we were doing, and basically give us our A plus report card, and so I showed him some shots we were working on, and waiting for the reaction that you hope for, which is what I got. (Music) (Launch noises) So I showed him these two shots, and then he basically told me what he thought. ("That's wrong") (Laughter) Okay. (Laughter) It's what you dream about. (Laughter) So what I got from him is, he turned to me and said, "You would never, ever design a rocket like that. You would never have a rocket go up while the gantry arms are going out. Can you imagine the tragedy that could possibly happen with that? You would never, ever design a rocket like that." And he was looking at me. It's like, Yeah, I don't know if you noticed, but I'm the guy out in the parking lot recreating one of America's finest moments with fire extinguishers. (Laughter) And I'm not going to argue with you. You're an astronaut, a hero, and I'm from New Jersey, so -- (Laughter) I'm just going to show you some footage. I'm just going to show you some footage, and tell me what you think. And then I did kind of get the reaction I was hoping for. So I showed him this, and this is actual footage that he was on. This is Apollo 15. This was his mission. So I showed him this, and the reaction I got was interesting. ("That's wrong too.") (Laughter) So, and what happened was, I mean, what I sort of intuned in that is that he remembered it differently. He remembered that was a perfectly safe sort of gantry system, perfectly safe rocket launch, because he's sitting in a rocket that has, like, a hundred thousand pounds of thrust, built by the lowest bidder. He was hoping it was going to work out okay. (Laughter) (Applause) So he twisted his memory around. Now, Ron Howard ran into Buzz Aldrin, who was not on the movie, so he had no idea that we were faking any of this footage, and he just responded as he would respond, and I'll run this. Ron Howard: Buzz Aldrin came up to me and said, "Hey, that launch footage, I saw some shots I'd never seen before. Did you guys, what vault did you find that stuff in?" And I said, "Well, no vault, Buzz, we generated all that from scratch." And he said, "Huh, that's pretty good. Can we use it?" (Explosion) ("Sure") (Laughter) RL: I think he's a great American. (Laughter) So, "Titanic" was, if you don't know the story, doesn't end well. (Laughter) Jim Cameron actually photographed the real Titanic. So he basically set up, or basically shattered the suspension of disbelief, because what he photographed was the real thing, a Mir sub going down, or actually two Mir subs going down to the real wreck, and he created this very haunting footage. It's really beautiful, and it conjures up all these various different emotions, but he couldn't photograph everything, and to tell the story, I had to fill in the gaps, which is now rather daunting, because now I have to recreate back to back what really happened and I had, I'm the only one who could really blow it at that point. So this is the footage he photographed, and it was pretty moving and pretty awe-inspiring. So I'm going to just let it run, so you kind of absorb this sort of thing, and I'll describe my sort of reactions when I was looking at it for the very first time. I got the feeling that my brain wanted to basically see it come back to life. I automatically wanted to see this ship, this magnificent ship, basically in all its glory, and conversely, I wanted to see it not in all its glory, basically go back to what it looks like. So I conjured up an effect that I'm later going to show you what I tried to do, which is kind of the heart of the movie, for me, and so that's why I wanted to do the movie, that's why I wanted to create the sort of things I created. And I'll show you, you know, another thing that I found interesting is what we really were emoting to when you take a look at it. So here's the behind the scenes, a couple of little shots here. So, when you saw my footage, you were seeing this: basically, a bunch of guys flipping a ship upside down, and the little Mir subs are actually about the size of small footballs, and shot in smoke. Jim went three miles went down, and I went about three miles away from the studio and photographed this in a garage. And so, but what you're emoting to, or what you're looking at, had the same feeling, the same haunting quality, that Jim's footage had, so I found it so fascinating that our brains sort of, once you believe something's real, you transfer everything that you feel about it, this quality you have, and it's totally artificial. It's totally make-believe, yet it's not to you, and I found that that was a very interesting thing to explore and use, and it caused me to create the next effect that I'll show you, which is this sort of magic transition, and all I was really attempting to do is basically have the audience cue the effect, so it became a seamless experience for them, that I wasn't showing you my sort of interpretation, I was showing you what you wanted to see. And the very next shot, right after this -- So you can see what I was doing. So basically, if there's two subs in the same shot, I shot it, because where's the camera coming from? And when Jim shot it, it was only one sub, because he was photographing from the other, and I don't remember if I did this or Jim did this. I'll give it to Jim, because he could use the pat on the back. (Laughter) Okay. So now the Titanic transition. So this is what I was referring to where I wanted to basically magically transplant from one state of the Titanic to the other. So I'll just play the shot once. (Music) (Music) And what I was hoping for is that it just melts in front of you. Gloria Stuart: That was the last time Titanic ever saw daylight. RL: So, what I did is basically I had another screening room experience where I was basically tracking where I was looking, or where we were looking, and of course you're looking at the two people on the bow of the ship, and then at some point, I'm changing the periphery of the shot, I'm changing, it's becoming the rusted wreck, and then I would run it every day, and then I would find exactly the moment that I stopped looking at them and start noticing the rest of it, and the moment my eye shifted, we just marked it to the frame. The moment my eye shifted, I immediately started to change them, so now somehow you missed where it started and where it stopped. And so I'll just show it one more time. (Music) And it's literally done by using what our brains naturally do for us, which is, as soon as you shift your attention, something changes, and then I left the little scarf going, because it really wanted to be a ghostly shot, really wanted to feel like they were still on the wreck, essentially. That's where they were buried forever. Or something like that. I just made that up. (Laughter) It was, incidentally, the last time I ever saw daylight. It was a long film to work on. (Laughter) Now, "Hugo" was another interesting movie, because the movie itself is about film illusions. It's about how our brain is tricked into seeing a persistence of vision that creates a motion picture, and one of the things I had to do is, we — Sasha Baron Cohen is a very clever, very smart guy, comedian, wanted to basically do an homage to the kind of the Buster Keaton sort of slapstick things, and he wanted his leg brace to get caught on a moving train. Very dangerous, very impossible to do, and particularly on our stage, because there literally is no way to actually move this train, because it fits so snugly into our set. So let me show you the scene, and then I basically used the trick that was identified by Sergei Eisenstein, which is, if you have a camera that's moving with a moving object, what is not moving appears to be moving, and what is moving appears to be stopped, so what you're actually seeing now is the train is not moving at all, and what is actually moving is the floor. So this is the shot. That's a little video of what you're looking at there, which is our little test, so that's actually what you're seeing, and I thought it was sort of an interesting thing, because it was, part of the homage of the movie itself is coming up with this sort of genius trick which I can't take credit for. I'd love to but I can't, because it was invented like in 1910 or something like that, is I told Marty, and it's kind of one of those mind things that it's really hard to really get until you actually see it work, and I said, you know, what I was going to do, and he said, "So, let me see if I can get this straight. The thing with the wheels? That doesn't move." (Laughter) (Applause) "And the thing without the wheels, that moves." Precisely. (Laughter) Brings me to the next, and final -- Marty's not going to see this, is he? (Laughter) This isn't viewed outside of -- (Laughter) The next illustration is something that, there's like all one shot theory. It's a very elegant way of telling a story, especially if you're following somebody on a journey, and that journey basically tells something about their personality in a very concise way, and what we wanted to do based on the shot in "Goodfellas," which is one of the great shots ever, a Martin Scorsese film, of basically following Henry Hill through what it feels like to be a gangster walk going through the Copacabana and being treated in a special way. He was the master of his universe, and we wanted Hugo to feel the same way, so we created this shot. (Music) That's Hugo. (Music) And we felt that if we could basically move the camera with him, we would feel what it feels like to be this boy who is basically the master of his universe, and his universe is, you know, behind the scenes in the bowels of this particular train station that only he can actually navigate through and do it this way, and we had to make it feel that this is his normal, everyday sort of life, so the idea of doing it as one shot was very important, and of course, in shooting in 3D, which is basically it's a huge camera that's hanging off of a giant stick, so to recreate a steadycam shot was the task, and make it feel kind of like what the reaction you got when you saw the "Goodfellas" shot. So what you're now going to see is how we actually did it. It's actually five separate sets shot at five different times with two different boys. The one on the left is where the shot ends, and the shot on the right is where it takes over, and now we switch boys, so it went from Asa Butterfield, who's the star of the show, to his stand-in. (Music) I wouldn't say his stunt double. There's a crazy rig that we built for this. (Music) And so this is, and now this is set number three we're into, and then we're going to go into, basically the very last moment of the shot is actually the steadycam shot. Everything else was shot on cranes and various things like that, and it literally was done over five different sets, two different boys, different times, and it all had to feel like it was all one shot, and what was sort of great for me was it was probably the best-reviewed shot I've ever worked on, and, you know, I was kind of proud of it when I was done, which is, you should never really be proud of stuff, I guess. So I was kind of proud of it, and I went to a friend of mine, and said, "You know, this is, you know, kind of the best-reviewed shot I've ever worked on. What do you think was the reason?" And he said, "Because no one knows you had anything to do with it." (Laughter) So, all I can say is, thank you, and that's my presentation for you. (Applause) (Applause)

I want you to take a trip with me. Picture yourself driving down a small road in Africa, and as you drive along, you look off to the side, and this is what you see: you see a field of graves. And you stop, and you get out of your car and you take a picture. And you go into the town, and you inquire, "What's going on here?" and people are initially reluctant to tell you. And then someone says, "These are the recent AIDS deaths in our community." HIV isn't like other medical conditions; it's stigmatizing. People are reluctant to talk about it -- there's a fear associated with it. And I'm going to talk about HIV today, about the deaths, about the stigma. It's a medical story, but more than that, it's a social story. This map depicts the global distribution of HIV. And as you can see, Africa has a disproportionate share of the infection. There are 33 million people living with HIV in the world today. Of these, two-thirds, 22 million are living in sub-Saharan Africa. There are 1.4 million pregnant women in low- and middle-income countries living with HIV and of these, 90 percent are in sub-Saharan Africa. We talk about things in relative terms. And I'm going to talk about annual pregnancies and HIV-positive mothers. The United States -- a large country -- each year, 7,000 mothers with HIV who give birth to a child. But you go to Rwanda -- a very small country -- 8,000 mothers with HIV who are pregnant. And then you go to Baragwanath Hospital, outside of Johannesburg in South Africa, and 8,000 HIV-positive pregnant women giving birth -- a hospital the same as a country. And to realize that this is just the tip of an iceberg that when you compare everything here to South Africa, it just pales, because in South Africa, each year 300,000 mothers with HIV give birth to children. So we talk about PMTCT, and we refer to PMTCT, prevention of mother to child transmission. I think there's an assumption amongst most people in the public that if a mother is HIV-positive, she's going to infect her child. The reality is really, very different. In resource-rich countries, with all the tests and treatment we currently have, less than two percent of babies are born HIV-positive -- 98 percent of babies are born HIV-negative. And yet, the reality in resource-poor countries, in the absence of tests and treatment, 40 percent -- 40 percent of children are infected -- 40 percent versus two percent -- an enormous difference. So these programs -- and I'm going to refer to PMTCT though my talk -- these prevention programs, simply, they're the tests and the drugs that we give to mothers to prevent them from infecting their babies, and also the medicines we give to mothers to keep them healthy and alive to raise their children. So it's the test a mother gets when she comes in. It's the drugs she receives to protect the baby that's inside the uterus and during delivery. It's the guidance she gets around infant feeding and safer sex. It's an entire package of services, and it works. So in the United States, since the advent of treatment in the middle of the 1990s, there's been an 80-percent decline in the number of HIV-infected children. Less than 100 babies are born with HIV each year in the United States and yet, still, over 400,000 children are born every year in the world today with HIV. What does that mean? It means 1,100 children infected each day -- 1,100 children each day, infected with HIV. And where do they come from? Well, less than one comes from the United States. One, on average, comes from Europe. 100 come from Asia and the Pacific. And each day, a thousand babies -- a thousand babies are born each day with HIV in Africa. So again, I look at the globe here and the disproportionate share of HIV in Africa. And let's look at another map. And here, again, we see Africa has a disproportionate share of the numbers of doctors. That thin sliver you see here, that's Africa. And it's the same with nurses. The truth is sub-Saharan Africa has 24 percent of the global disease burden and yet only three percent of the world's health care workers. That means doctors and nurses simply don't have the time to take care of patients. A nurse in a busy clinic will see 50 to 100 patients in a day, which leaves her just minutes per patient -- minutes per patient. And so when we look at these PMTCT programs, what does it mean? Well, back in 2001, when there was just a simple test and a single dose of a drug, a nurse, in the course of her few minutes with a patient, would have to counsel for the HIV test, perform the HIV test, explain the results, dispense a single dose of the drug, Nevirapine, explain how to take it, discuss infant feeding options, reinforce infant feeding, and test the baby -- in minutes. Well, fortunately since 2001, we've got new treatments, new tests, and we're far more successful, but we don't have any more nurses. And so these are the tests a nurse now has to do in those same few minutes. It's not possible -- it doesn't work. And so we need to find better ways of providing care. This is a picture of a maternal health clinic in Africa -- mothers coming, pregnant and with their babies. These women are here for care, but we know that just doing a test, just giving someone a drug, it's not enough. Meds don't equal medical care. Doctors and nurses, frankly, don't have the time or skills to tell people what to do in ways they understand. I'm a doctor -- I tell people things to do, and I expect them to follow my guidance -- because I'm a doctor; I went to Harvard -- but the reality is, if I tell a patient, "You should have safer sex. You should always use a condom," and yet, in her relationship, she's not empowered -- what's going to happen? If I tell her to take her medicines every day and yet, no one in the household knows about her illness, so it's just not going to work. And so we need to do more, we need to do it differently, we need to do it in ways that are affordable and accessible and can be taken to scale, which means it can be done everywhere. So, I want to tell you a story -- I want to take you on a little trip. Imagine yourself, if you can, you're a young woman in Africa, you're going to the hospital or clinic. You go in for a test and you find out that you're pregnant, and you're delighted. And then they give you another test and they tell you you're HIV-positive, and you're devastated. And the nurse takes you into a room, and she tells you about the tests and HIV and the medicines you can take and how to take care of yourself and your baby, and you hear none of it. All you're hearing is, "I'm going to die, and my baby is going to die." And then you're out on the street, and you don't know where to go. And you don't know who you can talk to, because the truth is, HIV is so stigmatizing that if you partner, your family, anyone in your home, you're likely to be thrown out without any means of support. And this -- this is the face and story of HIV in Africa today. But we're here to talk about possible solutions and some good news. And I want to change the story a little bit. Take the same mother, and the nurse, after she gives her her test, takes her to a room. The door opens and there's a room full of mothers, mothers with babies, and they're sitting, and they're talking, they're listening. They're drinking tea, they're having sandwiches. And she goes inside, and woman comes up to her and says, "Welcome to mothers2mothers. Have a seat. You're safe here. We're all HIV-positive. You're going to be okay. You're going to live. Your baby is going to be HIV-negative." We view mothers as a community's single greatest resource. Mothers take care of the children, take care of the home. So often the men are gone. They're working, or they're not part of the household. Our organization, mothers2mothers, enlists women with HIV as care providers. We bring mothers who have HIV, who've been through these PMTCT programs in the very facilities, to come back and work side by side with doctors and nurses as part of the health care team. These mothers, we call them mentor mothers, are able to engage women who, just like themselves, pregnant with babies, have found out about being HIV-positive, who need support and education. And they support them around the diagnosis and educate them about how to take their medicines, how to take care of themselves, how to take care of their babies. Consider: if you needed surgery, you would want the best possible technical surgeon, right? But if you wanted to understand what that surgery would do to your life, you'd like to engage someone, someone who's had the procedure. Patients are experts on their own experience, and they can share that experience with others. This is the medical care that goes beyond just medicines. So the mothers who work for us, they come from the communities in which they work. They're hired -- they're paid as professional members of the health care teams, just like doctors and nurses. And we open bank accounts for them and they're paid directly into the accounts, because their money's protected; the men can't take it away from them. They go through two to three weeks of rigorous curriculum-based education, training. Now, doctors and nurses -- they too get trained. But so often, they only get trained once, so they're not aware of new medicines, new guidelines as they come out. Our mentor mothers get trained every single year and retrained. And so doctors and nurses -- they look up to them as experts. Imagine that: a woman, a former patient, being able to educate her doctor for the first time and educate the other patients that she's taking care of. Our organization has three goals. The first, to prevent mother-to-child transmission. The second: keep mothers healthy, keep mothers alive, keep the children alive -- no more orphans. And the third, and maybe the most grand, is to find ways to empower women, enable them to fight the stigma and to live positive and productive lives with HIV. So how do we do it? Well, maybe the most important engagement is the one-to-one, seeing patients one-to-one, educating them, supporting them, explaining how they can take care of themselves. We go beyond that; we try to bring in the husbands, the partners. In Africa, it's very, very hard to engage men. Men are not frequently part of pregnancy care. But in Rwanda, in one country, they've got a policy that a woman can't come for care unless she brings the father of the baby with her -- that's the rule. And so the father and the mother, together, go through the counseling and the testing. The father and the mother, together, they get the results. And this is so important in breaking through the stigma. Disclosure is so central to prevention. How do you have safer sex, how do you use a condom regularly if there hasn't been disclosure? Disclosure is so important to treatment, because again, people need the support of family members and friends to take their medicines regularly. We also work in groups. Now the groups, it's not like me lecturing, but what happens is women, they come together -- under the support and guidance of our mentor mothers -- they come together, and they share their personal experiences. And it's through the sharing that people get tactics of how to take care of themselves, how to disclose how to take medicines. And then there's the community outreach, engaging women in their communities. If we can change the way households believe and think, we can change the way communities believe and think. And if we can change enough communities, we can change national attitudes. We can change national attitudes to women and national attitudes to HIV. The hardest barrier really is around stigma reduction. We have the medicines, we have the tests, but how do you reduce the stigma? And it's important about disclosure. So, a couple years ago, one of the mentor mothers came back, and she told me a story. She had been asked by one of the clients to go to the home of the client, because the client wanted to tell the mother and her brothers and sisters about her HIV status, and she was afraid to go by herself. And so the mentor mother went along with. And the patient walked into the house and said to her mother and siblings, "I have something to tell you. I'm HIV-positive." And everybody was quiet. And then her oldest brother stood up and said, "I too have something to tell you. I'm HIV-positive. I've been afraid to tell everybody." And then this older sister stood up and said, "I too am living with the virus, and I've been ashamed." And then her younger brother stood up and said, "I'm also positive. I thought you were going to throw me out of the family." And you see where this is going. The last sister stood up and said, "I'm also positive. I thought you were going to hate me." And there they were, all of them together for the first time being able to share this experience for the first time and to support each other for the first time. (Video) Female Narrator: Women come to us, and they are crying and scared. I tell them my story, that I am HIV-positive, but my child is HIV-negative. I tell them, "You are going to make it, and you will raise a healthy baby." I am proof that there is hope. Mitchell Besser: Remember the images I showed you of how few doctors and nurses there are in Africa. And it is a crisis in health care systems. Even as we have more tests and more drugs, we can't reach people; we don't have enough providers. So we talk in terms of what we call task-shifting. Task-shifting is traditionally when you take health care services from one provider and have another provider do it. Typically, it's a doctor giving a job to a nurse. And the issue in Africa is that there are fewer nurses, really than doctors, and so we need to find new paradigm for health care. How do you build a better health care system? We've chosen to redefine the health care system as a doctor, a nurse and a mentor mother. And so what nurses do is that they ask the mentor mothers to explain how to take the drugs, the side effects. They delegate education about infant feeding, family planning, safer sex, actions that nurses simple just don't have time for. So we go back to the prevention of mother to child transmission. The world is increasingly seeing these programs as the bridge to comprehensive maternal and child health. And our organization helps women across that bridge. The care doesn't stop when the baby's born -- we deal with the ongoing health of the mother and baby, ensuring that they live healthy, successful lives. Our organization works on three levels. The first, at the patient level -- mothers and babies keeping babies from getting HIV, keeping mothers healthy to raise them. The second, communities -- empowering women. They become leaders within their communities. They change the way communities think -- we need to change attitudes to HIV. We need to change attitudes to women in Africa. We have to do that. And then rework the level of the health care systems, building stronger health care systems. Our health care systems are broken. They're not going to work the way they're currently designed. And so doctors and nurses who need to try to change people's behaviors don't have the skills, don't have the time -- our mentor mothers do. And so in redefining the health care teams by bringing the mentor mothers in, we can do that. I started the program in Capetown, South Africa back in 2001. It was at that point, just the spark of an idea. Referencing Steven Johnson's very lovely speech yesterday on where ideas come from, I was in the shower at the time -- I was alone. (Laughter) The program is now working in nine countries, we have 670 program sites, we're seeing about 230,000 women every month, we're employing 1,600 mentor mothers, and last year, they enrolled 300,000 HIV-positive pregnant women and mothers. That is 20 percent of the global HIV-positive pregnant women -- 20 percent of the world. What's extraordinary is how simple the premise is. Mothers with HIV caring for mothers with HIV. Past patients taking care of present patients. And empowerment through employment -- reducing stigma. (Video) Female Narrator: There is hope, hope that one day we shall win this fight against HIV and AIDS. Each person must know their HIV status. Those who are HIV-negative must know how to stay negative. Those who are HIV-infected must know how to take care of themselves. HIV-positive pregnant women must get PMTCT services in order to have HIV-negative babies. All of this is possible, if we each contribute to this fight. MB: Simple solutions to complex problems. Mothers caring for mothers. It's transformational. Thank you. (Applause)

I'd like to invite you to close your eyes. Imagine yourself standing outside the front door of your home. I'd like you to notice the color of the door, the material that it's made out of. Now visualize a pack of overweight nudists on bicycles. (Laughter) They are competing in a naked bicycle race, and they are headed straight for your front door. I need you to actually see this. They are pedaling really hard, they're sweaty, they're bouncing around a lot. And they crash straight into the front door of your home. Bicycles fly everywhere, wheels roll past you, spokes end up in awkward places. Step over the threshold of your door into your foyer, your hallway, whatever's on the other side, and appreciate the quality of the light. The light is shining down on Cookie Monster. Cookie Monster is waving at you from his perch on top of a tan horse. It's a talking horse. You can practically feel his blue fur tickling your nose. You can smell the oatmeal raisin cookie that he's about to shovel into his mouth. Walk past him. Walk past him into your living room. In your living room, in full imaginative broadband, picture Britney Spears. She is scantily clad, she's dancing on your coffee table, and she's singing "Hit Me Baby One More Time." And then, follow me into your kitchen. In your kitchen, the floor has been paved over with a yellow brick road, and out of your oven are coming towards you Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Lion from "The Wizard of Oz," hand-in-hand, skipping straight towards you. Okay. Open your eyes. I want to tell you about a very bizarre contest that is held every spring in New York City. It's called the United States Memory Championship. And I had gone to cover this contest a few years back as a science journalist, expecting, I guess, that this was going to be like the Superbowl of savants. This was a bunch of guys and a few ladies, widely varying in both age and hygienic upkeep. (Laughter) They were memorizing hundreds of random numbers, looking at them just once. They were memorizing the names of dozens and dozens and dozens of strangers. They were memorizing entire poems in just a few minutes. They were competing to see who could memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards the fastest. I was like, this is unbelievable. These people must be freaks of nature. And I started talking to a few of the competitors. This is a guy called Ed Cook, who had come over from England, where he had one of the best-trained memories. And I said to him, "Ed, when did you realize that you were a savant?" And Ed was like, "I'm not a savant. In fact, I have just an average memory. Everybody who competes in this contest will tell you that they have just an average memory. We've all trained ourselves to perform these utterly miraculous feats of memory using a set of ancient techniques, techniques invented 2,500 years ago in Greece, the same techniques that Cicero had used to memorize his speeches, that medieval scholars had used to memorize entire books." And I said, "Whoa. How come I never heard of this before?" And we were standing outside the competition hall, and Ed, who is a wonderful, brilliant, but somewhat eccentric English guy, says to me, "Josh, you're an American journalist. Do you know Britney Spears?" I'm like, "What? No. Why?" "Because I really want to teach Britney Spears how to memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards on U.S. national television. It will prove to the world that anybody can do this." (Laughter) I was like, "Well, I'm not Britney Spears, but maybe you could teach me. I mean, you've got to start somewhere, right?" And that was the beginning of a very strange journey for me. I ended up spending the better part of the next year not only training my memory, but also investigating it, trying to understand how it works, why it sometimes doesn't work, and what its potential might be. And I met a host of really interesting people. This is a guy called E.P. He's an amnesic who had, very possibly, the worst memory in the world. His memory was so bad, that he didn't even remember he had a memory problem, which is amazing. And he was this incredibly tragic figure, but he was a window into the extent to which our memories make us who we are. At the other end of the spectrum, I met this guy. This is Kim Peek, he was the basis for Dustin Hoffman's character in the movie "Rain Man." We spent an afternoon together in the Salt Lake City Public Library memorizing phone books, which was scintillating. (Laughter) And I went back and I read a whole host of memory treatises, treatises written 2,000-plus years ago in Latin, in antiquity, and then later, in the Middle Ages. And I learned a whole bunch of really interesting stuff. One of the really interesting things that I learned is that once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today. Once upon a time, people invested in their memories, in laboriously furnishing their minds. Over the last few millenia, we've invented a series of technologies -- from the alphabet, to the scroll, to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone -- that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity. These technologies have made our modern world possible, but they've also changed us. They've changed us culturally, and I would argue that they've changed us cognitively. Having little need to remember anymore, it sometimes seems like we've forgotten how. One of the last places on Earth where you still find people passionate about this idea of a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory, is at this totally singular memory contest. It's actually not that singular, there are contests held all over the world. And I was fascinated, I wanted to know how do these guys do it. A few years back a group of researchers at University College London brought a bunch of memory champions into the lab. They wanted to know: Do these guys have brains that are somehow structurally, anatomically different from the rest of ours? The answer was no. Are they smarter than the rest of us? They gave them a bunch of cognitive tests, and the answer was: not really. There was, however, one really interesting and telling difference between the brains of the memory champions and the control subjects that they were comparing them to. When they put these guys in an fMRI machine, scanned their brains while they were memorizing numbers and people's faces and pictures of snowflakes, they found that the memory champions were lighting up different parts of the brain than everyone else. Of note, they were using, or they seemed to be using, a part of the brain that's involved in spatial memory and navigation. Why? And is there something that the rest of us can learn from this? The sport of competitive memorizing is driven by a kind of arms race where, every year, somebody comes up with a new way to remember more stuff more quickly, and then the rest of the field has to play catch-up. This is my friend Ben Pridmore, three-time world memory champion. On his desk in front of him are 36 shuffled packs of playing cards that he is about to try to memorize in one hour, using a technique that he invented and he alone has mastered. He used a similar technique to memorize the precise order of 4,140 random binary digits in half an hour. (Laughter) Yeah. And while there are a whole host of ways of remembering stuff in these competitions, everything, all of the techniques that are being used, ultimately come down to a concept that psychologists refer to as "elaborative encoding." And it's well-illustrated by a nifty paradox known as the Baker/baker paradox, which goes like this: If I tell two people to remember the same word, if I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy named Baker." That's his name. And I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy who is a baker." Okay? And I come back to you at some point later on, and I say, "Do you remember that word that I told you a while back? Do you remember what it was?" The person who was told his name is Baker is less likely to remember the same word than the person was told his job is a baker. Same word, different amount of remembering; that's weird. What's going on here? Well, the name Baker doesn't actually mean anything to you. It is entirely untethered from all of the other memories floating around in your skull. But the common noun "baker" -- we know bakers. Bakers wear funny white hats. Bakers have flour on their hands. Bakers smell good when they come home from work. Maybe we even know a baker. And when we first hear that word, we start putting these associational hooks into it, that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date. The entire art of what is going on in these memory contests, and the entire art of remembering stuff better in everyday life, is figuring out ways to transform capital B Bakers into lower-case B bakers -- to take information that is lacking in context, in significance, in meaning, and transform it in some way, so that it becomes meaningful in the light of all the other things that you have in your mind. One of the more elaborate techniques for doing this dates back 2,500 years to Ancient Greece. It came to be known as the memory palace. The story behind its creation goes like this: There was a poet called Simonides, who was attending a banquet. He was actually the hired entertainment, because back then, if you wanted to throw a really slamming party, you didn't hire a D.J., you hired a poet. And he stands up, delivers his poem from memory, walks out the door, and at the moment he does, the banquet hall collapses. Kills everybody inside. It doesn't just kill everybody, it mangles the bodies beyond all recognition. Nobody can say who was inside, nobody can say where they were sitting. The bodies can't be properly buried. It's one tragedy compounding another. Simonides, standing outside, the sole survivor amid the wreckage, closes his eyes and has this realization, which is that in his mind's eye, he can see where each of the guests at the banquet had been sitting. And he takes the relatives by the hand, and guides them each to their loved ones amid the wreckage. What Simonides figured out at that moment, is something that I think we all kind of intuitively know, which is that, as bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers, and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories. If I asked you to recount the first 10 words of the story that I just told you about Simonides, chances are you would have a tough time with it. But, I would wager that if I asked you to recall who is sitting on top of a talking tan horse in your foyer right now, you would be able to see that. The idea behind the memory palace is to create this imagined edifice in your mind's eye, and populate it with images of the things that you want to remember -- the crazier, weirder, more bizarre, funnier, raunchier, stinkier the image is, the more unforgettable it's likely to be. This is advice that goes back 2,000-plus years to the earliest Latin memory treatises. So how does this work? Let's say that you've been invited to TED center stage to give a speech, and you want to do it from memory, and you want to do it the way that Cicero would have done it, if he had been invited to TEDxRome 2,000 years ago. (Laughter) What you might do is picture yourself at the front door of your house. And you'd come up with some sort of crazy, ridiculous, unforgettable image, to remind you that the first thing you want to talk about is this totally bizarre contest. (Laughter) And then you'd go inside your house, and you would see an image of Cookie Monster on top of Mister Ed. And that would remind you that you would want to then introduce your friend Ed Cook. And then you'd see an image of Britney Spears to remind you of this funny anecdote you want to tell. And you'd go into your kitchen, and the fourth topic you were going to talk about was this strange journey that you went on for a year, and you'd have some friends to help you remember that. This is how Roman orators memorized their speeches -- not word-for-word, which is just going to screw you up, but topic-for-topic. In fact, the phrase "topic sentence" -- that comes from the Greek word "topos," which means "place." That's a vestige of when people used to think about oratory and rhetoric in these sorts of spatial terms. The phrase "in the first place," that's like "in the first place of your memory palace." I thought this was just fascinating, and I got really into it. And I went to a few more of these memory contests, and I had this notion that I might write something longer about this subculture of competitive memorizers. But there was a problem. The problem was that a memory contest is a pathologically boring event. (Laughter) Truly, it is like a bunch of people sitting around taking the SATs -- I mean, the most dramatic it gets is when somebody starts massaging their temples. And I'm a journalist, I need something to write about. I know that there's incredible stuff happening in these people's minds, but I don't have access to it. And I realized, if I was going to tell this story, I needed to walk in their shoes a little bit. And so I started trying to spend 15 or 20 minutes every morning, before I sat down with my New York Times, just trying to remember something. Maybe it was a poem, maybe it was names from an old yearbook that I bought at a flea market. And I found that this was shockingly fun. I never would have expected that. It was fun because this is actually not about training your memory. What you're doing, is you're trying to get better and better at creating, at dreaming up, these utterly ludicrous, raunchy, hilarious, and hopefully unforgettable images in your mind's eye. And I got pretty into it. This is me wearing my standard competitive memorizer's training kit. (Laughter) It's a pair of earmuffs and a set of safety goggles that have been masked over except for two small pinholes, because distraction is the competitive memorizer's greatest enemy. I ended up coming back to that same contest that I had covered a year earlier, and I had this notion that I might enter it, sort of as an experiment in participatory journalism. It'd make, I thought, maybe a nice epilogue to all my research. Problem was, the experiment went haywire. I won the contest -- (Laughter) which really wasn't supposed to happen. (Applause) Now, it is nice to be able to memorize speeches and phone numbers and shopping lists, but it's actually kind of beside the point. These are just tricks. They work because they're based on some pretty basic principles about how our brains work. And you don't have to be building memory palaces or memorizing packs of playing cards to benefit from a little bit of insight about how your mind works. We often talk about people with great memories as though it were some sort of an innate gift, but that is not the case. Great memories are learned. At the most basic level, we remember when we pay attention. We remember when we are deeply engaged. We remember when we are able to take a piece of information and experience, and figure out why it is meaningful to us, why it is significant, why it's colorful, when we're able to transform it in some way that makes sense in the light of all of the other things floating around in our minds, when we're able to transform Bakers into bakers. The memory palace, these memory techniques -- they're just shortcuts. In fact, they're not even really shortcuts. They work because they make you work. They force a kind of depth of processing, a kind of mindfulness, that most of us don't normally walk around exercising. But there actually are no shortcuts. This is how stuff is made memorable. And I think if there's one thing that I want to leave you with, it's what E.P., the amnesic who couldn't even remember he had a memory problem, left me with, which is the notion that our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives, by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not paying attention to the human being across from us who is talking with us, by being so lazy that we're not willing to process deeply? I learned firsthand that there are incredible memory capacities latent in all of us. But if you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember. Thank you. (Applause)

When we think about prejudice and bias, we tend to think about stupid and evil people doing stupid and evil things. And this idea is nicely summarized by the British critic William Hazlitt, who wrote, "Prejudice is the child of ignorance." I want to try to convince you here that this is mistaken. I want to try to convince you that prejudice and bias are natural, they're often rational, and they're often even moral, and I think that once we understand this, we're in a better position to make sense of them when they go wrong, when they have horrible consequences, and we're in a better position to know what to do when this happens. So, start with stereotypes. You look at me, you know my name, you know certain facts about me, and you could make certain judgments. You could make guesses about my ethnicity, my political affiliation, my religious beliefs. And the thing is, these judgments tend to be accurate. We're very good at this sort of thing. And we're very good at this sort of thing because our ability to stereotype people is not some sort of arbitrary quirk of the mind, but rather it's a specific instance of a more general process, which is that we have experience with things and people in the world that fall into categories, and we can use our experience to make generalizations about novel instances of these categories. So everybody here has a lot of experience with chairs and apples and dogs, and based on this, you could see unfamiliar examples and you could guess, you could sit on the chair, you could eat the apple, the dog will bark. Now we might be wrong. The chair could collapse if you sit on it, the apple might be poison, the dog might not bark, and in fact, this is my dog Tessie, who doesn't bark. But for the most part, we're good at this. For the most part, we make good guesses both in the social domain and the non-social domain, and if we weren't able to do so, if we weren't able to make guesses about new instances that we encounter, we wouldn't survive. And in fact, Hazlitt later on in his wonderful essay concedes this. He writes, "Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way my across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life." Or take bias. Now sometimes, we break the world up into us versus them, into in-group versus out-group, and sometimes when we do this, we know we're doing something wrong, and we're kind of ashamed of it. But other times we're proud of it. We openly acknowledge it. And my favorite example of this is a question that came from the audience in a Republican debate prior to the last election. (Video) Anderson Cooper: Gets to your question, the question in the hall, on foreign aid? Yes, ma'am. Woman: The American people are suffering in our country right now. Why do we continue to send foreign aid to other countries when we need all the help we can get for ourselves? AC: Governor Perry, what about that? (Applause) Rick Perry: Absolutely, I think it's— Paul Bloom: Each of the people onstage agreed with the premise of her question, which is as Americans, we should care more about Americans than about other people. And in fact, in general, people are often swayed by feelings of solidarity, loyalty, pride, patriotism, towards their country or towards their ethnic group. Regardless of your politics, many people feel proud to be American, and they favor Americans over other countries. Residents of other countries feel the same about their nation, and we feel the same about our ethnicities. Now some of you may reject this. Some of you may be so cosmopolitan that you think that ethnicity and nationality should hold no moral sway. But even you sophisticates accept that there should be some pull towards the in-group in the domain of friends and family, of people you're close to, and so even you make a distinction between us versus them. Now, this distinction is natural enough and often moral enough, but it can go awry, and this was part of the research of the great social psychologist Henri Tajfel. Tajfel was born in Poland in 1919. He left to go to university in France, because as a Jew, he couldn't go to university in Poland, and then he enlisted in the French military in World War II. He was captured and ended up in a prisoner of war camp, and it was a terrifying time for him, because if it was discovered that he was a Jew, he could have been moved to a concentration camp, where he most likely would not have survived. And in fact, when the war ended and he was released, most of his friends and family were dead. He got involved in different pursuits. He helped out the war orphans. But he had a long-lasting interest in the science of prejudice, and so when a prestigious British scholarship on stereotypes opened up, he applied for it, and he won it, and then he began this amazing career. And what started his career is an insight that the way most people were thinking about the Holocaust was wrong. Many people, most people at the time, viewed the Holocaust as sort of representing some tragic flaw on the part of the Germans, some genetic taint, some authoritarian personality. And Tajfel rejected this. Tajfel said what we see in the Holocaust is just an exaggeration of normal psychological processes that exist in every one of us. And to explore this, he did a series of classic studies with British adolescents. And in one of his studies, what he did was he asked the British adolescents all sorts of questions, and then based on their answers, he said, "I've looked at your answers, and based on the answers, I have determined that you are either" — he told half of them — "a Kandinsky lover, you love the work of Kandinsky, or a Klee lover, you love the work of Klee." It was entirely bogus. Their answers had nothing to do with Kandinsky or Klee. They probably hadn't heard of the artists. He just arbitrarily divided them up. But what he found was, these categories mattered, so when he later gave the subjects money, they would prefer to give the money to members of their own group than members of the other group. Worse, they were actually most interested in establishing a difference between their group and other groups, so they would give up money for their own group if by doing so they could give the other group even less. This bias seems to show up very early. So my colleague and wife, Karen Wynn, at Yale has done a series of studies with babies where she exposes babies to puppets, and the puppets have certain food preferences. So one of the puppets might like green beans. The other puppet might like graham crackers. They test the babies own food preferences, and babies typically prefer the graham crackers. But the question is, does this matter to babies in how they treat the puppets? And it matters a lot. They tend to prefer the puppet who has the same food tastes that they have, and worse, they actually prefer puppets who punish the puppet with the different food taste. (Laughter) We see this sort of in-group, out-group psychology all the time. We see it in political clashes within groups with different ideologies. We see it in its extreme in cases of war, where the out-group isn't merely given less, but dehumanized, as in the Nazi perspective of Jews as vermin or lice, or the American perspective of Japanese as rats. Stereotypes can also go awry. So often they're rational and useful, but sometimes they're irrational, they give the wrong answers, and other times they lead to plainly immoral consequences. And the case that's been most studied is the case of race. There was a fascinating study prior to the 2008 election where social psychologists looked at the extent to which the candidates were associated with America, as in an unconscious association with the American flag. And in one of their studies they compared Obama and McCain, and they found McCain is thought of as more American than Obama, and to some extent, people aren't that surprised by hearing that. McCain is a celebrated war hero, and many people would explicitly say he has more of an American story than Obama. But they also compared Obama to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and they found that Blair was also thought of as more American than Obama, even though subjects explicitly understood that he's not American at all. But they were responding, of course, to the color of his skin. These stereotypes and biases have real-world consequences, both subtle and very important. In one recent study, researchers put ads on eBay for the sale of baseball cards. Some of them were held by white hands, others by black hands. They were the same baseball cards. The ones held by black hands got substantially smaller bids than the ones held by white hands. In research done at Stanford, psychologists explored the case of people sentenced for the murder of a white person. It turns out, holding everything else constant, you are considerably more likely to be executed if you look like the man on the right than the man on the left, and this is in large part because the man on the right looks more prototypically black, more prototypically African-American, and this apparently influences people's decisions over what to do about him. So now that we know about this, how do we combat it? And there are different avenues. One avenue is to appeal to people's emotional responses, to appeal to people's empathy, and we often do that through stories. So if you are a liberal parent and you want to encourage your children to believe in the merits of nontraditional families, you might give them a book like this. ["Heather Has Two Mommies"] If you are conservative and have a different attitude, you might give them a book like this. (Laughter) ["Help! Mom! There Are Liberals under My Bed!"] But in general, stories can turn anonymous strangers into people who matter, and the idea that we care about people when we focus on them as individuals is an idea which has shown up across history. So Stalin apocryphally said, "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic," and Mother Teresa said, "If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will." Psychologists have explored this. For instance, in one study, people were given a list of facts about a crisis, and it was seen how much they would donate to solve this crisis, and another group was given no facts at all but they were told of an individual and given a name and given a face, and it turns out that they gave far more. None of this I think is a secret to the people who are engaged in charity work. People don't tend to deluge people with facts and statistics. Rather, you show them faces, you show them people. It's possible that by extending our sympathies to an individual, they can spread to the group that the individual belongs to. This is Harriet Beecher Stowe. The story, perhaps apocryphal, is that President Lincoln invited her to the White House in the middle of the Civil War and said to her, "So you're the little lady who started this great war." And he was talking about "Uncle Tom's Cabin." "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is not a great book of philosophy or of theology or perhaps not even literature, but it does a great job of getting people to put themselves in the shoes of people they wouldn't otherwise be in the shoes of, put themselves in the shoes of slaves. And that could well have been a catalyst for great social change. More recently, looking at America in the last several decades, there's some reason to believe that shows like "The Cosby Show" radically changed American attitudes towards African-Americans, while shows like "Will and Grace" and "Modern Family" changed American attitudes towards gay men and women. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the major catalyst in America for moral change has been a situation comedy. But it's not all emotions, and I want to end by appealing to the power of reason. At some point in his wonderful book "The Better Angels of Our Nature," Steven Pinker says, the Old Testament says love thy neighbor, and the New Testament says love thy enemy, but I don't love either one of them, not really, but I don't want to kill them. I know I have obligations to them, but my moral feelings to them, my moral beliefs about how I should behave towards them, aren't grounded in love. What they're grounded in is the understanding of human rights, a belief that their life is as valuable to them as my life is to me, and to support this, he tells a story by the great philosopher Adam Smith, and I want to tell this story too, though I'm going to modify it a little bit for modern times. So Adam Smith starts by asking you to imagine the death of thousands of people, and imagine that the thousands of people are in a country you are not familiar with. It could be China or India or a country in Africa. And Smith says, how would you respond? And you would say, well that's too bad, and you'd go on to the rest of your life. If you were to open up The New York Times online or something, and discover this, and in fact this happens to us all the time, we go about our lives. But imagine instead, Smith says, you were to learn that tomorrow you were to have your little finger chopped off. Smith says, that would matter a lot. You would not sleep that night wondering about that. So this raises the question: Would you sacrifice thousands of lives to save your little finger? Now answer this in the privacy of your own head, but Smith says, absolutely not, what a horrid thought. And so this raises the question, and so, as Smith puts it, "When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble?" And Smith's answer is, "It is reason, principle, conscience. [This] calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it." And this last part is what is often described as the principle of impartiality. And this principle of impartiality manifests itself in all of the world's religions, in all of the different versions of the golden rule, and in all of the world's moral philosophies, which differ in many ways but share the presupposition that we should judge morality from sort of an impartial point of view. The best articulation of this view is actually, for me, it's not from a theologian or from a philosopher, but from Humphrey Bogart at the end of "Casablanca." So, spoiler alert, he's telling his lover that they have to separate for the more general good, and he says to her, and I won't do the accent, but he says to her, "It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." Our reason could cause us to override our passions. Our reason could motivate us to extend our empathy, could motivate us to write a book like "Uncle Tom's Cabin," or read a book like "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and our reason can motivate us to create customs and taboos and laws that will constrain us from acting upon our impulses when, as rational beings, we feel we should be constrained. This is what a constitution is. A constitution is something which was set up in the past that applies now in the present, and what it says is, no matter how much we might to reelect a popular president for a third term, no matter how much white Americans might choose to feel that they want to reinstate the institution of slavery, we can't. We have bound ourselves. And we bind ourselves in other ways as well. We know that when it comes to choosing somebody for a job, for an award, we are strongly biased by their race, we are biased by their gender, we are biased by how attractive they are, and sometimes we might say, "Well fine, that's the way it should be." But other times we say, "This is wrong." And so to combat this, we don't just try harder, but rather what we do is we set up situations where these other sources of information can't bias us, which is why many orchestras audition musicians behind screens, so the only information they have is the information they believe should matter. I think prejudice and bias illustrate a fundamental duality of human nature. We have gut feelings, instincts, emotions, and they affect our judgments and our actions for good and for evil, but we are also capable of rational deliberation and intelligent planning, and we can use these to, in some cases, accelerate and nourish our emotions, and in other cases staunch them. And it's in this way that reason helps us create a better world. Thank you. (Applause)

The world is changing with really remarkable speed. If you look at the chart at the top here, you'll see that in 2025, these Goldman Sachs projections suggest that the Chinese economy will be almost the same size as the American economy. And if you look at the chart for 2050, it's projected that the Chinese economy will be twice the size of the American economy, and the Indian economy will be almost the same size as the American economy. And we should bear in mind here that these projections were drawn up before the Western financial crisis. A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at the latest projection by BNP Paribas for when China will have a larger economy than the United States. Goldman Sachs projected 2027. The post-crisis projection is 2020. That's just a decade away. China is going to change the world in two fundamental respects. First of all, it's a huge developing country with a population of 1.3 billion people, which has been growing for over 30 years at around 10 percent a year. And within a decade, it will have the largest economy in the world. Never before in the modern era has the largest economy in the world been that of a developing country, rather than a developed country. Secondly, for the first time in the modern era, the dominant country in the world -- which I think is what China will become -- will be not from the West and from very, very different civilizational roots. Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West. It will remain in very fundamental respects very different. Now the big question here is obviously, how do we make sense of China? How do we try to understand what China is? And the problem we have in the West at the moment, by and large, is that the conventional approach is that we understand it really in Western terms, using Western ideas. We can't. Now I want to offer you three building blocks for trying to understand what China is like, just as a beginning. The first is this: that China is not really a nation-state. Okay, it's called itself a nation-state for the last hundred years, but everyone who knows anything about China knows it's a lot older than this. This was what China looked like with the victory of the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C. at the end of the warring-state period -- the birth of modern China. And you can see it against the boundaries of modern China. Or immediately afterward, the Han Dynasty, still 2,000 years ago. And you can see already it occupies most of what we now know as Eastern China, which is where the vast majority of Chinese lived then and live now. Now what is extraordinary about this is, what gives China its sense of being China, what gives the Chinese the sense of what it is to be Chinese, comes not from the last hundred years, not from the nation-state period, which is what happened in the West, but from the period, if you like, of the civilization-state. I'm thinking here, for example, of customs like ancestral worship, of a very distinctive notion of the state, likewise, a very distinctive notion of the family, social relationships like guanxi, Confucian values and so on. These are all things that come from the period of the civilization-state. In other words, China, unlike the Western states and most countries in the world, is shaped by its sense of civilization, its existence as a civilization-state, rather than as a nation-state. And there's one other thing to add to this, and that is this: Of course we know China's big, huge, demographically and geographically, with a population of 1.3 billion people. What we often aren't really aware of is the fact that China is extremely diverse and very pluralistic, and in many ways very decentralized. You can't run a place on this scale simply from Beijing, even though we think this to be the case. It's never been the case. So this is China, a civilization-state, rather than a nation-state. And what does it mean? Well, I think it has all sorts of profound implications. I'll give you two quick ones. The first is that the most important political value for the Chinese is unity, is the maintenance of Chinese civilization. You know, 2,000 years ago, Europe: breakdown -- the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire. It divided, and it's remained divided ever since. China, over the same time period, went in exactly the opposite direction, very painfully holding this huge civilization, civilization-state, together. The second is maybe more prosaic, which is Hong Kong. Do you remember the handover of Hong Kong by Britain to China in 1997? You may remember what the Chinese constitutional proposition was. One country, two systems. And I'll lay a wager that barely anyone in the West believed them. "Window dressing. When China gets its hands on Hong Kong, that won't be the case." Thirteen years on, the political and legal system in Hong Kong is as different now as it was in 1997. We were wrong. Why were we wrong? We were wrong because we thought, naturally enough, in nation-state ways. Think of German unification, 1990. What happened? Well, basically the East was swallowed by the West. One nation, one system. That is the nation-state mentality. But you can't run a country like China, a civilization-state, on the basis of one civilization, one system. It doesn't work. So actually the response of China to the question of Hong Kong -- as it will be to the question of Taiwan -- was a natural response: one civilization, many systems. Let me offer you another building block to try and understand China -- maybe not sort of a comfortable one. The Chinese have a very, very different conception of race to most other countries. Do you know, of the 1.3 billion Chinese, over 90 percent of them think they belong to the same race, the Han? Now, this is completely different from the world's [other] most populous countries. India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil -- all of them are multiracial. The Chinese don't feel like that. China is only multiracial really at the margins. So the question is, why? Well the reason, I think, essentially is, again, back to the civilization-state. A history of at least 2,000 years, a history of conquest, occupation, absorption, assimilation and so on, led to the process by which, over time, this notion of the Han emerged -- of course, nurtured by a growing and very powerful sense of cultural identity. Now the great advantage of this historical experience has been that, without the Han, China could never have held together. The Han identity has been the cement which has held this country together. The great disadvantage of it is that the Han have a very weak conception of cultural difference. They really believe in their own superiority, and they are disrespectful of those who are not. Hence their attitude, for example, to the Uyghurs and to the Tibetans. Or let me give you my third building block, the Chinese state. Now the relationship between the state and society in China is very different from that in the West. Now we in the West overwhelmingly seem to think -- in these days at least -- that the authority and legitimacy of the state is a function of democracy. The problem with this proposition is that the Chinese state enjoys more legitimacy and more authority amongst the Chinese than is true with any Western state. And the reason for this is because -- well, there are two reasons, I think. And it's obviously got nothing to do with democracy, because in our terms the Chinese certainly don't have a democracy. And the reason for this is, firstly, because the state in China is given a very special -- it enjoys a very special significance as the representative, the embodiment and the guardian of Chinese civilization, of the civilization-state. This is as close as China gets to a kind of spiritual role. And the second reason is because, whereas in Europe and North America, the state's power is continuously challenged -- I mean in the European tradition, historically against the church, against other sectors of the aristocracy, against merchants and so on -- for 1,000 years, the power of the Chinese state has not been challenged. It's had no serious rivals. So you can see that the way in which power has been constructed in China is very different from our experience in Western history. The result, by the way, is that the Chinese have a very different view of the state. Whereas we tend to view it as an intruder, a stranger, certainly an organ whose powers need to be limited or defined and constrained, the Chinese don't see the state like that at all. The Chinese view the state as an intimate -- not just as an intimate actually, as a member of the family -- not just in fact as a member of the family, but as the head of the family, the patriarch of the family. This is the Chinese view of the state -- very, very different to ours. It's embedded in society in a different kind of way to what is the case in the West. And I would suggest to you that actually what we are dealing with here, in the Chinese context, is a new kind of paradigm, which is different from anything we've had to think about in the past. Know that China believes in the market and the state. I mean, Adam Smith, already writing in the late 18th century, said, "The Chinese market is larger and more developed and more sophisticated than anything in Europe." And, apart from the Mao period, that has remained more or less the case ever since. But this is combined with an extremely strong and ubiquitous state. The state is everywhere in China. I mean, it's leading firms -- many of them are still publicly owned. Private firms, however large they are, like Lenovo, depend in many ways on state patronage. Targets for the economy and so on are set by the state. And the state, of course, its authority flows into lots of other areas -- as we are familiar with -- with something like the one-child policy. Moreover, this is a very old state tradition, a very old tradition of statecraft. I mean, if you want an illustration of this, the Great Wall is one. But this is another, this is the Grand Canal, which was constructed in the first instance in the fifth century B.C. and was finally completed in the seventh century A.D. It went for 1,114 miles, linking Beijing with Hangzhou and Shanghai. So there's a long history of extraordinary state infrastructural projects in China, which I suppose helps us to explain what we see today, which is something like the Three Gorges Dam and many other expressions of state competence within China. So there we have three building blocks for trying to understand the difference that is China -- the civilization-state, the notion of race and the nature of the state and its relationship to society. And yet we still insist, by and large, in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts. If you want to know why we unerringly seem to get China wrong -- our predictions about what's going to happen to China are incorrect -- this is the reason. Unfortunately, I think, I have to say that I think attitude towards China is that of a kind of little Westerner mentality. It's kind of arrogant. It's arrogant in the sense that we think that we are best, and therefore we have the universal measure. And secondly, it's ignorant. We refuse to really address the issue of difference. You know, there's a very interesting passage in a book by Paul Cohen, the American historian. And Paul Cohen argues that the West thinks of itself as probably the most cosmopolitan of all cultures. But it's not. In many ways, it's the most parochial, because for 200 years, the West has been so dominant in the world that it's not really needed to understand other cultures, other civilizations. Because, at the end of the day, it could, if necessary by force, get its own way. Whereas those cultures -- virtually the rest of the world, in fact, which have been in a far weaker position, vis-a-vis the West -- have been thereby forced to understand the West, because of the West's presence in those societies. And therefore, they are, as a result, more cosmopolitan in many ways than the West. I mean, take the question of East Asia. East Asia: Japan, Korea, China, etc. -- a third of the world's population lives there. Now the largest economic region in the world. And I'll tell you now, that East Asianers, people from East Asia, are far more knowledgeable about the West than the West is about East Asia. Now this point is very germane, I'm afraid, to the present. Because what's happening? Back to that chart at the beginning, the Goldman Sachs chart. What is happening is that, very rapidly in historical terms, the world is being driven and shaped, not by the old developed countries, but by the developing world. We've seen this in terms of the G20 usurping very rapidly the position of the G7, or the G8. And there are two consequences of this. First, the West is rapidly losing its influence in the world. There was a dramatic illustration of this actually a year ago -- Copenhagen, climate change conference. Europe was not at the final negotiating table. When did that last happen? I would wager it was probably about 200 years ago. And that is what is going to happen in the future. And the second implication is that the world will inevitably, as a consequence, become increasingly unfamiliar to us, because it'll be shaped by cultures and experiences and histories that we are not really familiar with, or conversant with. And at last, I'm afraid -- take Europe; America is slightly different -- but Europeans by and large, I have to say, are ignorant, are unaware about the way the world is changing. Some people -- I've got an English friend in China, and he said, "The continent is sleepwalking into oblivion." Well, maybe that's true, maybe that's an exaggeration. But there's another problem which goes along with this -- that Europe is increasingly out of touch with the world -- and that is a sort of loss of a sense of the future. I mean, Europe once, of course, once commanded the future in its confidence. Take the 19th century, for example. But this, alas, is no longer true. If you want to feel the future, if you want to taste the future, try China -- there's old Confucius. This is a railway station the likes of which you've never seen before. It doesn't even look like a railway station. This is the new Guangzhou railway station for the high-speed trains. China already has a bigger network than any other country in the world and will soon have more than all the rest of the world put together. Or take this: now this is an idea, but it's an idea to be tried out shortly in a suburb of Beijing. Here you have a megabus, on the upper deck carries about 2,000 people. It travels on rails down a suburban road, and the cars travel underneath it. And it does speeds of up to about 100 miles an hour. Now this is the way things are going to move, because China has a very specific problem, which is different from Europe and different from the United States: China has huge numbers of people and no space. So this is a solution to a situation where China's going to have many, many, many cities over 20 million people. Okay, so how would I like to finish? Well, what should our attitude be towards this world that we see very rapidly developing before us? I think there will be good things about it and there will be bad things about it. But I want to argue, above all, a big-picture positive for this world. For 200 years, the world was essentially governed by a fragment of the human population. That's what Europe and North America represented. The arrival of countries like China and India -- between them 38 percent of the world's population -- and others like Indonesia and Brazil and so on, represent the most important single act of democratization in the last 200 years. Civilizations and cultures, which had been ignored, which had no voice, which were not listened to, which were not known about, will have a different sort of representation in this world. As humanists, we must welcome, surely, this transformation, and we will have to learn about these civilizations. This big ship here was the one sailed in by Zheng He in the early 15th century on his great voyages around the South China Sea, the East China Sea and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa. The little boat in front of it was the one in which, 80 years later, Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic. (Laughter) Or, look carefully at this silk scroll made by ZhuZhou in 1368. I think they're playing golf. Christ, the Chinese even invented golf. Welcome to the future. Thank you. (Applause)

I'd like to invite you to close your eyes. Imagine yourself standing outside the front door of your home. I'd like you to notice the color of the door, the material that it's made out of. Now visualize a pack of overweight nudists on bicycles. They are competing in a naked bicycle race, and they are headed straight for your front door. I need you to actually see this. They are pedaling really hard, they're sweaty, they're bouncing around a lot. And they crash straight into the front door of your home. Bicycles fly everywhere, wheels roll past you, spokes end up in awkward places. Step over the threshold of your door into your foyer, your hallway, whatever's on the other side, and appreciate the quality of the light. The light is shining down on Cookie Monster. Cookie Monster is waving at you from his perch on top of a tan horse. It's a talking horse. You can practically feel his blue fur tickling your nose. You can smell the oatmeal raisin cookie that he's about to shovel into his mouth. Walk past him. Walk past him into your living room. In your living room, in full imaginative broadband, picture Britney Spears. She is scantily clad, she's dancing on your coffee table, and she's singing "Hit Me Baby One More Time." And then follow me into your kitchen. In your kitchen, the floor has been paved over with a yellow brick road and out of your oven are coming towards you Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow and the Lion from "The Wizard of Oz," hand-in-hand skipping straight towards you. Okay. Open your eyes. I want to tell you about a very bizarre contest that is held every spring in New York City. It's called the United States Memory Championship. And I had gone to cover this contest a few years back as a science journalist expecting, I guess, that this was going to be like the Superbowl of savants. This was a bunch of guys and a few ladies, widely varying in both age and hygienic upkeep. (Laughter) They were memorizing hundreds of random numbers, looking at them just once. They were memorizing the names of dozens and dozens and dozens of strangers. They were memorizing entire poems in just a few minutes. They were competing to see who could memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards the fastest. I was like, this is unbelievable. These people must be freaks of nature. And I started talking to a few of the competitors. This is a guy called Ed Cook who had come over from England where he had one of the best trained memories. And I said to him, "Ed, when did you realize that you were a savant?" And Ed was like, "I'm not a savant. In fact, I have just an average memory. Everybody who competes in this contest will tell you that they have just an average memory. We've all trained ourselves to perform these utterly miraculous feats of memory using a set of ancient techniques, techniques invented 2,500 years ago in Greece, the same techniques that Cicero had used to memorize his speeches, that medieval scholars had used to memorize entire books." And I was like, "Whoa. How come I never heard of this before?" And we were standing outside the competition hall, and Ed, who is a wonderful, brilliant, but somewhat eccentric English guy, says to me, "Josh, you're an American journalist. Do you know Britney Spears?" I'm like, "What? No. Why?" "Because I really want to teach Britney Spears how to memorize the order of a shuffled pack of playing cards on U.S. national television. It will prove to the world that anybody can do this." (Laughter) I was like, "Well I'm not Britney Spears, but maybe you could teach me. I mean, you've got to start somewhere, right?" And that was the beginning of a very strange journey for me. I ended up spending the better part of the next year not only training my memory, but also investigating it, trying to understand how it works, why it sometimes doesn't work and what its potential might be. I met a host of really interesting people. This is a guy called E.P. He's an amnesic who had, very possibly, the very worst memory in the world. His memory was so bad that he didn't even remember he had a memory problem, which is amazing. And he was this incredibly tragic figure, but he was a window into the extent to which our memories make us who we are. The other end of the spectrum: I met this guy. This is Kim Peek. He was the basis for Dustin Hoffman's character in the movie "Rain Man." We spent an afternoon together in the Salt Lake City Public Library memorizing phone books, which was scintillating. (Laughter) And I went back and I read a whole host of memory treatises, treatises written 2,000-plus years ago in Latin in Antiquity and then later in the Middle Ages. And I learned a whole bunch of really interesting stuff. One of the really interesting things that I learned is that once upon a time, this idea of having a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory was not nearly so alien as it would seem to us to be today. Once upon a time, people invested in their memories, in laboriously furnishing their minds. Over the last few millenia we've invented a series of technologies -- from the alphabet to the scroll to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone -- that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity. These technologies have made our modern world possible, but they've also changed us. They've changed us culturally, and I would argue that they've changed us cognitively. Having little need to remember anymore, it sometimes seems like we've forgotten how. One of the last places on Earth where you still find people passionate about this idea of a trained, disciplined, cultivated memory is at this totally singular memory contest. It's actually not that singular, there are contests held all over the world. And I was fascinated, I wanted to know how do these guys do it. A few years back a group of researchers at University College London brought a bunch of memory champions into the lab. They wanted to know: Do these guys have brains that are somehow structurally, anatomically different from the rest of ours? The answer was no. Are they smarter than the rest of us? They gave them a bunch of cognitive tests, and the answer was not really. There was however one really interesting and telling difference between the brains of the memory champions and the control subjects that they were comparing them to. When they put these guys in an fMRI machine, scanned their brains while they were memorizing numbers and people's faces and pictures of snowflakes, they found that the memory champions were lighting up different parts of the brain than everyone else. Of note, they were using, or they seemed to be using, a part of the brain that's involved in spatial memory and navigation. Why? And is there something the rest of us can learn from this? The sport of competitive memorizing is driven by a kind of arms race where every year somebody comes up with a new way to remember more stuff more quickly, and then the rest of the field has to play catchup. This is my friend Ben Pridmore, three-time world memory champion. On his desk in front of him are 36 shuffled packs of playing cards that he is about to try to memorize in one hour, using a technique that he invented and he alone has mastered. He used a similar technique to memorize the precise order of 4,140 random binary digits in half an hour. Yeah. And while there are a whole host of ways of remembering stuff in these competitions, everything, all of the techniques that are being used, ultimately come down to a concept that psychologists refer to as elaborative encoding. And it's well illustrated by a nifty paradox known as the Baker/baker paradox, which goes like this: If I tell two people to remember the same word, if I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy named Baker." That's his name. And I say to you, "Remember that there is a guy who is a baker." And I come back to you at some point later on, and I say, "Do you remember that word that I told you a while back? Do you remember what it was?" The person who was told his name is Baker is less likely to remember the same word than the person was told his job is that he is a baker. Same word, different amount of remembering; that's weird. What's going on here? Well the name Baker doesn't actually mean anything to you. It is entirely untethered from all of the other memories floating around in your skull. But the common noun baker, we know bakers. Bakers wear funny white hats. Bakers have flour on their hands. Bakers smell good when they come home from work. Maybe we even know a baker. And when we first hear that word, we start putting these associational hooks into it that make it easier to fish it back out at some later date. The entire art of what is going on in these memory contests and the entire art of remembering stuff better in everyday life is figuring out ways to transform capital B Bakers into lower-case B bakers -- to take information that is lacking in context, in significance, in meaning and transform it in some way so that it becomes meaningful in the light of all the other things that you have in your mind. One of the more elaborate techniques for doing this dates back 2,500 years to Ancient Greece. It came to be known as the memory palace. The story behind its creation goes like this: There was a poet called Simonides who was attending a banquet. He was actually the hired entertainment, because back then if you wanted to throw a really slamming party, you didn't hire a D.J., you hired a poet. And he stands up, delivers his poem from memory, walks out the door, and at the moment he does, the banquet hall collapses, kills everybody inside. It doesn't just kill everybody, it mangles the bodies beyond all recognition. Nobody can say who was inside, nobody can say where they were sitting. The bodies can't be properly buried. It's one tragedy compounding another. Simonides, standing outside, the sole survivor amid the wreckage, closes his eyes and has this realization, which is that in his mind's eye, he can see where each of the guests at the banquet had been sitting. And he takes the relatives by the hand and guides them each to their loved ones amid the wreckage. What Simonides figured out at that moment is something that I think we all kind of intuitively know, which is that, as bad as we are at remembering names and phone numbers and word-for-word instructions from our colleagues, we have really exceptional visual and spatial memories. If I asked you to recount the first 10 words of the story that I just told you about Simonides, chances are you would have a tough time with it. But I would wager that if I asked you to recall who is sitting on top of a talking tan horse in your foyer right now, you would be able to see that. The idea behind the memory palace is to create this imagined edifice in your mind's eye and populate it with images of the things that you want to remember -- the crazier, weirder, more bizarre, funnier, raunchier, stinkier the image is, the more unforgettable it's likely to be. This is advice that goes back 2,000-plus years to the earliest Latin memory treatises. So how does this work? Let's say that you've been invited to TED center stage to give a speech and you want to do it from memory, and you want to do it the way that Cicero would have done it if he had been invited to TEDxRome 2,000 years ago. What you might do is picture yourself at the front door of your house. And you'd come up with some sort of an absolutely crazy, ridiculous, unforgettable image to remind you that the first thing you want to talk about is this totally bizarre contest. And then you'd go inside your house, and you would see an image of Cookie Monster on top of Mister Ed. And that would remind you that you would want to then introduce your friend Ed Cook. And then you'd see an image of Britney Spears to remind you of this funny anecdote you want to tell. And you go into your kitchen, and the fourth topic you were going to talk about was this strange journey that you went on for a year, and you have some friends to help you remember that. This is how Roman orators memorized their speeches -- not word-for-word, which is just going to screw you up, but topic-for-topic. In fact, the phrase "topic sentence," that comes from the Greek word "topos," which means "place." That's a vestige of when people used to think about oratory and rhetoric in these sorts of spatial terms. The phrase "in the first place," that's like in the first place of your memory palace. I thought this was just fascinating, and I got really into it. And I went to a few more of these memory contests. And I had this notion that I might write something longer about this subculture of competitive memorizers. But there was a problem. The problem was that a memory contest is a pathologically boring event. (Laughter) Truly, it is like a bunch of people sitting around taking the SATs. I mean, the most dramatic it gets is when somebody starts massaging their temples. And I'm a journalist, I need something to write about. I know that there's this incredible stuff happening in these people's minds, but I don't have access to it. And I realized, if I was going to tell this story, I needed to walk in their shoes a little bit. And so I started trying to spend 15 or 20 minutes every morning before I sat down with my New York Times just trying to remember something. Maybe it was a poem. Maybe it was names from an old yearbook that I bought at a flea market. And I found that this was shockingly fun. I never would have expected that. It was fun because this is actually not about training your memory. What you're doing is you're trying to get better and better and better at creating, at dreaming up, these utterly ludicrous, raunchy, hilarious and hopefully unforgettable images in your mind's eye. And I got pretty into it. This is me wearing my standard competitive memorizer's training kit. It's a pair of earmuffs and a set of safety goggles that have been masked over except for two small pinholes, because distraction is the competitive memorizer's greatest enemy. I ended up coming back to that same contest that I had covered a year earlier. And I had this notion that I might enter it, sort of as an experiment in participatory journalism. It'd make, I thought, maybe a nice epilogue to all my research. Problem was the experiment went haywire. I won the contest, which really wasn't supposed to happen. (Applause) Now it is nice to be able to memorize speeches and phone numbers and shopping lists, but it's actually kind of beside the point. These are just tricks. They are tricks that work because they're based on some pretty basic principles about how our brains work. And you don't have to be building memory palaces or memorizing packs of playing cards to benefit from a little bit of insight about how your mind works. We often talk about people with great memories as though it were some sort of an innate gift, but that is not the case. Great memories are learned. At the most basic level, we remember when we pay attention. We remember when we are deeply engaged. We remember when we are able to take a piece of information and experience and figure out why it is meaningful to us, why it is significant, why it's colorful, when we're able to transform it in some way that it makes sense in the light of all of the other things floating around in our minds, when we're able to transform Bakers into bakers. The memory palace, these memory techniques, they're just shortcuts. In fact, they're not even really shortcuts. They work because they make you work. They force a kind of depth of processing, a kind of mindfulness, that most of us don't normally walk around exercising. But there actually are no shortcuts. This is how stuff is made memorable. And I think if there's one thing that I want to leave you with, it's what E.P., the amnesic who couldn't even remember that he had a memory problem, left me with, which is the notion that our lives are the sum of our memories. How much are we willing to lose from our already short lives by losing ourselves in our Blackberries, our iPhones, by not paying attention to the human being across from us who is talking with us, by being so lazy that we're not willing to process deeply? I learned firsthand that there are incredible memory capacities latent in all of us. But if you want to live a memorable life, you have to be the kind of person who remembers to remember. Thank you. (Applause)

As someone who has spent his entire career trying to be invisible, standing in front of an audience is a cross between an out-of-body experience and a deer caught in the headlights, so please forgive me for violating one of the TED commandments by relying on words on paper, and I only hope I'm not struck by lightning bolts before I'm done. I'd like to begin by talking about some of the ideas that motivated me to become a documentary photographer. I was a student in the '60s, a time of social upheaval and questioning, and on a personal level, an awakening sense of idealism. The war in Vietnam was raging; the Civil Rights Movement was under way; and pictures had a powerful influence on me. Our political and military leaders were telling us one thing, and photographers were telling us another. I believed the photographers, and so did millions of other Americans. Their images fueled resistance to the war and to racism. They not only recorded history; they helped change the course of history. Their pictures became part of our collective consciousness and, as consciousness evolved into a shared sense of conscience, change became not only possible, but inevitable. I saw that the free flow of information represented by journalism, specifically visual journalism, can bring into focus both the benefits and the cost of political policies. It can give credit to sound decision-making, adding momentum to success. In the face of poor political judgment or political inaction, it becomes a kind of intervention, assessing the damage and asking us to reassess our behavior. It puts a human face on issues which from afar can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact. What happens at ground level, far from the halls of power, happens to ordinary citizens one by one. And I understood that documentary photography has the ability to interpret events from their point of view. It gives a voice to those who otherwise would not have a voice. And as a reaction, it stimulates public opinion and gives impetus to public debate, thereby preventing the interested parties from totally controlling the agenda, much as they would like to. Coming of age in those days made real the concept that the free flow of information is absolutely vital for a free and dynamic society to function properly. The press is certainly a business, and in order to survive it must be a successful business, but the right balance must be found between marketing considerations and journalistic responsibility. Society's problems can't be solved until they're identified. On a higher plane, the press is a service industry, and the service it provides is awareness. Every story does not have to sell something. There's also a time to give. That was a tradition I wanted to follow. Seeing the war created such incredibly high stakes for everyone involved and that visual journalism could actually become a factor in conflict resolution -- I wanted to be a photographer in order to be a war photographer. But I was driven by an inherent sense that a picture that revealed the true face of war would almost by definition be an anti-war photograph. I'd like to take you on a visual journey through some of the events and issues I've been involved in over the past 25 years. In 1981, I went to Northern Ireland. 10 IRA prisoners were in the process of starving themselves to death in protest against conditions in jail. The reaction on the streets was violent confrontation. I saw that the front lines of contemporary wars are not on isolated battlefields, but right where people live. During the early '80s, I spent a lot of time in Central America, which was engulfed by civil wars that straddled the ideological divide of the Cold War. In Guatemala, the central government -- controlled by a oligarchy of European decent -- was waging a scorched Earth campaign against an indigenous rebellion, and I saw an image that reflected the history of Latin America: conquest through a combination of the Bible and the sword. An anti-Sandinista guerrilla was mortally wounded as Commander Zero attacked a town in Southern Nicaragua. A destroyed tank belonging to Somoza's national guard was left as a monument in a park in Managua, and was transformed by the energy and spirit of a child. At the same time, a civil war was taking place in El Salvador, and again, the civilian population was caught up in the conflict. I've been covering the Palestinian-Israeli conflict since 1981. This is a moment from the beginning of the second intifada, in 2000, when it was still stones and Molotovs against an army. In 2001, the uprising escalated into an armed conflict, and one of the major incidents was the destruction of the Palestinian refugee camp in the West Bank town of Jenin. Without the political will to find common ground, the continual friction of tactic and counter-tactic only creates suspicion and hatred and vengeance, and perpetuates the cycle of violence. In the '90s, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia fractured along ethnic fault lines, and civil war broke out between Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia. This is a scene of house-to-house fighting in Mostar, neighbor against neighbor. A bedroom, the place where people share intimacy, where life itself is conceived, became a battlefield. A mosque in northern Bosnia was destroyed by Serbian artillery and was used as a makeshift morgue. Dead Serbian soldiers were collected after a battle and used as barter for the return of prisoners or Bosnian soldiers killed in action. This was once a park. The Bosnian soldier who guided me told me that all of his friends were there now. At the same time in South Africa, after Nelson Mandela had been released from prison, the black population commenced the final phase of liberation from apartheid. One of the things I had to learn as a journalist was what to do with my anger. I had to use it, channel its energy, turn it into something that would clarify my vision, instead of clouding it. In Transkei, I witnessed a rite of passage into manhood, of the Xhosa tribe. Teenage boys lived in isolation, their bodies covered with white clay. After several weeks, they washed off the white and took on the full responsibilities of men. It was a very old ritual that seemed symbolic of the political struggle that was changing the face of South Africa. Children in Soweto playing on a trampoline. Elsewhere in Africa there was famine. In Somalia, the central government collapsed and clan warfare broke out. Farmers were driven off their land, and crops and livestock were destroyed or stolen. Starvation was being used as a weapon of mass destruction -- primitive but extremely effective. Hundreds of thousands of people were exterminated, slowly and painfully. The international community responded with massive humanitarian relief, and hundreds of thousands of more lives were saved. American troops were sent to protect the relief shipments, but they were eventually drawn into the conflict, and after the tragic battle in Mogadishu, they were withdrawn. In southern Sudan, another civil war saw similar use of starvation as a means of genocide. Again, international NGOs, united under the umbrella of the U.N., staged a massive relief operation and thousands of lives were saved. I'm a witness, and I want my testimony to be honest and uncensored. I also want it to be powerful and eloquent, and to do as much justice as possible to the experience of the people I'm photographing. This man was in an NGO feeding center, being helped as much as he could be helped. He literally had nothing. He was a virtual skeleton, yet he could still summon the courage and the will to move. He had not given up, and if he didn't give up, how could anyone in the outside world ever dream of losing hope? In 1994, after three months of covering the South African election, I saw the inauguration of Nelson Mandela, and it was the most uplifting thing I've ever seen. It exemplified the best that humanity has to offer. The next day I left for Rwanda, and it was like taking the express elevator to hell. This man had just been liberated from a Hutu death camp. He allowed me to photograph him for quite a long time, and he even turned his face toward the light, as if he wanted me to see him better. I think he knew what the scars on his face would say to the rest of the world. This time, maybe confused or discouraged by the military disaster in Somalia, the international community remained silent, and somewhere around 800,000 people were slaughtered by their own countrymen -- sometimes their own neighbors -- using farm implements as weapons. Perhaps because a lesson had been learned by the weak response to the war in Bosnia and the failure in Rwanda, when Serbia attacked Kosovo, international action was taken much more decisively. NATO forces went in, and the Serbian army withdrew. Ethnic Albanians had been murdered, their farms destroyed and a huge number of people forcibly deported. They were received in refugee camps set up by NGOs in Albania and Macedonia. The imprint of a man who had been burned inside his own home. The image reminded me of a cave painting, and echoed how primitive we still are in so many ways. Between 1995 and '96, I covered the first two wars in Chechnya from inside Grozny. This is a Chechen rebel on the front line against the Russian army. The Russians bombarded Grozny constantly for weeks, killing mainly the civilians who were still trapped inside. I found a boy from the local orphanage wandering around the front line. My work has evolved from being concerned mainly with war to a focus on critical social issues as well. After the fall of Ceausescu, I went to Romania and discovered a kind of gulag of children, where thousands of orphans were being kept in medieval conditions. Ceausescu had imposed a quota on the number of children to be produced by each family, thereby making women's bodies an instrument of state economic policy. Children who couldn't be supported by their families were raised in government orphanages. Children with birth defects were labeled incurables, and confined for life to inhuman conditions. As reports began to surface, again international aid went in. Going deeper into the legacy of the Eastern European regimes, I worked for several months on a story about the effects of industrial pollution, where there had been no regard for the environment or the health of either workers or the general population. An aluminum factory in Czechoslovakia was filled with carcinogenic smoke and dust, and four out of five workers came down with cancer. After the fall of Suharto in Indonesia, I began to explore conditions of poverty in a country that was on its way towards modernization. I spent a good deal of time with a man who lived with his family on a railway embankment and had lost an arm and a leg in a train accident. When the story was published, unsolicited donations poured in. A trust fund was established, and the family now lives in a house in the countryside and all their basic necessities are taken care of. It was a story that wasn't trying to sell anything. Journalism had provided a channel for people's natural sense of generosity, and the readers responded. I met a band of homeless children who'd come to Jakarta from the countryside, and ended up living in a train station. By the age of 12 or 14, they'd become beggars and drug addicts. The rural poor had become the urban poor, and in the process, they'd become invisible. These heroin addicts in detox in Pakistan reminded me of figures in a play by Beckett: isolated, waiting in the dark, but drawn to the light. Agent Orange was a defoliant used during the Vietnam War to deny cover to the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese army. The active ingredient was dioxin, an extremely toxic chemical that was sprayed in vast quantities, and whose effects passed through the genes to the next generation. In 2000, I began documenting global health issues, concentrating first on AIDS in Africa. I tried to tell the story through the work of caregivers. I thought it was important to emphasize that people were being helped, whether by international NGOs or by local grassroots organizations. So many children have been orphaned by the epidemic that grandmothers have taken the place of parents, and a lot of children had been born with HIV. A hospital in Zambia. I began documenting the close connection between HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. This is an MSF hospital in Cambodia. My pictures can play a supporting role to the work of NGOs by shedding light on the critical social problems they're trying to deal with. I went to Congo with MSF, and contributed to a book and an exhibition that focused attention on a forgotten war in which millions of people have died, and exposure to disease without treatment is used as a weapon. A malnourished child being measured as part of the supplemental feeding program. In the fall of 2004 I went to Darfur. This time I was on assignment for a magazine, but again worked closely with MSF. The international community still hasn't found a way to create the pressure necessary to stop this genocide. An MSF hospital in a camp for displaced people. I've been working on a long project on crime and punishment in America. This is a scene from New Orleans. A prisoner on a chain gang in Alabama was punished by being handcuffed to a post in the midday sun. This experience raised a lot of questions, among them questions about race and equality and for whom in our country opportunities and options are available. In the yard of a chain gang in Alabama. I didn't see either of the planes hit, and when I glanced out my window, I saw the first tower burning, and I thought it might have been an accident. A few minutes later when I looked again and saw the second tower burning, I knew we were at war. In the midst of the wreckage at Ground Zero, I had a realization. I'd been photographing in the Islamic world since 1981 -- not only in the Middle East, but also in Africa, Asia and Europe. At the time I was photographing in these different places, I thought I was covering separate stories, but on 9/11 history crystallized, and I understood I'd actually been covering a single story for more than 20 years, and the attack on New York was its latest manifestation. The central commercial district of Kabul, Afghanistan at the end of the civil war, shortly before the city fell to the Taliban. Land mine victims being helped at the Red Cross rehab center being run by Alberto Cairo. A boy who lost a leg to a leftover mine. I'd witnessed immense suffering in the Islamic world from political oppression, civil war, foreign invasions, poverty, famine. I understood that in its suffering, the Islamic world had been crying out. Why weren't we listening? A Taliban fighter shot during a battle as the Northern Alliance entered the city of Kunduz. When war with Iraq was imminent, I realized the American troops would be very well covered, so I decided to cover the invasion from inside Baghdad. A marketplace was hit by a mortar shell that killed several members of a single family. A day after American forces entered Baghdad, a company of Marines began rounding up bank robbers and were cheered on by the crowds -- a hopeful moment that was short lived. For the first time in years, Shi'ites were allowed to make the pilgrimage to Karbala to observe Ashura, and I was amazed by the sheer number of people and how fervently they practiced their religion. A group of men march through the streets cutting themselves with knives. It was obvious that the Shi'ites were a force to be reckoned with, and we would do well to understand them and learn how to deal with them. Last year I spent several months documenting our wounded troops, from the battlefield in Iraq all the way home. This is a helicopter medic giving CPR to a soldier who had been shot in the head. Military medicine has become so efficient that the percentage of troops who survive after being wounded is much higher in this war than in any other war in our history. The signature weapon of the war is the IED, and the signature wound is severe leg damage. After enduring extreme pain and trauma, the wounded face a grueling physical and psychological struggle in rehab. The spirit they displayed was absolutely remarkable. I tried to imagine myself in their place, and I was totally humbled by their courage and determination in the face of such catastrophic loss. Good people had been put in a very bad situation for questionable results. One day in rehab someone, started talking about surfing and all these guys who'd never surfed before said, "Hey, let's go." And they went surfing. Photographers go to the extreme edges of human experience to show people what's going on. Sometimes they put their lives on the line, because they believe your opinions and your influence matter. They aim their pictures at your best instincts, generosity, a sense of right and wrong, the ability and the willingness to identify with others, the refusal to accept the unacceptable. My TED wish: there's a vital story that needs to be told, and I wish for TED to help me gain access to it and then to help me come up with innovative and exciting ways to use news photography in the digital era. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The world is changing with really remarkable speed. If you look at the chart at the top here, you'll see that in 2025, these Goldman Sachs projections suggest that the Chinese economy will be almost the same size as the American economy. And if you look at the chart for 2050, it's projected that the Chinese economy will be twice the size of the American economy, and the Indian economy will be almost the same size as the American economy. And we should bear in mind here that these projections were drawn up before the Western financial crisis. A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at the latest projection by BNP Paribas for when China will have a larger economy than the United States. Goldman Sachs projected 2027. The post-crisis projection is 2020. That's just a decade away. China is going to change the world in two fundamental respects. First of all, it's a huge developing country with a population of 1.3 billion people, which has been growing for over 30 years at around 10 percent a year. And within a decade, it will have the largest economy in the world. Never before in the modern era has the largest economy in the world been that of a developing country, rather than a developed country. Secondly, for the first time in the modern era, the dominant country in the world -- which I think is what China will become -- will be not from the West and from very, very different civilizational roots. Now, I know it's a widespread assumption in the West that as countries modernize, they also westernize. This is an illusion. It's an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not. It is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West. It will remain in very fundamental respects very different. Now the big question here is obviously, how do we make sense of China? How do we try to understand what China is? And the problem we have in the West at the moment, by and large, is that the conventional approach is that we understand it really in Western terms, using Western ideas. We can't. Now I want to offer you three building blocks for trying to understand what China is like, just as a beginning. The first is this: that China is not really a nation-state. Okay, it's called itself a nation-state for the last hundred years, but everyone who knows anything about China knows it's a lot older than this. This was what China looked like with the victory of the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C. at the end of the warring-state period -- the birth of modern China. And you can see it against the boundaries of modern China. Or immediately afterward, the Han Dynasty, still 2,000 years ago. And you can see already it occupies most of what we now know as Eastern China, which is where the vast majority of Chinese lived then and live now. Now what is extraordinary about this is, what gives China its sense of being China, what gives the Chinese the sense of what it is to be Chinese, comes not from the last hundred years, not from the nation-state period, which is what happened in the West, but from the period, if you like, of the civilization-state. I'm thinking here, for example, of customs like ancestral worship, of a very distinctive notion of the state, likewise, a very distinctive notion of the family, social relationships like guanxi, Confucian values and so on. These are all things that come from the period of the civilization-state. In other words, China, unlike the Western states and most countries in the world, is shaped by its sense of civilization, its existence as a civilization-state, rather than as a nation-state. And there's one other thing to add to this, and that is this: Of course we know China's big, huge, demographically and geographically, with a population of 1.3 billion people. What we often aren't really aware of is the fact that China is extremely diverse and very pluralistic, and in many ways very decentralized. You can't run a place on this scale simply from Beijing, even though we think this to be the case. It's never been the case. So this is China, a civilization-state, rather than a nation-state. And what does it mean? Well, I think it has all sorts of profound implications. I'll give you two quick ones. The first is that the most important political value for the Chinese is unity, is the maintenance of Chinese civilization. You know, 2,000 years ago, Europe: breakdown -- the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire. It divided, and it's remained divided ever since. China, over the same time period, went in exactly the opposite direction, very painfully holding this huge civilization, civilization-state, together. The second is maybe more prosaic, which is Hong Kong. Do you remember the handover of Hong Kong by Britain to China in 1997? You may remember what the Chinese constitutional proposition was. One country, two systems. And I'll lay a wager that barely anyone in the West believed them. "Window dressing. When China gets its hands on Hong Kong, that won't be the case." Thirteen years on, the political and legal system in Hong Kong is as different now as it was in 1997. We were wrong. Why were we wrong? We were wrong because we thought, naturally enough, in nation-state ways. Think of German unification, 1990. What happened? Well, basically the East was swallowed by the West. One nation, one system. That is the nation-state mentality. But you can't run a country like China, a civilization-state, on the basis of one civilization, one system. It doesn't work. So actually the response of China to the question of Hong Kong -- as it will be to the question of Taiwan -- was a natural response: one civilization, many systems. Let me offer you another building block to try and understand China -- maybe not sort of a comfortable one. The Chinese have a very, very different conception of race to most other countries. Do you know, of the 1.3 billion Chinese, over 90 percent of them think they belong to the same race, the Han? Now, this is completely different from the world's [other] most populous countries. India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil -- all of them are multiracial. The Chinese don't feel like that. China is only multiracial really at the margins. So the question is, why? Well the reason, I think, essentially is, again, back to the civilization-state. A history of at least 2,000 years, a history of conquest, occupation, absorption, assimilation and so on, led to the process by which, over time, this notion of the Han emerged -- of course, nurtured by a growing and very powerful sense of cultural identity. Now the great advantage of this historical experience has been that, without the Han, China could never have held together. The Han identity has been the cement which has held this country together. The great disadvantage of it is that the Han have a very weak conception of cultural difference. They really believe in their own superiority, and they are disrespectful of those who are not. Hence their attitude, for example, to the Uyghurs and to the Tibetans. Or let me give you my third building block, the Chinese state. Now the relationship between the state and society in China is very different from that in the West. Now we in the West overwhelmingly seem to think -- in these days at least -- that the authority and legitimacy of the state is a function of democracy. The problem with this proposition is that the Chinese state enjoys more legitimacy and more authority amongst the Chinese than is true with any Western state. And the reason for this is because -- well, there are two reasons, I think. And it's obviously got nothing to do with democracy, because in our terms the Chinese certainly don't have a democracy. And the reason for this is, firstly, because the state in China is given a very special -- it enjoys a very special significance as the representative, the embodiment and the guardian of Chinese civilization, of the civilization-state. This is as close as China gets to a kind of spiritual role. And the second reason is because, whereas in Europe and North America, the state's power is continuously challenged -- I mean in the European tradition, historically against the church, against other sectors of the aristocracy, against merchants and so on -- for 1,000 years, the power of the Chinese state has not been challenged. It's had no serious rivals. So you can see that the way in which power has been constructed in China is very different from our experience in Western history. The result, by the way, is that the Chinese have a very different view of the state. Whereas we tend to view it as an intruder, a stranger, certainly an organ whose powers need to be limited or defined and constrained, the Chinese don't see the state like that at all. The Chinese view the state as an intimate -- not just as an intimate actually, as a member of the family -- not just in fact as a member of the family, but as the head of the family, the patriarch of the family. This is the Chinese view of the state -- very, very different to ours. It's embedded in society in a different kind of way to what is the case in the West. And I would suggest to you that actually what we are dealing with here, in the Chinese context, is a new kind of paradigm, which is different from anything we've had to think about in the past. Know that China believes in the market and the state. I mean, Adam Smith, already writing in the late 18th century, said, "The Chinese market is larger and more developed and more sophisticated than anything in Europe." And, apart from the Mao period, that has remained more or less the case ever since. But this is combined with an extremely strong and ubiquitous state. The state is everywhere in China. I mean, it's leading firms -- many of them are still publicly owned. Private firms, however large they are, like Lenovo, depend in many ways on state patronage. Targets for the economy and so on are set by the state. And the state, of course, its authority flows into lots of other areas -- as we are familiar with -- with something like the one-child policy. Moreover, this is a very old state tradition, a very old tradition of statecraft. I mean, if you want an illustration of this, the Great Wall is one. But this is another, this is the Grand Canal, which was constructed in the first instance in the fifth century B.C. and was finally completed in the seventh century A.D. It went for 1,114 miles, linking Beijing with Hangzhou and Shanghai. So there's a long history of extraordinary state infrastructural projects in China, which I suppose helps us to explain what we see today, which is something like the Three Gorges Dam and many other expressions of state competence within China. So there we have three building blocks for trying to understand the difference that is China -- the civilization-state, the notion of race and the nature of the state and its relationship to society. And yet we still insist, by and large, in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts. If you want to know why we unerringly seem to get China wrong -- our predictions about what's going to happen to China are incorrect -- this is the reason. Unfortunately, I think, I have to say that I think attitude towards China is that of a kind of little Westerner mentality. It's kind of arrogant. It's arrogant in the sense that we think that we are best, and therefore we have the universal measure. And secondly, it's ignorant. We refuse to really address the issue of difference. You know, there's a very interesting passage in a book by Paul Cohen, the American historian. And Paul Cohen argues that the West thinks of itself as probably the most cosmopolitan of all cultures. But it's not. In many ways, it's the most parochial, because for 200 years, the West has been so dominant in the world that it's not really needed to understand other cultures, other civilizations. Because, at the end of the day, it could, if necessary by force, get its own way. Whereas those cultures -- virtually the rest of the world, in fact, which have been in a far weaker position, vis-a-vis the West -- have been thereby forced to understand the West, because of the West's presence in those societies. And therefore, they are, as a result, more cosmopolitan in many ways than the West. I mean, take the question of East Asia. East Asia: Japan, Korea, China, etc. -- a third of the world's population lives there. Now the largest economic region in the world. And I'll tell you now, that East Asianers, people from East Asia, are far more knowledgeable about the West than the West is about East Asia. Now this point is very germane, I'm afraid, to the present. Because what's happening? Back to that chart at the beginning, the Goldman Sachs chart. What is happening is that, very rapidly in historical terms, the world is being driven and shaped, not by the old developed countries, but by the developing world. We've seen this in terms of the G20 usurping very rapidly the position of the G7, or the G8. And there are two consequences of this. First, the West is rapidly losing its influence in the world. There was a dramatic illustration of this actually a year ago -- Copenhagen, climate change conference. Europe was not at the final negotiating table. When did that last happen? I would wager it was probably about 200 years ago. And that is what is going to happen in the future. And the second implication is that the world will inevitably, as a consequence, become increasingly unfamiliar to us, because it'll be shaped by cultures and experiences and histories that we are not really familiar with, or conversant with. And at last, I'm afraid -- take Europe; America is slightly different -- but Europeans by and large, I have to say, are ignorant, are unaware about the way the world is changing. Some people -- I've got an English friend in China, and he said, "The continent is sleepwalking into oblivion." Well, maybe that's true, maybe that's an exaggeration. But there's another problem which goes along with this -- that Europe is increasingly out of touch with the world -- and that is a sort of loss of a sense of the future. I mean, Europe once, of course, once commanded the future in its confidence. Take the 19th century, for example. But this, alas, is no longer true. If you want to feel the future, if you want to taste the future, try China -- there's old Confucius. This is a railway station the likes of which you've never seen before. It doesn't even look like a railway station. This is the new [Wuhan] railway station for the high-speed trains. China already has a bigger network than any other country in the world and will soon have more than all the rest of the world put together. Or take this: now this is an idea, but it's an idea to be tried out shortly in a suburb of Beijing. Here you have a megabus, on the upper deck carries about 2,000 people. It travels on rails down a suburban road, and the cars travel underneath it. And it does speeds of up to about 100 miles an hour. Now this is the way things are going to move, because China has a very specific problem, which is different from Europe and different from the United States: China has huge numbers of people and no space. So this is a solution to a situation where China's going to have many, many, many cities over 20 million people. Okay, so how would I like to finish? Well, what should our attitude be towards this world that we see very rapidly developing before us? I think there will be good things about it and there will be bad things about it. But I want to argue, above all, a big-picture positive for this world. For 200 years, the world was essentially governed by a fragment of the human population. That's what Europe and North America represented. The arrival of countries like China and India -- between them 38 percent of the world's population -- and others like Indonesia and Brazil and so on, represent the most important single act of democratization in the last 200 years. Civilizations and cultures, which had been ignored, which had no voice, which were not listened to, which were not known about, will have a different sort of representation in this world. As humanists, we must welcome, surely, this transformation, and we will have to learn about these civilizations. This big ship here was the one sailed in by Zheng He in the early 15th century on his great voyages around the South China Sea, the East China Sea and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa. The little boat in front of it was the one in which, 80 years later, Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic. (Laughter) Or, look carefully at this silk scroll made by ZhuZhou in 1368. I think they're playing golf. Christ, the Chinese even invented golf. Welcome to the future. Thank you. (Applause)

We live on a human-dominated planet, putting unprecedented pressure on the systems on Earth. This is bad news, but perhaps surprising to you, it's also part of the good news. We're the first generation -- thanks to science -- to be informed that we may be undermining the stability and the ability of planet Earth to support human development as we know it. It's also good news, because the planetary risks we're facing are so large, that business as usual is not an option. In fact, we're in a phase where transformative change is necessary, which opens the window for innovation, for new ideas and new paradigms. This is a scientific journey on the challenges facing humanity in the global phase of sustainability. On this journey, I'd like to bring, apart from yourselves, a good friend, a stakeholder, who's always absent when we deal with the negotiations on environmental issues, a stakeholder who refuses to compromise -- planet Earth. So I thought I'd bring her with me today on stage, to have her as a witness of a remarkable journey, which humbly reminds us of the period of grace we've had over the past 10,000 years. This is the living conditions on the planet over the last 100,000 years. It's a very important period -- it's roughly half the period when we've been fully modern humans on the planet. We've had the same, roughly, abilities that developed civilizations as we know it. This is the environmental conditions on the planet. Here, used as a proxy, temperature variability. It was a jumpy ride. 80,000 years back in a crisis, we leave Africa, we colonize Australia in another crisis, 60,000 years back, we leave Asia for Europe in another crisis, 40,000 years back, and then we enter the remarkably stable Holocene phase, the only period in the whole history of the planet, that we know of, that can support human development. A thousand years into this period, we abandon our hunting and gathering patterns. We go from a couple of million people to the seven billion people we are today. The Mesopotamian culture: we invent agriculture, we domesticate animals and plants. You have the Roman, the Greek and the story as you know it. The only phase, as we know it that can support humanity. The trouble is we're putting a quadruple sqeeze on this poor planet, a quadruple sqeeze, which, as its first squeeze, has population growth of course. Now, this is not only about numbers; this is not only about the fact that we're seven billion people committed to nine billion people, it's an equity issue as well. The majority of the environmental impacts on the planet have been caused by the rich minority, the 20 percent that jumped onto the industrial bandwagon in the mid-18th century. The majority of the planet, aspiring for development, having the right for development, are in large aspiring for an unsustainable lifestyle, a momentous pressure. The second pressure on the planet is, of course the climate agenda -- the big issue -- where the policy interpretation of science is that it would be enough to stabilize greenhouse gases at 450 ppm to avoid average temperatures exceeding two degrees, to avoid the risk that we may be destabilizing the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, holding six meters -- level rising, the risk of destabilizing the Greenland Ice Sheet, holding another seven meters -- sea level rising. Now, you would have wished the climate pressure to hit a strong planet, a resilient planet, but unfortunately, the third pressure is the ecosystem decline. Never have we seen, in the past 50 years, such a sharp decline of ecosystem functions and services on the planet, one of them being the ability to regulate climate on the long term, in our forests, land and biodiversity. The forth pressure is surprise, the notion and the evidence that we need to abandon our old paradigm, that ecosystems behave linearly, predictably, controllably in our -- so to say -- linear systems, and that in fact, surprise is universal, as systems tip over very rapidly, abruptly and often irreversibly. This, dear friends, poses a human pressure on the planet of momentous scale. We may, in fact, have entered a new geological era -- the Anthropocene, where humans are the predominant driver of change at a planetary level. Now, as a scientist, what's the evidence for this? Well, the evidence is, unfortunately, ample. It's not only carbon dioxide that has this hockey stick pattern of accelerated change. You can take virtually any parameter that matters for human well-being -- nitrous oxide, methane, deforestation, overfishing land degredation, loss of species -- they all show the same pattern over the past 200 years. Simultaneously, they branch off in the mid-50s, 10 years after the Second World War, showing very clearly that the great acceleration of the human enterprise starts in the mid-50s. You see, for the first time, an imprint on the global level. And I can tell you, you enter the disciplinary research in each of these, you find something remarkably important, the conclusion that we may have come to the point where we have to bend the curves, that we may have entered the most challenging and exciting decade in the history humanity on the planet, the decade when we have to bend the curves. Now, as if this was not enough -- to just bend the curves and understanding the accelerated pressure on the planet -- we also have to recognize the fact that systems do have multiple stable states, separated by thresholds -- illustrated here by this ball and cup diagram, where the depth of the cup is the resilience of the system. Now, the system may gradually -- under pressure of climate change, erosion, biodiversity loss -- lose the depth of the cup, the resilience, but appear to be healthy and appear to suddenly, under a threshold, be tipping over. Upff. Sorry. Changing state and literally ending up in an undesired situation, where new biophysical logic takes over, new species take over, and the system gets locked. Do we have evidence of this? Yes, coral reef systems. Biodiverse, low-nutrient, hard coral systems under multiple pressures of overfishing, unsustainable tourism, climate change. A trigger and the system tips over, loses its resilience, soft corals take over, and we get undesired systems that cannot support economic and social development. The Arctic -- a beautiful system -- a regulating biome at the planetary level, taking the knock after knock on climate change, appearing to be in a good state. No scientist could predict that in 2007, suddenly, what could be crossing a threshold. The system suddenly, very surprisingly, loses 30 to 40 percent of its summer ice cover. And the drama is, of course, that when the system does this, the logic may change. It may get locked in an undesired state, because it changes color, absorbs more energy, and the system may get stuck. In my mind, the largest red flag warning for humanity that we are in a precarious situation. As a sideline, you know that the only red flag that popped up here was a submarine from an unnamed country that planted a red flag at the bottom of the Arctic to be able to control the oil resources. Now, if we have evidence, which we now have, that wetlands, forests, [unclear] monsoon system, the rainforests, behave in this nonlinear way. 30 or so scientists around the world gathered and asked a question for the first time, "Do we have to put the planet into the the pot?" So we have to ask ourselves: are we threatening this extraordinarily stable Holocene state? Are we in fact putting ourselves in a situation where we're coming too close to thresholds that could lead to deleterious and very undesired, if now catastrophic, change for human development? You know, you don't want to stand there. In fact, you're not even allowed to stand where this gentleman is standing, at the foaming, slippery waters at the threshold. In fact, there's a fence quite upstream of this threshold, beyond which you are in a danger zone. And this is the new paradigm, which we gathered two, three years back, recognizing that our old paradigm of just analyzing and pushing and predicting parameters into the future, aiming at minimalizing environmental impacts, is of the past. Now we to ask ourselves: which are the large environmental processes that we have to be stewards of to keep ourselves safe in the Holocene? And could we even, thanks to major advancements in Earth systems science, identify the thresholds, the points where we may expect nonlinear change? And could we even define a planetary boundary, a fence, within which we then have a safe operating space for humanity? This work, which was published in "Nature," late 2009, after a number of years of analysis, led to the final proposition that we can only find nine planetary boundaries with which, under active stewardship, would allow ourselves to have a safe operating space. These include, of course, climate. It may surprise you that it's not only climate. But it shows that we are interconnected, among many systems on the planet, with the three big systems, climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion and ocean acidification being the three big systems, where the scientific evidence of large-scale thresholds in the paleo-record of the history of the planet. But we also include, what we call, the slow variables, the systems that, under the hood, regulate and buffer the capacity of the resilience of the planet -- the interference of the big nitrogen and phosphorus cycles on the planet, land use change, rate of biodiversity loss, freshwater use, functions which regulate biomass on the planet, carbon sequestration, diversity. And then we have two parameters which we were not able to quantify -- air pollution, including warming gases and air-polluting sulfates and nitrates, but also chemical pollution. Together, these form an integrated whole for guiding human development in the Anthropocene, understanding that the planet is a complex self-regulating system. In fact, most evidence indicates that these nine may behave as three Musketeers, "One for all. All for one." You degrade forests, you go beyond the boundary on land, you undermine the ability of the climate system to stay stable. The drama here is, in fact, that it may show that the climate challenge is the easy one, if you consider the whole challenge of sustainable development. Now this is the Big Bang equivalent then of human development within the safe operating space of the planetary boundaries. What you see here in black line is the safe operating space, the quantified boundaries, as suggested by this analysis. The yellow dot in the middle here is our starting point, the pre-industrial point, where we're very safely in the safe operating space. In the '50s, we start branching out. In the '60s already, through the green revolution and the Haber-Bosch process of fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere -- you know, human's today take out more nitrogen from the atmosphere than the whole biosphere does naturally as a whole. We don't transgress the climate boundary until the early '90s, actually, right after Rio. And today, we are in a situation where we estimate that we've transgressed three boundaries, the rate of biodiversity loss, which is the sixth extinction period in the history of humanity -- one of them being the extinctions of the dinosaurs -- nitrogen and climate change. But we still have some degrees of freedom on the others, but we are approaching fast on land, water, phosphorus and oceans. But this gives a new paradigm to guide humanity, to put the light on our, so far overpowered industrial vehicle, which operates as if we're only on a dark, straight highway. Now the question then is: how gloomy is this? Is then sustainable development utopia? Well, there's no science to suggest. In fact, there is ample science to indicate that we can do this transformative change, that we have the ability to now move into a new innovative, a transformative gear, across scales. The drama is, of course, is that 200 countries on this planet have to simultaneously start moving in the same direction. But it changes fundamentally our governance and management paradigm, from the current linear, command and control thinking, looking at efficiencies and optimization towards a much more flexible, a much more adaptive approach, where we recognize that redundancy, both in social and environmental systems, is key to be able to deal with a turbulent era of global change. We have to invest in persistence, in the ability of social systems and ecological systems to withstand shocks and still remain in that desired cup. We have to invest in transformations capability, moving from crisis into innovation and the ability to rise after a crisis, and of course to adapt to unavoidable change. This is a new paradigm. We're not doing that at any scale on governance. But is it happening anywhere? Do we have any examples of success on this mind shift being applied at the local level? Well, yes, in fact we do and the list can start becoming longer and longer. There's good news here, for example, from Latin America, where plow-based farming systems of the '50s and '60s led farming basically to a dead-end, with lower and lower yields, degrading the organic matter and fundamental problems at the livelihood levels in Paraguay, Uruguay and a number of countries, Brazil, leading to innovation and entrepreneurship among farmers in partnership with scientists into an agricultural revolution of zero tillage systems combined with mulch farming with locally adapted technologies, which today, for example, in some countries, have led to a tremendous increase in area under mulch, zero till farming which, not only produces more food, but also sequesters carbon. The Australian Great Barrier Reef is another success story. Under the realization from tourist operators, fishermen, the Australian Great Barrier Reef Authority and scientists that the Great Barrier Reef is doomed under the current governance regime. Global change, beautification rack culture, overfishing and unsustainable tourism, all together placing this system in the realization of crisis. But the window of opportunity was innovation and new mindset, which today has led to a completely new governance strategy to build resilience, acknowledge redundancy and invest in the whole system as an integrated whole, and then allow for much more redundancy in the system. Sweden, the country I come from, has other examples, where wetlands in southern Sweden were seen as -- as in many countries -- as flood-prone polluted nuisance in the peri-urban regions. But again, a crisis, new partnerships, actors locally, transforming these into a key component of sustainable urban planning. So crisis leading into opportunities. Now, what about the future? Well, the future, of course, has one massive challenge, which is feeding a world of nine billion people. We need nothing less than a new green revolution, and the planet boundaries shows that agriculture has to go from a source of greenhouse gases to a sink. It has to basically do this on current land. We cannot expand anymore, because it erodes the planetary boundaries. We cannot continue consuming water as we do today, with 25 percent of world rivers not even reaching the ocean. And we need a transformation. Well, interestingly, and based on my work and others in Africa, for example, we've shown that even the most vulnerable small-scale rainfall farming systems, with innovations and supplementary irrigation to bridge dry spells and droughts, sustainable sanitation systems to close the loop on nutrients from toilets back to farmers' fields, and innovations in tillage systems, we can triple, quadruple, yield levels on current land. Elinor Ostrom, the latest Nobel laureate of economics, clearly shows empirically across the world that we can govern the commons if we invest in trust, local, action-based partnerships and cross-scale institutional innovations, where local actors, together, can deal with the global commons at a large scale. But even on the hard policy area we have innovations. We know that we have to move from our fossil dependence very quickly into a low-carbon economy in record time. And what shall we do? Everybody talks about carbon taxes -- it won't work -- emission schemes, but for example, one policy measure, feed-in tariffs on the energy system, which is already applied, from China doing it on offshore wind systems, all the way to the U.S. where you give the guaranteed price for investment in renewable energy, but you can subsidize electricity to poor people. You get people out of poverty. You solve the climate issue with regards to the energy sector, while at the same time, stimulating innovation -- examples of things that can be out scaled quickly at the planetary level. So there is -- no doubt -- opportunity here, and we can list many, many examples of transformative opportunities around the planet. The key though in all of these, the red thread, is the shift in mindset, moving away from a situation where we simply are pushing ourselves into a dark future, where we instead backcast our future, and we say, "What is the playing field on the planet? What are the planetary boundaries within which we can safely operate?" and then backtrack innovations within that. But of course, the drama is, it clearly shows that incremental change is not an option. So, there is scientific evidence. They sort of say the harsh news, that we are facing the largest transformative development since the industrialization. In fact, what we have to do over the next 40 years is much more dramatic and more exciting than what we did when we moved into the situation we're in today. Now, science indicates that, yes, we can achieve a prosperous future within the safe operating space, if we move simultaneously, collaborating on a global level, from local to global scale, in transformative options, which build resilience on a finite planet. Thank you. (Applause)

I just did something I've never done before. I spent a week at sea on a research vessel. Now I'm not a scientist, but I was accompanying a remarkable scientific team from the University of South Florida who have been tracking the travels of BP's oil in the Gulf of Mexico. This is the boat we were on, by the way. The scientists I was with were not studying the effect of the oil and dispersants on the big stuff -- the birds, the turtles, the dolphins, the glamorous stuff. They're looking at the really little stuff that gets eaten by the slightly less little stuff that eventually gets eaten by the big stuff. And what they're finding is that even trace amounts of oil and dispersants can be highly toxic to phytoplankton, which is very bad news, because so much life depends on it. So contrary to what we heard a few months back about how 75 percent of that oil sort of magically disappeared and we didn't have to worry about it, this disaster is still unfolding. It's still working its way up the food chain. Now this shouldn't come as a surprise to us. Rachel Carson -- the godmother of modern environmentalism -- warned us about this very thing back in 1962. She pointed out that the "control men" -- as she called them -- who carpet-bombed towns and fields with toxic insecticides like DDT, were only trying to kill the little stuff, the insects, not the birds. But they forgot this: the fact that birds dine on grubs, that robins eat lots of worms now saturated with DDT. And so, robin eggs failed to hatch, songbirds died en masse, towns fell silent. Thus the title "Silent Spring." I've been trying to pinpoint what keeps drawing me back to the Gulf of Mexico, because I'm Canadian, and I can draw no ancestral ties. And I think what it is is I don't think we have fully come to terms with the meaning of this disaster, with what it meant to witness a hole ripped in our world, with what it meant to watch the contents of the Earth gush forth on live TV, 24 hours a day, for months. After telling ourselves for so long that our tools and technology can control nature, suddenly we were face-to-face with our weakness, with our lack of control, as the oil burst out of every attempt to contain it -- "top hats," "top kills" and, most memorably, the "junk shot" -- the bright idea of firing old tires and golf balls down that hole in the world. But even more striking than the ferocious power emanating from that well was the recklessness with which that power was unleashed -- the carelessness, the lack of planning that characterized the operation from drilling to clean-up. If there is one thing BP's watery improv act made clear, it is that, as a culture, we have become far too willing to gamble with things that are precious and irreplaceable, and to do so without a back-up plan, without an exit strategy. And BP was hardly our first experience of this in recent years. Our leaders barrel into wars, telling themselves happy stories about cakewalks and welcome parades. Then, it is years of deadly damage control, Frankensteins of sieges and surges and counter-insurgencies, and once again, no exit strategy. Our financial wizards routinely fall victim to similar overconfidence, convincing themselves that the latest bubble is a new kind of market -- the kind that never goes down. And when it inevitably does, the best and the brightest reach for the financial equivalent of the junk shot -- in this case, throwing massive amounts of much-needed public money down a very different kind of hole. As with BP, the hole does get plugged, at least temporarily, but not before exacting a tremendous price. We have to figure out why we keep letting this happen, because we are in the midst of what may be our highest-stakes gamble of all -- deciding what to do, or not to do, about climate change. Now as you know, a great deal of time is spent, in this country and around the world, inside the climate debate, on the question of, "What if the IPC scientists are all wrong?" Now a far more relevant question -- as MIT physicist Evelyn Fox Keller puts it -- is, "What if those scientists are right?" Given the stakes, the climate crisis clearly calls for us to act based on the precautionary principle -- the theory that holds that when human health and the environment are significantly at risk and when the potential damage is irreversible, we cannot afford to wait for perfect scientific certainty. Better to err on the side of caution. More overt, the burden of proving that a practice is safe should not be placed on the public that would be harmed, but rather on the industry that stands to profit. But climate policy in the wealthy world -- to the extent that such a thing exists -- is not based on precaution, but rather on cost-benefit analysis -- finding the course of action that economists believe will have the least impact on our GDP. So rather than asking, as precaution would demand, what can we do as quickly as possible to avoid potential catastrophe, we ask bizarre questions like this: "What is the latest possible moment we can wait before we begin seriously lowering emissions? Can we put this off till 2020, 2030, 2050?" Or we ask, "How much hotter can we let the planet get and still survive? Can we go with two degrees, three degrees, or -- where we're currently going -- four degrees Celsius?" And by the way, the assumption that we can safely control the Earth's awesomely complex climate system as if it had a thermostat, making the planet not too hot, not too cold, but just right -- sort of Goldilocks style -- this is pure fantasy, and it's not coming from the climate scientists. It's coming from the economists imposing their mechanistic thinking on the science. The fact is that we simply don't know when the warming that we create will be utterly overwhelmed by feedback loops. So once again, why do we take these crazy risks with the precious? A range of explanations may be popping into your mind by now, like "greed." This is a popular explanation, and there's lots of truth to it, because taking big risks, as we all know, pays a lot of money. Another explanation that you often hear for recklessness is hubris. And greed and hubris are intimately intertwined when it comes to recklessness. For instance, if you happen to be a 35-year-old banker taking home 100 times more than a brain surgeon, then you need a narrative, you need a story that makes that disparity okay. And you actually don't have a lot of options. You're either an incredibly good scammer, and you're getting away with it -- you gamed the system -- or you're some kind of boy genius, the likes of which the world has never seen. Now both of these options -- the boy genius and the scammer -- are going to make you vastly overconfident and therefore more prone to taking even bigger risks in the future. By the way, Tony Hayward, the former CEO of BP, had a plaque on his desk inscribed with this inspirational slogan: "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" Now this is actually a popular plaque, and this is a crowd of overachievers, so I'm betting that some of you have this plaque. Don't feel ashamed. Putting fear of failure out of your mind can be a very good thing if you're training for a triathlon or preparing to give a TEDTalk, but personally, I think people with the power to detonate our economy and ravage our ecology would do better having a picture of Icarus hanging from the wall, because -- maybe not that one in particular -- but I want them thinking about the possibility of failure all of the time. So we have greed, we've got overconfidence/hubris, but since we're here at TEDWomen, let's consider one other factor that could be contributing in some small way to societal recklessness. Now I'm not going to belabor this point, but studies do show that, as investors, women are much less prone to taking reckless risks than men, precisely because, as we've already heard, women tend not to suffer from overconfidence in the same way that men do. So it turns out that being paid less and praised less has its upsides -- for society at least. The flipside of this is that constantly being told that you are gifted, chosen and born to rule has distinct societal downsides. And this problem -- call it the "perils of privilege" -- brings us closer, I think, to the root of our collective recklessness. Because none of us -- at least in the global North -- neither men nor women, are fully exempt from this message. Here's what I'm talking about. Whether we actively believe them or consciously reject them, our culture remains in the grips of certain archetypal stories about our supremacy over others and over nature -- the narrative of the newly discovered frontier and the conquering pioneer, the narrative of manifest destiny, the narrative of apocalypse and salvation. And just when you think these stories are fading into history, and that we've gotten over them, they pop up in the strangest places. For instance, I stumbled across this advertisement outside the women's washroom in the Kansas City airport. It's for Motorola's new Rugged cell phone, and yes, it really does say, "Slap Mother Nature in the face." And I'm not just showing it to pick on Motorola -- that's just a bonus. I'm showing it because -- they're not a sponsor, are they? -- because, in its own way, this is a crass version of our founding story. We slapped Mother Nature around and won, and we always win, because dominating nature is our destiny. But this is not the only fairytale we tell ourselves about nature. There's another one, equally important, about how that very same Mother Nature is so nurturing and so resilient that we can never make a dent in her abundance. Let's hear from Tony Hayward again. "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersants that we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume." In other words, the ocean is big; she can take it. It is this underlying assumption of limitlessness that makes it possible to take the reckless risks that we do. Because this is our real master-narrative: however much we mess up, there will always be more -- more water, more land, more untapped resources. A new bubble will replace the old one. A new technology will come along to fix the messes we made with the last one. In a way, that is the story of the settling of the Americas, the supposedly inexhaustible frontier to which Europeans escaped. And it's also the story of modern capitalism, because it was the wealth from this land that gave birth to our economic system, one that cannot survive without perpetual growth and an unending supply of new frontiers. Now the problem is that the story was always a lie. The Earth always did have limits. They were just beyond our sights. And now we are hitting those limits on multiple fronts. I believe that we know this, yet we find ourselves trapped in a kind of narrative loop. Not only do we continue to tell and retell the same tired stories, but we are now doing so with a frenzy and a fury that, frankly, verges on camp. How else to explain the cultural space occupied by Sarah Palin? Now on the one hand, exhorting us to "drill, baby, drill," because God put those resources into the ground in order for us to exploit them, and on the other, glorying in the wilderness of Alaska's untouched beauty on her hit reality TV show. The twin message is as comforting as it is mad. Ignore those creeping fears that we have finally hit the wall. There are still no limits. There will always be another frontier. So stop worrying and keep shopping. Now, would that this were just about Sarah Palin and her reality TV show. In environmental circles, we often hear that, rather than shifting to renewables, we are continuing with business as usual. This assessment, unfortunately, is far too optimistic. The truth is that we have already exhausted so much of the easily accessible fossil fuels that we have already entered a far riskier business era, the era of extreme energy. So that means drilling for oil in the deepest water, including the icy Arctic seas, where a clean-up may simply be impossible. It means large-scale hydraulic fracking for gas and massive strip-mining operations for coal, the likes of which we haven't yet seen. And most controversially, it means the tar sands. I'm always surprised by how little people outside of Canada know about the Alberta Tar Sands, which this year are projected to become the number one source of imported oil to the United States. It's worth taking a moment to understand this practice, because I believe it speaks to recklessness and the path we're on like little else. So this is where the tar sands live, under one of the last magnificent Boreal forests. The oil is not liquid. You can't just drill a hole and pump it out. Tar sand's oil is solid, mixed in with the soil. So to get at it, you first have to get rid of the trees. Then, you rip off the topsoil and get at that oily sand. The process requires a huge amount of water, which is then pumped into massive toxic tailing ponds. That's very bad news for local indigenous people living downstream who are reporting alarmingly high cancer rates. Now looking at these images, it's difficult to grasp the scale of this operation, which can already be seen from space and could grow to an area the size of England. I find it helps actually to look at the dump trucks that move the earth, the largest ever built. That's a person down there by the wheel. My point is that this is not oil drilling. It's not even mining. It is terrestrial skinning. Vast, vivid landscapes are being gutted, left monochromatic gray. Now I should confess that as [far as] I'm concerned this would be an abomination if it emitted not one particle of carbon. But the truth is that, on average, turning that gunk into crude oil produces about three times more greenhouse gas pollution than it does to produce conventional oil in Canada. How else to describe this, but as a form of mass insanity? Just when we know we need to be learning to live on the surface of our planet, off the power of sun, wind and waves, we are frantically digging to get at the dirtiest, highest-emitting stuff imaginable. This is where our story of endless growth has taken us, to this black hole at the center of my country -- a place of such planetary pain that, like the BP gusher, one can only stand to look at it for so long. As Jared Diamond and others have shown us, this is how civilizations commit suicide, by slamming their foot on the accelerator at the exact moment when they should be putting on the brakes. The problem is that our master-narrative has an answer for that too. At the very last minute, we are going to get saved just like in every Hollywood movie, just like in the Rapture. But, of course, our secular religion is technology. Now, you may have noticed more and more headlines like these. The idea behind this form of "geoengineering" as it's called, is that, as the planet heats up, we may be able to shoot sulfates and aluminum particles into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun's rays back to space, thereby cooling the planet. The wackiest plan -- and I'm not making this up -- would put what is essentially a garden hose 18-and-a-half miles high into the sky, suspended by balloons, to spew sulfur dioxide. So, solving the problem of pollution with more pollution. Think of it as the ultimate junk shot. The serious scientists involved in this research all stress that these techniques are entirely untested. They don't know if they'll work, and they have no idea what kind of terrifying side effects they could unleash. Nevertheless, the mere mention of geoengineering is being greeted in some circles, particularly media circles, with a relief tinged with euphoria. An escape hatch has been reached. A new frontier has been found. Most importantly, we don't have to change our lifestyles after all. You see, for some people, their savior is a guy in a flowing robe. For other people, it's a guy with a garden hose. We badly need some new stories. We need stories that have different kinds of heroes willing to take different kinds of risks -- risks that confront recklessness head on, that put the precautionary principle into practice, even if that means through direct action -- like hundreds of young people willing to get arrested, blocking dirty power plants or fighting mountaintop-removal coal mining. We need stories that replace that linear narrative of endless growth with circular narratives that remind us that what goes around comes around. That this is our only home. There is no escape hatch. Call it karma, call it physics, action and reaction, call it precaution -- the principle that reminds us that life is too precious to be risked for any profit. Thank you. (Applause)

The universe is really big. We live in a galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy. There are about a hundred billion stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. And if you take a camera and you point it at a random part of the sky, and you just keep the shutter open, as long as your camera is attached to the Hubble Space Telescope, it will see something like this. Every one of these little blobs is a galaxy roughly the size of our Milky Way -- a hundred billion stars in each of those blobs. There are approximately a hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe. 100 billion is the only number you need to know. The age of the universe, between now and the Big Bang, is a hundred billion in dog years. (Laughter) Which tells you something about our place in the universe. One thing you can do with a picture like this is simply admire it. It's extremely beautiful. I've often wondered, what is the evolutionary pressure that made our ancestors in the Veldt adapt and evolve to really enjoy pictures of galaxies when they didn't have any. But we would also like to understand it. As a cosmologist, I want to ask, why is the universe like this? One big clue we have is that the universe is changing with time. If you looked at one of these galaxies and measured its velocity, it would be moving away from you. And if you look at a galaxy even farther away, it would be moving away faster. So we say the universe is expanding. What that means, of course, is that, in the past, things were closer together. In the past, the universe was more dense, and it was also hotter. If you squeeze things together, the temperature goes up. That kind of makes sense to us. The thing that doesn't make sense to us as much is that the universe, at early times, near the Big Bang, was also very, very smooth. You might think that that's not a surprise. The air in this room is very smooth. You might say, "Well, maybe things just smoothed themselves out." But the conditions near the Big Bang are very, very different than the conditions of the air in this room. In particular, things were a lot denser. The gravitational pull of things was a lot stronger near the Big Bang. What you have to think about is we have a universe with a hundred billion galaxies, a hundred billion stars each. At early times, those hundred billion galaxies were squeezed into a region about this big -- literally -- at early times. And you have to imagine doing that squeezing without any imperfections, without any little spots where there were a few more atoms than somewhere else. Because if there had been, they would have collapsed under the gravitational pull into a huge black hole. Keeping the universe very, very smooth at early times is not easy; it's a delicate arrangement. It's a clue that the early universe is not chosen randomly. There is something that made it that way. We would like to know what. So part of our understanding of this was given to us by Ludwig Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist in the 19th century. And Boltzmann's contribution was that he helped us understand entropy. You've heard of entropy. It's the randomness, the disorder, the chaoticness of some systems. Boltzmann gave us a formula -- engraved on his tombstone now -- that really quantifies what entropy is. And it's basically just saying that entropy is the number of ways we can rearrange the constituents of a system so that you don't notice, so that macroscopically it looks the same. If you have the air in this room, you don't notice each individual atom. A low entropy configuration is one in which there's only a few arrangements that look that way. A high entropy arrangement is one that there are many arrangements that look that way. This is a crucially important insight because it helps us explain the second law of thermodynamics -- the law that says that entropy increases in the universe, or in some isolated bit of the universe. The reason why entropy increases is simply because there are many more ways to be high entropy than to be low entropy. That's a wonderful insight, but it leaves something out. This insight that entropy increases, by the way, is what's behind what we call the arrow of time, the difference between the past and the future. Every difference that there is between the past and the future is because entropy is increasing -- the fact that you can remember the past, but not the future. The fact that you are born, and then you live, and then you die, always in that order, that's because entropy is increasing. Boltzmann explained that if you start with low entropy, it's very natural for it to increase because there's more ways to be high entropy. What he didn't explain was why the entropy was ever low in the first place. The fact that the entropy of the universe was low was a reflection of the fact that the early universe was very, very smooth. We'd like to understand that. That's our job as cosmologists. Unfortunately, it's actually not a problem that we've been giving enough attention to. It's not one of the first things people would say, if you asked a modern cosmologist, "What are the problems we're trying to address?" One of the people who did understand that this was a problem was Richard Feynman. 50 years ago, he gave a series of a bunch of different lectures. He gave the popular lectures that became "The Character of Physical Law." He gave lectures to Caltech undergrads that became "The Feynman Lectures on Physics." He gave lectures to Caltech graduate students that became "The Feynman Lectures on Gravitation." In every one of these books, every one of these sets of lectures, he emphasized this puzzle: Why did the early universe have such a small entropy? So he says -- I'm not going to do the accent -- he says, "For some reason, the universe, at one time, had a very low entropy for its energy content, and since then the entropy has increased. The arrow of time cannot be completely understood until the mystery of the beginnings of the history of the universe are reduced still further from speculation to understanding." So that's our job. We want to know -- this is 50 years ago, "Surely," you're thinking, "we've figured it out by now." It's not true that we've figured it out by now. The reason the problem has gotten worse, rather than better, is because in 1998 we learned something crucial about the universe that we didn't know before. We learned that it's accelerating. The universe is not only expanding. If you look at the galaxy, it's moving away. If you come back a billion years later and look at it again, it will be moving away faster. Individual galaxies are speeding away from us faster and faster so we say the universe is accelerating. Unlike the low entropy of the early universe, even though we don't know the answer for this, we at least have a good theory that can explain it, if that theory is right, and that's the theory of dark energy. It's just the idea that empty space itself has energy. In every little cubic centimeter of space, whether or not there's stuff, whether or not there's particles, matter, radiation or whatever, there's still energy, even in the space itself. And this energy, according to Einstein, exerts a push on the universe. It is a perpetual impulse that pushes galaxies apart from each other. Because dark energy, unlike matter or radiation, does not dilute away as the universe expands. The amount of energy in each cubic centimeter remains the same, even as the universe gets bigger and bigger. This has crucial implications for what the universe is going to do in the future. For one thing, the universe will expand forever. Back when I was your age, we didn't know what the universe was going to do. Some people thought that the universe would recollapse in the future. Einstein was fond of this idea. But if there's dark energy, and the dark energy does not go away, the universe is just going to keep expanding forever and ever and ever. 14 billion years in the past, 100 billion dog years, but an infinite number of years into the future. Meanwhile, for all intents and purposes, space looks finite to us. Space may be finite or infinite, but because the universe is accelerating, there are parts of it we cannot see and never will see. There's a finite region of space that we have access to, surrounded by a horizon. So even though time goes on forever, space is limited to us. Finally, empty space has a temperature. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking told us that a black hole, even though you think it's black, it actually emits radiation when you take into account quantum mechanics. The curvature of space-time around the black hole brings to life the quantum mechanical fluctuation, and the black hole radiates. A precisely similar calculation by Hawking and Gary Gibbons showed that if you have dark energy in empty space, then the whole universe radiates. The energy of empty space brings to life quantum fluctuations. And so even though the universe will last forever, and ordinary matter and radiation will dilute away, there will always be some radiation, some thermal fluctuations, even in empty space. So what this means is that the universe is like a box of gas that lasts forever. Well what is the implication of that? That implication was studied by Boltzmann back in the 19th century. He said, well, entropy increases because there are many, many more ways for the universe to be high entropy, rather than low entropy. But that's a probabilistic statement. It will probably increase, and the probability is enormously huge. It's not something you have to worry about -- the air in this room all gathering over one part of the room and suffocating us. It's very, very unlikely. Except if they locked the doors and kept us here literally forever, that would happen. Everything that is allowed, every configuration that is allowed to be obtained by the molecules in this room, would eventually be obtained. So Boltzmann says, look, you could start with a universe that was in thermal equilibrium. He didn't know about the Big Bang. He didn't know about the expansion of the universe. He thought that space and time were explained by Isaac Newton -- they were absolute; they just stuck there forever. So his idea of a natural universe was one in which the air molecules were just spread out evenly everywhere -- the everything molecules. But if you're Boltzmann, you know that if you wait long enough, the random fluctuations of those molecules will occasionally bring them into lower entropy configurations. And then, of course, in the natural course of things, they will expand back. So it's not that entropy must always increase -- you can get fluctuations into lower entropy, more organized situations. Well if that's true, Boltzmann then goes onto invent two very modern-sounding ideas -- the multiverse and the anthropic principle. He says, the problem with thermal equilibrium is that we can't live there. Remember, life itself depends on the arrow of time. We would not be able to process information, metabolize, walk and talk, if we lived in thermal equilibrium. So if you imagine a very, very big universe, an infinitely big universe, with randomly bumping into each other particles, there will occasionally be small fluctuations in the lower entropy states, and then they relax back. But there will also be large fluctuations. Occasionally, you will make a planet or a star or a galaxy or a hundred billion galaxies. So Boltzmann says, we will only live in the part of the multiverse, in the part of this infinitely big set of fluctuating particles, where life is possible. That's the region where entropy is low. Maybe our universe is just one of those things that happens from time to time. Now your homework assignment is to really think about this, to contemplate what it means. Carl Sagan once famously said that "in order to make an apple pie, you must first invent the universe." But he was not right. In Boltzmann's scenario, if you want to make an apple pie, you just wait for the random motion of atoms to make you an apple pie. That will happen much more frequently than the random motions of atoms making you an apple orchard and some sugar and an oven, and then making you an apple pie. So this scenario makes predictions. And the predictions are that the fluctuations that make us are minimal. Even if you imagine that this room we are in now exists and is real and here we are, and we have, not only our memories, but our impression that outside there's something called Caltech and the United States and the Milky Way Galaxy, it's much easier for all those impressions to randomly fluctuate into your brain than for them actually to randomly fluctuate into Caltech, the United States and the galaxy. The good news is that, therefore, this scenario does not work; it is not right. This scenario predicts that we should be a minimal fluctuation. Even if you left our galaxy out, you would not get a hundred billion other galaxies. And Feynman also understood this. Feynman says, "From the hypothesis that the world is a fluctuation, all the predictions are that if we look at a part of the world we've never seen before, we will find it mixed up, and not like the piece we've just looked at -- high entropy. If our order were due to a fluctuation, we would not expect order anywhere but where we have just noticed it. We therefore conclude the universe is not a fluctuation." So that's good. The question is then what is the right answer? If the universe is not a fluctuation, why did the early universe have a low entropy? And I would love to tell you the answer, but I'm running out of time. (Laughter) Here is the universe that we tell you about, versus the universe that really exists. I just showed you this picture. The universe is expanding for the last 10 billion years or so. It's cooling off. But we now know enough about the future of the universe to say a lot more. If the dark energy remains around, the stars around us will use up their nuclear fuel, they will stop burning. They will fall into black holes. We will live in a universe with nothing in it but black holes. That universe will last 10 to the 100 years -- a lot longer than our little universe has lived. The future is much longer than the past. But even black holes don't last forever. They will evaporate, and we will be left with nothing but empty space. That empty space lasts essentially forever. However, you notice, since empty space gives off radiation, there's actually thermal fluctuations, and it cycles around all the different possible combinations of the degrees of freedom that exist in empty space. So even though the universe lasts forever, there's only a finite number of things that can possibly happen in the universe. They all happen over a period of time equal to 10 to the 10 to the 120 years. So here's two questions for you. Number one: If the universe lasts for 10 to the 10 to the 120 years, why are we born in the first 14 billion years of it, in the warm, comfortable afterglow of the Big Bang? Why aren't we in empty space? You might say, "Well there's nothing there to be living," but that's not right. You could be a random fluctuation out of the nothingness. Why aren't you? More homework assignment for you. So like I said, I don't actually know the answer. I'm going to give you my favorite scenario. Either it's just like that. There is no explanation. This is a brute fact about the universe that you should learn to accept and stop asking questions. Or maybe the Big Bang is not the beginning of the universe. An egg, an unbroken egg, is a low entropy configuration, and yet, when we open our refrigerator, we do not go, "Hah, how surprising to find this low entropy configuration in our refrigerator." That's because an egg is not a closed system; it comes out of a chicken. Maybe the universe comes out of a universal chicken. Maybe there is something that naturally, through the growth of the laws of physics, gives rise to universe like ours in low entropy configurations. If that's true, it would happen more than once; we would be part of a much bigger multiverse. That's my favorite scenario. So the organizers asked me to end with a bold speculation. My bold speculation is that I will be absolutely vindicated by history. And 50 years from now, all of my current wild ideas will be accepted as truths by the scientific and external communities. We will all believe that our little universe is just a small part of a much larger multiverse. And even better, we will understand what happened at the Big Bang in terms of a theory that we will be able to compare to observations. This is a prediction. I might be wrong. But we've been thinking as a human race about what the universe was like, why it came to be in the way it did for many, many years. It's exciting to think we may finally know the answer someday. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm here to talk to you about the economic invisibility of nature. The bad news is that mother nature's back office isn't working yet, so those invoices don't get issued. But we need to do something about this problem. I began my life as a markets professional and continued to take an interest, but most of my recent effort has been looking at the value of what comes to human beings from nature, and which doesn't get priced by the markets. A project called TEEB was started in 2007, and it was launched by a group of environment ministers of the G8+5. And their basic inspiration was a stern review of Lord Stern. They asked themselves a question: If economics could make such a convincing case for early action on climate change, well why can't the same be done for conservation? Why can't an equivalent case be made for nature? And the answer is: Yeah, it can. But it's not that straightforward. Biodiversity, the living fabric of this planet, is not a gas. It exists in many layers, ecosystems, species and genes across many scales -- international, national, local, community -- and doing for nature what Lord Stern and his team did for nature is not that easy. And yet, we began. We began the project with an interim report, which quickly pulled together a lot of information that had been collected on the subject by many, many researchers. And amongst our compiled results was the startling revelation that, in fact, we were losing natural capital -- the benefits that flow from nature to us. We were losing it at an extraordinary rate -- in fact, of the order of two to four trillion dollars-worth of natural capital. This came out in 2008, which was, of course, around the time that the banking crisis had shown that we had lost financial capital of the order of two and a half trillion dollars. So this was comparable in size to that kind of loss. We then have gone on since to present for [the] international community, for governments, for local governments and for business and for people, for you and me, a whole slew of reports, which were presented at the U.N. last year, which address the economic invisibility of nature and describe what can be done to solve it. What is this about? A picture that you're familiar with -- the Amazon rainforests. It's a massive store of carbon, it's an amazing store of biodiversity, but what people don't really know is this also is a rain factory. Because the northeastern trade winds, as they go over the Amazonas, effectively gather the water vapor. Something like 20 billion tons per day of water vapor is sucked up by the northeastern trade winds, and eventually precipitates in the form of rain across the La Plata Basin. This rainfall cycle, this rainfall factory, effectively feeds an agricultural economy of the order of 240 billion dollars-worth in Latin America. But the question arises: Okay, so how much do Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and indeed the state of Mato Grosso in Brazil pay for that vital input to that economy to the state of Amazonas, which produces that rainfall? And the answer is zilch, exactly zero. That's the economic invisibility of nature. That can't keep going on, because economic incentives and disincentives are very powerful. Economics has become the currency of policy. And unless we address this invisibility, we are going to get the results that we are seeing, which is a gradual degradation and loss of this valuable natural asset. It's not just about the Amazonas, or indeed about rainforests. No matter what level you look at, whether it's at the ecosystem level or at the species level or at the genetic level, we see the same problem again and again. So rainfall cycle and water regulation by rainforests at an ecosystem level. At the species level, it's been estimated that insect-based pollination, bees pollinating fruit and so on, is something like 190 billion dollars-worth. That's something like eight percent of the total agricultural output globally. It completely passes below the radar screen. But when did a bee actually ever give you an invoice? Or for that matter, if you look at the genetic level, 60 percent of medicines were prospected, were found first as molecules in a rainforest or a reef. Once again, most of that doesn't get paid. And that brings me to another aspect of this, which is, to whom should this get paid? That genetic material probably belonged, if it could belong to anyone, to a local community of poor people who parted with the knowledge that helped the researchers to find the molecule, which then became the medicine. They were the ones that didn't get paid. And if you look at the species level, you saw about fish. Today, the depletion of ocean fisheries is so significant that effectively it is effecting the ability of the poor, the artisanal fisher folk and those who fish for their own livelihoods, to feed their families. Something like a billion people depend on fish, the quantity of fish in the oceans. A billion people depend on fish for their main source for animal protein. And at this rate at which we are losing fish, it is a human problem of enormous dimensions, a health problem of a kind we haven't seen before. And finally, at the ecosystem level, whether it's flood prevention or drought control provided by the forests, or whether it is the ability of poor farmers to go out and gather leaf litter for their cattle and goats, or whether it's the ability of their wives to go and collect fuel wood from the forest, it is actually the poor who depend most on these ecosystem services. We did estimates in our study that for countries like Brazil, India and Indonesia, even though ecosystem services -- these benefits that flow from nature to humanity for free -- they're not very big in percentage terms of GDP -- two, four, eight, 10, 15 percent -- but in these countries, if we measure how much they're worth to the poor, the answers are more like 45 percent, 75 percent, 90 percent. That's the difference. Because these are important benefits for the poor. And you can't really have a proper model for development if at the same time you're destroying or allowing the degradation of the very asset, the most important asset, which is your development asset, that is ecological infrastructure. How bad can things get? Well here a picture of something called the mean species abundance. It's basically a measure of how many tigers, toads, ticks or whatever on average of biomass of various species are around. The green represents the percentage. If you start green, it's like 80 to 100 percent. If it's yellow, it's 40 to 60 percent. And these are percentages versus the original state, so to speak, the pre-industrial era, 1750. Now I'm going to show you how business as usual will affect this. And just watch the change in colors in India, China, Europe, sub-Saharan Africa as we move on and consume global biomass at a rate which is actually not going to be able to sustain us. See that again. The only places that remain green -- and that's not good news -- is, in fact, places like the Gobi Desert, like the tundra and like the Sahara. But that doesn't help because there were very few species and volume of biomass there in the first place. This is the challenge. The reason this is happening boils down, in my mind, to one basic problem, which is our inability to perceive the difference between public benefits and private profits. We tend to constantly ignore public wealth simply because it is in the common wealth, it's common goods. And here's an example from Thailand where we found that, because the value of a mangrove is not that much -- it's about $600 over the life of nine years that this has been measured -- compared to its value as a shrimp farm, which is more like $9,600, there has been a gradual trend to deplete the mangroves and convert them to shrimp farms. But of course, if you look at exactly what those profits are, almost 8,000 of those dollars are, in fact, subsidies. So you compare the two sides of the coin and you find that it's more like 1,200 to 600. That's not that hard. But on the other hand, if you start measuring, how much would it actually cost to restore the land of the shrimp farm back to productive use? Once salt deposition and chemical deposition has had its effects, that answer is more like $12,000 of cost. And if you see the benefits of the mangrove in terms of the storm protection and cyclone protection that you get and in terms of the fisheries, the fish nurseries, that provide fish for the poor, that answer is more like $11,000. So now look at the different lens. If you look at the lens of public wealth as against the lens of private profits, you get a completely different answer, which is clearly conservation makes more sense, and not destruction. So is this just a story from South Thailand? Sorry, this is a global story. And here's what the same calculation looks like, which was done recently -- well I say recently, over the last 10 years -- by a group called TRUCOST. And they calculated for the top 3,000 corporations, what are the externalities? In other words, what are the costs of doing business as usual? This is not illegal stuff, this is basically business as usual, which causes climate-changing emissions, which have an economic cost. It causes pollutants being issued, which have an economic cost, health cost and so on. Use of freshwater. If you drill water to make coke near a village farm, that's not illegal, but yes, it costs the community. Can we stop this, and how? I think the first point to make is that we need to recognize natural capital. Basically the stuff of life is natural capital, and we need to recognize and build that into our systems. When we measure GDP as a measure of economic performance at the national level, we don't include our biggest asset at the country level. When we measure corporate performances, we don't include our impacts on nature and what our business costs society. That has to stop. In fact, this was what really inspired my interest in this phase. I began a project way back called the Green Accounting Project. That was in the early 2000s when India was going gung-ho about GDP growth as the means forward -- looking at China with its stellar growths of eight, nine, 10 percent and wondering, why can we do the same? And a few friends of mine and I decided this doesn't make sense. This is going to create more cost to society and more losses. So we decided to do a massive set of calculations and started producing green accounts for India and its states. That's how my interests began and went to the TEEB project. Calculating this at the national level is one thing, and it has begun. And the World Bank has acknowledged this and they've started a project called WAVES -- Wealth Accounting and Valuation of Ecosystem Services. But calculating this at the next level, that means at the business sector level, is important. And actually we've done this with the TEEB project. We've done this for a very difficult case, which was for deforestation in China. This is important, because in China in 1997, the Yellow River actually went dry for nine months causing severe loss of agriculture output and pain and loss to society. Just a year later the Yangtze flooded, causing something like 5,500 deaths. So clearly there was a problem with deforestation. It was associated largely with the construction industry. And the Chinese government responded sensibly and placed a ban on felling. A retrospective on 40 years shows that if we had accounted for these costs -- the cost of loss of topsoil, the cost of loss of waterways, the lost productivity, the loss to local communities as a result of all these factors, desertification and so on -- those costs are almost twice as much as the market price of timber. So in fact, the price of timber in the Beijing marketplace ought to have been three-times what it was had it reflected the true pain and the costs to the society within China. Of course, after the event one can be wise. The way to do this is to do it on a company basis, to take leadership forward, and to do it for as many important sectors which have a cost, and to disclose these answers. Someone once asked me, "Who is better or worse, is it Unilever or is it P&G when it comes to their impact on rainforests in Indonesia?" And I couldn't answer because neither of these companies, good though they are and professional though they are, do not calculate or disclose their externalities. But if we look at companies like PUMA -- Jochen Zeitz, their CEO and chairman, once challenged me at a function, saying that he's going to implement my project before I finish it. Well I think we kind of did it at the same time, but he's done it. He's basically worked the cost to PUMA. PUMA has 2.7 billion dollars of turnover, 300 million dollars of profits, 200 million dollars after tax, 94 million dollars of externalities, cost to business. Now that's not a happy situation for them, but they have the confidence and the courage to come forward and say, "Here's what we are measuring. We are measuring it because we know that you cannot manage what you do not measure." That's an example, I think, for us to look at and for us to draw comfort from. If more companies did this, and if more sectors engaged this as sectors, you could have analysts, business analysts, and you could have people like us and consumers and NGOs actually look and compare the social performance of companies. Today we can't yet do that, but I think the path is laid out. This can be done. And I'm delighted that the Institute of Chartered Accountants in the U.K. has already set up a coalition to do this, an international coalition. The other favorite, if you like, solution for me is the creation of green carbon markets. And by the way, these are my favorites -- externalities calculation and green carbon markets. TEEB has more than a dozen separate groups of solutions including protected area evaluation and payments for ecosystem services and eco-certification and you name it, but these are the favorites. What's green carbon? Today what we have is basically a brown carbon marketplace. It's about energy emissions. The European Union ETS is the main marketplace. It's not doing too well. We've over-issued. A bit like inflation: you over-issue currency, you get what you see, declining prices. But that's all about energy and industry. But what we're missing is also some other emissions like black carbon, that is soot. What we're also missing is blue carbon, which, by the way, is the largest store of carbon -- more than 55 percent. Thankfully, the flux, in other words, the flow of emissions from the ocean to the atmosphere and vice versa, is more or less balanced. In fact, what's being absorbed is something like 25 percent of our emissions, which then leads to acidification or lower alkalinity in oceans. More of that in a minute. And finally, there's deforestation, and there's emission of methane from agriculture. Green carbon, which is the deforestation and agricultural emissions, and blue carbon together comprise 25 percent of our emissions. We have the means already in our hands, through a structure, through a mechanism, called REDD Plus -- a scheme for the reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. And already Norway has contributed a billion dollars each towards Indonesia and Brazil to implement this Red Plus scheme. So we actually have some movement forward. But the thing is to do a lot more of that. Will this solve the problem? Will economics solve everything? Well I'm afraid not. There is an area that is the oceans, coral reefs. As you can see, they cut across the entire globe all the way from Micronesia across Indonesia, Malaysia, India, Madagascar and to the West of the Caribbean. These red dots, these red areas, basically provide the food and livelihood for more than half a billion people. So that's almost an eighth of society. And the sad thing is that, as these coral reefs are lost -- and scientists tell us that any level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere above 350 parts per million is too dangerous for the survival of these reefs -- we are not only risking the extinction of the entire coral species, the warm water corals, we're not only risking a fourth of all fish species which are in the oceans, but we are risking the very lives and livelihoods of more than 500 million people who live in the developing world in poor countries. So in selecting targets of 450 parts per million and selecting two degrees at the climate negotiations, what we have done is we've made an ethical choice. We've actually kind of made an ethical choice in society to not have coral reefs. Well what I will say to you in parting is that we may have done that. Let's think about it and what it means, but please, let's not do more of that. Because mother nature only has that much in ecological infrastructure and that much natural capital. I don't think we can afford too much of such ethical choices. Thank you. (Applause)

There are two groups of women when it comes to screening mammography -- women in whom mammography works very well and has saved thousands of lives and women in whom it doesn't work well at all. Do you know which group you're in? If you don't, you're not alone. Because the breast has become are very political organ. The truth has become lost in all the rhetoric coming from the press, politicians, radiologists and medical imaging companies. I will do my best this morning to tell you what I think is the truth. But first, my disclosures. I am not a breast cancer survivor. I'm not a radiologist. I don't have any patents, and I've never received any money from a medical imaging company, and I am not seeking your vote. (Laughter) What I am is a doctor of internal medicine who became passionately interested in this topic about 10 years ago when a patient asked me a question. She came to see me after discovering a breast lump. Her sister had been diagnosed with breast cancer in her 40s. She and I were both very pregnant at that time, and my heart just ached for her, imagining how afraid she must be. Fortunately, her lump proved to be benign. But she asked me a question: how confident was I that I would find a tumor early on her mammogram if she developed one? So I studied her mammogram, and I reviewed the radiology literature, and I was shocked to discover that, in her case, our chances of finding a tumor early on the mammogram were less than the toss of a coin. You may recall a year ago when a firestorm erupted after the United States Preventive Services Task Force reviewed the world's mammography screening literature and issued a guideline recommending against screening mammograms in women in their 40s. Now everybody rushed to criticize the Task Force, even though most of them weren't in anyway familiar with the mammography studies. It took the Senate just 17 days to ban the use of the guidelines in determining insurance coverage. Radiologists were outraged by the guidelines. The pre-eminent mammographer in the United States issued the following quote to the Washington Post. The radiologists were, in turn, criticized for protecting their own financial self-interest. But in my view, the radiologists are heroes. There's a shortage of radiologists qualified to read mammograms, and that's because mammograms are one of the most complex of all radiology studies to interpret, and because radiologists are sued more often over missed breast cancer than any other cause. But that very fact is telling. Where there is this much legal smoke, there is likely to be some fire. The factor most responsible for that fire is breast density. Breast density refers to the relative amount of fat -- pictured here in yellow -- versus connective and epithelial tissues -- pictured in pink. And that proportion is primarily genetically determined. Two-thirds of women in their 40s have dense breast tissue, which is why mammography doesn't work as well in them. And although breast density generally declines with age, up to a third of women retain dense breast tissue for years after menopause. So how do you know if your breasts are dense? Well, you need to read the details of your mammography report. Radiologists classify breast density into four categories based on the appearance of the tissue on a mammogram. If the breast is less than 25 percent dense, that's called fatty-replaced. The next category is scattered fibroglandular densities, followed by heterogeneously dense and extremely dense. And breasts that fall into these two categories are considered dense. The problem with breast density is that it's truly the wolf in sheep's clothing. Both tumors and dense breast tissue appear white on a mammogram, and the X-ray often can't distinguish between the two. So it's easy to see this tumor in the upper part of this fatty breast. But imagine how difficult it would be to find that tumor in this dense breast. That's why mammograms find over 80 percent of tumors in fatty breasts, but as few as 40 percent in extremely dense breasts. Now it's bad enough that breast density makes it hard to find a cancer, but it turns out that it's also a powerful predictor of your risk for breast cancer. It's a stronger risk factor than having a mother or a sister with breast cancer. At the time my patient posed this question to me, breast density was an obscure topic in the radiology literature, and very few women having mammograms, or the physicians ordering them, knew about this. But what else could I offer her? Mammograms have been around since the 1960's, and it's changed very little. There have been surprisingly few innovations, until digital mammography was approved in 2000. Digital mammography is still an X-ray of the breast, but the images can be stored and manipulated digitally, just like we can with a digital camera. The U.S. has invested four billion dollars converting to digital mammography equipment, and what have we gained from that investment? In a study funded by over 25 million taxpayer dollars, digital mammography was found to be no better over all than traditional mammography, and in fact, it was worse in older women. But it was better in one group, and that was women under 50 who were pre-menopausal and had dense breasts, and in those women, digital mammography found twice as many cancers, but it still only found 60 percent. So digital mammography has been a giant leap forward for manufacturers of digital mammography equipment, but it's been a very small step forward for womankind. What about ultrasound? Ultrasound generates more biopsies that are unnecessary relative to other technologies, so it's not widely used. And MRI is exquisitely sensitive for finding tumors, but it's also very expensive. If we think about disruptive technology, we see an almost ubiquitous pattern of the technology getting smaller and less expensive. Think about iPods compared to stereos. But it's the exact opposite in health care. The machines get ever bigger and ever more expensive. Screening the average young woman with an MRI is kind of like driving to the grocery store in a Hummer. It's just way too much equipment. One MRI scan costs 10 times what a digital mammogram costs. And sooner or later, we're going to have to accept the fact that health care innovation can't always come at a much higher price. Malcolm Gladwell wrote an article in the New Yorker on innovation, and he made the case that scientific discoveries are rarely the product of one individual's genius. Rather, big ideas can be orchestrated, if you can simply gather people with different perspectives in a room and get them to talk about things that they don't ordinarily talk about. It's like the essence of TED. He quotes one innovator who says, "The only time a physician and a physicist get together is when the physicist gets sick." (Laughter) This makes no sense, because physicians have all kinds of problems that they don't realize have solutions. And physicists have all kinds of solutions for things that they don't realize are problems. Now, take a look at this cartoon that accompanied Gladwell's article, and tell me if you see something disturbing about this depiction of innovative thinkers. (Laughter) So if you will allow me a little creative license, I will tell you the story of the serendipitous collision of my patient's problem with a physicist's solution. Shortly after her visit, I was introduced to a nuclear physicist at Mayo named Michael O'Conner, who was a specialist in cardiac imaging, something I had nothing to do with. And he happened to tell me about a conference he'd just returned from in Israel, where they were talking about a new type of gamma detector. Now gamma imaging has been around for a long time to image the heart, and it had even been tried to image the breast. But the problem was that the gamma detectors were these huge, bulky tubes, and they were filled with these scintillating crystals, and you just couldn't get them close enough around the breast to find small tumors. But the potential advantage was that gamma rays, unlike X-rays, are not influenced by breast density. But this technology could not find tumors when they're small, and finding a small tumor is critical for survival. If you can find a tumor when it's less than a centimeter, survival exceeds 90 percent, but drops off rapidly as tumor size increases. But Michael told me about a new type of gamma detector that he'd seen, and this is it. It's made not of a bulky tube, but of a thin layer of a semiconductor material that serves as the gamma detector. And I started talking to him about this problem with breast density, and we realized that we might be able to get this detector close enough around the breast to actually find small tumors. So after putting together a grid of these cubes with tape -- (Laughter) -- Michael hacked off the X-ray plate of a mammography machine that was about to be thrown out, and we attached the new detector, and we decided to call this machine Molecular Breast Imaging, or MBI. This is an image from our first patient. And you can see, using the old gamma technology, that it just looked like noise. But using our new detector, we could begin to see the outline of a tumor. So here we were, a nuclear physicist, an internist, soon joined by Carrie Hruska, a biomedical engineer, and two radiologists, and we were trying to take on the entrenched world of mammography with a machine that was held together by duct tape. To say that we faced high doses of skepticism in those early years is just a huge understatement, but we were so convinced that we might be able to make this work that we chipped away with incremental modifications to this system. This is our current detector. And you can see that it looks a lot different. The duct tape is gone, and we added a second detector on top of the breast, which has further improved our tumor detection. So how does this work? The patient receives an injection of a radio tracer that's taken up by rapidly proliferating tumor cells, but not by normal cells, and this is the key difference from mammography. Mammography relies on differences in the appearance of the tumor from the background tissue, and we've seen that those differences can be obscured in a dense breast. But MBI exploits the different molecular behavior of tumors, and therefore, it's impervious to breast density. After the injection, the patient's breast is placed between the detectors. And if you've ever had a mammogram -- if you're old enough to have had a mammogram -- you know what comes next: pain. You may be surprised to know that mammography is the only radiologic study that's regulated by federal law, and the law requires that the equivalent of a 40-pound car battery come down on your breast during this study. But with MBI, we use just light, pain-free compression. (Applause) And the detector then transmits the image to the computer. So here's an example. You can see, on the right, a mammogram showing a faint tumor, the edges of which are blurred by the dense tissue. But the MBI image shows that tumor much more clearly, as well as a second tumor, which profoundly influence that patient's surgical options. In this example, although the mammogram found one tumor, we were able to demonstrate three discrete tumors -- one is small as three millimeters. Our big break came in 2004. After we had demonstrated that we could find small tumors, we used these images to submit a grant to the Susan G. Komen Foundation. And we were elated when they took a chance on a team of completely unknown investigators and funded us to study 1,000 women with dense breasts, comparing a screening mammogram to an MBI. Of the tumors that we found, mammography found only 25 percent of those tumors. MBI found 83 percent. Here's an example from that screening study. The digital mammogram was read as normal and shows lots of dense tissue, but the MBI shows an area of intense uptake, which correlated with a two-centimeter tumor. In this case, a one-centimeter tumor. And in this case, a 45-year-old medical secretary at Mayo, who had lost her mother to breast cancer when she was very young, wanted to enroll in our study. And her mammogram showed an area of very dense tissue, but her MBI showed an area of worrisome uptake, which we can also see on a color image. And this corresponded to a tumor the size of a golf ball. But fortunately it was removed before it had spread to her lymph nodes. So now that we knew that this technology could find three times more tumors in a dense breast, we had to solve one very important problem. We had to figure out how to lower the radiation dose, and we have spent the last three years making modifications to every aspect of the imaging system to allow this. And I'm very happy to report that we're now using a dose of radiation that is equivalent to the effective dose from one digital mammogram. And at this low dose, we're continuing this screening study, and this image from three weeks ago in a 67-year-old woman shows a normal digital mammogram, but an MBI image showing an uptake that proved to be a large cancer. So this is not just young women that it's benefiting. It's also older women with dense tissue. And we're now routinely using one-fifth the radiation dose that's used in any other type of gamma technology. MBI generates four images per breast. MRI generates over a thousand. It takes a radiologist years of specialty training to become expert in differentiating the normal anatomic detail from the worrisome finding. But I suspect even the non-radiologists in the room can find the tumor on the MBI image. But this is why MBI is so potentially disruptive -- it's as accurate as MRI, it's far less complex to interpret, and it's a fraction of the cost. But you can understand why there may be forces in the breast-imaging world who prefer the status quo. After achieving what we felt were remarkable results, our manuscript was rejected by four journals. After the fourth rejection, we requested reconsideration of the manuscript, because we strongly suspected that one of the reviewers who had rejected it had a financial conflict of interest in a competing technology. Our manuscript was then accepted and will be published later this month in the journal Radiology. (Applause) We still need to complete the screening study using the low dose, and then our findings will need to be replicated at other institutions, and this could take five or more years. If this technology is widely adopted, I will not benefit financially in any way, and that is very important to me, because it allows me to continue to tell you the truth. But I recognize -- (Applause) I recognize that the adoption of this technology will depend as much on economic and political forces as it will on the soundness of the science. The MBI unit has now been FDA approved, but it's not yet widely available. So until something is available for women with dense breasts, there are things that you should know to protect yourself. First, know your density. Ninety percent of women don't, and 95 percent of women don't know that it increases your breast cancer risk. The State of Connecticut became the first and only state to mandate that women receive notification of their breast density after a mammogram. I was at a conference of 60,000 people in breast-imaging last week in Chicago, and I was stunned that there was a heated debate as to whether we should be telling women what their breast density is. Of course we should. And if you don't know, please ask your doctor or read the details of your mammography report. Second, if you're pre-menopausal, try to schedule your mammogram in the first two weeks of your menstrual cycle, when breast density is relatively lower. Third, if you notice a persistent change in your breast, insist on additional imaging. And fourth and most important, the mammography debate will rage on, but I do believe that all women 40 and older should have an annual mammogram. Mammography isn't perfect, but it's the only test that's been proven to reduce mortality from breast cancer. But this mortality banner is the very sword which mammography's most ardent advocates use to deter innovation. Some women who develop breast cancer die from it many years later, and most women, thankfully, survive. So it takes 10 or more years for any screening method to demonstrate a reduction in mortality from breast cancer. Mammography's the only one that's been around long enough to have a chance of making that claim. It is time for us to accept both the extraordinary successes of mammography and the limitations. We need to individualize screening based on density. For women without dense breasts, mammography is the best choice. But for women with dense breasts; we shouldn't abandon screening altogether, we need to offer them something better. The babies that we were carrying when my patient first asked me this question are now both in middle school, and the answer has been so slow to come. She's given me her blessing to share this story with you. After undergoing biopsies that further increased her risk for cancer and losing her sister to cancer, she made the difficult decision to have a prophylactic mastectomy. We can and must do better, not just in time for her granddaughters and my daughters, but in time for you. Thank you. (Applause)

(Applause) Thank you very much. I have a few pictures, and I'll talk a little bit about how I'm able to do what I do. All these houses are built from between 70 and 80 percent recycled material, stuff that was headed to the mulcher, the landfill, the burn pile. It was all just gone. This is the first house I built. This double front door here with the three-light transom that was headed to the landfill. Have a little turret there. And then these buttons on the corbels here. Right there -- those are hickory nuts. And these buttons there -- those are chicken eggs. Of course, first you have breakfast, and then you fill the shell full of Bondo and paint it and nail it up, and you have an architectural button in just a fraction of the time. Then, this is a look at the inside. You can see the three-light transom there with the eyebrow windows -- certainly an architectural antique headed to the landfill. Even the lockset is probably worth 200 dollars. Everything in the kitchen was salvaged. There's a 1952 O'Keefe & Merritt stove, if you like to cook -- cool stove. This is going up into the turret. I got that staircase for 20 dollars, including delivery to my lot. (Laughter) Then, looking up in the turret, you see there are bulges and pokes and sags and so forth. Well, if that ruins your life, well then you shouldn't live there. (Laughter) This is a laundry chute, and this right here is a shoe last. And those are those cast-iron things you see at antique shops. So I had one of those, so I made some low-tech gadgetry, there, where you just stomp on the shoe last and then the door flies open, you throw your laundry down. And then if you're smart enough, it goes on a basket on top of the washer. If not, it goes into the toilet. (Laughter) This is a bathtub I made, made out of scrap two-by-four here. Started with a rim there and then glued and nailed it up into a flat, corbelled it up and flipped it over, then did the two profiles on this side. It's a two-person tub. After all, it's not just a question of hygiene, but there's a possibility of recreation as well. (Laughter) Then, this faucet here is just a piece of Osage Orange. It looks a little phallic, but after all, it's a bathroom. (Laughter) Then, this is a house based on a Budweiser can. It doesn't look like a can of beer, but the design take-offs are absolutely unmistakable. The barley hops design worked up into the eaves, then the dentil work comes directly off the can's red, white, blue and silver. Then, these corbeles going down underneath the eaves are that little design that comes off the can. I just put a can on a copier and kept enlarging it until I got the size I want. Then, on the can it says, "This is the famous Budweiser beer, we know of no other beer, blah, blah, blah." So we changed that and put, "This is the famous Budweiser house. We don't know of any other house," and so forth and so on. Then, this is a deadbolt. It's a fence from a 1930s shaper, which is a very angry woodworking machine. And they gave me the fence, but they didn't give me the shaper, so we made a deadbolt out of it. That'll keep bull elephants out, I promise. And sure enough, we've had no problems with bull elephants. (Laughter) The shower is intended to simulate a glass of beer. We've got bubbles going up there, then suds at the top with lumpy tiles. Where do you get lumpy tiles? Well, of course, you don't. But I get a lot of toilets, and so you just dispatch a toilet with a hammer, and then you have lumpy tiles. And then the faucet, there, is a beer tap. (Laughter) Then, this panel of glass is the same panel of glass that occurs in every middle-class front door in America. We're getting tired of it. It's kind of cliched now. So if you put it in the front door, your design fails. So don't put it in the front door; put it somewhere else. It's a pretty panel of glass. But then if you put it in the front door, people say, "Oh, you're trying to be like those guys, and you didn't make it." So don't put it there. Then, another bathroom upstairs. This light up here is the same light that occurs in every middle-class foyer in America. Don't put it in the foyer. Put it in the shower, or in the closet, but not in the foyer. Then, somebody gave me a bidet, so it got a bidet. (Laughter) This little house here, those branches there are made out of Bois D'arc or Osage Orange, and these pictures will keep scrolling as I talk a little bit. In order to do what I do, you have to understand what causes waste in the building industry. Our housing has become a commodity, and I'll talk a little bit about that. But the first cause of waste is probably even buried in our DNA. Human beings have a need for maintaining consistency of the apperceptive mass. What does that mean? What it means is, for every perception we have, it needs to tally with the one like it before, or we don't have continuity, and we become a little bit disoriented. So I can show you an object you've never seen before. Oh, that's a cell phone. But you've never seen this one before. What you're doing is sizing up the pattern of structural features here, and then you go through your databanks -- brrrr, cell phone. Oh, that's a cell phone. If I took a bite out of it, you'd go, "Wait a second. That's not a cell phone. That's one of those new chocolate cell phones." (Laughter) And you'd have to start a new category, right between cell phones and chocolate. That's how we process information. So you translate that to the building industry, if we have a wall of windowpanes and one pane is cracked, we go, "Oh, dear. That's cracked. Let's repair it. Let's take it out. Throw it away so nobody can use it and put a new one in." Because that's what you do with a cracked pane. Never mind that it doesn't affect our lives at all. It only rattles that expected pattern and unity of structural features. However, if we took a small hammer, and we added cracks to all the other windows, then we have a pattern. Because Gestalt Psychology emphasizes recognition of pattern over parts that comprise a pattern. We'll go, "Ooh, that's nice." So, that serves me every day. Repetition creates pattern. If I have a hundred of these, a hundred of those, it doesn't make any difference what these and those are. If I can repeat anything, I have the possibility of a pattern from hickory nuts and chicken eggs, shards of glass, branches. It doesn't make any difference. That causes a lot of waste in the building industry. Second is, Friedrich Nietzsche along about 1885 wrote a book titled "The Birth of Tragedy." And in there he said that cultures tend to swing between one of two perspectives. On the one hand, we have an Apollonian perspective, which is very crisp and premeditated and intellectualized and perfect. On the other end of the spectrum, we have a Dionysian perspective, which is more given to the passions and intuition, tolerant of organic texture and human gesture. So the way the Apollonian personality takes a picture, or hangs a picture, is they'll get out a transit and a laser level and a micrometer. "Okay, honey. A thousandth of an inch to the left. That's where we want the picture. Right. Perfect." Predicated on plumb level, square and centered. The Dionysian personality takes the picture and goes ... (Laughter) That's the difference. I feature blemish. I feature organic process. Dead-center John Dewey. Apollonian mindset creates mountains of waste. If something isn't perfect, if it doesn't line up with that premeditated model, dumpster. "Oops, scratch, dumpster." "Oops" this, "oops" that. "Landfill. Landfill. Landfill." The third thing is arguably -- the Industrial Revolution started in the Renaissance with the rise of humanism, then got a little jump-start along about the French Revolution. By the middle of the 19th century, it's in full flower. And we have dumaflages and gizmos and contraptions that will do anything that we, up to that point, had to do my hand. So now we have standardized materials. Well, trees don't grow two inches by four inches, eight, ten and twelve feet tall. We create mountains of waste. And they're doing a pretty good job there in the forest, working all the byproduct of their industry -- with OSB and particle board and so forth and so on -- but it does no good to be responsible at the point of harvest in the forest if consumers are wasting the harvest at the point of consumption, and that's what's happening. And so if something isn't standard, "Oops, dumpster." "Oops" this. "Oops, warped." If you buy a two-by-four and it's not straight, you can take it back. "Oh, I'm so sorry, sir. We'll get you a straight one." Well I feature all those warped things because repetition creates pattern, and it's from a Dionysian perspective. The fourth thing is labor is disproportionately more expensive than materials. Well, that's just a myth. And here's a story: Jim Tulles, one of the guys I trained, I said, "Jim, it's time now. I got a job for you as a foreman on a framing crew. It's time for you to go." "Dan, I just don't think I'm ready." "Jim, now it's time. You're the down, oh." So we hired on. And he was out there with his tape measure going through the trash heap, looking for header material, which is the board that goes over a door, thinking he'd impress his boss -- that's how we taught him to do it. And the superintendent walked up and said, "What are you doing?" "Oh, just looking for some header material," waiting for that kudos. He said, "No, no. I'm not paying you to go through the trash. Get back to work." And he had the wherewithal to say, he said, "You know, if you were paying me 300 dollars an hour, I can see how you might say that, but right now, I'm saving you five dollars a minute. Do the math." (Laughter) "Good call, Tulles. From now on, you guys hit this pile first." And the irony is that he wasn't very good at math. (Laughter) But once in a while you get access to the control room, and then you can kind of mess with the dials. And that's what happened there. The fifth thing is that maybe, after 2,500 years, Plato is still having his way with us in his notion of perfect forms. He said that we have in our noggin the perfect idea of what we want, and we force environmental resources to accommodate that. So we all have in our head the perfect house, the American dream, which is a house, the dream house. The problem is we can't afford it. So we have the American dream look-alike, which is a mobile home. Now there's a blight on the planet. It's a chattel mortgage, just like furniture, just like a car. You write the check, and instantly it depreciates 30 percent. After a year, you can't get insurance on everything you have in it, only on 70 percent. Wired with 14-gauge wire typically. Nothing wrong with that, unless you ask it to do what 12-gauge wire's supposed to do, and that's what happens. It out-gasses formaldehyde so much so that there is a federal law in place to warn new mobile home buyers of the formaldehyde atmosphere danger. Are we just being numbingly stupid? The walls are this thick. The whole thing has the structural value of corn. (Laughter) "So I thought Palm Harbor Village was over there." "No, no. We had a wind last night. It's gone now." (Laughter) Then when they degrade, what do you do with them? Now, all that, that Apollonian, Platonic model, is what the building industry is predicated on, and there are a number of things that exacerbate that. One is that all the professionals, all the tradesmen, vendors, inspectors, engineers, architects all think like this. And then it works its way back to the consumer, who demands the same model. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. We can't get out of it. Then here come the marketeers and the advertisers. "Woo. Woohooo." We buy stuff we didn't know we needed. All we have to do is look at what one company did with carbonated prune juice. How disgusting. (Laughter) But you know what they did? They hooked a metaphor into it and said, "I drink Dr. Pepper ..." And pretty soon, we're swilling that stuff by the lake-ful, by the billions of gallons. It doesn't even have real prunes. Doesn't even keep you regular. (Laughter) My oh my, that makes it worse. And we get sucked into that faster than anything. Then a man named Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a book titled "Being and Nothingness." It's a pretty quick read. You can snap through it in maybe two years if you read eight hours a day. In there he talked about the divided self. He said human beings act differently when they know they're alone than when they know somebody else is around. So if I'm eating spaghetti, and I know I'm alone, I can eat like a backhoe. I can wipe my mouth on my sleeve, napkin on the table, chew with my mouth open, make little noises, scratch wherever I want. (Laughter) But as soon as you walk in, I go, "Ooh. Spaghetti sauce there." Napkin in my lap, half bites, chew with my mouth closed, no scratching. Now what I'm doing is fulfilling your expectations of how I should live my life. I feel that expectation, and so I accommodate it, and I'm living my life according to what you expect me to do. That happens in the building industry as well. That's why all of our subdivisions look the same. Sometimes we even have these formalized cultural expectations. I'll bet all your shoes match. Sure enough, we all buy into that, and with gated communities, we have a formalized expectation with a homeowners association. Sometimes those guys are Nazis, my oh my. That exacerbates and continues this model. The last thing is gregariousness. Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with. And so you see this in junior high a lot. Those kids, they'll work all summer long, kill themselves, so that they can afford one pair of designer jeans. So along about September they can stride in and go, "I'm important today. See, look, don't touch my designer jeans. I see you don't have designer jeans. You're not one of the beautiful people. See, I'm one of the beautiful people. See my jeans?" Right there is reason enough to have uniforms. And so that happens in the building industry as well. We have confused Maslow's hierarchy of needs just a little bit. On the bottom tier we have basic needs -- shelter, clothing, food, water, mating and so forth. Second, security. Third, relationships. Fourth, status, self-esteem -- that is, vanity. And we're taking vanity and shoving it down here. And so we end up with vain decisions and we can't even afford our mortgage. We can't even afford to eat anything except beans. That is, our housing has become a commodity. And it takes a little bit of nerve to dive into those primal, terrifying parts of ourselves and make our own decisions and not make our housing a commodity, but make it something that bubbles up from seminal sources. That takes a little bit of nerve, and, darn it, once in a while you fail. But that's okay. If failure destroys you, then you can't do this. I fail all the time, every day, and I've had some whopping failures, I promise, big, public, humiliating, embarrassing failures. Everybody points and laughs, and they say, "He tried it a fifth time and it still didn't work. What a moron." Early on, contractors come by and say, "Dan, you're a cute little bunny, but you know, this just isn't going to work. What don't you do this, and why don't you do that?" And your instinct is to say, "Why don't you suck an egg?" But you don't say that, because they're the guys you're targeting. And so what we've done -- and this isn't just in housing. It's in clothing and food and our transportation needs, our energy -- we sprawl just a little bit. And when I get a little bit of press, I hear from people all over the world. And we may have invented excess, but the problem of waste is worldwide. We're in trouble. And I don't wear ammo belts crisscrossing my chest and a red bandana, but we're clearly in trouble. And what we need to do is reconnect with those really primal parts of ourselves and make some decisions and say, "You know, I think I would like to put CDs across the wall there. What do you think, honey?" If it doesn't work, take it down. What we need to do is reconnect with who we really are, and that's thrilling indeed. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I want to tell you three stories about the power of relationships to solve the deep and complex social problems of this century. You know, sometimes it seems like all these problems of poverty, inequality, ill health, unemployment, violence, addiction -- they're right there in one person's life. So I want to tell you about someone like this that I know. I'm going to call her Ella. Ella lives in a British city on a run down estate. The shops are closed, the pub's gone, the playground's pretty desolate and never used, and inside Ella's house, the tension is palpable and the noise levels are deafening. The TV's on at full volume. One of her sons is fighting with one of her daughters. Another son, Ryan, is keeping up this constant stream of abuse from the kitchen, and the dogs are locked behind the bedroom door and straining. Ella is stuck. She has lived with crisis for 40 years. She knows nothing else, and she knows no way out. She's had a whole series of abusive partners, and, tragically, one of her children has been taken into care by social services. The three children that still live with her suffer from a whole range of problems, and none of them are in education. And Ella says to me that she is repeating the cycle of her own mother's life before her. But when I met Ella, there were 73 different services on offer for her and her family in the city where she lives, 73 different services run out of 24 departments in one city, and Ella and her partners and her children were known to most of them. They think nothing of calling social services to try and mediate one of the many arguments that broke out. And the family home was visited on a regular basis by social workers, youth workers, a health officer, a housing officer, a home tutor and the local policemen. And the governments say that there are 100,000 families in Britain today like Ella's, struggling to break the cycle of economic, social and environmental deprivation. And they also say that managing this problem costs a quarter of a million pounds per family per year and yet nothing changes. None of these well-meaning visitors are making a difference. This is a chart we made in the same city with another family like Ella's. This shows 30 years of intervention in that family's life. And just as with Ella, not one of these interventions is part of an overall plan. There's no end goal in sight. None of the interventions are dealing with the underlying issues. These are just containment measures, ways of managing a problem. One of the policemen says to me, "Look, I just deliver the message and then I leave." So, I've spent time living with families like Ella's in different parts of the world, because I want to know: what can we learn from places where our social institutions just aren't working? I want to know what it feels like to live in Ella's family. I want to know what's going on and what we can do differently. Well, the first thing I learned is that cost is a really slippery concept. Because when the government says that a family like Ella's costs a quarter of a million pounds a year to manage, what it really means is that this system costs a quarter of a million pounds a year. Because not one penny of this money actually touches Ella's family in a way that makes a difference. Instead, the system is just like this costly gyroscope that spins around the families, keeping them stuck at its heart, exactly where they are. And I also spent time with the frontline workers, and I learned that it is an impossible situation. So Tom, who is the social worker for Ella's 14-year-old son Ryan, has to spend 86 percent of his time servicing the system: meetings with colleagues, filling out forms, more meetings with colleagues to discuss the forms, and maybe most shockingly, the 14 percent of the time he has to be with Ryan is spent getting data and information for the system. So he says to Ryan, "How often have you been smoking? Have you been drinking? When did you go to school?" And this kind of interaction rules out the possibility of a normal conversation. It rules out the possibility of what's needed to build a relationship between Tom and Ryan. When we made this chart, the frontline workers, the professionals -- they stared at it absolutely amazed. It snaked around the walls of their offices. So many hours, so well meant, but ultimately so futile. And there was this moment of absolute breakdown, and then of clarity: we had to work in a different way. So in a really brave step, the leaders of the city where Ella lives agreed that we could start by reversing Ryan's ratio. So everyone who came into contact with Ella or a family like Ella's would spend 80 percent of their time working with the families and only 20 percent servicing the system. And even more radically, the families would lead and they would decide who was in a best position to help them. So Ella and another mother were asked to be part of an interview panel, to choose from amongst the existing professionals who would work with them. And many, many people wanted to join us, because you don't go into this kind of work to manage a system, you go in because you can and you want to make a difference. So Ella and the mother asked everybody who came through the door, "What will you do when my son starts kicking me?" And so the first person who comes in says, "Well, I'll look around for the nearest exit and I will back out very slowly, and if the noise is still going on, I'll call my supervisor." And the mothers go, "You're the system. Get out of here!" And then the next person who comes is a policeman, and he says, "Well, I'll tackle your son to the ground and then I'm not sure what I'll do." And the mothers say, "Thank you." So, they chose professionals who confessed they didn't necessarily have the answers, who said -- well, they weren't going to talk in jargon. They showed their human qualities and convinced the mothers that they would stick with them through thick and thin, even though they wouldn't be soft with them. So these new teams and the families were then given a sliver of the former budget, but they could spend the money in any way they chose. And so one of the families went out for supper. They went to McDonald's and they sat down and they talked and they listened for the first time in a long time. Another family asked the team if they would help them do up their home. And one mother took the money and she used it as a float to start a social enterprise. And in a really short space of time, something new started to grow: a relationship between the team and the workers. And then some remarkable changes took place. Maybe it's not surprising that the journey for Ella has had some big steps backwards as well as forwards. But today, she's completed an IT training course, she has her first paid job, her children are back in school, and the neighbors, who previously just hoped this family would be moved anywhere except next door to them, are fine. They've made some new friendships. And all the same people have been involved in this transformation -- same families, same workers. But the relationship between them has been supported to change. So I'm telling you about Ella because I think that relationships are the critical resource we have in solving some of these intractable problems. But today, our relationships are all but written off by our politics, our social policies, our welfare institutions. And I've learned that this really has to change. So what do I mean by relationships? I'm talking about the simple human bonds between us, a kind of authentic sense of connection, of belonging, the bonds that make us happy, that support us to change, to be brave like Ella and try something new. And, you know, it's no accident that those who run and work in the institutions that are supposed to support Ella and her family don't talk about relationships, because relationships are expressly designed out of a welfare model that was drawn up in Britain and exported around the world. The contemporaries of William Beveridge, who was the architect of the first welfare state and the author of the Beveridge Report, had little faith in what they called the average sensual or emotional man. Instead, they trusted this idea of the impersonal system and the bureaucrat who would be detached and work in this system. And the impact of Beveridge on the way the modern state sees social issues just can't be underestimated. The Beveridge Report sold over 100,000 copies in the first weeks of publication alone. People queued in the rain on a November night to get hold of a copy, and it was read across the country, across the colonies, across Europe, across the United States of America, and it had this huge impact on the way that welfare states were designed around the globe. The cultures, the bureaucracies, the institutions -- they are global, and they've come to seem like common sense. They've become so ingrained in us, that actually we don't even see them anymore. And I think it's really important to say that in the 20th century, they were remarkably successful, these institutions. They led to longer lifespans, the eradication of mass disease, mass housing, almost universal education. But at the same time, Beveridge sowed the seeds of today's challenges. So let me tell you a second story. What do you think today is a bigger killer than a lifetime of smoking? It's loneliness. According to government statistics, one person over 60 -- one in three -- doesn't speak to or see another person in a week. One person in 10, that's 850,000 people, doesn't speak to anyone else in a month. And we're not the only people with this problem; this problem touches the whole of the Western world. And it's even more acute in countries like China, where a process of rapid urbanization, mass migration, has left older people alone in the villages. And so the services that Beveridge designed and exported -- they can't address this kind of problem. Loneliness is like a collective relational challenge, and it can't be addressed by a traditional bureaucratic response. So some years ago, wanting to understand this problem, I started to work with a group of about 60 older people in South London, where I live. I went shopping, I played bingo, but mainly I was just observing and listening. I wanted to know what we could do differently. And if you ask them, people tell you they want two things. They want somebody to go up a ladder and change a light bulb, or to be there when they come out of hospital. They want on-demand, practical support. And they want to have fun. They want to go out, do interesting things with like-minded people, and make friends like we've all made friends at every stage of our lives. So we rented a phone line, hired a couple of handymen, and started a service we called "Circle." And Circle offers its local membership a toll-free 0 800 number that they can call on demand for any support. And people have called us for so many reasons. They've called because their pets are unwell, their DVD is broken, they've forgotten how to use their mobile phone, or maybe they are coming out of hospital and they want someone to be there. And Circle also offers a rich social calendar -- knitting, darts, museum tours, hot air ballooning -- you name it. But here's the interesting thing, the really deep change: over time, the friendships that have formed have begun to replace the practical offer. So let me tell you about Belinda. Belinda's a Circle member, and she was going into hospital for a hip operation, so she called her local Circle to say they wouldn't see her for a bit. And Damon, who runs the local Circle, calls her back and says, "How can I help?" And Belinda says, "Oh no, I'm fine -- Jocelyn is doing the shopping, Tony's doing the gardening, Melissa and Joe are going to come in and cook and chat." So five Circle members had organized themselves to take care of Belinda. And Belinda's 80, although she says that she feels 25 inside, but she also says that she felt stuck and pretty down when she joined Circle. But the simple act of encouraging her to come along to that first event led to a process where natural friendships formed, friendships that today are replacing the need for expensive services. It's relationships that are making the difference. So I think that three factors have converged that enable us to put relationships at the heart and center of how we solve social problems today. Firstly, the nature of the problems -- they've changed, and they require different solutions. Secondly, the cost, human as much as financial, of doing business as usual. And thirdly, technology. I've talked about the first two factors. It's technology that enables these approaches to scale and potentially now support thousands of people. So the technology we've used is really simple, it's made up of available things like databases, mobile phones. Circle has got this very simple system that underpins it, enables a small local team to support a membership of up to a thousand. And you can contrast this with a neighborhood organization of the 1970s, when this kind of scale just wasn't possible, neither was the quality or the longevity that the spine of technology can provide. So it's relationships underpinned by technology that can turn the Beveridge models on their heads. The Beveridge models are all about institutions with finite resources, anonymously managing access. In my work at the front line, I've seen again and again how up to 80 percent of resource is spent keeping people out. So professionals have to administer these increasingly complex forms of administration that are basically about stopping people accessing the service or managing the queue. And Circle, like the relational services that we and others have designed, inverts this logic. What it says is, the more people, the more relationships, the stronger the solution. So I want to tell you my third and final story, which is about unemployment. In Britain, as in most places in the world, our welfare states were primarily designed to get people into work, to educate them for this, and to keep them healthy. But here, too, the systems are failing. And so the response has been to try and make these old systems even more efficient and transactional -- to speed up processing times, divide people into ever-smaller categories, try and target services at them more efficiently -- in other words, the very opposite of relational. But guess how most people find work today? Through word of mouth. It turns out that in Britain today, most new jobs are not advertised. So it's friends that tell you about a job, it's friends that recommend you for a job, and it's a rich and diverse social network that helps you find work. Maybe some of you here this evening are thinking, "But I found my job through an advert," but if you think back, it was probably a friend that showed you the ad and then encouraged you to apply. But not surprisingly, people who perhaps most need this rich and diverse network are those who are most isolated from it. So knowing this, and also knowing about the costs and failure of current systems, we designed something new with relationships at its heart. We designed a service that encourages people to meet up, people in and out of work, to work together in structured ways and try new opportunities. And, well, it's very hard to compare the results of these new systems with the old transactional models, but it looks like, with our first 1,000 members, we outperformed existing services by a factor of three, at a fraction of the cost. And here, too, we've used technology, but not to network people in the way that a social platform would do. We've used it to bring people face to face and connect them with each other, building real relationships and supporting people to find work. At the end of his life, in 1948, Beveridge wrote a third report. And in it he said he had made a dreadful mistake. He had left people and their communities out. And this omission, he said, led to seeing people, and people starting to see themselves, within the categories of the bureaucracies and the institutions. And human relationships were already withering. But unfortunately, this third report was much less read than Beveridge's earlier work. But today, we need to bring people and their communities back into the heart of the way we design new systems and new services, in an approach that I call "Relational Welfare." We need to leave behind these old, transactional, unsuitable, outdated models, and we need to adopt instead the shared collective relational responses that can support a family like Ella's, that can address an issue like loneliness, that can support people into work and up the skills curve in a modern labor market, that can also address challenges of education, of health care systems, and so many more of those problems that are pressing on our societies. It is all about relationships. Relationships are the critical resource we have. Thank you. (Applause)

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

I'd like to take you on the epic quest of the Rosetta spacecraft. To escort and land the probe on a comet, this has been my passion for the past two years. In order to do that, I need to explain to you something about the origin of the solar system. When we go back four and a half billion years, there was a cloud of gas and dust. In the center of this cloud, our sun formed and ignited. Along with that, what we now know as planets, comets and asteroids formed. What then happened, according to theory, is that when the Earth had cooled down a bit after its formation, comets massively impacted the Earth and delivered water to Earth. They probably also delivered complex organic material to Earth, and that may have bootstrapped the emergence of life. You can compare this to having to solve a 250-piece puzzle and not a 2,000-piece puzzle. Afterwards, the big planets like Jupiter and Saturn, they were not in their place where they are now, and they interacted gravitationally, and they swept the whole interior of the solar system clean, and what we now know as comets ended up in something called the Kuiper Belt, which is a belt of objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. And sometimes these objects run into each other, and they gravitationally deflect, and then the gravity of Jupiter pulls them back into the solar system. And they then become the comets as we see them in the sky. The important thing here to note is that in the meantime, the four and a half billion years, these comets have been sitting on the outside of the solar system, and haven't changed -- deep, frozen versions of our solar system. In the sky, they look like this. We know them for their tails. There are actually two tails. One is a dust tail, which is blown away by the solar wind. The other one is an ion tail, which is charged particles, and they follow the magnetic field in the solar system. There's the coma, and then there is the nucleus, which here is too small to see, and you have to remember that in the case of Rosetta, the spacecraft is in that center pixel. We are only 20, 30, 40 kilometers away from the comet. So what's important to remember? Comets contain the original material from which our solar system was formed, so they're ideal to study the components that were present at the time when Earth, and life, started. Comets are also suspected of having brought the elements which may have bootstrapped life. In 1983, ESA set up its long-term Horizon 2000 program, which contained one cornerstone, which would be a mission to a comet. In parallel, a small mission to a comet, what you see here, Giotto, was launched, and in 1986, flew by the comet of Halley with an armada of other spacecraft. From the results of that mission, it became immediately clear that comets were ideal bodies to study to understand our solar system. And thus, the Rosetta mission was approved in 1993, and originally it was supposed to be launched in 2003, but a problem arose with an Ariane rocket. However, our P.R. department, in its enthusiasm, had already made 1,000 Delft Blue plates with the name of the wrong comets. So I've never had to buy any china since. That's the positive part. (Laughter) Once the whole problem was solved, we left Earth in 2004 to the newly selected comet, Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This comet had to be specially selected because A, you have to be able to get to it, and B, it shouldn't have been in the solar system too long. This particular comet has been in the solar system since 1959. That's the first time when it was deflected by Jupiter, and it got close enough to the sun to start changing. So it's a very fresh comet. Rosetta made a few historic firsts. It's the first satellite to orbit a comet, and to escort it throughout its whole tour through the solar system -- closest approach to the sun, as we will see in August, and then away again to the exterior. It's the first ever landing on a comet. We actually orbit the comet using something which is not normally done with spacecraft. Normally, you look at the sky and you know where you point and where you are. In this case, that's not enough. We navigated by looking at landmarks on the comet. We recognized features -- boulders, craters -- and that's how we know where we are respective to the comet. And, of course, it's the first satellite to go beyond the orbit of Jupiter on solar cells. Now, this sounds more heroic than it actually is, because the technology to use radio isotope thermal generators wasn't available in Europe at that time, so there was no choice. But these solar arrays are big. This is one wing, and these are not specially selected small people. They're just like you and me. (Laughter) We have two of these wings, 65 square meters. Now later on, of course, when we got to the comet, you find out that 65 square meters of sail close to a body which is outgassing is not always a very handy choice. Now, how did we get to the comet? Because we had to go there for the Rosetta scientific objectives very far away -- four times the distance of the Earth to the sun -- and also at a much higher velocity than we could achieve with fuel, because we'd have to take six times as much fuel as the whole spacecraft weighed. So what do you do? You use gravitational flybys, slingshots, where you pass by a planet at very low altitude, a few thousand kilometers, and then you get the velocity of that planet around the sun for free. We did that a few times. We did Earth, we did Mars, we did twice Earth again, and we also flew by two asteroids, Lutetia and Steins. Then in 2011, we got so far from the sun that if the spacecraft got into trouble, we couldn't actually save the spacecraft anymore, so we went into hibernation. Everything was switched off except for one clock. Here you see in white the trajectory, and the way this works. You see that from the circle where we started, the white line, actually you get more and more and more elliptical, and then finally we approached the comet in May 2014, and we had to start doing the rendezvous maneuvers. On the way there, we flew by Earth and we took a few pictures to test our cameras. This is the moon rising over Earth, and this is what we now call a selfie, which at that time, by the way, that word didn't exist. (Laughter) It's at Mars. It was taken by the CIVA camera. That's one of the cameras on the lander, and it just looks under the solar arrays, and you see the planet Mars and the solar array in the distance. Now, when we got out of hibernation in January 2014, we started arriving at a distance of two million kilometers from the comet in May. However, the velocity the spacecraft had was much too fast. We were going 2,800 kilometers an hour faster than the comet, so we had to brake. We had to do eight maneuvers, and you see here, some of them were really big. We had to brake the first one by a few hundred kilometers per hour, and actually, the duration of that was seven hours, and it used 218 kilos of fuel, and those were seven nerve-wracking hours, because in 2007, there was a leak in the system of the propulsion of Rosetta, and we had to close off a branch, so the system was actually operating at a pressure which it was never designed or qualified for. Then we got in the vicinity of the comet, and these were the first pictures we saw. The true comet rotation period is 12 and a half hours, so this is accelerated, but you will understand that our flight dynamics engineers thought, this is not going to be an easy thing to land on. We had hoped for some kind of spud-like thing where you could easily land. But we had one hope: maybe it was smooth. No. That didn't work either. (Laughter) So at that point in time, it was clearly unavoidable: we had to map this body in all the detail you could get, because we had to find an area which is 500 meters in diameter and flat. Why 500 meters? That's the error we have on landing the probe. So we went through this process, and we mapped the comet. We used a technique called photoclinometry. You use shadows thrown by the sun. What you see here is a rock sitting on the surface of the comet, and the sun shines from above. From the shadow, we, with our brain, can immediately determine roughly what the shape of that rock is. You can program that in a computer, you then cover the whole comet, and you can map the comet. For that, we flew special trajectories starting in August. First, a triangle of 100 kilometers on a side at 100 kilometers' distance, and we repeated the whole thing at 50 kilometers. At that time, we had seen the comet at all kinds of angles, and we could use this technique to map the whole thing. Now, this led to a selection of landing sites. This whole process we had to do, to go from the mapping of the comet to actually finding the final landing site, was 60 days. We didn't have more. To give you an idea, the average Mars mission takes hundreds of scientists for years to meet about where shall we go? We had 60 days, and that was it. We finally selected the final landing site and the commands were prepared for Rosetta to launch Philae. The way this works is that Rosetta has to be at the right point in space, and aiming towards the comet, because the lander is passive. The lander is then pushed out and moves towards the comet. Rosetta had to turn around to get its cameras to actually look at Philae while it was departing and to be able to communicate with it. Now, the landing duration of the whole trajectory was seven hours. Now do a simple calculation: if the velocity of Rosetta is off by one centimeter per second, seven hours is 25,000 seconds. That means 252 meters wrong on the comet. So we had to know the velocity of Rosetta much better than one centimeter per second, and its location in space better than 100 meters at 500 million kilometers from Earth. That's no mean feat. Let me quickly take you through some of the science and the instruments. I won't bore you with all the details of all the instruments, but it's got everything. We can sniff gas, we can measure dust particles, the shape of them, the composition, there are magnetometers, everything. This is one of the results from an instrument which measures gas density at the position of Rosetta, so it's gas which has left the comet. The bottom graph is September of last year. There is a long-term variation, which in itself is not surprising, but you see the sharp peaks. This is a comet day. You can see the effect of the sun on the evaporation of gas and the fact that the comet is rotating. So there is one spot, apparently, where there is a lot of stuff coming from, it gets heated in the Sun, and then cools down on the back side. And we can see the density variations of this. These are the gases and the organic compounds that we already have measured. You will see it's an impressive list, and there is much, much, much more to come, because there are more measurements. Actually, there is a conference going on in Houston at the moment where many of these results are presented. Also, we measured dust particles. Now, for you, this will not look very impressive, but the scientists were thrilled when they saw this. Two dust particles: the right one they call Boris, and they shot it with tantalum in order to be able to analyze it. Now, we found sodium and magnesium. What this tells you is this is the concentration of these two materials at the time the solar system was formed, so we learned things about which materials were there when the planet was made. Of course, one of the important elements is the imaging. This is one of the cameras of Rosetta, the OSIRIS camera, and this actually was the cover of Science magazine on January 23 of this year. Nobody had expected this body to look like this. Boulders, rocks -- if anything, it looks more like the Half Dome in Yosemite than anything else. We also saw things like this: dunes, and what look to be, on the righthand side, wind-blown shadows. Now we know these from Mars, but this comet doesn't have an atmosphere, so it's a bit difficult to create a wind-blown shadow. It may be local outgassing, stuff which goes up and comes back. We don't know, so there is a lot to investigate. Here, you see the same image twice. On the left-hand side, you see in the middle a pit. On the right-hand side, if you carefully look, there are three jets coming out of the bottom of that pit. So this is the activity of the comet. Apparently, at the bottom of these pits is where the active regions are, and where the material evaporates into space. There is a very intriguing crack in the neck of the comet. You see it on the right-hand side. It's a kilometer long, and it's two and a half meters wide. Some people suggest that actually, when we get close to the sun, the comet may split in two, and then we'll have to choose, which comet do we go for? The lander -- again, lots of instruments, mostly comparable except for the things which hammer in the ground and drill, etc. But much the same as Rosetta, and that is because you want to compare what you find in space with what you find on the comet. These are called ground truth measurements. These are the landing descent images that were taken by the OSIRIS camera. You see the lander getting further and further away from Rosetta. On the top right, you see an image taken at 60 meters by the lander, 60 meters above the surface of the comet. The boulder there is some 10 meters. So this is one of the last images we took before we landed on the comet. Here, you see the whole sequence again, but from a different perspective, and you see three blown-ups from the bottom-left to the middle of the lander traveling over the surface of the comet. Then, at the top, there is a before and an after image of the landing. The only problem with the after image is, there is no lander. But if you carefully look at the right-hand side of this image, we saw the lander still there, but it had bounced. It had departed again. Now, on a bit of a comical note here is that originally Rosetta was designed to have a lander which would bounce. That was discarded because it was way too expensive. Now, we forgot, but the lander knew. (Laughter) During the first bounce, in the magnetometers, you see here the data from them, from the three axes, x, y and z. Halfway through, you see a red line. At that red line, there is a change. What happened, apparently, is during the first bounce, somewhere, we hit the edge of a crater with one of the legs of the lander, and the rotation velocity of the lander changed. So we've been rather lucky that we are where we are. This is one of the iconic images of Rosetta. It's a man-made object, a leg of the lander, standing on a comet. This, for me, is one of the very best images of space science I have ever seen. (Applause) One of the things we still have to do is to actually find the lander. The blue area here is where we know it must be. We haven't been able to find it yet, but the search is continuing, as are our efforts to start getting the lander to work again. We listen every day, and we hope that between now and somewhere in April, the lander will wake up again. The findings of what we found on the comet: This thing would float in water. It's half the density of water. So it looks like a very big rock, but it's not. The activity increase we saw in June, July, August last year was a four-fold activity increase. By the time we will be at the sun, there will be 100 kilos a second leaving this comet: gas, dust, whatever. That's 100 million kilos a day. Then, finally, the landing day. I will never forget -- absolute madness, 250 TV crews in Germany. The BBC was interviewing me, and another TV crew who was following me all day were filming me being interviewed, and it went on like that for the whole day. The Discovery Channel crew actually caught me when leaving the control room, and they asked the right question, and man, I got into tears, and I still feel this. For a month and a half, I couldn't think about landing day without crying, and I still have the emotion in me. With this image of the comet, I would like to leave you. Thank you. (Applause)

My name is Jonathan Zittrain, and in my recent work I've been a bit of a pessimist. So I thought this morning I would try to be the optimist, and give reason to hope for the future of the Internet by drawing upon its present. Now, it may seem like there is less hope today than there was before. People are less kind. There is less trust around. I don't know. As a simple example, we could run a test here. How many people have ever hitchhiked? I know. How many people have hitchhiked within the past 10 years? Right. So what has changed? It's not better public transportation. So that's one reason to think that we might be declensionists, going in the wrong direction. But I want to give you three examples to try to say that the trend line is in fact in the other direction, and it's the Internet helping it along. So example number one: the Internet itself. These are three of the founders of the Internet. They were actually high school classmates together at the same high school in suburban Los Angles in the 1960s. You might have had a French club or a Debate club. They had a "Let's build a global network" club, and it worked out very well. They are pictured here for their 25th anniversary Newsweek retrospective on the Internet. And as you can tell, they are basically goof balls. They had one great limitation and one great freedom as they tried to conceive of a global network. The limitation was that they didn't have any money. No particular amount of capital to invest, of the sort that for a physical network you might need for trucks and people and a hub to move packages around overnight. They had none of that. But they had an amazing freedom, which was they didn't have to make any money from it. The Internet has no business plan, never did. No CEO, no firm responsible, singly, for building it. Instead, it's folks getting together to do something for fun, rather than because they were told to, or because they were expecting to make a mint off of it. That ethos led to a network architecture, a structure that was unlike other digital networks then or since. So unusual, in fact, that it was said that it's not clear the Internet could work. As late as 1992, IBM was known to say you couldn't possibly build a corporate network using Internet Protocol. And even some Internet engineers today say the whole thing is a pilot project and the jury is still out. (Laughter) That's why the mascot of Internet engineering, if it had one, is said to be the bumblebee. Because the fur-to-wingspan ratio of the bumblebee is far too large for it to be able to fly. And yet, mysteriously, somehow the bee flies. I'm pleased to say that, thanks to massive government funding, about three years ago we finally figured out how bees fly. (Laughter) It's very complicated, but it turns out they flap their wings very quickly. (Laughter) So what is this bizarre architecture configuration that makes the network sing and be so unusual? Well, to move data around from one place to another -- again, it's not like a package courier. It's more like a mosh pit. (Laughter) Imagine, you being part of a network where, you're maybe at a sporting event, and you're sitting in rows like this, and somebody asks for a beer, and it gets handed at the aisle. And your neighborly duty is to pass the beer along, at risk to your own trousers, to get it to the destination. No one pays you to do this. It's just part of your neighborly duty. And, in a way, that's exactly how packets move around the Internet, sometimes in as many as 25 or 30 hops, with the intervening entities that are passing the data around having no particular contractual or legal obligation to the original sender or to the receiver. Now, of course, in a mosh pit it's hard to specify a destination. You need a lot of trust, but it's not like, "I'm trying to get to Pensacola, please." So the Internet needs addressing and directions. It turns out there is no one overall map of the Internet. Instead, again, it is as if we are all sitting together in a theater, but we can only see amidst the fog the people immediately around us. So what do we do to figure out who is where? We turn to the person on the right, and we tell that person what we see on our left, and vice versa. And they can lather, rinse, repeat. And before you know it, you have a general sense of where everything is. This is how Internet addressing and routing actually work. This is a system that relies on kindness and trust, which also makes it very delicate and vulnerable. In rare but striking instances, a single lie told by just one entity in this honeycomb can lead to real trouble. So, for example, last year, the government of Pakistan asked its Internet service providers there to prevent citizens of Pakistan from seeing YouTube. There was a video there that the government did not like and they wanted to make sure it was blocked. This is a common occurrence. Governments everywhere are often trying to block and filter and censor content on the Internet. Well this one ISP in Pakistan chose to effectuate the block for its subscribers in a rather unusual way. It advertised -- the way that you might be asked, if you were part of the Internet, to declare what you see near you -- it advertised that near it, in fact, it had suddenly awakened to find that it was YouTube. "That's right," it said, "I am YouTube." Which meant that packets of data from subscribers going to YouTube stopped at the ISP, since they thought they were already there, and the ISP threw them away unopened because the point was to block it. But it didn't stop there. You see, that announcement went one click out, which got reverberated, one click out. And it turns out that as you look at the postmortem of this event, you have at one moment perfectly working YouTube. Then, at moment number two, you have the fake announcement go out. And within two minutes, it reverberates around and YouTube is blocked everywhere in the world. If you were sitting in Oxford, England, trying to get to YouTube, your packets were going to Pakistan and they weren't coming back. Now just think about that. One of the most popular websites in the world, run by the most powerful company in the world, and there was nothing that YouTube or Google were particularly privileged to do about it. And yet, somehow, within about two hours, the problem was fixed. How did this happen? Well, for a big clue, we turn to NANOG. The North American Network Operators Group, a group of people who, on a beautiful day outside, enter into a windowless room, at their terminals reading email and messages in fixed proportion font, like this, and they talk about networks. And some of them are mid-level employees at Internet service providers around the world. And here is the message where one of them says, "Looks like we've got a live one. We have a hijacking of YouTube! This is not a drill. It's not just the cluelessness of YouTube engineers. I promise. Something is up in Pakistan." And they came together to help find the problem and fix it. So it's kind of like if your house catches on fire. The bad news is there is no fire brigade. The good news is random people apparate from nowhere, put out the fire and leave without expecting payment or praise. (Applause) I was trying to think of the right model to describe this form of random acts of kindness by geeky strangers. (Laughter) You know, it's just like the hail goes out and people are ready to help. And it turns out this model is everywhere, once you start looking for it. Example number two: Wikipedia. If a man named Jimbo came up to you in 2001 and said, "I've got a great idea! We start with seven articles that anybody can edit anything, at any time, and we'll get a great encyclopedia! Eh?" Right. Dumbest idea ever. (Laughter) In fact, Wikipedia is an idea so profoundly stupid that even Jimbo never had it. Jimbo's idea was for Nupedia. It was going to be totally traditional. He would pay people money because he was feeling like a good guy, and the money would go to the people and they would write the articles. The wiki was introduced so others could make suggestions on edits -- as almost an afterthought, a back room. And then it turns out the back room grew to encompass the entire project. And today, Wikipedia is so ubiquitous that you can now find it on Chinese restaurant menus. (Laughter) I am not making this up. (Laughter) I have a theory I can explain later. Suffice it to say for now that I prefer my Wikipedia stir-fried with pimentos. (Laughter) But now, Wikipedia doesn't just spontaneously work. How does it really work? It turns out there is a back room that is kind of windowless, metaphorically speaking. And there are a bunch of people who, on a sunny day, would rather be inside and monitoring this, the administrator's notice board, itself a wiki page that anyone can edit. And you just bring your problems to the page. It's reminiscent of the description of history as "one damn thing after another," right? Number one: "Tendentious editing by user Andyvphil." Apologies, Andyvphil, if you're here today. I'm not taking sides. "Anon attacking me for reverting." Here is my favorite: "A long story." (Laughter) It turns out there are more people checking this page for problems and wanting to solve them than there are problems arising on the page. And that's what keeps Wikipedia afloat. At all times, Wikipedia is approximately 45 minutes away from utter destruction. Right? There are spambots crawling it, trying to turn every article into an ad for a Rolex watch. (Laughter) It's this thin geeky line that keeps it going. Not because it's a job, not because it's a career, but because it's a calling. It's something they feel impelled to do because they care about it. They even gather together in such groups as the Counter-Vandalism Unit -- "Civility, Maturity, Responsibility" -- to just clean up the pages. It does make you wonder if there were, for instance, a massive, extremely popular Star Trek convention one weekend, who would be minding the store? (Laughter) So what we see -- (Laughter) what we see in this phenomenon is something that the crazed, late traffic engineer Hans Monderman discovered in the Netherlands, and here in South Kensington, that sometimes if you remove some of the external rules and signs and everything else, you can actually end up with a safer environment in which people can function, and one in which they are more human with each other. They're realizing that they have to take responsibility for what they do. And Wikipedia has embraced this. Some of you may remember Star Wars Kid, the poor teenager who filmed himself with a golf ball retriever, acting as if it were a light saber. The film, without his permission or even knowledge at first, found its way onto the Internet. Hugely viral video. Extremely popular. Totally mortifying to him. Now, it being encyclopedic and all, Wikipedia had to do an article about Star Wars Kid. Every article on Wikipedia has a corresponding discussion page, and on the discussion page they had extensive argument among the Wikipedians as to whether to have his real name featured in the article. You could see arguments on both sides. Here is just a snapshot of some of them. They eventually decided -- not unanimously by any means -- not to include his real name, despite the fact that nearly all media reports did. They just didn't think it was the right thing to do. It was an act of kindness. And to this day, the page for Star Wars Kid has a warning right at the top that says you are not to put his real name on the page. If you do, it will be removed immediately, removed by people who may have disagreed with the original decision, but respect the outcome and work to make it stay because they believe in something bigger than their own opinion. As a lawyer, I've got to say these guys are inventing the law and stare decisis and stuff like that as they go along. Now, this isn't just limited to Wikipedia. We see it on blogs all over the place. I mean, this is a 2005 Business Week cover. Wow. Blogs are going to change your business. I know they look silly. And sure they look silly. They start off on all sorts of goofy projects. This is my favorite goofy blog: Catsthatlooklikehitler.com. (Laughter) You send in a picture of your cat if it looks like Hitler. (Laughter) Yeah, I know. Number four, it's like, can you imagine coming home to that cat everyday? (Laughter) But then, you can see the same kind of whimsy applied to people. So this is a blog devoted to unfortunate portraiture. This one says, "Bucolic meadow with split-rail fence. Is that an animal carcass behind her?" (Laughter) You're like, "You know? I think that's an animal carcass behind her." And it's one after the other. But then you hit this one. Image removed at request of owner. That's it. Image removed at request of owner. It turns out that somebody lampooned here wrote to the snarky guy that does the site, not with a legal threat, not with an offer of payment, but just said, "Hey, would you mind?" The person said, "No, that's fine." I believe we can build architectures online to make such human requests that much easier to do, to make it possible for all of us to see that the data we encounter online is just stuff on which to click and paste and copy and forward that actually represents human emotion and endeavor and impact, and to be able to have an ethical moment where we decide how we want to treat it. I even think it can go into the real world. We can end up, as we get in a world with more censors -- everywhere there is something filming you, maybe putting it online -- to be able to have a little clip you could wear that says, "You know, I'd rather not." And then have technology that the person taking the photo will know later, this person requested to be contacted before this goes anywhere big, if you don't mind. And that person taking the photo can make a decision about how and whether to respect it. In the real world, we see filtering of this sort taking place in Pakistan. And we now have means that we can build, like this system, so that people can report the filtering as they encounter it. And it's no longer just a "I don't know. I couldn't get there. I guess I'll move on," but suddenly a collective consciousness about what is blocked and censored where online. In fact, talk about technology imitating life imitating tech, or maybe it's the other way around. An NYU researcher here took little cardboard robots with smiley faces on them, and a motor that just drove them forward and a flag sticking out the back with a desired destination. It said, "Can you help me get there?" Released it on the streets of Manhattan. (Laughter) They'll fund anything these days. Here is the chart of over 43 people helping to steer the robot that could not steer and get it on its way, from one corner from one corner of Washington Square Park to another. That leads to example number three: hitchhiking. I'm not so sure hitchhiking is dead. Why? There is the Craigslist rideshare board. If it were called the Craigslist hitchhiking board, tumbleweeds would be blowing through it. But it's the rideshare board, and it's basically the same thing. Now why are people using it? I don't know. Maybe they think that, uh, killers don't plan ahead? (Laughter) No. I think the actual answer is that once you reframe it, once you get out of one set of stale expectations from a failed project that had its day, but now, for whatever reason, is tarnished, you can actually rekindle the kind of human kindness and sharing that something like this on Craigslist represents. And then you can highlight it into something like, yes, CouchSurfing.org. CouchSurfing: one guy's idea to, at last, put together people who are going somewhere far away and would like to sleep on a stranger's couch for free, with people who live far away, and would like someone they don't know to sleep on their couch for free. It's a brilliant idea. It's a bee that, yes, flies. Amazing how many successful couch surfings there have been. And if you're wondering, no, there have been no known fatalities associated with CouchSurfing. Although, to be sure, the reputation system, at the moment, works that you leave your report after the couch surfing experience, so there may be some selection bias there. (Laughter) So, my urging, my thought, is that the Internet isn't just a pile of information. It's not a noun. It's a verb. And when you go on it, if you listen and see carefully and closely enough, what you will discover is that that information is saying something to you. What it's saying to you is what we heard yesterday, Demosthenes was saying to us. It's saying, "Let's march." Thank you very much. (Applause)

How do you explain when things don't go as we assume? Or better, how do you explain when others are able to achieve things that seem to defy all of the assumptions? For example: Why is Apple so innovative? Year after year, after year, they're more innovative than all their competition. And yet, they're just a computer company. They're just like everyone else. They have the same access to the same talent, the same agencies, the same consultants, the same media. Then why is it that they seem to have something different? Why is it that Martin Luther King led the Civil Rights Movement? He wasn't the only man who suffered in pre-civil rights America, and he certainly wasn't the only great orator of the day. Why him? And why is it that the Wright brothers were able to figure out controlled, powered man flight when there were certainly other teams who were better qualified, better funded -- and they didn't achieve powered man flight, and the Wright brothers beat them to it. There's something else at play here. About three and a half years ago, I made a discovery. And this discovery profoundly changed my view on how I thought the world worked, and it even profoundly changed the way in which I operate in it. As it turns out, there's a pattern. As it turns out, all the great inspiring leaders and organizations in the world, whether it's Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers, they all think, act and communicate the exact same way. And it's the complete opposite to everyone else. All I did was codify it, and it's probably the world's simplest idea. I call it the golden circle. Why? How? What? This little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire where others aren't. Let me define the terms really quickly. Every single person, every single organization on the planet knows what they do, 100 percent. Some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiated value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP. But very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do. And by "why" I don't mean "to make a profit." That's a result. It's always a result. By "why," I mean: What's your purpose? What's your cause? What's your belief? Why does your organization exist? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? And why should anyone care? As a result, the way we think, we act, the way we communicate is from the outside in, it's obvious. We go from the clearest thing to the fuzziest thing. But the inspired leaders and the inspired organizations -- regardless of their size, regardless of their industry -- all think, act and communicate from the inside out. Let me give you an example. I use Apple because they're easy to understand and everybody gets it. If Apple were like everyone else, a marketing message from them might sound like this: "We make great computers. They're beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. Want to buy one?" "Meh." That's how most of us communicate. That's how most marketing and sales are done, that's how we communicate interpersonally. We say what we do, we say how we're different or better and we expect some sort of a behavior, a purchase, a vote, something like that. Here's our new law firm: We have the best lawyers with the biggest clients, we always perform for our clients. Here's our new car: It gets great gas mileage, it has leather seats. Buy our car. But it's uninspiring. Here's how Apple actually communicates. "Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?" Totally different, right? You're ready to buy a computer from me. I just reversed the order of the information. What it proves to us is that people don't buy what you do; people buy why you do it. This explains why every single person in this room is perfectly comfortable buying a computer from Apple. But we're also perfectly comfortable buying an MP3 player from Apple, or a phone from Apple, or a DVR from Apple. As I said before, Apple's just a computer company. Nothing distinguishes them structurally from any of their competitors. Their competitors are equally qualified to make all of these products. In fact, they tried. A few years ago, Gateway came out with flat-screen TVs. They're eminently qualified to make flat-screen TVs. They've been making flat-screen monitors for years. Nobody bought one. Dell came out with MP3 players and PDAs, and they make great quality products, and they can make perfectly well-designed products -- and nobody bought one. In fact, talking about it now, we can't even imagine buying an MP3 player from Dell. Why would you buy one from a computer company? But we do it every day. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. The goal is not to do business with everybody who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe. Here's the best part: None of what I'm telling you is my opinion. It's all grounded in the tenets of biology. Not psychology, biology. If you look at a cross-section of the human brain, from the top down, the human brain is actually broken into three major components that correlate perfectly with the golden circle. Our newest brain, our Homo sapien brain, our neocortex, corresponds with the "what" level. The neocortex is responsible for all of our rational and analytical thought and language. The middle two sections make up our limbic brains, and our limbic brains are responsible for all of our feelings, like trust and loyalty. It's also responsible for all human behavior, all decision-making, and it has no capacity for language. In other words, when we communicate from the outside in, yes, people can understand vast amounts of complicated information like features and benefits and facts and figures. It just doesn't drive behavior. When we can communicate from the inside out, we're talking directly to the part of the brain that controls behavior, and then we allow people to rationalize it with the tangible things we say and do. This is where gut decisions come from. Sometimes you can give somebody all the facts and figures, and they say, "I know what all the facts and details say, but it just doesn't feel right." Why would we use that verb, it doesn't "feel" right? Because the part of the brain that controls decision-making doesn't control language. The best we can muster up is, "I don't know. It just doesn't feel right." Or sometimes you say you're leading with your heart or soul. I hate to break it to you, those aren't other body parts controlling your behavior. It's all happening here in your limbic brain, the part of the brain that controls decision-making and not language. But if you don't know why you do what you do, and people respond to why you do what you do, then how will you ever get people to vote for you, or buy something from you, or, more importantly, be loyal and want to be a part of what it is that you do. The goal is not just to sell to people who need what you have; the goal is to sell to people who believe what you believe. The goal is not just to hire people who need a job; it's to hire people who believe what you believe. I always say that, you know, if you hire people just because they can do a job, they'll work for your money, but if they believe what you believe, they'll work for you with blood and sweat and tears. Nowhere else is there a better example than with the Wright brothers. Most people don't know about Samuel Pierpont Langley. And back in the early 20th century, the pursuit of powered man flight was like the dot com of the day. Everybody was trying it. And Samuel Pierpont Langley had, what we assume, to be the recipe for success. Even now, you ask people, "Why did your product or why did your company fail?" and people always give you the same permutation of the same three things: under-capitalized, the wrong people, bad market conditions. It's always the same three things, so let's explore that. Samuel Pierpont Langley was given 50,000 dollars by the War Department to figure out this flying machine. Money was no problem. He held a seat at Harvard and worked at the Smithsonian and was extremely well-connected; he knew all the big minds of the day. He hired the best minds money could find and the market conditions were fantastic. The New York Times followed him around everywhere, and everyone was rooting for Langley. Then how come we've never heard of Samuel Pierpont Langley? A few hundred miles away in Dayton Ohio, Orville and Wilbur Wright, they had none of what we consider to be the recipe for success. They had no money; they paid for their dream with the proceeds from their bicycle shop; not a single person on the Wright brothers' team had a college education, not even Orville or Wilbur; and The New York Times followed them around nowhere. The difference was, Orville and Wilbur were driven by a cause, by a purpose, by a belief. They believed that if they could figure out this flying machine, it'll change the course of the world. Samuel Pierpont Langley was different. He wanted to be rich, and he wanted to be famous. He was in pursuit of the result. He was in pursuit of the riches. And lo and behold, look what happened. The people who believed in the Wright brothers' dream worked with them with blood and sweat and tears. The others just worked for the paycheck. They tell stories of how every time the Wright brothers went out, they would have to take five sets of parts, because that's how many times they would crash before supper. And, eventually, on December 17th, 1903, the Wright brothers took flight, and no one was there to even experience it. We found out about it a few days later. And further proof that Langley was motivated by the wrong thing: The day the Wright brothers took flight, he quit. He could have said, "That's an amazing discovery, guys, and I will improve upon your technology," but he didn't. He wasn't first, he didn't get rich, he didn't get famous, so he quit. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. If you talk about what you believe, you will attract those who believe what you believe. But why is it important to attract those who believe what you believe? Something called the law of diffusion of innovation, if you don't know the law, you know the terminology. The first 2.5% of our population are our innovators. The next 13.5% of our population are our early adopters. The next 34% are your early majority, your late majority and your laggards. The only reason these people buy touch-tone phones is because you can't buy rotary phones anymore. (Laughter) We all sit at various places at various times on this scale, but what the law of diffusion of innovation tells us is that if you want mass-market success or mass-market acceptance of an idea, you cannot have it until you achieve this tipping point between 15 and 18 percent market penetration, and then the system tips. I love asking businesses, "What's your conversion on new business?" They love to tell you, "It's about 10 percent," proudly. Well, you can trip over 10% of the customers. We all have about 10% who just "get it." That's how we describe them, right? That's like that gut feeling, "Oh, they just get it." The problem is: How do you find the ones that get it before doing business versus the ones who don't get it? So it's this here, this little gap that you have to close, as Jeffrey Moore calls it, "Crossing the Chasm" -- because, you see, the early majority will not try something until someone else has tried it first. And these guys, the innovators and the early adopters, they're comfortable making those gut decisions. They're more comfortable making those intuitive decisions that are driven by what they believe about the world and not just what product is available. These are the people who stood in line for six hours to buy an iPhone when they first came out, when you could have bought one off the shelf the next week. These are the people who spent 40,000 dollars on flat-screen TVs when they first came out, even though the technology was substandard. And, by the way, they didn't do it because the technology was so great; they did it for themselves. It's because they wanted to be first. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it and what you do simply proves what you believe. In fact, people will do the things that prove what they believe. The reason that person bought the iPhone in the first six hours, stood in line for six hours, was because of what they believed about the world, and how they wanted everybody to see them: They were first. People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it. So let me give you a famous example, a famous failure and a famous success of the law of diffusion of innovation. First, the famous failure. It's a commercial example. As we said before, the recipe for success is money and the right people and the right market conditions. You should have success then. Look at TiVo. From the time TiVo came out about eight or nine years ago to this current day, they are the single highest-quality product on the market, hands down, there is no dispute. They were extremely well-funded. Market conditions were fantastic. I mean, we use TiVo as verb. I TiVo stuff on my piece-of-junk Time Warner DVR all the time. (Laughter) But TiVo's a commercial failure. They've never made money. And when they went IPO, their stock was at about 30 or 40 dollars and then plummeted, and it's never traded above 10. In fact, I don't think it's even traded above six, except for a couple of little spikes. Because you see, when TiVo launched their product, they told us all what they had. They said, "We have a product that pauses live TV, skips commercials, rewinds live TV and memorizes your viewing habits without you even asking." And the cynical majority said, "We don't believe you. We don't need it. We don't like it. You're scaring us." What if they had said, "If you're the kind of person who likes to have total control over every aspect of your life, boy, do we have a product for you. It pauses live TV, skips commercials, memorizes your viewing habits, etc., etc." People don't buy what you do; they buy why you do it, and what you do simply serves as the proof of what you believe. Now let me give you a successful example of the law of diffusion of innovation. In the summer of 1963, 250,000 people showed up on the mall in Washington to hear Dr. King speak. They sent out no invitations, and there was no website to check the date. How do you do that? Well, Dr. King wasn't the only man in America who was a great orator. He wasn't the only man in America who suffered in a pre-civil rights America. In fact, some of his ideas were bad. But he had a gift. He didn't go around telling people what needed to change in America. He went around and told people what he believed. "I believe, I believe, I believe," he told people. And people who believed what he believed took his cause, and they made it their own, and they told people. And some of those people created structures to get the word out to even more people. And lo and behold, 250,000 people showed up on the right day at the right time to hear him speak. How many of them showed up for him? Zero. They showed up for themselves. It's what they believed about America that got them to travel in a bus for eight hours to stand in the sun in Washington in the middle of August. It's what they believed, and it wasn't about black versus white: 25% of the audience was white. Dr. King believed that there are two types of laws in this world: those that are made by a higher authority and those that are made by men. And not until all the laws that are made by men are consistent with the laws made by the higher authority will we live in a just world. It just so happened that the Civil Rights Movement was the perfect thing to help him bring his cause to life. We followed, not for him, but for ourselves. By the way, he gave the "I have a dream" speech, not the "I have a plan" speech. (Laughter) Listen to politicians now, with their comprehensive 12-point plans. They're not inspiring anybody. Because there are leaders and there are those who lead. Leaders hold a position of power or authority, but those who lead inspire us. Whether they're individuals or organizations, we follow those who lead, not because we have to, but because we want to. We follow those who lead, not for them, but for ourselves. And it's those who start with "why" that have the ability to inspire those around them or find others who inspire them. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I've always been interested in the relationship of formal structures and human behavior. If you build a wide road out to the outskirts of town, people will move there. Well, law is also a powerful driver of human behavior. And what I'd like to discuss today is the need to overhaul and simplify the law to release the energy and passion of Americans, so that we can begin to address the challenges of our society. You might have noticed that law has grown progressively denser in your lives over the last decade or two. If you run a business, it's hard to do much of anything without calling your general counsel. Indeed, there is this phenomenon now where the general counsels are becoming the CEOs. It's a little bit like the Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. You need a lawyer to run the company, because there's so much law. But it's not just business that's affected by this, it's actually pressed down into the daily activities of ordinary people. A couple of years ago I was hiking near Cody, Wyoming. It was in a grizzly bear preserve, although no one told me that before we went. And our guide was a local science teacher. She was wholly unconcerned about the bears, but she was terrified of lawyers. The stories started pouring out. She'd just been involved in an episode where a parent had threatened to sue the school because she lowered the grade of the student by 10 percent when he turned the paper in late. The principal didn't want to stand up to the parent because he didn't want to get dragged into some legal proceedings. So, she had to go to meeting after meeting, same arguments made over and over again. After 30 days of sleepless nights, she finally capitulated and raised the grade. She said, "Life's too short, I just can't keep going with this." About the same time, she was going to take two students to a leadership conference in Laramie, which is a couple of hours away, and she was going to drive them in her car, but the school said, "No, you can't drive them in the car for liability reasons. You have to go in a school bus." So, they provided a bus that held 60 people and drove the three of them back and forth several hours to Laramie. Her husband is also a science teacher, and he takes his biology class on a hike in the nearby national park. But he was told he couldn't go on the hike this year because one of the students in the class was disabled, so the other 25 students didn't get to go on the hike either. At the end of this day I could have filled a book just with stories about law from this one teacher. Now, we've been taught to believe that law is the foundation of freedom. But somehow or another, in the last couple of decades, the land of the free has become a legal minefield. It's really changed our lives in ways that are sort of imperceptible; and yet, when you pull back, you see it all the time. It's changed the way we talk. I was talking to a pediatrician friend in North Carolina. He said, "Well you know, I don't deal with patients the same way anymore. You wouldn't want to say something off-the-cuff that might be used against you." This is a doctor, whose life is caring for people. My own law firm has a list of questions that I'm not allowed to ask when interviewing candidates, such as the sinister question, bulging with hidden motives and innuendo, "Where are you from?" (Laughter) Now for 20 years, tort reformers have been sounding the alarm that lawsuits are out of control. And we read every once in while about these crazy lawsuits, like the guy in the District of Columbia who sued his dry cleaners for 54 million dollars because they lost his pair of pants. The case went on for two years; I think he's still appealing the case. But the reality is, these crazy cases are relatively rare. They don't usually win. And the total of direct tort cost in this country is about two percent, which is twice as much as in other countries but, as taxes go, hardly crippling. But the direct costs are really only the tip of the iceberg. What's happened here, again, almost without our knowing, is our culture has changed. People no longer feel free to act on their best judgment. So, what do we do about it? We certainly don't want to give up the rights, when people do something wrong, to seek redress in the courts. We need regulation to make sure people don't pollute and such. We lack even a vocabulary to deal with this problem, and that's because we have the wrong frame of reference. We've been trained to think that the way to look at every dispute, every issue, is a matter of kind of individual rights. And so we peer through a legal microscope, and look at everything. Is it possible that there are extenuating circumstances that explain why Johnny turned his paper in late in Cody, Wyoming? Is it possible that the doctor might have done something differently when the sick person gets sicker? And of course the hindsight bias is perfect. There's always a different scenario that you can sketch out where it's possible that something could have been done differently. And yet, we've been trained to squint into this legal microscope, hoping that we can judge any dispute against the standard of a perfect society, where everyone will agree what's fair, and where accidents will be extinct, risk will be no more. Of course, this is Utopia; it's a formula for paralysis, not freedom. It's not the basis of the rule of law, it's not the basis of a free society. So, now I have the first of four propositions I'm going to leave with you about how you simplify the law: You've got to judge law mainly by its effect on the broader society, not individual disputes. Absolutely vital. So, let's pull back from the anecdotes for a second and look at our society from high above. Is it working? What does the macro-data show us? Well, the healthcare system has been transformed: a culture pervaded with defensiveness, universal distrust of the system of justice, universal practice of defensive medicine. It's very hard to measure because there are mixed motives. Doctors can make more on ordering tests sometimes, and also they no longer even know what's right or wrong. But reliable estimates range between 60 billion and 200 billion dollars per year. That's enough to provide care to all the people in America who don't have it. The trial lawyers say, "Well, this legal fear makes doctors practice better medicine." Well that's been studied too, by the Institute of Medicine and others. Turns out that's not the case. The fear has chilled professional interaction so thousands of tragic errors occur because doctors are afraid to speak up: "Are you sure that's the right dosage?" Because they're not sure, and they don't want to take legal responsibility. Let's go to schools. As we saw with the teacher in Cody, Wyoming, she seems to be affected by the law. Well it turns out the schools are literally drowning in law. You could have a separate section of a law library around each of the following legal concepts: due process, special education, no child left behind, zero tolerance, work rules ... it goes on. We did a study of all the rules that affect one school in New York. The Board of Ed. had no idea. Tens of thousands of discreet rules, 60 steps to suspend a student from school: It's a formula for paralysis. What's the effect of that? One is a decline in order. Again, studies have shown it's directly attributable to the rise of due process. Public agenda did a survey for us a couple of years ago where they found that 43 percent of the high school teachers in America say that they spend at least half of their time maintaining order in the classroom. That means those students are getting half the learning they're supposed to, because if one child is disrupting the class no one can learn. And what happens when the teacher tries to assert order? They're threatened with a legal claim. We also surveyed that. Seventy-eight percent of the middle and high school teachers in America have been threatened by their students with violating their rights, with lawsuits by their students. They are threatening, their students. It's not that they usually sue, it's not that they would win, but it's an indication of the corrosion of authority. And how has this system of law worked for government? It doesn't seem to be working very well does it? Neither in Sacramento nor in Washington. The other day at the State of the Union speech, President Obama said, and I think we could all agree with this goal, "From the first railroads to the interstate highway system, our nation has always been the first to compete. There is no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains." Well, actually there is a reason: Environmental review has evolved into a process of no pebble left unturned for any major project taking the better part of a decade, then followed by years of litigation by anybody who doesn't like the project. Then, just staying above the Earth for one more second, people are acting like idiots, (Laughter) all across the country. (Applause) Idiots. A couple of years ago, Broward County, Florida, banned running at recess. (Laughter) That means all the boys are going to be ADD. I mean it's just absolutely a formula for failure. My favorite, though, are all the warning labels. "Caution: Contents are hot," on billions of coffee cups. Archeologists will dig us up in a thousand years and they won't know about defensive medicine and stuff, but they'll see all these labels, "Contents are extremely hot." They'll think it was some kind of aphrodisiac. That's the only explanation. Because why would you have to tell people that something was actually hot? My favorite warning was one on a five-inch fishing lure. I grew up in the South and whiled away the summers fishing. Five-inch fishing lure, it's a big fishing lure, with a three pronged hook in the back, and outside it said, "Harmful if swallowed." (Laughter) So, none of these people are doing what they think is right. And why not? They don't trust the law. Why don't they trust the law? Because it gives us the worst of both worlds: It's random -- anybody can sue for almost anything and take it to a jury, not even an effort at consistency -- and it's also too detailed. In the areas that are regulated, there are so many rules no human could possibly know it. Well how do you fix it? We could spend 10,000 lifetimes trying to prune this legal jungle. But the challenge here is not one of just amending the law, because the hurdle for success is trust. People -- for law to be the platform for freedom, people have to trust it. So, that's my second proposition: Trust is an essential condition to a free society. Life is complicated enough without legal fear. But law is different than other kinds of uncertainties, because it carries with it the power of state. And so the state can come in. It actually changes the way people think. It's like having a little lawyer on your shoulders all day long, whispering in your ear, "Could that go wrong? Might that go wrong?" It drives people from the smart part of the brain -- that dark, deep well of the subconscious, where instincts and experience, and all the other factors of creativity and good judgment are -- it drives us to the thin veneer of conscious logic. Pretty soon the doctor's saying, "Well, I doubt if that headache could be a tumor, but who would protect me if it were? So maybe I'll just order the MRI." Then you've wasted 200 billion dollars in unnecessary tests. If you make people self-conscious about their judgments, studies show you will make them make worse judgments. If you tell the pianist to think about how she's hitting the notes when she's playing the piece, she can't play the piece. Self-consciousness is the enemy of accomplishment. Edison stated it best. He said, "Hell, we ain't got no rules around here, we're trying to accomplish something." (Laughter) So, how do you restore trust? Tweaking the law's clearly not good enough, and tort reform, which is a great idea, lowers your cost if you're a businessperson, but it's like a Band-Aid on this gaping wound of distrust. States with extensive tort reform still suffer all these pathologies. So, what's needed is not just to limit claims, but actually create a dry ground of freedom. It turns out that freedom actually has a formal structure. And it is this: Law sets boundaries, and on one side of those boundaries are all the things you can't do or must do -- you can't steal, you've got to pay your taxes -- but those same boundaries are supposed to define and protect a dry ground of freedom. Isaiah Berlin put it this way: "Law sets frontiers, not artificially drawn, within which men shall be inviolable." We've forgotten that second part. Those dikes have burst. People wade through law all day long. So, what's needed now is to rebuild these boundaries. And it's especially important to rebuild them for lawsuits. Because what people can sue for establishes the boundaries for everybody else's freedom. If someone brings a lawsuit over, "A kid fell off the seesaw," it doesn't matter what happens in the lawsuit, all the seesaws will disappear. Because no one will want to take the risk of a lawsuit. And that's what's happened. There are no seesaws, jungle gyms, merry-go-rounds, climbing ropes, nothing that would interest a kid over the age of four, because there's no risk associated with it. So, how do we rebuild it? Life is too complex for... (Applause) Life is too complex for a software program. All these choices involve value judgments and social norms, not objective facts. And so here is the fourth proposition. This is what we have, the philosophy we have to change to. And there are two essential elements of it: We have to simplify the law. We have to migrate from all this complexity towards general principles and goals. The constitution is only 16 pages long. Worked pretty well for 200 years. Law has to be simple enough so that people can internalize it in their daily choices. If they can't internalize it, they won't trust it. And how do you make it simple? Because life is complex, and here is the hardest and biggest change: We have to restore the authority to judges and officials to interpret and apply the law. (Applause) We have to rehumanize the law. To make law simple so that you feel free, the people in charge have to be free to use their judgment to interpret and apply the law in accord with reasonable social norms. As you're going down, and walking down the sidewalk during the day, you have to think that if there is a dispute, there's somebody in society who sees it as their job to affirmatively protect you if you're acting reasonably. That person doesn't exist today. This is the hardest hurdle. It's actually not very hard. Ninety-eight percent of cases, this is a piece of cake. Maybe you've got a claim in small claims court for your lost pair of pants for $100, but not in a court of general jurisdiction for millions of dollars. Case dismissed without prejudice or refiling in small claims court. Takes five minutes. That's it, it's not that hard. But it's a hard hurdle because we got into this legal quicksand because we woke up in the 1960s to all these really bad values: racism, gender discrimination, pollution -- they were bad values. And we wanted to create a legal system where no one could have bad values anymore. The problem is, we created a system where we eliminated the right to have good values. It doesn't mean that people in authority can do whatever they want. They're still bounded by legal goals and principles: The teacher is accountable to the principal, the judge is accountable to an appellate court, the president is accountable to voters. But the accountability's up the line judging the decision against the effect on everybody, not just on the disgruntled person. You can't run a society by the lowest common denominator. (Applause) So, what's needed is a basic shift in philosophy. We can pull the plug on a lot of this stuff if we shift our philosophy. We've been taught that authority is the enemy of freedom. It's not true. Authority, in fact, is essential to freedom. Law is a human institution; responsibility is a human institution. If teachers don't have authority to run the classroom, to maintain order, everybody's learning suffers. If the judge doesn't have the authority to toss out unreasonable claims, then all of us go through the day looking over our shoulders. If the environmental agency can't decide that the power lines are good for the environment, then there's no way to bring the power from the wind farms to the city. A free society requires red lights and green lights, otherwise it soon descends into gridlock. That's what's happened to America. Look around. What the world needs now is to restore the authority to make common choices. It's the only way to get our freedom back, and it's the only way to release the energy and passion needed so that we can meet the challenges of our time. Thank you. (Applause)

One of my earliest memories is of trying to wake up one of my relatives and not being able to. And I was just a little kid, so I didn't really understand why, but as I got older, I realized we had drug addiction in my family, including later cocaine addiction. I'd been thinking about it a lot lately, partly because it's now exactly 100 years since drugs were first banned in the United States and Britain, and we then imposed that on the rest of the world. It's a century since we made this really fateful decision to take addicts and punish them and make them suffer, because we believed that would deter them; it would give them an incentive to stop. And a few years ago, I was looking at some of the addicts in my life who I love, and trying to figure out if there was some way to help them. And I realized there were loads of incredibly basic questions I just didn't know the answer to, like, what really causes addiction? Why do we carry on with this approach that doesn't seem to be working, and is there a better way out there that we could try instead? So I read loads of stuff about it, and I couldn't really find the answers I was looking for, so I thought, okay, I'll go and sit with different people around the world who lived this and studied this and talk to them and see if I could learn from them. And I didn't realize I would end up going over 30,000 miles at the start, but I ended up going and meeting loads of different people, from a transgender crack dealer in Brownsville, Brooklyn, to a scientist who spends a lot of time feeding hallucinogens to mongooses to see if they like them -- it turns out they do, but only in very specific circumstances -- to the only country that's ever decriminalized all drugs, from cannabis to crack, Portugal. And the thing I realized that really blew my mind is, almost everything we think we know about addiction is wrong, and if we start to absorb the new evidence about addiction, I think we're going to have to change a lot more than our drug policies. But let's start with what we think we know, what I thought I knew. Let's think about this middle row here. Imagine all of you, for 20 days now, went off and used heroin three times a day. Some of you look a little more enthusiastic than others at this prospect. (Laughter) Don't worry, it's just a thought experiment. Imagine you did that, right? What would happen? Now, we have a story about what would happen that we've been told for a century. We think, because there are chemical hooks in heroin, as you took it for a while, your body would become dependent on those hooks, you'd start to physically need them, and at the end of those 20 days, you'd all be heroin addicts. Right? That's what I thought. First thing that alerted me to the fact that something's not right with this story is when it was explained to me. If I step out of this TED Talk today and I get hit by a car and I break my hip, I'll be taken to hospital and I'll be given loads of diamorphine. Diamorphine is heroin. It's actually much better heroin than you're going to buy on the streets, because the stuff you buy from a drug dealer is contaminated. Actually, very little of it is heroin, whereas the stuff you get from the doctor is medically pure. And you'll be given it for quite a long period of time. There are loads of people in this room, you may not realize it, you've taken quite a lot of heroin. And anyone who is watching this anywhere in the world, this is happening. And if what we believe about addiction is right -- those people are exposed to all those chemical hooks -- What should happen? They should become addicts. This has been studied really carefully. It doesn't happen; you will have noticed if your grandmother had a hip replacement, she didn't come out as a junkie. (Laughter) And when I learned this, it seemed so weird to me, so contrary to everything I'd been told, everything I thought I knew, I just thought it couldn't be right, until I met a man called Bruce Alexander. He's a professor of psychology in Vancouver who carried out an incredible experiment I think really helps us to understand this issue. Professor Alexander explained to me, the idea of addiction we've all got in our heads, that story, comes partly from a series of experiments that were done earlier in the 20th century. They're really simple. You can do them tonight at home if you feel a little sadistic. You get a rat and you put it in a cage, and you give it two water bottles: One is just water, and the other is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drug water and almost always kill itself quite quickly. So there you go, right? That's how we think it works. In the '70s, Professor Alexander comes along and he looks at this experiment and he noticed something. He said ah, we're putting the rat in an empty cage. It's got nothing to do except use these drugs. Let's try something different. So Professor Alexander built a cage that he called "Rat Park," which is basically heaven for rats. They've got loads of cheese, they've got loads of colored balls, they've got loads of tunnels. Crucially, they've got loads of friends. They can have loads of sex. And they've got both the water bottles, the normal water and the drugged water. But here's the fascinating thing: In Rat Park, they don't like the drug water. They almost never use it. None of them ever use it compulsively. None of them ever overdose. You go from almost 100 percent overdose when they're isolated to zero percent overdose when they have happy and connected lives. Now, when he first saw this, Professor Alexander thought, maybe this is just a thing about rats, they're quite different to us. Maybe not as different as we'd like, but, you know -- But fortunately, there was a human experiment into the exact same principle happening at the exact same time. It was called the Vietnam War. In Vietnam, 20 percent of all American troops were using loads of heroin, and if you look at the news reports from the time, they were really worried, because they thought, my God, we're going to have hundreds of thousands of junkies on the streets of the United States when the war ends; it made total sense. Now, those soldiers who were using loads of heroin were followed home. The Archives of General Psychiatry did a really detailed study, and what happened to them? It turns out they didn't go to rehab. They didn't go into withdrawal. Ninety-five percent of them just stopped. Now, if you believe the story about chemical hooks, that makes absolutely no sense, but Professor Alexander began to think there might be a different story about addiction. He said, what if addiction isn't about your chemical hooks? What if addiction is about your cage? What if addiction is an adaptation to your environment? Looking at this, there was another professor called Peter Cohen in the Netherlands who said, maybe we shouldn't even call it addiction. Maybe we should call it bonding. Human beings have a natural and innate need to bond, and when we're happy and healthy, we'll bond and connect with each other, but if you can't do that, because you're traumatized or isolated or beaten down by life, you will bond with something that will give you some sense of relief. Now, that might be gambling, that might be pornography, that might be cocaine, that might be cannabis, but you will bond and connect with something because that's our nature. That's what we want as human beings. And at first, I found this quite a difficult thing to get my head around, but one way that helped me to think about it is, I can see, I've got over by my seat a bottle of water, right? I'm looking at lots of you, and lots of you have bottles of water with you. Forget the drugs. Forget the drug war. Totally legally, all of those bottles of water could be bottles of vodka, right? We could all be getting drunk -- I might after this -- (Laughter) -- but we're not. Now, because you've been able to afford the approximately gazillion pounds that it costs to get into a TED Talk, I'm guessing you guys could afford to be drinking vodka for the next six months. You wouldn't end up homeless. You're not going to do that, and the reason you're not going to do that is not because anyone's stopping you. It's because you've got bonds and connections that you want to be present for. You've got work you love. You've got people you love. You've got healthy relationships. And a core part of addiction, I came to think, and I believe the evidence suggests, is about not being able to bear to be present in your life. Now, this has really significant implications. The most obvious implications are for the War on Drugs. In Arizona, I went out with a group of women who were made to wear t-shirts saying, "I was a drug addict," and go out on chain gangs and dig graves while members of the public jeer at them, and when those women get out of prison, they're going to have criminal records that mean they'll never work in the legal economy again. Now, that's a very extreme example, obviously, in the case of the chain gang, but actually almost everywhere in the world we treat addicts to some degree like that. We punish them. We shame them. We give them criminal records. We put barriers between them reconnecting. There was a doctor in Canada, Dr. Gabor Maté, an amazing man, who said to me, if you wanted to design a system that would make addiction worse, you would design that system. Now, there's a place that decided to do the exact opposite, and I went there to see how it worked. In the year 2000, Portugal had one of the worst drug problems in Europe. One percent of the population was addicted to heroin, which is kind of mind-blowing, and every year, they tried the American way more and more. They punished people and stigmatized them and shamed them more, and every year, the problem got worse. And one day, the Prime Minister and the leader of the opposition got together, and basically said, look, we can't go on with a country where we're having ever more people becoming heroin addicts. Let's set up a panel of scientists and doctors to figure out what would genuinely solve the problem. And they set up a panel led by an amazing man called Dr. João Goulão, to look at all this new evidence, and they came back and they said, "Decriminalize all drugs from cannabis to crack, but" -- and this is the crucial next step -- "take all the money we used to spend on cutting addicts off, on disconnecting them, and spend it instead on reconnecting them with society." And that's not really what we think of as drug treatment in the United States and Britain. So they do do residential rehab, they do psychological therapy, that does have some value. But the biggest thing they did was the complete opposite of what we do: a massive program of job creation for addicts, and microloans for addicts to set up small businesses. So say you used to be a mechanic. When you're ready, they'll go to a garage, and they'll say, if you employ this guy for a year, we'll pay half his wages. The goal was to make sure that every addict in Portugal had something to get out of bed for in the morning. And when I went and met the addicts in Portugal, what they said is, as they rediscovered purpose, they rediscovered bonds and relationships with the wider society. It'll be 15 years this year since that experiment began, and the results are in: injecting drug use is down in Portugal, according to the British Journal of Criminology, by 50 percent, five-zero percent. Overdose is massively down, HIV is massively down among addicts. Addiction in every study is significantly down. One of the ways you know it's worked so well is that almost nobody in Portugal wants to go back to the old system. Now, that's the political implications. I actually think there's a layer of implications to all this research below that. We live in a culture where people feel really increasingly vulnerable to all sorts of addictions, whether it's to their smartphones or to shopping or to eating. Before these talks began -- you guys know this -- we were told we weren't allowed to have our smartphones on, and I have to say, a lot of you looked an awful lot like addicts who were told their dealer was going to be unavailable for the next couple of hours. (Laughter) A lot of us feel like that, and it might sound weird to say, I've been talking about how disconnection is a major driver of addiction and weird to say it's growing, because you think we're the most connected society that's ever been, surely. But I increasingly began to think that the connections we have or think we have, are like a kind of parody of human connection. If you have a crisis in your life, you'll notice something. It won't be your Twitter followers who come to sit with you. It won't be your Facebook friends who help you turn it round. It'll be your flesh and blood friends who you have deep and nuanced and textured, face-to-face relationships with, and there's a study I learned about from Bill McKibben, the environmental writer, that I think tells us a lot about this. He looked at the number of close friends the average American believes they can call on in a crisis. That number has been declining steadily since the 1950s. The amount of floor space an individual has in their home has been steadily increasing, and I think that's like a metaphor for the choice we've made as a culture. We've traded floorspace for friends, we've traded stuff for connections, and the result is we are one of the loneliest societies there has ever been. And Bruce Alexander, the guy who did the Rat Park experiment, says, we talk all the time in addiction about individual recovery, and it's right to talk about that, but we need to talk much more about social recovery. Something's gone wrong with us, not just with individuals but as a group, and we've created a society where, for a lot of us, life looks a whole lot more like that isolated cage and a whole lot less like Rat Park. If I'm honest, this isn't why I went into it. I didn't go in to the discover the political stuff, the social stuff. I wanted to know how to help the people I love. And when I came back from this long journey and I'd learned all this, I looked at the addicts in my life, and if you're really candid, it's hard loving an addict, and there's going to be lots of people who know in this room. You are angry a lot of the time, and I think one of the reasons why this debate is so charged is because it runs through the heart of each of us, right? Everyone has a bit of them that looks at an addict and thinks, I wish someone would just stop you. And the kind of scripts we're told for how to deal with the addicts in our lives is typified by, I think, the reality show "Intervention," if you guys have ever seen it. I think everything in our lives is defined by reality TV, but that's another TED Talk. If you've ever seen the show "Intervention," it's a pretty simple premise. Get an addict, all the people in their life, gather them together, confront them with what they're doing, and they say, if you don't shape up, we're going to cut you off. So what they do is they take the connection to the addict, and they threaten it, they make it contingent on the addict behaving the way they want. And I began to think, I began to see why that approach doesn't work, and I began to think that's almost like the importing of the logic of the Drug War into our private lives. So I was thinking, how could I be Portuguese? And what I've tried to do now, and I can't tell you I do it consistently and I can't tell you it's easy, is to say to the addicts in my life that I want to deepen the connection with them, to say to them, I love you whether you're using or you're not. I love you, whatever state you're in, and if you need me, I'll come and sit with you because I love you and I don't want you to be alone or to feel alone. And I think the core of that message -- you're not alone, we love you -- has to be at every level of how we respond to addicts, socially, politically and individually. For 100 years now, we've been singing war songs about addicts. I think all along we should have been singing love songs to them, because the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. Thank you. (Applause)

What I want to tell you about today is how I see robots invading our lives at multiple levels, over multiple timescales. And when I look out in the future, I can't imagine a world, 500 years from now, where we don't have robots everywhere. Assuming -- despite all the dire predictions from many people about our future -- assuming we're still around, I can't imagine the world not being populated with robots. And then the question is, well, if they're going to be here in 500 years, are they going to be everywhere sooner than that? Are they going to be around in 50 years? Yeah, I think that's pretty likely -- there's going to be lots of robots everywhere. And in fact I think that's going to be a lot sooner than that. I think we're sort of on the cusp of robots becoming common, and I think we're sort of around 1978 or 1980 in personal computer years, where the first few robots are starting to appear. Computers sort of came around through games and toys. And you know, the first computer most people had in the house may have been a computer to play Pong, a little microprocessor embedded, and then other games that came after that. And we're starting to see that same sort of thing with robots: LEGO Mindstorms, Furbies -- who here -- did anyone here have a Furby? Yeah, there's 38 million of them sold worldwide. They are pretty common. And they're a little tiny robot, a simple robot with some sensors, a little bit of processing actuation. On the right there is another robot doll, who you could get a couple of years ago. And just as in the early days, when there was a lot of sort of amateur interaction over computers, you can now get various hacking kits, how-to-hack books. And on the left there is a platform from Evolution Robotics, where you put a PC on, and you program this thing with a GUI to wander around your house and do various stuff. And then there's a higher price point sort of robot toys -- the Sony Aibo. And on the right there, is one that the NEC developed, the PaPeRo, which I don't think they're going to release. But nevertheless, those sorts of things are out there. And we've seen, over the last two or three years, lawn-mowing robots, Husqvarna on the bottom, Friendly Robotics on top there, an Israeli company. And then in the last 12 months or so we've started to see a bunch of home-cleaning robots appear. The top left one is a very nice home-cleaning robot from a company called Dyson, in the U.K. Except it was so expensive -- 3,500 dollars -- they didn't release it. But at the bottom left, you see Electrolux, which is on sale. Another one from Karcher. At the bottom right is one that I built in my lab about 10 years ago, and we finally turned that into a product. And let me just show you that. We're going to give this away I think, Chris said, after the talk. This is a robot that you can go out and buy, and that will clean up your floor. And it starts off sort of just going around in ever-increasing circles. If it hits something -- you people see that? Now it's doing wall-following, it's following around my feet to clean up around me. Let's see, let's -- oh, who stole my Rice Krispies? They stole my Rice Krispies! (Laughter) Don't worry, relax, no, relax, it's a robot, it's smart! (Laughter) See, the three-year-old kids, they don't worry about it. It's grown-ups that get really upset. (Laughter) We'll just put some crap here. (Laughter) Okay. (Laughter) I don't know if you see -- so, I put a bunch of Rice Krispies there, I put some pennies, let's just shoot it at that, see if it cleans up. Yeah, OK. So -- we'll leave that for later. (Applause) Part of the trick was building a better cleaning mechanism, actually; the intelligence on board was fairly simple. And that's true with a lot of robots. We've all, I think, become, sort of computational chauvinists, and think that computation is everything, but the mechanics still matter. Here's another robot, the PackBot, that we've been building for a bunch of years. It's a military surveillance robot, to go in ahead of troops -- looking at caves, for instance. But we had to make it fairly robust, much more robust than the robots we build in our labs. (Laughter) On board that robot is a PC running Linux. It can withstand a 400G shock. The robot has local intelligence: it can flip itself over, can get itself into communication range, can go upstairs by itself, et cetera. Okay, so it's doing local navigation there. A soldier gives it a command to go upstairs, and it does. That was not a controlled descent. (Laughter) Now it's going to head off. And the big breakthrough for these robots, really, was September 11th. We had the robots down at the World Trade Center late that evening. Couldn't do a lot in the main rubble pile, things were just too -- there was nothing left to do. But we did go into all the surrounding buildings that had been evacuated, and searched for possible survivors in the buildings that were too dangerous to go into. Let's run this video. Reporter: ...battlefield companions are helping to reduce the combat risks. Nick Robertson has that story. Rodney Brooks: Can we have another one of these? Okay, good. So, this is a corporal who had seen a robot two weeks previously. He's sending robots into caves, looking at what's going on. The robot's being totally autonomous. The worst thing that's happened in the cave so far was one of the robots fell down ten meters. So one year ago, the US military didn't have these robots. Now they're on active duty in Afghanistan every day. And that's one of the reasons they say a robot invasion is happening. There's a sea change happening in how -- where technology's going. Thanks. And over the next couple of months, we're going to be sending robots in production down producing oil wells to get that last few years of oil out of the ground. Very hostile environments, 150˚ C, 10,000 PSI. Autonomous robots going down, doing this sort of work. But robots like this, they're a little hard to program. How, in the future, are we going to program our robots and make them easier to use? And I want to actually use a robot here -- a robot named Chris -- stand up. Yeah. Okay. Come over here. Now notice, he thinks robots have to be a bit stiff. He sort of does that. But I'm going to -- Chris Anderson: I'm just British. RB: Oh. (Laughter) (Applause) I'm going to show this robot a task. It's a very complex task. Now notice, he nodded there, he was giving me some indication he was understanding the flow of communication. And if I'd said something completely bizarre he would have looked askance at me, and regulated the conversation. So now I brought this up in front of him. I'd looked at his eyes, and I saw his eyes looked at this bottle top. And I'm doing this task here, and he's checking up. His eyes are going back and forth up to me, to see what I'm looking at -- so we've got shared attention. And so I do this task, and he looks, and he looks to me to see what's happening next. And now I'll give him the bottle, and we'll see if he can do the task. Can you do that? (Laughter) Okay. He's pretty good. Yeah. Good, good, good. I didn't show you how to do that. Now see if you can put it back together. (Laughter) And he thinks a robot has to be really slow. Good robot, that's good. So we saw a bunch of things there. We saw when we're interacting, we're trying to show someone how to do something, we direct their visual attention. The other thing communicates their internal state to us, whether he's understanding or not, regulates a social interaction. There was shared attention looking at the same sort of thing, and recognizing socially communicated reinforcement at the end. And we've been trying to put that into our lab robots because we think this is how you're going to want to interact with robots in the future. I just want to show you one technical diagram here. The most important thing for building a robot that you can interact with socially is its visual attention system. Because what it pays attention to is what it's seeing and interacting with, and what you're understanding what it's doing. So in the videos I'm about to show you, you're going to see a visual attention system on a robot which has -- it looks for skin tone in HSV space, so it works across all human colorings. It looks for highly saturated colors, from toys. And it looks for things that move around. And it weights those together into an attention window, and it looks for the highest-scoring place -- the stuff where the most interesting stuff is happening -- and that is what its eyes then segue to. And it looks right at that. At the same time, some top-down sort of stuff: might decide that it's lonely and look for skin tone, or might decide that it's bored and look for a toy to play with. And so these weights change. And over here on the right, this is what we call the Steven Spielberg memorial module. Did people see the movie "AI"? (Audience: Yes.) RB: Yeah, it was really bad, but -- remember, especially when Haley Joel Osment, the little robot, looked at the blue fairy for 2,000 years without taking his eyes off it? Well, this gets rid of that, because this is a habituation Gaussian that gets negative, and more and more intense as it looks at one thing. And it gets bored, so it will then look away at something else. So, once you've got that -- and here's a robot, here's Kismet, looking around for a toy. You can tell what it's looking at. You can estimate its gaze direction from those eyeballs covering its camera, and you can tell when it's actually seeing the toy. And it's got a little bit of an emotional response here. (Laughter) But it's still going to pay attention if something more significant comes into its field of view -- such as Cynthia Breazeal, the builder of this robot, from the right. It sees her, pays attention to her. Kismet has an underlying, three-dimensional emotional space, a vector space, of where it is emotionally. And at different places in that space, it expresses -- can we have the volume on here? Can you hear that now, out there? (Audience: Yeah.) Kismet: Do you really think so? Do you really think so? Do you really think so? RB: So it's expressing its emotion through its face and the prosody in its voice. And when I was dealing with my robot over here, Chris, the robot, was measuring the prosody in my voice, and so we have the robot measure prosody for four basic messages that mothers give their children pre-linguistically. Here we've got naive subjects praising the robot: Voice: Nice robot. You're such a cute little robot. (Laughter) RB: And the robot's reacting appropriately. Voice: ...very good, Kismet. (Laughter) Voice: Look at my smile. RB: It smiles. She imitates the smile. This happens a lot. These are naive subjects. Here we asked them to get the robot's attention and indicate when they have the robot's attention. Voice: Hey, Kismet, ah, there it is. RB: So she realizes she has the robot's attention. Voice: Kismet, do you like the toy? Oh. RB: Now, here they're asked to prohibit the robot, and this first woman really pushes the robot into an emotional corner. Voice: No. No. You're not to do that. No. (Laughter) Not appropriate. No. No. (Laughter) RB: I'm going to leave it at that. We put that together. Then we put in turn taking. When we talk to someone, we talk. Then we sort of raise our eyebrows, move our eyes, give the other person the idea it's their turn to talk. And then they talk, and then we pass the baton back and forth between each other. So we put this in the robot. We got a bunch of naive subjects in, we didn't tell them anything about the robot, sat them down in front of the robot and said, talk to the robot. Now what they didn't know was, the robot wasn't understanding a word they said, and that the robot wasn't speaking English. It was just saying random English phonemes. And I want you to watch carefully, at the beginning of this, where this person, Ritchie, who happened to talk to the robot for 25 minutes -- (Laughter) -- says, "I want to show you something. I want to show you my watch." And he brings the watch center, into the robot's field of vision, points to it, gives it a motion cue, and the robot looks at the watch quite successfully. We don't know whether he understood or not that the robot -- Notice the turn-taking. Ritchie: OK, I want to show you something. OK, this is a watch that my girlfriend gave me. Robot: Oh, cool. Ritchie: Yeah, look, it's got a little blue light in it too. I almost lost it this week. (Laughter) RB: So it's making eye contact with him, following his eyes. Ritchie: Can you do the same thing? Robot: Yeah, sure. RB: And they successfully have that sort of communication. And here's another aspect of the sorts of things that Chris and I were doing. This is another robot, Cog. They first make eye contact, and then, when Christie looks over at this toy, the robot estimates her gaze direction and looks at the same thing that she's looking at. (Laughter) So we're going to see more and more of this sort of robot over the next few years in labs. But then the big questions, two big questions that people ask me are: if we make these robots more and more human-like, will we accept them, will we -- will they need rights eventually? And the other question people ask me is, will they want to take over? (Laughter) And on the first -- you know, this has been a very Hollywood theme with lots of movies. You probably recognize these characters here -- where in each of these cases, the robots want more respect. Well, do you ever need to give robots respect? They're just machines, after all. But I think, you know, we have to accept that we are just machines. After all, that's certainly what modern molecular biology says about us. You don't see a description of how, you know, Molecule A, you know, comes up and docks with this other molecule. And it's moving forward, you know, propelled by various charges, and then the soul steps in and tweaks those molecules so that they connect. It's all mechanistic. We are mechanism. If we are machines, then in principle at least, we should be able to build machines out of other stuff, which are just as alive as we are. But I think for us to admit that, we have to give up on our special-ness, in a certain way. And we've had the retreat from special-ness under the barrage of science and technology many times over the last few hundred years, at least. 500 years ago we had to give up the idea that we are the center of the universe when the earth started to go around the sun; 150 years ago, with Darwin, we had to give up the idea we were different from animals. And to imagine -- you know, it's always hard for us. Recently we've been battered with the idea that maybe we didn't even have our own creation event, here on earth, which people didn't like much. And then the human genome said, maybe we only have 35,000 genes. And that was really -- people didn't like that, we've got more genes than that. We don't like to give up our special-ness, so, you know, having the idea that robots could really have emotions, or that robots could be living creatures -- I think is going to be hard for us to accept. But we're going to come to accept it over the next 50 years or so. And the second question is, will the machines want to take over? And here the standard scenario is that we create these things, they grow, we nurture them, they learn a lot from us, and then they start to decide that we're pretty boring, slow. They want to take over from us. And for those of you that have teenagers, you know what that's like. (Laughter) But Hollywood extends it to the robots. And the question is, you know, will someone accidentally build a robot that takes over from us? And that's sort of like this lone guy in the backyard, you know -- "I accidentally built a 747." I don't think that's going to happen. And I don't think -- (Laughter) -- I don't think we're going to deliberately build robots that we're uncomfortable with. We'll -- you know, they're not going to have a super bad robot. Before that has to come to be a mildly bad robot, and before that a not so bad robot. (Laughter) And we're just not going to let it go that way. (Laughter) So, I think I'm going to leave it at that: the robots are coming, we don't have too much to worry about, it's going to be a lot of fun, and I hope you all enjoy the journey over the next 50 years. (Applause)

The public debate about architecture quite often just stays on contemplating the final result, the architectural object. Is the latest tower in London a gherkin or a sausage or a sex tool? So recently, we asked ourselves if we could invent a format that could actually tell the stories behind the projects, maybe combining images and drawings and words to actually sort of tell stories about architecture. And we discovered that we didn't have to invent it, it already existed in the form of a comic book. So we basically copied the format of the comic book to actually tell the stories of behind the scenes, how our projects actually evolve through adaptation and improvisation. Sort of through the turmoil and the opportunities and the incidents of the real world. We call this comic book "Yes is More," which is obviously a sort of evolution of the ideas of some of our heroes. In this case it's Mies van der Rohe's Less is More. He triggered the modernist revolution. After him followed the post-modern counter-revolution, Robert Venturi saying, "Less is a bore." After him, Philip Johnson sort of introduced (Laughter) you could say promiscuity, or at least openness to new ideas with, "I am a whore." Recently, Obama has introduced optimism at a sort of time of global financial crisis. And what we'd like to say with "Yes is More" is basically trying to question this idea that the architectural avant-garde is almost always negatively defined, as who or what we are against. The cliche of the radical architect is the sort of angry young man rebelling against the establishment. Or this idea of the misunderstood genius, frustrated that the world doesn't fit in with his or her ideas. Rather than revolution, we're much more interested in evolution, this idea that things gradually evolve by adapting and improvising to the changes of the world. In fact, I actually think that Darwin is one of the people who best explains our design process. His famous evolutionary tree could almost be a diagram of the way we work. As you can see, a project evolves through a series of generations of design meetings. At each meeting, there's way too many ideas. Only the best ones can survive. And through a process of architectural selection, we might choose a really beautiful model or we might have a very functional model. We mate them. They have sort of mutant offspring. And through these sort of generations of design meetings we arrive at a design. A very literal way of showing it is a project we did for a library and a hotel in Copenhagen. The design process was really tough, almost like a struggle for survival, but gradually an idea evolved: this sort of idea of a rational tower that melts together with the surrounding city, sort of expanding the public space onto what we refer to as a Scandinavian version of the Spanish Steps in Rome, but sort of public on the outside, as well as on the inside, with the library. But Darwin doesn't only explain the evolution of a single idea. As you can see, sometimes a subspecies branches off. And quite often we sit in a design meeting and we discover that there is this great idea. It doesn't really work in this context. But for another client in another culture, it could really be the right answer to a different question. So as a result, we never throw anything out. We keep our office almost like an archive of architectural biodiversity. You never know when you might need it. And what I'd like to do now, in an act of warp-speed storytelling, is tell the story of how two projects evolved by adapting and improvising to the happenstance of the world. The first story starts last year when we went to Shanghai to do the competition for the Danish National Pavilion for the World Expo in 2010. And we saw this guy, Haibao. He's the mascot of the expo, and he looks strangely familiar. In fact he looked like a building we had designed for a hotel in the north of Sweden. When we submitted it for the Swedish competition we thought it was a really cool scheme, but it didn't exactly look like something from the north of Sweden. The Swedish jury didn't think so either. So we lost. But then we had a meeting with a Chinese businessman who saw our design and said, "Wow, that's the Chinese character for the word 'people.'" (Laughter) So, apparently this is how you write "people," as in the People's Republic of China. We even double checked. And at the same time, we got invited to exhibit at the Shanghai Creative Industry Week. So we thought like, this is too much of an opportunity, so we hired a feng shui master. We scaled the building up three times to Chinese proportions, and went to China. (Laughter) So the People's Building, as we called it. This is our two interpreters, sort of reading the architecture. It went on the cover of the Wen Wei Po newspaper, which got Mr. Liangyu Chen, the mayor of Shanghai, to visit the exhibition. And we had the chance to explain the project. And he said, "Shanghai is the city in the world with most skyscrapers," but to him it was as if the connection to the roots had been cut over. And with the People's Building, he saw an architecture that could bridge the gap between the ancient wisdom of China and the progressive future of China. So we obviously profoundly agreed with him. (Laughter) (Applause) Unfortunately, Mr. Chen is now in prison for corruption. (Laughter) But like I said, Haibao looked very familiar, because he is actually the Chinese character for "people." And they chose this mascot because the theme of the expo is "Better City, Better Life." Sustainability. And we thought, sustainability has grown into being this sort of neo-Protestant idea that it has to hurt in order to do good. You know, you're not supposed to take long, warm showers. You're not supposed to fly on holidays because it's bad for the environment. Gradually, you get this idea that sustainable life is less fun than normal life. So we thought that maybe it could be interesting to focus on examples where a sustainable city actually increases the quality of life. We also asked ourselves, what could Denmark possibly show China that would be relevant? You know, it's one of the biggest countries in the world, one of the smallest. China symbolized by the dragon. Denmark, we have a national bird, the swan. (Laughter) China has many great poets, but we discovered that in the People's Republic public school curriculum, they have three fairy tales by An Tu Sheng, or Hans Christian Anderson, as we call him. So that means that all 1.3 billion Chinese have grown up with "The Emperor's New Clothes," "The Matchstick Girl" and "The Little Mermaid." It's almost like a fragment of Danish culture integrated into Chinese culture. The biggest tourist attraction in China is the Great Wall. The Great Wall is the only thing that can be seen from the moon. The big tourist attraction in Denmark is The Little Mermaid. That can actually hardly be seen from the canal tours. (Laughter) And it sort of shows the difference between these two cities. Copenhagen, Shanghai, modern, European. But then we looked at recent urban development, and we noticed that this is like a Shanghai street, 30 years ago. All bikes, no cars. This is how it looks today; all traffic jam. Bicycles have become forbidden many places. Meanwhile, in Copenhagen we're actually expanding the bicycle lanes. A third of all the people commute by bike. We have a free system of bicycles called the City Bike that you can borrow if you visit the city. So we thought, why don't we reintroduce the bicycle in China? We donate 1,000 bikes to Shanghai. So if you come to the expo, go straight to the Danish pavilion, get a Danish bike, and then continue on that to visit the other pavilions. Like I said, Shanghai and Copenhagen are both port cities, but in Copenhagen the water has gotten so clean that you can actually swim in it. One of the first projects we ever did was the harbor bath in Copenhagen, sort of continuing the public realm into the water. So we thought that these expos quite often have a lot of state financed propaganda, images, statements, but no real experience. So just like with a bike, we don't talk about it. You can try it. Like with the water, instead of talking about it, we're going to sail a million liters of harbor water from Copenhagen to Shanghai, so the Chinese who have the courage can actually dive in and feel how clean it is. This is where people normally object that it doesn't sound very sustainable to sail water from Copenhagen to China. But in fact, the container ships go full of goods from China to Denmark, and then they sail empty back. So quite often you load water for ballast. So we can actually hitch a ride for free. And in the middle of this sort of harbor bath, we're actually going to put the actual Little Mermaid. So the real Mermaid, the real water, and the real bikes. And when she's gone, we're going to invite a Chinese artist to reinterpret her. The architecture of the pavilion is this sort of loop of exhibition and bikes. When you go to the exhibition, you'll see the Mermaid and the pool. You'll walk around, start looking for a bicycle on the roof, jump on your ride and then continue out into the rest of the expo. So when we actually won the competition we had to do an exhibition in China explaining the project. And to our surprise we got one of our boards back with corrections from the Chinese state censorship. The first thing, the China map missed Taiwan. It's a very serious political issue in China. We will add on. The second thing, we had compared the swan to the dragon, and then the Chinese state said, "Suggest change to panda." (Laughter) (Applause) So, when it came out in Denmark that we were actually going to move our national monument, the National People's Party sort of rebelled against it. They tried to pass a law against moving the Mermaid. So for the first time, I got invited to speak at the National Parliament. It was kind of interesting because in the morning, from 9 to 11, they were discussing the bailout package -- how many billions to invest in saving the Danish economy. And then at 11 o'clock they stopped talking about these little issues. And then from 11 to 1, they were debating whether or not to send the Mermaid to China. (Laughter) (Applause) But to conclude, if you want to see the Mermaid from May to December next year, don't come to Copenhagen, because she's going to be in Shanghai. If you do come to Copenhagen, you will probably see an installation by Ai Weiwei, the Chinese artist. But if the Chinese government intervenes, it might even be a panda. (Laughter) So the second story that I'd like to tell is, actually starts in my own house. This is my apartment. This is the view from my apartment, over the sort of landscape of triangular balconies that our client called the Leonardo DiCaprio balcony. And they form this sort of vertical backyard where, on a nice summer day, you'll actually get introduced to all your neighbors in a vertical radius of 10 meters. The house is sort of a distortion of a square block. Trying to zigzag it to make sure that all of the apartments look at the straight views, instead of into each other. Until recently, this was the view from my apartment, onto this place where our client actually bought the neighbor site. And he said that he was going to do an apartment block next to a parking structure. And we thought, rather than doing a traditional stack of apartments looking straight into a big boring block of cars, why don't we turn all the apartments into penthouses, put them on a podium of cars. And because Copenhagen is completely flat, if you want to have a nice south-facing slope with a view, you basically have to do it yourself. Then we sort of cut up the volume, so we wouldn't block the view from my apartment. (Laughter) And essentially the parking is sort of occupying the deep space underneath the apartments. And up in the sun, you have a single layer of apartments that combine all the splendors of a suburban lifestyle, like a house with a garden with a sort of metropolitan view, and a sort of dense urban location. This is our first architectural model. This is an aerial photo taken last summer. And essentially, the apartments cover the parking. They are accessed through this diagonal elevator. It's actually a stand-up product from Switzerland, because in Switzerland they have a natural need for diagonal elevators. (Laughter) And the facade of the parking, we wanted to make the parking naturally ventilated, so we needed to perforate it. And we discovered that by controlling the size of the holes, we could actually turn the entire facade into a gigantic, naturally ventilated, rasterized image. And since we always refer to the project as The Mountain, we commissioned this Japanese Himalaya photographer to give us this beautiful photo of Mount Everest, making the entire building a 3,000 square meter artwork. (Applause) So if you go back into the parking, into the corridors, it's almost like traveling into a parallel universe from cars and colors, into this sort of south-facing urban oasis. The wood of your apartment continues outside becoming the facades. If you go even further, it turns into this green garden. And all the rainwater that drops on the Mountain is actually accumulated. And there is an automatic irrigation system that makes sure that this sort of landscape of gardens, in one or two years it will sort of transform into a Cambodian temple ruin, completely covered in green. So, the Mountain is like our first built example of what we like to refer to as architectural alchemy. This idea that you can actually create, if not gold, then at least added value by mixing traditional ingredients, like normal apartments and normal parking, and in this case actually offer people the chance that they don't have to choose between a life with a garden or a life in the city. They can actually have both. As an architect, it's really hard to set the agenda. You can't just say that now I'd like to do a sustainable city in central Asia, because that's not really how you get commissions. You always have to sort of adapt and improvise to the opportunities and accidents that happen, and the sort of turmoil of the world. One last example is that recently we, like last summer, we won the competition to design a Nordic national bank. This was the director of the bank when he was still smiling. (Laughter) It was in the middle of the capital so we were really excited by this opportunity. Unfortunately, it was the national bank of Iceland. At the same time, we actually had a visitor -- a minister from Azerbaijan came to our office. We took him to see the Mountain. And he got very excited by this idea that you could actually make mountains out of architecture, because Azerbaijan is known as the Alps of Central Asia. So he asked us if we could actually imagine an urban master plan on an island outside the capital that would recreate the silhouette of the seven most significant mountains of Azerbaijan. So we took the commission. And we made this small movie that I'd like to show. We quite often make little movies. We always argue a lot about the soundtrack, but in this case it was really easy to choose the song. So basically, Baku is this sort of crescent bay overlooking the island of Zira, the island that we are planning -- almost like the diagram of their flag. And our main idea was to sort of sample the seven most significant mountains of the topography of Azerbaijan and reinterpret them into urban and architectural structures, inhabitable of human life. Then we place these mountains on the island, surrounding this sort of central green valley, almost like a central park. And what makes it interesting is that the island right now is just a piece of desert. It has no vegetation. It has no water. It has no energy, no resources. So we actually sort of designed the entire island as a single ecosystem, exploiting wind energy to drive the desalination plants, and to use the thermal properties of water to heat and cool the buildings. And all the sort of excess freshwater wastewater is filtered organically into the landscape, gradually transforming the desert island into sort of a green, lush landscape. So, you can say where an urban development normally happens at the expense of nature, in this case it's actually creating nature. And the buildings, they don't only sort of invoke the imagery of the mountains, they also operate like mountains. They create shelter from the wind. They accumulate the solar energy. They accumulate the water. So they actually transform the entire island into a single ecosystem. So we recently presented the master plan, and it has gotten approved. And this summer we are starting the construction documents of the two first mountains, in what's going to be the first carbon-neutral island in Central Asia. (Applause) Yes, maybe just to round off. So in a way you can see how the Mountain in Copenhagen sort of evolved into the Seven Peaks of Azerbaijan. With a little luck and some more evolution, maybe in 10 years it could be the Five Mountains on Mars. Thank you. (Applause)

There's a great big elephant in the room called the economy. So let's start talking about that. I wanted to give you a current picture of the economy. That's what I have behind myself. (Laughter) But of course what we have to remember is this. And what you have to think about is, when you're dancing in the flames, what's next? So what I'm going to try to do in the next 17 and a half minutes is I'm going to talk first about the flames -- where we are in the economy -- and then I'm going to take three trends that have taken place at TED over the last 25 years and that will take place in this conference and I will try and bring them together. And I will try and give you a sense of what the ultimate reboot looks like. Those three trends are the ability to engineer cells, the ability to engineer tissues, and robots. And somehow it will all make sense. But anyway, let's start with the economy. There's a couple of really big problems that are still sitting there. One is leverage. And the problem with leverage is it makes the U.S. financial system look like this. (Laughter) So, a normal commercial bank has nine to 10 times leverage. That means for every dollar you deposit, it loans out about nine or 10. A normal investment bank is not a deposit bank, it's an investment bank; it has 15 to 20 times. It turns out that B of A in September had 32 times. And your friendly Citibank had 47 times. Oops. That means every bad loan goes bad 47 times over. And that, of course, is the reason why all of you are making such generous and wonderful donations to these nice folks. And as you think about that, you've got to wonder: so what do banks have in store for you now? (Laughter) It ain't pretty. The government, meanwhile, has been acting like Santa Claus. We all love Santa Claus, right? But the problem with Santa Clause is, if you look at the mandatory spending of what these folks have been doing and promising folks, it turned out that in 1967, 38 percent was mandatory spending on what we call "entitlements." And then by 2007 it was 68 percent. And we weren't supposed to run into 100 percent until about 2030. Except we've been so busy giving away a trillion here, a trillion there, that we've brought that date of reckoning forward to about 2017. And we thought we were going to be able to lay these debts off on our kids, but, guess what? We're going to start to pay them. And the problem with this stuff is, now that the bill's come due, it turns out Santa isn't quite as cute when it's summertime. Right? (Laughter) Here's some advice from one of the largest investors in the United States. This guy runs the China Investment Corporation. He is the main buyer of U.S. Treasury bonds. And he gave an interview in December. Here's his first bit of advice. And here's his second bit of advice. And, by the way, the Chinese Prime Minister reiterated this at Davos last Sunday. This stuff is getting serious enough that if we don't start paying attention to the deficit, we're going to end up losing the dollar. And then all bets are off. Let me show you what it looks like. I think I can safely say that I'm the only trillionaire in this room. This is an actual bill. And it's 10 triliion dollars. The only problem with this bill is it's not really worth very much. That was eight bucks last week, four bucks this week, a buck next week. And that's what happens to currencies when you don't stand behind them. So the next time somebody as cute as this shows up on your doorstep, and sometimes this creature's called Chrysler and sometimes Ford and sometimes ... whatever you want -- you've just got to say no. And you've got to start banishing a word that's called "entitlement." And the reason we have to do that in the short term is because we have just run out of cash. If you look at the federal budget, this is what it looks like. The orange slice is what's discretionary. Everything else is mandated. It makes no difference if we cut out the bridges to Alaska in the overall scheme of things. So what we have to start thinking about doing is capping our medical spending because that's a monster that's simply going to eat the entire budget. We've got to start thinking about asking people to retire a little bit later. If you're 60 to 65 you retire on time. Your 401(k) just got nailed. If you're 50 to 60 we want you to work two years more. If you're under 50 we want you to work four more years. The reason why that's reasonable is, when your grandparents were given Social Security, they got it at 65 and were expected to check out at 68. Sixty-eight is young today. We've also got to cut the military about three percent a year. We've got to limit other mandatory spending. We've got to quit borrowing as much, because otherwise the interest is going to eat that whole pie. And we've got to end up with a smaller government. And if we don't start changing this trend line, we are going to lose the dollar and start to look like Iceland. I got what you're thinking. This is going to happen when hell freezes over. But let me remind you this December it did snow in Vegas. (Laughter) Here's what happens if you don't address this stuff. So, Japan had a fiscal real estate crisis back in the late '80s. And its 225 largest companies today are worth one quarter of what they were 18 years ago. We don't fix this now, how would you like to see a Dow 3,500 in 2026? Because that's the consequence of not dealing with this stuff. And unless you want this person to not just become the CFO of Florida, but the United States, we'd better deal with this stuff. That's the short term. That's the flame part. That's the financial crisis. Now, right behind the financial crisis there's a second and bigger wave that we need to talk about. That wave is much larger, much more powerful, and that's of course the wave of technology. And what's really important in this stuff is, as we cut, we also have to grow. Among other things, because startup companies are .02 percent of U.S. GDP investmentm and they're about 17.8 percent of output. It's groups like that in this room that generate the future of the U.S. economy. And that's what we've got to keep growing. We don't have to keep growing these bridges to nowhere. So let's bring a romance novelist into this conversation. And that's where these three trends come together. That's where the ability to engineer microbes, the ability to engineer tissues, and the ability to engineer robots begin to lead to a reboot. And let me recap some of the stuff you've seen. Craig Venter showed up last year and showed you the first fully programmable cell that acts like hardware where you can insert DNA and have it boot up as a different species. In parallel, the folks at MIT have been building a standard registry of biological parts. So think of it as a Radio Shack for biology. You can go out and get your proteins, your RNA, your DNA, whatever. And start building stuff. In 2006 they brought together high school students and college students and started to build these little odd creatures. They just happened to be alive instead of circuit boards. Here was one of the first things they built. So, cells have this cycle. First they don't grow. Then they grow exponentially. Then they stop growing. Graduate students wanted a way of telling which stage they were in. So they engineered these cells so that when they're growing in the exponential phase, they would smell like wintergreen. And when they stopped growing they would smell like bananas. And you could tell very easily when your experiment was working and wasn't, and where it was in the phase. This got a bit more complicated two years later. Twenty-one countries came together. Dozens of teams. They started competing. The team from Rice University started to engineer the substance in red wine that makes red wine good for you into beer. So you take resveratrol and you put it into beer. Of course, one of the judges is wandering by, and he goes, "Wow! Cancer-fighting beer! There is a God." (Laughter) The team from Taiwan was a little bit more ambitious. They tried to engineer bacterias in such a way that they would act as your kidneys. Four years ago, I showed you this picture. And people oohed and ahhed, because Cliff Tabin had been able to grow an extra wing on a chicken. And that was very cool stuff back then. But now moving from bacterial engineering to tissue engineering, let me show you what's happened in that period of time. Two years ago, you saw this creature. An almost-extinct animal from Xochimilco, Mexico called an axolotl that can re-generate its limbs. You can freeze half its heart. It regrows. You can freeze half the brain. It regrows. It's almost like leaving Congress. (Laughter) But now, you don't have to have the animal itself to regenerate, because you can build cloned mice molars in Petri dishes. And, of course if you can build mice molars in Petri dishes, you can grow human molars in Petri dishes. This should not surprise you, right? I mean, you're born with no teeth. You give away all your teeth to the tooth fairy. You re-grow a set of teeth. But then if you lose one of those second set of teeth, they don't regrow, unless, if you're a lawyer. (Laughter) But, of course, for most of us, we know how to grow teeth, and therefore we can take adult stem teeth, put them on a biodegradable mold, re-grow a tooth, and simply implant it. And we can do it with other things. So, a Spanish woman who was dying of T.B. had a donor trachea, they took all the cells off the trachea, they spraypainted her stem cells onto that cartilage. She regrew her own trachea, and 72 hours later it was implanted. She's now running around with her kids. This is going on in Tony Atala's lab in Wake Forest where he is re-growing ears for injured soldiers, and he's also re-growing bladders. So there are now nine women walking around Boston with re-grown bladders, which is much more pleasant than walking around with a whole bunch of plastic bags for the rest of your life. This is kind of getting boring, right? I mean, you understand where this story's going. But, I mean it gets more interesting. Last year, this group was able to take all the cells off a heart, leaving just the cartilage. Then, they sprayed stem cells onto that heart, from a mouse. Those stem cells self-organized, and that heart started to beat. Life happens. This may be one of the ultimate papers. This was done in Japan and in the U.S., published at the same time, and it rebooted skin cells into stem cells, last year. That meant that you can take the stuff right here, and turn it into almost anything in your body. And this is becoming common, it's moving very quickly, it's moving in a whole series of places. Third trend: robots. Those of us of a certain age grew up expecting that by now we would have Rosie the Robot from "The Jetsons" in our house. And all we've got is a Roomba. (Laughter) We also thought we'd have this robot to warn us of danger. Didn't happen. And these were robots engineered for a flat world, right? So, Rosie runs around on skates and the other one ran on flat threads. If you don't have a flat world, that's not good, which is why the robot's we're designing today are a little different. This is Boston Dynamics' "BigDog." And this is about as close as you can get to a physical Turing test. O.K., so let me remind you, a Turing test is where you've got a wall, you're talking to somebody on the other side of the wall, and when you don't know if that thing is human or animal -- that's when computers have reached human intelligence. This is not an intelligence Turing rest, but this is as close as you can get to a physical Turing test. And this stuff is moving very quickly, and by the way, that thing can carry about 350 pounds of weight. These are not the only interesting robots. You've also got flies, the size of flies, that are being made by Robert Wood at Harvard. You've got Stickybots that are being made at Stanford. And as you bring these things together, as you bring cells, biological tissue engineering and mechanics together, you begin to get some really odd questions. In the last Olympics, this gentleman, who had several world records in the Special Olympics, tried to run in the normal Olympics. The only issue with Oscar Pistorius is he was born without bones in the lower part of his legs. He came within about a second of qualifying. He sued to be allowed to run, and he won the suit, but didn't qualify by time. Next Olympics, you can bet that Oscar, or one of Oscar's successors, is going to make the time. And two or three Olympics after that, they are going to be unbeatable. And as you bring these trends together, and as you think of what it means to take people who are profoundly deaf, who can now begin to hear -- I mean, remember the evolution of hearing aids, right? I mean, your grandparents had these great big cones, and then your parents had these odd boxes that would squawk at odd times during dinner, and now we have these little buds that nobody sees. And now you have cochlear implants that go into people's heads and allow the deaf to begin to hear. Now, they can't hear as well as you and I can. But, in 10 or 15 machine generations they will, and these are machine generations, not human generations. And about two or three years after they can hear as well as you and I can, they'll be able to hear maybe how bats sing, or how whales talk, or how dogs talk, and other types of tonal scales. They'll be able to focus their hearing, they'll be able to increase the sensitivity, decrease the sensitivity, do a series of things that we can't do. And the same thing is happening in eyes. This is a group in Germany that's beginning to engineer eyes so that people who are blind can begin to see light and dark. Very primitive. And then they'll be able to see shape. And then they'll be able to see color, and then they'll be able to see in definition, and one day, they'll see as well as you and I can. And a couple of years after that, they'll be able to see in ultraviolet, they'll be able to see in infrared, they'll be able to focus their eyes, they'll be able to come into a microfocus. They'll do stuff you and I can't do. All of these things are coming together, and it's a particularly important thing to understand, as we worry about the flames of the present, to keep an eye on the future. And, of course, the future is looking back 200 years, because next week is the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. And it's the 150th anniversary of the publication of "The Origin of Species." And Darwin, of course, argued that evolution is a natural state. It is a natural state in everything that is alive, including hominids. There have actually been 22 species of hominids that have been around, have evolved, have wandered in different places, have gone extinct. It is common for hominids to evolve. And that's the reason why, as you look at the hominid fossil record, erectus, and heidelbergensis, and floresiensis, and Neanderthals, and Homo sapiens, all overlap. The common state of affairs is to have overlapping versions of hominids, not one. And as you think of the implications of that, here's a brief history of the universe. The universe was created 13.7 billion years ago, and then you created all the stars, and all the planets, and all the galaxies, and all the Milky Ways. And then you created Earth about 4.5 billion years ago, and then you got life about four billion years ago, and then you got hominids about 0.006 billion years ago, and then you got our version of hominids about 0.0015 billion years ago. Ta-dah! Maybe the reason for thr creation of the universe, and all the galaxies, and all the planets, and all the energy, and all the dark energy, and all the rest of stuff is to create what's in this room. Maybe not. That would be a mildly arrogant viewpoint. (Laughter) So, if that's not the purpose of the universe, then what's next? (Laughter) I think what we're going to see is we're going to see a different species of hominid. I think we're going to move from a Homo sapiens into a Homo evolutis. And I think this isn't 1,000 years out. I think most of us are going to glance at it, and our grandchildren are going to begin to live it. And a Homo evolutis brings together these three trends into a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over the evolution of his species, her species and other species. And that, of course, would be the ultimate reboot. Thank you very much. (Applause)

This is my first time at TED. Normally, as an advertising man, I actually speak at TED Evil, which is TED's secret sister that pays all the bills. It's held every two years in Burma. And I particularly remember a really good speech by Kim Jong Il on how to get teens smoking again. (Laughter) But, actually, it's suddenly come to me after years working in the business, that what we create in advertising, which is intangible value -- you might call it perceived value, you might call it badge value, subjective value, intangible value of some kind -- gets rather a bad rap. If you think about it, if you want to live in a world in the future where there are fewer material goods, you basically have two choices. You can either live in a world which is poorer, which people in general don't like. Or you can live in a world where actually intangible value constitutes a greater part of overall value, that actually intangible value, in many ways is a very, very fine substitute for using up labor or limited resources in the creation of things. Here is one example. This is a train which goes from London to Paris. The question was given to a bunch of engineers, about 15 years ago, "How do we make the journey to Paris better?" And they came up with a very good engineering solution, which was to spend six billion pounds building completely new tracks from London to the coast, and knocking about 40 minutes off a three-and-half-hour journey time. Now, call me Mister Picky. I'm just an ad man ... ... but it strikes me as a slightly unimaginative way of improving a train journey merely to make it shorter. Now what is the hedonic opportunity cost on spending six billion pounds on those railway tracks? Here is my naive advertising man's suggestion. What you should in fact do is employ all of the world's top male and female supermodels, pay them to walk the length of the train, handing out free Chateau Petrus for the entire duration of the journey. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, you'll still have about three billion pounds left in change, and people will ask for the trains to be slowed down. (Laughter) Now, here is another naive advertising man's question again. And this shows that engineers, medical people, scientific people, have an obsession with solving the problems of reality, when actually most problems, once you reach a basic level of wealth in society, most problems are actually problems of perception. So I'll ask you another question. What on earth is wrong with placebos? They seem fantastic to me. They cost very little to develop. They work extraordinarily well. They have no side effects, or if they do, they're imaginary, so you can safely ignore them. (Laughter) So I was discussing this. And I actually went to the Marginal Revolution blog by Tyler Cowen. I don't know if anybody knows it. Someone was actually suggesting that you can take this concept further, and actually produce placebo education. The point is that education doesn't actually work by teaching you things. It actually works by giving you the impression that you've had a very good education, which gives you an insane sense of unwarranted self-confidence, which then makes you very, very successful in later life. So, welcome to Oxford, ladies and gentlemen. (Laughter) (Applause) But, actually, the point of placebo education is interesting. How many problems of life can be solved actually by tinkering with perception, rather than that tedious, hardworking and messy business of actually trying to change reality? Here's a great example from history. I've heard this attributed to several other kings, but doing a bit of historical research, it seems to be Fredrick the Great. Fredrick the Great of Prussia was very, very keen for the Germans to adopt the potato and to eat it, because he realized that if you had two sources of carbohydrate, wheat and potatoes, you get less price volatility in bread. And you get a far lower risk of famine, because you actually had two crops to fall back on, not one. The only problem is: potatoes, if you think about it, look pretty disgusting. And also, 18th century Prussians ate very, very few vegetables -- rather like contemporary Scottish people. (Laughter) So, actually, he tried making it compulsory. The Prussian peasantry said, "We can't even get the dogs to eat these damn things. They are absolutely disgusting and they're good for nothing." There are even records of people being executed for refusing to grow potatoes. So he tried plan B. He tried the marketing solution, which is he declared the potato as a royal vegetable, and none but the royal family could consume it. And he planted it in a royal potato patch, with guards who had instructions to guard over it, night and day, but with secret instructions not to guard it very well. (Laughter) Now, 18th century peasants know that there is one pretty safe rule in life, which is if something is worth guarding, it's worth stealing. Before long, there was a massive underground potato-growing operation in Germany. What he'd effectively done is he'd re-branded the potato. It was an absolute masterpiece. I told this story and a gentleman from Turkey came up to me and said, "Very, very good marketer, Fredrick the Great. But not a patch on Ataturk." Ataturk, rather like Nicolas Sarkozy, was very keen to discourage the wearing of a veil, in Turkey, to modernize it. Now, boring people would have just simply banned the veil. But that would have ended up with a lot of awful kickback and a hell of a lot of resistance. Ataturk was a lateral thinker. He made it compulsory for prostitutes to wear the veil. (Laughter) (Applause) I can't verify that fully, but it does not matter. There is your environmental problem solved, by the way, guys: All convicted child molesters have to drive a Porsche Cayenne. (Laughter) What Ataturk realized actually is two very fundamental things. Which is that, actually, first one, all value is actually relative. All value is perceived value. For those of you who don't speak Spanish, jugo de naranja -- it's actually the Spanish for "orange juice." Because actually it's not the dollar. It's actually the peso in Buenos Aires. Very clever Buenos Aires street vendors decided to practice price discrimination to the detriment of any passing gringo tourists. As an advertising man, I have to admire that. But the first thing is that all value is subjective. Second point is that persuasion is often better than compulsion. These funny signs that flash your speed at you, some of the new ones, on the bottom right, now actually show a smiley face or a frowny face, to act as an emotional trigger. What's fascinating about these signs is they cost about 10 percent of the running cost of a conventional speed camera, but they prevent twice as many accidents. So, the bizarre thing, which is baffling to conventional, classically trained economists, is that a weird little smiley face has a better effect on changing your behavior than the threat of a £60 fine and three penalty points. Tiny little behavioral economics detail: in Italy, penalty points go backwards. You start with 12 and they take them away. Because they found that loss aversion is a more powerful influence on people's behavior. In Britain we tend to feel, "Whoa! Got another three!" Not so in Italy. Another fantastic case of creating intangible value to replace actual or material value, which remember, is what, after all, the environmental movement needs to be about: This again is from Prussia, from, I think, about 1812, 1813. The wealthy Prussians, to help in the war against the French, were encouraged to give in all their jewelry. And it was replaced with replica jewelry made of cast iron. Here's one: "Gold gab ich für Eisen, 1813." The interesting thing is that for 50 years hence, the highest status jewelry you could wear in Prussia wasn't made of gold or diamonds. It was made of cast iron. Because actually, never mind the actual intrinsic value of having gold jewelry. This actually had symbolic value, badge value. It said that your family had made a great sacrifice in the past. So, the modern equivalent would of course be this. (Laughter) But, actually, there is a thing, just as there are Veblen goods, where the value of the good depends on it being expensive and rare -- there are opposite kind of things where actually the value in them depends on them being ubiquitous, classless and minimalistic. If you think about it, Shakerism was a proto-environmental movement. Adam Smith talks about 18th century America, where the prohibition against visible displays of wealth was so great, it was almost a block in the economy in New England, because even wealthy farmers could find nothing to spend their money on without incurring the displeasure of their neighbors. It's perfectly possible to create these social pressures which lead to more egalitarian societies. What's also interesting, if you look at products that have a high component of what you might call messaging value, a high component of intangible value, versus their intrinsic value: They are often quite egalitarian. In terms of dress, denim is perhaps the perfect example of something which replaces material value with symbolic value. Coca-Cola. A bunch of you may be a load of pinkos, and you may not like the Coca-Cola company, but it's worth remembering Andy Warhol's point about Coke. What Warhol said about Coke is, he said, "What I really like about Coca-Cola is the president of the United States can't get a better Coke than the bum on the corner of the street." Now, that is, actually, when you think about it -- we take it for granted -- it's actually a remarkable achievement, to produce something that's that democratic. Now, we basically have to change our views slightly. There is a basic view that real value involves making things, involves labor. It involves engineering. It involves limited raw materials. And that what we add on top is kind of false. It's a fake version. And there is a reason for some suspicion and uncertainly about it. It patently veers toward propaganda. However, what we do have now is a much more variegated media ecosystem in which to kind of create this kind of value, and it's much fairer. When I grew up, this was basically the media environment of my childhood as translated into food. You had a monopoly supplier. On the left, you have Rupert Murdoch, or the BBC. (Laughter) And on your right you have a dependent public which is pathetically grateful for anything you give it. (Laughter) Nowadays, the user is actually involved. This is actually what's called, in the digital world, "user-generated content." Although it's called agriculture in the world of food. (Laughter) This is actually called a mash-up, where you take content that someone else has produced and you do something new with it. In the world of food we call it cooking. This is food 2.0, which is food you produce for the purpose of sharing it with other people. This is mobile food. British are very good at that. Fish and chips in newspaper, the Cornish Pasty, the pie, the sandwich. We invented the whole lot of them. We're not very good at food in general. Italians do great food, but it's not very portable, generally. (Laughter) I only learned this the other day. The Earl of Sandwich didn't invent the sandwich. He actually invented the toasty. But then, the Earl of Toasty would be a ridiculous name. (Laughter) Finally, we have contextual communication. Now, the reason I show you Pernod -- it's only one example. Every country has a contextual alcoholic drink. In France it's Pernod. It tastes great within the borders of that country, but absolute shite if you take it anywhere else. (Laughter) Unicum in Hungary, for example. The Greeks have actually managed to produce something called Retsina, which even tastes shite when you're in Greece. (Laughter) But so much communication now is contextual that the capacity for actually nudging people, for giving them better information -- B.J. Fogg, at the University of Stanford, makes the point that actually the mobile phone is -- He's invented the phrase, "persuasive technologies." He believes the mobile phone, by being location-specific, contextual, timely and immediate, is simply the greatest persuasive technology device ever invented. Now, if we have all these tools at our disposal, we simply have to ask the question, and Thaler and Sunstein have, of how we can use these more intelligently. I'll give you one example. If you had a large red button of this kind, on the wall of your home, and every time you pressed it, it saved 50 dollars for you, put 50 dollars into your pension, you would save a lot more. The reason is that the interface fundamentally determines the behavior. Okay? Now, marketing has done a very, very good job of creating opportunities for impulse buying. Yet we've never created the opportunity for impulse saving. If you did this, more people would save more. It's simply a question of changing the interface by which people make decisions, and the very nature of the decisions changes. Obviously, I don't want people to do this, because as an advertising man I tend to regard saving as just consumerism needlessly postponed. (Laughter) But if anybody did want to do that, that's the kind of thing we need to be thinking about, actually: fundamental opportunities to change human behavior. Now, I've got an example here from Canada. There was a young intern at Ogilvy Canada called Hunter Somerville, who was working in improv in Toronto, and got a part-time job in advertising, and was given the job of advertising Shreddies. Now this is the most perfect case of creating intangible, added value, without changing the product in the slightest. Shreddies is a strange, square, whole-grain cereal, only available in New Zealand, Canada and Britain. It's Kraft's peculiar way of rewarding loyalty to the crown. (Laughter) In working out how you could re-launch Shreddies, he came up with this. Video: (Buzzer) Man: Shreddies is supposed to be square. (Laughter) Woman: Have any of these diamond shapes gone out? (Laughter) Voiceover: New Diamond Shreddies cereal. Same 100 percent whole-grain wheat in a delicious diamond shape. (Applause) Rory Sutherland: I'm not sure this isn't the most perfect example of intangible value creation. All it requires is photons, neurons, and a great idea to create this thing. I would say it's a work of genius. But, naturally, you can't do this kind of thing without a little bit of market research. Man: So, Shreddies is actually producing a new product, which is something very exciting for them. So they are introducing new Diamond Shreddies. (Laughter) So I just want to get your first impressions when you see that, when you see the Diamond Shreddies box there. (Laughter) Woman: Weren't they square? Woman #2: I'm a little bit confused. Woman #3: They look like the squares to me. Man: They -- Yeah, it's all in the appearance. But it's kind of like flipping a six or a nine. Like a six, if you flip it over it looks like a nine. But a six is very different from a nine. Woman # 3: Or an "M" and a "W". Man: An "M" and a "W", exactly. Man #2: [unclear] You just looked like you turned it on its end. But when you see it like that it's more interesting looking. Man: Just try both of them. Take a square one there, first. (Laughter) Man: Which one did you prefer? Man #2: The first one. Man: The first one? (Laughter) Rory Sutherland: Now, naturally, a debate raged. There were conservative elements in Canada, unsurprisingly, who actually resented this intrusion. So, eventually, the manufacturers actually arrived at a compromise, which was the combo pack. (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) If you think it's funny, bear in mind there is an organization called the American Institute of Wine Economics, which actually does extensive research into perception of things, and discovers that except for among perhaps five or ten percent of the most knowledgeable people, there is no correlation between quality and enjoyment in wine, except when you tell the people how expensive it is, in which case they tend to enjoy the more expensive stuff more. So drink your wine blind in the future. But this is both hysterically funny -- but I think an important philosophical point, which is, going forward, we need more of this kind of value. We need to spend more time appreciating what already exists, and less time agonizing over what else we can do. Two quotations to more or less end with. One of them is, "Poetry is when you make new things familiar and familiar things new." Which isn't a bad definition of what our job is, to help people appreciate what is unfamiliar, but also to gain a greater appreciation, and place a far higher value on those things which are already existing. There is some evidence, by the way, that things like social networking help do that. Because they help people share news. They give badge value to everyday little trivial activities. So they actually reduce the need for actually spending great money on display, and increase the kind of third-party enjoyment you can get from the smallest, simplest things in life. Which is magic. The second one is the second G.K. Chesterton quote of this session, which is, "We are perishing for want of wonder, not for want of wonders," which I think for anybody involved in technology, is perfectly true. And a final thing: When you place a value on things like health, love, sex and other things, and learn to place a material value on what you've previously discounted for being merely intangible, a thing not seen, you realize you're much, much wealthier than you ever imagined. Thank you very much indeed. (Applause)

Good morning. My name is Eric Li, and I was born here. But no, I wasn't born there. This was where I was born: Shanghai, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. My grandmother tells me that she heard the sound of gunfire along with my first cries. When I was growing up, I was told a story that explained all I ever needed to know about humanity. It went like this. All human societies develop in linear progression, beginning with primitive society, then slave society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and finally, guess where we end up? Communism! Sooner or later, all of humanity, regardless of culture, language, nationality, will arrive at this final stage of political and social development. The entire world's peoples will be unified in this paradise on Earth and live happily ever after. But before we get there, we're engaged in a struggle between good and evil, the good of socialism against the evil of capitalism, and the good shall triumph. That, of course, was the meta-narrative distilled from the theories of Karl Marx. And the Chinese bought it. We were taught that grand story day in and day out. It became part of us, and we believed in it. The story was a bestseller. About one third of the entire world's population lived under that meta-narrative. Then, the world changed overnight. As for me, disillusioned by the failed religion of my youth, I went to America and became a Berkeley hippie. (Laughter) Now, as I was coming of age, something else happened. As if one big story wasn't enough, I was told another one. This one was just as grand. It also claims that all human societies develop in a linear progression towards a singular end. This one went as follows: All societies, regardless of culture, be it Christian, Muslim, Confucian, must progress from traditional societies in which groups are the basic units to modern societies in which atomized individuals are the sovereign units, and all these individuals are, by definition, rational, and they all want one thing: the vote. Because they are all rational, once given the vote, they produce good government and live happily ever after. Paradise on Earth, again. Sooner or later, electoral democracy will be the only political system for all countries and all peoples, with a free market to make them all rich. But before we get there, we're engaged in a struggle between good and evil. (Laughter) The good belongs to those who are democracies and are charged with a mission of spreading it around the globe, sometimes by force, against the evil of those who do not hold elections. (Video) George H.W. Bush: A new world order ... (Video) George W. Bush: ... ending tyranny in our world ... (Video) Barack Obama: ... a single standard for all who would hold power. Eric X. Li: Now -- (Laughter) (Applause) This story also became a bestseller. According to Freedom House, the number of democracies went from 45 in 1970 to 115 in 2010. In the last 20 years, Western elites tirelessly trotted around the globe selling this prospectus: Multiple parties fight for political power and everyone voting on them is the only path to salvation to the long-suffering developing world. Those who buy the prospectus are destined for success. Those who do not are doomed to fail. But this time, the Chinese didn't buy it. Fool me once ... (Laughter) The rest is history. In just 30 years, China went from one of the poorest agricultural countries in the world to its second-largest economy. Six hundred fifty million people were lifted out of poverty. Eighty percent of the entire world's poverty alleviation during that period happened in China. In other words, all the new and old democracies put together amounted to a mere fraction of what a single, one-party state did without voting. See, I grew up on this stuff: food stamps. Meat was rationed to a few hundred grams per person per month at one point. Needless to say, I ate all my grandmother's portions. So I asked myself, what's wrong with this picture? Here I am in my hometown, my business growing leaps and bounds. Entrepreneurs are starting companies every day. Middle class is expanding in speed and scale unprecedented in human history. Yet, according to the grand story, none of this should be happening. So I went and did the only thing I could. I studied it. Yes, China is a one-party state run by the Chinese Communist Party, the Party, and they don't hold elections. Three assumptions are made by the dominant political theories of our time. Such a system is operationally rigid, politically closed, and morally illegitimate. Well, the assumptions are wrong. The opposites are true. Adaptability, meritocracy, and legitimacy are the three defining characteristics of China's one-party system. Now, most political scientists will tell us that a one-party system is inherently incapable of self-correction. It won't last long because it cannot adapt. Now here are the facts. In 64 years of running the largest country in the world, the range of the Party's policies has been wider than any other country in recent memory, from radical land collectivization to the Great Leap Forward, then privatization of farmland, then the Cultural Revolution, then Deng Xiaoping's market reform, then successor Jiang Zemin took the giant political step of opening up Party membership to private businesspeople, something unimaginable during Mao's rule. So the Party self-corrects in rather dramatic fashions. Institutionally, new rules get enacted to correct previous dysfunctions. For example, term limits. Political leaders used to retain their positions for life, and they used that to accumulate power and perpetuate their rules. Mao was the father of modern China, yet his prolonged rule led to disastrous mistakes. So the Party instituted term limits with mandatory retirement age of 68 to 70. One thing we often hear is, "Political reforms have lagged far behind economic reforms," and "China is in dire need of political reform." But this claim is a rhetorical trap hidden behind a political bias. See, some have decided a priori what kinds of changes they want to see, and only such changes can be called political reform. The truth is, political reforms have never stopped. Compared with 30 years ago, 20 years, even 10 years ago, every aspect of Chinese society, how the country is governed, from the most local level to the highest center, are unrecognizable today. Now such changes are simply not possible without political reforms of the most fundamental kind. Now I would venture to suggest the Party is the world's leading expert in political reform. The second assumption is that in a one-party state, power gets concentrated in the hands of the few, and bad governance and corruption follow. Indeed, corruption is a big problem, but let's first look at the larger context. Now, this may be counterintuitive to you. The Party happens to be one of the most meritocratic political institutions in the world today. China's highest ruling body, the Politburo, has 25 members. In the most recent one, only five of them came from a background of privilege, so-called princelings. The other 20, including the president and the premier, came from entirely ordinary backgrounds. In the larger central committee of 300 or more, the percentage of those who were born into power and wealth was even smaller. The vast majority of senior Chinese leaders worked and competed their way to the top. Compare that with the ruling elites in both developed and developing countries, I think you'll find the Party being near the top in upward mobility. The question then is, how could that be possible in a system run by one party? Now we come to a powerful political institution, little-known to Westerners: the Party's Organization Department. The department functions like a giant human resource engine that would be the envy of even some of the most successful corporations. It operates a rotating pyramid made up of three components: civil service, state-owned enterprises, and social organizations like a university or a community program. They form separate yet integrated career paths for Chinese officials. They recruit college grads into entry-level positions in all three tracks, and they start from the bottom, called "keyuan" [clerk]. Then they could get promoted through four increasingly elite ranks: fuke [deputy section manager], ke [section manager], fuchu [deputy division manager], and chu [division manger]. Now these are not moves from "Karate Kid," okay? It's serious business. The range of positions is wide, from running health care in a village to foreign investment in a city district to manager in a company. Once a year, the department reviews their performance. They interview their superiors, their peers, their subordinates. They vet their personal conduct. They conduct public opinion surveys. Then they promote the winners. Throughout their careers, these cadres can move through and out of all three tracks. Over time, the good ones move beyond the four base levels to the fuju [deputy bureau chief] and ju [bureau chief] levels. There, they enter high officialdom. By that point, a typical assignment will be to manage a district with a population in the millions or a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Just to show you how competitive the system is, in 2012, there were 900,000 fuke and ke levels, 600,000 fuchu and chu levels, and only 40,000 fuju and ju levels. After the ju levels, the best few move further up several more ranks, and eventually make it to the Central Committee. The process takes two to three decades. Does patronage play a role? Yes, of course. But merit remains the fundamental driver. In essence, the Organization Department runs a modernized version of China's centuries-old mentoring system. China's new president, Xi Jinping, is the son of a former leader, which is very unusual, first of his kind to make the top job. Even for him, the career took 30 years. He started as a village manager, and by the time he entered the Politburo, he had managed areas with a total population of 150 million people and combined GDPs of 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars. Now, please don't get me wrong, okay? This is not a put-down of anyone. It's just a statement of fact. George W. Bush, remember him? This is not a put-down. (Laughter) Before becoming governor of Texas, or Barack Obama before running for president, could not make even a small county manager in China's system. Winston Churchill once said that democracy is a terrible system except for all the rest. Well, apparently he hadn't heard of the Organization Department. Now, Westerners always assume that multi-party election with universal suffrage is the only source of political legitimacy. I was asked once, "The Party wasn't voted in by election. Where is the source of legitimacy?" I said, "How about competency?" We all know the facts. In 1949, when the Party took power, China was mired in civil wars, dismembered by foreign aggression, average life expectancy at that time, 41 years old. Today, it's the second largest economy in the world, an industrial powerhouse, and its people live in increasing prosperity. Pew Research polls Chinese public attitudes, and here are the numbers in recent years. Satisfaction with the direction of the country: 85 percent. Those who think they're better off than five years ago: 70 percent. Those who expect the future to be better: a whopping 82 percent. Financial Times polls global youth attitudes, and these numbers, brand new, just came from last week. Ninety-three percent of China's Generation Y are optimistic about their country's future. Now, if this is not legitimacy, I'm not sure what is. In contrast, most electoral democracies around the world are suffering from dismal performance. I don't need to elaborate for this audience how dysfunctional it is, from Washington to European capitals. With a few exceptions, the vast number of developing countries that have adopted electoral regimes are still suffering from poverty and civil strife. Governments get elected, and then they fall below 50 percent approval in a few months and stay there and get worse until the next election. Democracy is becoming a perpetual cycle of elect and regret. At this rate, I'm afraid it is democracy, not China's one-party system, that is in danger of losing legitimacy. Now, I don't want to create the misimpression that China's hunky-dory, on the way to some kind of superpowerdom. The country faces enormous challenges. The social and economic problems that come with wrenching change like this are mind-boggling. Pollution is one. Food safety. Population issues. On the political front, the worst problem is corruption. Corruption is widespread and undermines the system and its moral legitimacy. But most analysts misdiagnose the disease. They say that corruption is the result of the one-party system, and therefore, in order to cure it, you have to do away with the entire system. But a more careful look would tell us otherwise. Transparency International ranks China between 70 and 80 in recent years among 170 countries, and it's been moving up. India, the largest democracy in the world, 94 and dropping. For the hundred or so countries that are ranked below China, more than half of them are electoral democracies. So if election is the panacea for corruption, how come these countries can't fix it? Now, I'm a venture capitalist. I make bets. It wouldn't be fair to end this talk without putting myself on the line and making some predictions. So here they are. In the next 10 years, China will surpass the U.S. and become the largest economy in the world. Income per capita will be near the top of all developing countries. Corruption will be curbed, but not eliminated, and China will move up 10 to 20 notches to above 60 in T.I. ranking. Economic reform will accelerate, political reform will continue, and the one-party system will hold firm. We live in the dusk of an era. Meta-narratives that make universal claims failed us in the 20th century and are failing us in the 21st. Meta-narrative is the cancer that is killing democracy from the inside. Now, I want to clarify something. I'm not here to make an indictment of democracy. On the contrary, I think democracy contributed to the rise of the West and the creation of the modern world. It is the universal claim that many Western elites are making about their political system, the hubris, that is at the heart of the West's current ills. If they would spend just a little less time on trying to force their way onto others, and a little bit more on political reform at home, they might give their democracy a better chance. China's political model will never supplant electoral democracy, because unlike the latter, it doesn't pretend to be universal. It cannot be exported. But that is the point precisely. The significance of China's example is not that it provides an alternative, but the demonstration that alternatives exist. Let us draw to a close this era of meta-narratives. Communism and democracy may both be laudable ideals, but the era of their dogmatic universalism is over. Let us stop telling people and our children there's only one way to govern ourselves and a singular future towards which all societies must evolve. It is wrong. It is irresponsible. And worst of all, it is boring. Let universality make way for plurality. Perhaps a more interesting age is upon us. Are we brave enough to welcome it? Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Bruno Giussani: Eric, stay with me for a couple of minutes, because I want to ask you a couple of questions. I think many here, and in general in Western countries, would agree with your statement about analysis of democratic systems becoming dysfunctional, but at the same time, many would kind of find unsettling the thought that there is an unelected authority that, without any form of oversight or consultation, decides what the national interest is. What is the mechanism in the Chinese model that allows people to say, actually, the national interest as you defined it is wrong? EXL: You know, Frank Fukuyama, the political scientist, called the Chinese system "responsive authoritarianism." It's not exactly right, but I think it comes close. So I know the largest public opinion survey company in China, okay? Do you know who their biggest client is? The Chinese government. Not just from the central government, the city government, the provincial government, to the most local neighborhood districts. They conduct surveys all the time. Are you happy with the garbage collection? Are you happy with the general direction of the country? So there is, in China, there is a different kind of mechanism to be responsive to the demands and the thinking of the people. My point is, I think we should get unstuck from the thinking that there's only one political system -- election, election, election -- that could make it responsive. I'm not sure, actually, elections produce responsive government anymore in the world. (Applause) BG: Many seem to agree. One of the features of a democratic system is a space for civil society to express itself. And you have shown figures about the support that the government and the authorities have in China. But then you've just mentioned other elements like, you know, big challenges, and there are, of course, a lot of other data that go in a different direction: tens of thousands of unrests and protests and environmental protests, etc. So you seem to suggest the Chinese model doesn't have a space outside of the Party for civil society to express itself. EXL: There's a vibrant civil society in China, whether it's environment or what-have-you. But it's different. You wouldn't recognize it. Because, by Western definitions, a so-called civil society has to be separate or even in opposition to the political system, but that concept is alien for Chinese culture. For thousands of years, you have civil society, yet they are consistent and coherent and part of a political order, and I think it's a big cultural difference. BG: Eric, thank you for sharing this with TED. EXL: Thank you.

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

There's an old joke about a cop who's walking his beat in the middle of the night, and he comes across a guy under a street lamp who's looking at the ground and moving from side to side, and the cop asks him what he's doing. The guys says he's looking for his keys. So the cop takes his time and looks over and kind of makes a little matrix and looks for about two, three minutes. No keys. The cop says, "Are you sure? Hey buddy, are you sure you lost your keys here?" And the guy says, "No, actually I lost them down at the other end of the street, but the light is better here." (Laughter) There's a concept that people talk about nowadays called "big data." And what they're talking about is all of the information that we're generating through our interaction with and over the Internet, everything from Facebook and Twitter to music downloads, movies, streaming, all this kind of stuff, the live streaming of TED. And the folks who work with big data, for them, they talk about that their biggest problem is we have so much information. The biggest problem is: how do we organize all that information? I can tell you that, working in global health, that is not our biggest problem. Because for us, even though the light is better on the Internet, the data that would help us solve the problems we're trying to solve is not actually present on the Internet. So we don't know, for example, how many people right now are being affected by disasters or by conflict situations. We don't know for, really, basically, any of the clinics in the developing world, which ones have medicines and which ones don't. We have no idea of what the supply chain is for those clinics. We don't know -- and this is really amazing to me -- we don't know how many children were born -- or how many children there are -- in Bolivia or Botswana or Bhutan. We don't know how many kids died last week in any of those countries. We don't know the needs of the elderly, the mentally ill. For all of these different critically important problems or critically important areas that we want to solve problems in, we basically know nothing at all. And part of the reason why we don't know anything at all is that the information technology systems that we use in global health to find the data to solve these problems is what you see here. This is about a 5,000-year-old technology. Some of you may have used it before. It's kind of on its way out now, but we still use it for 99 percent of our stuff. This is a paper form. And what you're looking at is a paper form in the hand of a Ministry of Health nurse in Indonesia, who is tramping out across the countryside in Indonesia on, I'm sure, a very hot and humid day, and she is going to be knocking on thousands of doors over a period of weeks or months, knocking on the doors and saying, "Excuse me, we'd like to ask you some questions. Do you have any children? Were your children vaccinated?" Because the only way we can actually find out how many children were vaccinated in the country of Indonesia, what percentage were vaccinated, is actually not on the Internet, but by going out and knocking on doors, sometimes tens of thousands of doors. Sometimes it takes months to even years to do something like this. You know, a census of Indonesia would probably take two years to accomplish. And the problem, of course, with all of this is that, with all those paper forms -- and I'm telling you, we have paper forms for every possible thing: We have paper forms for vaccination surveys. We have paper forms to track people who come into clinics. We have paper forms to track drug supplies, blood supplies -- all these different paper forms for many different topics, they all have a single, common endpoint, and the common endpoint looks something like this. And what we're looking at here is a truckful of data. This is the data from a single vaccination coverage survey in a single district in the country of Zambia from a few years ago, that I participated in. The only thing anyone was trying to find out is what percentage of Zambian children are vaccinated, and this is the data, collected on paper over weeks, from a single district, which is something like a county in the United States. You can imagine that, for the entire country of Zambia, answering just that single question ... looks something like this. Truck after truck after truck, filled with stack after stack after stack of data. And what makes it even worse is that's just the beginning. Because once you've collected all that data, of course, someone -- some unfortunate person -- is going to have to type that into a computer. When I was a graduate student, I actually was that unfortunate person sometimes. I can tell you, I often wasn't really paying attention. I probably made a lot of mistakes when I did it that no one ever discovered, so data quality goes down. But eventually that data, hopefully, gets typed into a computer, and someone can begin to analyze it, and once they have an analysis and a report, hopefully, then you can take the results of that data collection and use it to vaccinate children better. Because if there's anything worse in the field of global public health -- I don't know what's worse than allowing children on this planet to die of vaccine-preventable diseases -- diseases for which the vaccine costs a dollar. And millions of children die of these diseases every year. And the fact is, millions is a gross estimate, because we don't really know how many kids die each year of this. What makes it even more frustrating is that the data-entry part, the part that I used to do as a grad student, can take sometimes six months. Sometimes it can take two years to type that information into a computer, And sometimes, actually not infrequently, it actually never happens. Now try and wrap your head around that for a second. You just had teams of hundreds of people. They went out into the field to answer a particular question. You probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on fuel and photocopying and per diem. And then for some reason, momentum is lost or there's no money left, and all of that comes to nothing, because no one actually types it into the computer at all. The process just stops. Happens all the time. This is what we base our decisions on in global health: little data, old data, no data. So back in 1995, I began to think about ways in which we could improve this process. Now 1995 -- obviously, that was quite a long time ago. It kind of frightens me to think of how long ago that was. The top movie of the year was "Die Hard with a Vengeance." As you can see, Bruce Willis had a lot more hair back then. I was working in the Centers for Disease Control and I had a lot more hair back then as well. But to me, the most significant thing that I saw in 1995 was this. Hard for us to imagine, but in 1995, this was the ultimate elite mobile device. It wasn't an iPhone. It wasn't a Galaxy phone. It was a PalmPilot. And when I saw the PalmPilot for the first time, I thought, "Why can't we put the forms on these PalmPilots? And go out into the field just carrying one PalmPilot, which can hold the capacity of tens of thousands of paper forms? Why don't we try to do that? Because if we can do that, if we can actually just collect the data electronically, digitally, from the very beginning, we can just put a shortcut right through that whole process of typing, of having somebody type that stuff into the computer. We can skip straight to the analysis and then straight to the use of the data to actually save lives." So that's what I began to do. Working at CDC, I began to travel to different programs around the world and to train them in using PalmPilots to do data collection, instead of using paper. And it actually worked great. It worked exactly as well as anybody would have predicted. What do you know? Digital data collection is actually more efficient than collecting on paper. While I was doing it, my business partner, Rose, who's here with her husband, Matthew, here in the audience, Rose was out doing similar stuff for the American Red Cross. The problem was, after a few years of doing that, I realized -- I had been to maybe six or seven programs -- and I thought, you know, if I keep this up at this pace, over my whole career, maybe I'm going to go to maybe 20 or 30 programs. But the problem is, 20 or 30 programs, like, training 20 or 30 programs to use this technology, that is a tiny drop in the bucket. The demand for this, the need for data to run better programs just within health -- not to mention all of the other fields in developing countries -- is enormous. There are millions and millions and millions of programs, millions of clinics that need to track drugs, millions of vaccine programs. There are schools that need to track attendance. There are all these different things for us to get the data that we need to do. And I realized if I kept up the way that I was doing, I was basically hardly going to make any impact by the end of my career. And so I began to rack my brain, trying to think about, what was the process that I was doing? How was I training folks, and what were the bottlenecks and what were the obstacles to doing it faster and to doing it more efficiently? And, unfortunately, after thinking about this for some time, I identified the main obstacle. And the main obstacle, it turned out -- and this is a sad realization -- the main obstacle was me. So what do I mean by that? I had developed a process whereby I was the center of the universe of this technology. If you wanted to use this technology, you had to get in touch with me. That means you had to know I existed. Then you had to find the money to pay for me to fly out to your country and the money to pay for my hotel and my per diem and my daily rate. So you could be talking about 10- or 20- or 30,000 dollars, if I actually had the time or it fit my schedule and I wasn't on vacation. The point is that anything, any system that depends on a single human being or two or three or five human beings -- it just doesn't scale. And this is a problem for which we need to scale this technology, and we need to scale it now. And so I began to think of ways in which I could basically take myself out of the picture. And, you know, I was thinking, "How could I take myself out of the picture?" for quite some time. I'd been trained that the way you distribute technology within international development is always consultant-based. It's always guys that look pretty much like me, flying from countries that look pretty much like this to other countries with people with darker skin. And you go out there, and you spend money on airfare and you spend time and you spend per diem and you spend for a hotel and all that stuff. As far as I knew, that was the only way you could distribute technology, and I couldn't figure out a way around it. But the miracle that happened -- I'm going to call it Hotmail for short. You may not think of Hotmail as being miraculous, but for me it was miraculous, because I noticed, just as I was wrestling with this problem -- I was working in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly, at the time -- I noticed that every sub-Saharan African health worker that I was working with had a Hotmail account. And it struck me, "Wait a minute -- I know the Hotmail people surely didn't fly to the Ministry of Health in Kenya to train people in how to use Hotmail. So these guys are distributing technology, getting software capacity out there, but they're not actually flying around the world. I need to think about this more." While I was thinking about it, people started using even more things like this, just as we were. They started using LinkedIn and Flickr and Gmail and Google Maps -- all these things. Of course, all of these things are cloud based and don't require any training. They don't require any programmers. They don't require consultants. Because the business model for all these businesses requires that something be so simple we can use it ourselves, with little or no training. You just have to hear about it and go to the website. And so I thought, what would happen if we built software to do what I'd been consulting in? Instead of training people how to put forms onto mobile devices, let's create software that lets them do it themselves with no training and without me being involved. And that's exactly what we did. So we created software called Magpi, which has an online form creator. No one has to speak to me, you just have to hear about it and go to the website. You can create forms, and once you've created the forms, you push them to a variety of common mobile phones. Obviously, nowadays, we've moved past PalmPilots to mobile phones. And it doesn't have to be a smartphone, it can be a basic phone, like the phone on the right, the basic Symbian phone that's very common in developing countries. And the great part about this is it's just like Hotmail. It's cloud based, and it doesn't require any training, programming, consultants. But there are some additional benefits as well. Now we knew when we built this system, the whole point of it, just like with the PalmPilots, was that you'd be able to collect the data and immediately upload the data and get your data set. But what we found, of course, since it's already on a computer, we can deliver instant maps and analysis and graphing. We can take a process that took two years and compress that down to the space of five minutes. Unbelievable improvements in efficiency. Cloud based, no training, no consultants, no me. And I told you that in the first few years of trying to do this the old-fashioned way, going out to each country, we probably trained about 1,000 people. What happened after we did this? In the second three years, we had 14,000 people find the website, sign up and start using it to collect data: data for disaster response, Canadian pig farmers tracking pig disease and pig herds, people tracking drug supplies. One of my favorite examples, the IRC, International Rescue Committee, they have a program where semi-literate midwives, using $10 mobile phones, send a text message using our software, once a week, with the number of births and the number of deaths, which gives IRC something that no one in global health has ever had: a near-real-time system of counting babies, of knowing how many kids are born, of knowing how many children there are in Sierra Leone, which is the country where this is happening, and knowing how many children die. Physicians for Human Rights -- this is moving a little bit outside the health field -- they're basically training people to do rape exams in Congo, where this is an epidemic, a horrible epidemic, and they're using our software to document the evidence they find, including photographically, so that they can bring the perpetrators to justice. Camfed, another charity based out of the UK -- Camfed pays girls' families to keep them in school. They understand this is the most significant intervention they can make. They used to track the disbursements, the attendance, the grades, on paper. The turnaround time between a teacher writing down grades or attendance and getting that into a report was about two to three years. Now it's real time. And because this is such a low-cost system and based in the cloud, it costs, for the entire five countries that Camfed runs this in, with tens of thousands of girls, the whole cost combined is 10,000 dollars a year. That's less than I used to get just traveling out for two weeks to do a consultation. So I told you before that when we were doing it the old-fashioned way, I realized all of our work was really adding up to just a drop in the bucket -- 10, 20, 30 different programs. We've made a lot of progress, but I recognize that right now, even the work that we've done with 14,000 people using this is still a drop in the bucket. But something's changed, and I think it should be obvious. What's changed now is, instead of having a program in which we're scaling at such a slow rate that we can never reach all the people who need us, we've made it unnecessary for people to get reached by us. We've created a tool that lets programs keep kids in school, track the number of babies that are born and the number of babies that die, catch criminals and successfully prosecute them -- to do all these different things to learn more about what's going on, to understand more, to see more ... and to save lives and improve lives. Thank you. (Applause)

Images like this, from the Auschwitz concentration camp, have been seared into our consciousness during the twentieth century and have given us a new understanding of who we are, where we've come from and the times we live in. During the twentieth century, we witnessed the atrocities of Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Rwanda and other genocides, and even though the twenty-first century is only seven years old, we have already witnessed an ongoing genocide in Darfur and the daily horrors of Iraq. This has led to a common understanding of our situation, namely that modernity has brought us terrible violence, and perhaps that native peoples lived in a state of harmony that we have departed from, to our peril. Here is an example from an op-ed on Thanksgiving, in the Boston Globe a couple of years ago, where the writer wrote, "The Indian life was a difficult one, but there were no employment problems, community harmony was strong, substance abuse unknown, crime nearly non-existent, what warfare there was between tribes was largely ritualistic and seldom resulted in indiscriminate or wholesale slaughter." Now, you're all familiar with this treacle. We teach it to our children. We hear it on television and in storybooks. Now, the original title of this session was, "Everything You Know Is Wrong," and I'm going to present evidence that this particular part of our common understanding is wrong, that, in fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are, that violence has been in decline for long stretches of time, and that today we are probably living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence. Now, in the decade of Darfur and Iraq, a statement like that might seem somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene. But I'm going to try to convince you that that is the correct picture. The decline of violence is a fractal phenomenon. You can see it over millennia, over centuries, over decades and over years, although there seems to have been a tipping point at the onset of the Age of Reason in the sixteenth century. One sees it all over the world, although not homogeneously. It's especially evident in the West, beginning with England and Holland around the time of the Enlightenment. Let me take you on a journey of several powers of 10 -- from the millennium scale to the year scale -- to try to persuade you of this. Until 10,000 years ago, all humans lived as hunter-gatherers, without permanent settlements or government. And this is the state that's commonly thought to be one of primordial harmony. But the archaeologist Lawrence Keeley, looking at casualty rates among contemporary hunter-gatherers, which is our best source of evidence about this way of life, has shown a rather different conclusion. Here is a graph that he put together showing the percentage of male deaths due to warfare in a number of foraging, or hunting and gathering societies. The red bars correspond to the likelihood that a man will die at the hands of another man, as opposed to passing away of natural causes, in a variety of foraging societies in the New Guinea Highlands and the Amazon Rainforest. And they range from a rate of almost a 60 percent chance that a man will die at the hands of another man to, in the case of the Gebusi, only a 15 percent chance. The tiny, little blue bar in the lower left-hand corner plots the corresponding statistic from United States and Europe in the twentieth century, and includes all the deaths of both World Wars. If the death rate in tribal warfare had prevailed during the 20th century, there would have been two billion deaths rather than 100 million. Also at the millennium scale, we can look at the way of life of early civilizations such as the ones described in the Bible. And in this supposed source of our moral values, one can read descriptions of what was expected in warfare, such as the following from Numbers 31: "And they warred against the Midianites as the Lord commanded Moses, and they slew all the males. And Moses said unto them, 'Have you saved all the women alive? Now, therefore, kill every male among the little ones and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him, but all the women children that have not know a man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves.'" In other words, kill the men; kill the children; if you see any virgins, then you can keep them alive so that you can rape them. You can find four or five passages in the Bible of this ilk. Also in the Bible, one sees that the death penalty was the accepted punishment for crimes such as homosexuality, adultery, blasphemy, idolatry, talking back to your parents -- (Laughter) -- and picking up sticks on the Sabbath. Well, let's click the zoom lens down one order of magnitude, and look at the century scale. Although we don't have statistics for warfare throughout the Middle Ages to modern times, we know just from conventional history -- the evidence was under our nose all along that there has been a reduction in socially sanctioned forms of violence. For example, any social history will reveal that mutilation and torture were routine forms of criminal punishment. The kind of infraction today that would give you a fine, in those days would result in your tongue being cut out, your ears being cut off, you being blinded, a hand being chopped off and so on. There were numerous ingenious forms of sadistic capital punishment: burning at the stake, disemboweling, breaking on the wheel, being pulled apart by horses and so on. The death penalty was a sanction for a long list of non-violent crimes: criticizing the king, stealing a loaf of bread. Slavery, of course, was the preferred labor-saving device, and cruelty was a popular form of entertainment. Perhaps the most vivid example was the practice of cat burning, in which a cat was hoisted on a stage and lowered in a sling into a fire, and the spectators shrieked in laughter as the cat, howling in pain, was burned to death. What about one-on-one murder? Well, there, there are good statistics, because many municipalities recorded the cause of death. The criminologist Manuel Eisner scoured all of the historical records across Europe for homicide rates in any village, hamlet, town, county that he could find, and he supplemented them with national data, when nations started keeping statistics. He plotted on a logarithmic scale, going from 100 deaths per 100,000 people per year, which was approximately the rate of homicide in the Middle Ages. And the figure plummets down to less than one homicide per 100,000 people per year in seven or eight European countries. Then, there is a slight uptick in the 1960s. The people who said that rock 'n' roll would lead to the decline of moral values actually had a grain of truth to that. But there was a decline from at least two orders of magnitude in homicide from the Middle Ages to the present, and the elbow occurred in the early sixteenth century. Let's click down now to the decade scale. According to non-governmental organizations that keep such statistics, since 1945, in Europe and the Americas, there has been a steep decline in interstate wars, in deadly ethnic riots or pogroms, and in military coups, even in South America. Worldwide, there's been a steep decline in deaths in interstate wars. The yellow bars here show the number of deaths per war per year from 1950 to the present. And, as you can see, the death rate goes down from 65,000 deaths per conflict per year in the 1950s to less than 2,000 deaths per conflict per year in this decade, as horrific as it is. Even in the year scale, one can see a decline of violence. Since the end of the Cold War, there have been fewer civil wars, fewer genocides -- indeed, a 90 percent reduction since post-World War II highs -- and even a reversal of the 1960s uptick in homicide and violent crime. This is from the FBI Uniform Crime Statistics. You can see that there is a fairly low rate of violence in the '50s and the '60s, then it soared upward for several decades, and began a precipitous decline, starting in the 1990s, so that it went back to the level that was last enjoyed in 1960. President Clinton, if you're here, thank you. (Laughter) So the question is, why are so many people so wrong about something so important? I think there are a number of reasons. One of them is we have better reporting. The Associated Press is a better chronicler of wars over the surface of the Earth than sixteenth-century monks were. There's a cognitive illusion. We cognitive psychologists know that the easier it is to recall specific instances of something, the higher the probability that you assign to it. Things that we read about in the paper with gory footage burn into memory more than reports of a lot more people dying in their beds of old age. There are dynamics in the opinion and advocacy markets: no one ever attracted observers, advocates and donors by saying things just seem to be getting better and better. (Laughter) There's guilt about our treatment of native peoples in modern intellectual life, and an unwillingness to acknowledge there could be anything good about Western culture. And of course, our change in standards can outpace the change in behavior. One of the reasons violence went down is that people got sick of the carnage and cruelty in their time. That's a process that seems to be continuing, but if it outstrips behavior by the standards of the day, things always look more barbaric than they would have been by historic standards. So today, we get exercised -- and rightly so -- if a handful of murderers get executed by lethal injection in Texas after a 15-year appeal process. We don't consider that a couple of hundred years ago, they may have been burned at the stake for criticizing the king after a trial that lasted 10 minutes, and indeed, that that would have been repeated over and over again. Today, we look at capital punishment as evidence of how low our behavior can sink, rather than how high our standards have risen. Well, why has violence declined? No one really knows, but I have read four explanations, all of which, I think, have some grain of plausibility. The first is, maybe Thomas Hobbes got it right. He was the one who said that life in a state of nature was "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Not because, he argued, humans have some primordial thirst for blood or aggressive instinct or territorial imperative, but because of the logic of anarchy. In a state of anarchy, there's a constant temptation to invade your neighbors preemptively, before they invade you. More recently, Thomas Schelling gives the analogy of a homeowner who hears a rustling in the basement. Being a good American, he has a pistol in the nightstand, pulls out his gun, and walks down the stairs. And what does he see but a burglar with a gun in his hand. Now, each one of them is thinking, "I don't really want to kill that guy, but he's about to kill me. Maybe I had better shoot him, before he shoots me, especially since, even if he doesn't want to kill me, he's probably worrying right now that I might kill him before he kills me." And so on. Hunter-gatherer peoples explicitly go through this train of thought, and will often raid their neighbors out of fear of being raided first. Now, one way of dealing with this problem is by deterrence. You don't strike first, but you have a publicly announced policy that you will retaliate savagely if you are invaded. The only thing is that it's liable to having its bluff called, and therefore can only work if it's credible. To make it credible, you must avenge all insults and settle all scores, which leads to the cycles of bloody vendetta. Life becomes an episode of "The Sopranos." Hobbes' solution, the "Leviathan," was that if authority for the legitimate use of violence was vested in a single democratic agency -- a leviathan -- then such a state can reduce the temptation of attack, because any kind of aggression will be punished, leaving its profitability as zero. That would remove the temptation to invade preemptively, out of fear of them attacking you first. It removes the need for a hair trigger for retaliation to make your deterrent threat credible. And therefore, it would lead to a state of peace. Eisner -- the man who plotted the homicide rates that you failed to see in the earlier slide -- argued that the timing of the decline of homicide in Europe coincided with the rise of centralized states. So that's a bit of a support for the leviathan theory. Also supporting it is the fact that we today see eruptions of violence in zones of anarchy, in failed states, collapsed empires, frontier regions, mafias, street gangs and so on. The second explanation is that in many times and places, there is a widespread sentiment that life is cheap. In earlier times, when suffering and early death were common in one's own life, one has fewer compunctions about inflicting them on others. And as technology and economic efficiency make life longer and more pleasant, one puts a higher value on life in general. This was an argument from the political scientist James Payne. A third explanation invokes the concept of a nonzero-sum game, and was worked out in the book "Nonzero" by the journalist Robert Wright. Wright points out that in certain circumstances, cooperation or non-violence can benefit both parties in an interaction, such as gains in trade when two parties trade their surpluses and both come out ahead, or when two parties lay down their arms and split the so-called peace dividend that results in them not having to fight the whole time. Wright argues that technology has increased the number of positive-sum games that humans tend to be embroiled in, by allowing the trade of goods, services and ideas over longer distances and among larger groups of people. The result is that other people become more valuable alive than dead, and violence declines for selfish reasons. As Wright put it, "Among the many reasons that I think that we should not bomb the Japanese is that they built my mini-van." (Laughter) The fourth explanation is captured in the title of a book called "The Expanding Circle," by the philosopher Peter Singer, who argues that evolution bequeathed humans with a sense of empathy, an ability to treat other peoples' interests as comparable to one's own. Unfortunately, by default we apply it only to a very narrow circle of friends and family. People outside that circle are treated as sub-human, and can be exploited with impunity. But, over history, the circle has expanded. One can see, in historical record, it expanding from the village, to the clan, to the tribe, to the nation, to other races, to both sexes, and, in Singer's own arguments, something that we should extend to other sentient species. The question is, if this has happened, what has powered that expansion? And there are a number of possibilities, such as increasing circles of reciprocity in the sense that Robert Wright argues for. The logic of the golden rule -- the more you think about and interact with other people, the more you realize that it is untenable to privilege your interests over theirs, at least not if you want them to listen to you. You can't say that my interests are special compared to yours, anymore than you can say that the particular spot that I'm standing on is a unique part of the universe because I happen to be standing on it that very minute. It may also be powered by cosmopolitanism, by histories, and journalism, and memoirs, and realistic fiction, and travel, and literacy, which allows you to project yourself into the lives of other people that formerly you may have treated as sub-human, and also to realize the accidental contingency of your own station in life, the sense that "there but for fortune go I." Whatever its causes, the decline of violence, I think, has profound implications. It should force us to ask not just, why is there war? But also, why is there peace? Not just, what are we doing wrong? But also, what have we been doing right? Because we have been doing something right, and it sure would be good to find out what it is. Thank you very much. (Applause). Chris Anderson: I loved that talk. I think a lot of people here in the room would say that that expansion of -- that you were talking about, that Peter Singer talks about, is also driven by, just by technology, by greater visibility of the other, and the sense that the world is therefore getting smaller. I mean, is that also a grain of truth? Steven Pinker: Very much. It would fit both in Wright's theory, that it allows us to enjoy the benefits of cooperation over larger and larger circles. But also, I think it helps us imagine what it's like to be someone else. I think when you read these horrific tortures that were common in the Middle Ages, you think, how could they possibly have done it, how could they have not have empathized with the person that they're disemboweling? But clearly, as far as they're concerned, this is just an alien being that does not have feelings akin to their own. Anything, I think, that makes it easier to imagine trading places with someone else means that it increases your moral consideration to that other person. CA: Well, Steve, I would love every news media owner to hear that talk at some point in the next year. I think it's really important. Thank you so much. SP: My pleasure.

Most of the talks that you've heard in the last several fabulous days have been from people who have the characteristic that they have thought about something, they are experts, they know what's going on. All of you know about the topic that I'm supposed to talk about. That is, you know what simplicity is, you know what complexity is. The trouble is, I don't. And what I'm going to do is share with you my ignorance on this subject. I want you to read this, because we're going to come back to it in a moment. The quote is from the fabled Potter Stewart opinion on pornography. And let me just read it, the important details here: "Shorthand description, ['hardcore pornography']; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly defining it. But I know it when I see it." I'm going to come back to that in a moment. So, what is simplicity? It's good to start with some examples. A coffee cup -- we don't think about coffee cups, but it's much more interesting than one might think -- a coffee cup is a device, which has a container and a handle. The handle enables you to hold it when the container is filled with hot liquid. Why is that important? Well, it enables you to drink coffee. But also, by the way, the coffee is hot, the liquid is sterile; you're not likely to get cholera that way. So the coffee cup, or the cup with a handle, is one of the tools used by society to maintain public health. Scissors are your clothes, glasses enable you to see things and keep you from being eaten by cheetahs or run down by automobiles, and books are, after all, your education. But there's another class of simple things, which are also very important. Simple in function, but not at all simple in how they're constructed. And the two here are just examples. One is the cellphone, which we use every day. And it rests on a complexity, which has some characteristics very different from those that my friend Benoit Mandelbrot discussed, but are very interesting. And the other, of course, is a birth control pill, which, in a very simple way, fundamentally changed the structure of society by changing the role of women in it by providing to them the opportunity to make reproductive choices. So, there are two ways of thinking about this word, I think. And here I've corrupted the Potter Stewart quotation by saying that we can think about something -- which spans all the way from scissors to the cell phone, Internet and birth control pills -- by saying that they're simple, the functions are simple, and we recognize what that simplicity is when we see it. Or there may be another way of doing it, which is to think about the problem in terms of what -- if you associate with moral philosophers -- is called the teapot problem. The teapot problem I'll pose this way. Suppose you see a teapot, and the teapot is filled with hot water. And you then ask the question: Why is the water hot? And that's a simple question. It's like, what is simplicity? One answer would be: because the kinetic energy of the water molecules is high and they bounce against things rapidly -- that's a kind of physical science argument. A second argument would be: because it was sitting on a stove with the flame on -- that's an historical argument. A third is that I wanted hot water for tea -- that's an intentional argument. And, since this is coming from a moral philosopher, the fourth would be that it's part of God's plan for the universe. All of these are possibilities. The point is that you get into trouble when you ask a single question with a single box for an answer, in which that single question actually is many questions with quite different meanings, but with the same words. Asking, "What is simplicity?" I think falls in that category. What is the state of science? And, interestingly, complexity is very highly evolved. We have a lot of interesting information about what complexity is. Simplicity, for reasons that are a little bit obscure, is almost not pursued, at least in the academic world. We academics -- I am an academic -- we love complexity. You can write papers about complexity, and the nice thing about complexity is it's fundamentally intractable in many ways, so you're not responsible for outcomes. (Laughter) Simplicity -- all of you really would like your Waring Blender in the morning to make whatever a Waring Blender does, but not explode or play Beethoven. You're not interested in the limits of these things. So what one is interested in has a lot to do with the rewards of the system. And there's a lot of rewards in thinking about complexity and emergence, not so much in thinking about simplicity. One of the things I want to do is to help you with a very important task -- which you may not know that you have very often -- which is to understand how to sit next to a physicist at a dinner party and have a conversation. (Laughter) And the words that I would like you to focus on are complexity and emergence, because these will enable you to start the conversation and then daydream about other things. (Laughter) All right, what is complexity in this view of things, and what is emergence? We have, actually, a pretty good working definition of complexity. It is a system, like traffic, which has components. The components interact with one another. These are cars and drivers. They dissipate energy. It turns out that, whenever you have that system, weird stuff happens, and you in Los Angeles probably know this better than anyone. Here's another example, which I put up because it's an example of really important current science. You can't possibly read that. It's not intended that you read it, but that's a tiny part of the chemical reactions going on in each of your cells at any given moment. And it's like the traffic that you see. The amazing thing about the cell is that it actually does maintain a fairly stable working relationship with other cells, but we don't know why. Anyone who tells you that we understand life, walk away. And let me reduce this to the simplest level. We've heard from Bill Gates recently. All of us, to some extent, study this thing called a Bill Gates. Terrific. You learn everything you can about that. And then there's another kind of thing that you might study, and you study that hard. That's a Bono, this is a Bono. But then, if you know everything you can know about those two things, and you put them together, what can you say about this combination? The answer is, not a lot. And that's complexity. Now, imagine building that up to a city, or to a society, and you've got, obviously, an interesting problem. All right, so let me give you an example of simplicity of a particular kind. And I want to introduce a word that I think is very useful, which is stacking. And I'm going to use stacking for a kind of simplicity that has the characteristic that it is so simple and so reliable that I can build things with it. Or I'm going to use simple to mean reliable, predictable, repeatable. And I'm going to use as an example the Internet, because it's a particularly good example of stacked simplicity. We call it a complex system, which it is, but it's also something else. The Internet starts with mathematics, it starts with binary. And if you look at the list of things on the bottom, we are familiar with the Arabic numbers one to 10 and so on. In binary, one is 0001, seven is 0111. The question is: Why is binary simpler than Arabic? And the answer is, simply, that if I hold up three fingers, you can count that easily, but if I hold up this, it's sort of hard to say that I just did seven. The virtue of binary is that it's the simplest possible way of representing numbers. Anything else is more complicated. You can catch errors with it, it's unambiguous in its reading, there are lots of good things about binary. So it is very, very simple once you learn how to read it. Now, if you like to represent this zero and one of binary, you need a device. And think of things in your life that are binary, one of them is light switches. They can be on and off. That's binary. Now wall switches, we all know, fail. But our friends who are condensed matter physicists managed to come up, some 50 years ago, with a very nice device, shown under that bell jar, which is a transistor. A transistor is nothing more than a wall switch. It turns things on and off, but it does so without moving parts and it doesn't fail, basically, for a very long period of time. So the second layer of simplicity was the transistor in the Internet. So, since the transistor is so simple, you can put lots of them together. And you put lots of them together and you come with something called integrated circuits. And a current integrated circuit might have in each one of these chips something like a billion transistors, all of which have to work perfectly every time. So that's the next layer of simplicity, and, in fact, integrated circuits are really simple in the sense that they, in general, work really well. With integrated circuits, you can build cellphones. You all are accustomed to having your cellphones work the large majority of the time. In Boston ... Boston is a little bit like Namibia in its cell phone coverage, (Laughter) so that we're not accustomed to that all the time, but some of the time. But, in fact, if you have cell phones, you can now go to this nice lady who's somewhere like Namibia, and who is extremely happy with the fact that although she does not have an master's degree in electrical engineering from MIT, she's nonetheless able to hack her cell phone to get power in some funny way. And from that comes the Internet. And this is a map of bitflows across the continent. The two blobs that are light in the middle there are the United States and Europe. And then back to simplicity again. So here we have what I think is one of the great ideas, which is Google. Which, in this simple portal makes the claim that it makes accessible all of the world's information. But the point is that that extraordinary simple idea rests on layers of simplicity each compounded into a complexity that is itself simple, in the sense that it is completely reliable. All right, let me then finish off with four general statements, an example and two aphorisms. The characteristics, which I think are useful to think about for simple things: First, they are predictable. Their behavior is predictable. Now, one of the nice characteristics of simple things is you know what it's going to do, in general. So simplicity and predictability are characteristics of simple things. The second is, and this is a real world statement, they're cheap. If you have things that are cheap enough, people will find uses for them, even if they seem very primitive. So, for example, stones. You can build cathedrals out of stones, you just have to know what it does. You carve them in blocks and then you pile them on top of one another, and they support weight. So there has to be function, the function has to be predictable and the cost has to be low. What that means is that you have to have a high performance or value for cost. And then I would propose as this last component that they serve, or have the potential to serve, as building blocks. That is, you can stack them. And stack can mean this way, or it can mean this way, or it can mean in some arbitrary n-dimensional space. But if you have something that has a function, and it's really cheap, people will find new ways of putting it together to make new things. Cheap, functional, reliable things unleash the creativity of people who then build stuff that you could not imagine. There's no way of predicting the Internet based on the first transistor. It just is not possible. So these are the components. Now, the example is something that I want to give you from the work that we ourselves do. We are very interested in delivering health care in the developing world, and one of the things that we wish to do in this particular business is to find a way of doing medical diagnosis at as close to zero cost as we can manage. So, how does one do that? This is a world in which there's no electricity, there's no money, there's no medical competence. And I don't want to spend your time in going through the details, but in the lower right-hand corner, you see an example of the kind of thing that we have. It's a little paper chip. It has a few things printed on it using the same technology that you use for making comic books, which was the inspiration for this particular idea. And you put a drop, in this case, of urine at the bottom. It wicks its way up into these little branches. You know, no power required. It turns colors. In this particular case, you're reading kidney function. And, since the health care worker of much of this part of the world is an 18 year-old with an AK-47, who happens to be out of work and is willing to go around and do this sort of thing, he can take a picture of it with his cellphone, send the picture back to where there is a doctor, and the doctor can look at it. So what you've done is to take a technology, which is available everywhere, make a device, which is extremely cheap, and make it in such a fashion that it is very, very reliable. If we can pull this off, if we can build more function, it will be stackable. That is to say, if we can make the basic technology of one or two things work, it will be applicable to a very, very large variety of human conditions, and hence, extendable in both vertical and horizontal directions. Part of my interest in this, I have to say, is that I would like to -- how do I put this politely? -- change the way, or maybe eviscerate, the capital structure of the U.S. health care system, which I think is fundamentally broken. So, let me close -- (Applause) Let me close with my two aphorisms. One of them is from Mr. Einstein, and he says, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." And I think that's a very good way of thinking about the problem. If you take too much out of something that's simple, you lose function. You have to have low cost, but you also have to have a function. So you can't make it too simple. And the second is a design issue, and it's not directly relevant, but it's a nice statement. This is by de Saint-Exupery. And he says, "You know you've achieved perfection in design, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing more to take away." And that certainly is going in the right direction. So, what I think one can begin to do with this kind of cut at the word simplicity, which doesn't cover Brancusi, it doesn't answer the question of why Mondrian is better or worse or simpler or less simpler than Van Gogh, and certainly doesn't address the question of whether Mozart is simpler than Bach. But it does make a point -- which is one which, in a sense, differentiates the real world of people who make things, and the world of people who think about things, which is, there is an intellectual merit to asking: How do we make things as simple as we can, as cheap as we can, as functional as we can and as freely interconnectable as we can? If we make that kind of simplicity in our technology and then give it to you guys, you can go off and do all kinds of fabulous things with it. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Quick question. So can you picture that a science of simplicity might get to the point where you could look out at various systems -- say a financial system or a legal system, health system -- and say, "That has got to the point of danger or dysfunctionality for the following reasons, and this is how we might simplify it"? George Whitesides: Yes, I think you could. Because if you look at the components from which the system is made and examine their fragility, or their stability, you can probably build a kind of risk assessment based on that basis. CA: Have you started to do that? I mean, with the health system, you got a sort of radical solution on the cost side, but in terms of the system itself? GW: Well, no. How do I put that simply? No. CA: That was a simple, powerful answer. GW: Yes. CA: So, in terms of that diagnostic technology that you've got, where is that, and when do you see that maybe getting rolled out to scale. GW: That's coming out soon. I mean, the systems work, and we have to find out how to manufacture them and do things of this kind, but the basic technology works. CA: You've got a company set up to ... GW: A foundation, a foundation. Not-for-profit. CA: All right. Well, thank you so much for your talk. Thank you. (Applause)

I think I was supposed to talk about my new book, which is called "Blink," and it's about snap judgments and first impressions. And it comes out in January, and I hope you all buy it in triplicate. (Laughter) But I was thinking about this, and I realized that although my new book makes me happy, and I think would make my mother happy, it's not really about happiness. So I decided instead, I would talk about someone who I think has done as much to make Americans happy as perhaps anyone over the last 20 years, a man who is a great personal hero of mine: someone by the name of Howard Moskowitz, who is most famous for reinventing spaghetti sauce. Howard's about this high, and he's round, and he's in his 60s, and he has big huge glasses and thinning gray hair, and he has a kind of wonderful exuberance and vitality, and he has a parrot, and he loves the opera, and he's a great aficionado of medieval history. And by profession, he's a psychophysicist. Now, I should tell you that I have no idea what psychophysics is, although at some point in my life, I dated a girl for two years who was getting her doctorate in psychophysics. Which should tell you something about that relationship. (Laughter) As far as I know, psychophysics is about measuring things. And Howard is very interested in measuring things. And he graduated with his doctorate from Harvard, and he set up a little consulting shop in White Plains, New York. And one of his first clients was Pepsi. This is many years ago, back in the early 70s. And Pepsi came to Howard and they said, "You know, there's this new thing called aspartame, and we would like to make Diet Pepsi. We'd like you to figure out how much aspartame we should put in each can of Diet Pepsi in order to have the perfect drink." Now that sounds like an incredibly straightforward question to answer, and that's what Howard thought. Because Pepsi told him, "We're working with a band between eight and 12 percent. Anything below eight percent sweetness is not sweet enough; anything above 12 percent sweetness is too sweet. We want to know: what's the sweet spot between 8 and 12?" Now, if I gave you this problem to do, you would all say, it's very simple. What we do is you make up a big experimental batch of Pepsi, at every degree of sweetness -- eight percent, 8.1, 8.2, 8.3, all the way up to 12 -- and we try this out with thousands of people, and we plot the results on a curve, and we take the most popular concentration, right? Really simple. Howard does the experiment, and he gets the data back, and he plots it on a curve, and all of a sudden he realizes it's not a nice bell curve. In fact, the data doesn't make any sense. It's a mess. It's all over the place. Now, most people in that business, in the world of testing food and such, are not dismayed when the data comes back a mess. They think, "Well, you know, figuring out what people think about cola's not that easy." "You know, maybe we made an error somewhere along the way." "You know, let's just make an educated guess," and they simply point and they go for 10 percent, right in the middle. Howard is not so easily placated. Howard is a man of a certain degree of intellectual standards. And this was not good enough for him, and this question bedeviled him for years. And he would think it through and say, "What was wrong? Why could we not make sense of this experiment with Diet Pepsi?" And one day, he was sitting in a diner in White Plains, about to go trying to dream up some work for Nescafé. And suddenly, like a bolt of lightning, the answer came to him. And that is, that when they analyzed the Diet Pepsi data, they were asking the wrong question. They were looking for the perfect Pepsi, and they should have been looking for the perfect Pepsis. Trust me. This was an enormous revelation. This was one of the most brilliant breakthroughs in all of food science. Howard immediately went on the road, and he would go to conferences around the country, and he would stand up and say, "You had been looking for the perfect Pepsi. You're wrong. You should be looking for the perfect Pepsis." And people would look at him blankly and say, "What are you talking about? Craziness." And they would say, "Move! Next!" Tried to get business, nobody would hire him -- he was obsessed, though, and he talked about it and talked about it. Howard loves the Yiddish expression "To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish." This was his horseradish. (Laughter) He was obsessed with it! And finally, he had a breakthrough. Vlasic Pickles came to him, and they said, "Doctor Moskowitz, we want to make the perfect pickle." And he said, "There is no perfect pickle; there are only perfect pickles." And he came back to them and he said, "You don't just need to improve your regular; you need to create zesty." And that's where we got zesty pickles. Then the next person came to him: Campbell's Soup. And this was even more important. In fact, Campbell's Soup is where Howard made his reputation. Campbell's made Prego, and Prego, in the early 80s, was struggling next to Ragù, which was the dominant spaghetti sauce of the 70s and 80s. In the industry -- I don't know whether you care about this, or how much time I have to go into this. But it was, technically speaking -- this is an aside -- Prego is a better tomato sauce than Ragù. The quality of the tomato paste is much better; the spice mix is far superior; it adheres to the pasta in a much more pleasing way. In fact, they would do the famous bowl test back in the 70s with Ragù and Prego. You'd have a plate of spaghetti, and you would pour it on, right? And the Ragù would all go to the bottom, and the Prego would sit on top. That's called "adherence." And, anyway, despite the fact that they were far superior in adherence, and the quality of their tomato paste, Prego was struggling. So they came to Howard, and they said, fix us. And Howard looked at their product line, and he said, what you have is a dead tomato society. So he said, this is what I want to do. And he got together with the Campbell's soup kitchen, and he made 45 varieties of spaghetti sauce. And he varied them according to every conceivable way that you can vary tomato sauce: by sweetness, by level of garlic, by tomatoey-ness, by tartness, by sourness, by visible solids -- my favorite term in the spaghetti sauce business. (Laughter) Every conceivable way you can vary spaghetti sauce, he varied spaghetti sauce. And then he took this whole raft of 45 spaghetti sauces, and he went on the road. He went to New York, to Chicago, he went to Jacksonville, to Los Angeles. And he brought in people by the truckload into big halls. And he sat them down for two hours, and over the course of that two hours, he gave them ten bowls. Ten small bowls of pasta, with a different spaghetti sauce on each one. And after they ate each bowl, they had to rate, from 0 to 100, how good they thought the spaghetti sauce was. At the end of that process, after doing it for months and months, he had a mountain of data about how the American people feel about spaghetti sauce. And then he analyzed the data. Did he look for the most popular variety of spaghetti sauce? No! Howard doesn't believe that there is such a thing. Instead, he looked at the data, and he said, let's see if we can group all these different data points into clusters. Let's see if they congregate around certain ideas. And sure enough, if you sit down, and you analyze all this data on spaghetti sauce, you realize that all Americans fall into one of three groups. There are people who like their spaghetti sauce plain; there are people who like their spaghetti sauce spicy; and there are people who like it extra chunky. And of those three facts, the third one was the most significant, because at the time, in the early 1980s, if you went to a supermarket, you would not find extra-chunky spaghetti sauce. And Prego turned to Howard, and they said, "You're telling me that one third of Americans crave extra-chunky spaghetti sauce and yet no one is servicing their needs?" And he said "Yes!" (Laughter) And Prego then went back, and completely reformulated their spaghetti sauce, and came out with a line of extra chunky that immediately and completely took over the spaghetti sauce business in this country. And over the next 10 years, they made 600 million dollars off their line of extra-chunky sauces. Everyone else in the industry looked at Howard had done, and they said, "Oh my god! We've been thinking all wrong!" And that's when you started to get seven different kinds of vinegar, and 14 different kinds of mustard, and 71 different kinds of olive oil. And then eventually even Ragù hired Howard, and Howard did the exact same thing for Ragù that he did for Prego. And today, if you go to a really good supermarket, do you know how many Ragùs there are? 36! In six varieties: Cheese, Light, Robusto, Rich & Hearty, Old World Traditional -- Extra-Chunky Garden. (Laughter) That's Howard's doing. That is Howard's gift to the American people. Now why is that important? (Laughter) It is, in fact, enormously important. I'll explain to you why. What Howard did is he fundamentally changed the way the food industry thinks about making you happy. Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people want to eat, what will make people happy, is to ask them. And for years and years and years, Ragù and Prego would have focus groups, and they would sit you down, and they would say, "What do you want in a spaghetti sauce? Tell us what you want in a spaghetti sauce." And for all those years -- 20, 30 years -- through all those focus group sessions, no one ever said they wanted extra-chunky. Even though at least a third of them, deep in their hearts, actually did. (Laughter) People don't know what they want! As Howard loves to say, "The mind knows not what the tongue wants." It's a mystery! (Laughter) And a critically important step in understanding our own desires and tastes is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want, deep down. If I asked all of you, for example, in this room, what you want in a coffee, you know what you'd say? Every one of you would say, "I want a dark, rich, hearty roast." It's what people always say when you ask them. "What do you like?" "Dark, rich, hearty roast!" What percentage of you actually like a dark, rich, hearty roast? According to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27 percent of you. Most of you like milky, weak coffee. (Laughter) But you will never, ever say to someone who asks you what you want that "I want a milky, weak coffee." So that's number one thing that Howard did. Number two thing that Howard did is he made us realize -- it's another very critical point -- he made us realize the importance of what he likes to call "horizontal segmentation." Why is this critical? Because this is the way the food industry thought before Howard. What were they obsessed with in the early 80s? They were obsessed with mustard. In particular, they were obsessed with the story of Grey Poupon. Used to be, there were two mustards: French's and Gulden's. What were they? Yellow mustard. What's in it? Yellow mustard seeds, turmeric, and paprika. That was mustard. Grey Poupon came along, with a Dijon. Right? Much more volatile brown mustard seed, some white wine, a nose hit, much more delicate aromatics. And what do they do? They put it in a little tiny glass jar, with a wonderful enameled label on it, made it look French, even though it's made in Oxnard, California. (Laughter) And instead of charging a dollar fifty for the eight-ounce bottle, the way that French's and Gulden's did, they decided to charge four dollars. And they had those ads. With the guy in the Rolls Royce, eating the Grey Poupon. Another pulls up, and says, "Do you have any Grey Poupon?" And the whole thing, after they did that, Grey Poupon takes off! Takes over the mustard business! And everyone's take-home lesson from that was that the way to make people happy is to give them something that is more expensive, something to aspire to. It's to make them turn their back on what they think they like now, and reach out for something higher up the mustard hierarchy. (Laughter) A better mustard! A more expensive mustard! A mustard of more sophistication and culture and meaning. And Howard looked to that and said, "That's wrong!" Mustard does not exist on a hierarchy. Mustard exists, just like tomato sauce, on a horizontal plane. There is no good mustard or bad mustard. There is no perfect mustard or imperfect mustard. There are only different kinds of mustards that suit different kinds of people. He fundamentally democratized the way we think about taste. And for that, as well, we owe Howard Moskowitz a huge vote of thanks. Third thing that Howard did, and perhaps the most important, is Howard confronted the notion of the Platonic dish. (Laughter) What do I mean by that? (Laughter) For the longest time in the food industry, there was a sense that there was one way, a perfect way, to make a dish. You go to Chez Panisse, they give you the red-tail sashimi with roasted pumpkin seeds in a something something reduction. They don't give you five options on the reduction. They don't say, "Do you want the extra-chunky reduction, or ...?" No! You just get the reduction. Why? Because the chef at Chez Panisse has a Platonic notion about red-tail sashimi. "This is the way it ought to be." And she serves it that way time and time again, and if you quarrel with her, she will say, "You know what? You're wrong! This is the best way it ought to be in this restaurant." Now that same idea fueled the commercial food industry as well. They had a Platonic notion of what tomato sauce was. And where did that come from? It came from Italy. Italian tomato sauce is what? It's blended; it's thin. The culture of tomato sauce was thin. When we talked about "authentic tomato sauce" in the 1970s, we talked about Italian tomato sauce, we talked about the earliest Ragùs, which had no visible solids, right? Which were thin, you just put a little bit and it sunk down to the bottom of the pasta. That's what it was. And why were we attached to that? Because we thought that what it took to make people happy was to provide them with the most culturally authentic tomato sauce, A. And B, we thought that if we gave them the culturally authentic tomato sauce, then they would embrace it. And that's what would please the maximum number of people. In other words, people in the cooking world were looking for cooking universals. They were looking for one way to treat all of us. And it's good reason for them to be obsessed with the idea of universals, because all of science, through the 19th century and much of the 20th, was obsessed with universals. Psychologists, medical scientists, economists were all interested in finding out the rules that govern the way all of us behave. But that changed, right? What is the great revolution in science of the last 10, 15 years? It is the movement from the search for universals to the understanding of variability. Now in medical science, we don't want to know, necessarily, just how cancer works, we want to know how your cancer is different from my cancer. I guess my cancer different from your cancer. Genetics has opened the door to the study of human variability. What Howard Moskowitz was doing was saying, "This same revolution needs to happen in the world of tomato sauce." And for that, we owe him a great vote of thanks. I'll give you one last illustration of variability, and that is -- oh, I'm sorry. Howard not only believed that, but he took it a second step, which was to say that when we pursue universal principles in food, we aren't just making an error; we are actually doing ourselves a massive disservice. And the example he used was coffee. And coffee is something he did a lot of work with, with Nescafé. If I were to ask all of you to try and come up with a brand of coffee -- a type of coffee, a brew -- that made all of you happy, and then I asked you to rate that coffee, the average score in this room for coffee would be about 60 on a scale of 0 to 100. If, however, you allowed me to break you into coffee clusters, maybe three or four coffee clusters, and I could make coffee just for each of those individual clusters, your scores would go from 60 to 75 or 78. The difference between coffee at 60 and coffee at 78 is a difference between coffee that makes you wince, and coffee that makes you deliriously happy. That is the final, and I think most beautiful lesson, of Howard Moskowitz: that in embracing the diversity of human beings, we will find a surer way to true happiness. Thank you. (Applause)

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

I grew up on a small farm in Missouri. We lived on less than a dollar a day for about 15 years. I got a scholarship, went to university, studied international agriculture, studied anthropology, and decided I was going to give back. I was going to work with small farmers. I was going to help alleviate poverty. I was going to work on international development, and then I took a turn and ended up here. Now, if you get a Ph.D., and you decide not to teach, you don't always end up in a place like this. It's a choice. You might end up driving a taxicab. You could be in New York. What I found was, I started working with refugees and famine victims -- small farmers, all, or nearly all -- who had been dispossessed and displaced. Now, what I'd been trained to do was methodological research on such people. So I did it: I found out how many women had been raped en route to these camps. I found out how many people had been put in jail, how many family members had been killed. I assessed how long they were going to stay and how much it would take to feed them. And I got really good at predicting how many body bags you would need for the people who were going to die in these camps. Now this is God's work, but it's not my work. It's not the work I set out to do. So I was at a Grateful Dead benefit concert on the rainforests in 1988. I met a guy -- the guy on the left. His name was Ben. He said, "What can I do to save the rainforests?" I said, "Well, Ben, what do you do?" "I make ice cream." So I said, "Well, you've got to make a rainforest ice cream. And you've got to use nuts from the rainforests to show that forests are worth more as forests than they are as pasture." He said, "Okay." Within a year, Rainforest Crunch was on the shelves. It was a great success. We did our first million-dollars-worth of trade by buying on 30 days and selling on 21. That gets your adrenaline going. Then we had a four and a half million-dollar line of credit because we were credit-worthy at that point. We had 15 to 20, maybe 22 percent of the global Brazil-nut market. We paid two to three times more than anybody else. Everybody else raised their prices to the gatherers of Brazil nuts because we would buy it otherwise. A great success. 50 companies signed up, 200 products came out, generated 100 million in sales. It failed. Why did it fail? Because the people who were gathering Brazil nuts weren't the same people who were cutting the forests. And the people who made money from Brazil nuts were not the people who made money from cutting the forests. We were attacking the wrong driver. We needed to be working on beef. We needed to be working on lumber. We needed to be working on soy -- things that we were not focused on. So let's go back to Sudan. I often talk to refugees: "Why was it that the West didn't realize that famines are caused by policies and politics, not by weather?" And this farmer said to me, one day, something that was very profound. He said, "You can't wake a person who's pretending to sleep." (Laughter) Okay. Fast forward. We live on a planet. There's just one of them. We've got to wake up to the fact that we don't have any more and that this is a finite planet. We know the limits of the resources we have. We may be able to use them differently. We may have some innovative, new ideas. But in general, this is what we've got. There's no more of it. There's a basic equation that we can't get away from. Population times consumption has got to have some kind of relationship to the planet, and right now, it's a simple "not equal." Our work shows that we're living at about 1.3 planets. Since 1990, we crossed the line of being in a sustainable relationship to the planet. Now we're at 1.3. If we were farmers, we'd be eating our seed. For bankers, we'd be living off the principal, not the interest. This is where we stand today. A lot of people like to point to some place else as the cause of the problem. It's always population growth. Population growth's important, but it's also about how much each person consumes. So when the average American consumes 43 times as much as the average African, we've got to think that consumption is an issue. It's not just about population, and it's not just about them; it's about us. But it's not just about people; it's about lifestyles. There's very good evidence -- again, we don't necessarily have a peer-reviewed methodology that's bulletproof yet -- but there's very good evidence that the average cat in Europe has a larger environmental footprint in its lifetime than the average African. You think that's not an issue going forward? You think that's not a question as to how we should be using the Earth's resources? Let's go back and visit our equation. In 2000, we had six billion people on the planet. They were consuming what they were consuming -- let's say one unit of consumption each. We have six billion units of consumption. By 2050, we're going to have nine billion people -- all the scientists agree. They're all going to consume twice as much as they currently do -- scientists, again, agree -- because income is going to grow in developing countries five times what it is today -- on global average, about [2.9]. So we're going to have 18 billion units of consumption. Who have you heard talking lately that's said we have to triple production of goods and services? But that's what the math says. We're not going to be able to do that. We can get productivity up. We can get efficiency up. But we've also got to get consumption down. We need to use less to make more. And then we need to use less again. And then we need to consume less. All of those things are part of that equation. But it basically raises a fundamental question: should consumers have a choice about sustainability, about sustainable products? Should you be able to buy a product that's sustainable sitting next to one that isn't, or should all the products on the shelf be sustainable? If they should all be sustainable on a finite planet, how do you make that happen? The average consumer takes 1.8 seconds in the U.S. Okay, so let's be generous. Let's say it's 3.5 seconds in Europe. How do you evaluate all the scientific data around a product, the data that's changing on a weekly, if not a daily, basis? How do you get informed? You don't. Here's a little question. From a greenhouse gas perspective, is lamb produced in the U.K. better than lamb produced in New Zealand, frozen and shipped to the U.K.? Is a bad feeder lot operation for beef better or worse than a bad grazing operation for beef? Do organic potatoes actually have fewer toxic chemicals used to produce them than conventional potatoes? In every single case, the answer is "it depends." It depends on who produced it and how, in every single instance. And there are many others. How is a consumer going to walk through this minefield? They're not. They may have a lot of opinions about it, but they're not going to be terribly informed. Sustainability has got to be a pre-competitive issue. It's got to be something we all care about. And we need collusion. We need groups to work together that never have. We need Cargill to work with Bunge. We need Coke to work with Pepsi. We need Oxford to work with Cambridge. We need Greenpeace to work with WWF. Everybody's got to work together -- China and the U.S. We need to begin to manage this planet as if our life depended on it, because it does, it fundamentally does. But we can't do everything. Even if we get everybody working on it, we've got to be strategic. We need to focus on the where, the what and the who. So, the where: We've identified 35 places globally that we need to work. These are the places that are the richest in biodiversity and the most important from an ecosystem function point-of-view. We have to work in these places. We have to save these places if we want a chance in hell of preserving biodiversity as we know it. We looked at the threats to these places. These are the 15 commodities that fundamentally pose the biggest threats to these places because of deforestation, soil loss, water use, pesticide use, over-fishing, etc. So we've got 35 places, we've got 15 priority commodities, who do we work with to change the way those commodities are produced? Are we going to work with 6.9 billion consumers? Let's see, that's about 7,000 languages, 350 major languages -- a lot of work there. I don't see anybody actually being able to do that very effectively. Are we going to work with 1.5 billion producers? Again, a daunting task. There must be a better way. 300 to 500 companies control 70 percent or more of the trade of each of the 15 commodities that we've identified as the most significant. If we work with those, if we change those companies and the way they do business, then the rest will happen automatically. So, we went through our 15 commodities. This is nine of them. We lined them up side-by-side, and we put the names of the companies that work on each of those. And if you go through the first 25 or 30 names of each of the commodities, what you begin to see is, gosh, there's Cargill here, there's Cargill there, there's Cargill everywhere. In fact, these names start coming up over and over again. So we did the analysis again a slightly different way. We said: if we take the top hundred companies, what percentage of all 15 commodities do they touch, buy or sell? And what we found is it's 25 percent. So 100 companies control 25 percent of the trade of all 15 of the most significant commodities on the planet. We can get our arms around a hundred companies. A hundred companies, we can work with. Why is 25 percent important? Because if these companies demand sustainable products, they'll pull 40 to 50 percent of production. Companies can push producers faster than consumers can. By companies asking for this, we can leverage production so much faster than by waiting for consumers to do it. After 40 years, the global organic movement has achieved 0.7 of one percent of global food. We can't wait that long. We don't have that kind of time. We need change that's going to accelerate. Even working with individual companies is not probably going to get us there. We need to begin to work with industries. So we've started roundtables where we bring together the entire value chain, from producers all the way to the retailers and brands. We bring in civil society, we bring in NGOs, we bring in researchers and scientists to have an informed discussion -- sometimes a battle royale -- to figure out what are the key impacts of these products, what is a global benchmark, what's an acceptable impact, and design standards around that. It's not all fun and games. In salmon aquaculture, we kicked off a roundtable almost six years ago. Eight entities came to the table. We eventually got, I think, 60 percent of global production at the table and 25 percent of demand at the table. Three of the original eight entities were suing each other. And yet, next week, we launch globally verified, vetted and certified standards for salmon aquaculture. It can happen. (Applause) So what brings the different entities to the table? It's risk and demand. For the big companies, it's reputational risk, but more importantly, they don't care what the price of commodities is. If they don't have commodities, they don't have a business. They care about availability, so the big risk for them is not having product at all. For the producers, if a buyer wants to buy something produced a certain way, that's what brings them to the table. So it's the demand that brings them to the table. The good news is we identified a hundred companies two years ago. In the last 18 months, we've signed agreements with 40 of those hundred companies to begin to work with them on their supply chain. And in the next 18 months, we will have signed up to work with another 40, and we think we'll get those signed as well. Now what we're doing is bringing the CEOs of these 80 companies together to help twist the arms of the final 20, to bring them to the table, because they don't like NGOs, they've never worked with NGOs, they're concerned about this, they're concerned about that, but we all need to be in this together. So we're pulling out all the stops. We're using whatever leverage we have to bring them to the table. One company we're working with that's begun -- in baby steps, perhaps -- but has begun this journey on sustainability is Cargill. They've funded research that shows that we can double global palm oil production without cutting a single tree in the next 20 years, and do it all in Borneo alone by planting on land that's already degraded. The study shows that the highest net present value for palm oil is on land that's been degraded. They're also undertaking a study to look at all of their supplies of palm oil to see if they could be certified and what they would need to change in order to become third-party certified under a credible certification program. Why is Cargill important? Because Cargill has 20 to 25 percent of global palm oil. If Cargill makes a decision, the entire palm oil industry moves, or at least 40 or 50 percent of it. That's not insignificant. More importantly, Cargill and one other company ship 50 percent of the palm oil that goes to China. We don't have to change the way a single Chinese company works if we get Cargill to only send sustainable palm oil to China. It's a pre-competitive issue. All the palm oil going there is good. Buy it. Mars is also on a similar journey. Now most people understand that Mars is a chocolate company, but Mars has made sustainability pledges to buy only certified product for all of its seafood. It turns out Mars buys more seafood than Walmart because of pet food. But they're doing some really interesting things around chocolate, and it all comes from the fact that Mars wants to be in business in the future. And what they see is that they need to improve chocolate production. On any given plantation, 20 percent of the trees produce 80 percent of the crop, so Mars is looking at the genome, they're sequencing the genome of the cocoa plant. They're doing it with IBM and the USDA, and they're putting it in the public domain because they want everybody to have access to this data, because they want everybody to help them make cocoa more productive and more sustainable. What they've realized is that if they can identify the traits on productivity and drought tolerance, they can produce 320 percent as much cocoa on 40 percent of the land. The rest of the land can be used for something else. It's more with less and less again. That's what the future has got to be, and putting it in the public domain is smart. They don't want to be an I.P. company; they want to be a chocolate company, but they want to be a chocolate company forever. Now, the price of food, many people complain about, but in fact, the price of food is going down, and that's odd because in fact, consumers are not paying for the true cost of food. If you take a look just at water, what we see is that, with four very common products, you look at how much a farmer produced to make those products, and then you look at how much water input was put into them, and then you look at what the farmer was paid. If you divide the amount of water into what the farmer was paid, the farmer didn't receive enough money to pay a decent price for water in any of those commodities. That is an externality by definition. This is the subsidy from nature. Coca-Cola, they've worked a lot on water, but right now, they're entering into 17-year contracts with growers in Turkey to sell juice into Europe, and they're doing that because they want to have a product that's closer to the European market. But they're not just buying the juice; they're also buying the carbon in the trees to offset the shipment costs associated with carbon to get the product into Europe. There's carbon that's being bought with sugar, with coffee, with beef. This is called bundling. It's bringing those externalities back into the price of the commodity. We need to take what we've learned in private, voluntary standards of what the best producers in the world are doing and use that to inform government regulation, so we can shift the entire performance curve. We can't just focus on identifying the best; we've got to move the rest. The issue isn't what to think, it's how to think. These companies have begun to think differently. They're on a journey; there's no turning back. We're all on that same journey with them. We have to really begin to change the way we think about everything. Whatever was sustainable on a planet of six billion is not going to be sustainable on a planet with nine. Thank you. (Applause)

Hi. I'm going to talk to you today about laughter, and I just want to start by thinking about the first time I can ever remember noticing laughter. This is when I was a little girl. I would've been about six. And I came across my parents doing something unusual, where they were laughing. They were laughing very, very hard. They were lying on the floor laughing. They were screaming with laughter. I did not know what they were laughing at, but I wanted in. I wanted to be part of that, and I kind of sat around at the edge going, "Hoo hoo!" (Laughter) Now, incidentally, what they were laughing at was a song which people used to sing, which was based around signs in toilets on trains telling you what you could and could not do in toilets on trains. And the thing you have to remember about the English is, of course, we do have an immensely sophisticated sense of humor. (Laughter) At the time, though, I didn't understand anything of that. I just cared about the laughter, and actually, as a neuroscientist, I've come to care about it again. And it is a really weird thing to do. What I'm going to do now is just play some examples of real human beings laughing, and I want you think about the sound people make and how odd that can be, and in fact how primitive laughter is as a sound. It's much more like an animal call than it is like speech. So here we've got some laughter for you. The first one is pretty joyful. (Audio: Laughing) Now this next guy, I need him to breathe. There's a point in there where I'm just, like, you've got to get some air in there, mate, because he just sounds like he's breathing out. (Audio: Laughing) This hasn't been edited; this is him. (Audio: Laughing) (Laughter) And finally we have -- this is a human female laughing. And laughter can take us to some pretty odd places in terms of making noises. (Audio: Laughing) She actually says, "Oh my God, what is that?" in French. We're all kind of with her. I have no idea. Now, to understand laughter, you have to look at a part of the body that psychologists and neuroscientists don't normally spend much time looking at, which is the ribcage, and it doesn't seem terribly exciting, but actually you're all using your ribcage all the time. What you're all doing at the moment with your ribcage, and don't stop doing it, is breathing. So you use the intercostal muscles, the muscles between your ribs, to bring air in and out of your lungs just by expanding and contracting your ribcage, and if I was to put a strap around the outside of your chest called a breath belt, and just look at that movement, you see a rather gentle sinusoidal movement, so that's breathing. You're all doing it. Don't stop. As soon as you start talking, you start using your breathing completely differently. So what I'm doing now is you see something much more like this. In talking, you use very fine movements of the ribcage to squeeze the air out -- and in fact, we're the only animals that can do this. It's why we can talk at all. Now, both talking and breathing has a mortal enemy, and that enemy is laughter, because what happens when you laugh is those same muscles start to contract very regularly, and you get this very marked sort of zig-zagging, and that's just squeezing the air out of you. It literally is that basic a way of making a sound. You could be stamping on somebody, it's having the same effect. You're just squeezing air out, and each of those contractions -- Ha! -- gives you a sound. And as the contractions run together, you can get these spasms, and that's when you start getting these -- (Wheezing) -- things happening. I'm brilliant at this. (Laughter) Now, in terms of the science of laughter, there isn't very much, but it does turn out that pretty much everything we think we know about laughter is wrong. So it's not at all unusual, for example, to hear people to say humans are the only animals that laugh. Nietzsche thought that humans are the only animals that laugh. In fact, you find laughter throughout the mammals. It's been well-described and well-observed in primates, but you also see it in rats, and wherever you find it -- humans, primates, rats -- you find it associated with things like tickling. That's the same for humans. You find it associated with play, and all mammals play. And wherever you find it, it's associated with interactions. So Robert Provine, who has done a lot of work on this, has pointed out that you are 30 times more likely to laugh if you are with somebody else than if you're on your own, and where you find most laughter is in social interactions like conversation. So if you ask human beings, "When do you laugh?" they'll talk about comedy and they'll talk about humor and they'll talk about jokes. If you look at when they laugh, they're laughing with their friends. And when we laugh with people, we're hardly ever actually laughing at jokes. You are laughing to show people that you understand them, that you agree with them, that you're part of the same group as them. You're laughing to show that you like them. You might even love them. You're doing all that at the same time as talking to them, and the laughter is doing a lot of that emotional work for you. Something that Robert Provine has pointed out, as you can see here, and the reason why we were laughing when we heard those funny laughs at the start, and why I was laughing when I found my parents laughing, is that it's an enormously behaviorally contagious effect. You can catch laughter from somebody else, and you are more likely to catch laughter off somebody else if you know them. So it's still modulated by this social context. You have to put humor to one side and think about the social meaning of laughter because that's where its origins lie. Now, something I've got very interested in is different kinds of laughter, and we have some neurobiological evidence about how human beings vocalize that suggests there might be two kinds of laughs that we have. So it seems possible that the neurobiology for helpless, involuntary laughter, like my parents lying on the floor screaming about a silly song, might have a different basis to it than some of that more polite social laughter that you encounter, which isn't horrible laughter, but it's behavior somebody is doing as part of their communicative act to you, part of their interaction with you; they are choosing to do this. In our evolution, we have developed two different ways of vocalizing. Involuntary vocalizations are part of an older system than the more voluntary vocalizations like the speech I'm doing now. So we might imagine that laughter might actually have two different roots. So I've been looking at this in more detail. To do this, we've had to make recordings of people laughing, and we've had to do whatever it takes to make people laugh, and we got those same people to produce more posed, social laughter. So imagine your friend told a joke, and you're laughing because you like your friend, but not really because the joke's all that. So I'm going to play you a couple of those. I want you to tell me if you think this laughter is real laughter, or if you think it's posed. So is this involuntary laughter or more voluntary laughter? (Audio: Laughing) What does that sound like to you? Audience: Posed. Sophie Scott: Posed? Posed. How about this one? (Audio: Laughing) (Laughter) I'm the best. (Laughter) (Applause) Not really. No, that was helpless laughter, and in fact, to record that, all they had to do was record me watching one of my friends listening to something I knew she wanted to laugh at, and I just started doing this. What you find is that people are good at telling the difference between real and posed laughter. They seem to be different things to us. Interestingly, you see something quite similar with chimpanzees. Chimpanzees laugh differently if they're being tickled than if they're playing with each other, and we might be seeing something like that here, involuntary laughter, tickling laughter, being different from social laughter. They're acoustically very different. The real laughs are longer. They're higher in pitch. When you start laughing hard, you start squeezing air out from your lungs under much higher pressures than you could ever produce voluntarily. For example, I could never pitch my voice that high to sing. Also, you start to get these sort of contractions and weird whistling sounds, all of which mean that real laughter is extremely easy, or feels extremely easy to spot. In contrast, posed laughter, we might think it sounds a bit fake. Actually, it's not, it's actually an important social cue. We use it a lot, we're choosing to laugh in a lot of situations, and it seems to be its own thing. So, for example, you find nasality in posed laughter, that kind of "ha ha ha ha ha" sound that you never get, you could not do, if you were laughing involuntarily. So they do seem to be genuinely these two different sorts of things. We took it into the scanner to see how brains respond when you hear laughter. And when you do this, this is a really boring experiment. We just played people real and posed laughs. We didn't tell them it was a study on laughter. We put other sounds in there to distract them, and all they're doing is lying listening to sounds. We don't tell them to do anything. Nonetheless, when you hear real laughter and when you hear posed laughter, the brains are responding completely differently, significantly differently. What you see in the regions in blue, which lies in auditory cortex, are the brain areas that respond more to the real laughs, and what seems to be the case, when you hear somebody laughing involuntarily, you hear sounds you would never hear in any other context. It's very unambiguous, and it seems to be associated with greater auditory processing of these novel sounds. In contrast, when you hear somebody laughing in a posed way, what you see are these regions in pink, which are occupying brain areas associated with mentalizing, thinking about what somebody else is thinking. And I think what that means is, even if you're having your brain scanned, which is completely boring and not very interesting, when you hear somebody going, "A ha ha ha ha ha," you're trying to work out why they're laughing. Laughter is always meaningful. You are always trying to understand it in context, even if, as far as you are concerned, at that point in time, it has not necessarily anything to do with you, you still want to know why those people are laughing. Now, we've had the opportunity to look at how people hear real and posed laughter across the age range. So this is an online experiment we ran with the Royal Society, and here we just asked people two questions. First of all, they heard some laughs, and they had to say, how real or posed do these laughs sound? The real laughs are shown in red and the posed laughs are shown in blue. What you see is there is a rapid onset. As you get older, you get better and better at spotting real laughter. So six-year-olds are at chance, they can't really hear the difference. By the time you are older, you get better, but interestingly, you do not hit peak performance in this dataset until you are in your late 30s and early 40s. You don't understand laughter fully by the time you hit puberty. You don't understand laughter fully by the time your brain has matured at the end of your teens. You're learning about laughter throughout your entire early adult life. If we turn the question around and now say not, what does the laughter sound like in terms of being real or posed, but we say, how much does this laughter make you want to laugh, how contagious is this laughter to you, we see a different profile. And here, the younger you are, the more you want to join in when you hear laughter. Remember me laughing with my parents when I had no idea what was going on. You really can see this. Now everybody, young and old, finds the real laughs more contagious than the posed laughs, but as you get older, it all becomes less contagious to you. Now, either we're all just becoming really grumpy as we get older, or it may mean that as you understand laughter better, and you are getting better at doing that, you need more than just hearing people laugh to want to laugh. You need the social stuff there. So we've got a very interesting behavior about which a lot of our lay assumptions are incorrect, but I'm coming to see that actually there's even more to laughter than it's an important social emotion we should look at, because it turns out people are phenomenally nuanced in terms of how we use laughter. There's a really lovely set of studies coming out from Robert Levenson's lab in California, where he's doing a longitudinal study with couples. He gets married couples, men and women, into the lab, and he gives them stressful conversations to have while he wires them up to a polygraph so he can see them becoming stressed. So you've got the two of them in there, and he'll say to the husband, "Tell me something that your wife does that irritates you." And what you see is immediately -- just run that one through your head briefly, you and your partner -- you can imagine everybody gets a bit more stressed as soon as that starts. You can see physically, people become more stressed. What he finds is that the couples who manage that feeling of stress with laughter, positive emotions like laughter, not only immediately become less stressed, they can see them physically feeling better, they're dealing with this unpleasant situation better together, they are also the couples that report high levels of satisfaction in their relationship and they stay together for longer. So in fact, when you look at close relationships, laughter is a phenomenally useful index of how people are regulating their emotions together. We're not just emitting it at each other to show that we like each other, we're making ourselves feel better together. Now, I don't think this is going to be limited to romantic relationships. I think this is probably going to be a characteristic of close emotional relationships such as you might have with friends, which explains my next clip, which is of a YouTube video of some young men in the former East Germany on making a video to promote their heavy metal band, and it's extremely macho, and the mood is very serious, and I want you to notice what happens in terms of laughter when things go wrong and how quickly that happens, and how that changes the mood. He's cold. He's about to get wet. He's got swimming trunks on, got a towel. Ice. What might possibly happen? Video starts. Serious mood. And his friends are already laughing. They are already laughing, hard. He's not laughing yet. (Laughter) He's starting to go now. And now they're all off. (Laughter) They're on the floor. (Laughter) The thing I really like about that is it's all very serious until he jumps onto the ice, and as soon as he doesn't go through the ice, but also there isn't blood and bone everywhere, his friends start laughing. And imagine if that had played him out with him standing there going, "No seriously, Heinrich, I think this is broken," we wouldn't enjoy watching that. That would be stressful. Or if he was running around with a visibly broken leg laughing, and his friends are going, "Heinrich, I think we need to go to the hospital now," that also wouldn't be funny. The fact that the laughter works, it gets him from a painful, embarrassing, difficult situation, into a funny situation, into what we're actually enjoying there, and I think that's a really interesting use, and it's actually happening all the time. For example, I can remember something like this happening at my father's funeral. We weren't jumping around on the ice in our underpants. We're not Canadian. (Laughter) (Applause) These events are always difficult, I had a relative who was being a bit difficult, my mum was not in a good place, and I can remember finding myself just before the whole thing started telling this story about something that happened in a 1970s sitcom, and I just thought at the time, I don't know why I'm doing this, and what I realized I was doing was I was coming up with something from somewhere I could use to make her laugh together with me. It was a very basic reaction to find some reason we can do this. We can laugh together. We're going to get through this. We're going to be okay. And in fact, all of us are doing this all the time. You do it so often, you don't even notice it. Everybody underestimates how often they laugh, and you're doing something, when you laugh with people, that's actually letting you access a really ancient evolutionary system that mammals have evolved to make and maintain social bonds, and clearly to regulate emotions, to make ourselves feel better. It's not something specific to humans -- it's a really ancient behavior which really helps us regulate how we feel and makes us feel better. In other words, when it comes to laughter, you and me, baby, ain't nothing but mammals. (Laughter) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

Thirteen trillion dollars in wealth has evaporated over the course of the last two years. We've questioned the future of capitalism. We've questioned the financial industry. We've looked at our government oversight. We've questioned where we're going. And yet, at the same time, this very well may be a seminal moment in American history, an opportunity for the consumer to actually take control and guide us to a new trajectory in America. I'm calling this The Great Unwind. And the idea is a simple, simple idea, which is the fact that the consumer has moved from a state of anxiety to action. Consumers who represent 72 percent of the GDP of America have actually started, just like banks and just like businesses, to de-leverage, to unwind their leverage, in daily life, to remove themselves from the liability and risk that presents itself as we move forward. So, to understand this -- and I'm going to stress this -- it's not about the consumer being in retreat. The consumer is empowered. In order to understand this, we're going to step back and look a little bit at what's happened over the course of the last year and a half. So, if you've been gone, this is the easy CliffsNotes on what's happened in the economy. Okay? (Laughter) Unemployment up. Housing values down. Equity markets down. Commodity prices are like this. If you're a mom trying to manage a budget, and oil was 150 dollars a barrel last summer, and it's somewhere between 50 and 70, do you plan vacations? How do you buy? What is your strategy in your household? Will the bailout work? We have national debt, Detroit, currency valuations, healthcare, all these issues facing us. You put them all together, you mix them up in a bouillabaisse, and you have consumer confidence that's basically a ticking time-bomb. In fact, let's go back and look at what caused this crisis, because the consumer, all of us, in our daily lives, actually contributed a large part to the problem. This is something I call the 50-20 paradox. It took us 50 years to reach annual savings ratings of almost 10 percent. 50 years. Do you know what this was right here? This was World War II. Do you know why savings was so high? There was nothing to buy, unless you wanted to buy some rivets. Right? So, what happened though, over the course of the last 20 years -- we went from a 10 percent savings rate to a negative savings rate. Because we binged. We bought extra-large cars, supersized everything, we bought remedies for restless leg syndrome. All these things together basically created a factor where the consumer sort of drove us headlong into the crisis that we face today. The personal debt-to-income ratio basically went from 65 percent to 135 percent in the span of about 15 years. So consumers got overleveraged. And of course our banks did as well, as did our federal government. This is an absolutely staggering chart. It shows leverage, trended out from 1919 to 2009. And what you end up seeing is the whole phenomenon of the fact that we are actually stepping forth and basically leveraging future education, future children in our households. So if you look at this in the context of visualizing the bailout, what you can see is if you stack up dollar bills, first of all, 360,000 dollars is about the size of a five-foot-four guy. But if you stack it up, you just see this amazing, staggering amount of dollars that have been put into the system to fund and bail us out. So this is the first 315 billion. But I read this fact the other day, that one trillion seconds equals 32 thousand years, so if you think about that, the context, the casualness with which we talk about trillion-dollar bailout here, and trillion there, we are stacking ourselves up for long-term leverage. However, consumers have moved. They are taking responsibility. What we're seeing is an uptake in the savings rate. In fact, 11 straight months of savings have happened since the beginning of the crisis. We are working our way back up to that 10 percent. Also, remarkably, in the fourth quarter, spending dropped to its lowest level in 62 years, almost a 3.7 percent decline. Visa now reports that more people are using debit cards than they're using credit cards. So we're starting to pay for things with money that we have. And we're starting to be much more careful about how we save and how we invest. But that's not really the whole story. Because this has also been a dramatic time of transformation. And you've got to admit, over the course of the last year and a half, consumers have been doing some pretty weird things. It's been pretty staggering, what we've lived through. If you take into account 80 percent of all Americans were born after World War II, this is essentially our Depression. And so, as a result, some crazy things have happened. I'll give you some examples. Lets talk about dentists, vasectomies, guns and shark attacks. Okay? (Laughter) Dentists report molars, you know, people grinding their teeth, coming in and reporting the fact that they've had stress. And so there is an increase in people having to have their fillings replaced. Guns, gun sales, according to the FBI, who does background checks, are up almost 25 percent since January. Vasectomies are up 48 percent, according to the Cornell institute. And lastly, but a very good point, hopefully not related to the former point I just made, which is that shark attacks are at their lowest level from 2003. Does anybody know why? No one is at the beach. So there is a bright side to everything. But seriously, what we see happening, and the reason I want to stress that the consumer is not in retreat, is that this is a tremendous opportunity for the consumer who drove us into this recession to lead us right back out. And what I mean by that is that we can move from mindless consumption to mindful consumption. Right? If you think about the last three decades, the consumer has moved from savvy about marketing in the '90s, to gathering all these amazing social and search tools in this decade, but the one thing that has been holding them back is the ability to discriminate. By restricting their demand, consumers can actually align their values with their spending, and drive capitalism and business to not just be about more, but be about better. We're going to explain that right now. Based on Y&R's BrandAsset Valuator, proprietary tool of VML and Young & Rubicam, we set out to understand what's been happening in the crisis with the consumer marketplace. We found a couple of really interesting things. We're going to go through four value-shifts that we see driving new consumer behaviors, that offer new management principles. The first cultural value shift that we see is this tendency toward something we call liquid life. This is the movement from Americans defining their success on having things to having liquidity, because the less excess that you have around you, the more nimble and fleet of foot you are. As a result, déclassé consumption is in. Déclassé consumption is the whole idea that spending money frivolously makes you look a little bit anti-fashion. The management principle is dollars and cents. So let's look at some examples of this déclassé consumption that falls out of this value. First things is we see something must be happening when P. Diddy vows to tone down his bling. (Laughter) But seriously, we also have this phenomenon on Madison Avenue and in other places, where people are actually walking out of luxury boutiques with ordinary, sort of generic paper bags to hide the brand purchases. We see high-end haggling in fashion today. High-end haggling for luxury and real estate. We also see just a relaxing of ego, and sort of a dismantling of artifice. This is a story on the yacht club that's all basically blue collar. Blue-collar yacht club, where you can join the yacht club, but you've got to work in the boat yard, as sort of condition of membership. We also see the trend toward tourism that's a little bit more low key. Right? Agritourism, going to vineyards and going to farms. And then we also see this movement forward from dollars and cents. What businesses can do to connect with these new mindsets is really interesting. A couple things that are kind of cool. One is that Frito-Lay figured out this liquidity thing with their consumer. They found their consumer had more money at the beginning of the month, less at the end of the month. So what they did is they started to change their packaging. Larger packs at the beginning of the month, smaller packaging at the end of the month. Really interestingly, too, was the San Francisco Giants. They've just instituted dynamic pricing. So it takes into account everything from the pitcher match-ups, to the weather, to the team records, in setting prices for the consumer. Another quick example of these types of movements is the rise of Zynga. Zynga has risen on the consumer's desire to not want to be locked in to fixed-cost. Again, this theme is about variable cost, variable living. So micropayments have become huge. And lastly, some people are using Hulu actually as a device to get rid of their cable bill. So, really clever ideas there that are kind of being taken ahold and marketers are starting to understand. The second of the four values is this movement toward ethics and fair play. We see that play itself out with empathy and respect. The consumer is demanding it. And, as a result, businesses must provide not only value, but values. Increasingly, consumers are looking at the culture of the company, looking for their conduct in the marketplace. So, what we see with empathy and respect, lots of really hopeful things that have come out of this recession. And I'll give you a few examples. One is the rise toward communities and neighborhoods, and increased emphasis on your neighbors as your support system. Also a wonderful byproduct of sort of a really lousy thing, which has been unemployment, is a rise in volunteerism that's been noted in our country. We also see the phenomenon -- some of you may have "boomerang kids" -- these are "boomerang alumni," where universities are actually reconnecting with alumni in helping them with jobs, sharing skills and retraining. We also talked about character and professionalism. We had this miracle on the Hudson in New York City, you know, in January, and suddenly Sully has become a key name on Babycenter. (Laughter) So, from a value and values standpoint, what companies can do is connect in lots of different ways. Microsoft is doing something wonderful. They are actually vowing to retrain two million Americans with I.T. training, using their existing infrastructure to do something good. Also a really interesting company is Gore-Tex. Gore-Tex is all about personal accountability of their management and their employees, to the point where they really kind of shun the idea of bosses. But they also talk about the fact that their executives, all of their expense reports are put onto their company intranet for everyone to see. Complete transparency. Think twice before you have that bottle of wine. The third of the four laws of post-crisis consumerism is about durable living. We're seeing on our data that consumers are realizing this is a marathon, not a sprint. They are digging in. And they're looking for ways to extract value out of every purchase that they make. Witness the fact that Americans are holding on to their cars longer than ever before, 9.4 years on average, in March. A record. We also see the fact that libraries have become a huge resource for America. Did you know that 68 percent of Americans now carry a library card? The highest percentage ever in our nation's history. So what you see in this trend is also the accumulation of knowledge. Continuing education is up. Everything is focused on betterment, and training, and development and moving forward. We also see a big DIY movement. I was fascinated to learn that 30 percent of all homes in America are actually built by owners. That includes cottages and the like. But 30 percent. So, people are getting their hands dirty. They are rolling up their sleeves. They want these skills. We see that with the phenomenon of raising backyard hens and chickens and ducks. And when you work out the math, they say it doesn't work, but the principle is there that it's about being sustainable and taking care of yourself. And then we look at the High Line in New York City, an excellent use of reimagining existing infrastructure for something good, which is a brand new park in New York City. So, what brands can do, and companies, is pay dividends to consumers, be a brand that lasts, offer transparency, promise you're going to be there beyond today's sale. Perfect example of that is Patagonia. Patagonia's Footprint Chronicles basically goes through and tracks every product that they make, and gives you social responsibility, and helps you understand the ethics that are behind the product that they make. Another great example is Fidelity. Rather than instant cash-back rewards on your credit or debit purchases, this is about 529 rewards for your student education. Or the interesting company SunRun. I love this company. They've created a consumer collective where they put solar panels on households and create a consumer-based utility, where the electricity that they generate is basically pumped back out into the marketplace. So, it's a consumer driven co-op. So, the fourth sort of post-crisis consumerism that we see is this movement about return to the fold. It's incredibly important right now. Trust is not parceled out, as we all know. It's now about connecting to your communities, connecting to your social networks. In my book I talked about the fact that 72 percent of people trust what other people say about a brand or a company, versus 15 percent on advertising. So, in that respect, cooperative consumerism has really taken off. This is about consumers working together to get what they want out of the marketplace. Let's look at a couple of quick examples. The artisanal movement is huge. Everything about locally derived products and services, supporting your local neighborhoods, whether it's cheeses, wines and other products. Also this rise of local currencies. Realizing that it's difficult to get loans in this environment, you're doing business with people you trust, in your local markets. So, this rise of this sort of local currency is another really interesting phenomenon. And then they did a recent report I thought was fascinating. They actually started, in certain communities in the United States, start to publish people's electricity usage. And what they found out is when that was available for public record, the people's electricity usage in those communities dropped. Then we also look at the idea of cow-pooling, which is the whole phenomenon of consumers organizing together to buy meat from organic farms that they know is safe and controlled in the way that they want it to be controlled. And then there is this other really interesting movement that's happened in California, which is about carrot mobs. The traditional thing would be to boycott right? Have a stick? Well why not have a carrot? So these are consumers organizing, pooling their resources to incentify companies to do good. And then we look at what companies can do. This is all the opportunity about being a community organizer. You have to realize that you can't fight and control this. You actually need to organize it. You need to harness it. You need to give it meaning. And there is lots of really interesting examples here that we see. First is just the rise of the fact that Zagat's has actually moved out of and diversified from rating restaurants, into actually rating healthcare. So what credentials does Zagat's have? Well, they have a lot, because it's their network of people. Right? So that becomes a very powerful force for them to make their brand more elastic. Then you look at the phenomenon of Kogi. This Kogi doesn't exist. It's a moving truck. Right? It's a moving truck through L.A., and the only way you can find it is through Twitter. Or you look at Johnson & Johnson's Momversations. A phenomenal blog that's been built up. Where J&J basically is tapping into the power of mommy bloggers, allowing them to basically create a forum where they can communicate and they can connect. And it's also become a very, very valuable sort of advertising revenue for J&J as well. This plus the fact that you've got phenomenal work from CEOs from Ford to Zappos, connecting on Twitter, creating an open environment, allowing their employees to be part of the process, rather than hidden behind walls. You see this rising force in sort of total transparency and openness that companies are starting to adopt, all because the consumer is demanding it. So, when we look at this and we step back, what I believe is that the crisis that exists today is definitely real. It's been tremendously powerful for consumers. But, at the same time, this is also a tremendous opportunity. And the Chinese character for crisis is actually the same side of the same coin. Crisis equals opportunity. What we're seeing with consumers right now is the ability for them to actually lead us forward out of this recession. So, we believe that values-driven spending will force capitalism to be better. It will drive innovation. It will make longer-lasting products. It will create better, more intuitive customer service. It will give us the opportunity to connect with companies that share the values that we share. So, when we look back and step out at this and see the beginning of these trends that we're seeing in our data, we see a very hopeful picture for the future of America. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I went to Spain a few months ago and I had the best foie gras of my life. The best culinary experience of my life. Because what I saw, I'm convinced, is the future of cooking. Ridiculous, right? Foie gras and the future of cooking. There's not a food today that's more maligned than foie gras, right? I mean, it's crucified. It was outlawed in Chicago for a while. It's pending here in California, and just recently in New York. It's like if you're a chef and you put it on your menu, you risk being attacked. Really, it happened here in San Francisco to a famous chef. I'm not saying that there's not a rationale for being opposed to foie gras. The reasons usually just boil down to the gavage, which is the force feeding. Basically you take a goose or a duck and you force feed a ton of grain down its throat. More grain in a couple of weeks than it would ever get in a lifetime. Its liver expands by eight times. Suffice to say it's like -- it's not the prettiest picture of sustainable farming. The problem for us chefs is that it's so freakin' delicious. (Laughter) I mean, I love the stuff. It is fatty, it's sweet, it's silky, it's unctuous. It makes everything else you put it with taste incredible. Can we produce a menu that's delicious without foie gras? Yes, sure. You can also bike the Tour de France without steroids, right? (Laughter) Not a lot of people are doing it. And for good reason. (Laughter) So several months ago, a friend of mine sent me this link to this guy, Eduardo Sousa. Eduardo is doing what he calls natural foie gras. Natural foie gras. What's natural about foie gras? To take advantage of when the temperature drops in the fall, geese and ducks gorge on food to prepare for the harsh realities of winter. And the rest of the year they're free to roam around Eduardo's land and eat what they want. So no gavage, no force feeding, no factory-like conditions, no cruelty. And it's shockingly not a new idea. His great-granddad started -- Patería de Sousa -- in 1812. And they've been doing it quietly ever since. That is until last year, when Eduardo won the Coup de Coeur, the coveted French gastronomic prize. It's like the Olympics of food products. He placed first for his foie gras. Big, big problem. As he said to me, that really pissed the French off. (Laughter) He said it sort of gleefully. It was all over the papers. I read about it. It was in Le Monde. "Spanish chef accused ... " -- and the French accused him. "Spanish chef accused of cheating." They accused him of paying off the judges. They implicated actually, the Spanish government, amazingly. Huh, amazing. A huge scandal for a few weeks. Couldn't find a shred of evidence. Now, look at the guy. He doesn't look like a guy who's paying off French judges for his foie gras. So that died down, and very soon afterward, new controversy. He shouldn't win because it's not foie gras. It's not foie gras because it's not gavage. There's no force feeding. So by definition, he's lying and should be disqualified. As funny as it sounds, articulating it now and reading about it -- actually, if we had talked about it before this controversy, I would have said, "That's kind of true." You know, foie gras by definition, force feeding, it's gavage, and that's what you get when you want foie gras. That is, until I went to Eduardo's farm in Extremadura, 50 miles north of Seville, right on the Portugal border. I saw first-hand a system that is incredibly complex and then at the same time, like everything beautiful in nature, is utterly simple. And he said to me, really from the first moment, my life's work is to give the geese what they want. He repeated that about 50 times in the two days I was with him. I'm just here to give the geese what they want. Actually, when I showed up he was lying down with the geese with his cell phone taking pictures of them like his children in the grass. Amazing. He's really just in love with -- he's at one with -- he's the goose whisperer. (Laughter) And when I was speaking to him, you know, I thought, like I'm speaking to you now, right, but sort of in the middle of my questions, my excited questions, because the more I got to know him and his system, the more exciting this whole idea became. He kept going like this to me. And I thought, OK, excited Jew from New York, right? I'm talking a little too aggressively, whatever, so you know, I slowed down. And finally, by the end of the day I was like, Ed-uar-do, you know like this? But he was still going like this. I figured it out. I was speaking too loudly. So I hushed my voice. I kind of like asked these questions and chatted with him through a translator in kind of a half whisper. And he stopped doing this. And amazingly, the geese who were on the other side of the paddock when I was around -- "Get the hell away from this kid!" -- when I lowered my voice, they all came right up to us. Right up to us, like right up to here. Right along the fence line. And fence line was amazing in itself. The fence -- like this conception of fence that we have it's totally backward with him. The electricity on this fiberglass fence is only on the outside. He rewired it. He invented it. I've never seen it. Have you? You fence in animals. You electrify the inside. He doesn't. He electrifies only the outside. Why? Because he said to me that he felt like the geese -- and he proved this actually, not just a conceit, he proved this -- the geese felt manipulated when they were imprisoned in their little paddocks. Even though they were imprisoned in this Garden of Eden with figs and everything else. He felt like they felt manipulated. So he got rid of the electricity, he got rid of current on the inside and kept it on the outside, so it would protect them against coyotes and other predators. Now, what happened? They ate, and he showed me on a chart, how they ate about 20 percent more feed to feed their livers. The landscape is incredible. I mean, his farm is incredible. It really is the Garden of Eden. There's figs and everything else there for the taking. And the irony of ironies is because Extremadura, the area -- what does Extremadura mean? Extra hard land, right? Extra difficult. Extra hard. But over four generations, he and his family have literally transformed this extra hard land into a tasting menu. Upgrades the life for these geese. And they are allowed to take whatever they want. Another irony, the double irony is that on the figs and the olives, Eduardo can make more money selling those than he can on the foie gras. He doesn't care. He lets them take what they want and he says, "Usually, it's about 50 percent. They're very fair." The other 50 percent, he takes and he sells and he makes money on them. Part of the income for his farm. A big part of his income for his farm. But he never controls it. They get what they want, they leave the rest for me and I sell it. His biggest obstacle, really, was the marketplace, which demands these days bright yellow foie gras. That's how I've been trained. You want to look and see what good foie gras is, it's got to be bright yellow. It's the indication that it's the best foie gras. Well, because he doesn't force feed, because he doesn't gavage tons of corn, his livers were pretty grey. Or they were. But he found this wild plant called the Lupin bush. The Lupin bush, it's all around Extremadura. He let it go to seed, he took the seeds, he planted it on his 30 acres, all around. And the geese love the Lupin bush. Not for the bush, but for the seeds. And when they eat the seeds, their foie gras turns yellow. Radioactive yellow. Bright yellow. Of the highest quality foie gras yellow I've ever seen. (Laughter) So I'm listening to all this, you know, and I'm like, is this guy for real? Is he making some of this up? Is he like, you know -- because he seemed to have an answer for everything, and it was always nature. It was never him. And I was like, you know, I always get a little, like, weirded out by people who deflect everything away from themselves. Because, really, they want you to look at themselves, right? But he deflected everything away from his ingenuity into working with his landscape. So it's like, here I am, I'm on the fence about this guy, but increasingly, eating up his every word. And we're sitting there, and I hear [clapping] from a distance, so I look over. And he grabs my arm and the translator's, and ducks us under a bush and says, "Watch this." "Shush," he says again for the 500th time to me. "Shush, watch this." And this squadron of geese come over. [Clapping] And they're getting louder, louder, louder, like really loud, right over us. And like airport traffic control, as they start to go past us they're called back -- and they're called back and back and back. And then they circle around. And his geese are calling up now to the wild geese. [Clapping] And the wild geese are calling down. [Clapping] And it's getting louder and louder and they circle and circle and they land. And I'm just saying, "No way." (Laughter) No way. And I look at Eduardo, who's near tears looking at this, and I say, "You're telling me that your geese are calling to the wild geese to say come for a visit?" And he says, "No, no, no. They've come to stay." They've come to stay? (Laughter) It's like the DNA of a goose is to fly south in the winter, right? I said that. I said "Isn't that what they're put on this Earth for? To fly south in the winter and north when it gets warm?" He said, "No, no, no. Their DNA is to find the conditions that are conducive to life. To happiness. They find it here. They don't need anything more." They stop. They mate with his domesticated geese, and his flock continues. Think about that for a minute. It's brilliant, right? Imagine -- I don't know, imagine a hog farm in, like, North Carolina, and a wild pig comes upon a factory farm and decides to stay. (Laughter) So how did it taste? I finally got to taste it before I left. He took me to his neighborhood restaurant and he served me some of his foie gras, confit de foie gras. It was incredible. And the problem with saying that, of course, is that you know, at this point it risks hyperbole really easily. And I'd like to make a metaphor, but I don't have one really. I was drinking this guy's Kool-Aid so much, he could have served me goose feathers and I would have been like, this guy's a genius, you know? I'm really in love with him at this point. But it truly was the best foie gras of my life. So much so that I don't think I had ever really had foie gras until that moment. I'd had something that was called foie gras. But this was transformative. Really transformative. And I say to you, I might not stick to this, but I don't think I'll ever serve foie gras on my menu again because of that taste experience with Eduardo. It was sweet, it was unctuous. It had all the qualities of foie gras, but its fat had a lot of integrity and a lot of honesty. And you could taste herbs, you could taste spices. And I kept -- I said, you know, I swear to God I tasted star anise. I was sure of it. And I'm not like some super taster, you know? But I can taste things. There's 100 percent star anise in there. And he says, "No." And I ended up like going down the spices, and finally, it was like, OK, salt and pepper, thinking he's salted and peppered his liver. But no. He takes the liver when he harvests the foie gras, he sticks them in this jar and he confits it. No salt, no pepper, no oil, no spices. What? We went back out for the final tour of the farm, and he showed me the wild pepper plants and the plants that he made sure existed on his farm for salinity. He doesn't need salt and pepper. And he doesn't need spices, because he's got this potpourri of herbs and flavors that his geese love to gorge on. I turned to him at the end of the meal, and it's a question I asked several times, and he hadn't, kind of, answered me directly, but I said, "Now look, you're in Spain, some of the greatest chefs in the world are -- Ferran Adria, the preeminent chef of the world today, not that far from you. How come you don't give him this? How come no one's really heard of you?" And it may be because of the wine, or it may be because of my excitement, he answered me directly and he said, "Because chefs don't deserve my foie gras." (Laughter) And he was right. He was right. Chefs take foie gras and they make it their own. They create a dish where all the vectors point at us. With Eduardo it's about the expression of nature. And as he said, I think fittingly, it's a gift from God, with God saying, you've done good work. Simple. I flew home, I'm on the flight with my little black book and I took, you know, pages and pages of notes about it. I really was moved. And in the corner of one of these -- one of my notes, is this note that says, when asked, what do you think of conventional foie gras? What do you think of foie gras that 99.99999 percent of the world eats? He said, "I think it's an insult to history." And I wrote, insult to history. I'm on the plane and I'm just tearing my hair out. It's like, why didn't I follow up on that? What the hell does that mean? Insult to history. So I did some research when I got back, and here's what I found. The history of foie gras. Jews invented foie gras. True story. True story. By accident. They were looking for an alternative to schmaltz. Gotten sick of the chicken fat. They were looking for an alternative. And they saw in the fall that there was this natural, beautiful, sweet, delicious fat from geese. And they slaughtered them, used the fat throughout the winter for cooking. The Pharaoh got wind of this -- This is true, right off the Internet. The Pharaoh got -- (Laughter) I swear to God. (Laughter) The Pharaoh got wind of this and wanted to taste it. He tasted it and fell in love with it. He started demanding it. And he didn't want it just in the fall, he wanted it all year round. And he demanded that the Jews supply enough for everyone. And the Jews, fearing for their life, had to come up with an ingenious idea, or at least try and satisfy the Pharaoh's wishes, of course. And they invented, what? Gavage. They invented gavage in a great moment of fear for their lives, and they provided the Pharaoh with gavage liver, and the good stuff they kept for themselves. Supposedly, anyway. I believe that one. That's the history of foie gras. And if you think about it, it's the history of industrial agriculture. It's the history of what we eat today. Most of what we eat today. Mega-farms, feed lots, chemical amendments, long-distance travel, food processing. All of it, our food system. That's also an insult to history. It's an insult to the basic laws of nature and of biology. Whether we're talking about beef cattle or we're talking about chickens, or we're talking about broccoli or Brussels sprouts, or in the case of this morning's New York Times, catfish -- which wholesale are going out of business. Whatever it is, it's a mindset that is reminiscent of General Motors. It's rooted in extraction. Take more, sell more, waste more. And for the future it won't serve us. Jonas Salk has a great quote. He said, "If all the insects disappeared, life on Earth as we know it would disappear within 50 years. If human beings disappeared, life on Earth as we know it would flourish." And he's right. We need now to adopt a new conception of agriculture. Really new. One in which we stop treating the planet as if it were some kind of business in liquidation. And stop degrading resources under the guise of cheap food. We can start by looking to farmers like Eduardo. Farmers that rely on nature for solutions, for answers, rather than imposing solutions on nature. Listening as Janine Benyus, one of my favorite writers and thinkers about this topic says, "Listening to nature's operating instructions." That's what Eduardo does, and does so brilliantly. And what he showed me and what he can show all of us, I think, is that the great thing for chefs, the great blessing for chefs, and for people that care about food and cooking, is that the most ecological choice for food is also the most ethical choice for food. Whether we're talking about Brussels sprouts or foie gras. And it's also almost always, and I haven't found an example otherwise, but almost always, the most delicious choice. That's serendipitous. Thank you. (Applause)

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

I'm going to give you four specific examples, I'm going to cover at the end about how a company called Silk tripled their sales; how an artist named Jeff Koons went from being a nobody to making a whole bunch of money and having a lot of impact; to how Frank Gehry redefined what it meant to be an architect. And one of my biggest failures as a marketer in the last few years -- a record label I started that had a CD called "Sauce." Before I can do that I've got to tell you about sliced bread, and a guy named Otto Rohwedder. Now, before sliced bread was invented in the 1910s I wonder what they said? Like the greatest invention since the telegraph or something. But this guy named Otto Rohwedder invented sliced bread, and he focused, like most inventors did, on the patent part and the making part. And the thing about the invention of sliced bread is this -- that for the first 15 years after sliced bread was available no one bought it; no one knew about it; it was a complete and total failure. And the reason is that until Wonder came along and figured out how to spread the idea of sliced bread, no one wanted it. That the success of sliced bread, like the success of almost everything we've talked about at this conference, is not always about what the patent is like, or what the factory is like -- it's about can you get your idea to spread, or not. And I think that the way you're going to get what you want, or cause the change that you want to change, to happen, is to figure out a way to get your ideas to spread. And it doesn't matter to me whether you're running a coffee shop or you're an intellectual, or you're in business, or you're flying hot air balloons. I think that all this stuff applies to everybody regardless of what we do. That what we are living in is a century of idea diffusion. That people who can spread ideas, regardless of what those ideas are, win. When I talk about it I usually pick business, because they make the best pictures that you can put in your presentation, and because it's the easiest sort of way to keep score. But I want you to forgive me when I use these examples because I'm talking about anything that you decide to spend your time to do. At the heart of spreading ideas is TV and stuff like TV. TV and mass media made it really easy to spread ideas in a certain way. I call it the "TV-industrial complex." The way the TV-industrial complex works, is you buy some ads, interrupt some people, that gets you distribution. You use the distribution you get to sell more products. You take the profit from that to buy more ads. And it goes around and around and around, the same way that the military-industrial complex worked a long time ago. That model of, and we heard it yesterday -- if we could only get onto the homepage of Google, if we could only figure out how to get promoted there, or grab that person by the throat, and tell them about what we want to do. If we did that then everyone would pay attention, and we would win. Well, this TV-industrial complex informed my entire childhood and probably yours. I mean, all of these products succeeded because someone figured out how to touch people in a way they weren't expecting, in a way they didn't necessarily want, with an ad, over and over again until they bought it. And the thing that's happened is, they canceled the TV-industrial complex. That just over the last few years, what anybody who markets anything has discovered is that it's not working the way that it used to. This picture is really fuzzy, I apologize; I had a bad cold when I took it. (Laughter) But the product in the blue box in the center is my poster child. I go to the deli; I'm sick; I need to buy some medicine. The brand manager for that blue product spent 100 million dollars trying to interrupt me in one year. 100 million dollars interrupting me with TV commercials and magazine ads and Spam and coupons and shelving allowances and spiff -- all so I could ignore every single message. And I ignored every message because I don't have a pain reliever problem. I buy the stuff in the yellow box because I always have. And I'm not going to invest a minute of my time to solve her problem, because I don't care. Here's a magazine called "Hydrate." It's 180 pages about water. (Laughter) Articles about water, ads about water. Imagine what the world was like 40 years ago, with just the Saturday Evening Post and Time and Newsweek. Now there are magazines about water. New product from Coke Japan: water salad. (Laughter) Coke Japan comes out with a new product every three weeks, because they have no idea what's going to work and what's not. I couldn't have written this better myself. It came out four days ago -- I circled the important parts so you can see them here. They've come out... Arby's is going to spend 85 million dollars promoting an oven mitt with the voice of Tom Arnold, hoping that that will get people to go to Arby's and buy a roast beef sandwich. (Laughter) Now, I had tried to imagine what could possibly be in an animated TV commercial featuring Tom Arnold, that would get you to get in your car, drive across town and buy a roast beef sandwich. (Laughter) Now, this is Copernicus, and he was right, when he was talking to anyone who needs to hear your idea. "The world revolves around me." Me, me, me, me. My favorite person -- me. I don't want to get email from anybody; I want to get "memail." (Laughter) So consumers, and I don't just mean people who buy stuff at the Safeway; I mean people at the Defense Department who might buy something, or people at, you know, the New Yorker who might print your article. Consumers don't care about you at all; they just don't care. Part of the reason is -- they've got way more choices than they used to, and way less time. And in a world where we have too many choices and too little time, the obvious thing to do is just ignore stuff. And my parable here is you're driving down the road and you see a cow, and you keep driving because you've seen cows before. Cows are invisible. Cows are boring. Who's going to stop and pull over and say -- "Oh, look, a cow." Nobody. (Laughter) But if the cow was purple -- isn't that a great special effect? I could do that again if you want. If the cow was purple, you'd notice it for a while. I mean, if all cows were purple you'd get bored with those, too. The thing that's going to decide what gets talked about, what gets done, what gets changed, what gets purchased, what gets built, is: "Is it remarkable?" And "remarkable" is a really cool word, because we think it just means "neat," but it also means "worth making a remark about." And that is the essence of where idea diffusion is going. That two of the hottest cars in the United States is a 55,000-dollar giant car, big enough to hold a Mini in its trunk. People are paying full price for both, and the only thing they have in common is that they don't have anything in common. (Laughter) Every week, the number one best-selling DVD in America changes. It's never "The Godfather," it's never "Citizen Kane," it's always some third-rate movie with some second-rate star. But the reason it's number one is because that's the week it came out. Because it's new, because it's fresh. People saw it and said "I didn't know that was there" and they noticed it. Two of the big success stories of the last 20 years in retail -- one sells things that are super-expensive in a blue box, and one sells things that are as cheap as they can make them. The only thing they have in common is that they're different. We're now in the fashion business, no matter what we do for a living, we're in the fashion business. And people in the fashion business know what it's like to be in the fashion business -- they're used to it. The rest of us have to figure out how to think that way. How to understand that it's not about interrupting people with big full-page ads, or insisting on meetings with people. But it's a totally different sort of process that determines which ideas spread, and which ones don't. They sold a billion dollars' worth of Aeron chairs by reinventing what it meant to sell a chair. They turned a chair from something the purchasing department bought, to something that was a status symbol about where you sat at work. This guy, Lionel Poilâne, the most famous baker in the world -- he died two and a half months ago, and he was a hero of mine and a dear friend. He lived in Paris. Last year, he sold 10 million dollars' worth of French bread. Every loaf baked in a bakery he owned, by one baker at a time, in a wood-fired oven. And when Lionel started his bakery, the French pooh-pooh-ed it. They didn't want to buy his bread. It didn't look like "French bread." It wasn't what they expected. It was neat; it was remarkable; and slowly, it spread from one person to another person until finally, it became the official bread of three-star restaurants in Paris. Now he's in London, and he ships by FedEx all around the world. What marketers used to do is make average products for average people. That's what mass marketing is. Smooth out the edges; go for the center; that's the big market. They would ignore the geeks, and God forbid, the laggards. It was all about going for the center. But in a world where the TV-industrial complex is broken, I don't think that's a strategy we want to use any more. I think the strategy we want to use is to not market to these people because they're really good at ignoring you. But market to these people because they care. These are the people who are obsessed with something. And when you talk to them, they'll listen, because they like listening -- it's about them. And if you're lucky, they'll tell their friends on the rest of the curve, and it'll spread. It'll spread to the entire curve. They have something I call "otaku" -- it's a great Japanese word. It describes the desire of someone who's obsessed to say, drive across Tokyo to try a new ramen noodle place, because that's what they do: they get obsessed with it. To make a product, to market an idea, to come up with any problem you want to solve that doesn't have a constituency with an otaku, is almost impossible. Instead, you have to find a group that really, desperately cares about what it is you have to say. Talk to them and make it easy for them to tell their friends. There's a hot sauce otaku, but there's no mustard otaku. That's why there's lots and lots of kinds of hot sauces, and not so many kinds of mustard. Not because it's hard to make interesting mustard -- you could make interesting mustard -- but people don't, because no one's obsessed with it, and thus no one tells their friends. Krispy Kreme has figured this whole thing out. It has a strategy, and what they do is, they enter a city, they talk to the people, with the otaku, and then they spread through the city to the people who've just crossed the street. This yoyo right here cost 112 dollars, but it sleeps for 12 minutes. Not everybody wants it but they don't care. They want to talk to the people who do, and maybe it'll spread. These guys make the loudest car stereo in the world. (Laughter) It's as loud as a 747 jet. You can't get in, the car's got bulletproof glass, because it'll blow out the windshield otherwise. But the fact remains that when someone wants to put a couple of speakers in their car, if they've got the otaku or they've heard from someone who does, they go ahead and they pick this. It's really simple -- you sell to the people who are listening, and just maybe, those people tell their friends. So when Steve Jobs talks to 50,000 people at his keynote, who are all tuned in from 130 countries watching his two-hour commercial -- that's the only thing keeping his company in business -- it's that those 50,000 people care desperately enough to watch a two-hour commercial, and then tell their friends. Pearl Jam, 96 albums released in the last two years. Every one made a profit. How? They only sell them on their website. Those people who buy them have the otaku, and then they tell their friends, and it spreads and it spreads. This hospital crib cost 10,000 dollars, 10 times the standard. But hospitals are buying it faster than any other model. Hard Candy nail polish, doesn't appeal to everybody, but to the people who love it, they talk about it like crazy. This paint can right here saved the Dutch Boy paint company, making them a fortune. It costs 35 percent more than regular paint because Dutch Boy made a can that people talk about, because it's remarkable. They didn't just slap a new ad on the product; they changed what it meant to build a paint product. AmIhotornot.com -- everyday 250,000 people go to this site, run by two volunteers, and I can tell you they are hard graders -- (Laughter) They didn't get this way by advertising a lot. They got this way by being remarkable, sometimes a little too remarkable. And this picture frame has a cord going out the back, and you plug it into the wall. My father has this on his desk, and he sees his grandchildren everyday, changing constantly. And every single person who walks into his office hears the whole story of how this thing ended up on his desk. And one person at a time, the idea spreads. These are not diamonds, not really. They're made from "cremains." After you're cremated you can have yourself made into a gem. (Laughter) Oh, you like my ring? It's my grandmother. (Laughter) Fastest-growing business in the whole mortuary industry. But you don't have to be Ozzie Osborne -- you don't have to be super-outrageous to do this. What you have to do is figure out what people really want and give it to them. A couple of quick rules to wrap up. The first one is: Design is free when you get to scale. The people who come up with stuff that's remarkable more often than not figure out how to put design to work for them. Number two: The riskiest thing you can do now is be safe. Proctor and Gamble knows this, right? The whole model of being Proctor and Gamble is always about average products for average people. That's risky. The safe thing to do now is to be at the fringes, be remarkable. And being very good is one of the worst things you can possibly do. Very good is boring. Very good is average. It doesn't matter whether you're making a record album, or you're an architect, or you have a tract on sociology. If it's very good, it's not going to work, because no one's going to notice it. So my three stories. Silk put a product that does not need to be in the refrigerated section next to the milk in the refrigerated section. Sales tripled. Why? Milk, milk, milk, milk, milk -- not milk. For the people who were there and looking at that section, it was remarkable. They didn't triple their sales with advertising; they tripled it by doing something remarkable. That is a remarkable piece of art. You don't have to like it, but a 40-foot tall dog made out of bushes in the middle of New York City is remarkable. (Laughter) Frank Gehry didn't just change a museum; he changed an entire city's economy by designing one building that people from all over the world went to see. Now, at countless meetings at, you know, the Portland City Council, or who knows where, they said, we need an architect -- can we get Frank Gehry? Because he did something that was at the fringes. And my big failure? I came out with an entire -- (Music) A record album and hopefully a whole bunch of record albums in SACD, this remarkable new format -- and I marketed it straight to people with 20,000-dollar stereos. People with 20,000-dollar stereos don't like new music. (Laughter) So what you need to do is figure out who does care. Who is going to raise their hand and say, "I want to hear what you're doing next," and sell something to them. The last example I want to give you. This is a map of Soap Lake, Washington. As you can see, if that's nowhere, it's in the middle of it. (Laughter) But they do have a lake. And people used to come from miles around to swim in the lake. They don't anymore. So the founding fathers said, "We've got some money to spend. What can we build here?" And like most committees, they were going to build something pretty safe. And then an artist came to them -- this is a true artist's rendering -- he wants to build a 55-foot tall lava lamp in the center of town. That's a purple cow; that's something worth noticing. I don't know about you, but if they build it, that's where I'm going to go. Thank you very much for your attention.

So, why does good sex so often fade, even for couples who continue to love each other as much as ever? And why does good intimacy not guarantee good sex, contrary to popular belief? Or, the next question would be, can we want what we already have? That's the million-dollar question, right? And why is the forbidden so erotic? What is it about transgression that makes desire so potent? And why does sex make babies, and babies spell erotic disaster in couples? It's kind of the fatal erotic blow, isn't it? And when you love, how does it feel? And when you desire, how is it different? These are some of the questions that are at the center of my exploration on the nature of erotic desire and its concomitant dilemmas in modern love. So I travel the globe, and what I'm noticing is that everywhere where romanticism has entered, there seems to be a crisis of desire. A crisis of desire, as in owning the wanting -- desire as an expression of our individuality, of our free choice, of our preferences, of our identity -- desire that has become a central concept as part of modern love and individualistic societies. You know, this is the first time in the history of humankind where we are trying to experience sexuality in the long term, not because we want 14 children, for which we need to have even more because many of them won't make it, and not because it is exclusively a woman's marital duty. This is the first time that we want sex over time about pleasure and connection that is rooted in desire. So what sustains desire, and why is it so difficult? And at the heart of sustaining desire in a committed relationship, I think is the reconciliation of two fundamental human needs. On the one hand, our need for security, for predictability, for safety, for dependability, for reliability, for permanence -- all these anchoring, grounding experiences of our lives that we call home. But we also have an equally strong need -- men and women -- for adventure, for novelty, for mystery, for risk, for danger, for the unknown, for the unexpected, surprise -- you get the gist -- for journey, for travel. So reconciling our need for security and our need for adventure into one relationship, or what we today like to call a passionate marriage, used to be a contradiction in terms. Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. (Laughter) So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide: Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise. And we think it's a given, and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that. (Applause) So now we get to the existential reality of the story, right? Because I think, in some way -- and I'll come back to that -- but the crisis of desire is often a crisis of the imagination. So why does good sex so often fade? What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? Because therein lies the mystery of eroticism. So if there is a verb, for me, that comes with love, it's "to have." And if there is a verb that comes with desire, it is "to want." In love, we want to have, we want to know the beloved. We want to minimize the distance. We want to contract that gap. We want to neutralize the tensions. We want closeness. But in desire, we tend to not really want to go back to the places we've already gone. Forgone conclusion does not keep our interest. In desire, we want an Other, somebody on the other side that we can go visit, that we can go spend some time with, that we can go see what goes on in their red light district. In desire, we want a bridge to cross. Or in other words, I sometimes say, fire needs air. Desire needs space. And when it's said like that, it's often quite abstract. But then I took a question with me. And I've gone to more than 20 countries in the last few years with "Mating in Captivity," and I asked people, when do you find yourself most drawn to your partner? Not attracted sexually, per se, but most drawn. And across culture, across religion, and across gender -- except for one -- there are a few answers that just keep coming back. So the first group is: I am most drawn to my partner when she is away, when we are apart, when we reunite. Basically, when I get back in touch with my ability to imagine myself with my partner, when my imagination comes back in the picture, and when I can root it in absence and in longing, which is a major component of desire. But then the second group is even more interesting: I am most drawn to my partner when I see him in the studio, when she is onstage, when he is in his element, when she's doing something she's passionate about, when I see him at a party and other people are really drawn to him, when I see her hold court. Basically, when I look at my partner radiant and confident, probably the biggest turn-on across the board. Radiant, as in self-sustaining. I look at this person -- by the way, in desire people rarely talk about it, when we are blended into one, five centimeters from each other. I don't know in inches how much that is. But it's also not when the other person is that far apart that you no longer see them. It's when I'm looking at my partner from a comfortable distance, where this person that is already so familiar, so known, is momentarily once again somewhat mysterious, somewhat elusive. And in this space between me and the other lies the erotic élan, lies that movement toward the other. Because sometimes, as Proust says, mystery is not about traveling to new places, but it's about looking with new eyes. And so, when I see my partner on his own or her own, doing something in which they are enveloped, I look at this person and I momentarily get a shift in perception, and I stay open to the mysteries that are living right next to me. And then, more importantly, in this description about the other or myself -- it's the same -- what is most interesting is that there is no neediness in desire. Nobody needs anybody. There is no caretaking in desire. Caretaking is mightily loving. It's a powerful anti-aphrodisiac. I have yet to see somebody who is so turned on by somebody who needs them. Wanting them is one thing. Needing them is a shutdown, and women have known that forever, because anything that will bring up parenthood will usually decrease the erotic charge. For good reasons, right? And then the third group of answers usually would be when I'm surprised, when we laugh together, as somebody said to me in the office today, when he's in his tux, so I said, you know, it's either the tux or the cowboy boots. But basically it's when there is novelty. But novelty isn't about new positions. It isn't a repertoire of techniques. Novelty is, what parts of you do you bring out? What parts of you are just being seen? Because in some way one could say sex isn't something you do, eh? Sex is a place you go. It's a space you enter inside yourself and with another, or others. So where do you go in sex? What parts of you do you connect to? What do you seek to express there? Is it a place for transcendence and spiritual union? Is it a place for naughtiness and is it a place to be safely aggressive? Is it a place where you can finally surrender and not have to take responsibility for everything? Is it a place where you can express your infantile wishes? What comes out there? It's a language. It isn't just a behavior. And it's the poetic of that language that I'm interested in, which is why I began to explore this concept of erotic intelligence. You know, animals have sex. It's the pivot, it's biology, it's the natural instinct. We are the only ones who have an erotic life, which means that it's sexuality transformed by the human imagination. We are the only ones who can make love for hours, have a blissful time, multiple orgasms, and touch nobody, just because we can imagine it. We can hint at it. We don't even have to do it. We can experience that powerful thing called anticipation, which is a mortar to desire, the ability to imagine it, as if it's happening, to experience it as if it's happening, while nothing is happening and everything is happening at the same time. So when I began to think about eroticism, I began to think about the poetics of sex, and if I look at it as an intelligence, then it's something that you cultivate. What are the ingredients? Imagination, playfulness, novelty, curiosity, mystery. But the central agent is really that piece called the imagination. But more importantly, for me to begin to understand who are the couples who have an erotic spark, what sustains desire, I had to go back to the original definition of eroticism, the mystical definition, and I went through it through a bifurcation by looking actually at trauma, which is the other side, and I looked at it looking at the community that I had grown up in, which was a community in Belgium, all Holocaust survivors, and in my community there were two groups: those who didn't die, and those who came back to life. And those who didn't die lived often very tethered to the ground, could not experience pleasure, could not trust, because when you're vigilant, worried, anxious, and insecure, you can't lift your head to go and take off in space and be playful and safe and imaginative. Those who came back to life were those who understood the erotic as an antidote to death. They knew how to keep themselves alive. And when I began to listen to the sexlessness of the couples that I work with, I sometimes would hear people say, "I want more sex," but generally people want better sex, and better is to reconnect with that quality of aliveness, of vibrancy, of renewal, of vitality, of eros, of energy that sex used to afford them, or that they've hoped it would afford them. And so I began to ask a different question. "I shut myself off when ..." began to be the question. "I turn off my desires when ..." which is not the same question as, "What turns me off is ..." and "You turn me off when ..." And people began to say, "I turn myself off when I feel dead inside, when I don't like my body, when I feel old, when I haven't had time for myself, when I haven't had a chance to even check in with you, when I don't perform well at work, when I feel low self esteem, when I don't have a sense of self-worth, when I don't feel like I have a right to want, to take, to receive pleasure." And then I began to ask the reverse question. "I turn myself on when ..." Because most of the time, people like to ask the question, "You turn me on, what turns me on," and I'm out of the question. You know? Now, if you are dead inside, the other person can do a lot of things for Valentine's. It won't make a dent. There is nobody at the reception desk. (Laughter) So I turn myself on when, I turn my desires, I wake up when ... Now, in this paradox between love and desire, what seems to be so puzzling is that the very ingredients that nurture love -- mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other -- are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire. Because desire comes with a host of feelings that are not always such favorites of love: jealousy, possessiveness, aggression, power, dominance, naughtiness, mischief. Basically most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day. You know, the erotic mind is not very politically correct. If everybody was fantasizing on a bed of roses, we wouldn't be having such interesting talks about this. But no, in our mind up there are a host of things going on that we don't always know how to bring to the person that we love, because we think love comes with selflessness and in fact desire comes with a certain amount of selfishness in the best sense of the word: the ability to stay connected to one's self in the presence of another. So I want to draw that little image for you, because this need to reconcile these two sets of needs, we are born with that. Our need for connection, our need for separateness, or our need for security and adventure, or our need for togetherness and for autonomy, and if you think about the little kid who sits on your lap and who is cozily nested here and very secure and comfortable, and at some point all of us need to go out into the world to discover and to explore. That's the beginning of desire, that exploratory needs curiosity, discovery. And then at some point they turn around and they look at you, and if you tell them, "Hey kiddo, the world's a great place. Go for it. There's so much fun out there," then they can turn away and they can experience connection and separateness at the same time. They can go off in their imagination, off in their body, off in their playfulness, all the while knowing that there's somebody when they come back. But if on this side there is somebody who says, "I'm worried. I'm anxious. I'm depressed. My partner hasn't taken care of me in so long. What's so good out there? Don't we have everything you need together, you and I?" then there are a few little reactions that all of us can pretty much recognize. Some of us will come back, came back a long time ago, and that little child who comes back is the child who will forgo a part of himself in order not to lose the other. I will lose my freedom in order not to lose connection. And I will learn to love in a certain way that will become burdened with extra worry and extra responsibility and extra protection, and I won't know how to leave you in order to go play, in order to go experience pleasure, in order to discover, to enter inside myself. Translate this into adult language. It starts very young. It continues into our sex lives up to the end. Child number two comes back but looks like that over their shoulder all the time. "Are you going to be there? Are you going to curse me? Are you going to scold me? Are you going to be angry with me?" And they may be gone, but they're never really away, and those are often the people that will tell you, in the beginning it was super hot. Because in the beginning, the growing intimacy wasn't yet so strong that it actually led to the decrease of desire. The more connected I became, the more responsible I felt, the less I was able to let go in your presence. The third child doesn't really come back. So what happens, if you want to sustain desire, it's that real dialectic piece. On the one hand you want the security in order to be able to go. On the other hand if you can't go, you can't have pleasure, you can't culminate, you don't have an orgasm, you don't get excited because you spend your time in the body and the head of the other and not in your own. So in this dilemma about reconciling these two sets of fundamental needs, there are a few things that I've come to understand erotic couples do. One, they have a lot of sexual privacy. They understand that there is an erotic space that belongs to each of them. They also understand that foreplay is not something you do five minutes before the real thing. Foreplay pretty much starts at the end of the previous orgasm. They also understand that an erotic space isn't about, you begin to stroke the other. It's about you create a space where you leave Management Inc., maybe where you leave the agile program, (Laughter) and you actually just enter that place where you stop being the good citizen who is taking care of things and being responsible. Responsibility and desire just butt heads. They don't really do well together. Erotic couples also understand that passion waxes and wanes. It's pretty much like the moon. It has intermittent eclipses. But what they know is they know how to resurrect it. They know how to bring it back, and they know how to bring it back because they have demystified one big myth, which is the myth of spontaneity, which is that it's just going to fall from heaven while you're folding the laundry like a deus ex machina, and in fact they understood that whatever is going to just happen in a long-term relationship already has. Committed sex is premeditated sex. It's willful. It's intentional. It's focus and presence. Merry Valentine's. (Applause)

So, why does good sex so often fade, even for couples who continue to love each other as much as ever? And why does good intimacy not guarantee good sex, contrary to popular belief? Or, the next question would be, can we want what we already have? That's the million-dollar question, right? And why is the forbidden so erotic? What is it about transgression that makes desire so potent? And why does sex make babies, and babies spell erotic disaster in couples? It's kind of the fatal erotic blow, isn't it? And when you love, how does it feel? And when you desire, how is it different? These are some of the questions that are at the center of my exploration on the nature of erotic desire and its concomitant dilemmas in modern love. So I travel the globe, and what I'm noticing is that everywhere where romanticism has entered, there seems to be a crisis of desire. A crisis of desire, as in owning the wanting -- desire as an expression of our individuality, of our free choice, of our preferences, of our identity -- desire that has become a central concept as part of modern love and individualistic societies. You know, this is the first time in the history of humankind where we are trying to experience sexuality in the long term, not because we want 14 children, for which we need to have even more because many of them won't make it, and not because it is exclusively a woman's marital duty. This is the first time that we want sex over time about pleasure and connection that is rooted in desire. So what sustains desire, and why is it so difficult? And at the heart of sustaining desire in a committed relationship, I think is the reconciliation of two fundamental human needs. On the one hand, our need for security, for predictability, for safety, for dependability, for reliability, for permanence -- all these anchoring, grounding experiences of our lives that we call home. But we also have an equally strong need -- men and women -- for adventure, for novelty, for mystery, for risk, for danger, for the unknown, for the unexpected, surprise -- you get the gist -- for journey, for travel. So reconciling our need for security and our need for adventure into one relationship, or what we today like to call a passionate marriage, used to be a contradiction in terms. Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. (Laughter) So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide: Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise. And we think it's a given, and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that. (Applause) So now we get to the existential reality of the story, right? Because I think, in some way -- and I'll come back to that -- but the crisis of desire is often a crisis of the imagination. So why does good sex so often fade? What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? Because therein lies the mystery of eroticism. So if there is a verb, for me, that comes with love, it's "to have." And if there is a verb that comes with desire, it is "to want." In love, we want to have, we want to know the beloved. We want to minimize the distance. We want to contract that gap. We want to neutralize the tensions. We want closeness. But in desire, we tend to not really want to go back to the places we've already gone. Forgone conclusion does not keep our interest. In desire, we want an Other, somebody on the other side that we can go visit, that we can go spend some time with, that we can go see what goes on in their red light district. In desire, we want a bridge to cross. Or in other words, I sometimes say, fire needs air. Desire needs space. And when it's said like that, it's often quite abstract. But then I took a question with me. And I've gone to more than 20 countries in the last few years with "Mating in Captivity," and I asked people, when do you find yourself most drawn to your partner? Not attracted sexually, per se, but most drawn. And across culture, across religion, and across gender -- except for one -- there are a few answers that just keep coming back. So the first group is: I am most drawn to my partner when she is away, when we are apart, when we reunite. Basically, when I get back in touch with my ability to imagine myself with my partner, when my imagination comes back in the picture, and when I can root it in absence and in longing, which is a major component of desire. But then the second group is even more interesting: I am most drawn to my partner when I see him in the studio, when she is onstage, when he is in his element, when she's doing something she's passionate about, when I see him at a party and other people are really drawn to him, when I see her hold court. Basically, when I look at my partner radiant and confident, probably the biggest turn-on across the board. Radiant, as in self-sustaining. I look at this person -- by the way, in desire people rarely talk about it, when we are blended into one, five centimeters from each other. I don't know in inches how much that is. But it's also not when the other person is that far apart that you no longer see them. It's when I'm looking at my partner from a comfortable distance, where this person that is already so familiar, so known, is momentarily once again somewhat mysterious, somewhat elusive. And in this space between me and the other lies the erotic élan, lies that movement toward the other. Because sometimes, as Proust says, mystery is not about traveling to new places, but it's about looking with new eyes. And so, when I see my partner on his own or her own, doing something in which they are enveloped, I look at this person and I momentarily get a shift in perception, and I stay open to the mysteries that are living right next to me. And then, more importantly, in this description about the other or myself -- it's the same -- what is most interesting is that there is no neediness in desire. Nobody needs anybody. There is no caretaking in desire. Caretaking is mightily loving. It's a powerful anti-aphrodisiac. I have yet to see somebody who is so turned on by somebody who needs them. Wanting them is one thing. Needing them is a shutdown, and women have known that forever, because anything that will bring up parenthood will usually decrease the erotic charge. For good reasons, right? And then the third group of answers usually would be when I'm surprised, when we laugh together, as somebody said to me in the office today, when he's in his tux, so I said, you know, it's either the tux or the cowboy boots. But basically it's when there is novelty. But novelty isn't about new positions. It isn't a repertoire of techniques. Novelty is, what parts of you do you bring out? What parts of you are just being seen? Because in some way one could say sex isn't something you do, eh? Sex is a place you go. It's a space you enter inside yourself and with another, or others. So where do you go in sex? What parts of you do you connect to? What do you seek to express there? Is it a place for transcendence and spiritual union? Is it a place for naughtiness and is it a place to be safely aggressive? Is it a place where you can finally surrender and not have to take responsibility for everything? Is it a place where you can express your infantile wishes? What comes out there? It's a language. It isn't just a behavior. And it's the poetic of that language that I'm interested in, which is why I began to explore this concept of erotic intelligence. You know, animals have sex. It's the pivot, it's biology, it's the natural instinct. We are the only ones who have an erotic life, which means that it's sexuality transformed by the human imagination. We are the only ones who can make love for hours, have a blissful time, multiple orgasms, and touch nobody, just because we can imagine it. We can hint at it. We don't even have to do it. We can experience that powerful thing called anticipation, which is a mortar to desire, the ability to imagine it, as if it's happening, to experience it as if it's happening, while nothing is happening and everything is happening at the same time. So when I began to think about eroticism, I began to think about the poetics of sex, and if I look at it as an intelligence, then it's something that you cultivate. What are the ingredients? Imagination, playfulness, novelty, curiosity, mystery. But the central agent is really that piece called the imagination. But more importantly, for me to begin to understand who are the couples who have an erotic spark, what sustains desire, I had to go back to the original definition of eroticism, the mystical definition, and I went through it through a bifurcation by looking actually at trauma, which is the other side, and I looked at it looking at the community that I had grown up in, which was a community in Belgium, all Holocaust survivors, and in my community there were two groups: those who didn't die, and those who came back to life. And those who didn't die lived often very tethered to the ground, could not experience pleasure, could not trust, because when you're vigilant, worried, anxious, and insecure, you can't lift your head to go and take off in space and be playful and safe and imaginative. Those who came back to life were those who understood the erotic as an antidote to death. They knew how to keep themselves alive. And when I began to listen to the sexlessness of the couples that I work with, I sometimes would hear people say, "I want more sex," but generally people want better sex, and better is to reconnect with that quality of aliveness, of vibrancy, of renewal, of vitality, of eros, of energy that sex used to afford them, or that they've hoped it would afford them. And so I began to ask a different question. "I shut myself off when ..." began to be the question. "I turn off my desires when ..." which is not the same question as, "What turns me of is ..." and "You turn me off when ..." And people began to say, "I turn myself off when I feel dead inside, when I don't like my body, when I feel old, when I haven't had time for myself, when I haven't had a chance to even check in with you, when I don't perform well at work, when I feel low self esteem, when I don't have a sense of self-worth, when I don't feel like I have a right to want, to take, to receive pleasure." And then I began to ask the reverse question. "I turn myself on when ..." Because most of the time, people like to ask the question, "You turn me on, what turns me on," and I'm out of the question. You know? Now, if you are dead inside, the other person can do a lot of things for Valentine's. It won't make a dent. There is nobody at the reception desk. (Laughter) So I turn myself on when, I turn my desires, I wake up when ... Now, in this paradox between love and desire, what seems to be so puzzling is that the very ingredients that nurture love -- mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other -- are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire. Because desire comes with a host of feelings that are not always such favorites of love: jealousy, possessiveness, aggression, power, dominance, naughtiness, mischief. Basically most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day. You know, the erotic mind is not very politically correct. If everybody was fantasizing on a bed of roses, we wouldn't be having such interesting talks about this. But no, in our mind up there are a host of things going on that we don't always know how to bring to the person that we love, because we think love comes with selflessness and in fact desire comes with a certain amount of selfishness in the best sense of the word: the ability to stay connected to one's self in the presence of another. So I want to draw that little image for you, because this need to reconcile these two sets of needs, we are born with that. Our need for connection, our need for separateness, or our need for security and adventure, or our need for togetherness and for autonomy, and if you think about the little kid who sits on your lap and who is cozily nested here and very secure and comfortable, and at some point all of us need to go out into the world to discover and to explore. That's the beginning of desire, that exploratory needs curiosity, discovery. And then at some point they turn around and they look at you, and if you tell them, "Hey kiddo, the world's a great place. Go for it. There's so much fun out there," then they can turn away and they can experience connection and separateness at the same time. They can go off in their imagination, off in their body, off in their playfulness, all the while knowing that there's somebody when they come back. But if on this side there is somebody who says, "I'm worried. I'm anxious. I'm depressed. My partner hasn't taken care of me in so long. What's so good out there? Don't we have everything you need together, you and I?" then there are a few little reactions that all of us can pretty much recognize. Some of us will come back, came back a long time ago, and that little child who comes back is the child who will forgo a part of himself in order not to lose the other. I will lose my freedom in order not to lose connection. And I will learn to love in a certain way that will become burdened with extra worry and extra responsibility and extra protection, and I won't know how to leave you in order to go play, in order to go experience pleasure, in order to discover, to enter inside myself. Translate this into adult language. It starts very young. It continues into our sex lives up to the end. Child number two comes back but looks like that over their shoulder all the time. "Are you going to be there? Are you going to curse me? Are you going to scold me? Are you going to be angry with me?" And they may be gone, but they're never really away, and those are often the people that will tell you, in the beginning it was super hot. Because in the beginning, the growing intimacy wasn't yet so strong that it actually led to the decrease of desire. The more connected I became, the more responsible I felt, the less I was able to let go in your presence. The third child doesn't really come back. So what happens, if you want to sustain desire, it's that real dialectic piece. On the one hand you want the security in order to be able to go. On the other hand if you can't go, you can't have pleasure, you can't culminate, you don't have an orgasm, you don't get excited because you spend your time in the body and the head of the other and not in your own. So in this dilemma about reconciling these two sets of fundamental needs, there are a few things that I've come to understand erotic couples do. One, they have a lot of sexual privacy. They understand that there is an erotic space that belongs to each of them. They also understand that foreplay is not something you do five minutes before the real thing. Foreplay pretty much starts at the end of the previous orgasm. They also understand that an erotic space isn't about, you begin to stroke the other. It's about you create a space where you leave Management Inc., maybe where you leave the agile program, (Laughter) and you actually just enter that place where you stop being the good citizen who is taking care of things and being responsible. Responsibility and desire just butt heads. They don't really do well together. Erotic couples also understand that passion waxes and wanes. It's pretty much like the moon. It has intermittent eclipses. But what they know is they know how to resurrect it. They know how to bring it back, and they know how to bring it back because they have demystified one big myth, which is the myth of spontaneity, which is that it's just going to fall from heaven while you're folding the laundry like a deus ex machina, and in fact they understood that whatever is going to just happen in a long-term relationship already has. Committed sex is premeditated sex. It's willful. It's intentional. It's focus and presence. Merry Valentine's. (Applause)

So a while ago, I tried an experiment. For one year, I would say yes to all the things that scared me. Anything that made me nervous, took me out of my comfort zone, I forced myself to say yes to. Did I want to speak in public? No, but yes. Did I want to be on live TV? No, but yes. Did I want to try acting? No, no, no, but yes, yes, yes. And a crazy thing happened: the very act of doing the thing that scared me undid the fear, made it not scary. My fear of public speaking, my social anxiety, poof, gone. It's amazing, the power of one word. "Yes" changed my life. "Yes" changed me. But there was one particular yes that affected my life in the most profound way, in a way I never imagined, and it started with a question from my toddler. I have these three amazing daughters, Harper, Beckett and Emerson, and Emerson is a toddler who inexplicably refers to everyone as "honey." as though she's a Southern waitress. (Laughter) "Honey, I'm gonna need some milk for my sippy cup." (Laughter) The Southern waitress asked me to play with her one evening when I was on my way somewhere, and I said, "Yes." And that yes was the beginning of a new way of life for my family. I made a vow that from now on, every time one of my children asks me to play, no matter what I'm doing or where I'm going, I say yes, every single time. Almost. I'm not perfect at it, but I try hard to practice it. And it's had a magical effect on me, on my children, on our family. But it's also had a stunning side effect, and it wasn't until recently that I fully understood it, that I understood that saying yes to playing with my children likely saved my career. See, I have what most people would call a dream job. I'm a writer. I imagine. I make stuff up for a living. Dream job. No. I'm a titan. Dream job. I create television. I executive produce television. I make television, a great deal of television. In one way or another, this TV season, I'm responsible for bringing about 70 hours of programming to the world. Four television programs, 70 hours of TV -- (Applause) Three shows in production at a time, sometimes four. Each show creates hundreds of jobs that didn't exist before. The budget for one episode of network television can be anywhere from three to six million dollars. Let's just say five. A new episode made every nine days times four shows, so every nine days that's 20 million dollars worth of television, four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time, sometimes four, 16 episodes going on at all times: 24 episodes of "Grey's," 21 episodes of "Scandal," 15 episodes of "How To Get Away With Murder," 10 episodes of "The Catch," that's 70 hours of TV, that's 350 million dollars for a season. In America, my television shows are back to back to back on Thursday night. Around the world, my shows air in 256 territories in 67 languages for an audience of 30 million people. My brain is global, and 45 hours of that 70 hours of TV are shows I personally created and not just produced, so on top of everything else, I need to find time, real quiet, creative time, to gather my fans around the campfire and tell my stories. Four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time, sometimes four, 350 million dollars, campfires burning all over the world. You know who else is doing that? Nobody, so like I said, I'm a titan. Dream job. (Applause) Now, I don't tell you this to impress you. I tell you this because I know what you think of when you hear the word "writer." I tell you this so that all of you out there who work so hard, whether you run a company or a country or a classroom or a store or a home, take me seriously when I talk about working, so you'll get that I don't peck at a computer and imagine all day, so you'll hear me when I say that I understand that a dream job is not about dreaming. It's all job, all work, all reality, all blood, all sweat, no tears. I work a lot, very hard, and I love it. When I'm hard at work, when I'm deep in it, there is no other feeling. For me, my work is at all times building a nation out of thin air. It is manning the troops. It is painting a canvas. It is hitting every high note. It is running a marathon. It is being Beyoncé. And it is all of those things at the same time. I love working. It is creative and mechanical and exhausting and exhilarating and hilarious and disturbing and clinical and maternal and cruel and judicious, and what makes it all so good is the hum. There is some kind of shift inside me when the work gets good. A hum begins in my brain, and it grows and it grows and that hum sounds like the open road, and I could drive it forever. And a lot of people, when I try to explain the hum, they assume that I'm talking about the writing, that my writing brings me joy. And don't get me wrong, it does. But the hum -- it wasn't until I started making television that I started working, working and making and building and creating and collaborating, that I discovered this thing, this buzz, this rush, this hum. The hum is more than writing. The hum is action and activity. The hum is a drug. The hum is music. The hum is light and air. The hum is God's whisper right in my ear. And when you have a hum like that, you can't help but strive for greatness. That feeling, you can't help but strive for greatness at any cost. That's called the hum. Or, maybe it's called being a workaholic. (Laughter) Maybe it's called genius. Maybe it's called ego. Maybe it's just fear of failure. I don't know. I just know that I'm not built for failure, and I just know that I love the hum. I just know that I want to tell you I'm a titan, and I know that I don't want to question it. But here's the thing: the more successful I become, the more shows, the more episodes, the more barriers broken, the more work there is to do, the more balls in the air, the more eyes on me, the more history stares, the more expectations there are. The more I work to be successful, the more I need to work. And what did I say about work? I love working, right? The nation I'm building, the marathon I'm running, the troops, the canvas, the high note, the hum, the hum, the hum. I like that hum. I love that hum. I need that hum. I am that hum. Am I nothing but that hum? And then the hum stopped. Overworked, overused, overdone, burned out. The hum stopped. Now, my three daughters are used to the truth that their mother is a single working titan. Harper tells people, "My mom won't be there, but you can text my nanny." And Emerson says, "Honey, I'm wanting to go to ShondaLand." They're children of a titan. They're baby titans. They were 12, 3, and 1 when the hum stopped. The hum of the engine died. I stopped loving work. I couldn't restart the engine. The hum would not come back. My hum was broken. I was doing the same things I always did, all the same titan work, 15-hour days, working straight through the weekends, no regrets, never surrender, a titan never sleeps, a titan never quits, full hearts, clear eyes, yada, whatever. But there was no hum. Inside me was silence. Four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time, sometimes four. Four television programs, 70 hours of TV, three shows in production at a time ... I was the perfect titan. I was a titan you could take home to your mother. All the colors were the same, and I was no longer having any fun. And it was my life. It was all I did. I was the hum, and the hum was me. So what do you do when the thing you do, the work you love, starts to taste like dust? Now, I know somebody's out there thinking, "Cry me a river, stupid writer titan lady." (Laughter) But you know, you do, if you make, if you work, if you love what you do, being a teacher, being a banker, being a mother, being a painter, being Bill Gates, if you simply love another person and that gives you the hum, if you know the hum, if you know what the hum feels like, if you have been to the hum, when the hum stops, who are you? What are you? What am I? Am I still a titan? If the song of my heart ceases to play, can I survive in the silence? And then my Southern waitress toddler asks me a question. I'm on my way out the door, I'm late, and she says, "Momma, wanna play?" And I'm just about to say no, when I realize two things. One, I'm supposed to say yes to everything, and two, my Southern waitress didn't call me "honey." She's not calling everyone "honey" anymore. When did that happen? I'm missing it, being a titan and mourning my hum, and here she is changing right before my eyes. And so she says, "Momma, wanna play?" And I say, "Yes." There's nothing special about it. We play, and we're joined by her sisters, and there's a lot of laughing, and I give a dramatic reading from the book Everybody Poops. Nothing out of the ordinary. (Laughter) And yet, it is extraordinary, because in my pain and my panic, in the homelessness of my humlessness, I have nothing to do but pay attention. I focus. I am still. The nation I'm building, the marathon I'm running, the troops, the canvas, the high note does not exist. All that exists are sticky fingers and gooey kisses and tiny voices and crayons and that song about letting go of whatever it is that Frozen girl needs to let go of. (Laughter) It's all peace and simplicity. The air is so rare in this place for me that I can barely breathe. I can barely believe I'm breathing. Play is the opposite of work. And I am happy. Something in me loosens. A door in my brain swings open, and a rush of energy comes. And it's not instantaneous, but it happens, it does happen. I feel it. A hum creeps back. Not at full volume, barely there, it's quiet, and I have to stay very still to hear it, but it is there. Not the hum, but a hum. And now I feel like I know a very magical secret. Well, let's not get carried away. It's just love. That's all it is. No magic. No secret. It's just love. It's just something we forgot. The hum, the work hum, the hum of the titan, that's just a replacement. If I have to ask you who I am, if I have to tell you who I am, if I describe myself in terms of shows and hours of television and how globally badass my brain is, I have forgotten what the real hum is. The hum is not power and the hum is not work-specific. The hum is joy-specific. The real hum is love-specific. The hum is the electricity that comes from being excited by life. The real hum is confidence and peace. The real hum ignores the stare of history, and the balls in the air, and the expectation, and the pressure. The real hum is singular and original. The real hum is God's whisper in my ear, but maybe God was whispering the wrong words, because which one of the gods was telling me I was the titan? It's just love. We could all use a little more love, a lot more love. Any time my child asks me to play, I will say yes. I make it a firm rule for one reason, to give myself permission, to free me from all of my workaholic guilt. It's a law, so I don't have a choice, and I don't have a choice, not if I want to feel the hum. I wish it were that easy, but I'm not good at playing. I don't like it. I'm not interested in doing it the way I'm interested in doing work. The truth is incredibly humbling and humiliating to face. I don't like playing. I work all the time because I like working. I like working more than I like being at home. Facing that fact is incredibly difficult to handle, because what kind of person likes working more than being at home? Well, me. I mean, let's be honest, I call myself a titan. I've got issues. (Laughter) And one of those issues isn't that I am too relaxed. (Laughter) We run around the yard, up and back and up and back. We have 30-second dance parties. We sing show tunes. We play with balls. I blow bubbles and they pop them. And I feel stiff and delirious and confused most of the time. I itch for my cell phone always. But it is OK. My tiny humans show me how to live and the hum of the universe fills me up. I play and I play until I begin to wonder why we ever stop playing in the first place. You can do it too, say yes every time your child asks you to play. Are you thinking that maybe I'm an idiot in diamond shoes? You're right, but you can still do this. You have time. You know why? Because you're not Rihanna and you're not a Muppet. Your child does not think you're that interesting. (Laughter) You only need 15 minutes. My two- and four-year-old only ever want to play with me for about 15 minutes or so before they think to themselves they want to do something else. It's an amazing 15 minutes, but it's 15 minutes. If I'm not a ladybug or a piece of candy, I'm invisible after 15 minutes. (Laughter) And my 13-year-old, if I can get a 13-year-old to talk to me for 15 minutes I'm Parent of the Year. (Laughter) 15 minutes is all you need. I can totally pull off 15 minutes of uninterrupted time on my worst day. Uninterrupted is the key. No cell phone, no laundry, no anything. You have a busy life. You have to get dinner on the table. You have to force them to bathe. But you can do 15 minutes. My kids are my happy place, they're my world, but it doesn't have to be your kids, the fuel that feeds your hum, the place where life feels more good than not good. It's not about playing with your kids, it's about joy. It's about playing in general. Give yourself the 15 minutes. Find what makes you feel good. Just figure it out and play in that arena. I'm not perfect at it. In fact, I fail as often as I succeed, seeing friends, reading books, staring into space. "Wanna play?" starts to become shorthand for indulging myself in ways I'd given up on right around the time I got my first TV show, right around the time I became a titan-in-training, right around the time I started competing with myself for ways unknown. 15 minutes? What could be wrong with giving myself my full attention for 15 minutes? Turns out, nothing. The very act of not working has made it possible for the hum to return, as if the hum's engine could only refuel while I was away. Work doesn't work without play. It takes a little time, but after a few months, one day the floodgates open and there's a rush, and I find myself standing in my office filled with an unfamiliar melody, full on groove inside me, and around me, and it sends me spinning with ideas, and the humming road is open, and I can drive it and drive it, and I love working again. But now, I like that hum, but I don't love that hum. I don't need that hum. I am not that hum. That hum is not me, not anymore. I am bubbles and sticky fingers and dinners with friends. I am that hum. Life's hum. Love's hum. Work's hum is still a piece of me, it is just no longer all of me, and I am so grateful. And I don't give a crap about being a titan, because I have never once seen a titan play Red Rover, Red Rover. I said yes to less work and more play, and somehow I still run my world. My brain is still global. My campfires still burn. The more I play, the happier I am, and the happier my kids are. The more I play, the more I feel like a good mother. The more I play, the freer my mind becomes. The more I play, the better I work. The more I play, the more I feel the hum, the nation I'm building, the marathon I'm running, the troops, the canvas, the high note, the hum, the hum, the other hum, the real hum, life's hum. The more I feel that hum, the more this strange, quivering, uncocooned, awkward, brand new, alive non-titan feels like me. The more I feel that hum, the more I know who I am. I'm a writer, I make stuff up, I imagine. That part of the job, that's living the dream. That's the dream of the job. Because a dream job should be a little bit dreamy. I said yes to less work and more play. Titans need not apply. Wanna play? Thank you. (Applause)

So, why does good sex so often fade, even for couples who continue to love each other as much as ever? And why does good intimacy not guarantee good sex, contrary to popular belief? Or, the next question would be, can we want what we already have? That's the million-dollar question, right? And why is the forbidden so erotic? What is it about transgression that makes desire so potent? And why does sex make babies, and babies spell erotic disaster in couples? (Laughter) It's kind of the fatal erotic blow, isn't it? And when you love, how does it feel? And when you desire, how is it different? These are some of the questions that are at the center of my exploration on the nature of erotic desire and its concomitant dilemmas in modern love. So I travel the globe, and what I'm noticing is that everywhere where romanticism has entered, there seems to be a crisis of desire. A crisis of desire, as in owning the wanting -- desire as an expression of our individuality, of our free choice, of our preferences, of our identity -- desire that has become a central concept as part of modern love and individualistic societies. You know, this is the first time in the history of humankind where we are trying to experience sexuality in the long term not because we want 14 children, for which we need to have even more because many of them won't make it, and not because it is exclusively a woman's marital duty. This is the first time that we want sex over time about pleasure and connection that is rooted in desire. So what sustains desire, and why is it so difficult? And at the heart of sustaining desire in a committed relationship, I think, is the reconciliation of two fundamental human needs. On the one hand, our need for security, for predictability, for safety, for dependability, for reliability, for permanence. All these anchoring, grounding experiences of our lives that we call home. But we also have an equally strong need -- men and women -- for adventure, for novelty, for mystery, for risk, for danger, for the unknown, for the unexpected, surprise -- you get the gist. For journey, for travel. So reconciling our need for security and our need for adventure into one relationship, or what we today like to call a passionate marriage, used to be a contradiction in terms. Marriage was an economic institution in which you were given a partnership for life in terms of children and social status and succession and companionship. But now we want our partner to still give us all these things, but in addition I want you to be my best friend and my trusted confidant and my passionate lover to boot, and we live twice as long. (Laughter) So we come to one person, and we basically are asking them to give us what once an entire village used to provide. Give me belonging, give me identity, give me continuity, but give me transcendence and mystery and awe all in one. Give me comfort, give me edge. Give me novelty, give me familiarity. Give me predictability, give me surprise. And we think it's a given, and toys and lingerie are going to save us with that. (Laughter) (Applause) So now we get to the existential reality of the story, right? Because I think, in some way -- and I'll come back to that -- but the crisis of desire is often a crisis of the imagination. So why does good sex so often fade? What is the relationship between love and desire? How do they relate, and how do they conflict? Because therein lies the mystery of eroticism. So if there is a verb, for me, that comes with love, it's "to have." And if there is a verb that comes with desire, it is "to want." In love, we want to have, we want to know the beloved. We want to minimize the distance. We want to contract that gap. We want to neutralize the tensions. We want closeness. But in desire, we tend to not really want to go back to the places we've already gone. Forgone conclusion does not keep our interest. In desire, we want an Other, somebody on the other side that we can go visit, that we can go spend some time with, that we can go see what goes on in their red-light district. You know? In desire, we want a bridge to cross. Or in other words, I sometimes say, fire needs air. Desire needs space. And when it's said like that, it's often quite abstract. But then I took a question with me. And I've gone to more than 20 countries in the last few years with "Mating in Captivity," and I asked people, when do you find yourself most drawn to your partner? Not attracted sexually, per Se, but most drawn. And across culture, across religion, and across gender -- except for one -- there are a few answers that just keep coming back. So the first group is: I am most drawn to my partner when she is away, when we are apart, when we reunite. Basically, when I get back in touch with my ability to imagine myself with my partner, when my imagination comes back in the picture, and when I can root it in absence and in longing, which is a major component of desire. But then the second group is even more interesting. I am most drawn to my partner when I see him in the studio, when she is onstage, when he is in his element, when she's doing something she's passionate about, when I see him at a party and other people are really drawn to him, when I see her hold court. Basically, when I look at my partner radiant and confident. Probably the biggest turn-on across the board. Radiant, as in self-sustaining. I look at this person -- by the way, in desire people rarely talk about it, when we are blended into one, five centimeters from each other. I don't know in inches how much that is. But it's also not when the other person is that far apart that you no longer see them. It's when I'm looking at my partner from a comfortable distance, where this person that is already so familiar, so known, is momentarily once again somewhat mysterious, somewhat elusive. And in this space between me and the other lies the erotic élan, lies that movement toward the other. Because sometimes, as Proust says, mystery is not about traveling to new places, but it's about looking with new eyes. And so, when I see my partner on his own or her own, doing something in which they are enveloped, I look at this person and I momentarily get a shift in perception, and I stay open to the mysteries that are living right next to me. And then, more importantly, in this description about the other or myself -- it's the same -- what is most interesting is that there is no neediness in desire. Nobody needs anybody. There is no caretaking in desire. Caretaking is mightily loving. It's a powerful anti-aphrodisiac. (Laughter) I have yet to see somebody who is so turned on by somebody who needs them. Wanting them is one thing. Needing them is a shot down and women have known that forever, because anything that will bring up parenthood will usually decrease the erotic charge. (Laughter) For good reasons, right? And then the third group of answers usually would be: when I'm surprised, when we laugh together, as somebody said to me in the office today, when he's in his tux, so I said, you know, it's either the tux or the cowboy boots. But basically it's when there is novelty. But novelty isn't about new positions. It isn't a repertoire of techniques. Novelty is, what parts of you do you bring out? What parts of you are just being seen? Because in some way one could say sex isn't something you do, eh? Sex is a place you go. It's a space you enter inside yourself and with another, or others. So where do you go in sex? What parts of you do you connect to? What do you seek to express there? Is it a place for transcendence and spiritual union? Is it a place for naughtiness and is it a place to be safely aggressive? Is it a place where you can finally surrender and not have to take responsibility for everything? Is it a place where you can express your infantile wishes? What comes out there? It's a language. It isn't just a behavior. And it's the poetic of that language that I'm interested in, which is why I began to explore this concept of erotic intelligence. You know, animals have sex. It's the pivot, it's biology, it's the natural instinct. We are the only ones who have an erotic life, which means that it's sexuality transformed by the human imagination. We are the only ones who can make love for hours, have a blissful time, multiple orgasms, and touch nobody, just because we can imagine it. We can hint at it. We don't even have to do it. We can experience that powerful thing called anticipation, which is a mortar to desire. The ability to imagine it, as if it's happening, to experience it as if it's happening, while nothing is happening and everything is happening, at the same time. So when I began to think about eroticism, I began to think about the poetics of sex. And if I look at it as an intelligence, then it's something that you cultivate. What are the ingredients? Imagination, playfulness, novelty, curiosity, mystery. But the central agent is really that piece called the imagination. But more importantly, for me to begin to understand who are the couples who have an erotic spark, what sustains desire, I had to go back to the original definition of eroticism, the mystical definition, and I went through it through a bifurcation by looking, actually, at trauma, which is the other side. And I looked at it, looking at the community that I had grown up in, which was a community in Belgium, all Holocaust survivors, and in my community, there were two groups: those who didn't die, and those who came back to life. And those who didn't die lived often very tethered to the ground, could not experience pleasure, could not trust, because when you're vigilant, worried, anxious, and insecure, you can't lift your head to go and take off in space and be playful and safe and imaginative. Those who came back to life were those who understood the erotic as an antidote to death. They knew how to keep themselves alive. And when I began to listen to the sexlessness of the couples that I work with, I sometimes would hear people say, "I want more sex," but generally, people want better sex, and better is to reconnect with that quality of aliveness, of vibrancy, of renewal, of vitality, of Eros, of energy that sex used to afford them, or that they've hoped it would afford them. And so I began to ask a different question. "I shut myself off when ..." began to be the question. "I turn off my desires when ..." Which is not the same question as, "What turns me off is ..." and "You turn me off when ..." And people began to say, "I turn myself off when I feel dead inside, when I don't like my body, when I feel old, when I haven't had time for myself, when I haven't had a chance to even check in with you, when I don't perform well at work, when I feel low self esteem, when I don't have a sense of self-worth, when I don't feel like I have a right to want, to take, to receive pleasure." And then I began to ask the reverse question. "I turn myself on when ..." Because most of the time, people like to ask the question, "You turn me on, what turns me on," and I'm out of the question, you know? Now, if you are dead inside, the other person can do a lot of things for Valentine's. It won't make a dent. There is nobody at the reception desk. (Laughter) So I turn myself on when, I turn on my desires, I wake up when ... Now, in this paradox between love and desire, what seems to be so puzzling is that the very ingredients that nurture love -- mutuality, reciprocity, protection, worry, responsibility for the other -- are sometimes the very ingredients that stifle desire. Because desire comes with a host of feelings that are not always such favorites of love: jealousy, possessiveness, aggression, power, dominance, naughtiness, mischief. Basically most of us will get turned on at night by the very same things that we will demonstrate against during the day. You know, the erotic mind is not very politically correct. If everybody was fantasizing on a bed of roses, we wouldn't be having such interesting talks about this. (Laughter) But no, in our mind up there are a host of things going on that we don't always know how to bring to the person that we love, because we think love comes with selflessness and in fact desire comes with a certain amount of selfishness in the best sense of the word: the ability to stay connected to one's self in the presence of another. So I want to draw that little image for you, because this need to reconcile these two sets of needs, we are born with that. Our need for connection, our need for separateness, or our need for security and adventure, or our need for togetherness and for autonomy, and if you think about the little kid who sits on your lap and who is cozily nested here and very secure and comfortable, and at some point all of us need to go out into the world to discover and to explore. That's the beginning of desire, that exploratory need, curiosity, discovery. And then at some point they turn around and they look at you. And if you tell them, "Hey kiddo, the world's a great place. Go for it. There's so much fun out there," then they can turn away and they can experience connection and separateness at the same time. They can go off in their imagination, off in their body, off in their playfulness, all the while knowing that there's somebody when they come back. But if on this side there is somebody who says, "I'm worried. I'm anxious. I'm depressed. My partner hasn't taken care of me in so long. What's so good out there? Don't we have everything you need together, you and I?" then there are a few little reactions that all of us can pretty much recognize. Some of us will come back, came back a long time ago, and that little child who comes back is the child who will forgo a part of himself in order not to lose the other. I will lose my freedom in order not to lose connection. And I will learn to love in a certain way that will become burdened with extra worry and extra responsibility and extra protection, and I won't know how to leave you in order to go play, in order to go experience pleasure, in order to discover, to enter inside myself. Translate this into adult language. It starts very young. It continues into our sex lives up to the end. Child number two comes back but looks like that over their shoulder all the time. "Are you going to be there? Are you going to curse me, scold me? Are you going to be angry with me?" And they may be gone, but they're never really away. And those are often the people that will tell you, "In the beginning, it was super hot." Because in the beginning, the growing intimacy wasn't yet so strong that it actually led to the decrease of desire. The more connected I became, the more responsible I felt, the less I was able to let go in your presence. The third child doesn't really come back. So what happens, if you want to sustain desire, it's that real dialectic piece. On the one hand you want the security in order to be able to go. On the other hand if you can't go, you can't have pleasure, you can't culminate, you don't have an orgasm, you don't get excited because you spend your time in the body and the head of the other and not in your own. So in this dilemma about reconciling these two sets of fundamental needs, there are a few things that I've come to understand erotic couples do. One, they have a lot of sexual privacy. They understand that there is an erotic space that belongs to each of them. They also understand that foreplay is not something you do five minutes before the real thing. Foreplay pretty much starts at the end of the previous orgasm. They also understand that an erotic space isn't about, you begin to stroke the other. It's about you create a space where you leave Management Inc., maybe where you leave the Agile program -- (Laughter) And you actually just enter that place where you stop being the good citizen who is taking care of things and being responsible. Responsibility and desire just butt heads. They don't really do well together. Erotic couples also understand that passion waxes and wanes. It's pretty much like the moon. It has intermittent eclipses. But what they know is they know how to resurrect it. They know how to bring it back. And they know how to bring it back because they have demystified one big myth, which is the myth of spontaneity, which is that it's just going to fall from heaven while you're folding the laundry like a deus ex machina, and in fact they understood that whatever is going to just happen in a long-term relationship, already has. Committed sex is premeditated sex. It's willful. It's intentional. It's focus and presence. Merry Valentine's. (Applause)

Hi, my name is Roz Savage and I row across oceans. Four years ago, I rowed solo across the Atlantic, and since then, I've done two out of three stages across the Pacific, from San Francisco to Hawaii and from Hawaii to Kiribati. And tomorrow, I'll be leaving this boat to fly back to Kiribati to continue with the third and final stage of my row across the Pacific. Cumulatively, I will have rowed over 8,000 miles, taken over three million oar strokes and spent more than 312 days alone on the ocean on a 23 foot rowboat. This has given me a very special relationship with the ocean. We have a bit of a love/hate thing going on. I feel a bit about it like I did about a very strict math teacher that I once had at school. I didn't always like her, but I did respect her, and she taught me a heck of a lot. So today I'd like to share with you some of my ocean adventures and tell you a little bit about what they've taught me, and how I think we can maybe take some of those lessons and apply them to this environmental challenge that we face right now. Now, some of you might be thinking, "Hold on a minute. She doesn't look very much like an ocean rower. Isn't she meant to be about this tall and about this wide and maybe look a bit more like these guys?" You'll notice, they've all got something that I don't. Well, I don't know what you're thinking, but I'm talking about the beards. (Laughter) And no matter how long I've spent on the ocean, I haven't yet managed to muster a decent beard, and I hope that it remains that way. For a long time, I didn't believe that I could have a big adventure. The story that I told myself was that adventurers looked like this. I didn't look the part. I thought there were them and there were us, and I was not one of them. So for 11 years, I conformed. I did what people from my kind of background were supposed to do. I was working in an office in London as a management consultant. And I think I knew from day one that it wasn't the right job for me. But that kind of conditioning just kept me there for so many years, until I reached my mid-30s and I thought, "You know, I'm not getting any younger. I feel like I've got a purpose in this life, and I don't know what it is, but I'm pretty certain that management consultancy is not it. So, fast forward a few years. I'd gone through some changes. To try and answer that question of, "What am I supposed to be doing with my life?" I sat down one day and wrote two versions of my own obituary, the one that I wanted, a life of adventure, and the one that I was actually heading for which was a nice, normal, pleasant life, but it wasn't where I wanted to be by the end of my life. I wanted to live a life that I could be proud of. And I remember looking at these two versions of my obituary and thinking, "Oh boy, I'm on totally the wrong track here. If I carry on living as I am now, I'm just not going to end up where I want to be in five years, or 10 years, or at the end of my life." I made a few changes, let go of some loose trappings of my old life, and through a bit of a leap of logic, decided to row across the Atlantic Ocean. (Laughter) The Atlantic Rowing Race runs from the Canaries to Antigua, it's about 3,000 miles, and it turned out to be the hardest thing I had ever done. Sure, I had wanted to get outside of my comfort zone, but what I'd sort of failed to notice was that getting out of your comfort zone is, by definition, extremely uncomfortable. And my timing was not great either: 2005, when I did the Atlantic, was the year of Hurricane Katrina. There were more tropical storms in the North Atlantic than ever before, since records began. And pretty early on, those storms started making their presence known. All four of my oars broke before I reached halfway across. Oars are not supposed to look like this. But what can you do? You're in the middle of the ocean. Oars are your only means of propulsion. So I just had to look around the boat and figure out what I was going to use to fix up these oars so that I could carry on. So I found a boat hook and my trusty duct tape and splintered the boat hook to the oars to reinforce it. Then, when that gave out, I sawed the wheel axles off my spare rowing seat and used those. And then when those gave out, I cannibalized one of the broken oars. I'd never been very good at fixing stuff when I was living my old life, but it's amazing how resourceful you can become when you're in the middle of the ocean and there's only one way to get to the other side. And the oars kind of became a symbol of just in how many ways I went beyond what I thought were my limits. I suffered from tendinitis on my shoulders and saltwater sores on my bottom. I really struggled psychologically, totally overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge, realizing that, if I carried on moving at two miles an hour, 3,000 miles was going to take me a very, very long time. There were so many times when I thought I'd hit that limit, but had no choice but to just carry on and try and figure out how I was going to get to the other side without driving myself crazy. And eventually after 103 days at sea, I arrived in Antigua. I don't think I've ever felt so happy in my entire life. It was a bit like finishing a marathon and getting out of solitary confinement and winning an Oscar all rolled into one. I was euphoric. And to see all the people coming out to greet me and standing along the cliff tops and clapping and cheering, I just felt like a movie star. It was absolutely wonderful. And I really learned then that, the bigger the challenge, the bigger the sense of achievement when you get to the end of it. So this might be a good moment to take a quick time-out to answer a few FAQs about ocean rowing that might be going through your mind. Number one that I get asked: What do you eat? A few freeze-dried meals, but mostly I try and eat much more unprocessed foods. So I grow my own beansprouts. I eat fruits and nut bars, a lot of nuts. And generally arrive about 30 pounds lighter at the other end. Question number two: How do you sleep? With my eyes shut. Ha-ha. I suppose what you mean is: What happens to the boat while I'm sleeping? Well, I plan my route so that I'm drifting with the winds and the currents while I'm sleeping. On a good night, I think my best ever was 11 miles in the right direction. Worst ever, 13 miles in the wrong direction. That's a bad day at the office. What do I wear? Mostly, a baseball cap, rowing gloves and a smile -- or a frown, depending on whether I went backwards overnight -- and lots of sun lotion. Do I have a chase boat? No I don't. I'm totally self-supporting out there. I don't see anybody for the whole time that I'm at sea, generally. And finally: Am I crazy? Well, I leave that one up to you to judge. So, how do you top rowing across the Atlantic? Well, naturally, you decide to row across the Pacific. Well, I thought the Atlantic was big, but the Pacific is really, really big. I think we tend to do it a little bit of a disservice in our usual maps. I don't know for sure that the Brits invented this particular view of the world, but I suspect we might have done so: we are right in the middle, and we've cut the Pacific in half and flung it to the far corners of the world. Whereas if you look in Google Earth, this is how the Pacific looks. It pretty much covers half the planet. You can just see a little bit of North America up here and a sliver of Australia down there. It is really big -- 65 million square miles -- and to row in a straight line across it would be about 8,000 miles. Unfortunately, ocean rowboats very rarely go in a straight line. By the time I get to Australia, if I get to Australia, I will have rowed probably nine or 10,000 miles in all. So, because nobody in their straight mind would row straight past Hawaii without dropping in, I decided to cut this very big undertaking into three segments. The first attempt didn't go so well. In 2007, I did a rather involuntary capsize drill three times in 24 hours. A bit like being in a washing machine. Boat got a bit dinged up, so did I. I blogged about it. Unfortunately, somebody with a bit of a hero complex decided that this damsel was in distress and needed saving. The first I knew about this was when the Coast Guard plane turned up overhead. I tried to tell them to go away. We had a bit of a battle of wills. I lost and got airlifted. Awful, really awful. It was one of the worst feelings of my life, as I was lifted up on that winch line into the helicopter and looked down at my trusty little boat rolling around in the 20 foot waves and wondering if I would ever see her again. So I had to launch a very expensive salvage operation and then wait another nine months before I could get back out onto the ocean again. But what do you do? Fall down nine times, get up 10. So, the following year, I set out and, fortunately, this time made it safely across to Hawaii. But it was not without misadventure. My watermaker broke, only the most important piece of kit that I have on the boat. Powered by my solar panels, it sucks in saltwater and turns it into freshwater. But it doesn't react very well to being immersed in ocean, which is what happened to it. Fortunately, help was at hand. There was another unusual boat out there at the same time, doing as I was doing, bringing awareness to the North Pacific Garbage Patch, that area in the North Pacific about twice the size of Texas, with an estimated 3.5 million tons of trash in it, circulating at the center of that North Pacific Gyre. So, to make the point, these guys had actually built their boat out of plastic trash, 15,000 empty water bottles latched together into two pontoons. They were going very slowly. Partly, they'd had a bit of a delay. They'd had to pull in at Catalina Island shortly after they left Long Beach because the lids of all the water bottles were coming undone, and they were starting to sink. So they'd had to pull in and do all the lids up. But, as I was approaching the end of my water reserves, luckily, our courses were converging. They were running out of food; I was running out of water. So we liaised by satellite phone and arranged to meet up. And it took about a week for us to actually gradually converge. I was doing a pathetically slow speed of about 1.3 knots, and they were doing only marginally less pathetic speed of about 1.4: it was like two snails in a mating dance. But, eventually, we did manage to meet up and Joel hopped overboard, caught us a beautiful, big mahi-mahi, which was the best food I'd had in, ooh, at least three months. Fortunately, the one that he caught that day was better than this one they caught a few weeks earlier. When they opened this one up, they found its stomach was full of plastic. And this is really bad news because plastic is not an inert substance. It leaches out chemicals into the flesh of the poor critter that ate it, and then we come along and eat that poor critter, and we get some of the toxins accumulating in our bodies as well. So there are very real implications for human health. I eventually made it to Hawaii still alive. And, the following year, set out on the second stage of the Pacific, from Hawaii down to Tarawa. And you'll notice something about Tarawa; it is very low-lying. It's that little green sliver on the horizon, which makes them very nervous about rising oceans. This is big trouble for these guys. They've got no points of land more than about six feet above sea level. And also, as an increase in extreme weather events due to climate change, they're expecting more waves to come in over the fringing reef, which will contaminate their fresh water supply. I had a meeting with the president there, who told me about his exit strategy for his country. He expects that within the next 50 years, the 100,000 people that live there will have to relocate to New Zealand or Australia. And that made me think about how would I feel if Britain was going to disappear under the waves; if the places where I'd been born and gone to school and got married, if all those places were just going to disappear forever. How, literally, ungrounded that would make me feel. Very shortly, I'll be setting out to try and get to Australia, and if I'm successful, I'll be the first woman ever to row solo all the way across the Pacific. And I try to use this to bring awareness to these environmental issues, to bring a human face to the ocean. If the Atlantic was about my inner journey, discovering my own capabilities, maybe the Pacific has been about my outer journey, figuring out how I can use my interesting career choice to be of service to the world, and to take some of those things that I've learned out there and apply them to the situation that humankind now finds itself in. I think there are probably three key points here. The first one is about the stories that we tell ourselves. For so long, I told myself that I couldn't have an adventure because I wasn't six foot tall and athletic and bearded. And then that story changed. I found out that people had rowed across oceans. I even met one of them and she was just about my size. So even though I didn't grow any taller, I didn't sprout a beard, something had changed: My interior dialogue had changed. At the moment, the story that we collectively tell ourselves is that we need all this stuff, that we need oil. But what about if we just change that story? We do have alternatives, and we have the power of free will to choose those alternatives, those sustainable ones, to create a greener future. The second point is about the accumulation of tiny actions. We might think that anything that we do as an individual is just a drop in the ocean, that it can't really make a difference. But it does. Generally, we haven't got ourselves into this mess through big disasters. Yes, there have been the Exxon Valdezes and the Chernobyls, but mostly it's been an accumulation of bad decisions by billions of individuals, day after day and year after year. And, by the same token, we can turn that tide. We can start making better, wiser, more sustainable decisions. And when we do that, we're not just one person. Anything that we do spreads ripples. Other people will see if you're in the supermarket line and you pull out your reusable grocery bag. Maybe if we all start doing this, we can make it socially unacceptable to say yes to plastic in the checkout line. That's just one example. This is a world-wide community. The other point: It's about taking responsibility. For so much of my life, I wanted something else to make me happy. I thought if I had the right house or the right car or the right man in my life, then I could be happy. But when I wrote that obituary exercise, I actually grew up a little bit in that moment and realized that I needed to create my own future. I couldn't just wait passively for happiness to come and find me. And I suppose I'm a selfish environmentalist. I plan on being around for a long time, and when I'm 90 years old, I want to be happy and healthy. And it's very difficult to be happy on a planet that's racked with famine and drought. It's very difficult to be healthy on a planet where we've poisoned the earth and the sea and the air. So, shortly, I'm going to be launching a new initiative called Eco-Heroes. And the idea here is that all our Eco-Heroes will log at least one green deed every day. It's meant to be a bit of a game. We're going to make an iPhone app out of it. We just want to try and create that awareness because, sure, changing a light bulb isn't going to change the world, but that attitude, that awareness that leads you to change the light bulb or take your reusable coffee mug, that is what could change the world. I really believe that we stand at a very important point in history. We have a choice. We've been blessed, or cursed, with free will. We can choose a greener future, and we can get there if we all pull together to take it one stroke at a time. Thank you. (Applause)

There's an old joke about a cop who's walking his beat in the middle of the night, and he comes across a guy under a street lamp who's looking at the ground and moving from side to side, and the cop asks him what he's doing. The guys says he's looking for his keys. So the cop takes his time and looks over and kind of makes a little matrix and looks for about two, three minutes. No keys. The cop says, "Are you sure? Hey buddy, are you sure you lost your keys here?" And the guy says, "No, no, actually I lost them down at the other end of the street, but the light is better here." There's a concept that people talk about nowadays called big data, and what they're talking about is all of the information that we're generating through our interaction with and over the Internet, everything from Facebook and Twitter to music downloads, movies, streaming, all this kind of stuff, the live streaming of TED. And the folks who work with big data, for them, they talk about that their biggest problem is we have so much information, the biggest problem is, how do we organize all that information? I can tell you that working in global health, that is not our biggest problem. Because for us, even though the light is better on the Internet, the data that would help us solve the problems we're trying to solve is not actually present on the Internet. So we don't know, for example, how many people right now are being affected by disasters or by conflict situations. We don't know for really basically any of the clinics in the developing world, which ones have medicines and which ones don't. We have no idea of what the supply chain is for those clinics. We don't know -- and this is really amazing to me -- we don't know how many children were born, or how many children there are in Bolivia or Botswana or Bhutan. We don't know how many kids died last week in any of those countries. We don't know the needs of the elderly, the mentally ill. For all of these different critically important problems or critically important areas that we want to solve problems in, we basically know nothing at all. And part of the reason why we don't know anything at all is that the information technology systems that we use in global health to find the data to solve these problems is what you see here. And this is about a 5,000-year-old technology. Some of you may have used it before. It's kind of on its way out now, but we still use it for 99 percent of our stuff. This is a paper form, and what you're looking at is a paper form in the hand of a Ministry of Health nurse in Indonesia who is tramping out across the countryside in Indonesia on, I'm sure, a very hot and humid day, and she is going to be knocking on thousands of doors over a period of weeks or months, knocking on the doors and saying, "Excuse me, we'd like to ask you some questions. Do you have any children? Were your children vaccinated?" Because the only way we can actually find out how many children were vaccinated in the country of Indonesia, what percentage were vaccinated, is actually not on the Internet but by going out and knocking on doors, sometimes tens of thousands of doors. Sometimes it takes months to even years to do something like this. You know, a census of Indonesia would probably take two years to accomplish. And the problem, of course, with all of this is that with all those paper forms — and I'm telling you we have paper forms for every possible thing. We have paper forms for vaccination surveys. We have paper forms to track people who come into clinics. We have paper forms to track drug supplies, blood supplies, all these different paper forms for many different topics, they all have a single common endpoint, and the common endpoint looks something like this. And what we're looking at here is a truckful o' data. This is the data from a single vaccination coverage survey in a single district in the country of Zambia from a few years ago that I participated in. The only thing anyone was trying to find out is what percentage of Zambian children are vaccinated, and this is the data, collected on paper over weeks from a single district, which is something like a county in the United States. You can imagine that, for the entire country of Zambia, answering just that single question looks something like this. Truck after truck after truck filled with stack after stack after stack of data. And what makes it even worse is that that's just the beginning, because once you've collected all that data, of course someone's going to have to -- some unfortunate person is going to have to type that into a computer. When I was a graduate student, I actually was that unfortunate person sometimes. I can tell you, I often wasn't really paying attention. I probably made a lot of mistakes when I did it that no one ever discovered, so data quality goes down. But eventually that data hopefully gets typed into a computer, and someone can begin to analyze it, and once they have an analysis and a report, hopefully then you can take the results of that data collection and use it to vaccinate children better. Because if there's anything worse in the field of global public health, I don't know what's worse than allowing children on this planet to die of vaccine-preventable diseases, diseases for which the vaccine costs a dollar. And millions of children die of these diseases every year. And the fact is, millions is a gross estimate because we don't really know how many kids die each year of this. What makes it even more frustrating is that the data entry part, the part that I used to do as a grad student, can take sometimes six months. Sometimes it can take two years to type that information into a computer, and sometimes, actually not infrequently, it actually never happens. Now try and wrap your head around that for a second. You just had teams of hundreds of people. They went out into the field to answer a particular question. You probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on fuel and photocopying and per diem, and then for some reason, momentum is lost or there's no money left, and all of that comes to nothing because no one actually types it into the computer at all. The process just stops. Happens all the time. This is what we base our decisions on in global health: little data, old data, no data. So back in 1995, I began to think about ways in which we could improve this process. Now 1995, obviously that was quite a long time ago. It kind of frightens me to think of how long ago that was. The top movie of the year was "Die Hard with a Vengeance." As you can see, Bruce Willis had a lot more hair back then. I was working in the Centers for Disease Control, and I had a lot more hair back then as well. But to me, the most significant thing that I saw in 1995 was this. Hard for us to imagine, but in 1995, this was the ultimate elite mobile device. Right? It wasn't an iPhone. It wasn't a Galaxy phone. It was a Palm Pilot. And when I saw the Palm Pilot for the first time, I thought, why can't we put the forms on these Palm Pilots and go out into the field just carrying one Palm Pilot, which can hold the capacity of tens of thousands of paper forms? Why don't we try to do that? Because if we can do that, if we can actually just collect the data electronically, digitally, from the very beginning, we can just put a shortcut right through that whole process of typing, of having somebody type that stuff into the computer. We can skip straight to the analysis and then straight to the use of the data to actually save lives. So that's actually what I began to do. Working at CDC, I began to travel to different programs around the world and to train them in using Palm Pilots to do data collection instead of using paper. And it actually worked great. It worked exactly as well as anybody would have predicted. What do you know? Digital data collection is actually more efficient than collecting on paper. While I was doing it, my business partner, Rose, who's here with her husband, Matthew, here in the audience, Rose was out doing similar stuff for the American Red Cross. The problem was, after a few years of doing that, I realized I had done -- I had been to maybe six or seven programs, and I thought, you know, if I keep this up at this pace, over my whole career, maybe I'm going to go to maybe 20 or 30 programs. But the problem is, 20 or 30 programs, like, training 20 or 30 programs to use this technology, that is a tiny drop in the bucket. The demand for this, the need for data to run better programs, just within health, not to mention all of the other fields in developing countries, is enormous. There are millions and millions and millions of programs, millions of clinics that need to track drugs, millions of vaccine programs. There are schools that need to track attendance. There are all these different things for us to get the data that we need to do. And I realized, if I kept up the way that I was doing, I was basically hardly going to make any impact by the end of my career. And so I began to wrack my brain trying to think about, you know, what was the process that I was doing, how was I training folks, and what were the bottlenecks and what were the obstacles to doing it faster and to doing it more efficiently? And unfortunately, after thinking about this for some time, I realized -- I identified the main obstacle. And the main obstacle, it turned out, and this is a sad realization, the main obstacle was me. So what do I mean by that? I had developed a process whereby I was the center of the universe of this technology. If you wanted to use this technology, you had to get in touch with me. That means you had to know I existed. Then you had to find the money to pay for me to fly out to your country and the money to pay for my hotel and my per diem and my daily rate. So you could be talking about 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000 dollars if I actually had the time or it fit my schedule and I wasn't on vacation. The point is that anything, any system that depends on a single human being or two or three or five human beings, it just doesn't scale. And this is a problem for which we need to scale this technology and we need to scale it now. And so I began to think of ways in which I could basically take myself out of the picture. And, you know, I was thinking, how could I take myself out of the picture for quite some time. You know, I'd been trained that the way that you distribute technology within international development is always consultant-based. It's always guys that look pretty much like me flying from countries that look pretty much like this to other countries with people with darker skin. And you go out there, and you spend money on airfare and you spend time and you spend per diem and you spend [on a] hotel and you spend all that stuff. As far as I knew, that was the only way you could distribute technology, and I couldn't figure out a way around it. But the miracle that happened, I'm going to call it Hotmail for short. Now you may not think of Hotmail as being miraculous, but for me it was miraculous, because I noticed, just as I was wrestling with this problem, I was working in sub-Saharan Africa mostly at the time. I noticed that every sub-Saharan African health worker that I was working with had a Hotmail account. And I thought, it struck me, wait a minute, I know that the Hotmail people surely didn't fly to the Ministry of Health of Kenya to train people in how to use Hotmail. So these guys are distributing technology. They're getting software capacity out there but they're not actually flying around the world. I need to think about this some more. While I was thinking about it, people started using even more things just like this, just as we were. They started using LinkedIn and Flickr and Gmail and Google Maps, all these things. Of course, all of these things are cloud-based and don't require any training. They don't require any programmers. They don't require any consultants, because the business model for all these businesses requires that something be so simple we can use it ourselves with little or no training. You just have to hear about it and go to the website. And so I thought, what would happen if we built software to do what I'd been consulting in? Instead of training people how to put forms onto mobile devices, let's create software that lets them do it themselves with no training and without me being involved? And that's exactly what we did. So we created software called Magpi, which has an online form creator. No one has to speak to me. You just have to hear about it and go to the website. You can create forms, and once you've created the forms, you push them to a variety of common mobile phones. Obviously nowadays, we've moved past Palm Pilots to mobile phones. And it doesn't have to be a smartphone. It can be a basic phone like the phone on the right there, you know, the basic kind of Symbian phone that's very common in developing countries. And the great part about this is, it's just like Hotmail. It's cloud-based, and it doesn't require any training, programming, consultants. But there are some additional benefits as well. Now we knew, when we built this system, the whole point of it, just like with the Palm Pilots, was that you'd have to, you'd be able to collect the data and immediately upload the data and get your data set. But what we found, of course, since it's already on a computer, we can deliver instant maps and analysis and graphing. We can take a process that took two years and compress that down to the space of five minutes. Unbelievable improvements in efficiency. Cloud-based, no training, no consultants, no me. And I told you that in the first few years of trying to do this the old-fashioned way, going out to each country, we reached about, I don't know, probably trained about 1,000 people. What happened after we did this? In the second three years, we had 14,000 people find the website, sign up, and start using it to collect data, data for disaster response, Canadian pig farmers tracking pig disease and pig herds, people tracking drug supplies. One of my favorite examples, the IRC, International Rescue Committee, they have a program where semi-literate midwives using $10 mobile phones send a text message using our software once a week with the number of births and the number of deaths, which gives IRC something that no one in global health has ever had: a near real-time system of counting babies, of knowing how many kids are born, of knowing how many children there are in Sierra Leone, which is the country where this is happening, and knowing how many children die. Physicians for Human Rights -- this is moving a little bit outside the health field — they are gathering, they're basically training people to do rape exams in Congo, where this is an epidemic, a horrible epidemic, and they're using our software to document the evidence they find, including photographically, so that they can bring the perpetrators to justice. Camfed, another charity based out of the U.K., Camfed pays girls' families to keep them in school. They understand this is the most significant intervention they can make. They used to track the dispersements, the attendance, the grades, on paper. The turnaround time between a teacher writing down grades or attendance and getting that into a report was about two to three years. Now it's real time, and because this is such a low-cost system and based in the cloud, it costs, for the entire five countries that Camfed runs this in with tens of thousands of girls, the whole cost combined is 10,000 dollars a year. That's less than I used to get just traveling out for two weeks to do a consultation. So I told you before that when we were doing it the old-fashioned way, I realized all of our work was really adding up to just a drop in the bucket -- 10, 20, 30 different programs. We've made a lot of progress, but I recognize that right now, even the work that we've done with 14,000 people using this, is still a drop in the bucket. But something's changed. And I think it should be obvious. What's changed now is, instead of having a program in which we're scaling at such a slow rate that we can never reach all the people who need us, we've made it unnecessary for people to get reached by us. We've created a tool that lets programs keep kids in school, track the number of babies that are born and the number of babies that die, to catch criminals and successfully prosecute them, to do all these different things to learn more about what's going on, to understand more, to see more, and to save lives and improve lives. Thank you. (Applause)

For a moment, what I need to do is project something on the screen of your imagination. We're in 17th century Japan on the west coast, and a little, wizened monk is hurrying along, near midnight, to the crest of a small hill. He arrives on the small hill, dripping with water. He stands there, and he looks across at the island, Sado. And he scans across the ocean, and he looks at the sky. Then he says to himself, very quietly, "[Turbulent the sea,] [Stretching across to Sado] [The Milky Way]." Basho was a brilliant man. He said more with less than any human that I have ever read or talked to. Basho, in 17 syllables, juxtaposed a turbulent ocean driven by a storm now past, and captured the almost impossible beauty of our home galaxy with millions of stars, probably hundreds and hundreds of -- who knows how many -- planets, maybe even an ocean that we will probably call Sylvia in time. As he was nearing his death, his disciples and followers kept asking him, "What's the secret? How can you make haiku poems so beautiful so easily?" And toward the end, he said, "If you would know the pine tree, go to the pine tree." That was it. (Laughter) Sylvia has said we must use every capacity we have in order to know the oceans. If we would know the oceans, we must go to the oceans. And what I'd like to talk to you today about, a little bit, is really transforming the relationship, or the interplay, between humans and oceans with a new capability that is not at all routine yet. I hope it will be. There are a few key points. One of them is the oceans are central to the quality of life on earth. Another is that there are bold, new ways of studying oceans that we have not used well yet. And the last is that these bold, new ways that we are exploring as a community will transform the way we look at our planet, our oceans, and eventually how we manage probably the entire planet, for what it's worth. So what scientists do when they begin is to start with the system. They define what the system is. The system isn't Chesapeake Bay. It's not the Kuril arc. It's not even the entire Pacific. It's the whole planet, the entire planet, continents and oceans together. That's the system. And basically, our challenge is to optimize the benefits and mitigate the risks of living on a planet that's driven by only two processes, two sources of energy, one of which is solar, that drives the winds, the waves, the clouds, the storms and photosynthesis. The second one is internal energy. And these two war against one another almost continuously. Mountain ranges, plate tectonics, moves the continents around, forms ore deposits. Volcanoes erupt. That's the planet that we live on. It's immensely complex. Now I don't expect all of you to see all the details here, but what I want you to see is this is about 10 percent of the processes that operate within the oceans almost continuously, and have for the last 4 billion years. This is a system that's been around a very long time. And these have all co-evolved. What do I mean by that? They interact with one another constantly. All of them interact with one another. So the complexity of this system that we're looking at, the one driven by the sun -- upper portion, mostly -- and the lower portion is partly driven by the input from heat below and by other processes. This is very, very important because this is the system, this is the crucible, out of which life on the planet came, and it's now time for us to understand it. We must understand it. That's one of the themes that Sylvia reminds us about: understand this ocean of ours, this basic life support system, the dominant life support system on the planet. Look at this complexity here. This is only one variable. If you can see the complexity, you can see how tiny, little eddies and large eddies and the motion -- this is just sea surface temperature, but it's immensely complicated. Now a layer in, the other two or three hundred processes that are all interacting, partly as a function of temperature, partly as a function of all the other factors, and you've got a really complicated system. That's our challenge, is to understand, understand this system in new and phenomenal ways. And there's an urgency to this. Part of the urgency comes from the fact that, of order, a billion people on the planet currently are undernourished or starving. And part of the issue is for Cody -- who's here, 16 years old -- and I have permission to relay this number. When he, 40 years from now, is the age of Nancy Brown, there are going to be another two and a half billion people on the planet. We can't solve all the problems by looking only at the oceans, but if we don't understand the fundamental life support system of this planet much more thoroughly than we do now, then the stresses that we will face, and that Cody will face, and even Nancy, who's going to live till she's 98, will have really problems coping. All right, let's talk about another perspective on the importance of the oceans. Look at this diagram, which is showing warm waters in red, cool waters in blue, and on the continents, what you're seeing in bright green, is the growth of vegetation, and in olive green, the dieback of vegetation. And in the lower left hand corner there's a clock ticking away from 1982 to 1998 and then cycling again. What you'll see is that the rhythms of growth, of vegetation -- a subset of which is food on the continents -- is directly tied to the rhythms of the sea surface temperatures. The oceans control, or at least significantly influence, correlate with, the growth patterns and the drought patterns and the rain patterns on the continents. So people in Kansas, in a wheat field in Kansas, need to understand that the oceans are central to them as well. Another complexity: this is the age of the oceans. I'm going to layer in on top of this the tectonic plates. The age of the ocean, the tectonic plates, gives rise to a totally new phenomenon that we have heard about in this conference. And I share with you some very high-definition video that we collected in real time. Seconds after this video was taken, people in Beijing, people in Sydney, people in Amsterdam, people in Washington D.C. were watching this. Now you've heard of hydrothermal vents, but the other discovery is that deep below the sea floor, there is vast reservoir of microbial activity, which we have only just discovered and we have almost no way to study. Some people have estimated that the biomass tied up in these microbes living in the pours and the cracks of the sea floor and below rival the total amount of living biomass at the surface of the planet. It's an astonishing insight, and we have only found out about this recently. This is very, very exciting. It may be the next rainforest, in terms of pharmaceuticals. We know little or nothing about it. Well, Marcel Proust has this wonderful saying that, "The real voyage of discovery consists not so much in seeking new territory, but possibly in having new sets of eyes," new ways of seeing things, a new mindset. And many of you remember the early stages of oceanography, when we had to use what we had at our fingertips. And it wasn't easy. It wasn't easy in those days. Some of you remember this, I'm sure. And now, we have an entire suite of tools that are really pretty powerful -- ships, satellites, moorings. But they don't quite cut it. They don't quite give us what we need. And the program that I wanted to talk to you about just a little bit here, was funded, and it involves autonomous vehicles like the one running across the base of this image. Modeling: on the right hand side, there's a very complex computational model. On the left hand side, there's a new type of mooring, which I'll show you in just a second. And on the basis of several points, the oceans are complex, and they're central to the life on earth. They are changing rapidly, but not predictably. And the models that we need to predict the future do not have enough data to refine them. The computational power is amazing. But without data, those models will never ever be predicted. And that's what we really need. For a variety of reasons they're dangerous, but we feel that OOI, this Ocean Observatory Initiative, which the National Science Foundation has begun to fund, has the potential to really transform things. And the goal of the program is to launch an era of scientific discovery and understanding across and within the ocean basins, utilizing widely accessible, interactive telepresence. It's a new world. We will be present throughout the volume of the ocean, at will, communicating in real time. And this is what the system involves, a number of sites in the southern hemisphere, shown in those circles. And in the northern hemisphere there are four sites. I won't talk a lot about most of them right here, but the one on the west coast, that's in the box, is called the regional scale nodes. It was once called Neptune. And let me show you what's behind it. Fiber: next-generation way of communicating. You can see the copper tips on these things. You can transmit power, but the bandwidth is in those tiny, little threads smaller than the hair on your head in diameter. And this particular set here can transmit something of the order of three to five terabits per second. This is phenomenal bandwidth. And this is what the planet looks like. We are already laced up as if we're in a fiber optic corset, if you like. This is what it looks like. And the cables go really continent to continent. It's a very powerful system, and most of our communications consist of it. So this is the system that I'm talking about, off the west coast. It's coincident with the tectonic plate, the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate. And it's going to deliver abundant power and unprecedented bandwidth across this entire volume -- in the overlying ocean, on the sea floor and below the sea floor. Bandwidth and power and a wide variety of processes that will be operating. This is what one of those primary nodes looks like, and it's like a sub station with power and bandwidth that can spread out over an area the size of Seattle. And the kind of science that can be done will be determined by a variety of scientists who want to be involved and can bring the instrumentation to the table. They will bring it and link it in. It'll be, in a sense, like having time on a telescope, except you'll have your own port. Climate change, ocean acidification, dissolved oxygen, carbon cycle, coastal upwelling, fishing dynamics -- the full spectrum of earth science and ocean science simultaneously in the same volume. So anyone coming along later simply accesses the database and can draw down the information they need about anything that has taken place. And this is just the first of these. In conjunction with our Canadian colleagues, we've set this up. Now I want to take you into the caldera. On the left hand side there is a large volcano called Axial Seamount. And we're going to go down into the Axial Seamount using animation. Here's what this system is going to look like that we are funded to build at this point. Very powerful. That's an elevator that's constantly moving up and down, but it can be controlled by the folks on land who are responsible for it. Or they can transfer control to someone in India or China who can take over for a while, because it's all going to be directly connected through the Internet. There will be massive amounts of data flowing ashore, all available to anyone who has any interest in using it. This is going to be much more powerful than having a single ship in a single location, then move to a new location. We're flying across the caldera floor. There is a number of robotic systems. There's cameras that can be turned on and off at your will, if those are your experiments. The kinds of systems that will be down there, the kinds of instruments that will be on the sea floor, consist of -- if you can read them there -- there's cameras, there's pressure sensors, fluorometers, there's seismometers. It's a full spectrum of tools. Now, that mound right there actually looks like this. This is what it actually looks like. And this is the kind of activity that we can see with high-definition video, because the bandwidth of these cables is so huge that we could have five to 10 stereo HD systems running continuously and, again, directed through robotic techniques from land. Very, very powerful. And these are the things that we're funded to do today. So what can we actually do tomorrow? We're about to ride the wave of technological opportunity. There are emerging technologies throughout the field around oceanography, which we will incorporate into oceanography, and through that convergence, we will transform oceanography into something even more magical. Robotics systems are just incredible these days, absolutely incredible. And we will be bringing robotics of all sorts into the ocean. Nanotechnology: this is a small generator. It's smaller than a postage stamp, and it can generate power just by being attached to your shirt as you move. Just as you move, it generates power. There are many kinds of things that can be used in the ocean, continuously. Imaging: Many of you know a good deal more about this type of thing than I, but stereo imaging at four times the definition that we have in HD will be routine within five years. And this is the magic one. As a result of the human genome process, we are in a situation where events that take place in the ocean -- like an erupting volcano, or something of that sort -- can actually be sampled. We pump the fluid through one of these systems, and we press the button, and it's analyzed for the genomic character. And that's transmitted back to land immediately. So in the volume of the ocean, we will know, not just the physics and the chemistry, but the base of the food chain will be transparent to us with data on a continuous basis. Grid computing: the power of grid computers is going to be just amazing here. We will soon be using grid computing to do pretty much everything, like adjust the data and everything that goes with the data. The power generation will come from the ocean itself. And the next generation fiber will be simply magic. It's far beyond what we currently have. So the presence of the power and the bandwidth in the environment will allow all of these new technologies to converge in a manner that is just unprecedented. So within five to seven years, I see us having a capacity to be completely present throughout the ocean and have all of that connected to the Internet, so we can reach many, many folks. Delivering the power and the bandwidth into the ocean will dramatically accelerate adaptation. Here's an example. When earthquakes take place, massive amounts of these new microbes we've never seen before come out of the sea floor. We have a way of addressing that, a new way of addressing that. We've determined from the earthquake activity that you're seeing here that the top of that volcano is erupting, so we deploy the troops. What are the troops? The troops are the autonomous vehicles, of course. And they fly into the erupting volcano. They sample the fluids coming out of the sea floor during an eruption, which have the microbes that have never been to the surface of the planet before. They eject it to the surface where it floats, and it is picked up by an autonomous airplane, and it's brought back to the laboratory within 24 hours of the eruption. This is doable. All the pieces are there. A laboratory: many of you heard what happened on 9/7. Some doctors in New York City removed the gallbladder of a woman in France. We could do work on the sea floor that would be stunning, and it would be on live TV, if we have interesting things to show. So we can bring an entirely new telepresence to the world, throughout the ocean. This -- I've shown you sea floor -- but so the goal here is real time interaction with the oceans from anywhere on earth. It's going to be amazing. And as I go here, I just want to show you what we can bring into classrooms, and indeed, what we can bring into your pocket. Many of you don't think of this yet, but the ocean will be in your pocket. It won't be long. It won't be long. So let me leave you then with a few words from another poet, if you'll forgive me. In 1943, T.S. Eliot wrote the "Four Quartets." He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. In "Little Gidding" he says -- speaking I think for the human race, but certainly for the TED Conference and Sylvia -- "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time, arrive through the unknown remembered gate where the last of earth left to discover is that which was the beginning. At the source of the longest river the voice of a hidden waterfall not known because not looked for, but heard, half heard in the stillness beneath the waves of the sea." Thank you. (Applause)

If you're here today -- and I'm very happy that you are -- you've all heard about how sustainable development will save us from ourselves. However, when we're not at TED, we are often told that a real sustainability policy agenda is just not feasible, especially in large urban areas like New York City. And that's because most people with decision-making powers, in both the public and the private sector, really don't feel as though they're in danger. The reason why I'm here today, in part, is because of a dog -- an abandoned puppy I found back in the rain, back in 1998. She turned out to be a much bigger dog than I'd anticipated. When she came into my life, we were fighting against a huge waste facility planned for the East River waterfront despite the fact that our small part of New York City already handled more than 40 percent of the entire city's commercial waste: a sewage treatment pelletizing plant, a sewage sludge plant, four power plants, the world's largest food-distribution center, as well as other industries that bring more than 60,000 diesel truck trips to the area each week. The area also has one of the lowest ratios of parks to people in the city. So when I was contacted by the Parks Department about a $10,000 seed-grant initiative to help develop waterfront projects, I thought they were really well-meaning, but a bit naive. I'd lived in this area all my life, and you could not get to the river, because of all the lovely facilities that I mentioned earlier. Then, while jogging with my dog one morning, she pulled me into what I thought was just another illegal dump. There were weeds and piles of garbage and other stuff that I won't mention here, but she kept dragging me, and lo and behold, at the end of that lot was the river. I knew that this forgotten little street-end, abandoned like the dog that brought me there, was worth saving. And I knew it would grow to become the proud beginnings of the community-led revitalization of the new South Bronx. And just like my new dog, it was an idea that got bigger than I'd imagined. We garnered much support along the way, and the Hunts Point Riverside Park became the first waterfront park that the South Bronx had had in more than 60 years. We leveraged that $10,000 seed grant more than 300 times, into a $3 million park. And in the fall, I'm going to exchange marriage vows with my beloved. (Audience whistles) Thank you very much. (Applause) That's him pressing my buttons back there, which he does all the time. (Laughter) (Applause) But those of us living in environmental justice communities are the canary in the coal mine. We feel the problems right now, and have for some time. Environmental justice, for those of you who may not be familiar with the term, goes something like this: no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other. Unfortunately, race and class are extremely reliable indicators as to where one might find the good stuff, like parks and trees, and where one might find the bad stuff, like power plants and waste facilities. As a black person in America, I am twice as likely as a white person to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest risk to my health. I am five times more likely to live within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility, which I do. These land-use decisions created the hostile conditions that lead to problems like obesity, diabetes and asthma. Why would someone leave their home to go for a brisk walk in a toxic neighborhood? Our 27 percent obesity rate is high even for this country, and diabetes comes with it. One out of four South Bronx children has asthma. Our asthma hospitalization rate is seven times higher than the national average. These impacts are coming everyone's way. And we all pay dearly for solid waste costs, health problems associated with pollution and more odiously, the cost of imprisoning our young black and Latino men, who possess untold amounts of untapped potential. Fifty percent of our residents live at or below the poverty line; 25 percent of us are unemployed. Low-income citizens often use emergency-room visits as primary care. This comes at a high cost to taxpayers and produces no proportional benefits. Poor people are not only still poor, they are still unhealthy. Fortunately, there are many people like me who are striving for solutions that won't compromise the lives of low-income communities of color in the short term, and won't destroy us all in the long term. None of us want that, and we all have that in common. So what else do we have in common? Well, first of all, we're all incredibly good-looking. (Laughter) Graduated high school, college, post-graduate degrees, traveled to interesting places, didn't have kids in your early teens, financially stable, never been imprisoned. OK. Good. (Laughter) But, besides being a black woman, I am different from most of you in some other ways. I watched nearly half of the buildings in my neighborhood burn down. My big brother Lenny fought in Vietnam, only to be gunned down a few blocks from our home. Jesus. I grew up with a crack house across the street. Yeah, I'm a poor black child from the ghetto. These things make me different from you. But the things we have in common set me apart from most of the people in my community, and I am in between these two worlds with enough of my heart to fight for justice in the other. So how did things get so different for us? In the late '40s, my dad -- a Pullman porter, son of a slave -- bought a house in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx, and a few years later, he married my mom. At the time, the community was a mostly white, working-class neighborhood. My dad was not alone. And as others like him pursued their own version of the American dream, white flight became common in the South Bronx and in many cities around the country. Red-lining was used by banks, wherein certain sections of the city, including ours, were deemed off-limits to any sort of investment. Many landlords believed it was more profitable to torch their buildings and collect insurance money rather than to sell under those conditions -- dead or injured former tenants notwithstanding. Hunts Point was formerly a walk-to-work community, but now residents had neither work nor home to walk to. A national highway construction boom was added to our problems. In New York State, Robert Moses spearheaded an aggressive highway-expansion campaign. One of its primary goals was to make it easier for residents of wealthy communities in Westchester County to go to Manhattan. The South Bronx, which lies in between, did not stand a chance. Residents were often given less than a month's notice before their buildings were razed. 600,000 people were displaced. The common perception was that only pimps and pushers and prostitutes were from the South Bronx. And if you are told from your earliest days that nothing good is going to come from your community, that it's bad and ugly, how could it not reflect on you? So now, my family's property was worthless, save for that it was our home, and all we had. And luckily for me, that home and the love inside of it, along with help from teachers, mentors and friends along the way, was enough. Now, why is this story important? Because from a planning perspective, economic degradation begets environmental degradation, which begets social degradation. The disinvestment that began in the 1960s set the stage for all the environmental injustices that were to come. Antiquated zoning and land-use regulations are still used to this day to continue putting polluting facilities in my neighborhood. Are these factors taken into consideration when land-use policy is decided? What costs are associated with these decisions? And who pays? Who profits? Does anything justify what the local community goes through? This was "planning" -- in quotes -- that did not have our best interests in mind. Once we realized that, we decided it was time to do our own planning. That small park I told you about earlier was the first stage of building a Greenway movement in the South Bronx. I wrote a one-and-a-quarter-million dollar federal transportation grant to design the plan for a waterfront esplanade with dedicated on-street bike paths. Physical improvements help inform public policy regarding traffic safety, the placement of the waste and other facilities, which, if done properly, don't compromise a community's quality of life. They provide opportunities to be more physically active, as well as local economic development. Think bike shops, juice stands. We secured 20 million dollars to build first-phase projects. This is Lafayette Avenue -- and that's redesigned by Mathews Nielsen Landscape Architects. And once this path is constructed, it'll connect the South Bronx with more than 400 acres of Randall's Island Park. Right now we're separated by about 25 feet of water, but this link will change that. As we nurture the natural environment, its abundance will give us back even more. We run a project called the Bronx [Environmental] Stewardship Training, which provides job training in the fields of ecological restoration, so that folks from our community have the skills to compete for these well-paying jobs. Little by little, we're seeding the area with green-collar jobs -- and with people that have both a financial and personal stake in their environment. The Sheridan Expressway is an underutilized relic of the Robert Moses era, built with no regard for the neighborhoods that were divided by it. Even during rush hour, it goes virtually unused. The community created an alternative transportation plan that allows for the removal of the highway. We have the opportunity now to bring together all the stakeholders to re-envision how this 28 acres can be better utilized for parkland, affordable housing and local economic development. We also built New York City's first green and cool roof demonstration project on top of our offices. Cool roofs are highly-reflective surfaces that don't absorb solar heat, and pass it on to the building or atmosphere. Green roofs are soil and living plants. Both can be used instead of petroleum-based roofing materials that absorb heat, contribute to urban "heat island" effect and degrade under the sun, which we in turn breathe. Green roofs also retain up to 75 percent of rainfall, so they reduce a city's need to fund costly end-of-pipe solutions -- which, incidentally, are often located in environmental justice communities like mine. And they provide habitats for our little friends! [Butterfly] (Laughter) So cool! Anyway, the demonstration project is a springboard for our own green roof installation business, bringing jobs and sustainable economic activity to the South Bronx. [Green is the new black ...] (Laughter) (Applause) I like that, too. Anyway, I know Chris told us not to do pitches up here, but since I have all of your attention: We need investors. End of pitch. It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Anyway -- (Laughter) (Applause) OK. Katrina. Prior to Katrina, the South Bronx and New Orleans' Ninth Ward had a lot in common. Both were largely populated by poor people of color, both hotbeds of cultural innovation: think hip-hop and jazz. Both are waterfront communities that host both industries and residents in close proximity of one another. In the post-Katrina era, we have still more in common. We're at best ignored, and maligned and abused, at worst, by negligent regulatory agencies, pernicious zoning and lax governmental accountability. Neither the destruction of the Ninth Ward nor the South Bronx was inevitable. But we have emerged with valuable lessons about how to dig ourselves out. We are more than simply national symbols of urban blight or problems to be solved by empty campaign promises of presidents come and gone. Now will we let the Gulf Coast languish for a decade or two, like the South Bronx did? Or will we take proactive steps and learn from the homegrown resource of grassroots activists that have been born of desperation in communities like mine? Now listen, I do not expect individuals, corporations or government to make the world a better place because it is right or moral. This presentation today only represents some of what I've been through. Like a tiny little bit. You've no clue. But I'll tell you later, if you want to know. (Laughter) But -- I know it's the bottom line, or one's perception of it, that motivates people in the end. I'm interested in what I like to call the "triple bottom line" that sustainable development can produce. Developments that have the potential to create positive returns for all concerned: the developers, government and the community where these projects go up. At present, that's not happening in New York City. And we are operating with a comprehensive urban-planning deficit. A parade of government subsidies is going to propose big-box and stadium developments in the South Bronx, but there is scant coordination between city agencies on how to deal with the cumulative effects of increased traffic, pollution, solid waste and the impacts on open space. And their approaches to local economic and job development are so lame it's not even funny. Because on top of that, the world's richest sports team is replacing the House That Ruth Built by destroying two well-loved community parks. Now, we'll have even less than that stat I told you about earlier. And although less than 25 percent of South Bronx residents own cars, these projects include thousands of new parking spaces, yet zip in terms of mass public transit. Now, what's missing from the larger debate is a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis between not fixing an unhealthy, environmentally-challenged community, versus incorporating structural, sustainable changes. My agency is working closely with Columbia University and others to shine a light on these issues. Now let's get this straight: I am not anti-development. Ours is a city, not a wilderness preserve. And I've embraced my inner capitalist. And, but I don't have -- (Laughter) You probably all have, and if you haven't, you need to. (Laughter) So I don't have a problem with developers making money. There's enough precedent out there to show that a sustainable, community-friendly development can still make a fortune. Fellow TEDsters Bill McDonough and Amory Lovins -- both heroes of mine by the way -- have shown that you can actually do that. I do have a problem with developments that hyper-exploit politically vulnerable communities for profit. That it continues is a shame upon us all, because we are all responsible for the future that we create. But one of the things I do to remind myself of greater possibilities, is to learn from visionaries in other cities. This is my version of globalization. Let's take Bogota. Poor, Latino, surrounded by runaway gun violence and drug trafficking; a reputation not unlike that of the South Bronx. However, this city was blessed in the late 1990s with a highly-influential mayor named Enrique Peñalosa. He looked at the demographics. Few Bogotanos own cars, yet a huge portion of the city's resources was dedicated to serving them. If you're a mayor, you can do something about that. His administration narrowed key municipal thoroughfares from five lanes to three, outlawed parking on those streets, expanded pedestrian walkways and bike lanes, created public plazas, created one of the most efficient bus mass-transit systems in the entire world. For his brilliant efforts, he was nearly impeached. But as people began to see that they were being put first on issues reflecting their day-to-day lives, incredible things happened. People stopped littering. Crime rates dropped, because the streets were alive with people. His administration attacked several typical urban problems at one time, and on a third-world budget, at that. We have no excuse in this country, I'm sorry. But the bottom line is: their people-first agenda was not meant to penalize those who could actually afford cars, but rather, to provide opportunities for all Bogotanos to participate in the city's resurgence. That development should not come at the expense of the majority of the population is still considered a radical idea here in the U.S. But Bogota's example has the power to change that. You, however, are blessed with the gift of influence. That's why you're here and why you value the information we exchange. Use your influence in support of comprehensive, sustainable change everywhere. Don't just talk about it at TED. This is a nationwide policy agenda I'm trying to build, and as you all know, politics are personal. Help me make green the new black. Help me make sustainability sexy. Make it a part of your dinner and cocktail conversations. Help me fight for environmental and economic justice. Support investments with a triple-bottom-line return. Help me democratize sustainability by bringing everyone to the table, and insisting that comprehensive planning can be addressed everywhere. Oh good, glad I have a little more time! Listen -- when I spoke to Mr. Gore the other day after breakfast, I asked him how environmental justice activists were going to be included in his new marketing strategy. His response was a grant program. I don't think he understood that I wasn't asking for funding. I was making him an offer. (Applause) What troubled me was that this top-down approach is still around. Now, don't get me wrong, we need money. (Laughter) But grassroots groups are needed at the table during the decision-making process. Of the 90 percent of the energy that Mr. Gore reminded us that we waste every day, don't add wasting our energy, intelligence and hard-earned experience to that count. (Applause) I have come from so far to meet you like this. Please don't waste me. By working together, we can become one of those small, rapidly-growing groups of individuals who actually have the audacity and courage to believe that we actually can change the world. We might have come to this conference from very, very different stations in life, but believe me, we all share one incredibly powerful thing. We have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Ciao, bellos! (Applause)

You know, there's a small country nestled in the Himalayan Mountains, far from these beautiful mountains, where the people of the Kingdom of Bhutan have decided to do something different, which is to measure their gross national happiness rather than their gross national product. And why not? After all, happiness is not just a privilege for the lucky few, but a fundamental human right for all. And what is happiness? Happiness is the freedom of choice. The freedom to chose where to live, what to do, what to buy, what to sell, from whom, to whom, when and how. Where does choice come from? And who gets to express it, and how do we express it? Well, one way to express choice is through the market. Well-functioning markets provide choices, and ultimately, the ability to express one's pursuit for happiness. The great Indian economist, Amartya Sen, was awarded the Nobel prize for demonstrating that famine is not so much about the availability of food supply, but rather the ability to acquire or entitle oneself to that food through the market. In 1984, in what can only be considered one of the greatest crimes of humanity, nearly one million people died of starvation in my country of birth, Ethiopia. Not because there was not enough food -- because there was actually a surplus of food in the fertile regions of the south parts of the country -- but because in the north, people could not access or entitle themselves to that food. That was a turning point for my life. Most Africans today, by far, are farmers. And most of Africa's farmers are, by and large, small farmers in terms of land that they operate, and very, very small farmers in terms of the capital they have at their disposal. African agriculture today is among, or is, the most under-capitalized in the world. Only seven percent of arable land in Africa is irrigated, compared to 40 percent in Asia. African farmers only use some 22 kilograms of fertilizer per hectare, compared to 144 in Asia. Road density is six times greater in Asia than it is in rural Africa. There are eight times more tractors in Latin America, and three times more tractors in Asia, than in Africa. The small farmer in Africa today lives a life without much choice, and therefore without much freedom. His livelihood is predetermined by the conditions of grinding poverty. He comes to the market when prices are lowest, with the meager fruits of his hard labor, just after the harvest, because he has no choice. She comes back to the market some months later, when prices are highest, in what we call the lean season -- when food is scarce -- because she has to feed her family and has no choice. The real question is, how can markets be developed in rural Africa to harness the power of innovation and entrepreneurship that we know exists? Another notable economist, Theodore Schultz, in 1974 won the Nobel prize for demonstrating that farmers are efficient, but poor. Meaning, in fact, that farmers are rational and profit-minded just like everybody else. Well, we don't need, now, any more Nobel prizes to know that farmers want a fair shake at the market and want to make money, just like everyone else. And one thing is clear, which is at least now we know that Africa is open for business. And that business is agriculture. Over two decades ago, the world insisted to Africa that markets must be liberalized, that economies must be structurally adjusted. This meant that governments were to remove themselves from the business of buying and selling -- which they did rather inefficiently -- and let the private market do its magic. Well, what happened over the last 25 years? Did Africa feed itself? Did our farmers turn into highly productive commercial actors? I think we're all in this room, probably, because we know that, in fact, Africa is the only region in the world where hunger and malnutrition are projected to go up over the next 10 years, where the food import bill is now double what it was 20 years ago, where food production per capita has stagnated, and where fertilizer use has declined rather than increased. So why didn't agriculture markets perform to expectations? The market reforms prompted by the West -- and I've spent some 15 years traveling around the continent doing research on agricultural markets, and have interviewed traders in 10 to 15 countries in this continent, hundreds of traders -- trying to understand what went wrong with our market reform. And it seems to me that the reforms might have thrown the baby out with the bath water. Like its agriculture, Africa's markets are highly under-capitalized and inefficient. We know from our work around the continent that transaction costs of reaching the market, and the risks of transacting in rural, agriculture markets, are extremely high. In fact, only one third of agricultural output produced in Africa even reaches the market. Africa's markets are weak not only because of weak infrastructure in terms of roads and telecommunications, but also because of the virtual absence of necessary market institutions, such as market information, grades and standards, and reliable ways to connect buyers and sellers. Because of this, commodity buyers and sellers typically transact in small circles, in narrow networks of people they know and trust. And because of that, as grain changes hands -- and I've measured that it changes hands four, five times in its trajectory from the farmer to the consumer -- every time it changes hands -- and I've seen this all over rural Africa -- it also changes sacks. And I thought that was incredibly peculiar. And really realized that that was because -- as traders would tell me over and over -- that's the only way people know what they're getting in terms of the quantity and the product quality. And that actually has huge implications for the ability of markets to quickly respond to price signals, and situations where there are deficits, for example. It also has very high cost implications. I have measured that 26 percent of the marketing margin is simply due to the fact that, because of the absence of grades and standards and market information, sacks have to be constantly changed. And this leads to very high handling costs. For their part, small farmers, who produce the bulk of our agricultural output in Africa, come to the market with virtually no information at all -- blind -- trusting that they're going to have some sort of demand for their produce, and completely at the mercy of the merchants in the only market, the nearest local market they know -- where they're unable to negotiate better prices or reduce their risk. Speaking of risk, we have seen that price volatility of food crops in Africa is the highest in the world. In Africa, small farmers bear the brunt of this risk. In fact, in my view, there is no region of the world and no period in history that farmers have been expected to bear the kind of market risk that Africa's farmers have to bear. And in my view, there is simply no place in the world that has grown its agriculture on the kind of risk that our farmers in Africa today face. In Ethiopia, for example, the variation in maize prices from year to year is as much as 50 percent annually. This kind of market risk is mind-boggling, and has direct implications for not only the incentives of farmers to invest in higher productivity technology, such as modern seeds and fertilizers, but also direct implications for food security. To give you an example, between 2001 and 2002, Ethiopian maize farmers produced two years of bumper harvest. That in turn, because of the weak marketing system, led to an 80 percent collapse in maize prices in the country. This made it unprofitable for some farmers to even harvest the grain from the fields. And we calculated that some 300,000 tons of grain was left in the fields to rot in early 2002. Not six months later, in July 2002, Ethiopia announced a major food crisis, to the same proportions as 1984: 14 million people at risk of starvation. What also happened that year is in the areas where there were good rains, and where farmers had previously produced surplus grain, farmers had decided to withdraw from the fertilizer market, not use fertilizer and actually had dropped their use of fertilizer by 27 percent. This is a tragic example of arrested development, or a budding green revolution stopped in its tracks. And this is not just specific to Ethiopia, but happens over and over, all over Africa. Well, I'm not here today to lament about the situation, or wring my hands. I am here to tell you that change is in the air. Africa today is not the Africa waiting for aid solutions, or cookie-cutter foreign expert policy prescriptions. Africa has learned, or is learning somewhat slowly, that markets don't happen by themselves. In the 1980s, it was very fashionable to talk about getting prices right. There was a very influential book about that, which was mainly about getting governments out of the market. We now recognize that getting markets right is about not just price incentives, but also investing in the right infrastructure and the appropriate and necessary institutions to create the conditions to unleash the power of innovation in the market. When conditions are right, we know and see that that innovation is ready to explode in rural Africa, just like anywhere else. Nearly three years ago, I decided to leave my comfortable job as a World Bank senior economist in Washington and come back to my country of birth, Ethiopia, after nearly 30 years abroad. I did so for a simple reason. After having spent more than a decade understanding, studying, and trying to convince policymakers and donors about what was wrong with Africa's agricultural markets, I decided it was time to do something about it. I currently lead, in Ethiopia, an exciting new initiative to establish the first Ethiopia Commodity Exchange, or ECX. Now, the commodity exchange itself, that concept, is not new to the world. In fact, in 1848, 82 grain merchants and farmers got together in a small town at the crossroads of the Illinois River and Lake Michigan to establish a way to trade better amongst themselves. That was, of course, the birth of the Chicago Board of Trade, which is the most famous commodity exchange in the world. The Chicago Board of Trade was established then for precisely the same reasons that our farmers today would benefit from a commodity exchange. In the American Midwest, farmers used to load grain onto barges and send it upriver to the Chicago market. But once it arrived, if no buyer was to be found, or if prices suddenly dropped, farmers would incur tremendous losses. And in fact, would even dump the grain in Lake Michigan, rather than spend more money transporting it back to their farms. Well, the need to avoid these huge risks and tremendous losses led to the birth of the futures market, and the underlying system of grading grain and receipting -- issuing warehouse receipts on the basis of which trade could be done. From there, the greatest innovation of all came about in this market, which is that buyers and sellers could transact grain without actually having to physically or visually inspect the grain. That meant that grain could be traded across tremendous distances, and even across time -- as far forward as 18 months into the future. This innovation is at the heart of the transformation of American agriculture, and the rise of Chicago to a global market, agricultural market, superpower from where it was, a small regional town. Now, over the last century, we tend to think of commodity exchanges as the purview of Western industrialized countries, and that the reference prices for cotton, coffee, cocoa -- products produced mainly in the south -- are actually a reference price, or a price discovered in these organized commodity exchanges in the northern countries. But that is actually changing. And we're seeing a shift -- powered mainly because of information technology -- a shift in market dominance towards the emerging markets. And over the last decade, you see that the share of Western exchanges -- and this is the U.S. share of exchanges in the world -- has gone down by nearly half in just the last decade. Similarly, there's been explosive growth in India, for example, where rural farmers are using exchanges -- growing here over the last three years by 270 percent a year. This is powered by low-cost VSAT technology, aggressively trying to reach farmers to bring them into the market. China's Dalian Commodity Exchange, three years ago, 2004, overtook the Chicago Board of Trade to become the second largest commodity exchange in the world. Now, in Ethiopia, we're in the process of designing the first organized Ethiopia Commodity Exchange. We're not trying to cut and paste the Chicago model or the India model, but creating a system uniquely tailored to Ethiopia's needs and realities, Ethiopia's small farmers. So, the ECX is an Ethiopian exchange for Ethiopia. We're creating a system that serves all market actors, that creates integrity, trust, efficiency, transparency and enables small farmers to manage the risks that I have described. In the design of our commodity exchange in Ethiopia, we've done something rather unique, which is to take the approach of an integrated perspective, or what we call the ECX Edge. The ECX Edge pretty much creates the entire ecosystem in which the market will develop itself. And this is because one of the things we've learned over the last decade of studying market development in Africa is that the piecemeal approach does not work. You've got one donor trying to develop market information, another trying to work on or sponsor grades and standards, another ICT, and yet another on warehousing, or warehouse receipts. In our approach in Ethiopia, we've decided to put together the entire ecosystem, or environment, in which trade takes place. That means that the exchange will operate a trading system, which will initially start as an open outcry, because we don't think the country's ready for full electronic trading. But at the same time, we'll do something which I think no exchange in the world has ever done, which is itself to operate something like an Internet cafe in the rural areas. So that farmers and small traders can actually come to a terminal center -- what we call the remote access terminal centers -- and actually, without having to buy a computer or figure out how to dial up or any of those things, simply see the trading that's happening on the Addis Ababa trading floor. At the same time, what's very fundamental to this market is that -- and again, an innovation that we've designed for our exchange -- is that the exchange will operate warehouses around the country, in which grade certification and warehouse receipting will be done. And in turn, we'll operate an in-house clearing system, to assure that payment is done appropriately, in the right amount and at the right time, so that basically, we create trust and integrity in the system. Obviously, we work with exchange actors, and as we're developing the exchange market itself, we're also developing the regulatory infrastructure and legal framework, the overarching legal framework for making this market work. So, in fact, our proclamation is going to parliament next month. What's really important is that the ECX will operate a market information system to disseminate prices in real time to farmers around the country, using VSAT technology to bring an electronic price dissemination directly to farmers. What this does is transforms, fundamentally, the farmers' relationship to the market. Whereas before the farmer used to think local -- meaning that he or she would go to the nearest local market, eight to 10 kilometers away on average, and sell whatever they happened to have, without any idea of what the price premium or anything else was -- now farmers come with knowledge of what prices are at the national market. And they start to think national, and even global. They start to make not only commercial marketing decisions, but also planting decisions, on the basis of information coming from the futures price market. And they come to the market knowing what grades their products will achieve in terms of a price premium. So all of this will transform farmers. It will also transform the way traders do business. It will stop them from doing simple, back-to-back, limited arbitrage to really thinking strategically about how to move grain across long distances from [surplus regions] to [deficit areas]. Can Ethiopia do this? It seems very ambitious. But it will create new opportunities. We believe that this initiative requires great political will, and we'll have to align the financial sector, as well as the ICT sector, and really even the underlying legal framework. We believe that the winds of change are here, and that we can do it. ECX is the market for Ethiopia's new millennium, which starts in about eight months. The last parliament of our century opened with our president announcing to the country that this was the most important economic initiative for the country today. We believe that the stakes are high, but that the returns will be even greater. ECX, moreover, can become a trading platform for a pan-African market in agricultural commodities. Ethiopia's domestic market is about one billion dollars of value. And we feel that over the next five years, if Ethiopia can capture even 40 percent, just 40 percent, of the domestic market, and add just 25 percent value to that market, the value of the market doubles. Ethiopia's agricultural market is 30 percent higher than South Africa's grain production, and, in fact, Ethiopia is the second largest maize producer in Africa. So the potential is there. The will is there. The commitment is there. So we feel that we have a winning value proposition to transform farmers' choices, to grow our agriculture, and to change Africa. So, we are in the business of finding our happiness. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I want to talk to you today a little bit about predictable irrationality. And my interest in irrational behavior started many years ago in the hospital. I was burned very badly. And if you spend a lot of time in hospital, you'll see a lot of types of irrationalities. And the one that particularly bothered me in the burn department was the process by which the nurses took the bandage off me. Now, you must have all taken a Band-Aid off at some point, and you must have wondered what's the right approach. Do you rip it off quickly -- short duration but high intensity -- or do you take your Band-Aid off slowly -- you take a long time, but each second is not as painful -- which one of those is the right approach? The nurses in my department thought that the right approach was the ripping one, so they would grab hold and they would rip, and they would grab hold and they would rip. And because I had 70 percent of my body burned, it would take about an hour. And as you can imagine, I hated that moment of ripping with incredible intensity. And I would try to reason with them and say, "Why don't we try something else? Why don't we take it a little longer -- maybe two hours instead of an hour -- and have less of this intensity?" And the nurses told me two things. They told me that they had the right model of the patient -- that they knew what was the right thing to do to minimize my pain -- and they also told me that the word patient doesn't mean to make suggestions or to interfere or ... This is not just in Hebrew, by the way. It's in every language I've had experience with so far. And, you know, there's not much -- there wasn't much I could do, and they kept on doing what they were doing. And about three years later, when I left the hospital, I started studying at the university. And one of the most interesting lessons I learned was that there is an experimental method that if you have a question you can create a replica of this question in some abstract way, and you can try to examine this question, maybe learn something about the world. So that's what I did. I was still interested in this question of how do you take bandages off burn patients. So originally I didn't have much money, so I went to a hardware store and I bought a carpenter's vice. And I would bring people to the lab and I would put their finger in it, and I would crunch it a little bit. (Laughter) And I would crunch it for long periods and short periods, and pain that went up and pain that went down, and with breaks and without breaks -- all kinds of versions of pain. And when I finished hurting people a little bit, I would ask them, so, how painful was this? Or, how painful was this? Or, if you had to choose between the last two, which one would you choose? (Laughter) I kept on doing this for a while. (Laughter) And then, like all good academic projects, I got more funding. I moved to sounds, electrical shocks -- I even had a pain suit that I could get people to feel much more pain. But at the end of this process, what I learned was that the nurses were wrong. Here were wonderful people with good intentions and plenty of experience, and nevertheless they were getting things wrong predictably all the time. It turns out that because we don't encode duration in the way that we encode intensity, I would have had less pain if the duration would have been longer and the intensity was lower. It turns out it would have been better to start with my face, which was much more painful, and move toward my legs, giving me a trend of improvement over time -- that would have been also less painful. And it also turns out that it would have been good to give me breaks in the middle to kind of recuperate from the pain. All of these would have been great things to do, and my nurses had no idea. And from that point on I started thinking, are the nurses the only people in the world who get things wrong in this particular decision, or is it a more general case? And it turns out it's a more general case -- there's a lot of mistakes we do. And I want to give you one example of one of these irrationalities, and I want to talk to you about cheating. And the reason I picked cheating is because it's interesting, but also it tells us something, I think, about the stock market situation we're in. So, my interest in cheating started when Enron came on the scene, exploded all of a sudden, and I started thinking about what is happening here. Is it the case that there was kind of a few apples who are capable of doing these things, or are we talking a more endemic situation, that many people are actually capable of behaving this way? So, like we usually do, I decided to do a simple experiment. And here's how it went. If you were in the experiment, I would pass you a sheet of paper with 20 simple math problems that everybody could solve, but I wouldn't give you enough time. When the five minutes were over, I would say, "Pass me the sheets of paper, and I'll pay you a dollar per question." People did this. I would pay people four dollars for their task -- on average people would solve four problems. Other people I would tempt to cheat. I would pass their sheet of paper. When the five minutes were over, I would say, "Please shred the piece of paper. Put the little pieces in your pocket or in your backpack, and tell me how many questions you got correctly." People now solved seven questions on average. Now, it wasn't as if there was a few bad apples -- a few people cheated a lot. Instead, what we saw is a lot of people who cheat a little bit. Now, in economic theory, cheating is a very simple cost-benefit analysis. You say, what's the probability of being caught? How much do I stand to gain from cheating? And how much punishment would I get if I get caught? And you weigh these options out -- you do the simple cost-benefit analysis, and you decide whether it's worthwhile to commit the crime or not. So, we try to test this. For some people, we varied how much money they could get away with -- how much money they could steal. We paid them 10 cents per correct question, 50 cents, a dollar, five dollars, 10 dollars per correct question. You would expect that as the amount of money on the table increases, people would cheat more, but in fact it wasn't the case. We got a lot of people cheating by stealing by a little bit. What about the probability of being caught? Some people shredded half the sheet of paper, so there was some evidence left. Some people shredded the whole sheet of paper. Some people shredded everything, went out of the room, and paid themselves from the bowl of money that had over 100 dollars. You would expect that as the probability of being caught goes down, people would cheat more, but again, this was not the case. Again, a lot of people cheated by just by a little bit, and they were insensitive to these economic incentives. So we said, "If people are not sensitive to the economic rational theory explanations, to these forces, what could be going on?" And we thought maybe what is happening is that there are two forces. At one hand, we all want to look at ourselves in the mirror and feel good about ourselves, so we don't want to cheat. On the other hand, we can cheat a little bit, and still feel good about ourselves. So, maybe what is happening is that there's a level of cheating we can't go over, but we can still benefit from cheating at a low degree, as long as it doesn't change our impressions about ourselves. We call this like a personal fudge factor. Now, how would you test a personal fudge factor? Initially we said, what can we do to shrink the fudge factor? So, we got people to the lab, and we said, "We have two tasks for you today." First, we asked half the people to recall either 10 books they read in high school, or to recall The Ten Commandments, and then we tempted them with cheating. Turns out the people who tried to recall The Ten Commandments -- and in our sample nobody could recall all of The Ten Commandments -- but those people who tried to recall The Ten Commandments, given the opportunity to cheat, did not cheat at all. It wasn't that the more religious people -- the people who remembered more of the Commandments -- cheated less, and the less religious people -- the people who couldn't remember almost any Commandments -- cheated more. The moment people thought about trying to recall The Ten Commandments, they stopped cheating. In fact, even when we gave self-declared atheists the task of swearing on the Bible and we give them a chance to cheat, they don't cheat at all. Now, Ten Commandments is something that is hard to bring into the education system, so we said, "Why don't we get people to sign the honor code?" So, we got people to sign, "I understand that this short survey falls under the MIT Honor Code." Then they shredded it. No cheating whatsoever. And this is particularly interesting, because MIT doesn't have an honor code. (Laughter) So, all this was about decreasing the fudge factor. What about increasing the fudge factor? The first experiment -- I walked around MIT and I distributed six-packs of Cokes in the refrigerators -- these were common refrigerators for the undergrads. And I came back to measure what we technically call the half-lifetime of Coke -- how long does it last in the refrigerators? As you can expect it doesn't last very long; people take it. In contrast, I took a plate with six one-dollar bills, and I left those plates in the same refrigerators. No bill ever disappeared. Now, this is not a good social science experiment, so to do it better I did the same experiment as I described to you before. A third of the people we passed the sheet, they gave it back to us. A third of the people we passed it to, they shredded it, they came to us and said, "Mr. Experimenter, I solved X problems. Give me X dollars." A third of the people, when they finished shredding the piece of paper, they came to us and said, "Mr Experimenter, I solved X problems. Give me X tokens." We did not pay them with dollars; we paid them with something else. And then they took the something else, they walked 12 feet to the side, and exchanged it for dollars. Think about the following intuition. How bad would you feel about taking a pencil from work home, compared to how bad would you feel about taking 10 cents from a petty cash box? These things feel very differently. Would being a step removed from cash for a few seconds by being paid by token make a difference? Our subjects doubled their cheating. I'll tell you what I think about this and the stock market in a minute. But this did not solve the big problem I had with Enron yet, because in Enron, there's also a social element. People see each other behaving. In fact, every day when we open the news we see examples of people cheating. What does this cause us? So, we did another experiment. We got a big group of students to be in the experiment, and we prepaid them. So everybody got an envelope with all the money for the experiment, and we told them that at the end, we asked them to pay us back the money they didn't make. OK? The same thing happens. When we give people the opportunity to cheat, they cheat. They cheat just by a little bit, all the same. But in this experiment we also hired an acting student. This acting student stood up after 30 seconds, and said, "I solved everything. What do I do now?" And the experimenter said, "If you've finished everything, go home. That's it. The task is finished." So, now we had a student -- an acting student -- that was a part of the group. Nobody knew it was an actor. And they clearly cheated in a very, very serious way. What would happen to the other people in the group? Will they cheat more, or will they cheat less? Here is what happens. It turns out it depends on what kind of sweatshirt they're wearing. Here is the thing. We ran this at Carnegie Mellon and Pittsburgh. And at Pittsburgh there are two big universities, Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh. All of the subjects sitting in the experiment were Carnegie Mellon students. When the actor who was getting up was a Carnegie Mellon student -- he was actually a Carnegie Mellon student -- but he was a part of their group, cheating went up. But when he actually had a University of Pittsburgh sweatshirt, cheating went down. (Laughter) Now, this is important, because remember, when the moment the student stood up, it made it clear to everybody that they could get away with cheating, because the experimenter said, "You've finished everything. Go home," and they went with the money. So it wasn't so much about the probability of being caught again. It was about the norms for cheating. If somebody from our in-group cheats and we see them cheating, we feel it's more appropriate, as a group, to behave this way. But if it's somebody from another group, these terrible people -- I mean, not terrible in this -- but somebody we don't want to associate ourselves with, from another university, another group, all of a sudden people's awareness of honesty goes up -- a little bit like The Ten Commandments experiment -- and people cheat even less. So, what have we learned from this about cheating? We've learned that a lot of people can cheat. They cheat just by a little bit. When we remind people about their morality, they cheat less. When we get bigger distance from cheating, from the object of money, for example, people cheat more. And when we see cheating around us, particularly if it's a part of our in-group, cheating goes up. Now, if we think about this in terms of the stock market, think about what happens. What happens in a situation when you create something where you pay people a lot of money to see reality in a slightly distorted way? Would they not be able to see it this way? Of course they would. What happens when you do other things, like you remove things from money? You call them stock, or stock options, derivatives, mortgage-backed securities. Could it be that with those more distant things, it's not a token for one second, it's something that is many steps removed from money for a much longer time -- could it be that people will cheat even more? And what happens to the social environment when people see other people behave around them? I think all of those forces worked in a very bad way in the stock market. More generally, I want to tell you something about behavioral economics. We have many intuitions in our life, and the point is that many of these intuitions are wrong. The question is, are we going to test those intuitions? We can think about how we're going to test this intuition in our private life, in our business life, and most particularly when it goes to policy, when we think about things like No Child Left Behind, when you create new stock markets, when you create other policies -- taxation, health care and so on. And the difficulty of testing our intuition was the big lesson I learned when I went back to the nurses to talk to them. So I went back to talk to them and tell them what I found out about removing bandages. And I learned two interesting things. One was that my favorite nurse, Ettie, told me that I did not take her pain into consideration. She said, "Of course, you know, it was very painful for you. But think about me as a nurse, taking, removing the bandages of somebody I liked, and had to do it repeatedly over a long period of time. Creating so much torture was not something that was good for me, too." And she said maybe part of the reason was it was difficult for her. But it was actually more interesting than that, because she said, "I did not think that your intuition was right. I felt my intuition was correct." So, if you think about all of your intuitions, it's very hard to believe that your intuition is wrong. And she said, "Given the fact that I thought my intuition was right ..." -- she thought her intuition was right -- it was very difficult for her to accept doing a difficult experiment to try and check whether she was wrong. But in fact, this is the situation we're all in all the time. We have very strong intuitions about all kinds of things -- our own ability, how the economy works, how we should pay school teachers. But unless we start testing those intuitions, we're not going to do better. And just think about how better my life would have been if these nurses would have been willing to check their intuition, and how everything would have been better if we just start doing more systematic experimentation of our intuitions. Thank you very much.

I am a computer science and engineering professor here at Carnegie Mellon, and my research focuses on usable privacy and security, and so my friends like to give me examples of their frustrations with computing systems, especially frustrations related to unusable privacy and security. So passwords are something that I hear a lot about. A lot of people are frustrated with passwords, and it's bad enough when you have to have one really good password that you can remember but nobody else is going to be able to guess. But what do you do when you have accounts on a hundred different systems and you're supposed to have a unique password for each of these systems? It's tough. At Carnegie Mellon, they used to make it actually pretty easy for us to remember our passwords. The password requirement up through 2009 was just that you had to have a password with at least one character. Pretty easy. But then they changed things, and at the end of 2009, they announced that we were going to have a new policy, and this new policy required passwords that were at least eight characters long, with an uppercase letter, lowercase letter, a digit, a symbol, you couldn't use the same character more than three times, and it wasn't allowed to be in a dictionary. Now, when they implemented this new policy, a lot of people, my colleagues and friends, came up to me and they said, "Wow, now that's really unusable. Why are they doing this to us, and why didn't you stop them?" And I said, "Well, you know what? They didn't ask me." But I got curious, and I decided to go talk to the people in charge of our computer systems and find out what led them to introduce this new policy, and they said that the university had joined a consortium of universities, and one of the requirements of membership was that we had to have stronger passwords that complied with some new requirements, and these requirements were that our passwords had to have a lot of entropy. Now entropy is a complicated term, but basically it measures the strength of passwords. But the thing is, there isn't actually a standard measure of entropy. Now, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has a set of guidelines which have some rules of thumb for measuring entropy, but they don't have anything too specific, and the reason they only have rules of thumb is it turns out they don't actually have any good data on passwords. In fact, their report states, "Unfortunately, we do not have much data on the passwords users choose under particular rules. NIST would like to obtain more data on the passwords users actually choose, but system administrators are understandably reluctant to reveal password data to others." So this is a problem, but our research group looked at it as an opportunity. We said, "Well, there's a need for good password data. Maybe we can collect some good password data and actually advance the state of the art here. So the first thing we did is, we got a bag of candy bars and we walked around campus and talked to students, faculty and staff, and asked them for information about their passwords. Now we didn't say, "Give us your password." No, we just asked them about their password. How long is it? Does it have a digit? Does it have a symbol? And were you annoyed at having to create a new one last week? So we got results from 470 students, faculty and staff, and indeed we confirmed that the new policy was very annoying, but we also found that people said they felt more secure with these new passwords. We found that most people knew they were not supposed to write their password down, and only 13 percent of them did, but disturbingly, 80 percent of people said they were reusing their password. Now, this is actually more dangerous than writing your password down, because it makes you much more susceptible to attackers. So if you have to, write your passwords down, but don't reuse them. We also found some interesting things about the symbols people use in passwords. So CMU allows 32 possible symbols, but as you can see, there's only a small number that most people are using, so we're not actually getting very much strength from the symbols in our passwords. So this was a really interesting study, and now we had data from 470 people, but in the scheme of things, that's really not very much password data, and so we looked around to see where could we find additional password data? So it turns out there are a lot of people going around stealing passwords, and they often go and post these passwords on the Internet. So we were able to get access to some of these stolen password sets. This is still not really ideal for research, though, because it's not entirely clear where all of these passwords came from, or exactly what policies were in effect when people created these passwords. So we wanted to find some better source of data. So we decided that one thing we could do is we could do a study and have people actually create passwords for our study. So we used a service called Amazon Mechanical Turk, and this is a service where you can post a small job online that takes a minute, a few minutes, an hour, and pay people, a penny, ten cents, a few dollars, to do a task for you, and then you pay them through Amazon.com. So we paid people about 50 cents to create a password following our rules and answering a survey, and then we paid them again to come back two days later and log in using their password and answering another survey. So we did this, and we collected 5,000 passwords, and we gave people a bunch of different policies to create passwords with. So some people had a pretty easy policy, we call it Basic8, and here the only rule was that your password had to have at least eight characters. Then some people had a much harder policy, and this was very similar to the CMU policy, that it had to have eight characters including uppercase, lowercase, digit, symbol, and pass a dictionary check. And one of the other policies we tried, and there were a whole bunch more, but one of the ones we tried was called Basic16, and the only requirement here was that your password had to have at least 16 characters. All right, so now we had 5,000 passwords, and so we had much more detailed information. Again we see that there's only a small number of symbols that people are actually using in their passwords. We also wanted to get an idea of how strong the passwords were that people were creating, but as you may recall, there isn't a good measure of password strength. So what we decided to do was to see how long it would take to crack these passwords using the best cracking tools that the bad guys are using, or that we could find information about in the research literature. So to give you an idea of how bad guys go about cracking passwords, they will steal a password file that will have all of the passwords in kind of a scrambled form, called a hash, and so what they'll do is they'll make a guess as to what a password is, run it through a hashing function, and see whether it matches the passwords they have on their stolen password list. So a dumb attacker will try every password in order. They'll start with AAAAA and move on to AAAAB, and this is going to take a really long time before they get any passwords that people are really likely to actually have. A smart attacker, on the other hand, does something much more clever. They look at the passwords that are known to be popular from these stolen password sets, and they guess those first. So they're going to start by guessing "password," and then they'll guess "I love you," and "monkey," and "12345678," because these are the passwords that are most likely for people to have. In fact, some of you probably have these passwords. So what we found by running all of these 5,000 passwords we collected through these tests to see how strong they were, we found that the long passwords were actually pretty strong, and the complex passwords were pretty strong too. However, when we looked at the survey data, we saw that people were really frustrated by the very complex passwords, and the long passwords were a lot more usable, and in some cases, they were actually even stronger than the complex passwords. So this suggests that, instead of telling people that they need to put all these symbols and numbers and crazy things into their passwords, we might be better off just telling people to have long passwords. Now here's the problem, though: Some people had long passwords that actually weren't very strong. You can make long passwords that are still the sort of thing that an attacker could easily guess. So we need to do more than just say long passwords. There has to be some additional requirements, and some of our ongoing research is looking at what additional requirements we should add to make for stronger passwords that also are going to be easy for people to remember and type. Another approach to getting people to have stronger passwords is to use a password meter. Here are some examples. You may have seen these on the Internet when you were creating passwords. We decided to do a study to find out whether these password meters actually work. Do they actually help people have stronger passwords, and if so, which ones are better? So we tested password meters that were different sizes, shapes, colors, different words next to them, and we even tested one that was a dancing bunny. As you type a better password, the bunny dances faster and faster. So this was pretty fun. What we found was that password meters do work. (Laughter) Most of the password meters were actually effective, and the dancing bunny was very effective too, but the password meters that were the most effective were the ones that made you work harder before they gave you that thumbs up and said you were doing a good job, and in fact we found that most of the password meters on the Internet today are too soft. They tell you you're doing a good job too early, and if they would just wait a little bit before giving you that positive feedback, you probably would have better passwords. Now another approach to better passwords, perhaps, is to use pass phrases instead of passwords. So this was an xkcd cartoon from a couple of years ago, and the cartoonist suggests that we should all use pass phrases, and if you look at the second row of this cartoon, you can see the cartoonist is suggesting that the pass phrase "correct horse battery staple" would be a very strong pass phrase and something really easy to remember. He says, in fact, you've already remembered it. And so we decided to do a research study to find out whether this was true or not. In fact, everybody who I talk to, who I mention I'm doing password research, they point out this cartoon. "Oh, have you seen it? That xkcd. Correct horse battery staple." So we did the research study to see what would actually happen. So in our study, we used Mechanical Turk again, and we had the computer pick the random words in the pass phrase. Now the reason we did this is that humans are not very good at picking random words. If we asked a human to do it, they would pick things that were not very random. So we tried a few different conditions. In one condition, the computer picked from a dictionary of the very common words in the English language, and so you'd get pass phrases like "try there three come." And we looked at that, and we said, "Well, that doesn't really seem very memorable." So then we tried picking words that came from specific parts of speech, so how about noun-verb-adjective-noun. That comes up with something that's sort of sentence-like. So you can get a pass phrase like "plan builds sure power" or "end determines red drug." And these seemed a little bit more memorable, and maybe people would like those a little bit better. We wanted to compare them with passwords, and so we had the computer pick random passwords, and these were nice and short, but as you can see, they don't really look very memorable. And then we decided to try something called a pronounceable password. So here the computer picks random syllables and puts them together so you have something sort of pronounceable, like "tufritvi" and "vadasabi." That one kind of rolls off your tongue. So these were random passwords that were generated by our computer. So what we found in this study was that, surprisingly, pass phrases were not actually all that good. People were not really better at remembering the pass phrases than these random passwords, and because the pass phrases are longer, they took longer to type and people made more errors while typing them in. So it's not really a clear win for pass phrases. Sorry, all of you xkcd fans. On the other hand, we did find that pronounceable passwords worked surprisingly well, and so we actually are doing some more research to see if we can make that approach work even better. So one of the problems with some of the studies that we've done is that because they're all done using Mechanical Turk, these are not people's real passwords. They're the passwords that they created or the computer created for them for our study. And we wanted to know whether people would actually behave the same way with their real passwords. So we talked to the information security office at Carnegie Mellon and asked them if we could have everybody's real passwords. Not surprisingly, they were a little bit reluctant to share them with us, but we were actually able to work out a system with them where they put all of the real passwords for 25,000 CMU students, faculty and staff, into a locked computer in a locked room, not connected to the Internet, and they ran code on it that we wrote to analyze these passwords. They audited our code. They ran the code. And so we never actually saw anybody's password. We got some interesting results, and those of you Tepper students in the back will be very interested in this. So we found that the passwords created by people affiliated with the school of computer science were actually 1.8 times stronger than those affiliated with the business school. We have lots of other really interesting demographic information as well. The other interesting thing that we found is that when we compared the Carnegie Mellon passwords to the Mechanical Turk-generated passwords, there was actually a lot of similarities, and so this helped validate our research method and show that actually, collecting passwords using these Mechanical Turk studies is actually a valid way to study passwords. So that was good news. Okay, I want to close by talking about some insights I gained while on sabbatical last year in the Carnegie Mellon art school. One of the things that I did is I made a number of quilts, and I made this quilt here. It's called "Security Blanket." (Laughter) And this quilt has the 1,000 most frequent passwords stolen from the RockYou website. And the size of the passwords is proportional to how frequently they appeared in the stolen dataset. And what I did is I created this word cloud, and I went through all 1,000 words, and I categorized them into loose thematic categories. And it was, in some cases, it was kind of difficult to figure out what category they should be in, and then I color-coded them. So here are some examples of the difficulty. So "justin." Is that the name of the user, their boyfriend, their son? Maybe they're a Justin Bieber fan. Or "princess." Is that a nickname? Are they Disney princess fans? Or maybe that's the name of their cat. "Iloveyou" appears many times in many different languages. There's a lot of love in these passwords. If you look carefully, you'll see there's also some profanity, but it was really interesting to me to see that there's a lot more love than hate in these passwords. And there are animals, a lot of animals, and "monkey" is the most common animal and the 14th most popular password overall. And this was really curious to me, and I wondered, "Why are monkeys so popular?" And so in our last password study, any time we detected somebody creating a password with the word "monkey" in it, we asked them why they had a monkey in their password. And what we found out -- we found 17 people so far, I think, who have the word "monkey" -- We found out about a third of them said they have a pet named "monkey" or a friend whose nickname is "monkey," and about a third of them said that they just like monkeys and monkeys are really cute. And that guy is really cute. So it seems that at the end of the day, when we make passwords, we either make something that's really easy to type, a common pattern, or things that remind us of the word password or the account that we've created the password for, or whatever. Or we think about things that make us happy, and we create our password based on things that make us happy. And while this makes typing and remembering your password more fun, it also makes it a lot easier to guess your password. So I know a lot of these TED Talks are inspirational and they make you think about nice, happy things, but when you're creating your password, try to think about something else. Thank you. (Applause)

If you're here today -- and I'm very happy that you are -- you've all heard about how sustainable development will save us from ourselves. However, when we're not at TED, we are often told that a real sustainability policy agenda is just not feasible, especially in large, urban areas like New York City. And that's because most people with decision-making powers, in both the public and the private sector, really don't feel as though they're in danger. The reason why I'm here today, in part, is because of a dog: an abandoned puppy I found back in the rain, back in 1998. She turned out to be a much bigger dog than I'd anticipated. When she came into my life, we were fighting against a huge waste facility planned for the East River waterfront, despite the fact that our small part of New York City already handled more than 40 percent of the entire city's commercial waste: a sewage treatment pelletizing plant, a sewage sludge plant, four power plants, the world's largest food distribution center, as well as other industries that bring more than 60,000 diesel truck trips to the area each week. The area also has one of the lowest ratios of parks to people in the city. So when I was contacted by the Parks Department about a $10,000 seed grant initiative seed grant initiative to help develop waterfront projects, I thought they were really well-meaning, but a bit naive. I'd lived in this area all my life, and you could not get to the river because of all the lovely facilities that I'd mentioned earlier. Then, while jogging with my dog one morning, she pulled me into what I thought was just another illegal dump. There were weeds and piles of garbage and other stuff that I won't mention here, but she kept dragging me -- and lo and behold, at the end of that lot was the river. I knew that this forgotten little street-end, abandoned like the dog that brought me there, was worth saving. And I knew it would grow to become the proud beginnings of the community-led revitalization of the new South Bronx. And just like my new dog, it was an idea that got bigger than I'd imagined. We garnered much support along the way. And the Hunts Point Riverside Park became the first waterfront park that the South Bronx had had in more than 60 years. We leveraged that $10,000 seed grant more than 300 times into a $3 million park. And, in the fall, I'm actually going to -- I exchange marriage vows with my beloved. Thank you very much. That's him pressing my buttons back there, which he does all the time. (Laughter) (Applause) But those of us living in environmental justice communities are the canary in the coalmine. We feel the problems right now, and have for some time. Environmental justice, for those of you who may not be familiar with the term, goes something like this: no community should be saddled with more environmental burdens and less environmental benefits than any other. Unfortunately, race and class are extremely reliable indicators as to where one might find the good stuff, like parks and trees, and where one might find the bad stuff, like power plants and waste facilities. As a black person in America, I am twice as likely as a white person to live in an area where air pollution poses the greatest risk to my health. I am five times more likely to live within walking distance of a power plant or chemical facility -- which I do. These land-use decisions created the hostile conditions that lead to problems like obesity, diabetes and asthma. Why would someone leave their home to go for a brisk walk in a toxic neighborhood? Our 27 percent obesity rate is high, even for this country, and diabetes comes with it. One out of four South Bronx children has asthma. Our asthma hospitalization rate is seven times higher than the national average. These impacts are coming everyone's way. And we all pay dearly for solid waste costs, health problems associated with pollution and more odiously, the cost of imprisoning our young black and Latino men, who possess untold amounts of untapped potential. 50 percent of our residents live at or below the poverty line. 25 percent of us are unemployed. Low-income citizens often use emergency room visits as primary care. This comes at a high cost to taxpayers and produces no proportional benefits. Poor people are not only still poor; they are still unhealthy. Fortunately, there are many people like me who are striving for solutions that won't compromise the lives of low-income communities of color in the short term, and won't destroy us all in the long term. None of us want that, and we all have that in common. So what else do we have in common? Well, first of all, we're all incredibly good-looking -- (Laughter) -- graduated high school, college, post-graduate degrees, traveled to interesting places, didn't have kids in your early teens, financially stable, never been imprisoned. OK. Good. (Laughter) But, besides being a black woman, I am different from most of you in some other ways. I watched nearly half of the buildings in my neighborhood burn down. My big brother Lenny fought in Vietnam, only to be gunned down a few blocks from our home. Jesus. I grew up with a crack house across the street. Yeah, I'm a poor black child from the ghetto. These things make me different from you. But the things we have in common set me apart from most of the people in my community, and I am in between these two worlds, with enough of my heart to fight for justice in the other. So how did things get so different for us? In the late '40s, my dad -- a Pullman porter, son of a slave -- bought a house in the Hunts Point section of the South Bronx, and a few years later he married my mom. At the time, the community was a mostly white, working-class neighborhood. My dad was not alone. And as others like him pursued their own version of the American dream, white flight became common in the South Bronx and in many cities around the country. Red-lining was used by banks, wherein certain sections of the city, including ours, were deemed off-limits to any sort of investment. Many landlords believed it was more profitable to torch their buildings and collect insurance money rather than to sell under those conditions -- dead or injured former tenants notwithstanding. Hunts Point was formerly a walk-to-work community, but now residents had neither work nor home to walk to. A national highway construction boom was added to our problems. In New York State, Robert Moses spearheaded an aggressive highway expansion campaign. One of its primary goals was to make it easier for residents of wealthy communities in Westchester County to go to Manhattan. The South Bronx, which lies in between, did not stand a chance. Residents were often given less than a month's notice before their buildings were razed. 600,000 people were displaced. The common perception was that only pimps and pushers and prostitutes were from the South Bronx. And if you are told from your earliest days that nothing good is going to come from your community, that is bad and ugly, how could it not reflect on you? So now, my family's property was worthless, save for that it was our home and all we had. And luckily for me, that home and the love inside of it, along with help from teachers, mentors and friends along the way, was enough. Now, why is this story important? Because from a planning perspective, economic degradation begets environmental degradation, which begets social degradation. The disinvestment that began in the 1960s set the stage for all the environmental injustices that were to come. Antiquated zoning and land-use regulations are still used to this day to continue putting polluting facilities in my neighborhood. Are these factors taken into consideration when land-use policy is decided? What costs are associated with these decisions? And who pays? Who profits? Does anything justify what the local community goes through? This was "planning" -- in quotes -- that did not have our best interests in mind. Once we realized that, we decided it was time to do our own planning. That small park I told you about earlier was the first stage of building a greenway movement in the South Bronx. I wrote a one-and-a-quarter-million dollar federal transportation grant to design the plan for a waterfront esplanade with dedicated on-street bike paths. Physical improvements help inform public policy regarding traffic safety, the placement of the waste and other facilities, which, if done properly, don't compromise a community's quality of life. They provide opportunities to be more physically active, as well as local economic development. Think bike shops, juice stands. We secured 20 million dollars to build first-phase projects. This is Lafayette Avenue -- and as redesigned by Matthews-Nielsen landscape architects. And once this path is constructed, it'll connect the South Bronx with more than 400 acres of Randall's Island Park. Right now we're separated by about 25 feet of water, but this link will change that. As we nurture the natural environment, its abundance will give us back even more. We run a project called the Bronx Ecological Stewardship Training, which provides job training in the fields of ecological restorations, so that folks from our community have the skills to compete for these well-paying jobs. Little by little, we're seeding the area with green collar jobs -- then the people that have both a financial and personal stake in their environment. The Sheridan Expressway is an underutilized relic of the Robert Moses era, built with no regard for the neighborhoods that were divided by it. Even during rush hour, it goes virtually unused. The community created an alternative transportation plan that allows for the removal of the highway. We have the opportunity now to bring together all the stakeholders to re-envision how this 28 acres can be better utilized for parkland, affordable housing and local economic development. We also built the city's -- New York City's first green and cool roof demonstration project on top of our offices. Cool roofs are highly reflective surfaces that don't absorb solar heat and pass it on to the building or atmosphere. Green roofs are soil and living plants. Both can be used instead of petroleum-based roofing materials that absorb heat, contribute to urban "heat island" effect and degrade under the sun, which we in turn breathe. Green roofs also retain up to 75 percent of rainfall, so they reduce a city's need to fund costly end-of-pipe solutions -- which, incidentally, are often located in environmental justice communities like mine. And they provide habitats for our little friends! So -- (Laughter) -- so cool! Anyway, the demonstration project is a springboard for our own green roof installation business, bringing jobs and sustainable economic activity to the South Bronx. (Laughter) (Applause) I like that, too. Anyway, I know Chris told us not to do pitches up here, but since I have all of your attention: we need investors. End of pitch. It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission. Anyway -- (Laughter) (Applause) OK. Katrina. Prior to Katrina, the South Bronx and New Orleans' Ninth Ward had a lot in common. Both were largely populated by poor people of color, both hotbeds of cultural innovation: think hip-hop and jazz. Both are waterfront communities that host both industries and residents in close proximity of one another. In the post-Katrina era, we have still more in common. We're at best ignored and maligned and abused, at worst, by negligent regulatory agencies, pernicious zoning and lax governmental accountability. Neither the destruction of the Ninth Ward nor the South Bronx was inevitable. But we have emerged with valuable lessons about how to dig ourselves out. We are more than simply national symbols of urban blight. Or problems to be solved by empty campaign promises of presidents come and gone. Now will we let the Gulf Coast languish for a decade or two like the South Bronx did? Or will we take proactive steps and learn from the homegrown resource of grassroots activists that have been born of desperation in communities like mine? Now listen, I do not expect individuals, corporations or government to make the world a better place because it is right or moral. This presentation today only represents some of what I've been through, like a tiny little bit. You've no clue. But I'll tell you later if you want to know. But -- I know it's the bottom line, or one's perception of it, that motivates people in the end. I'm interested in what I like to call the "triple bottom line" that sustainable development can produce. Developments that have the potential to create positive returns for all concerned: the developers, government and the community where these projects go up. At present, that's not happening in New York City. And we are operating with a comprehensive urban planning deficit. A parade of government subsidies is going to proposed big-box and stadium developments in the South Bronx, but there is scant coordination between city agencies on how to deal with the cumulative effects of increased traffic, pollution, solid waste and the impacts on open space. And their approaches to local economic and job development are so lame it's not even funny. Because on top of that, the world's richest sports team is replacing the House That Ruth Built by destroying two well-loved community parks. Now, we'll have even less than that stat I told you about earlier. And although less than 25 percent of South Bronx residents own cars, these projects include thousands of new parking spaces, yet zip in terms of mass public transit. Now, what's missing from the larger debate is a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis between not fixing an unhealthy, environmentally challenged community, versus incorporating structural, sustainable changes. My agency is working closely with Columbia University and others to shine a light on these issues. Now let's get this straight. I am not anti-development. Ours is a city, not a wilderness preserve. And I've embraced my inner capitalist. You probably all have it, and if you haven't, you need to. (Laughter) So I don't have a problem with developers making money. There's enough precedent out there to show that a sustainable, community-friendly development can still make a fortune. Fellow TEDsters Bill McDonough and Amory Lovins -- both heroes of mine by the way -- have shown that you can actually do that. I do have a problem with developments that hyper-exploit politically vulnerable communities for profit. That it continues is a shame upon us all, because we are all responsible for the future that we create. But one of the things I do to remind myself of greater possibilities is to learn from visionaries in other cities. This is my version of globalization. Let's take Bogota. Poor, Latino, surrounded by runaway gun violence and drug trafficking: a reputation not unlike that of the South Bronx. However, this city was blessed in the late 1990s with a highly influential mayor named Enrique Penalosa. He looked at the demographics. Few Bogatanos own cars, yet a huge portion of the city's resources was dedicated to serving them. If you're a mayor, you can do something about that. His administration narrowed key municipal thoroughfares from five lanes to three, outlawed parking on those streets, expanded pedestrian walkways and bike lanes, created public plazas, created one of the most efficient bus mass-transit systems in the entire world. For his brilliant efforts, he was nearly impeached. But as people began to see that they were being put first on issues reflecting their day-to-day lives, incredible things happened. People stopped littering; crime rates dropped -- because the streets were alive with people. His administration attacked several typical urban problems at one time, and on a third-world budget at that. We have no excuse in this country. I'm sorry. But the bottom line is: their people-first agenda was not meant to penalize those who could actually afford cars, but rather to provide opportunities for all Bogatanos to participate in the city's resurgence. That development should not come at the expense of the majority of the population is still considered a radical idea here in the US. But Bogota's example has the power to change that. You, however, are blessed with the gift of influence. That's why you're here and why you value the information we exchange. Use your influence in support of comprehensive sustainable change everywhere. Don't just talk about it at TED. This is a nationwide policy agenda I'm trying to build, and as you all know, politics are personal. Help me make green the new black. Help me make sustainability sexy. Make it a part of your dinner and cocktail conversations. Help me fight for environmental and economic justice. Support investments with a triple-bottom-line return. Help me democratize sustainability by bringing everyone to the table and insisting that comprehensive planning can be addressed everywhere. Oh good, glad I have a little more time! Listen -- when I spoke to Mr. Gore the other day after breakfast, I asked him how environmental justice activists were going to be included in his new marketing strategy. His response was a grant program. I don't think he understood that I wasn't asking for funding. I was making him an offer. (Applause) What troubled me was that this top-down approach is still around. Now, don't get me wrong, we need money. (Laughter) But grassroots groups are needed at the table during the decision-making process. Of the 90 percent of the energy that Mr. Gore reminded us that we waste every day, don't add wasting our energy, intelligence and hard-earned experience to that count. (Applause) I have come from so far to meet you like this. Please don't waste me. By working together, we can become one of those small, rapidly growing groups of individuals who actually have the audacity and courage to believe that we actually can change the world. We might have come to this conference from very, very different stations in life, but believe me, we all share one incredibly powerful thing: we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Ciao bellos! (Applause)

The first idea I'd like to suggest is that we all love music a great deal. It means a lot to us. But music is even more powerful if you don't just listen to it, but you make it yourself. So, that's my first idea. And we all know about the Mozart effect -- the idea that's been around for the last five to 10 years -- that just by listening to music or by playing music to your baby [in utero], that it'll raise our IQ points 10, 20, 30 percent. Great idea, but it doesn't work at all. So, you can't just listen to music, you have to make it somehow. And I'd add to that, that it's not just making it, but everybody, each of us, everybody in the world has the power to create and be part of music in a very dynamic way, and that's one of the main parts of my work. So, with the MIT Media Lab, for quite a while now, we've been engaged in a field called active music. What are all the possible ways that we can think of to get everybody in the middle of a musical experience, not just listening, but making music? And we started by making instruments for some of the world's greatest performers -- we call these hyperinstruments -- for Yo-Yo Ma, Peter Gabriel, Prince, orchestras, rock bands. Instruments where they're all kinds of sensors built right into the instrument, so the instrument knows how it's being played. And just by changing the interpretation and the feeling, I can turn my cello into a voice, or into a whole orchestra, or into something that nobody has ever heard before. When we started making these, I started thinking, why can't we make wonderful instruments like that for everybody, people who aren't fantastic Yo-Yo Mas or Princes? So, we've made a whole series of instruments. One of the largest collections is called the Brain Opera. It's a whole orchestra of about 100 instruments, all designed for anybody to play using natural skill. So, you can play a video game, drive through a piece of music, use your body gesture to control huge masses of sound, touch a special surface to make melodies, use your voice to make a whole aura. And when we make the Brain Opera, we invite the public to come in, to try these instruments and then collaborate with us to help make each performance of the Brain Opera. We toured that for a long time. It is now permanently in Vienna, where we built a museum around it. And that led to something which you probably do know. Guitar Hero came out of our lab, and my two teenage daughters and most of the students at the MIT Media Lab are proof that if you make the right kind of interface, people are really interested in being in the middle of a piece of music, and playing it over and over and over again. So, the model works, but it's only the tip of the iceberg, because my second idea is that it's not enough just to want to make music in something like Guitar Hero. And music is very fun, but it's also transformative. It's very, very important. Music can change your life, more than almost anything. It can change the way you communicate with others, it can change your body, it can change your mind. So, we're trying to go to the next step of how you build on top of something like Guitar Hero. We are very involved in education. We have a long-term project called Toy Symphony, where we make all kinds of instruments that are also addictive, but for little kids, so the kids will fall in love with making music, want to spend their time doing it, and then will demand to know how it works, how to make more, how to create. So, we make squeezy instruments, like these Music Shapers that measure the electricity in your fingers, Beatbugs that let you tap in rhythms -- they gather your rhythm, and like hot potato, you send your rhythm to your friends, who then have to imitate or respond to what your doing -- and a software package called Hyperscore, which lets anybody use lines and color to make quite sophisticated music. Extremely easy to use, but once you use it, you can go quite deep -- music in any style. And then, by pressing a button, it turns into music notation so that live musicians can play your pieces. We've had good enough, really, very powerful effects with kids around the world, and now people of all ages, using Hyperscore. So, we've gotten more and more interested in using these kinds of creative activities in a much broader context, for all kinds of people who don't usually have the opportunity to make music. So, one of the growing fields that we're working on at the Media Lab right now is music, mind and health. A lot of you have probably seen Oliver Sacks' wonderful new book called "Musicophilia". It's on sale in the bookstore. It's a great book. If you haven't seen it, it's worth reading. He's a pianist himself, and he details his whole career of looking at and observing incredibly powerful effects that music has had on peoples' lives in unusual situations. So we know, for instance, that music is almost always the last thing that people with advanced Alzheimer's can still respond to. Maybe many of you have noticed this with loved ones, you can find somebody who can't recognize their face in the mirror, or can't tell anyone in their family, but you can still find a shard of music that that person will jump out of the chair and start singing. And with that you can bring back parts of people's memories and personalities. Music is the best way to restore speech to people who have lost it through strokes, movement to people with Parkinson's disease. It's very powerful for depression, schizophrenia, many, many things. So, we're working on understanding those underlying principles and then building activities which will let music really improve people's health. And we do this in many ways. We work with many different hospitals. One of them is right near Boston, called Tewksbury Hospital. It's a long-term state hospital, where several years ago we started working with Hyperscore and patients with physical and mental disabilities. This has become a central part of the treatment at Tewksbury hospital, so everybody there clamors to work on musical activities. It's the activity that seems to accelerate people's treatment the most and it also brings the entire hospital together as a kind of musical community. I wanted to show you a quick video of some of this work before I go on. Video: They're manipulating each other's rhythms. It's a real experience, not only to learn how to play and listen to rhythms, but to train your musical memory and playing music in a group. To get their hands on music, to shape it themselves, change it, to experiment with it, to make their own music. So Hyperscore lets you start from scratch very quickly. Everybody can experience music in a profound way, we just have to make different tools. The third idea I want to share with you is that music, paradoxically, I think even more than words, is one of the very best ways we have of showing who we really are. I love giving talks, although strangely I feel more nervous giving talks than playing music. If I were here playing cello, or playing on a synth, or sharing my music with you, I'd be able to show things about myself that I can't tell you in words, more personal things, perhaps deeper things. I think that's true for many of us, and I want to give you two examples of how music is one of the most powerful interfaces we have, from ourselves to the outside world. The first is a really crazy project that we're building right now, called Death and the Powers. And it's a big opera, one of the larger opera projects going on in the world right now. And it's about a man, rich, successful, powerful, who wants to live forever. So, he figures out a way to download himself into his environment, actually into a series of books. So this guy wants to live forever, he downloads himself into his environment. The main singer disappears at the beginning of the opera and the entire stage becomes the main character. It becomes his legacy. And the opera is about what we can share, what we can pass on to others, to the people we love, and what we can't. Every object in the opera comes alive and is a gigantic music instrument, like this chandelier. It takes up the whole stage. It looks like a chandelier, but it's actually a robotic music instrument. So, as you can see in this prototype, gigantic piano strings, each string is controlled with a little robotic element -- either little bows that stroke the strings, propellers that tickle the strings, acoustic signals that vibrate the strings. We also have an army of robots on stage. These robots are the kind of the intermediary between the main character, Simon Powers, and his family. There are a whole series of them, kind of like a Greek chorus. They observe the action. We've designed these square robots that we're testing right now at MIT called OperaBots. These OperaBots follow my music. They follow the characters. They're smart enough, we hope, not to bump into each other. They go off on their own. And then they can also, when you snap, line up exactly the way you'd like to. Even though they're cubes, they actually have a lot of personality. The largest set piece in the opera is called The System. It's a series of books. Every single book is robotic, so they all move, they all make sound, and when you put them all together, they turn into these walls, which have the gesture and the personality of Simon Powers. So he's disappeared, but the whole physical environment becomes this person. This is how he's chosen to represent himself. The books also have high-packed LEDs on the spines. So it's all display. And here's the great baritone James Maddalena as he enters The System. This is a sneak preview. This premieres in Monaco -- it's in September 2009. If by any chance you can't make it, another idea with this project -- here's this guy building his legacy through this very unusual form, through music and through the environment. But we're also making this available both online and in public spaces, as a way of each of us to use music and images from our lives to make our own legacy or to make a legacy of someone we love. So instead of being grand opera, this opera will turn into what we're thinking of as personal opera. And, if you're going to make a personal opera, what about a personal instrument? Everything I've shown you so far -- whether it's a hyper-cello for Yo-Yo Ma or squeezy toy for a child -- the instruments stayed the same and are valuable for a certain class of person: a virtuoso, a child. But what if I could make an instrument that could be adapted to the way I personally behave, to the way my hands work, to what I do very skillfully, perhaps, to what I don't do so skillfully? I think that this is the future of interface, it's the future of music, the future of instruments. And I'd like now to invite two very special people on the stage, so that I can give you an example of what personal instruments might be like. So, can you give a hand to Adam Boulanger, Ph.D. student from the MIT Media Lab, and Dan Ellsey. Dan, thanks to TED and to Bombardier Flexjet, Dan is here with us today all the way from Tewksbury. He's a resident at Tewksbury Hospital. This is by far the farthest he's strayed from Tewksbury Hospital, I can tell you that, because he's motivated to meet with you today and show you his own music. So, first of all, Dan, do you want to say hi to everyone and tell everyone who you are? Dan Ellsey: Hello. My name is Dan Ellsey. I am 34 years old and I have cerebral palsy. I have always loved music and I am excited to be able to conduct my own music with this new software. Tod Machover: And we're really excited to have you here, really Dan. (Applause) So we met Dan about three years ago, three and a half years ago, when we started working at Tewksbury. Everybody we met there was fantastic, did fantastic music. Dan had never made music before, and it turned out he was really fantastic at it. He's a born composer. He's very shy, too. So, turned out he's a fantastic composer, and over the last few years has been a constant collaborator of ours. He has made many, many pieces. He makes his own CDs. Actually, he is quite well known in the Boston area -- mentors people at the hospital and children, locally, in how to make their own music. And I'll let Adam tell you. So, Adam is a Ph.D. student at MIT, an expert in music technology and medicine. And Adam and Dan have become close collaborators. What Adam's been working on for this last period is not only how to have Dan be able easily to make his own pieces, but how he can perform his piece using this kind of personal instrument. So, you want to say a little bit about how you guys work? Adam Boulanger: Yes. So, Tod and I entered into a discussion following the Tewksbury work and it was really about how Dan is an expressive person, and he's an intelligent and creative person. And it's in his face, it's in his breathing, it's in his eyes. How come he can't perform one of his pieces of music? That's our responsibility, and it doesn't make sense. So we started developing a technology that will allow him with nuance, with precision, with control, and despite his physical disability, to be able to do that, to be able to perform his piece of music. So, the process and the technology -- basically, first we needed an engineering solution. So, you know, we have a FireWire camera, it looked at an infrared pointer. We went with the type of gesture metaphor that Dan was already used to with his speaking controller. And this was actually the least interesting part of the work, you know, the design process. We needed an input; we needed continuous tracking; in the software, we look at the types of shapes he's making. But, then was the really interesting aspect of the work, following the engineering part, where, basically, we're coding over Dan's shoulder at the hospital extensively to figure out, you know, how does Dan move? What's useful to him as an expressive motion? You know, what's his metaphor for performance? What types of things does he find important to control and convey in a piece of music? So all the parameter fitting, and really the technology was stretched at that point to fit just Dan. And, you know, I think this is a perspective shift. It's not that our technologies -- they provide access, they allow us to create pieces of creative work. But what about expression? What about that moment when an artist delivers that piece of work? You know, do our technologies allow us to express? Do they provide structure for us to do that? And, you know, that's a personal relationship to expression that is lacking in the technological sphere. So, you know, with Dan, we needed a new design process, a new engineering process to sort of discover his movement and his path to expression that allow him to perform. And so that's what we'll do today. TM: So let's do it. So Dan do you want to tell everyone about what you're going to play now? DE: This is "My Eagle Song." TM: So Dan is going to play a piece of his, called "My Eagle Song". In fact, this is the score for Dan's piece, completely composed by Dan in Hyperscore. So he can use his infrared tracker to go directly into Hyperscore. He's incredibly fast at it, too, faster than I am, in fact. (Laughter) TM: He's really modest, too. So he can go in Hyperscore. You start out by making melodies and rhythms. He can place those exactly where he wants. Each one gets a color. He goes back into the composition window, draws the lines, places everything the way he wants to. Looking at the Hyperscore, you can see it also, you can see where the sections are, something might continue for a while, change, get really crazy and then end up with a big bang at the end. So that's the way he made his piece, and as Adam says, we then figured out the best way to have him perform his piece. It's going to be looked at by this camera, analyze his movements, it's going to let Dan bring out all the different aspects of his music that he wants to. And you're also going to notice a visual on the screen. We asked one of our students to look at what the camera is measuring. But instead of making it very literal, showing you exactly the camera tracing, we turned it into a graphic that shows you the basic movement, and shows the way it's being analyzed. I think it gives an understanding of how we're picking out movement from what Dan's doing, but I think it will also show you, if you look at that movement, that when Dan makes music, his motions are very purposeful, very precise, very disciplined and they're also very beautiful. So, in hearing this piece, as I mentioned before, the most important thing is the music's great, and it'll show you who Dan is. So, are we ready Adam? AB: Yeah. TM: OK, now Dan will play his piece "My Eagle Song" for you. (Applause) TM: Bravo. (Applause)

Have you ever wanted to stay young a little longer and put off aging? This is a dream of the ages. But scientists have for a long time thought this just was never going to be possible. They thought you just wear out, there's nothing you can do about it -- kind of like an old shoe. But if you look in nature, you see that different kinds of animals can have really different lifespans. Now these animals are different from one another, because they have different genes. So that suggests that somewhere in these genes, somewhere in the DNA, are genes for aging, genes that allow them to have different lifespans. So if there are genes like that, then you can imagine that, if you could change one of the genes in an experiment, an aging gene, maybe you could slow down aging and extend lifespan. And if you could do that, then you could find the genes for aging. And if they exist and you can find them, then maybe one could eventually do something about it. So we've set out to look for genes that control aging. And we didn't study any of these animals. Instead, we studied a little, tiny, round worm called C. elegans, which is just about the size of a comma in a sentence. And we were really optimistic that we could find something because there had been a report of a long-lived mutant. So we started to change genes at random, looking for long-lived animals. And we were very lucky to find that mutations that damage one single gene called daf-2 doubled the lifespan of the little worm. So you can see in black, after a month -- they're very short-lived; that's why we like to study them for studies of aging -- in black, after a month, the normal worms are all dead. But at that time, most of the mutant worms are still alive. And it isn't until twice as long that they're all dead. And now I want to show what they actually look like in this movie here. So the first thing you're going to see is the normal worm when it's about college student age -- a young adult. It's quite a cute little fellow. And next you're going to see the long-lived mutant when it's young. So this animal is going to live twice as long. Is it miserable? It doesn't seem to be. It's active. You can't tell the difference really. And they can be completely fertile -- have the same number of progeny as the normal worms do. Now get out your handkerchiefs here. You're going to see, in just two weeks, the normal worms are old. You can see the little head moving down at the bottom there. But everything else is just lying there. The animal's clearly in the nursing home. And if you look at the tissues of the animal, they're starting to deteriorate. You know, even if you've never seen one of these little C. elegans -- which probably most of you haven't seen one -- you can tell they're old -- isn't that interesting? So there's something about aging that's kind of universal. And now here is the daf-2 mutant. One gene is changed out of 20,000, and look at it. It's the same age, but it's not in the nursing home; it's going skiing. This is what's really cool: it's aging more slowly. It takes this worm two days to age as much as the normal worm ages in one day. And when I tell people about this, they tend to think of maybe an 80 or 90 year-old person who looks really good for being 90 or 80. But it's really more like this: let's say you're a 30 year-old guy -- or in your 30s -- and you're a bachelor and you're dating people. And you meet someone you really like, you get to know her. And you're in a restaurant, and you say, "Well how old are you?" She says, "I'm 60." That's what it's like. And you would never know. You would never know, until she told you. (Laughter) Okay. So what is the daf-2 gene? Well as you know, genes, which are part of the DNA, they're instructions to make a protein that does something. And the daf-2 gene encodes a hormone receptor. So what you see in the picture there is a cell with a hormone receptor in red punching through the edge of the cell. So part of it is like a baseball glove. Part of it's on the outside, and it's catching the hormone as it comes by in green. And the other part is on the inside where it sends signals into the cell. Okay, so what is the daf-2 receptor telling the inside of the cell? I just told you that, if you make a mutation in the daf-2 gene cell, that you get a receptor that doesn't work as well; the animal lives longer. So that means that the normal function of this hormone receptor is to speed up aging. That's what that arrow means. It speeds up aging. It makes it go faster. So it's like the animal has the grim reaper inside of itself, speeding up aging. So this is altogether really, really interesting. It says that aging is subject to control by the genes, and specifically by hormones. So what kind of hormones are these? There's lots of hormones. There's testosterone, adrenalin. You know about a lot of them. These hormones are similar to hormones that we have in our bodies. The daf-2 hormone receptor is very similar to the receptor for the hormone insulin and IGF-1. Now you've all heard of at least insulin. Insulin is a hormone that promotes the uptake of nutrients into your tissues after you eat a meal. And the hormone IGF-1 promotes growth. So these functions were known for these hormones for a long time, but our studies suggested that maybe they had a third function that nobody knew about -- maybe they also affect aging. And it's looking like that's the case. So after we made our discoveries with little C. elegans, people who worked on other kinds of animals started asking, if we made the same daf-2 mutation, the hormone receptor mutation, in other animals, will they live longer? And that is the case in flies. If you change this hormone pathway in flies, they live longer. And also in mice -- and mice are mammals like us. So it's an ancient pathway, because it must have arisen a long time ago in evolution such that it still works in all these animals. And also, the common precursor also gave rise to people. So maybe it's working in people the same way. And there are hints of this. So for example, there was one study that was done in a population of Ashkenazi Jews in New York City. And just like any population, most of the people live to be about 70 or 80, but some live to be 90 or 100. And what they found was that people who lived to 90 or 100 were more likely to have daf-2 mutations -- that is, changes in the gene that encodes the receptor for IGF-1. And these changes made the gene not act as well as the normal gene would have acted. It damaged the gene. So those are hints suggesting that humans are susceptible to the effects of the hormones for aging. So the next question, of course, is: Is there any effect on age-related disease? As you age, you're much more likely to get cancer, Alzheimer's disease, heart disease, all sorts of diseases. It turns out that these long-lived mutants are more resistant to all these diseases. They hardly get cancer, and when they do it's not as severe. So it's really interesting, and it makes sense in a way, that they're still young, so why would they be getting diseases of aging until their old? So it suggests that, if we could have a therapeutic or a pill to take to replicate some of these effects in humans, maybe we would have a way of combating lots of different age-related diseases all at once. So how can a hormone ultimately affect the rate of aging? How could that work? Well it turns out that in the daf-2 mutants, a whole lot of genes are switched on in the DNA that encode proteins that protect the cells and the tissues, and repair damage. And the way that they're switched on is by a gene regulator protein called FOXO. So in a daf-2 mutant -- you see that I have the X drawn here through the receptor. The receptor isn't working as well. Under those conditions, the FOXO protein in blue has gone into the nucleus -- that little compartment there in the middle of the cell -- and it's sitting down on a gene binding to it. You see one gene. There are lots of genes actually that bind on FOXO. And it's just sitting on one of them. So FOXO turns on a lot of genes. And the genes it turns on includes antioxidant genes, genes I call carrot-giver genes, whose protein products actually help other proteins to function well -- to fold correctly and function correctly. And it can also escort them to the garbage cans of the cell and recycle them if they're damaged. DNA repair genes are more active in these animals. And the immune system is more active. And many of these different genes, we've shown, actually contribute to the long lifespan of the daf-2 mutant. So it's really interesting. These animals have within them the latent capacity to live much longer than they normally do. They have the ability to protect themselves from many kinds of damage, which we think makes them live longer. So what about the normal worm? Well when the daf-2 receptor is active, then it triggers a series of events that prevent FOXO from getting into the nucleus where the DNA is. So it can't turn the genes on. That's how it works. That's why we don't see the long lifespan, until we have the daf-2 mutant. But what good is this for the worm? Well we think that insulin and IGF-1 hormones are hormones that are particularly active under favorable conditions -- in the good times -- when food is plentiful and there's not a lot of stress in the environment. Then they promote the uptake of nutrients. You can store the food, use it for energy, grow, etc. But what we think is that, under conditions of stress, the levels of these hormones drop -- for example, having limited food supply. And that, we think, is registered by the animal as a danger signal, a signal that things are not okay and that it should roll out its protective capacity. So it activates FOXO, FOXO goes to the DNA, and that triggers the expression of these genes that improves the ability of the cell to protect itself and repair itself. And that's why we think the animals live longer. So you can think of FOXO as being like a building superintendent. So maybe he's a little bit lazy, but he's there, he's taking care of the building. But it's deteriorating. And then suddenly, he learns that there's going to be a hurricane. So he doesn't actually do anything himself. He gets on the telephone -- just like FOXO gets on the DNA -- and he calls up the roofer, the window person, the painter, the floor person. And they all come and they fortify the house. And then the hurricane comes through, and the house is in much better condition than it would normally have been in. And not only that, it can also just last longer, even if there isn't a hurricane. So that's the concept here for how we think this life extension ability exists. Now the really cool thing about FOXO is that there are different forms of it. We all have FOXO genes, but we don't all have exactly the same form of the FOXO gene. Just like we all have eyes, but some of us have blue eyes and some of us have brown eyes. And there are certain forms of the FOXO gene that have found to be more frequently present in people who live to be 90 or 100. And that's the case all over the world, as you can see from these stars. And each one of these stars represents a population where scientists have asked, "Okay, are there differences in the type of FOXO genes among people who live a really long time?" and there are. We don't know the details of how this works, but we do know then that FOXO genes can impact the lifespan of people. And that means that, maybe if we tweak it a little bit, we can increase the health and longevity of people. So this is really exciting to me. A FOXO is a protein that we found in these little, round worms to affect lifespan, and here it affects lifespan in people. So we've been trying in our lab now to develop drugs that will activate this FOXO cell using human cells now in order to try and come up with drugs that will delay aging and age-related diseases. And I'm really optimistic that this is going to work. There are lots of different proteins that are known to affect aging. And for at least one of them, there is a drug. There's one called TOR, which is another nutrient sensor, like the insulin pathway. And mutations that damage the TOR gene -- just like the daf-2 mutations -- extend lifespan in worms and flies and mice. But in this case, there's already a drug called rapamycin that binds to the TOR protein and inhibits its activity. And you can take rapamycin and give it to a mouse -- even when it's pretty old, like age 60 for a human, that old for a mouse -- if you give the mouse rapamycin, it will live longer. Now I don't want you all to go out taking rapamycin. It is a drug for people, but the reason is it suppresses the immune system. So people take it to prevent organ transplants from being rejected. So this may not be the perfect drug for staying young longer. But still, here in the year 2011, there's a drug that you can give to mice at a pretty old age that will extend their lifespan, which comes out of this science that's been done in all these different animals. So I'm really optimistic, and I think it won't be too long, I hope, before this age-old dream begins to come true. Thank you. (Applause) Matt Ridley: Thank you, Cynthia. Let me get this straight. Although you're looking for a drug that can solve aging in old men like me, what you could do now pretty well in the lab, if you were allowed ethically, is start a human life from scratch with altered genes that would make it live for a lot longer? CK: Ah, so the kinds of drugs I was talking about would not change the genes, they would just bind to the protein itself and change its activity. So if you stop taking the drug, the protein would go back to normal. You could change the genes in principle. There isn't the technology to do that. But I don't think that's a good idea. And the reason is that these hormones, like the insulin and the IGF hormones and the TOR pathway, they're essential. If you knock them out completely, then you're very sick. So it might be that you would just have to fine tune it very carefully to get the benefits without getting any problems. And I think that's much better, that kind of control would be much better as a drug. And also, there are other ways of activating FOXO that don't even involve insulin or IGF-1 that might even be safer. MR: I wasn't suggesting that I was going to go and do it, but ... (Laughter) There's a phenomenon which you have written about and spoken about, which is a negligible senescence. There are some creatures on this planet already that don't really do aging. Just move to one side for us, if you would. CK: There are. There are some animals that don't seem to age. For example, there are some tortoises called Blanding's turtles. And they grow to be about this size. And they've been tagged, and they've been found to be 70 years old. And when you look at these 70 year-old turtles, you can't tell the difference, just by looking, between those turtles and 20 year-old turtles. And the 70 year-old ones, actually they're better at scouting out the good nesting places, and they also have more progeny every year. And there are other examples of these kinds of animals, like turns, certain kinds of birds are like this. And nobody knows if they really can live forever, or what keeps them from aging. It's not clear. If you look at birds, which live a long time, cells from the birds tend to be more resistant to a lot of different environmental stresses like high temperature or hydrogen peroxide, things like that. And our long-lived mutants are too. They're more resistant to these kinds of stresses. So it could be that the pathways that I've been talking about, which are set to run really quickly in the worm, have a different normal set point in something like a bird, so that a bird can live a lot longer. And maybe they're even set really differently in animals with no senescence at all -- but we don't know. MR: But what you're talking about here is not extending human lifespan by preventing death, so much as extending human youthspan. CK: Yes, that's right. It's more like, say, if you were a dog. You notice that you're getting old, and you look at your human and you think, "Why isn't this human getting old?" They're not getting old in the dog's lifespan. It's more like that. But now we're the human looking out and imagining a different human. MR: Thank you very much indeed, Cynthia Kenyon. (Applause)

What we're really here to talk about is the "how." Okay, so how exactly do we create this world-shattering, if you will, innovation? Now, I want to tell you a quick story. We'll go back a little more than a year. In fact, the date -- I'm curious to know if any of you know what happened on this momentous date? It was February 3rd, 2008. Anyone remember what happened, February 3rd, 2008? Super Bowl. I heard it over here. It was the date of the Super Bowl. And the reason that this date was so momentous is that what my colleagues, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright, and I noticed as we began to debrief various Super Bowl parties, is that it seemed to us that across the United States, if you will, tribal councils had convened. And they had discussed things of great national importance. Like, "Do we like the Budweiser commercial?" and, "Do we like the nachos?" and, "Who is going to win?" But they also talked about which candidate they were going to support. And if you go back in time to February 3rd, it looked like Hilary Clinton was going to get the Democratic nomination. And there were even some polls that were saying she was going to go all the way. But when we talked to people, it appeared that a funnel effect had happened in these tribes all across the United States. Now what is a tribe? A tribe is a group of about 20 -- so kind of more than a team -- 20 to about 150 people. And it's within these tribes that all of our work gets done. But not just work. It's within these tribes that societies get built, that important things happen. And so as we surveyed the, if you will, representatives from various tribal councils that met, also known as Super Bowl parties, we sent the following email off to 40 newspaper editors the following day. February 4th, we posted it on our website. This was before Super Tuesday. We said, "The tribes that we're in are saying it's going to be Obama." Now, the reason we knew that was because we spent the previous 10 years studying tribes, studying these naturally occurring groups. All of you are members of tribes. In walking around at the break, many of you had met members of your tribe. And you were talking to them. And many of you were doing what great, if you will, tribal leaders do, which is to find someone who is a member of a tribe, and to find someone else who is another member of a different tribe, and make introductions. That is in fact what great tribal leaders do. So here is the bottom line. If you focus in on a group like this -- this happens to be a USC game -- and you zoom in with one of those super satellite cameras and do magnification factors so you could see individual people, you would in fact see not a single crowd, just like there is not a single crowd here, but you would see these tribes that are then coming together. And from a distance it appears that it's a single group. And so people form tribes. They always have. They always will. Just as fish swim and birds fly, people form tribes. It's just what we do. But here's the rub. Not all tribes are the same, and what makes the difference is the culture. Now here is the net out of this. You're all a member of tribes. If you can find a way to take the tribes that you're in and nudge them forward, along these tribal stages to what we call Stage Five, which is the top of the mountain. But we're going to start with what we call Stage One. Now, this is the lowest of the stages. You don't want this. Okay? This is a bit of a difficult image to put up on the screen. But it's one that I think we need to learn from. Stage One produces people who do horrible things. This is the kid who shot up Virginia Tech. Stage One is a group where people systematically sever relationships from functional tribes, and then pool together with people who think like they do. Stage One is literally the culture of gangs and it is the culture of prisons. Now, again, we don't often deal with Stage One. And I want to make the point that as members of society, we need to. It's not enough to simply write people off. But let's move on to Stage Two. Now, Stage One, you'll notice, says, in effect, "Life Sucks." So, this other book that Steve mentioned, that just came out, called "The Three Laws of Performance," my colleague, Steve Zaffron and I, argue that as people see the world, so they behave. Well, if people see the world in such a way that life sucks, then their behavior will follow automatically from that. It will be despairing hostility. They'll do whatever it takes to survive, even if that means undermining other people. Now, my birthday is coming up shortly, and my driver's license expires. And the reason that that's relevant is that very soon I will be walking into what we call a Stage Two tribe, which looks like this. (Laughter) Now, am I saying that in every Department of Motor Vehicles across the land, you find a Stage Two culture? No. But in the one near me, where I have to go in just a few days, what I will say when I'm standing in line is, "How can people be so dumb, and yet live?" (Laughter) Now, am I saying that there are dumb people working here? Actually, no, I'm not. But I'm saying the culture makes people dumb. So in a Stage Two culture -- and we find these in all sorts of different places -- you find them, in fact, in the best organizations in the world. You find them in all places in society. I've come across them at the organizations that everybody raves about as being best in class. But here is the point. If you believe and you say to people in your tribe, in effect, "My life sucks. I mean, if I got to go to TEDx USC my life wouldn't suck. But I don't. So it does." If that's how you talked, imagine what kind of work would get done. What kind of innovation would get done? The amount of world-changing behavior that would happen? In fact it would be basically nil. Now when we go on to Stage Three: this is the one that hits closest to home for many of us. Because it is in Stage Three that many of us move. And we park. And we stay. Stage Three says, "I'm great. And you're not." (Laughter) I'm great and you're not. Now imagine having a whole room of people saying, in effect, "I'm great and you're not." Or, "I'm going to find some way to compete with you and come out on top as a result of that." A whole group of people communicating that way, talking that way. I know this sounds like a joke. Three doctors walk into a bar. But, in this case, three doctors walk into an elevator. I happened to be in the elevator collecting data for this book. And one doctor said to the others, "Did you see my article in the New England Journal of Medicine?" And the other said, "No. That's great. Congratulations!" The next one got kind of a wry smile on his face and said, "Well while you were, you know, doing your research," -- notice the condescending tone -- "While you were off doing your research, I was off doing more surgeries than anyone else in the department of surgery at this institution." And the third one got the same wry smile and said, "Well, while you were off doing your research, and you were off doing your monkey meatball surgery, that eventually we'll train monkeys to do, or cells or robots, or maybe not even need to do it at all, I was off running the future of the residency program, which is really the future of medicine." And they all kind of laughed and they patted him on the back. And the elevator door opened, and they all walked out. That is a meeting of a Stage Three tribe. Now, we find these in places where really smart, successful people show up. Like, oh, I don't know, TEDx USC. (Laughter) Here is the greatest challenge we face in innovation. It is moving from Stage Three to Stage Four. Let's take a look at a quick video snippet. This is from a company called Zappos, located outside Las Vegas. And my question on the other side is just going to be, "What do you think they value?" It was not Christmas time. There was a Christmas tree. This is their lobby. Employees volunteer time in the advice booth. Notice it looks like something out of a Peanuts cartoon. Okay, we're going through the hallway here at Zappos. This is a call center. Notice how it's decorated. Notice people are applauding for us. They don't know who we are and they don't care. And if they did they probably wouldn't applaud. But you'll notice the level of excitement. Notice, again, how they decorate their office. Now, what's important to people at Zappos, these may not be the things that are important to you. But they value things like fun. And they value creativity. One of their stated values is, "Be a little bit weird." And you'll notice they are a little bit weird. So when individuals come together and find something that unites them that's greater than their individual competence, then something very important happens. The group gels. And it changes from a group of highly motivated but fairly individually-centric people into something larger, into a tribe that becomes aware of its own existence. Stage Four tribes can do remarkable things. But you'll notice we're not at the top of the mountain yet. There is, in fact, another stage. Now, some of you may not recognize the scene that's up here. And if you take a look at the headline of Stage Five, which is "Life is Great," this may seem a little incongruous. This is a scene or snippet from the Truth and Reconciliation process in South Africa for which Desmond Tutu won the Nobel Prize. Now think about that. South Africa, terrible atrocities had happened in the society. And people came together focused only on those two values: truth and reconciliation. There was no road map. No one had ever done anything like this before. And in this atmosphere, where the only guidance was people's values and their noble cause, what this group accomplished was historic. And people, at the time, feared that South Africa would end up going the way that Rwanda has gone, descending into one skirmish after another in a civil war that seems to have no end. In fact, South Africa has not gone down that road. Largely because people like Desmond Tutu set up a Stage Five process to involve the thousands and perhaps millions of tribes in the country, to bring everyone together. So, people hear this and they conclude the following, as did we in doing the study. Okay, got it. I don't want to talk Stage One. That's like, you know, "Life sucks." Who wants to talk that way? I don't want to talk like they do at the particular DMV that's close to where Dave lives. I really don't want to just say "I'm great," because that kind of sounds narcissistic, and then I won't have any friends. Saying, "We're great" -- that sounds pretty good. But I should really talk Stage Five, right? "Life is great." Well, in fact, there are three somewhat counter-intuitive findings that come out of all this. The first one, if you look at the Declaration of Independence and actually read it, the phrase that sticks in many of our minds is things about inalienable rights. I mean, that's Stage Five, right? Life is great, oriented only by our values, no other guidance. In fact, most of the document is written at Stage Two. "My life sucks because I live under a tyrant, also known as King George. We're great! Who is not great? England!" Sorry. (Laughter) Well, what about other great leaders? What about Gandhi? What about Martin Luther King? I mean, surely these were just people who preached, "Life is great," right? Just one little bit of happiness and joy after another. In fact, Martin Luther King's most famous line was at Stage Three. He didn't say "We have a dream." He said, "I have a dream." Why did he do that? Because most people are not at Stage Five. Two percent are at Stage One. About 25 percent are at Stage Two, saying, in effect, "My life sucks." 48 percent of working tribes say, these are employed tribes, say, "I'm great and you're not." And we have to duke it out every day, so we resort to politics. Only about 22 percent of tribes are at Stage Four, oriented by our values, saying "We're great. And our values are beginning to unite us." Only two percent, only two percent of tribes get to Stage Five. And those are the ones that change the world. So the first little finding from this is that leaders need to be able to talk all the levels so that you can touch every person in society. But you don't leave them where you found them. Okay? Tribes can only hear one level above and below where they are. So we have to have the ability to talk all the levels, to go to where they are. And then leaders nudge people within their tribes to the next level. I'd like to show you some examples of this. One of the people we interviewed was Frank Jordan, former Mayor of San Francisco. Before that he was Chief of Police in San Francisco. And he grew up essentially in Stage One. And you know what changed his life? It was walking into one of these, a Boys and Girls Club. Now here is what happened to this person who eventually became Mayor of San Francisco. He went from being alive and passionate at Stage One -- remember, "Life sucks, despairing hostility, I will do whatever it takes to survive" -- to walking into a Boys and Girls Club, folding his arms, sitting down in a chair, and saying, "Wow. My life really sucks. I don't know anybody. I mean, if I was into boxing, like they were, then my life wouldn't suck. But I don't. So it does. So I'm going to sit here in my chair and not do anything." In fact, that's progress. We move people from Stage One to Stage Two by getting them in a new tribe and then, over time, getting them connected. So, what about moving from Stage Three to Stage Four? I want to argue that we're doing that right here. TED represents a set of values, and as we unite around these values, something really interesting begins to emerge. If you want this experience to live on as something historic, then at the reception tonight I'd like to encourage you to do something beyond what people normally do and call networking. Which is not just to meet new people and extend your reach, extend your influence, but instead, find someone you don't know, and find someone else you don't know, and introduce them. That's called a triadic relationship. See, people who build world-changing tribes do that. They extend the reach of their tribes by connecting them, not just to myself, so that my following is greater, but I connect people who don't know each other to something greater than themselves. And ultimately that adds to their values. But we're not done yet. Because then how do we go from Stage Four, which is great, to Stage Five? The story that I like to end with is this. It comes out of a place called the Gallup Organization. You know they do polls, right? So it's Stage Four. We're great. Who is not great? Pretty much everybody else who does polls. If Gallup releases a poll on the same day that NBC releases a poll, people will pay attention to the Gallup poll. Okay, we understand that. So, they were bored. They wanted to change the world. So here is the question someone asked. "How could we, instead of just polling what Asia thinks or what the United States thinks, or who thinks what about Obama versus McCain or something like that, what does the entire world think?" And they found a way to do the first-ever world poll. They had people involved who were Nobel laureates in economics, who reported being bored. And suddenly they pulled out sheets of paper and were trying to figure out, "How do we survey the population of Sub-Saharan Africa? How do we survey populations that don't have access to technology, and speak languages we don't speak, and we don't know anyone who speaks those languages. Because in order to achieve on this great mission, we have to be able to do it. Incidentally, they did pull it off. And they released the first-ever world poll. So I'd like to leave you with these thoughts. First of all: we all form tribes, all of us. You're in tribes here. Hopefully you're extending the reach of the tribes that you have. But the question on the table is this: What kind of an impact are the tribes that you are in making? You're hearing one presentation after another, often representing a group of people, a tribe, about how they have changed the world. If you do what we've talked about, you listen for how people actually communicate in the tribes that you're in. And you don't leave them where they are. You nudge them forward. You remember to talk all five culture stages. Because we've got people in all five, around us. And the question that I'd like to leave you with is this: Will your tribes change the world? Thank you very much. (Applause)

(Music) (Skateboard sounds) (Music) (Applause) So, that's what I've done with my life. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) As a kid, I grew up on a farm in Florida, and I did what most little kids do. I played a little baseball, did a few other things like that, but I always had the sense of being an outsider, and it wasn't until I saw pictures in the magazines that a couple other guys skate, I thought, "Wow, that's for me," you know? Because there was no coach standing directly over you, and these guys, they were just being themselves. There was no opponent directly across from you. And I loved that sense, so I started skating when I was about 10 years old, in 1977, and when I did, I picked it up pretty quickly. In fact, here's some footage from about 1984. It wasn't until '79 I won my first amateur championship, and then, by '81, I was 14, and I won my first world championship, which was amazing to me, and in a very real sense, that was the first real victory I had. Oh, watch this. This is a casper slide, where the board's upside down. Mental note on that one. (Laughs) And this one here? An ollie. So, as she mentioned, that is overstated for sure, but that's why they called me the godfather of modern street skating. Here's some images of that. Now, I was about halfway through my pro career in, I would say, the mid-'80s. Freestyle itself, we developed all these flat ground tricks as you saw, but there was evolving a new kind of skateboarding, where guys were taking it to the streets, and they were using that ollie, like I showed you? They were using it to get up onto stuff like bleachers and handrails and over stairwells and all kinds of cool stuff. So it was evolving upwards. In fact, when someone tells you they're a skater today, they pretty much mean a street skater, because freestyle, it took about five years for it to die, and at that stage, I'd been a "champion" champion for 11 years, which, phew! And suddenly it was over for me. That's it. It was gone. They took my pro model off the shelf, which was essentially pronouncing you dead publicly. That's how you make your money, you know? You have a signature board and wheels and shoes and clothes. I had all that stuff, and it's gone. The crazy thing was, there was a really liberating sense about it, because I no longer had to protect my record as a champion. "Champion," again. Champion sounds so goofy, but it's what it was, right? And I got to -- What drew me to skateboarding, the freedom was now restored, where I could just create things, because that's where the joy was for me, always, was creating new stuff. The other thing that I had was a deep well of tricks to draw from that were rooted in these flat ground tricks. Stuff the normal guys were doing was very much different. So, as humbling and rotten as it was — And believe me, it was rotten. I would go to skate spots, and I was already, like, "famous guy," right? And everyone thought I was good. But in this new terrain, I was horrible. So people would go, "Oh, he's all -- Oh, what happened to Mullen?" (Laughter) (Laughs) So, humbling as it was, I began again. Here are some tricks that I started to bring to that new terrain. (Skateboard noises) And again, there's this undergirding layer of influence of freestyle that made me — Oh, that one? That's, like, the hardest thing I've ever done. Okay, look at that. It's a darkslide. See how it's sliding on the backside? Those are super-fun. (Laughter) And, actually, not that hard. You know, at the very root of that, see, caspers, see how you throw it? (Skateboard noises) Simple as that, right? No biggie. (Laughter) And your front foot, the way it grabs it, is -- I'd seen someone slide on the back of the board like that, and I was like, "How can I get it over?" Because that had not yet been done. And then it dawned on me, and here's part of what I'm saying. I had an infrastructure. I had this deep layer, where it was like, oh my gosh, it's just your foot. It's just the way you throw your board over. Just let the ledge do that, and it's easy, and the next thing you know, there's 20 more tricks based out of the variations. So that's the kind of thing that, here, check this out, here's another way, and I won't overdo this. A little indulgent, I understand. There's something called a primo slide. (Skateboard noises) It is the funnest trick ever to do. (Skateboard noises) It's like skinboarding. And this one, look how it slides sideways, every which way? Okay, so when you're skating, and you take a fall, the board slips that way or that way. It's kind of predictable. This? It goes every which way. It's like a cartoon, the falls, and that's what I love the most about it. It's so much fun to do. In fact, when I started doing them, I remember, because I got hurt. I had to get a knee surgery, right? So there were a couple of days where, actually a couple of weeks, where I couldn't skate at all. It would give out on me. And I would watch the guys, I'd go to this warehouse where a lot of the guys were skating, my friends, and I was like, "Man I gotta do something new. I want to do something new. I want to start fresh. I want to start fresh." And so the night before my surgery, I'd watched, and I was like, "How am I going to do this?" So I ran up, and I jumped on my board, and I cavemanned, and I flipped it down, and I remember thinking, I landed so light-footed, thinking, if my knee gives, they'll just have more work to do in the morning. (Laughs) (Laughter) And so, when it was the crazy thing. I don't know how many of you guys have had surgery, but -- (Laughter) -- you are so helpless, right? You're on this gurney and you're watching the ceiling go by, every time it's always that, and right when they're putting the mask on you before you go to sleep, all I was thinking is, "Man, when I wake up and I get better, the first thing I'm going to do is film that trick." (Laughter) And indeed I did. It was the very first thing I filmed, which was awesome. Now, let me -- I told you a little bit about the evolution of the tricks. Consider that content, in a sense. What we do as street skaters is, you have these tricks. Say I'm working on darkslides, or a primo, that you guys know this stuff now. (Laughter) (Laughs) What you do is you cruise around the same streets that you've seen a hundred times, but suddenly, because you already have something in this fixed domain of this target, it's like, what will match this trick? How can I expand, how can the context, how can the environment change the very nature of what I do? So you drive and drive and drive, and, actually I gotta admit, just because I was struggling with this because I'm here, but I'll just say it, is, I cannot tell you, not only to be here in front of you, but what a privilege it is to be at USC campus, because I have been escorted off of this campus so many times. (Laughter) (Applause) So let me give you another example of how context shapes content. This is a place not that far from here. It's a rotten neighborhood. Your first consideration is, am I gonna get beat up? You go out and -- See this wall? It's fairly mellow, and it's beckoning to do bank tricks, right? But there's this other aspect of it for wheelies, so check this out. There's a few tricks, again, how environment changes the nature of your tricks. Freestyle oriented, manual down -- wheelie down. Watch, this one? Oh, I love this. It's like surfing, this one, the way you catch it. This one, a little sketchy going backwards, and watch the back foot, watch the back foot. Oop. (Laughs) Mental note right there. Again, we'll get back to that. Here. Back foot, back foot. Okay, up there? That was called a 360 flip. Notice how the board flipped and spun this way, both axes. And another example of how the context changed, and the creative process for me and for most skaters, is, you go, you get out of the car, you check for security, you check for stuff. (Laughter) It's funny, you get to know their rhythms, you know, the guys that cruise around, and skateboarding is such a humbling thing, man. No matter how good you are, right, you still gotta deal with — So you hit this wall, and when I hit it, the first thing you do is you fall forward, and I'm like, all right, all right. As you adjust, you punch it up, and then when I would do that, it was throwing my shoulder this way, which as I was doing it, I was like, "Oh wow, that's begging for a 360 flip," because that's how you load up for a 360 flip. And so this is what I want to emphasize that, as you can imagine, all of these tricks are made of sub-movements, executive motor functions, more granular to the degree to which I can't quite tell you, but one thing I do know is, every trick is made of combining two or three or four or five movements. And so, as I'm going up, these things are floating around, and you have to sort of let the cognitive mind, like, rest back, pull it back a little bit, and let your intuition go as you feel these things. And these sub-movements are just kind of floating around, and as the wall hits you, they connect themselves to an extent, and that's when the cognitive mind, you think, "Oh, 360 flip, I'm going to make that." So that's how that works to me, the creative process, the process itself of street skating. So, next — Oh, mind you. (Laughs) Those are the community. These are some of the best skaters in the world. These are my friends. Oh my gosh, they're such good people. And the beauty of skateboarding is that, no one guy is the best. In fact, I know this is rotten to say, they're my friends, but a couple of them actually don't look that comfortable on their board. What makes them great is the degree to which they use their skateboarding to individuate themselves. Every single one of these guys, you look at them, you can see a silhouette of them, and you realize, like, "Oh, that's him, that's Haslam, that's Koston, there's these guys, these are the guys. And skaters, I think they tend to be outsiders who seek a sense of belonging, but belonging on their own terms, and real respect is given by how much we take what other guys do, these basic tricks, 360 flips, we take that, we make it our own, and then we contribute back to the community the inner way that edifies the community itself. The greater the contribution, the more we express and form our individuality, which is so important to a lot of us who feel like rejects to begin with. The summation of that gives us something we could never achieve as an individual. I should say this. There's some sort of beautiful symmetry that the degree to which we connect to a community is in proportion to our individuality, which we are expressing by what we do. Next. These guys. Very similar community that's extremely conducive to innovation. Notice a couple of these shots from the Police Department. But it is quite similar. I mean, what is it to hack, right? It's knowing a technology so well that you can manipulate it and steer it to do things it was never intended to do, right? And they're not all bad. You can be a Linux kernel hacker, make it more stable, right? More safe, more secure. You can be an iOS hacker, make your iPhone do stuff it wasn't supposed to. Not authorized, but not illegal. And then you've got some of these guys, right? What they do is very similar to our creative process. They connect disparate information, and they bring it together in a way that a security analyst doesn't expect. Right? It doesn't make them good people, but it's at the heart of engineering, at the heart of a creative community, an innovative community, and the open source community, the basic ethos of it is, take what other people do, make it better, give it back so we all rise further. Very similar communities, very similar. We have our edgier sides, too. It's funny, my dad was right. These are my peers. But I respect what they do, and they respect what I do, because they can do things. It's amazing what they can do. In fact, one of them, he was Ernst & Young's Entrepreneur of the Year for San Diego County, so they're not, you never know who you're dealing with. We've all had some degree of fame. In fact, I've had so much success that I strangely always feel unworthy of. I've had a patent, and that was cool, and we started a company, and it grew, and it became the biggest, and then it went down, and then it became the biggest again, which is harder than the first time, and then we sold it, and then we sold it again. So I've had some success. And in the end, when you've had all of these things, what is it that continues to drive you? As I mentioned, the knee stuff and these things, what is it that will punch you? Because it's not just the mind. What is it that will punch you and make you do something and bring it to another level, and when you've had it all, sometimes, guys, they die on the vine with all of that talent, and one of the things we've had, all of us, is fame, I think the best kind of fame, because you can take it off. I've been all around the world, and there will be a thousand kids crying out your name, and it's such a weird, visceral experience. It's like, it's disorienting. And you get in a car, and you drive away, and 10-minute drive, and you get out, and no one gives a rat's who you are. (Laughs) And it gives you that clarity of perspective of, man, I'm just me, and popularity, what does that really mean again? Not much. It's peer respect that drives us. That's the one thing that makes us do what we do. I've had over a dozen bones, these guys, this guy, over, what, eight, 10 concussions, to the point where it's comedy, right? It is actually comedy. They mess with him. Next. And this is something deeper, and this is where I'm — I think I was on tour when I, I was reading one of the Feynman biographies. It was the red one or the blue one. And he made this statement that was so profound to me. It was that the Nobel Prize was the tombstone on all great work, and it resonated because I had won 35 out of 36 contests that I'd entered over 11 years, and it made me bananas. In fact, winning isn't the word. I won it once. The rest of the time, you're just defending, and you get into this, like, turtle posture, you know? Where you're not doing. It usurped the joy of what I loved to do because I was no longer doing it to create and have fun, and when it died out from under me, that was one of the most liberating things because I could create. And look, I understand that I am on the very edge of preachy, right here. I'm not here to do that. It's just that I'm in front of a very privileged audience. If you guys aren't already leaders in your community, you probably will be, and if there's anything I can give you that will transcend what I've gotten from skateboarding, the only things of meaning, I think, and of permanence, it's not fame, it's not all these things. What it is is that there's an intrinsic value in creating something for the sake of creating it, and better than that, because, man, I'm 46 years old, or I'll be 46, and how pathetic is that I'm still skateboarding, but there is — (Laughter) -- there is this beauty in dropping it into a community of your own making, and seeing it dispersed, and seeing younger, more talented, just different talent, take it to levels you can never imagine, because that lives on. So thank you for your time. (Applause) Krisztina Holly: I have a question for you. So you've really reinvented yourself in the past from freestyle to street, and, I think it was about four years ago you officially retired. Is that it? What's next? Rodney Mullen: That's a good question. KH: Something tells me it's not the end. RM: Yeah. I, every time you think you've chased something down, it's funny, no matter how good you are, and I know guys like this, it feels like you're polishing a turd. You know? (Laughter) And I thought, the only way I can extend this is to change something infrastructural, and so that's what I proceeded to do, through a long story, one of desperation, so if I do it, rather than talk about it, if I do it, you'll be the first to know. KH: All right, we won't ask you any more. RM: You'll get a text. KH: (Laughs) Right. Thank you. Good job. (Applause) RM: Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)

So in 1885, Karl Benz invented the automobile. Later that year, he took it out for the first public test drive, and -- true story -- crashed into a wall. For the last 130 years, we've been working around that least reliable part of the car, the driver. We've made the car stronger. We've added seat belts, we've added air bags, and in the last decade, we've actually started trying to make the car smarter to fix that bug, the driver. Now, today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the difference between patching around the problem with driver assistance systems and actually having fully self-driving cars and what they can do for the world. I'm also going to talk to you a little bit about our car and allow you to see how it sees the world and how it reacts and what it does, but first I'm going to talk a little bit about the problem. And it's a big problem: 1.2 million people are killed on the world's roads every year. In America alone, 33,000 people are killed each year. To put that in perspective, that's the same as a 737 falling out of the sky every working day. It's kind of unbelievable. Cars are sold to us like this, but really, this is what driving's like. Right? It's not sunny, it's rainy, and you want to do anything other than drive. And the reason why is this: Traffic is getting worse. In America, between 1990 and 2010, the vehicle miles traveled increased by 38 percent. We grew by six percent of roads, so it's not in your brains. Traffic really is substantially worse than it was not very long ago. And all of this has a very human cost. So if you take the average commute time in America, which is about 50 minutes, you multiply that by the 120 million workers we have, that turns out to be about six billion minutes wasted in commuting every day. Now, that's a big number, so let's put it in perspective. You take that six billion minutes and you divide it by the average life expectancy of a person, that turns out to be 162 lifetimes spent every day, wasted, just getting from A to B. It's unbelievable. And then, there are those of us who don't have the privilege of sitting in traffic. So this is Steve. He's an incredibly capable guy, but he just happens to be blind, and that means instead of a 30-minute drive to work in the morning, it's a two-hour ordeal of piecing together bits of public transit or asking friends and family for a ride. He doesn't have that same freedom that you and I have to get around. We should do something about that. Now, conventional wisdom would say that we'll just take these driver assistance systems and we'll kind of push them and incrementally improve them, and over time, they'll turn into self-driving cars. Well, I'm here to tell you that's like me saying that if I work really hard at jumping, one day I'll be able to fly. We actually need to do something a little different. And so I'm going to talk to you about three different ways that self-driving systems are different than driver assistance systems. And I'm going to start with some of our own experience. So back in 2013, we had the first test of a self-driving car where we let regular people use it. Well, almost regular -- they were 100 Googlers, but they weren't working on the project. And we gave them the car and we allowed them to use it in their daily lives. But unlike a real self-driving car, this one had a big asterisk with it: They had to pay attention, because this was an experimental vehicle. We tested it a lot, but it could still fail. And so we gave them two hours of training, we put them in the car, we let them use it, and what we heard back was something awesome, as someone trying to bring a product into the world. Every one of them told us they loved it. In fact, we had a Porsche driver who came in and told us on the first day, "This is completely stupid. What are we thinking?" But at the end of it, he said, "Not only should I have it, everyone else should have it, because people are terrible drivers." So this was music to our ears, but then we started to look at what the people inside the car were doing, and this was eye-opening. Now, my favorite story is this gentleman who looks down at his phone and realizes the battery is low, so he turns around like this in the car and digs around in his backpack, pulls out his laptop, puts it on the seat, goes in the back again, digs around, pulls out the charging cable for his phone, futzes around, puts it into the laptop, puts it on the phone. Sure enough, the phone is charging. All the time he's been doing 65 miles per hour down the freeway. Right? Unbelievable. So we thought about this and we said, it's kind of obvious, right? The better the technology gets, the less reliable the driver is going to get. So by just making the cars incrementally smarter, we're probably not going to see the wins we really need. Let me talk about something a little technical for a moment here. So we're looking at this graph, and along the bottom is how often does the car apply the brakes when it shouldn't. You can ignore most of that axis, because if you're driving around town, and the car starts stopping randomly, you're never going to buy that car. And the vertical axis is how often the car is going to apply the brakes when it's supposed to to help you avoid an accident. Now, if we look at the bottom left corner here, this is your classic car. It doesn't apply the brakes for you, it doesn't do anything goofy, but it also doesn't get you out of an accident. Now, if we want to bring a driver assistance system into a car, say with collision mitigation braking, we're going to put some package of technology on there, and that's this curve, and it's going to have some operating properties, but it's never going to avoid all of the accidents, because it doesn't have that capability. But we'll pick some place along the curve here, and maybe it avoids half of accidents that the human driver misses, and that's amazing, right? We just reduced accidents on our roads by a factor of two. There are now 17,000 less people dying every year in America. But if we want a self-driving car, we need a technology curve that looks like this. We're going to have to put more sensors in the vehicle, and we'll pick some operating point up here where it basically never gets into a crash. They'll happen, but very low frequency. Now you and I could look at this and we could argue about whether it's incremental, and I could say something like "80-20 rule," and it's really hard to move up to that new curve. But let's look at it from a different direction for a moment. So let's look at how often the technology has to do the right thing. And so this green dot up here is a driver assistance system. It turns out that human drivers make mistakes that lead to traffic accidents about once every 100,000 miles in America. In contrast, a self-driving system is probably making decisions about 10 times per second, so order of magnitude, that's about 1,000 times per mile. So if you compare the distance between these two, it's about 10 to the eighth, right? Eight orders of magnitude. That's like comparing how fast I run to the speed of light. It doesn't matter how hard I train, I'm never actually going to get there. So there's a pretty big gap there. And then finally, there's how the system can handle uncertainty. So this pedestrian here might be stepping into the road, might not be. I can't tell, nor can any of our algorithms, but in the case of a driver assistance system, that means it can't take action, because again, if it presses the brakes unexpectedly, that's completely unacceptable. Whereas a self-driving system can look at that pedestrian and say, I don't know what they're about to do, slow down, take a better look, and then react appropriately after that. So it can be much safer than a driver assistance system can ever be. So that's enough about the differences between the two. Let's spend some time talking about how the car sees the world. So this is our vehicle. It starts by understanding where it is in the world, by taking a map and its sensor data and aligning the two, and then we layer on top of that what it sees in the moment. So here, all the purple boxes you can see are other vehicles on the road, and the red thing on the side over there is a cyclist, and up in the distance, if you look really closely, you can see some cones. Then we know where the car is in the moment, but we have to do better than that: we have to predict what's going to happen. So here the pickup truck in top right is about to make a left lane change because the road in front of it is closed, so it needs to get out of the way. Knowing that one pickup truck is great, but we really need to know what everybody's thinking, so it becomes quite a complicated problem. And then given that, we can figure out how the car should respond in the moment, so what trajectory it should follow, how quickly it should slow down or speed up. And then that all turns into just following a path: turning the steering wheel left or right, pressing the brake or gas. It's really just two numbers at the end of the day. So how hard can it really be? Back when we started in 2009, this is what our system looked like. So you can see our car in the middle and the other boxes on the road, driving down the highway. The car needs to understand where it is and roughly where the other vehicles are. It's really a geometric understanding of the world. Once we started driving on neighborhood and city streets, the problem becomes a whole new level of difficulty. You see pedestrians crossing in front of us, cars crossing in front of us, going every which way, the traffic lights, crosswalks. It's an incredibly complicated problem by comparison. And then once you have that problem solved, the vehicle has to be able to deal with construction. So here are the cones on the left forcing it to drive to the right, but not just construction in isolation, of course. It has to deal with other people moving through that construction zone as well. And of course, if anyone's breaking the rules, the police are there and the car has to understand that that flashing light on the top of the car means that it's not just a car, it's actually a police officer. Similarly, the orange box on the side here, it's a school bus, and we have to treat that differently as well. When we're out on the road, other people have expectations: So, when a cyclist puts up their arm, it means they're expecting the car to yield to them and make room for them to make a lane change. And when a police officer stood in the road, our vehicle should understand that this means stop, and when they signal to go, we should continue. Now, the way we accomplish this is by sharing data between the vehicles. The first, most crude model of this is when one vehicle sees a construction zone, having another know about it so it can be in the correct lane to avoid some of the difficulty. But we actually have a much deeper understanding of this. We could take all of the data that the cars have seen over time, the hundreds of thousands of pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles that have been out there and understand what they look like and use that to infer what other vehicles should look like and other pedestrians should look like. And then, even more importantly, we could take from that a model of how we expect them to move through the world. So here the yellow box is a pedestrian crossing in front of us. Here the blue box is a cyclist and we anticipate that they're going to nudge out and around the car to the right. Here there's a cyclist coming down the road and we know they're going to continue to drive down the shape of the road. Here somebody makes a right turn, and in a moment here, somebody's going to make a U-turn in front of us, and we can anticipate that behavior and respond safely. Now, that's all well and good for things that we've seen, but of course, you encounter lots of things that you haven't seen in the world before. And so just a couple of months ago, our vehicles were driving through Mountain View, and this is what we encountered. This is a woman in an electric wheelchair chasing a duck in circles on the road. (Laughter) Now it turns out, there is nowhere in the DMV handbook that tells you how to deal with that, but our vehicles were able to encounter that, slow down, and drive safely. Now, we don't have to deal with just ducks. Watch this bird fly across in front of us. The car reacts to that. Here we're dealing with a cyclist that you would never expect to see anywhere other than Mountain View. And of course, we have to deal with drivers, even the very small ones. Watch to the right as someone jumps out of this truck at us. And now, watch the left as the car with the green box decides he needs to make a right turn at the last possible moment. Here, as we make a lane change, the car to our left decides it wants to as well. And here, we watch a car blow through a red light and yield to it. And similarly, here, a cyclist blowing through that light as well. And of course, the vehicle responds safely. And of course, we have people who do I don't know what sometimes on the road, like this guy pulling out between two self-driving cars. You have to ask, "What are you thinking?" (Laughter) Now, I just fire-hosed you with a lot of stuff there, so I'm going to break one of these down pretty quickly. So what we're looking at is the scene with the cyclist again, and you might notice in the bottom, we can't actually see the cyclist yet, but the car can: it's that little blue box up there, and that comes from the laser data. And that's not actually really easy to understand, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn that laser data and look at it, and if you're really good at looking at laser data, you can see a few dots on the curve there, right there, and that blue box is that cyclist. Now as our light is red, the cyclist's light has turned yellow already, and if you squint, you can see that in the imagery. But the cyclist, we see, is going to proceed through the intersection. Our light has now turned green, his is solidly red, and we now anticipate that this bike is going to come all the way across. Unfortunately the other drivers next to us were not paying as much attention. They started to pull forward, and fortunately for everyone, this cyclists reacts, avoids, and makes it through the intersection. And off we go. Now, as you can see, we've made some pretty exciting progress, and at this point we're pretty convinced this technology is going to come to market. We do three million miles of testing in our simulators every single day, so you can imagine the experience that our vehicles have. We are looking forward to having this technology on the road, and we think the right path is to go through the self-driving rather than driver assistance approach because the urgency is so large. In the time I have given this talk today, 34 people have died on America's roads. How soon can we bring it out? Well, it's hard to say because it's a really complicated problem, but these are my two boys. My oldest son is 11, and that means in four and a half years, he's going to be able to get his driver's license. My team and I are committed to making sure that doesn't happen. Thank you. (Laughter) (Applause) Chris Anderson: Chris, I've got a question for you. Chris Urmson: Sure. CA: So certainly, the mind of your cars is pretty mind-boggling. On this debate between driver-assisted and fully driverless -- I mean, there's a real debate going on out there right now. So some of the companies, for example, Tesla, are going the driver-assisted route. What you're saying is that that's kind of going to be a dead end because you can't just keep improving that route and get to fully driverless at some point, and then a driver is going to say, "This feels safe," and climb into the back, and something ugly will happen. CU: Right. No, that's exactly right, and it's not to say that the driver assistance systems aren't going to be incredibly valuable. They can save a lot of lives in the interim, but to see the transformative opportunity to help someone like Steve get around, to really get to the end case in safety, to have the opportunity to change our cities and move parking out and get rid of these urban craters we call parking lots, it's the only way to go. CA: We will be tracking your progress with huge interest. Thanks so much, Chris. CU: Thank you. (Applause)

A few months ago, a 40 year-old woman came to an emergency room in a hospital close to where I live, and she was brought in confused. Her blood pressure was an alarming 230 over 170. Within a few minutes, she went into cardiac collapse. She was resuscitated, stabilized, whisked over to a CAT scan suite right next to the emergency room, because they were concerned about blood clots in the lung. And the CAT scan revealed no blood clots in the lung, but it showed bilateral, visible, palpable breast masses, breast tumors, that had metastasized widely all over the body. And the real tragedy was, if you look through her records, she had been seen in four or five other health care institutions in the preceding two years. Four or five opportunities to see the breast masses, touch the breast mass, intervene at a much earlier stage than when we saw her. Ladies and gentlemen, that is not an unusual story. Unfortunately, it happens all the time. I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI or orthopedic consult. I am not a Luddite. I teach at Stanford. I'm a physician practicing with cutting-edge technology. But I'd like to make the case to you in the next 17 minutes that when we shortcut the physical exam, when we lean towards ordering tests instead of talking to and examining the patient, we not only overlook simple diagnoses that can be diagnosed at a treatable, early stage, but we're losing much more than that. We're losing a ritual. We're losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship. This may actually be heresy to say this at TED, but I'd like to introduce you to the most important innovation, I think, in medicine to come in the next 10 years, and that is the power of the human hand -- to touch, to comfort, to diagnose and to bring about treatment. I'd like to introduce you first to this person whose image you may or may not recognize. This is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Since we're in Edinburgh, I'm a big fan of Conan Doyle. You might not know that Conan Doyle went to medical school here in Edinburgh, and his character, Sherlock Holmes, was inspired by Sir Joseph Bell. Joseph Bell was an extraordinary teacher by all accounts. And Conan Doyle, writing about Bell, described the following exchange between Bell and his students. So picture Bell sitting in the outpatient department, students all around him, patients signing up in the emergency room and being registered and being brought in. And a woman comes in with a child, and Conan Doyle describes the following exchange. The woman says, "Good Morning." Bell says, "What sort of crossing did you have on the ferry from Burntisland?" She says, "It was good." And he says, "What did you do with the other child?" She says, "I left him with my sister at Leith." And he says, "And did you take the shortcut down Inverleith Row to get here to the infirmary?" She says, "I did." And he says, "Would you still be working at the linoleum factory?" And she says, "I am." And Bell then goes on to explain to the students. He says, "You see, when she said, 'Good morning,' I picked up her Fife accent. And the nearest ferry crossing from Fife is from Burntisland. And so she must have taken the ferry over. You notice that the coat she's carrying is too small for the child who is with her, and therefore, she started out the journey with two children, but dropped one off along the way. You notice the clay on the soles of her feet. Such red clay is not found within a hundred miles of Edinburgh, except in the botanical gardens. And therefore, she took a short cut down Inverleith Row to arrive here. And finally, she has a dermatitis on the fingers of her right hand, a dermatitis that is unique to the linoleum factory workers in Burntisland." And when Bell actually strips the patient, begins to examine the patient, you can only imagine how much more he would discern. And as a teacher of medicine, as a student myself, I was so inspired by that story. But you might not realize that our ability to look into the body in this simple way, using our senses, is quite recent. The picture I'm showing you is of Leopold Auenbrugger who, in the late 1700s, discovered percussion. And the story is that Leopold Auenbrugger was the son of an innkeeper. And his father used to go down into the basement to tap on the sides of casks of wine to determine how much wine was left and whether to reorder. And so when Auenbrugger became a physician, he began to do the same thing. He began to tap on the chests of his patients, on their abdomens. And basically everything we know about percussion, which you can think of as an ultrasound of its day -- organ enlargement, fluid around the heart, fluid in the lungs, abdominal changes -- all of this he described in this wonderful manuscript "Inventum Novum," "New Invention," which would have disappeared into obscurity, except for the fact that this physician, Corvisart, a famous French physician -- famous only because he was physician to this gentleman -- Corvisart repopularized and reintroduced the work. And it was followed a year or two later by Laennec discovering the stethoscope. Laennec, it is said, was walking in the streets of Paris and saw two children playing with a stick. One was scratching at the end of the stick, another child listened at the other end. And Laennec thought this would be a wonderful way to listen to the chest or listen to the abdomen using what he called "the cylinder." Later he renamed it the stethoscope. And that is how stethoscope and auscultation was born. So within a few years, in the late 1800s, early 1900s, all of a sudden, the barber surgeon had given way to the physician who was trying to make a diagnosis. If you'll recall, prior to that time, no matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you. And, oh yes, if you wanted, he would give you a haircut -- short on the sides, long in the back -- and pull your tooth while he was at it. He made no attempt at diagnosis. In fact, some of you might well know that the barber pole, the red and white stripes, represents the blood bandages of the barber surgeon, and the receptacles on either end represent the pots in which the blood was collected. But the arrival of auscultation and percussion represented a sea change, a moment when physicians were beginning to look inside the body. And this particular painting, I think, represents the pinnacle, the peak, of that clinical era. This is a very famous painting: "The Doctor" by Luke Fildes. Luke Fildes was commissioned to paint this by Tate, who then established the Tate Gallery. And Tate asked Fildes to paint a painting of social importance. And it's interesting that Fildes picked this topic. Fildes' oldest son, Philip, died at the age of nine on Christmas Eve after a brief illness. And Fildes was so taken by the physician who held vigil at the bedside for two, three nights, that he decided that he would try and depict the physician in our time -- almost a tribute to this physician. And hence the painting "The Doctor," a very famous painting. It's been on calendars, postage stamps in many different countries. I've often wondered, what would Fildes have done had he been asked to paint this painting in the modern era, in the year 2011? Would he have substituted a computer screen for where he had the patient? I've gotten into some trouble in Silicon Valley for saying that the patient in the bed has almost become an icon for the real patient who's in the computer. I've actually coined a term for that entity in the computer. I call it the iPatient. The iPatient is getting wonderful care all across America. The real patient often wonders, where is everyone? When are they going to come by and explain things to me? Who's in charge? There's a real disjunction between the patient's perception and our own perceptions as physicians of the best medical care. I want to show you a picture of what rounds looked like when I was in training. The focus was around the patient. We went from bed to bed. The attending physician was in charge. Too often these days, rounds look very much like this, where the discussion is taking place in a room far away from the patient. The discussion is all about images on the computer, data. And the one critical piece missing is that of the patient. Now I've been influenced in this thinking by two anecdotes that I want to share with you. One had to do with a friend of mine who had a breast cancer, had a small breast cancer detected -- had her lumpectomy in the town in which I lived. This is when I was in Texas. And she then spent a lot of time researching to find the best cancer center in the world to get her subsequent care. And she found the place and decided to go there, went there. Which is why I was surprised a few months later to see her back in our own town, getting her subsequent care with her private oncologist. And I pressed her, and I asked her, "Why did you come back and get your care here?" And she was reluctant to tell me. She said, "The cancer center was wonderful. It had a beautiful facility, giant atrium, valet parking, a piano that played itself, a concierge that took you around from here to there. But," she said, "but they did not touch my breasts." Now you and I could argue that they probably did not need to touch her breasts. They had her scanned inside out. They understood her breast cancer at the molecular level; they had no need to touch her breasts. But to her, it mattered deeply. It was enough for her to make the decision to get her subsequent care with her private oncologist who, every time she went, examined both breasts including the axillary tail, examined her axilla carefully, examined her cervical region, her inguinal region, did a thorough exam. And to her, that spoke of a kind of attentiveness that she needed. I was very influenced by that anecdote. I was also influenced by another experience that I had, again, when I was in Texas, before I moved to Stanford. I had a reputation as being interested in patients with chronic fatigue. This is not a reputation you would wish on your worst enemy. I say that because these are difficult patients. They have often been rejected by their families, have had bad experiences with medical care and they come to you fully prepared for you to join the long list of people who's about to disappoint them. And I learned very early on with my first patient that I could not do justice to this very complicated patient with all the records they were bringing in a new patient visit of 45 minutes. There was just no way. And if I tried, I'd disappoint them. And so I hit on this method where I invited the patient to tell me the story for their entire first visit, and I tried not to interrupt them. We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds. And if I ever get to heaven, it will be because I held my piece for 45 minutes and did not interrupt my patient. I then scheduled the physical exam for two weeks hence, and when the patient came for the physical, I was able to do a thorough physical, because I had nothing else to do. I like to think that I do a thorough physical exam, but because the whole visit was now about the physical, I could do an extraordinarily thorough exam. And I remember my very first patient in that series continued to tell me more history during what was meant to be the physical exam visit. And I began my ritual. I always begin with the pulse, then I examine the hands, then I look at the nail beds, then I slide my hand up to the epitrochlear node, and I was into my ritual. And when my ritual began, this very voluble patient began to quiet down. And I remember having a very eerie sense that the patient and I had slipped back into a primitive ritual in which I had a role and the patient had a role. And when I was done, the patient said to me with some awe, "I have never been examined like this before." Now if that were true, it's a true condemnation of our health care system, because they had been seen in other places. I then proceeded to tell the patient, once the patient was dressed, the standard things that the person must have heard in other institutions, which is, "This is not in your head. This is real. The good news, it's not cancer, it's not tuberculosis, it's not coccidioidomycosis or some obscure fungal infection. The bad news is we don't know exactly what's causing this, but here's what you should do, here's what we should do." And I would lay out all the standard treatment options that the patient had heard elsewhere. And I always felt that if my patient gave up the quest for the magic doctor, the magic treatment and began with me on a course towards wellness, it was because I had earned the right to tell them these things by virtue of the examination. Something of importance had transpired in the exchange. I took this to my colleagues at Stanford in anthropology and told them the same story. And they immediately said to me, "Well you are describing a classic ritual." And they helped me understand that rituals are all about transformation. We marry, for example, with great pomp and ceremony and expense to signal our departure from a life of solitude and misery and loneliness to one of eternal bliss. I'm not sure why you're laughing. That was the original intent, was it not? We signal transitions of power with rituals. We signal the passage of a life with rituals. Rituals are terribly important. They're all about transformation. Well I would submit to you that the ritual of one individual coming to another and telling them things that they would not tell their preacher or rabbi, and then, incredibly on top of that, disrobing and allowing touch -- I would submit to you that that is a ritual of exceeding importance. And if you shortchange that ritual by not undressing the patient, by listening with your stethoscope on top of the nightgown, by not doing a complete exam, you have bypassed on the opportunity to seal the patient-physician relationship. I am a writer, and I want to close by reading you a short passage that I wrote that has to do very much with this scene. I'm an infectious disease physician, and in the early days of HIV, before we had our medications, I presided over so many scenes like this. I remember, every time I went to a patient's deathbed, whether in the hospital or at home, I remember my sense of failure -- the feeling of I don't know what I have to say; I don't know what I can say; I don't know what I'm supposed to do. And out of that sense of failure, I remember, I would always examine the patient. I would pull down the eyelids. I would look at the tongue. I would percuss the chest. I would listen to the heart. I would feel the abdomen. I remember so many patients, their names still vivid on my tongue, their faces still so clear. I remember so many huge, hollowed out, haunted eyes staring up at me as I performed this ritual. And then the next day, I would come, and I would do it again. And I wanted to read you this one closing passage about one patient. "I recall one patient who was at that point no more than a skeleton encased in shrinking skin, unable to speak, his mouth crusted with candida that was resistant to the usual medications. When he saw me on what turned out to be his last hours on this earth, his hands moved as if in slow motion. And as I wondered what he was up to, his stick fingers made their way up to his pajama shirt, fumbling with his buttons. I realized that he was wanting to expose his wicker-basket chest to me. It was an offering, an invitation. I did not decline. I percussed. I palpated. I listened to the chest. I think he surely must have known by then that it was vital for me just as it was necessary for him. Neither of us could skip this ritual, which had nothing to do with detecting rales in the lung, or finding the gallop rhythm of heart failure. No, this ritual was about the one message that physicians have needed to convey to their patients. Although, God knows, of late, in our hubris, we seem to have drifted away. We seem to have forgotten -- as though, with the explosion of knowledge, the whole human genome mapped out at our feet, we are lulled into inattention, forgetting that the ritual is cathartic to the physician, necessary for the patient -- forgetting that the ritual has meaning and a singular message to convey to the patient. And the message, which I didn't fully understand then, even as I delivered it, and which I understand better now is this: I will always, always, always be there. I will see you through this. I will never abandon you. I will be with you through the end." Thank you very much. (Applause)

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

The north coast of California has rainforests -- temperate rainforests -- where it can rain more than 100 inches a year. This is the realm of the Coast Redwood tree. Its species name is Sequoia sempervirens. Sequoia sempervirens is the tallest living organism on Earth. The range of the species goes up to as much as 380 feet tall. That's 38 stories tall. These are trees that would stand out in midtown Manhattan. Nobody knows how old the oldest living Coast Redwoods are because nobody has ever drilled into any of them to count their annual growth rings, and, in any case, the centers of the oldest individuals appear to be hollow. But it's believed that the oldest living Redwoods are perhaps 2,500 years old -- roughly the age of the Parthenon -- although it's also suspected that there may be individual trees that are older than that. You can see the range of the Coast Redwoods. It's here, in red. The largest individuals of this species, the dreadnoughts of their kind, live just on the north coast of California, where the rain is really intense. In recent historic times, about 96 percent of the Coast Redwood forest was cut down, especially in a series of bursts of intense liquidation logging, clear-cutting that took place in the 1970s through the early 1990s. Even so, about four percent of the primeval Redwood rainforest remains intact, wild and now protected -- entirely protected -- in a chain of small parks strung out like pearls along the north coast of California, including Redwood National Park. But curiously, Redwood rainforests, the fragments that we have left, to this day remain under-explored. Redwood rainforest is incredibly difficult to move through, and even today, individual trees are being discovered that have never been seen before, including, in the summer of 2006, Hyperion, the world's tallest tree. I'm going to do a little Gedanken experiment. I'm going to ask you to imagine what a Redwood really is as a living organism. And, Chris, if I could have you up here? I have a tape measure. It's a kind loaner from TED. And Chris, if you could take the end of that tape measure? We're going to show you what the diameter at breast height of a big Redwood is. Unfortunately, this tape isn't long enough -- it's only a 25-foot tape. Chris, could you extend your arm out that way? There we go. OK. And maybe about here, about 30 feet, is the diameter of a big Redwood. Now, let your imagination go upward into space. Think about this tree, rising upward into Redwood space, 325 feet, 32 stories, an individual living organism articulating its forms upward into space over long periods of time. The Redwood species seems to exist in another kind of time: not human time, but what we might call Redwood time. Redwood time moves at a more stately pace than human time. To us, when we look at a Redwood tree, it seems to be motionless and still, and yet Redwoods are constantly in motion, moving upward into space, articulating themselves and filling Redwood space over Redwood time, over thousands of years. Plant this small seed, wait 2,000 years, and you get this: the Lost Monarch. It dwells in the Grove of Titans on the north coast, and was discovered in 1998. And yet, when you look at the base of a Redwood tree, you're not seeing the organism. You're like a mouse looking at the foot of an elephant, and most of the organism is overhead, unseen. I became very interested, and I wrote about a couple. Steve Sillett and Marie Antoine are the principal explorers of the Redwood forest canopy. They're world-class athletes, and they also are world-class forest ecology scientists. Steve Sillett, when he was a 19-year-old college student at Reed College, had heard that the Redwood forest canopy is considered to be a so-called Redwood desert. That is to say, at that time it was believed that there was nothing up there except the branches of Redwood trees. And with a friend of his, he took it upon himself to free-climb a Redwood without ropes or any equipment to see what was up there. He climbed up a small tree next to this giant Redwood, and then he leaped through space and grabbed a branch with his hands, and ended up hanging, like catching a bar of a trapeze. And then, from there, he climbed directly up the bark until he got to the top of the tree. His friend, a guy named Marwood Harris, was following behind. Neither one of them had noticed that there was a Yellow Jacket wasp's nest the size of a bowling ball hanging from the branch that Steve had jumped into. And when Marwood made the jump, he was covered with wasps stinging him in the face and eyes. He nearly let go. He would have fallen to his death, being 75 feet above the ground. But they made it to the top, and what they found was not a Redwood desert, but a lost world -- a kind of three-dimensional labyrinth in the air, filled with unknown life. Now, I had been working on other topics: the emergence of infectious diseases, which come out of the natural ecosystems of the Earth, make a trans-species jump, and get into humans. After three books on this, it got to be a bit much, in a way. My wife and I adore our children. And I began climbing trees with my kids as just something to do with them, using the so-called arborist climbing technique, with ropes. You use ropes to get yourself up into the crown of a tree. Children are incredibly adept at climbing trees. That's my son, Oliver. They don't seem to suffer from the same fear of heights that humans do. (Laughter) If ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, then children are somewhat closer to our roots as primates in the arboreal forest. Humans appear to be the only primates that I know of that are afraid of heights. All other primates, when they're scared, they run up a tree, where they feel safe. We camped overnight in the trees, in tree boats. This is my daughter Laura, then 15, looking out of a tree boat. She's, by the way, tied in with a rope so she can't fall. Looking out of a tree boat in the morning and hearing birdsong coming in three dimensions around us. We had been visited in the night by flying squirrels, who don't seem to recognize humans for what they are because they've never seen them in the canopy before. And we practiced advanced techniques like sky-walking, where you can move from tree to tree through space, rather like Spiderman. It became a writing project. When Steve Sillett gets up into a big Redwood, he fires an arrow, which trails a fishing line, which gets over a branch in the tree, and then you ascend up a rope which has been dragged into the tree by the line. You ascend 30 stories. There are two people climbing this tree, Gaya, which is thought to be one of the oldest Redwoods. There they are. They are only one-seventh of the way up that tree. You do feel a sense of exposure. There is a small person right down there on the ground. You feel like you're climbing a wall of wood. But then you enter the Redwood canopy, and it's like coming through a layer of clouds. And all of a sudden, you lose sight of the ground, and you also lose sight of the sky, and you're in a three-dimensional labyrinth in the air filled with hanging gardens of ferns growing out of soil, which is populated with all kinds of small organisms. There are epiphytes, plants that grow on trees. These are huckleberry bushes. Many species of mosses, and then all sorts of lichens just plastering the tree. When you get near the top of the tree, you feel like you can't fall -- in fact, it's difficult to move. You're worming your way through branches which are crowded with living things that don't occur near the ground. It's like scuba diving into a coral reef, except you're going upward instead of downward. And then the trees tend to flare out into platform-like areas at the top. Maria's sitting on one of them. These limbs could be five to six hundred years old. Redwoods grow very slowly in their tops. They also have a feature: thickets of huckleberry bushes that grow out of the tops of Redwood trees that are technically known as huckleberry afros, and you can sit there and snack on the berries while you're resting. Redwoods have an enormous surface area that extends upward into space because they have a propensity to do something called reiteration. A Redwood is a fractal. And as they put out limbs, the limbs burst into small trees, copies of the Redwood. Now, here we see a reiteration in Chronos, one of the older Redwoods. This reiteration is a huge flying buttress that comes out the tree itself. This buttress is less than halfway up the tree. And then it bursts into a forest of Redwoods. This particular extra trunk is a meter across at the base and extends upward for 150 feet. It's as big as any of the biggest trees east of the Mississippi River, and yet it's only a minor feature on Chronos. This three-dimensional map of the crown structure of a Redwood named Iluvatar, made by Steve Sillett, Marie Antoine and their colleagues, gives you an idea. What you're seeing here is a hierarchical schematic development of the trunks of this tree as it has elaborated itself over time into six layers of fractal, of trunks springing from trunks springing from trunks. I asked Steve to put a human being in this to give a sense of scale. There's the person, right there. The person is waving to us. I've wanted to ask Craig Venter if it would be possible to insert a synthetic chromosome into a human so that we could reiterate ourselves if we wanted to. And if we were able to reiterate, then the fingers of our hand would be people who looked like us, and they would have people on their hands and so on. And if we had Redwood-like biology, we would have six layers of people on our hands, as it were. And it would be a lovely thing to be able to wave to someone and have all our reiterations wave at the same time. (Laughter) To reiterate the point, let's go closer into Iluvatar. We're looking at that yellow box. And this hallucinatory drawing shows you -- everything you see in this drawing is Iluvatar. These are millennial structures -- portions of the tree that are believed to be more than 1,000 years old. There are four humans in this shot -- one, two, three, four. And there's also something that I want to show you. This is a flying buttress. Redwoods grow back into themselves as they expand into space, and this flying buttress is a limb shot out of that small trunk, going back into the main trunk and fusing with it. Flying buttresses, just as in a cathedral, help strengthen the crown of the tree and help the tree exist longer through time. The scientists are doing all kinds of experiments in these trees. They've wired them like patients in an ICU. They're finding out that Redwoods can move moisture out of the air and down into their trunks, possibly all the way into their root systems. They also have the ability to put roots anywhere in the tree itself. If a portion of a Redwood is rotting, the Redwood will send roots into its own form and draw nutrients out of itself as it falls apart. If we had Redwood-like biology, if we got a touch of gangrene in our arm then we could just, you know, extract the nutrients extract the nutrients and the moisture out of it until it fell off. Canopy soil can occur up to a meter deep, hundreds of feet above the ground, and there are organisms in this soil that have, as yet, no names. This is an unnamed species of copepod. A copepod is a crustacean. These copepods are a major constituent of the oceans, and they are a major part of the diet of grazing baleen whales. What they're doing in the Redwood forest canopy soil hundreds of feet above the ocean, or how they got there, is completely unknown. There are some interesting theories that, if I had time, I would tell you about. But as you go and you look closer at a tree, what you see is, you see increasing complexity. We're looking at the very top of Gaya, which is thought to be the oldest Redwood. Gaya may be 3,000 to 5,000 years old, no one really knows, but its top has broken off and it's been rotting back now. This little Japanese garden-like creation probably took 700 years to form in its complexity that we see right now. As you look at a tree, it takes a magnifying glass to see a giant tree. I have to show you something unfortunately very sad at the conclusion of this talk. The Eastern Hemlock tree has often been described as the Redwood of the East. And we're moving in a full circle now. In the 1950s, a small organism appeared in Richmond, Virginia, called the Hemlock woolly adelgid. It made a trans-species jump out of some other organism in Asia, where it was living on Hemlock trees in Asia. When it moved into its new host, the Eastern Hemlock tree, it escaped its predators, and the new tree had no resistance to it. The Eastern Hemlock forest is being considered in some ways the last fragments of primeval rainforest east of the Mississippi River. I hadn't even known that there were rainforests in the east, but in Great Smoky Mountains National Park it can rain up to 100 inches of rain a year. And in the last two to three summers, these invasive organisms, this kind of Ebola of the trees, as it were, has swept through the primeval Hemlock forest of the east, and has absolutely wiped it out. I climbed there this past summer. This is Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the Hemlocks are dead as far as the eye can see. And what we're seeing is not just the potential death of the Eastern Hemlock species -- that is to say, its extinction from nature due to this invading parasite -- but we're also seeing the death of an incredibly complex ecosystem for which these trees are merely the substrate for the aerial labyrinth of the sky that exists in their crowns. It's absolutely heartbreaking to see. One of the things that is just -- I almost can't conceive it -- is the idea that the national news media hasn't picked this up at all, and this is the devastation of one of the most important ecosystems in North America. What can the Redwoods tell us about ourselves? Well, I think they can tell us something about human time. The flickering, transitory quality of human time and the brevity of human life -- the necessity to love. But we're different from trees, and they can also teach us something about ourselves in the differences that we have. We are human, and we have the capacity to love, we have the capacity to wonder, and we have a sort of boundless curiosity, a restless inquisitiveness that so suits us as primates, I think. And at least for me, personally, the trees have taught me an entirely new way of loving my children. Exploring with them the forest canopy has been one of the most lovely things of my existence on Earth. And I think that one of the happiest things is the sense that with my children I've been able to introduce them into the very small circle of humans who are lucky enough, or possibly stupid enough, to still climb trees. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: I think at a previous TED, I think it was Nathan Myhrvold who told me that it was thought that because these trees are like, 2,000 years and older, on many of them there are ecosystems where there are species that are not found anywhere on the Earth except on that one tree. Is that correct? Richard Preston: Yes, that is correct. I mentioned Hyperion, the world's tallest tree. And I was a member of a climbing team that made the first climb of it, in 2006. And while we were climbing Hyperion, Marie Antoine spotted an unknown species of golden-brown ant about halfway up the trunk. Ants are not known to occur in Redwood trees, curiously enough, and we wondered whether this ant, this species of ant, was only endemic to that one tree, or possibly to that grove. And in subsequent climbs they could never find that ant again, and so no specimens have ever been collected. We don't know what it is -- we just know it's there. CA: So, you have to wonder when, you know, if some other species than us was recording the stories that mattered on Earth, you know, our stories are about Iraq and war and politics and celebrity gossip. You've just told us a different story of this tragic arms race that's happening, and maybe whole ecosystems gone forever. It's an amazing sense of wonder you've given me, and a sense of just how fragile this whole thing is. RP: It is fragile, and you know, I think about emerging human diseases -- parasites that move into the human species. But that's just a very small facet of a much greater problem of invasions of species worldwide, all through the ecosystems, and you know, the Earth itself -- CA: Partly caused by us, inadvertently. RP: Caused by humans. Caused by the movement of humans. You can think of the Earth's biosphere as a palace, and the continents are rooms in the palace, and the islands are small rooms. But lately, the doors of the palace have been flung open, and the walls are coming down. CA: Richard Preston, thank you very much, I think. RP: Thank you.

As a culture, we tell ourselves lots of stories about the future, and where we might move forward from this point. Some of those stories are that somebody is just going to sort everything out for us. Other stories are that everything is on the verge of unraveling. But I want to tell you a different story here today. Like all stories, it has a beginning. My work, for a long time, has been involved in education, in teaching people practical skills for sustainability, teaching people how to take responsibility for growing some of their own food, how to build buildings using local materials, how to generate their own energy, and so on. I lived in Ireland, built the first straw-bale houses in Ireland, and some cob buildings and all this kind of thing. But all my work for many years was focused around the idea that sustainability means basically looking at the globalized economic growth model, and moderating what comes in at one end, and moderating the outputs at the other end. And then I came into contact with a way of looking at things which actually changed that profoundly. And in order to introduce you to that, I've got something here that I'm going to unveil, which is one of the great marvels of the modern age. And it's something so astounding and so astonishing that I think maybe as I remove this cloth a suitable gasp of amazement might be appropriate. If you could help me with that it would be fantastic. (Laughter) This is a liter of oil. This bottle of oil, distilled over a hundred million years of geological time, ancient sunlight, contains the energy equivalent of about five weeks hard human manual labor -- equivalent to about 35 strong people coming round and working for you. We can turn it into a dazzling array of materials, medicine, modern clothing, laptops, a whole range of different things. It gives us an energy return that's unimaginable, historically. We've based the design of our settlements, our business models, our transport plans, even the idea of economic growth, some would argue, on the assumption that we will have this in perpetuity. Yet, when we take a step back, and look over the span of history, at what we might call the petroleum interval, it's a short period in history where we've discovered this extraordinary material, and then based a whole way of life around it. But as we straddle the top of this energy mountain, at this stage, we move from a time where our economic success, our sense of individual prowess and well-being is directly linked to how much of this we consume, to a time when actually our degree of oil dependency is our degree of vulnerability. And it's increasingly clear that we aren't going to be able to rely on the fact that we're going to have this at our disposal forever. For every four barrels of oil that we consume, we only discover one. And that gap continues to widen. There is also the fact that the amount of energy that we get back from the oil that we discover is falling. In the 1930s we got 100 units of energy back for every one that we put in to extract it. Completely unprecedented, historically. Already that's fallen to about 11. And that's why, now, the new breakthroughs, the new frontiers in terms of oil extraction are scrambling about in Alberta, or at the bottom of the oceans. There are 98 oil-producing nations in the world. But of those, 65 have already passed their peak. The moment when the world on average passes this peak, people wonder when that's going to happen. And there is an emerging case that maybe that was what happened last July when the oil prices were so high. But are we to assume that the same brilliance and creativity and adaptability that got us up to the top of that energy mountain in the first place is somehow mysteriously going to evaporate when we have to design a creative way back down the other side? No. But the thinking that we have to come up with has to be based on a realistic assessment of where we are. There is also the issue of climate change, is the other thing that underpins this transition approach. But the thing that I notice, as I talk to climate scientists, is the increasingly terrified look they have in their eyes, as the data that's coming in, which is far ahead of what the IPCC are talking about. So the IPCC said that we might see significant breakup of the arctic ice in 2100, in their worst case scenario. Actually, if current trends continue, it could all be gone in five or 10 years' time. If just three percent of the carbon locked up in the arctic permafrost is released as the world warms, it would offset all the savings that we need to make, in carbon, over the next 40 years to avoid runaway climate change. We have no choice other than deep and urgent decarbonization. But I'm always very interested to think about what might the stories be that the generations further down the slope from us are going to tell about us. "The generation that lived at the top of the mountain, that partied so hard, and so abused its inheritance." And one of the ways I like to do that is to look back at the stories people used to tell before we had cheap oil, before we had fossil fuels, and people relied on their own muscle, animal muscle energy, or a little bit of wind, little bit of water energy. We had stories like "The Seven-League Boots": the giant who had these boots, where, once you put them on, with every stride you could cover seven leagues, or 21 miles, a kind of travel completely unimaginable to people without that kind of energy at their disposal. Stories like The Magic Porridge Pot, where you had a pot where if you knew the magic words, this pot would just make as much food as you liked, without you having to do any work, provided you could remember the other magic word to stop it making porridge. Otherwise you'd flood your entire town with warm porridge. There is the story of "The Elves and the Shoemaker." The people who make shoes go to sleep, wake up in the morning, and all the shoes are magically made for them. It's something that was unimaginable to people then. Now we have the seven-league boots in the form of Ryanair and Easyjet. We have the magic porridge pot in the form of Walmart and Tesco. And we have the elves in the form of China. But we don't appreciate what an astonishing thing that has been. And what are the stories that we tell ourselves now, as we look forward about where we're going to go. And I would argue that there are four. There is the idea of business as usual, that the future will be like the present, just more of it. But as we've seen over the last year, I think that's an idea that is increasingly coming into question. And in terms of climate change, is something that is not actually feasible. There is the idea of hitting the wall, that actually somehow everything is so fragile that it might just all unravel and collapse. This is a popular story in some places. The third story is the idea that technology can solve everything, that technology can somehow get us through this completely. And it's an idea that I think is very prevalent at these TED Talks, the idea that we can invent our way out of a profound economic and energy crisis, that a move to a knowledge economy can somehow neatly sidestep those energy constraints, the idea that we'll discover some fabulous new source of energy that will mean we can sweep all concerns about energy security to one side, the idea that we can step off neatly onto a completely renewable world. But the world isn't Second Life. We can't create new land and new energy systems at the click of a mouse. And as we sit, exchanging free ideas with each other, there are still people mining coal in order to power the servers, extracting the minerals to make all of those things. The breakfast that we eat as we sit down to check our email in the morning is still transported at great distances, usually at the expense of the local, more resilient food systems that would have supplied that in the past, which we've so effectively devalued and dismantled. We can be astonishingly inventive and creative. But we also live in a world with very real constraints and demands. Energy and technology are not the same thing. What I'm involved with is the transition response. And this is really about looking the challenges of peak oil and climate change square in the face, and responding with a creativity and an adaptability and an imagination that we really need. It's something which has spread incredibly fast. And it is something which has several characteristics. It's viral. It seems to spread under the radar very, very quickly. It's open source. It's something which everybody who's involved with it develops and passes on as they work with it. It's self-organizing. There is no great central organization that pushes this; people just pick up an idea and they run with it, and they implement it where they are. It's solutions-focused. It's very much looking at what people can do where they are, to respond to this. It's sensitive to place and to scale. Transitional is completely different. Transition groups in Chile, transition groups in the U.S., transition groups here, what they're doing looks very different in every place that you go to. It learns very much from its mistakes. And it feels historic. It tries to create a sense that this is a historic opportunity to do something really extraordinary. And it's a process which is really joyful. People have a huge amount of fun doing this, reconnecting with other people as they do it. One of the things that underpins it is this idea of resilience. And I think, in many ways, the idea of resilience is a more useful concept than the idea of sustainability. The idea of resilience comes from the study of ecology. And it's really about how systems, settlements, withstand shock from the outside. When they encounter shock from the outside that they don't just unravel and fall to pieces. And I think it's a more useful concept than sustainability, as I said. When our supermarkets have only two or three days' worth of food in them at any one time, often sustainability tends to focus on the energy efficiency of the freezers and on the packaging that the lettuces are wrapped up in. Looking through the lens of resilience, we really question how we've let ourselves get into a situation that's so vulnerable. Resilience runs much deeper: it's about building modularity into what we do, building surge breakers into how we organize the basic things that support us. This is a photograph of the Bristol and District Market Gardeners Association, in 1897. This is at a time when the city of Bristol, which is quite close to here, was surrounded by commercial market gardens, which provided a significant amount of the food that was consumed in the town, and created a lot of employment for people, as well. There was a degree of resilience, if you like, at that time, which we can now only look back on with envy. So how does this transition idea work? So basically, you have a group of people who are excited by the idea. They pick up some of the tools that we've developed. They start to run an awareness-raising program looking at how this might actually work in the town. They show films, they give talks, and so on. It's a process which is playful and creative and informative. Then they start to form working groups, looking at different aspects of this, and then from that, there emerge a whole lot of projects which then the transition project itself starts to support and enable. So it started out with some work I was involved in in Ireland, where I was teaching, and has since spread. There are now over 200 formal transition projects. And there are thousands of others who are at what we call the mulling stage. They are mulling whether they're going to take it further. And actually a lot of them are doing huge amounts of stuff. But what do they actually do? You know, it's a kind of nice idea, but what do they actually do on the ground? Well, I think it's really important to make the point that actually you know, this isn't something which is going to do everything on its own. We need international legislation from Copenhagen and so on. We need national responses. We need local government responses. But all of those things are going to be much easier if we have communities that are vibrant and coming up with ideas and leading from the front, making unelectable policies electable, over the next 5 to 10 years. Some of the things that emerge from it are local food projects, like community-supported agriculture schemes, urban food production, creating local food directories, and so on. A lot of places now are starting to set up their own energy companies, community-owned energy companies, where the community can invest money into itself, to start putting in place the kind of renewable energy infrastructure that we need. A lot of places are working with their local schools. Newent in the Forest of Dean: big polytunnel they built for the school; the kids are learning how to grow food. Promoting recycling, things like garden-share, that matches up people who don't have a garden who would like to grow food, with people who have gardens they aren't using anymore. Planting productive trees throughout urban spaces. And also starting to play around with the idea of alternative currencies. This is Lewes in Sussex, who have recently launched the Lewes Pound, a currency that you can only spend within the town, as a way of starting to cycle money within the local economy. You take it anywhere else, it's not worth anything. But actually within the town you start to create these economic cycles much more effectively. Another thing that they do is what we call an energy descent plan, which is basically to develop a plan B for the town. Most of our local authorities, when they sit down to plan for the next five, 10, 15, 20 years of a community, still start by assuming that there will be more energy, more cars, more housing, more jobs, more growth, and so on. What does it look like if that's not the case? And how can we embrace that and actually come up with something that was actually more likely to sustain everybody? As a friend of mine says, "Life is a series of things you're not quite ready for." And that's certainly been my experience with transition. From three years ago, it just being an idea, this has become something that has virally swept around the world. We're getting a lot of interest from government. Ed Miliband, the energy minister of this country, was invited to come to our recent conference as a keynote listener. Which he did -- (Laughter) (Applause) -- and has since become a great advocate of the whole idea. There are now two local authorities in this country who have declared themselves transitional local authorities, Leicestershire and Somerset. And in Stroud, the transition group there, in effect, wrote the local government's food plan. And the head of the council said, "If we didn't have Transition Stroud, we would have to invent all of that community infrastructure for the first time." As we see the spread of it, we see national hubs emerging. In Scotland, the Scottish government's climate change fund has funded Transition Scotland as a national organization supporting the spread of this. And we see it all over the place as well now. But the key to transition is thinking not that we have to change everything now, but that things are already inevitably changing, and what we need to do is to work creatively with that, based on asking the right questions. I think I'd like to just return at the end to the idea of stories. Because I think stories are vital here. And actually the stories that we tell ourselves, we have a huge dearth of stories about how to move forward creatively from here. And one of the key things that transition does is to pull those stories out of what people are doing. Stories about the community that's produced its own 21 pound note, for example, the school that's turned its car park into a food garden, the community that's founded its own energy company. And for me, one of the great stories recently was the Obamas digging up the south lawn of the White House to create a vegetable garden. Because the last time that was done, when Eleanor Roosevelt did it, it led to the creation of 20 million vegetable gardens across the United States. So the question I'd like to leave you with, really, is -- for all aspects of the things that your community needs in order to thrive, how can it be done in such a way that drastically reduces its carbon emissions, while also building resilience? Personally, I feel enormously grateful to have lived through the age of cheap oil. I've been astonishingly lucky, we've been astonishingly lucky. But let us honor what it has bought us, and move forward from this point. Because if we cling to it, and continue to assume that it can underpin our choices, the future that it presents to us is one which is really unmanageable. And by loving and leaving all that oil has done for us, and that the Oil Age has done for us, we are able to then begin the creation of a world which is more resilient, more nourishing, and in which, we find ourselves fitter, more skilled and more connected to each other. Thank you very much. (Applause)

What I'm going to do, in the spirit of collaborative creativity, is simply repeat many of the points that the three people before me have already made, but do them -- this is called "creative collaboration;" it's actually called "borrowing" -- but do it through a particular perspective, and that is to ask about the role of users and consumers in this emerging world of collaborative creativity that Jimmy and others have talked about. Let me just ask you, to start with, this simple question: who invented the mountain bike? Because traditional economic theory would say, well, the mountain bike was probably invented by some big bike corporation that had a big R&D lab where they were thinking up new projects, and it came out of there. It didn't come from there. Another answer might be, well, it came from a sort of lone genius working in his garage, who, working away on different kinds of bikes, comes up with a bike out of thin air. It didn't come from there. The mountain bike came from users, came from young users, particularly a group in Northern California, who were frustrated with traditional racing bikes, which were those sort of bikes that Eddy Merckx rode, or your big brother, and they're very glamorous. But also frustrated with the bikes that your dad rode, which sort of had big handlebars like that, and they were too heavy. So, they got the frames from these big bikes, put them together with the gears from the racing bikes, got the brakes from motorcycles, and sort of mixed and matched various ingredients. And for the first, I don't know, three to five years of their life, mountain bikes were known as "clunkers." And they were just made in a community of bikers, mainly in Northern California. And then one of these companies that was importing parts for the clunkers decided to set up in business, start selling them to other people, and gradually another company emerged out of that, Marin, and it probably was, I don't know, 10, maybe even 15, years, before the big bike companies realized there was a market. 30 years later, mountain bike sales and mountain bike equipment account for 65 percent of bike sales in America. That's 58 billion dollars. This is a category entirely created by consumers that would not have been created by the mainstream bike market because they couldn't see the need, the opportunity; they didn't have the incentive to innovate. The one thing I think I disagree with about Yochai's presentation is when he said the Internet causes this distributive capacity for innovation to come alive. It's when the Internet combines with these kinds of passionate pro-am consumers -- who are knowledgeable; they've got the incentive to innovate; they've got the tools; they want to -- that you get this kind of explosion of creative collaboration. And out of that, you get the need for the kind of things that Jimmy was talking about, which is our new kinds of organization, or a better way to put it: how do we organize ourselves without organizations? That's now possible; you don't need an organization to be organized, to achieve large and complex tasks, like innovating new software programs. So this is a huge challenge to the way we think creativity comes about. The traditional view, still enshrined in much of the way that we think about creativity -- in organizations, in government -- is that creativity is about special people: wear baseball caps the wrong way round, come to conferences like this, in special places, elite universities, R&D labs in the forests, water, maybe special rooms in companies painted funny colors, you know, bean bags, maybe the odd table-football table. Special people, special places, think up special ideas, then you have a pipeline that takes the ideas down to the waiting consumers, who are passive. They can say "yes" or "no" to the invention. That's the idea of creativity. What's the policy recommendation out of that if you're in government, or you're running a large company? More special people, more special places. Build creative clusters in cities; create more R&D parks, so on and so forth. Expand the pipeline down to the consumers. Well this view, I think, is increasingly wrong. I think it's always been wrong, because I think always creativity has been highly collaborative, and it's probably been largely interactive. But it's increasingly wrong, and one of the reasons it's wrong is that the ideas are flowing back up the pipeline. The ideas are coming back from the consumers, and they're often ahead of the producers. Why is that? Well, one issue is that radical innovation, when you've got ideas that affect a large number of technologies or people, have a great deal of uncertainty attached to them. The payoffs to innovation are greatest where the uncertainty is highest. And when you get a radical innovation, it's often very uncertain how it can be applied. The whole history of telephony is a story of dealing with that uncertainty. The very first landline telephones, the inventors thought that they would be used for people to listen in to live performances from West End theaters. When the mobile telephone companies invented SMS, they had no idea what it was for; it was only when that technology got into the hands of teenage users that they invented the use. So the more radical the innovation, the more the uncertainty, the more you need innovation in use to work out what a technology is for. All of our patents, our entire approach to patents and invention, is based on the idea that the inventor knows what the invention is for; we can say what it's for. More and more, the inventors of things will not be able to say that in advance. It will be worked out in use, in collaboration with users. We like to think that invention is a sort of moment of creation: there is a moment of birth when someone comes up with an idea. The truth is that most creativity is cumulative and collaborative; like Wikipedia, it develops over a long period of time. The second reason why users are more and more important is that they are the source of big, disruptive innovations. If you want to find the big new ideas, it's often difficult to find them in mainstream markets, in big organizations. And just look inside large organizations and you'll see why that is so. So, you're in a big corporation. You're obviously keen to go up the corporate ladder. Do you go into your board and say, "Look, I've got a fantastic idea for an embryonic product in a marginal market, with consumers we've never dealt with before, and I'm not sure it's going to have a big payoff, but it could be really, really big in the future?" No, what you do, is you go in and you say, "I've got a fantastic idea for an incremental innovation to an existing product we sell through existing channels to existing users, and I can guarantee you get this much return out of it over the next three years." Big corporations have an in-built tendency to reinforce past success. They've got so much sunk in it that it's very difficult for them to spot emerging new markets. Emerging new markets, then, are the breeding grounds for passionate users. Best example: who in the music industry, 30 years ago, would have said, "Yes, let's invent a musical form which is all about dispossessed black men in ghettos expressing their frustration with the world through a form of music that many people find initially quite difficult to listen to. That sounds like a winner; we'll go with it." (Laughter). So what happens? Rap music is created by the users. They do it on their own tapes, with their own recording equipment; they distribute it themselves. 30 years later, rap music is the dominant musical form of popular culture -- would never have come from the big companies. Had to start -- this is the third point -- with these pro-ams. This is the phrase that I've used in some stuff which I've done with a think tank in London called Demos, where we've been looking at these people who are amateurs -- i.e., they do it for the love of it -- but they want to do it to very high standards. And across a whole range of fields -- from software, astronomy, natural sciences, vast areas of leisure and culture like kite-surfing, so on and so forth -- you find people who want to do things because they love it, but they want to do these things to very high standards. They work at their leisure, if you like. They take their leisure very seriously: they acquire skills; they invest time; they use technology that's getting cheaper -- it's not just the Internet: cameras, design technology, leisure technology, surfboards, so on and so forth. Largely through globalization, a lot of this equipment has got a lot cheaper. More knowledgeable consumers, more educated, more able to connect with one another, more able to do things together. Consumption, in that sense, is an expression of their productive potential. Why, we found, people were interested in this, is that at work they don't feel very expressed. They don't feel as if they're doing something that really matters to them, so they pick up these kinds of activities. This has huge organizational implications for very large areas of life. Take astronomy as an example, which Yochai has already mentioned. 20 years ago, 30 years ago, only big professional astronomers with very big telescopes could see far into space. And there's a big telescope in Northern England called Jodrell Bank, and when I was a kid, it was amazing, because the moon shots would take off, and this thing would move on rails. And it was huge -- it was absolutely enormous. Now, six amateur astronomers, working with the Internet, with Dobsonian digital telescopes -- which are pretty much open source -- with some light sensors developed over the last 10 years, the Internet -- they can do what Jodrell Bank could only do 30 years ago. So here in astronomy, you have this vast explosion of new productive resources. The users can be producers. What does this mean, then, for our organizational landscape? Well, just imagine a world, for the moment, divided into two camps. Over here, you've got the old, traditional corporate model: special people, special places; patent it, push it down the pipeline to largely waiting, passive consumers. Over here, let's imagine we've got Wikipedia, Linux, and beyond -- open source. This is open; this is closed. This is new; this is traditional. Well, the first thing you can say, I think with certainty, is what Yochai has said already -- is there is a great big struggle between those two organizational forms. These people over there will do everything they can to stop these kinds of organizations succeeding, because they're threatened by them. And so the debates about copyright, digital rights, so on and so forth -- these are all about trying to stifle, in my view, these kinds of organizations. What we're seeing is a complete corruption of the idea of patents and copyright. Meant to be a way to incentivize invention, meant to be a way to orchestrate the dissemination of knowledge, they are increasingly being used by large companies to create thickets of patents to prevent innovation taking place. Let me just give you two examples. The first is: imagine yourself going to a venture capitalist and saying, "I've got a fantastic idea. I've invented this brilliant new program that is much, much better than Microsoft Outlook." Which venture capitalist in their right mind is going to give you any money to set up a venture competing with Microsoft, with Microsoft Outlook? No one. That is why the competition with Microsoft is bound to come -- will only come -- from an open-source kind of project. So, there is a huge competitive argument about sustaining the capacity for open-source and consumer-driven innovation, because it's one of the greatest competitive levers against monopoly. There'll be huge professional arguments as well. Because the professionals, over here in these closed organizations -- they might be academics; they might be programmers; they might be doctors; they might be journalists -- my former profession -- say, "No, no -- you can't trust these people over here." When I started in journalism -- Financial Times, 20 years ago -- it was very, very exciting to see someone reading the newspaper. And you'd kind of look over their shoulder on the Tube to see if they were reading your article. Usually they were reading the share prices, and the bit of the paper with your article on was on the floor, or something like that, and you know, "For heaven's sake, what are they doing! They're not reading my brilliant article!" And we allowed users, readers, two places where they could contribute to the paper: the letters page, where they could write a letter in, and we would condescend to them, cut it in half, and print it three days later. Or the op-ed page, where if they knew the editor -- had been to school with him, slept with his wife -- they could write an article for the op-ed page. Those were the two places. Shock, horror: now, the readers want to be writers and publishers. That's not their role; they're supposed to read what we write. But they don't want to be journalists. The journalists think that the bloggers want to be journalists; they don't want to be journalists; they just want to have a voice. They want to, as Jimmy said, they want to have a dialogue, a conversation. They want to be part of that flow of information. What's happening there is that the whole domain of creativity is expanding. So, there's going to be a tremendous struggle. But, also, there's going to be tremendous movement from the open to the closed. What you'll see, I think, is two things that are critical, and these, I think, are two challenges for the open movement. The first is: can we really survive on volunteers? If this is so critical, do we not need it funded, organized, supported in much more structured ways? I think the idea of creating the Red Cross for information and knowledge is a fantastic idea, but can we really organize that, just on volunteers? What kind of changes do we need in public policy and funding to make that possible? What's the role of the BBC, for instance, in that world? What should be the role of public policy? And finally, what I think you will see is the intelligent, closed organizations moving increasingly in the open direction. So it's not going to be a contest between two camps, but, in between them, you'll find all sorts of interesting places that people will occupy. New organizational models coming about, mixing closed and open in tricky ways. It won't be so clear-cut; it won't be Microsoft versus Linux -- there'll be all sorts of things in between. And those organizational models, it turns out, are incredibly powerful, and the people who can understand them will be very, very successful. Let me just give you one final example of what that means. I was in Shanghai, in an office block built on what was a rice paddy five years ago -- one of the 2,500 skyscrapers they've built in Shanghai in the last 10 years. And I was having dinner with this guy called Timothy Chan. Timothy Chan set up an Internet business in 2000. Didn't go into the Internet, kept his money, decided to go into computer games. He runs a company called Shanda, which is the largest computer games company in China. 9,000 servers all over China, has 250 million subscribers. At any one time, there are four million people playing one of his games. How many people does he employ to service that population? 500 people. Well, how can he service 250 million people from 500 employees? Because basically, he doesn't service them. He gives them a platform; he gives them some rules; he gives them the tools and then he kind of orchestrates the conversation; he orchestrates the action. But actually, a lot of the content is created by the users themselves. And it creates a kind of stickiness between the community and the company which is really, really powerful. The best measure of that: so you go into one of his games, you create a character that you develop in the course of the game. If, for some reason, your credit card bounces, or there's some other problem, you lose your character. You've got two options. One option: you can create a new character, right from scratch, but with none of the history of your player. That costs about 100 dollars. Or you can get on a plane, fly to Shanghai, queue up outside Shanda's offices -- cost probably 600, 700 dollars -- and reclaim your character, get your history back. Every morning, there are 600 people queuing outside their offices to reclaim these characters. (Laughter) So this is about companies built on communities, that provide communities with tools, resources, platforms in which they can share. He's not open source, but it's very, very powerful. So here is one of the challenges, I think, for people like me, who do a lot of work with government. If you're a games company, and you've got a million players in your game, you only need one percent of them to be co-developers, contributing ideas, and you've got a development workforce of 10,000 people. Imagine you could take all the children in education in Britain, and one percent of them were co-developers of education. What would that do to the resources available to the education system? Or if you got one percent of the patients in the NHS to, in some sense, be co-producers of health. The reason why -- despite all the efforts to cut it down, to constrain it, to hold it back -- why these open models will still start emerging with tremendous force, is that they multiply our productive resources. And one of the reasons they do that is that they turn users into producers, consumers into designers. Thank you very much.

G'day, my name's Kevin. I'm from Australia. I'm here to help. (Laughter) Tonight, I want to talk about a tale of two cities. One of those cities is called Washington, and the other is called Beijing. Because how these two capitals shape their future and the future of the United States and the future of China doesn't just affect those two countries, it affects all of us in ways, perhaps, we've never thought of: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the fish we eat, the quality of our oceans, the languages we speak in the future, the jobs we have, the political systems we choose, and, of course, the great questions of war and peace. You see that bloke? He's French. His name is Napoleon. A couple of hundred years ago, he made this extraordinary projection: "China is a sleeping lion, and when she awakes, the world will shake." Napoleon got a few things wrong; he got this one absolutely right. Because China is today not just woken up, China has stood up and China is on the march, and the question for us all is where will China go and how do we engage this giant of the 21st century? You start looking at the numbers, they start to confront you in a big way. It's projected that China will become, by whichever measure -- PPP, market exchange rates -- the largest economy in the world over the course of the decade ahead. They're already the largest trading nation, already the largest exporting nation, already the largest manufacturing nation, and they're also the biggest emitters of carbon in the world. America comes second. So if China does become the world's largest economy, think about this: It'll be the first time since this guy was on the throne of England -- George III, not a good friend of Napoleon's -- that in the world we will have as the largest economy a non-English speaking country, a non-Western country, a non-liberal democratic country. And if you don't think that's going to affect the way in which the world happens in the future, then personally, I think you've been smoking something, and it doesn't mean you're from Colorado. So in short, the question we have tonight is, how do we understand this mega-change, which I believe to be the biggest change for the first half of the 21st century? It'll affect so many things. It will go to the absolute core. It's happening quietly. It's happening persistently. It's happening in some senses under the radar, as we are all preoccupied with what's going in Ukraine, what's going on in the Middle East, what's going on with ISIS, what's going on with ISIL, what's happening with the future of our economies. This is a slow and quiet revolution. And with a mega-change comes also a mega-challenge, and the mega-challenge is this: Can these two great countries, China and the United States -- China, the Middle Kingdom, and the United States, Měiguó -- which in Chinese, by the way, means "the beautiful country." Think about that -- that's the name that China has given this country for more than a hundred years. Whether these two great civilizations, these two great countries, can in fact carve out a common future for themselves and for the world? In short, can we carve out a future which is peaceful and mutually prosperous, or are we looking at a great challenge of war or peace? And I have 15 minutes to work through war or peace, which is a little less time than they gave this guy to write a book called "War and Peace." People ask me, why is it that a kid growing up in rural Australia got interested in learning Chinese? Well, there are two reasons for that. Here's the first of them. That's Betsy the cow. Now, Betsy the cow was one of a herd of dairy cattle that I grew up with on a farm in rural Australia. See those hands there? These are not built for farming. So very early on, I discovered that in fact, working in a farm was not designed for me, and China was a very safe remove from any career in Australian farm life. Here's the second reason. That's my mom. Anyone here ever listen to what their mom told them to do? Everyone ever do what their mom told them to do? I rarely did, but what my mom said to me was, one day, she handed me a newspaper, a headline which said, here we have a huge change. And that change is China entering the United Nations. 1971, I had just turned 14 years of age, and she handed me this headline. And she said, "Understand this, learn this, because it's going to affect your future." So being a very good student of history, I decided that the best thing for me to do was, in fact, to go off and learn Chinese. The great thing about learning Chinese is that your Chinese teacher gives you a new name. And so they gave me this name: Kè, which means to overcome or to conquer, and Wén, and that's the character for literature or the arts. Kè Wén, Conqueror of the Classics. Any of you guys called "Kevin"? It's a major lift from being called Kevin to be called Conqueror of the Classics. (Laughter) I've been called Kevin all my life. Have you been called Kevin all your life? Would you prefer to be called Conqueror of the Classics? And so I went off after that and joined the Australian Foreign Service, but here is where pride -- before pride, there always comes a fall. So there I am in the embassy in Beijing, off to the Great Hall of the People with our ambassador, who had asked me to interpret for his first meeting in the Great Hall of the People. And so there was I. If you've been to a Chinese meeting, it's a giant horseshoe. At the head of the horsehoe are the really serious pooh-bahs, and down the end of the horseshoe are the not-so-serious pooh-bahs, the junior woodchucks like me. And so the ambassador began with this inelegant phrase. He said, "China and Australia are currently enjoying a relationship of unprecedented closeness." And I thought to myself, "That sounds clumsy. That sounds odd. I will improve it." Note to file: Never do that. It needed to be a little more elegant, a little more classical, so I rendered it as follows. [In Chinese] There was a big pause on the other side of the room. You could see the giant pooh-bahs at the head of the horseshoe, the blood visibly draining from their faces, and the junior woodchucks at the other end of the horseshoe engaged in peals of unrestrained laughter. Because when I rendered his sentence, "Australia and China are enjoying a relationship of unprecedented closeness," in fact, what I said was that Australia and China were now experiencing fantastic orgasm. (Laughter) That was the last time I was asked to interpret. But in that little story, there's a wisdom, which is, as soon as you think you know something about this extraordinary civilization of 5,000 years of continuing history, there's always something new to learn. History is against us when it comes to the U.S. and China forging a common future together. This guy up here? He's not Chinese and he's not American. He's Greek. His name's Thucydides. He wrote the history of the Peloponnesian Wars. And he made this extraordinary observation about Athens and Sparta. "It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this inspired in Sparta that made war inevitable." And hence, a whole literature about something called the Thucydides Trap. This guy here? He's not American and he's not Greek. He's Chinese. His name is Sun Tzu. He wrote "The Art of War," and if you see his statement underneath, it's along these lines: "Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected." Not looking good so far for China and the United States. This guy is an American. His name's Graham Allison. In fact, he's a teacher at the Kennedy School over there in Boston. He's working on a single project at the moment, which is, does the Thucydides Trap about the inevitably of war between rising powers and established great powers apply to the future of China-U.S. relations? It's a core question. And what Graham has done is explore 15 cases in history since the 1500s to establish what the precedents are. And in 11 out of 15 of them, let me tell you, they've ended in catastrophic war. You may say, "But Kevin -- or Conqueror of the Classics -- that was the past. We live now in a world of interdependence and globalization. It could never happen again." Guess what? The economic historians tell us that in fact, the time which we reached the greatest point of economic integration and globalization was in 1914, just before that happened, World War I, a sobering reflection from history. So if we are engaged in this great question of how China thinks, feels, and positions itself towards the United States, and the reverse, how do we get to the baseline of how these two countries and civilizations can possibly work together? Let me first go to, in fact, China's views of the U.S. and the rest of the West. Number one: China feels as if it's been humiliated at the hands of the West through a hundred years of history, beginning with the Opium Wars. When after that, the Western powers carved China up into little pieces, so that by the time it got to the '20s and '30s, signs like this one appeared on the streets of Shanghai. ["No dogs and Chinese allowed"] How would you feel if you were Chinese, in your own country, if you saw that sign appear? China also believes and feels as if, in the events of 1919, at the Peace Conference in Paris, when Germany's colonies were given back to all sorts of countries around in the world, what about German colonies in China? They were, in fact, given to Japan. When Japan then invaded China in the 1930s the world looked away and was indifferent to what would happen to China. And then, on top of that, the Chinese to this day believe that the United States and the West do not accept the legitimacy of their political system because it's so radically different from those of us who come from liberal democracies, and believe that the United States to this day is seeking to undermine their political system. China also believes that it is being contained by U.S. allies and by those with strategic partnerships with the U.S. right around its periphery. And beyond all that, the Chinese have this feeling in their heart of hearts and in their gut of guts that those of us in the collective West are just too damned arrogant. That is, we don't recognize the problems in our own system, in our politics and our economics, and are very quick to point the finger elsewhere, and believe that, in fact, we in the collective West are guilty of a great bunch of hypocrisy. Of course, in international relations, it's not just the sound of one hand clapping. There's another country too, and that's called the U.S. So how does the U.S. respond to all of the above? The U.S. has a response to each of those. On the question of is the U.S. containing China, they say, "No, look at the history of the Soviet Union. That was containment." Instead, what we have done in the U.S. and the West is welcome China into the global economy, and on top of that, welcome them into the World Trade Organization. The U.S. and the West say China cheats on the question of intellectual property rights, and through cyberattacks on U.S. and global firms. Furthermore, the United States says that the Chinese political system is fundamentally wrong because it's at such fundamental variance to the human rights, democracy, and rule of law that we enjoy in the U.S. and the collective West. And on top of all the above, what does the United States say? That they fear that China will, when it has sufficient power, establish a sphere of influence in Southeast Asia and wider East Asia, boot the United States out, and in time, when it's powerful enough, unilaterally seek to change the rules of the global order. So apart from all of that, it's just fine and dandy, the U.S.-China relationship. No real problems there. The challenge, though, is given those deep-rooted feelings, those deep-rooted emotions and thought patterns, what the Chinese call "Sīwéi," ways of thinking, how can we craft a basis for a common future between these two? I argue simply this: We can do it on the basis on a framework of constructive realism for a common purpose. What do I mean by that? Be realistic about the things that we disagree on, and a management approach that doesn't enable any one of those differences to break into war or conflict until we've acquired the diplomatic skills to solve them. Be constructive in areas of the bilateral, regional and global engagement between the two, which will make a difference for all of humankind. Build a regional institution capable of cooperation in Asia, an Asia-Pacific community. And worldwide, act further, like you've begun to do at the end of last year by striking out against climate change with hands joined together rather than fists apart. Of course, all that happens if you've got a common mechanism and political will to achieve the above. These things are deliverable. But the question is, are they deliverable alone? This is what our head tells us we need to do, but what about our heart? I have a little experience in the question back home of how you try to bring together two peoples who, frankly, haven't had a whole lot in common in the past. And that's when I apologized to Australia's indigenous peoples. This was a day of reckoning in the Australian government, the Australian parliament, and for the Australian people. After 200 years of unbridled abuse towards the first Australians, it was high time that we white folks said we were sorry. The important thing -- (Applause) The important thing that I remember is staring in the faces of all those from Aboriginal Australia as they came to listen to this apology. It was extraordinary to see, for example, old women telling me the stories of when they were five years old and literally ripped away from their parents, like this lady here. It was extraordinary for me to then be able to embrace and to kiss Aboriginal elders as they came into the parliament building, and one woman said to me, it's the first time a white fella had ever kissed her in her life, and she was over 70. That's a terrible story. And then I remember this family saying to me, "You know, we drove all the way from the far North down to Canberra to come to this thing, drove our way through redneck country. On the way back, stopped at a cafe after the apology for a milkshake." And they walked into this cafe quietly, tentatively, gingerly, a little anxious. I think you know what I'm talking about. But the day after the apology, what happened? Everyone in that cafe, every one of the white folks, stood up and applauded. Something had happened in the hearts of these people in Australia. The white folks, our Aboriginal brothers and sisters, and we haven't solved all these problems together, but let me tell you, there was a new beginning because we had gone not just to the head, we'd gone also to the heart. So where does that conclude in terms of the great question that we've been asked to address this evening, which is the future of U.S.-China relations? The head says there's a way forward. The head says there is a policy framework, there's a common narrative, there's a mechanism through regular summitry to do these things and to make them better. But the heart must also find a way to reimagine the possibilities of the America-China relationship, and the possibilities of China's future engagement in the world. Sometimes, folks, we just need to take a leap of faith not quite knowing where we might land. In China, they now talk about the Chinese Dream. In America, we're all familiar with the term "the American Dream." I think it's time, across the world, that we're able to think also of something we might also call a dream for all humankind. Because if we do that, we might just change the way that we think about each other. [In Chinese] That's my challenge to America. That's my challenge to China. That's my challenge to all of us, but I think where there's a will and where there is imagination we can turn this into a future driven by peace and prosperity and not once again repeat the tragedies of war. I thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thanks so much for that. Thanks so much for that. It feels like you yourself have a role to play in this bridging. You, in a way, are uniquely placed to speak to both sides. Kevin Rudd: Well, what we Australians do best is organize the drinks, so you get them together in one room, and we suggest this and suggest that, then we go and get the drinks. But no, look, for all of us who are friends of these two great countries, America and China, you can do something. You can make a practical contribution, and for all you good folks here, next time you meet someone from China, sit down and have a conversation. See what you can find out about where they come from and what they think, and my challenge for all the Chinese folks who are going to watch this TED Talk at some time is do the same. Two of us seeking to change the world can actually make a huge difference. Those of us up the middle, we can make a small contribution. CA: Kevin, all power to you, my friend. Thank you. KR: Thank you. Thank you, folks. (Applause)

So I'm going to speak about a problem that I have and that's that I'm a philosopher. (Laughter) When I go to a party and people ask me what do I do and I say, "I'm a professor," their eyes glaze over. When I go to an academic cocktail party and there are all the professors around, they ask me what field I'm in and I say, "philosophy" -- their eyes glaze over. (Laughter) When I go to a philosopher's party (Laughter) and they ask me what I work on and I say, "consciousness," their eyes don't glaze over -- their lips curl into a snarl. (Laughter) And I get hoots of derision and cackles and growls because they think, "That's impossible! You can't explain consciousness." The very chutzpah of somebody thinking that you could explain consciousness is just out of the question. My late, lamented friend Bob Nozick, a fine philosopher, in one of his books, "Philosophical Explanations," is commenting on the ethos of philosophy -- the way philosophers go about their business. And he says, you know, "Philosophers love rational argument." And he says, "It seems as if the ideal argument for most philosophers is you give your audience the premises and then you give them the inferences and the conclusion, and if they don't accept the conclusion, they die. Their heads explode." The idea is to have an argument that is so powerful that it knocks out your opponents. But in fact that doesn't change people's minds at all. It's very hard to change people's minds about something like consciousness, and I finally figured out the reason for that. The reason for that is that everybody's an expert on consciousness. We heard the other day that everybody's got a strong opinion about video games. They all have an idea for a video game, even if they're not experts. But they don't consider themselves experts on video games; they've just got strong opinions. I'm sure that people here who work on, say, climate change and global warming, or on the future of the Internet, encounter people who have very strong opinions about what's going to happen next. But they probably don't think of these opinions as expertise. They're just strongly held opinions. But with regard to consciousness, people seem to think, each of us seems to think, "I am an expert. Simply by being conscious, I know all about this." And so, you tell them your theory and they say, "No, no, that's not the way consciousness is! No, you've got it all wrong." And they say this with an amazing confidence. And so what I'm going to try to do today is to shake your confidence. Because I know the feeling -- I can feel it myself. I want to shake your confidence that you know your own innermost minds -- that you are, yourselves, authoritative about your own consciousness. That's the order of the day here. Now, this nice picture shows a thought-balloon, a thought-bubble. I think everybody understands what that means. That's supposed to exhibit the stream of consciousness. This is my favorite picture of consciousness that's ever been done. It's a Saul Steinberg of course -- it was a New Yorker cover. And this fellow here is looking at the painting by Braque. That reminds him of the word baroque, barrack, bark, poodle, Suzanne R. -- he's off to the races. There's a wonderful stream of consciousness here and if you follow it along, you learn a lot about this man. What I particularly like about this picture, too, is that Steinberg has rendered the guy in this sort of pointillist style. Which reminds us, as Rod Brooks was saying yesterday: what we are, what each of us is -- what you are, what I am -- is approximately 100 trillion little cellular robots. That's what we're made of. No other ingredients at all. We're just made of cells, about 100 trillion of them. Not a single one of those cells is conscious; not a single one of those cells knows who you are, or cares. Somehow, we have to explain how when you put together teams, armies, battalions of hundreds of millions of little robotic unconscious cells -- not so different really from a bacterium, each one of them -- the result is this. I mean, just look at it. The content -- there's color, there's ideas, there's memories, there's history. And somehow all that content of consciousness is accomplished by the busy activity of those hoards of neurons. How is that possible? Many people just think it isn't possible at all. They think, "No, there can't be any sort of naturalistic explanation of consciousness." This is a lovely book by a friend of mine named Lee Siegel, who's a professor of religion, actually, at the University of Hawaii, and he's an expert magician, and an expert on the street magic of India, which is what this book is about, "Net of Magic." And there's a passage in it which I would love to share with you. It speaks so eloquently to the problem. "'I'm writing a book on magic,' I explain, and I'm asked, 'Real magic?' By 'real magic,' people mean miracles, thaumaturgical acts, and supernatural powers. 'No,' I answer. 'Conjuring tricks, not real magic.' 'Real magic,' in other words, refers to the magic that is not real; while the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic." (Laughter) Now, that's the way a lot of people feel about consciousness. (Laughter) Real consciousness is not a bag of tricks. If you're going to explain this as a bag of tricks, then it's not real consciousness, whatever it is. And, as Marvin said, and as other people have said, "Consciousness is a bag of tricks." This means that a lot of people are just left completely dissatisfied and incredulous when I attempt to explain consciousness. So this is the problem. So I have to do a little bit of the sort of work that a lot of you won't like, for the same reason that you don't like to see a magic trick explained to you. How many of you here, if somebody -- some smart aleck -- starts telling you how a particular magic trick is done, you sort of want to block your ears and say, "No, no, I don't want to know! Don't take the thrill of it away. I'd rather be mystified. Don't tell me the answer." A lot of people feel that way about consciousness, I've discovered. And I'm sorry if I impose some clarity, some understanding on you. You'd better leave now if you don't want to know some of these tricks. But I'm not going to explain it all to you. I'm going to do what philosophers do. Here's how a philosopher explains the sawing-the-lady-in-half trick. You know the sawing-the-lady-in-half trick? The philosopher says, "I'm going to explain to you how that's done. You see, the magician doesn't really saw the lady in half." (Laughter) "He merely makes you think that he does." And you say, "Yes, and how does he do that?" He says, "Oh, that's not my department, I'm sorry." (Laughter) So now I'm going to illustrate how philosophers explain consciousness. But I'm going to try to also show you that consciousness isn't quite as marvelous -- your own consciousness isn't quite as wonderful -- as you may have thought it is. This is something, by the way, that Lee Siegel talks about in his book. He marvels at how he'll do a magic show, and afterwards people will swear they saw him do X, Y, and Z. He never did those things. He didn't even try to do those things. People's memories inflate what they think they saw. And the same is true of consciousness. Now, let's see if this will work. All right. Let's just watch this. Watch it carefully. I'm working with a young computer-animator documentarian named Nick Deamer, and this is a little demo that he's done for me, part of a larger project some of you may be interested in. We're looking for a backer. It's a feature-length documentary on consciousness. OK, now, you all saw what changed, right? How many of you noticed that every one of those squares changed color? Every one. I'll just show you by running it again. Even when you know that they're all going to change color, it's very hard to notice. You have to really concentrate to pick up any of the changes at all. Now, this is an example -- one of many -- of a phenomenon that's now being studied quite a bit. It's one that I predicted in the last page or two of my 1991 book, "Consciousness Explained," where I said if you did experiments of this sort, you'd find that people were unable to pick up really large changes. If there's time at the end, I'll show you the much more dramatic case. Now, how can it be that there are all those changes going on, and that we're not aware of them? Well, earlier today, Jeff Hawkins mentioned the way your eye saccades, the way your eye moves around three or four times a second. He didn't mention the speed. Your eye is constantly in motion, moving around, looking at eyes, noses, elbows, looking at interesting things in the world. And where your eye isn't looking, you're remarkably impoverished in your vision. That's because the foveal part of your eye, which is the high-resolution part, is only about the size of your thumbnail held at arms length. That's the detail part. It doesn't seem that way, does it? It doesn't seem that way, but that's the way it is. You're getting in a lot less information than you think. Here's a completely different effect. This is a painting by Bellotto. It's in the museum in North Carolina. Bellotto was a student of Canaletto's. And I love paintings like that -- the painting is actually about as big as it is right here. And I love Canalettos, because Canaletto has this fantastic detail, and you can get right up and see all the details on the painting. And I started across the hall in North Carolina, because I thought it was probably a Canaletto, and would have all that in detail. And I noticed that on the bridge there, there's a lot of people -- you can just barely see them walking across the bridge. And I thought as I got closer I would be able to see all the detail of most people, see their clothes, and so forth. And as I got closer and closer, I actually screamed. I yelled out because when I got closer, I found the detail wasn't there at all. There were just little artfully placed blobs of paint. And as I walked towards the picture, I was expecting detail that wasn't there. The artist had very cleverly suggested people and clothes and wagons and all sorts of things, and my brain had taken the suggestion. You're familiar with a more recent technology, which is -- There, you can get a better view of the blobs. See, when you get close they're really just blobs of paint. You will have seen something like this -- this is the reverse effect. I'll just give that to you one more time. Now, what does your brain do when it takes the suggestion? When an artful blob of paint or two, by an artist, suggests a person -- say, one of Marvin Minsky's little society of mind -- do they send little painters out to fill in all the details in your brain somewhere? I don't think so. Not a chance. But then, how on Earth is it done? Well, remember the philosopher's explanation of the lady? It's the same thing. The brain just makes you think that it's got the detail there. You think the detail's there, but it isn't there. The brain isn't actually putting the detail in your head at all. It's just making you expect the detail. Let's just do this experiment very quickly. Is the shape on the left the same as the shape on the right, rotated? Yes. How many of you did it by rotating the one on the left in your mind's eye, to see if it matched up with the one on the right? How many of you rotated the one on the right? OK. How do you know that's what you did? (Laughter) There's in fact been a very interesting debate raging for over 20 years in cognitive science -- various experiments started by Roger Shepherd, who measured the angular velocity of rotation of mental images. Yes, it's possible to do that. But the details of the process are still in significant controversy. And if you read that literature, one of the things that you really have to come to terms with is even when you're the subject in the experiment, you don't know. You don't know how you do it. You just know that you have certain beliefs. And they come in a certain order, at a certain time. And what explains the fact that that's what you think? Well, that's where you have to go backstage and ask the magician. This is a figure that I love: Bradley, Petrie, and Dumais. You may think that I've cheated, that I've put a little whiter-than-white boundary there. How many of you see that sort of boundary, with the Necker cube floating in front of the circles? Can you see it? Well, you know, in effect, the boundary's really there, in a certain sense. Your brain is actually computing that boundary, the boundary that goes right there. But now, notice there are two ways of seeing the cube, right? It's a Necker cube. Everybody can see the two ways of seeing the cube? OK. Can you see the four ways of seeing the cube? Because there's another way of seeing it. If you're seeing it as a cube floating in front of some circles, some black circles, there's another way of seeing it. As a cube, on a black background, as seen through a piece of Swiss cheese. (Laughter) Can you get it? How many of you can't get it? That'll help. (Laughter) Now you can get it. These are two very different phenomena. When you see the cube one way, behind the screen, those boundaries go away. But there's still a sort of filling in, as we can tell if we look at this. We don't have any trouble seeing the cube, but where does the color change? Does your brain have to send little painters in there? The purple-painters and the green-painters fight over who's going to paint that bit behind the curtain? No. Your brain just lets it go. The brain doesn't need to fill that in. When I first started talking about the Bradley, Petrie, Dumais example that you just saw -- I'll go back to it, this one -- I said that there was no filling-in behind there. And I supposed that that was just a flat truth, always true. But Rob Van Lier has recently shown that it isn't. Now, if you think you see some pale yellow -- I'll run this a few more times. Look in the gray areas, and see if you seem to see something sort of shadowy moving in there -- yeah, it's amazing. There's nothing there. It's no trick. ["Failure to Detect Changes in Scenes" slide] This is Ron Rensink's work, which was in some degree inspired by that suggestion right at the end of the book. Let me just pause this for a second if I can. This is change-blindness. What you're going to see is two pictures, one of which is slightly different from the other. You see here the red roof and the gray roof, and in between them there will be a mask, which is just a blank screen, for about a quarter of a second. So you'll see the first picture, then a mask, then the second picture, then a mask. And this will just continue, and your job as the subject is to press the button when you see the change. So, show the original picture for 240 milliseconds. Blank. Show the next picture for 240 milliseconds. Blank. And keep going, until the subject presses the button, saying, "I see the change." So now we're going to be subjects in the experiment. We're going to start easy. Some examples. No trouble there. Can everybody see? All right. Indeed, Rensink's subjects took only a little bit more than a second to press the button. Can you see that one? 2.9 seconds. How many don't see it still? What's on the roof of that barn? (Laughter) It's easy. Is it a bridge or a dock? There are a few more really dramatic ones, and then I'll close. I want you to see a few that are particularly striking. This one because it's so large and yet it's pretty hard to see. Can you see it? Audience: Yes. Dan Dennett: See the shadows going back and forth? Pretty big. So 15.5 seconds is the median time for subjects in his experiment there. I love this one. I'll end with this one, just because it's such an obvious and important thing. How many still don't see it? How many still don't see it? How many engines on the wing of that Boeing? (Laughter) Right in the middle of the picture! Thanks very much for your attention. What I wanted to show you is that scientists, using their from-the-outside, third-person methods, can tell you things about your own consciousness that you would never dream of, and that, in fact, you're not the authority on your own consciousness that you think you are. And we're really making a lot of progress on coming up with a theory of mind. Jeff Hawkins, this morning, was describing his attempt to get theory, and a good, big theory, into the neuroscience. And he's right. This is a problem. Harvard Medical School once -- I was at a talk -- director of the lab said, "In our lab, we have a saying. If you work on one neuron, that's neuroscience. If you work on two neurons, that's psychology." (Laughter) We have to have more theory, and it can come as much from the top down. Thank you very much. (Applause)

What I'm going to do, in the spirit of collaborative creativity, is simply repeat many of the points that the three people before me have already made, but do them -- this is called "creative collaboration;" it's actually called "borrowing" -- but do it through a particular perspective, and that is to ask about the role of users and consumers in this emerging world of collaborative creativity that Jimmy and others have talked about. Let me just ask you, to start with, this simple question: who invented the mountain bike? Because traditional economic theory would say, well, the mountain bike was probably invented by some big bike corporation that had a big R&D lab where they were thinking up new projects, and it came out of there. It didn't come from there. Another answer might be, well, it came from a sort of lone genius working in his garage, who, working away on different kinds of bikes, comes up with a bike out of thin air. It didn't come from there. The mountain bike came from users, came from young users, particularly a group in Northern California, who were frustrated with traditional racing bikes, which were those sort of bikes that Eddy Merckx rode, or your big brother, and they're very glamorous. But also frustrated with the bikes that your dad rode, which sort of had big handlebars like that, and they were too heavy. So, they got the frames from these big bikes, put them together with the gears from the racing bikes, got the brakes from motorcycles, and sort of mixed and matched various ingredients. And for the first, I don't know, three to five years of their life, mountain bikes were known as "clunkers." And they were just made in a community of bikers, mainly in Northern California. And then one of these companies that was importing parts for the clunkers decided to set up in business, start selling them to other people, and gradually another company emerged out of that, Marin, and it probably was, I don't know, 10, maybe even 15, years, before the big bike companies realized there was a market. Thirty years later, mountain bike sales and mountain bike equipment account for 65 percent of bike sales in America. That's 58 billion dollars. This is a category entirely created by consumers that would not have been created by the mainstream bike market because they couldn't see the need, the opportunity; they didn't have the incentive to innovate. The one thing I think I disagree with about Yochai's presentation is when he said the Internet causes this distributive capacity for innovation to come alive. It's when the Internet combines with these kinds of passionate pro-am consumers -- who are knowledgeable; they've got the incentive to innovate; they've got the tools; they want to -- that you get this kind of explosion of creative collaboration. And out of that, you get the need for the kind of things that Jimmy was talking about, which is our new kinds of organization, or a better way to put it: how do we organize ourselves without organizations? That's now possible; you don't need an organization to be organized, to achieve large and complex tasks, like innovating new software programs. So this is a huge challenge to the way we think creativity comes about. The traditional view, still enshrined in much of the way that we think about creativity -- in organizations, in government -- is that creativity is about special people: wear baseball caps the wrong way round, come to conferences like this, in special places, elite universities, R&D labs in the forests, water, maybe special rooms in companies painted funny colors, you know, bean bags, maybe the odd table-football table. Special people, special places, think up special ideas, then you have a pipeline that takes the ideas down to the waiting consumers, who are passive. They can say "yes" or "no" to the invention. That's the idea of creativity. What's the policy recommendation out of that if you're in government, or you're running a large company? More special people, more special places. Build creative clusters in cities; create more R&D parks, so on and so forth. Expand the pipeline down to the consumers. Well this view, I think, is increasingly wrong. I think it's always been wrong, because I think always creativity has been highly collaborative, and it's probably been largely interactive. But it's increasingly wrong, and one of the reasons it's wrong is that the ideas are flowing back up the pipeline. The ideas are coming back from the consumers, and they're often ahead of the producers. Why is that? Well, one issue is that radical innovation, when you've got ideas that affect a large number of technologies or people, have a great deal of uncertainty attached to them. The payoffs to innovation are greatest where the uncertainty is highest. And when you get a radical innovation, it's often very uncertain how it can be applied. The whole history of telephony is a story of dealing with that uncertainty. The very first landline telephones, the inventors thought that they would be used for people to listen in to live performances from West End theaters. When the mobile telephone companies invented SMS, they had no idea what it was for; it was only when that technology got into the hands of teenage users that they invented the use. So the more radical the innovation, the more the uncertainty, the more you need innovation in use to work out what a technology is for. All of our patents, our entire approach to patents and invention, is based on the idea that the inventor knows what the invention is for; we can say what it's for. More and more, the inventors of things will not be able to say that in advance. It will be worked out in use, in collaboration with users. We like to think that invention is a sort of moment of creation: there is a moment of birth when someone comes up with an idea. The truth is that most creativity is cumulative and collaborative; like Wikipedia, it develops over a long period of time. The second reason why users are more and more important is that they are the source of big, disruptive innovations. If you want to find the big new ideas, it's often difficult to find them in mainstream markets, in big organizations. And just look inside large organizations and you'll see why that is so. So, you're in a big corporation. You're obviously keen to go up the corporate ladder. Do you go into your board and say, "Look, I've got a fantastic idea for an embryonic product in a marginal market, with consumers we've never dealt with before, and I'm not sure it's going to have a big payoff, but it could be really, really big in the future?" No, what you do, is you go in and you say, "I've got a fantastic idea for an incremental innovation to an existing product we sell through existing channels to existing users, and I can guarantee you get this much return out of it over the next three years." Big corporations have an in-built tendency to reinforce past success. They've got so much sunk in it that it's very difficult for them to spot emerging new markets. Emerging new markets, then, are the breeding grounds for passionate users. Best example: who in the music industry, 30 years ago, would have said, "Yes, let's invent a musical form which is all about dispossessed black men in ghettos expressing their frustration with the world through a form of music that many people find initially quite difficult to listen to. That sounds like a winner; we'll go with it." (Laughter). So what happens? Rap music is created by the users. They do it on their own tapes, with their own recording equipment; they distribute it themselves. 30 years later, rap music is the dominant musical form of popular culture -- would never have come from the big companies. Had to start -- this is the third point -- with these pro-ams. This is the phrase that I've used in some stuff which I've done with a think tank in London called Demos, where we've been looking at these people who are amateurs -- i.e., they do it for the love of it -- but they want to do it to very high standards. And across a whole range of fields -- from software, astronomy, natural sciences, vast areas of leisure and culture like kite-surfing, so on and so forth -- you find people who want to do things because they love it, but they want to do these things to very high standards. They work at their leisure, if you like. They take their leisure very seriously: they acquire skills; they invest time; they use technology that's getting cheaper -- it's not just the Internet: cameras, design technology, leisure technology, surfboards, so on and so forth. Largely through globalization, a lot of this equipment has got a lot cheaper. More knowledgeable consumers, more educated, more able to connect with one another, more able to do things together. Consumption, in that sense, is an expression of their productive potential. Why, we found, people were interested in this, is that at work they don't feel very expressed. They don't feel as if they're doing something that really matters to them, so they pick up these kinds of activities. This has huge organizational implications for very large areas of life. Take astronomy as an example, which Yochai has already mentioned. Twenty years ago, 30 years ago, only big professional astronomers with very big telescopes could see far into space. And there's a big telescope in Northern England called Jodrell Bank, and when I was a kid, it was amazing, because the moon shots would take off, and this thing would move on rails. And it was huge -- it was absolutely enormous. Now, six amateur astronomers, working with the Internet, with Dobsonian digital telescopes -- which are pretty much open source -- with some light sensors developed over the last 10 years, the Internet -- they can do what Jodrell Bank could only do 30 years ago. So here in astronomy, you have this vast explosion of new productive resources. The users can be producers. What does this mean, then, for our organizational landscape? Well, just imagine a world, for the moment, divided into two camps. Over here, you've got the old, traditional corporate model: special people, special places; patent it, push it down the pipeline to largely waiting, passive consumers. Over here, let's imagine we've got Wikipedia, Linux, and beyond -- open source. This is open; this is closed. This is new; this is traditional. Well, the first thing you can say, I think with certainty, is what Yochai has said already -- is there is a great big struggle between those two organizational forms. These people over there will do everything they can to stop these kinds of organizations succeeding, because they're threatened by them. And so the debates about copyright, digital rights, so on and so forth -- these are all about trying to stifle, in my view, these kinds of organizations. What we're seeing is a complete corruption of the idea of patents and copyright. Meant to be a way to incentivize invention, meant to be a way to orchestrate the dissemination of knowledge, they are increasingly being used by large companies to create thickets of patents to prevent innovation taking place. Let me just give you two examples. The first is: imagine yourself going to a venture capitalist and saying, "I've got a fantastic idea. I've invented this brilliant new program that is much, much better than Microsoft Outlook." Which venture capitalist in their right mind is going to give you any money to set up a venture competing with Microsoft, with Microsoft Outlook? No one. That is why the competition with Microsoft is bound to come -- will only come -- from an open-source kind of project. So, there is a huge competitive argument about sustaining the capacity for open-source and consumer-driven innovation, because it's one of the greatest competitive levers against monopoly. There'll be huge professional arguments as well. Because the professionals, over here in these closed organizations -- they might be academics; they might be programmers; they might be doctors; they might be journalists -- my former profession -- say, "No, no -- you can't trust these people over here." When I started in journalism -- Financial Times, 20 years ago -- it was very, very exciting to see someone reading the newspaper. And you'd kind of look over their shoulder on the Tube to see if they were reading your article. Usually they were reading the share prices, and the bit of the paper with your article on was on the floor, or something like that, and you know, "For heaven's sake, what are they doing! They're not reading my brilliant article!" And we allowed users, readers, two places where they could contribute to the paper: the letters page, where they could write a letter in, and we would condescend to them, cut it in half, and print it three days later. Or the op-ed page, where if they knew the editor -- had been to school with him, slept with his wife -- they could write an article for the op-ed page. Those were the two places. Shock, horror: now, the readers want to be writers and publishers. That's not their role; they're supposed to read what we write. But they don't want to be journalists. The journalists think that the bloggers want to be journalists; they don't want to be journalists; they just want to have a voice. They want to, as Jimmy said, they want to have a dialogue, a conversation. They want to be part of that flow of information. What's happening there is that the whole domain of creativity is expanding. So, there's going to be a tremendous struggle. But, also, there's going to be tremendous movement from the open to the closed. What you'll see, I think, is two things that are critical, and these, I think, are two challenges for the open movement. The first is: can we really survive on volunteers? If this is so critical, do we not need it funded, organized, supported in much more structured ways? I think the idea of creating the Red Cross for information and knowledge is a fantastic idea, but can we really organize that, just on volunteers? What kind of changes do we need in public policy and funding to make that possible? What's the role of the BBC, for instance, in that world? What should be the role of public policy? And finally, what I think you will see is the intelligent, closed organizations moving increasingly in the open direction. So it's not going to be a contest between two camps, but, in between them, you'll find all sorts of interesting places that people will occupy. New organizational models coming about, mixing closed and open in tricky ways. It won't be so clear-cut; it won't be Microsoft versus Linux -- there'll be all sorts of things in between. And those organizational models, it turns out, are incredibly powerful, and the people who can understand them will be very, very successful. Let me just give you one final example of what that means. I was in Shanghai, in an office block built on what was a rice paddy five years ago -- one of the 2,500 skyscrapers they've built in Shanghai in the last 10 years. And I was having dinner with this guy called Timothy Chan. Timothy Chan set up an Internet business in 2000. Didn't go into the Internet, kept his money, decided to go into computer games. He runs a company called Shanda, which is the largest computer games company in China. Nine thousand servers all over China, has 250 million subscribers. At any one time, there are four million people playing one of his games. How many people does he employ to service that population? 500 people. Well, how can he service 250 million people from 500 employees? Because basically, he doesn't service them. He gives them a platform; he gives them some rules; he gives them the tools and then he kind of orchestrates the conversation; he orchestrates the action. But actually, a lot of the content is created by the users themselves. And it creates a kind of stickiness between the community and the company which is really, really powerful. The best measure of that: so you go into one of his games, you create a character that you develop in the course of the game. If, for some reason, your credit card bounces, or there's some other problem, you lose your character. You've got two options. One option: you can create a new character, right from scratch, but with none of the history of your player. That costs about 100 dollars. Or you can get on a plane, fly to Shanghai, queue up outside Shanda's offices -- cost probably 600, 700 dollars -- and reclaim your character, get your history back. Every morning, there are 600 people queuing outside their offices to reclaim these characters. (Laughter) So this is about companies built on communities, that provide communities with tools, resources, platforms in which they can share. He's not open source, but it's very, very powerful. So here is one of the challenges, I think, for people like me, who do a lot of work with government. If you're a games company, and you've got a million players in your game, you only need one percent of them to be co-developers, contributing ideas, and you've got a development workforce of 10,000 people. Imagine you could take all the children in education in Britain, and one percent of them were co-developers of education. What would that do to the resources available to the education system? Or if you got one percent of the patients in the NHS to, in some sense, be co-producers of health. The reason why -- despite all the efforts to cut it down, to constrain it, to hold it back -- why these open models will still start emerging with tremendous force, is that they multiply our productive resources. And one of the reasons they do that is that they turn users into producers, consumers into designers. Thank you very much.

As a magician, I try to create images that make people stop and think. I also try to challenge myself to do things that doctors say are not possible. I was buried alive in New York City in a coffin, buried alive in a coffin in April, 1999, for a week. I lived there with nothing but water. And it ended up being so much fun that I decided I could pursue doing more of these things. The next one is I froze myself in a block of ice for three days and three nights in New York City. That one was way more difficult than I had expected. The one after that, I stood on top of a hundred-foot pillar for 36 hours. I began to hallucinate so hard that the buildings that were behind me started to look like big animal heads. So, next I went to London. In London I lived in a glass box for 44 days with nothing but water. It was, for me, one of the most difficult things I'd ever done, but it was also the most beautiful. There was so many skeptics, especially the press in London, that they started flying cheeseburgers on helicopters around my box to tempt me. (Laughter) So, I felt very validated when the New England Journal of Medicine actually used the research for science. My next pursuit was I wanted to see how long I could go without breathing, like how long I could survive with nothing, not even air. I didn't realize that it would become the most amazing journey of my life. As a young magician, I was obsessed with Houdini and his underwater challenges. So, I began, early on, competing against the other kids, seeing how long I could stay underwater while they went up and down to breathe, you know, five times, while I stayed under on one breath. By the time I was a teenager, I was able to hold my breath for three minutes and 30 seconds. I would later find out that was Houdini's personal record. In 1987 I heard of a story about a boy that fell through ice and was trapped under a river. He was underneath, not breathing for 45 minutes. When the rescue workers came, they resuscitated him and there was no brain damage. His core temperature had dropped to 77 degrees. As a magician, I think everything is possible. And I think if something is done by one person, it can be done by others. I started to think, if the boy could survive without breathing for that long, there must be a way that I could do it. So, I met with a top neurosurgeon. And I asked him, how long is it possible to go without breathing, like how long could I go without air? And he said to me that anything over six minutes you have a serious risk of hypoxic brain damage. So, I took that as a challenge, basically. (Laughter) My first try, I figured that I could do something similar, and I created a water tank, and I filled it with ice and freezing cold water. And I stayed inside of that water tank hoping my core temperature would start to drop. And I was shivering. In my first attempt to hold my breath, I couldn't even last a minute. So, I realized that was completely not going to work. I went to talk to a doctor friend -- and I asked him, "How could I do that?" "I want to hold my breath for a really long time. How could it be done?" And he said, "David, you're a magician, create the illusion of not breathing, it will be much easier." (Laughter) So, he came up with this idea of creating a rebreather, with a CO2 scrubber, which was basically a tube from Home Depot, with a balloon duct-taped to it, that he thought we could put inside of me, and somehow be able to circulate the air and rebreathe with this thing in me. This is a little hard to watch. But this is that attempt. So, that clearly wasn't going to work. (Laughter) Then I actually started thinking about liquid breathing. There is a chemical that's called perflubron. And it's so high in oxygen levels that in theory you could breathe it. So, I got my hands on that chemical, filled the sink up with it, and stuck my face in the sink and tried to breathe that in, which was really impossible. It's basically like trying to breathe, as a doctor said, while having an elephant standing on your chest. So, that idea disappeared. Then I started thinking, would it be possible to hook up a heart/lung bypass machine and have a surgery where it was a tube going into my artery, and then appear to not breathe while they were oxygenating my blood? Which was another insane idea, obviously. Then I thought about the craziest idea of all the ideas: to actually do it. (Laughter) To actually try to hold my breath past the point that doctors would consider you brain dead. So, I started researching into pearl divers. You know, because they go down for four minutes on one breath. And when I was researching pearl divers, I found the world of free-diving. It was the most amazing thing that I ever discovered, pretty much. There is many different aspects to free-diving. There is depth records, where people go as deep as they can. And then there is static apnea. That's holding your breath as long as you can in one place without moving. That was the one that I studied. The first thing that I learned is when you're holding your breath, you should never move at all; that wastes energy. And that depletes oxygen, and it builds up CO2 in your blood. So, I learned never to move. And I learned how to slow my heart rate down. I had to remain perfectly still and just relax and think that I wasn't in my body, and just control that. And then I learned how to purge. Purging is basically hyperventilating. You blow in and out -- (Breathing loudly) You do that, you get lightheaded, you get tingling. And you're really ridding your body of CO2. So, when you hold your breath, it's infinitely easier. Then I learned that you have to take a huge breath, and just hold and relax and never let any air out, and just hold and relax through all the pain. Every morning, this is for months, I would wake up and the first thing that I would do is I would hold my breath for, out of 52 minutes, I would hold my breath for 44 minutes. So, basically what that means is I would purge, I'd breathe really hard for a minute. And I would hold, immediately after, for five and a half minutes. Then I would breathe again for a minute, purging as hard as I can, then immediately after that I would hold again for five and a half minutes. I would repeat this process eight times in a row. Out of 52 minutes, you're only breathing for eight minutes. At the end of that you're completely fried, your brain. You feel like you're walking around in a daze. And you have these awful headaches. Basically, I'm not the best person to talk to when I'm doing that stuff. I started learning about the world-record holder. His name is Tom Sietas. And this guy is perfectly built for holding his breath. He's six foot four. He's 160 pounds. And his total lung capacity is twice the size of an average person. I'm six foot one, and fat. We'll say big-boned. (Laughter) I had to drop 50 pounds in three months. So, everything that I put into my body, I considered as medicine. Every bit of food was exactly what it was for its nutritional value. I ate really small controlled portions throughout the day. And I started to really adapt my body. [Individual results may vary] (Laughter) The thinner I was, the longer I was able to hold my breath. And by eating so well and training so hard, my resting heart-rate dropped to 38 beats per minute. Which is lower than most Olympic athletes. In four months of training, I was able to hold my breath for over seven minutes. I wanted to try holding my breath everywhere. I wanted to try it in the most extreme situations to see if I could slow my heart rate down under duress. (Laughter) I decided that I was going to break the world record live on prime-time television. The world record was eight minutes and 58 seconds, held by Tom Sietas, that guy with the whale lungs I told you about. I assumed that I could put a water tank at Lincoln Center and if I stayed there a week not eating, I would get comfortable in that situation and I would slow my metabolism, which I was sure would help me hold my breath longer than I had been able to do it. I was completely wrong. I entered the sphere a week before the scheduled air date. And I thought everything seemed to be on track. Two days before my big breath-hold attempt, for the record, the producers of my television special thought that just watching somebody holding their breath, and almost drowning, is too boring for television. (Laughter) So, I had to add handcuffs, while holding my breath, to escape from. This was a critical mistake. Because of the movement, I was wasting oxygen. And by seven minutes I had gone into these awful convulsions. By 7:08, I started to black out. And by seven minutes and 30 seconds, they had to pull my body out and bring me back. I had failed on every level. (Laughter) So, naturally, the only way out of the slump that I could think of was, I decided to call Oprah. (Laughter) I told her that I wanted to up the ante and hold my breath longer than any human being ever had. This was a different record. This was a pure O2 static apnea record that Guinness had set the world record at 13 minutes. So, basically you breathe pure O2 first, oxygenating your body, flushing out CO2, and you are able to hold much longer. I realized that my real competition was the beaver. (Laughter) (Laughter ends) In January of '08, Oprah gave me four months to prepare and train. So, I would sleep in a hypoxic tent every night. A hypoxic tent is a tent that simulates altitude at 15,000 feet. So, it's like base camp, Everest. What that does is, you start building up the red bloodcell count in your body, which helps you carry oxygen better. Every morning, again, after getting out of that tent, your brain is completely wiped out. My first attempt on pure O2, I was able to go up to 15 minutes. So, it was a pretty big success. The neurosurgeon pulled me out of the water because in his mind, at 15 minutes your brain is done, you're brain dead. So, he pulled me up, and I was fine. There was one person there that was definitely not impressed. It was my ex-girlfriend. While I was breaking the record underwater for the first time, she was sifting through my Blackberry, checking all my messages. (Laughter) My brother had a picture of it. It is really -- (Laughter) (Laughter ends) I then announced that I was going to go for Sietas' record, publicly. And what he did in response, is he went on Regis and Kelly, and broke his old record. Then his main competitor went out and broke his record. So, he suddenly pushed the record up to 16 minutes and 32 seconds. Which was three minutes longer than I had prepared. It was longer than the record. I wanted to get the Science Times to document this. I wanted to get them to do a piece on it. So, I did what any person seriously pursuing scientific advancement would do. I walked into the New York Times offices and did card tricks to everybody. (Laughter) So, I don't know if it was the magic or the lure of the Cayman Islands, but John Tierney flew down and did a piece on the seriousness of breath-holding. While he was there, I tried to impress him, of course. And I did a dive down to 160 feet, which is basically the height of a 16 story building, and as I was coming up, I blacked out underwater, which is really dangerous; that's how you drown. Luckily, Kirk had seen me and he swam over and pulled me up. So, I started full focus. I completely trained to get my breath-hold time up for what I needed to do. But there was no way to prepare for the live television aspect of it, being on Oprah. But in practice, I would do it face down, floating on the pool. But for TV they wanted me to be upright so they could see my face, basically. The other problem was the suit was so buoyant that they had to strap my feet in to keep me from floating up. So, I had to use my legs to hold my feet into the straps that were loose, which was a real problem for me. That made me extremely nervous, raising the heart rate. Then, what they also did was, which we never did before, is there was a heart-rate monitor. And it was right next to the sphere. So, every time my heart would beat, I'd hear the beep-beep-beep-beep, you know, the ticking, really loud. Which was making me more nervous. And there was no way to slow my heart rate down. Normally, I would start at 38 beats per minute, and while holding my breath, it would drop to 12 beats per minute, which is pretty unusual. (Laughter) This time it started at 120 beats, and it never went down. I spent the first five minutes underwater desperately trying to slow my heart rate down. I was just sitting there thinking, "I've got to slow this down. I'm going to fail." And I was getting more nervous. And the heart rate just kept going up and up, all the way up to 150 beats. Basically it's the same thing that created my downfall at Lincoln Center. It was a waste of O2. When I made it to the halfway mark, at eight minutes, I was 100 percent certain that I was not going to be able to make this. There was no way for me to do it. I figured, Oprah had dedicated an hour to doing this breath-hold thing, if I had cracked early, it would be a whole show about how depressed I am. (Laughter) So, I figured I'm better off just fighting and staying there until I black out, at least then they can pull me out and take care of me and all that. (Laughter) I kept pushing to 10 minutes. At 10 minutes you start getting all these really strong tingling sensations in your fingers and toes. And I knew that that was blood shunting, when the blood rushes away from your extremities to provide oxygen to your vital organs. At 11 minutes I started feeling throbbing sensations in my legs, and my lips started to feel really strange. At minute 12 I started to have ringing in my ears, and I started to feel my arm going numb. And I'm a hypochondriac, and I remember arm numb means heart attack. So, I started to really get really paranoid. Then at 13 minutes, maybe because of the hypochondria, I started feeling pains all over my chest. It was awful. (Laughter) At 14 minutes, I had these awful contractions, like this urge to breathe. (Laughter) (Laughter ends) At 15 minutes I was suffering major O2 deprivation to the heart. And I started having ischemia to the heart. My heartbeat would go from 120 to 50, to 150, to 40, to 20, to 150 again. It would skip a beat. It would start. It would stop. And I felt all this. And I was sure that I was going to have a heart attack. So, at 16 minutes what I did is I slid my feet out because I knew that if I did go out, if I did have a heart attack, they'd have to jump into the binding and take my feet out before pulling me up. I was really nervous. I let my feet out, and I started floating to the top. And I didn't take my head out. But I was just floating there waiting for my heart to stop, just waiting. They had doctors with the "Pst," you know, sitting there waiting. And then suddenly I hear screaming. And I think that there is some weird thing -- that I had died or something had happened. And then I realized that I had made it to 16:32. So, with the energy of everybody that was there, I decided to keep pushing. And I went to 17 minutes and four seconds. (Applause) (Applause ends) As though that wasn't enough, what I did immediately after is I went to Quest Labs and had them take every blood sample that they could to test for everything and to see where my levels were, so the doctors could use it, once again. I also didn't want anybody to question it. I had the world record and I wanted to make sure it was legitimate. So, I get to New York City the next day, I'm walking out of the Apple store, and this kid walks up to me he's like, "Yo, D!" I'm like "Yeah?" He said, "If you really held your breath that long, why'd you come out of the water dry?" I was like "What?" (Laughter) And that's my life. So -- (Laughter) As a magician, I try to show things to people that seem impossible. And I think magic, whether I'm holding my breath or shuffling a deck of cards, is pretty simple. It's practice, it's training, and it's -- (Sobs) It's practice, it's training and experimenting, (Sobs) while pushing through the pain to be the best that I can be. And that's what magic is to me, so, thank you. (Applause)

Time flies. It's actually almost 20 years ago when I wanted to reframe the way we use information, the way we work together: I invented the World Wide Web. Now, 20 years on, at TED, I want to ask your help in a new reframing. So going back to 1989, I wrote a memo suggesting the global hypertext system. Nobody really did anything with it, pretty much. But 18 months later -- this is how innovation happens -- 18 months later, my boss said I could do it on the side, as a sort of a play project, kick the tires of a new computer we'd got. And so he gave me the time to code it up. So I basically roughed out what HTML should look like: hypertext protocol, HTTP; the idea of URLs, these names for things which started with HTTP. I wrote the code and put it out there. Why did I do it? Well, it was basically frustration. I was frustrated -- I was working as a software engineer in this huge, very exciting lab, lots of people coming from all over the world. They brought all sorts of different computers with them. They had all sorts of different data formats, all sorts, all kinds of documentation systems. So that, in all that diversity, if I wanted to figure out how to build something out of a bit of this and a bit of this, everything I looked into, I had to connect to some new machine, I had to learn to run some new program, I would find the information I wanted in some new data format. And these were all incompatible. It was just very frustrating. The frustration was all this unlocked potential. In fact, on all these discs there were documents. So if you just imagined them all being part of some big, virtual documentation system in the sky, say on the Internet, then life would be so much easier. Well, once you've had an idea like that it kind of gets under your skin and even if people don't read your memo -- actually he did, it was found after he died, his copy. He had written, "Vague, but exciting," in pencil, in the corner. (Laughter) But in general it was difficult -- it was really difficult to explain what the web was like. It's difficult to explain to people now that it was difficult then. But then -- OK, when TED started, there was no web so things like "click" didn't have the same meaning. I can show somebody a piece of hypertext, a page which has got links, and we click on the link and bing -- there'll be another hypertext page. Not impressive. You know, we've seen that -- we've got things on hypertext on CD-ROMs. What was difficult was to get them to imagine: so, imagine that that link could have gone to virtually any document you could imagine. Alright, that is the leap that was very difficult for people to make. Well, some people did. So yeah, it was difficult to explain, but there was a grassroots movement. And that is what has made it most fun. That has been the most exciting thing, not the technology, not the things people have done with it, but actually the community, the spirit of all these people getting together, sending the emails. That's what it was like then. Do you know what? It's funny, but right now it's kind of like that again. I asked everybody, more or less, to put their documents -- I said, "Could you put your documents on this web thing?" And you did. Thanks. It's been a blast, hasn't it? I mean, it has been quite interesting because we've found out that the things that happen with the web really sort of blow us away. They're much more than we'd originally imagined when we put together the little, initial website that we started off with. Now, I want you to put your data on the web. Turns out that there is still huge unlocked potential. There is still a huge frustration that people have because we haven't got data on the web as data. What do you mean, "data"? What's the difference -- documents, data? Well, documents you read, OK? More or less, you read them, you can follow links from them, and that's it. Data -- you can do all kinds of stuff with a computer. Who was here or has otherwise seen Hans Rosling's talk? One of the great -- yes a lot of people have seen it -- one of the great TED Talks. Hans put up this presentation in which he showed, for various different countries, in various different colors -- he showed income levels on one axis and he showed infant mortality, and he shot this thing animated through time. So, he'd taken this data and made a presentation which just shattered a lot of myths that people had about the economics in the developing world. He put up a slide a little bit like this. It had underground all the data OK, data is brown and boxy and boring, and that's how we think of it, isn't it? Because data you can't naturally use by itself But in fact, data drives a huge amount of what happens in our lives and it happens because somebody takes that data and does something with it. In this case, Hans had put the data together he had found from all kinds of United Nations websites and things. He had put it together, combined it into something more interesting than the original pieces and then he'd put it into this software, which I think his son developed, originally, and produces this wonderful presentation. And Hans made a point of saying, "Look, it's really important to have a lot of data." And I was happy to see that at the party last night that he was still saying, very forcibly, "It's really important to have a lot of data." So I want us now to think about not just two pieces of data being connected, or six like he did, but I want to think about a world where everybody has put data on the web and so virtually everything you can imagine is on the web and then calling that linked data. The technology is linked data, and it's extremely simple. If you want to put something on the web there are three rules: first thing is that those HTTP names -- those things that start with "http:" -- we're using them not just for documents now, we're using them for things that the documents are about. We're using them for people, we're using them for places, we're using them for your products, we're using them for events. All kinds of conceptual things, they have names now that start with HTTP. Second rule, if I take one of these HTTP names and I look it up and I do the web thing with it and I fetch the data using the HTTP protocol from the web, I will get back some data in a standard format which is kind of useful data that somebody might like to know about that thing, about that event. Who's at the event? Whatever it is about that person, where they were born, things like that. So the second rule is I get important information back. Third rule is that when I get back that information it's not just got somebody's height and weight and when they were born, it's got relationships. Data is relationships. Interestingly, data is relationships. This person was born in Berlin; Berlin is in Germany. And when it has relationships, whenever it expresses a relationship then the other thing that it's related to is given one of those names that starts HTTP. So, I can go ahead and look that thing up. So I look up a person -- I can look up then the city where they were born; then I can look up the region it's in, and the town it's in, and the population of it, and so on. So I can browse this stuff. So that's it, really. That is linked data. I wrote an article entitled "Linked Data" a couple of years ago and soon after that, things started to happen. The idea of linked data is that we get lots and lots and lots of these boxes that Hans had, and we get lots and lots and lots of things sprouting. It's not just a whole lot of other plants. It's not just a root supplying a plant, but for each of those plants, whatever it is -- a presentation, an analysis, somebody's looking for patterns in the data -- they get to look at all the data and they get it connected together, and the really important thing about data is the more things you have to connect together, the more powerful it is. So, linked data. The meme went out there. And, pretty soon Chris Bizer at the Freie Universitat in Berlin who was one of the first people to put interesting things up, he noticed that Wikipedia -- you know Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia with lots and lots of interesting documents in it. Well, in those documents, there are little squares, little boxes. And in most information boxes, there's data. So he wrote a program to take the data, extract it from Wikipedia, and put it into a blob of linked data on the web, which he called dbpedia. Dbpedia is represented by the blue blob in the middle of this slide and if you actually go and look up Berlin, you'll find that there are other blobs of data which also have stuff about Berlin, and they're linked together. So if you pull the data from dbpedia about Berlin, you'll end up pulling up these other things as well. And the exciting thing is it's starting to grow. This is just the grassroots stuff again, OK? Let's think about data for a bit. Data comes in fact in lots and lots of different forms. Think of the diversity of the web. It's a really important thing that the web allows you to put all kinds of data up there. So it is with data. I could talk about all kinds of data. We could talk about government data, enterprise data is really important, there's scientific data, there's personal data, there's weather data, there's data about events, there's data about talks, and there's news and there's all kinds of stuff. I'm just going to mention a few of them so that you get the idea of the diversity of it, so that you also see how much unlocked potential. Let's start with government data. Barack Obama said in a speech, that he -- American government data would be available on the Internet in accessible formats. And I hope that they will put it up as linked data. That's important. Why is it important? Not just for transparency, yeah transparency in government is important, but that data -- this is the data from all the government departments Think about how much of that data is about how life is lived in America. It's actual useful. It's got value. I can use it in my company. I could use it as a kid to do my homework. So we're talking about making the place, making the world run better by making this data available. In fact if you're responsible -- if you know about some data in a government department, often you find that these people, they're very tempted to keep it -- Hans calls it database hugging. You hug your database, you don't want to let it go until you've made a beautiful website for it. Well, I'd like to suggest that rather -- yes, make a beautiful website, who am I to say don't make a beautiful website? Make a beautiful website, but first give us the unadulterated data, we want the data. We want unadulterated data. OK, we have to ask for raw data now. And I'm going to ask you to practice that, OK? Can you say "raw"? Audience: Raw. Tim Berners-Lee: Can you say "data"? Audience: Data. TBL: Can you say "now"? Audience: Now! TBL: Alright, "raw data now"! Audience: Raw data now! Practice that. It's important because you have no idea the number of excuses people come up with to hang onto their data and not give it to you, even though you've paid for it as a taxpayer. And it's not just America. It's all over the world. And it's not just governments, of course -- it's enterprises as well. So I'm just going to mention a few other thoughts on data. Here we are at TED, and all the time we are very conscious of the huge challenges that human society has right now -- curing cancer, understanding the brain for Alzheimer's, understanding the economy to make it a little bit more stable, understanding how the world works. The people who are going to solve those -- the scientists -- they have half-formed ideas in their head, they try to communicate those over the web. But a lot of the state of knowledge of the human race at the moment is on databases, often sitting in their computers, and actually, currently not shared. In fact, I'll just go into one area -- if you're looking at Alzheimer's, for example, drug discovery -- there is a whole lot of linked data which is just coming out because scientists in that field realize this is a great way of getting out of those silos, because they had their genomics data in one database in one building, and they had their protein data in another. Now, they are sticking it onto -- linked data -- and now they can ask the sort of question, that you probably wouldn't ask, I wouldn't ask -- they would. What proteins are involved in signal transduction and also related to pyramidal neurons? Well, you take that mouthful and you put it into Google. Of course, there's no page on the web which has answered that question because nobody has asked that question before. You get 223,000 hits -- no results you can use. You ask the linked data -- which they've now put together -- 32 hits, each of which is a protein which has those properties and you can look at. The power of being able to ask those questions, as a scientist -- questions which actually bridge across different disciplines -- is really a complete sea change. It's very very important. Scientists are totally stymied at the moment -- the power of the data that other scientists have collected is locked up and we need to get it unlocked so we can tackle those huge problems. Now if I go on like this, you'll think that all the data comes from huge institutions and has nothing to do with you. But, that's not true. In fact, data is about our lives. You just -- you log on to your social networking site, your favorite one, you say, "This is my friend." Bing! Relationship. Data. You say, "This photograph, it's about -- it depicts this person. " Bing! That's data. Data, data, data. Every time you do things on the social networking site, the social networking site is taking data and using it -- re-purposing it -- and using it to make other people's lives more interesting on the site. But, when you go to another linked data site -- and let's say this is one about travel, and you say, "I want to send this photo to all the people in that group," you can't get over the walls. The Economist wrote an article about it, and lots of people have blogged about it -- tremendous frustration. The way to break down the silos is to get inter-operability between social networking sites. We need to do that with linked data. One last type of data I'll talk about, maybe it's the most exciting. Before I came down here, I looked it up on OpenStreetMap The OpenStreetMap's a map, but it's also a Wiki. Zoom in and that square thing is a theater -- which we're in right now -- The Terrace Theater. It didn't have a name on it. So I could go into edit mode, I could select the theater, I could add down at the bottom the name, and I could save it back. And now if you go back to the OpenStreetMap. org, and you find this place, you will find that The Terrace Theater has got a name. I did that. Me! I did that to the map. I just did that! I put that up on there. Hey, you know what? If I -- that street map is all about everybody doing their bit and it creates an incredible resource because everybody else does theirs. And that is what linked data is all about. It's about people doing their bit to produce a little bit, and it all connecting. That's how linked data works. You do your bit. Everybody else does theirs. You may not have lots of data which you have yourself to put on there but you know to demand it. And we've practiced that. So, linked data -- it's huge. I've only told you a very small number of things There are data in every aspect of our lives, every aspect of work and pleasure, and it's not just about the number of places where data comes, it's about connecting it together. And when you connect data together, you get power in a way that doesn't happen just with the web, with documents. You get this really huge power out of it. So, we're at the stage now where we have to do this -- the people who think it's a great idea. And all the people -- and I think there's a lot of people at TED who do things because -- even though there's not an immediate return on the investment because it will only really pay off when everybody else has done it -- they'll do it because they're the sort of person who just does things which would be good if everybody else did them. OK, so it's called linked data. I want you to make it. I want you to demand it. And I think it's an idea worth spreading. Thanks. (Applause)

So this is a story of a place that I now call home. It's a story of public education and of rural communities and of what design might do to improve both. So this is Bertie County, North Carolina, USA. To give you an idea of the "where:" So here's North Carolina, and if we zoom in, Bertie County is in the eastern part of the state. It's about two hours east driving-time from Raleigh. And it's very flat. It's very swampy. It's mostly farmland. The entire county is home to just 20,000 people, and they're very sparsely distributed. So there's only 27 people per square mile, which comes down to about 10 people per square kilometer. Bertie County is kind of a prime example in the demise of rural America. We've seen this story all over the country and even in places beyond the American borders. We know the symptoms. It's the hollowing out of small towns. It's downtowns becoming ghost towns. The brain drain -- where all of the most educated and qualified leave and never come back. It's the dependence on farm subsidies and under-performing schools and higher poverty rates in rural areas than in urban. And Bertie County is no exception to this. Perhaps the biggest thing it struggles with, like many communities similar to it, is that there's no shared, collective investment in the future of rural communities. Only 6.8 percent of all our philanthropic giving in the U.S. right now benefits rural communities, and yet 20 percent of our population lives there. So Bertie County is not only very rural; it's incredibly poor. It is the poorest county in the state. It has one in three of its children living in poverty, and it's what is referred to as a "rural ghetto." The economy is mostly agricultural. The biggest crops are cotton and tobacco, and we're very proud of our Bertie County peanut. The biggest employer is the Purdue chicken processing plant. The county seat is Windsor. This is like Times Square of Windsor that you're looking at right now. It's home to only 2,000 people, and like a lot of other small towns it has been hollowed out over the years. There are more buildings that are empty or in disrepair than occupied and in use. You can count the number of restaurants in the county on one hand -- Bunn's Barbecue being my absolute favorite. But in the whole county there is no coffee shop, there's no Internet cafe, there's no movie theater, there's no bookstore. There isn't even a Walmart. Racially, the county is about 60 percent African-American, but what happens in the public schools is most of the privileged white kids go to the private Lawrence Academy. So the public school students are about 86 percent African-American. And this is a spread from the local newspaper of the recent graduating class, and you can see the difference is pretty stark. So to say that the public education system in Bertie County is struggling would be a huge understatement. There's basically no pool of qualified teachers to pull from, and only eight percent of the people in the county have a bachelor's degree or higher. So there isn't a big legacy in the pride of education. In fact, two years ago, only 27 percent of all the third- through eighth-graders were passing the state standard in both English and math. So it sounds like I'm painting a really bleak picture of this place, but I promise there is good news. The biggest asset, in my opinion, one of the biggest assets in Bertie County right now is this man: This is Dr. Chip Zullinger, fondly known as Dr. Z. He was brought in in October 2007 as the new superintendent to basically fix this broken school system. And he previously was a superintendent in Charleston, South Carolina and then in Denver, Colorado. He started some of the country's first charter schools in the late '80s in the U.S. And he is an absolute renegade and a visionary, and he is the reason that I now live and work there. So in February of 2009, Dr. Zullinger invited us, Project H Design -- which is a non-profit design firm that I founded -- to come to Bertie and to partner with him on the repair of this school district and to bring a design perspective to the repair of the school district. And he invited us in particular because we have a very specific type of design process -- one that results in appropriate design solutions in places that don't usually have access to design services or creative capital. Specifically, we use these six design directives, probably the most important being number two: we design with, not for -- in that, when we're doing humanitarian-focused design, it's not about designing for clients anymore. It's about designing with people, and letting appropriate solutions emerge from within. So at the time of being invited down there, we were based in San Francisco, and so we were going back and forth for basically the rest of 2009, spending about half our time in Bertie County. And when I say we, I mean Project H, but more specifically, I mean myself and my partner, Matthew Miller, who's an architect and a sort of MacGyver-type builder. So fast-forward to today, and we now live there. I have strategically cut Matt's head out of this photo, because he would kill me if he knew I was using it because of the sweatsuits. But this is our front porch. We live there. We now call this place home. Over the course of this year that we spent flying back and forth, we realized we had fallen in love with the place. We had fallen in love with the place and the people and the work that we're able to do in a rural place like Bertie County, that, as designers and builders, you can't do everywhere. There's space to experiment and to weld and to test things. We have an amazing advocate in Dr. Zullinger. There's a nobility of real, hands-on, dirt-under-your-fingernails work. But beyond our personal reasons for wanting to be there, there is a huge need. There is a total vacuum of creative capital in Bertie County. There isn't a single licensed architect in the whole county. And so we saw an opportunity to bring design as this untouched tool, something that Bertie County didn't otherwise have, and to be sort of the -- to usher that in as a new type of tool in their tool kit. The initial goal became using design within the public education system in partnership with Dr. Zullinger -- that was why we were there. But beyond that, we recognized that Bertie County, as a community, was in dire need of a fresh perspective of pride and connectedness and of the creative capital that they were so much lacking. So the goal became, yes, to apply design within education, but then to figure out how to make education a great vehicle for community development. So in order to do this, we've taken three different approaches to the intersection of design and education. And I should say that these are three things that we've done in Bertie County, but I feel pretty confident that they could work in a lot of other rural communities around the U.S. and maybe even beyond. So the first of the three is design for education. This is the most kind of direct, obvious intersection of the two things. It's the physical construction of improved spaces and materials and experiences for teachers and students. This is in response to the awful mobile trailers and the outdated textbooks and the terrible materials that we're building schools out of these days. And so this played out for us in a couple different ways. The first was a series of renovations of computer labs. So traditionally, the computer labs, particularly in an under-performing school like Bertie County, where they have to benchmark test every other week, the computer lab is a kill-and-drill testing facility. You come in, you face the wall, you take your test and you leave. So we wanted to change the way that students approach technology, to create a more convivial and social space that was more engaging, more accessible, and also to increase the ability for teachers to use these spaces for technology-based instruction. So this is the lab at the high school, and the principal there is in love with this room. Every time he has visitors, it's the first place that he takes them. And this also meant the co-creation with some teachers of this educational playground system called the learning landscape. It allows elementary-level students to learn core subjects through game play and activity and running around and screaming and being a kid. So this game that the kids are playing here -- in this case they were learning basic multiplication through a game called Match Me. And in Match Me, you take the class, divide it into two teams, one team on each side of the playground, and the teacher will take a piece of chalk and just write a number on each of the tires. And then she'll call out a math problem -- so let's say four times four -- and then one student from each team has to compete to figure out that four times four is 16 and find the tire with the 16 on it and sit on it. So the goal is to have all of your teammates sitting on the tires and then your team wins. And the impact of the learning landscape has been pretty surprising and amazing. Some of the classes and teachers have reported higher test scores, a greater comfort level with the material, especially with the boys, that in going outside and playing, they aren't afraid to take on a double-digit multiplication problem -- and also that the teachers are able to use these as assessment tools to better gauge how their students are understanding new material. So with design for education, I think the most important thing is to have a shared ownership of the solutions with the teachers, so that they have the incentive and the desire to use them. So this is Mr. Perry. He's the assistant superintendent. He came out for one of our teacher-training days and won like five rounds of Match Me in a row and was very proud of himself. (Laughter) So the second approach is redesigning education itself. This is the most complex. It's a systems-level look at how education is administered and what is being offered and to whom. So in many cases this is not so much about making change as it is creating the conditions under which change is possible and the incentive to want to make change, which is easier said than done in rural communities and in inside-the-box education systems in rural communities. So for us, this was a graphic public campaign called Connect Bertie. There are thousands of these blue dots all over the county. And this was for a fund that the school district had to put a desktop computer and a broadband Internet connection in every home with a child in the public school system. Right now I should say, there are only 10 percent of the houses that actually have an in-home Internet connection. And the only places to get WiFi are in the school buildings, or at the Bojangles Fried Chicken joint, which I find myself squatting outside of a lot. Aside from, you know, getting people excited and wondering what the heck these blue dots were all over the place, it asked the school system to envision how it might become a catalyst for a more connected community. It asked them to reach outside of the school walls and to think about how they could play a role in the community's development. So the first batch of computers are being installed later this summer, and we're helping Dr. Zullinger develop some strategies around how we might connect the classroom and the home to extend learning beyond the school day. And then the third approach, which is what I'm most excited about, which is where we are now, is: design as education. So "design as education" means that we could actually teach design within public schools, and not design-based learning -- not like "let's learn physics by building a rocket," but actually learning design-thinking coupled with real construction and fabrication skills put towards a local community purpose. It also means that designers are no longer consultants, but we're teachers, and we are charged with growing creative capital within the next generation. And what design offers as an educational framework is an antidote to all of the boring, rigid, verbal instruction that so many of these school districts are plagued by. It's hands-on, it's in-your-face, it requires an active engagement, and it allows kids to apply all the core subject learning in real ways. So we started thinking about the legacy of shop class and how shop class -- wood and metal shop class in particular -- historically, has been something intended for kids who aren't going to go to college. It's a vocational training path. It's working-class; it's blue-collar. The projects are things like, let's make a birdhouse for your mom for Christmas. And in recent decades, a lot of the funding for shop class has gone away entirely. So we thought, what if you could bring back shop class, but this time orient the projects around things that the community needed, and to infuse shop class with a more critical and creative-design-thinking studio process. So we took this kind of nebulous idea and have worked really closely with Dr. Zullinger for the past year on writing this as a one-year curriculum offered at the high school level to the junior class. And so this starts in four weeks, at the end of the summer, and my partner and I, Matthew and I, just went through the arduous and totally convoluted process of getting certified as high school teachers to actually run it. And this is what it looks like. So over the course of two semesters, the Fall and the Spring, the students spend three hours a day every single day in our 4,500 square foot studio/shop space. And during that time, they're doing everything from going out and doing ethnographic research and doing the need-finding, coming back into the studio, doing the brainstorming and design visualization to come up with concepts that might work, and then moving into the shop and actually testing them, building them, prototyping them, figuring out if they are going to work and refining that. And then over the summer, they're offered a summer job. They're paid as employees of Project H to be the construction crew with us to build these projects in the community. So the first project, which will be built next summer, is an open-air farmers' market downtown, followed by bus shelters for the school bus system in the second year and home improvements for the elderly in the third year. So these are real visible projects that hopefully the students can point to and say, "I built that, and I'm proud of it." So I want you to meet three of our students. This is Ryan. She is 15 years old. She loves agriculture and wants to be a high school teacher. She wants to go to college, but she wants to come back to Bertie County, because that's where her family is from, where she calls home, and she feels very strongly about giving back to this place that she's been fairly fortunate in. So what Studio H might offer her is a way to develop skills so that she might give back in the most meaningful way. This is Eric. He plays for the football team. He is really into dirtbike racing, and he wants to be an architect. So for him, Studio H offers him a way to develop the skills he will need as an architect, everything from drafting to wood and metal construction to how to do research for a client. And then this is Anthony. He is 16 years old, loves hunting and fishing and being outside and doing anything with his hands, and so for him, Studio H means that he can stay interested in his education through that hands-on engagement. He's interested in forestry, but he isn't sure, so if he ends up not going to college, he will have developed some industry-relevant skills. What design and building really offers to public education is a different kind of classroom. So this building downtown, which may very well become the site of our future farmers' market, is now the classroom. And going out into the community and interviewing your neighbors about what kind of food they buy and from where and why -- that's a homework assignment. And the ribbon-cutting ceremony at the end of the summer when they have built the farmers' market and it's open to the public -- that's the final exam. And for the community, what design and building offers is real, visible, built progress. It's one project per year, and it makes the youth the biggest asset and the biggest untapped resource in imagining a new future. So we recognize that Studio H, especially in its first year, is a small story -- 13 students, it's two teachers, it's one project in one place. But we feel like this could work in other places. And I really, strongly believe in the power of the small story, because it is so difficult to do humanitarian work at a global scale. Because, when you zoom out that far, you lose the ability to view people as humans. Ultimately, design itself is a process of constant education for the people that we work with and for and for us as designers. And let's face it, designers, we need to reinvent ourselves. We need to re-educate ourselves around the things that matter, we need to work outside of our comfort zones more, and we need to be better citizens in our own backyard. So while this is a very small story, we hope that it represents a step in the right direction for the future of rural communities and for the future of public education and hopefully also for the future of design. Thank you. (Applause)

What you have here is an electronic cigarette. It's something that's, since it was invented a year or two ago, has given me untold happiness. (Laughter) A little bit of it, I think, is the nicotine, but there's something much bigger than that. Which is ever since, in the U.K., they banned smoking in public places, I've never enjoyed a drinks party ever again. (Laughter) And the reason, I only worked out just the other day, which is when you go to a drinks party and you stand up and you hold a glass of red wine and you talk endlessly to people, you don't actually want to spend all the time talking. It's really, really tiring. Sometimes you just want to stand there silently, alone with your thoughts. Sometimes you just want to stand in the corner and stare out of the window. Now the problem is, when you can't smoke, if you stand and stare out of the window on your own, you're an antisocial, friendless idiot. (Laughter) If you stand and stare out of the window on your own with a cigarette, you're a fucking philosopher. (Laughter) (Applause) So the power of reframing things cannot be overstated. What we have is exactly the same thing, the same activity, but one of them makes you feel great and the other one, with just a small change of posture, makes you feel terrible. And I think one of the problems with classical economics is it's absolutely preoccupied with reality. And reality isn't a particularly good guide to human happiness. Why, for example, are pensioners much happier than the young unemployed? Both of them, after all, are in exactly the same stage of life. You both have too much time on your hands and not much money. But pensioners are reportedly very, very happy, whereas the unemployed are extraordinarily unhappy and depressed. The reason, I think, is that the pensioners believe they've chosen to be pensioners, whereas the young unemployed feel it's been thrust upon them. In England the upper middle classes have actually solved this problem perfectly, because they've re-branded unemployment. If you're an upper-middle-class English person, you call unemployment "a year off." (Laughter) And that's because having a son who's unemployed in Manchester is really quite embarrassing, but having a son who's unemployed in Thailand is really viewed as quite an accomplishment. (Laughter) But actually the power to re-brand things -- to understand that actually our experiences, costs, things don't actually much depend on what they really are, but on how we view them -- I genuinely think can't be overstated. There's an experiment I think Daniel Pink refers to where you put two dogs in a box and the box has an electric floor. Every now and then an electric shock is applied to the floor, which pains the dogs. The only difference is one of the dogs has a small button in its half of the box. And when it nuzzles the button, the electric shock stops. The other dog doesn't have the button. It's exposed to exactly the same level of pain as the dog in the first box, but it has no control over the circumstances. Generally the first dog can be relatively content. The second dog lapses into complete depression. The circumstances of our lives may actually matter less to our happiness than the sense of control we feel over our lives. It's an interesting question. We ask the question -- the whole debate in the Western world is about the level of taxation. But I think there's another debate to be asked, which is the level of control we have over our tax money. That what costs us 10 pounds in one context can be a curse. What costs us 10 pounds in a different context we may actually welcome. You know, pay 20,000 pounds in tax toward health and you're merely feeling a mug. Pay 20,000 pounds to endow a hospital ward and you're called a philanthropist. I'm probably in the wrong country to talk about willingness to pay tax. (Laughter) So I'll give you one in return. How you frame things really matters. Do you call it the bailout of Greece or the bailout of a load of stupid banks which lent to Greece? Because they are actually the same thing. What you call them actually affects how you react to them, viscerally and morally. I think psychological value is great to be absolutely honest. One of my great friends, a professor called Nick Chater, who's the Professor of Decision Sciences in London, believes that we should spend far less time looking into humanity's hidden depths and spend much more time exploring the hidden shallows. I think that's true actually. I think impressions have an insane effect on what we think and what we do. But what we don't have is a really good model of human psychology. At least pre-Kahneman perhaps, we didn't have a really good model of human psychology to put alongside models of engineering, of neoclassical economics. So people who believed in psychological solutions didn't have a model. We didn't have a framework. This is what Warren Buffett's business partner Charlie Munger calls "a latticework on which to hang your ideas." Engineers, economists, classical economists all had a very, very robust existing latticework on which practically every idea could be hung. We merely have a collection of random individual insights without an overall model. And what that means is that in looking at solutions, we've probably given too much priority to what I call technical engineering solutions, Newtonian solutions, and not nearly enough to the psychological ones. You know my example of the Eurostar. Six million pounds spent to reduce the journey time between Paris and London by about 40 minutes. For 0.01 percent of this money you could have put WiFi on the trains, which wouldn't have reduced the duration of the journey, but would have improved its enjoyment and its usefullness far more. For maybe 10 percent of the money, you could have paid all of the world's top male and female supermodels to walk up and down the train handing out free Chateau Petrus to all the passengers. You'd still have five [million] pounds in change, and people would ask for the trains to be slowed down. (Laughter) Why were we not given the chance to solve that problem psychologically? I think it's because there's an imbalance, an asymmetry, in the way we treat creative, emotionally-driven psychological ideas versus the way we treat rational, numerical, spreadsheet-driven ideas. If you're a creative person, I think quite rightly, you have to share all your ideas for approval with people much more rational than you. You have to go in and you have to have a cost-benefit analysis, a feasibility study, an ROI study and so forth. And I think that's probably right. But this does not apply the other way around. People who have an existing framework, an economic framework, an engineering framework, feel that actually logic is its own answer. What they don't say is, "Well the numbers all seem to add up, but before I present this idea, I'll go and show it to some really crazy people to see if they can come up with something better." And so we, artificially I think, prioritize what I'd call mechanistic ideas over psychological ideas. An example of a great psychological idea: The single best improvement in passenger satisfaction on the London Underground per pound spent came when they didn't add any extra trains nor change the frequency of the trains, they put dot matrix display board on the platforms. Because the nature of a wait is not just dependent on its numerical quality, its duration, but on the level of uncertainty you experience during that wait. Waiting seven minutes for a train with a countdown clock is less frustrating and irritating than waiting four minutes, knuckle-biting going, "When's this train going to damn well arrive?" Here's a beautiful example of a psychological solution deployed in Korea. Red traffic lights have a countdown delay. It's proven to reduce the accident rate in experiments. Why? Because road rage, impatience and general irritation are massively reduced when you can actually see the time you have to wait. In China, not really understanding the principle behind this, they applied the same principle to green traffic lights. (Laughter) Which isn't a great idea. You're 200 yards away, you realize you've got five seconds to go, you floor it. (Laughter) The Koreans, very assiduously, did test both. The accident rate goes down when you apply this to red traffic lights; it goes up when you apply it to green traffic lights. This is all I'm asking for really in human decision making, is the consideration of these three things. I'm not asking for the complete primacy of one over the other. I'm merely saying that when you solve problems, you should look at all three of these equally and you should seek as far as possible to find solutions which sit in the sweet spot in the middle. If you actually look at a great business, you'll nearly always see all of these three things coming into play. Really, really successful businesses -- Google is great, great technological success, but it's also based on a very good psychological insight: People believe something that only does one thing is better at that thing than something that does that thing and something else. It's an innate thing called goal dilution. Ayelet Fishbach has written a paper about this. Everybody else at the time of Google, more or less, was trying to be a portal. Yes, there's a search function, but you also have weather, sports scores, bits of news. Google understood that if you're just a search engine, people assume you're a very, very good search engine. All of you know this actually from when you go in to buy a television. And in the shabbier end of the row of flat screen TVs you can see are these rather despised things called combined TV and DVD players. And we have no knowledge whatsoever of the quality of those things, but we look at a combined TV and DVD player and we go, "Uck. It's probably a bit of a crap telly and a bit rubbish as a DVD player." So we walk out of the shops with one of each. Google is as much a psychological success as it is a technological one. I propose that we can use psychology to solve problems that we didn't even realize were problems at all. This is my suggestion for getting people to finish their course of antibiotics. Don't give them 24 white pills. Give them 18 white pills and six blue ones and tell them to take the white pills first and then take the blue ones. It's called chunking. The likelihood that people will get to the end is much greater when there is a milestone somewhere in the middle. One of the great mistakes, I think, of economics is it fails to understand that what something is, whether it's retirement, unemployment, cost, is a function, not only of its amount, but also its meaning. This is a toll crossing in Britain. Quite often queues happen at the tolls. Sometimes you get very, very severe queues. You could apply the same principle actually, if you like, to the security lanes in airports. What would happen if you could actually pay twice as much money to cross the bridge, but go through a lane that's an express lane? It's not an unreasonable thing to do. It's an economically efficient thing to do. Time means more to some people than others. If you're waiting trying to get to a job interview, you'd patently pay a couple of pounds more to go through the fast lane. If you're on the way to visit your mother in-law, you'd probably prefer to stay on the left. The only problem is if you introduce this economically efficient solution, people hate it. Because they think you're deliberately creating delays at the bridge in order to maximize your revenue, and "Why on earth should I pay to subsidize your imcompetence?" On the other hand, change the frame slightly and create charitable yield management, so the extra money you get goes not to the bridge company, it goes to charity, and the mental willingness to pay completely changes. You have a relatively economically efficient solution, but one that actually meets with public approval and even a small degree of affection, rather than being seen as bastardy. So where economists make the fundamental mistake is they think that money is money. Actually my pain experienced in paying five pounds is not just proportionate to the amount, but where I think that money is going. And I think understanding that could revolutionize tax policy. It could revolutionize the public services. It could really change things quite significantly. Here's a guy you all need to study. He's an Austrian school economist who was first active in the first half of the 20th century in Vienna. What was interesting about the Austrian school is they actually grew up alongside Freud. And so they're predominantly interested in psychology. They believed that there was a discipline called praxeology, which is a prior discipline to the study of economics. Praxeology is the study of human choice, action and decision making. I think they're right. I think the danger we have in today's world is we have the study of economics considers itself to be a prior discipline to the study of human psychology. But as Charlie Munger says, "If economics isn't behavioral, I don't know what the hell is." Von Mises, interestingly, believes economics is just a subset of psychology. I think he just refers to economics as "the study of human praxeology under conditions of scarcity." But von Mises, among many other things, I think uses an analogy which is probably the best justification and explanation for the value of marketing, the value of perceived value and the fact that we should actually treat it as being absolutely equivalent to any other kind of value. We tend to, all of us -- even those of us who work in marketing -- to think of value in two ways. There's the real value, which is when you make something in a factory and provide a service, and then there's a kind of dubious value, which you create by changing the way people look at things. Von Mises completely rejected this distinction. And he used this following analogy. He referred actually to strange economists called the French Physiocrats, who believed that the only true value was what you extracted from the land. So if you're a shepherd or a quarryman or a farmer, you created true value. If however, you bought some wool from the shepherd and charged a premium for converting it into a hat, you weren't actually creating value, you were exploiting the shepherd. Now von Mises said that modern economists make exactly the same mistake with regard to advertising and marketing. He says, if you run a restaurant, there is no healthy distinction to be made between the value you create by cooking the food and the value you create by sweeping the floor. One of them creates, perhaps, the primary product -- the thing we think we're paying for -- the other one creates a context within which we can enjoy and appreciate that product. And the idea that one of them should actually have priority over the other is fundamentally wrong. Try this quick thought experiment. Imagine a restaurant that serves Michelin-starred food, but actually where the restaurant smells of sewage and there's human feces on the floor. The best thing you can do there to create value is not actually to improve the food still further, it's to get rid of the smell and clean up the floor. And it's vital we understand this. If that seems like some strange, abstruse thing, in the U.K., the post office had a 98 percent success rate at delivering first-class mail the next day. They decided this wasn't good enough and they wanted to get it up to 99. The effort to do that almost broke the organization. If at the same time you'd gone and asked people, "What percentage of first-class mail arrives the next day?" the average answer, or the modal answer would have been 50 to 60 percent. Now if your perception is much worse than your reality, what on earth are you doing trying to change the reality? That's like trying to improve the food in a restaurant that stinks. What you need to do is first of all tell people that 98 percent of mail gets there the next day, first-class mail. That's pretty good. I would argue, in Britain there's a much better frame of reference, which is to tell people that more first-class mail arrives the next day in the U.K. than in Germany. Because generally in Britain if you want to make us happy about something, just tell us we do it better than the Germans. (Laughter) (Applause) Choose your frame of reference and the perceived value and therefore the actual value is completely tranformed. It has to be said of the Germans that the Germans and the French are doing a brilliant job of creating a united Europe. The only thing they don't expect is they're uniting Europe through a shared mild hatred of the French and Germans. But I'm British, that's the way we like it. What you also notice is that in any case our perception is leaky. We can't tell the difference between the quality of the food and the environment in which we consume it. All of you will have seen this phenomenon if you have your car washed or valeted. When you drive away, your car feels as if it drives better. And the reason for this, unless my car valet mysteriously is changing the oil and performing work which I'm not paying him for and I'm unaware of, is because perception is in any case leaky. Analgesics that are branded are more effective at reducing pain than analgesics that are not branded. I don't just mean through reported pain reduction, actual measured pain reduction. And so perception actually is leaky in any case. So if you do something that's perceptually bad in one respect, you can damage the other. Thank you very much. (Applause)

We are built out of very small stuff, and we are embedded in a very large cosmos, and the fact is that we are not very good at understanding reality at either of those scales, and that's because our brains haven't evolved to understand the world at that scale. Instead, we're trapped on this very thin slice of perception right in the middle. But it gets strange, because even at that slice of reality that we call home, we're not seeing most of the action that's going on. So take the colors of our world. This is light waves, electromagnetic radiation that bounces off objects and it hits specialized receptors in the back of our eyes. But we're not seeing all the waves out there. In fact, what we see is less than a 10 trillionth of what's out there. So you have radio waves and microwaves and X-rays and gamma rays passing through your body right now and you're completely unaware of it, because you don't come with the proper biological receptors for picking it up. There are thousands of cell phone conversations passing through you right now, and you're utterly blind to it. Now, it's not that these things are inherently unseeable. Snakes include some infrared in their reality, and honeybees include ultraviolet in their view of the world, and of course we build machines in the dashboards of our cars to pick up on signals in the radio frequency range, and we built machines in hospitals to pick up on the X-ray range. But you can't sense any of those by yourself, at least not yet, because you don't come equipped with the proper sensors. Now, what this means is that our experience of reality is constrained by our biology, and that goes against the common sense notion that our eyes and our ears and our fingertips are just picking up the objective reality that's out there. Instead, our brains are sampling just a little bit of the world. Now, across the animal kingdom, different animals pick up on different parts of reality. So in the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and butyric acid; in the world of the black ghost knifefish, its sensory world is lavishly colored by electrical fields; and for the echolocating bat, its reality is constructed out of air compression waves. That's the slice of their ecosystem that they can pick up on, and we have a word for this in science. It's called the umwelt, which is the German word for the surrounding world. Now, presumably, every animal assumes that its umwelt is the entire objective reality out there, because why would you ever stop to imagine that there's something beyond what we can sense. Instead, what we all do is we accept reality as it's presented to us. Let's do a consciousness-raiser on this. Imagine that you are a bloodhound dog. Your whole world is about smelling. You've got a long snout that has 200 million scent receptors in it, and you have wet nostrils that attract and trap scent molecules, and your nostrils even have slits so you can take big nosefuls of air. Everything is about smell for you. So one day, you stop in your tracks with a revelation. You look at your human owner and you think, "What is it like to have the pitiful, impoverished nose of a human? (Laughter) What is it like when you take a feeble little noseful of air? How can you not know that there's a cat 100 yards away, or that your neighbor was on this very spot six hours ago?" (Laughter) So because we're humans, we've never experienced that world of smell, so we don't miss it, because we are firmly settled into our umwelt. But the question is, do we have to be stuck there? So as a neuroscientist, I'm interested in the way that technology might expand our umwelt, and how that's going to change the experience of being human. So we already know that we can marry our technology to our biology, because there are hundreds of thousands of people walking around with artificial hearing and artificial vision. So the way this works is, you take a microphone and you digitize the signal, and you put an electrode strip directly into the inner ear. Or, with the retinal implant, you take a camera and you digitize the signal, and then you plug an electrode grid directly into the optic nerve. And as recently as 15 years ago, there were a lot of scientists who thought these technologies wouldn't work. Why? It's because these technologies speak the language of Silicon Valley, and it's not exactly the same dialect as our natural biological sense organs. But the fact is that it works; the brain figures out how to use the signals just fine. Now, how do we understand that? Well, here's the big secret: Your brain is not hearing or seeing any of this. Your brain is locked in a vault of silence and darkness inside your skull. All it ever sees are electrochemical signals that come in along different data cables, and this is all it has to work with, and nothing more. Now, amazingly, the brain is really good at taking in these signals and extracting patterns and assigning meaning, so that it takes this inner cosmos and puts together a story of this, your subjective world. But here's the key point: Your brain doesn't know, and it doesn't care, where it gets the data from. Whatever information comes in, it just figures out what to do with it. And this is a very efficient kind of machine. It's essentially a general purpose computing device, and it just takes in everything and figures out what it's going to do with it, and that, I think, frees up Mother Nature to tinker around with different sorts of input channels. So I call this the P.H. model of evolution, and I don't want to get too technical here, but P.H. stands for Potato Head, and I use this name to emphasize that all these sensors that we know and love, like our eyes and our ears and our fingertips, these are merely peripheral plug-and-play devices: You stick them in, and you're good to go. The brain figures out what to do with the data that comes in. And when you look across the animal kingdom, you find lots of peripheral devices. So snakes have heat pits with which to detect infrared, and the ghost knifefish has electroreceptors, and the star-nosed mole has this appendage with 22 fingers on it with which it feels around and constructs a 3D model of the world, and many birds have magnetite so they can orient to the magnetic field of the planet. So what this means is that nature doesn't have to continually redesign the brain. Instead, with the principles of brain operation established, all nature has to worry about is designing new peripherals. Okay. So what this means is this: The lesson that surfaces is that there's nothing really special or fundamental about the biology that we come to the table with. It's just what we have inherited from a complex road of evolution. But it's not what we have to stick with, and our best proof of principle of this comes from what's called sensory substitution. And that refers to feeding information into the brain via unusual sensory channels, and the brain just figures out what to do with it. Now, that might sound speculative, but the first paper demonstrating this was published in the journal Nature in 1969. So a scientist named Paul Bach-y-Rita put blind people in a modified dental chair, and he set up a video feed, and he put something in front of the camera, and then you would feel that poked into your back with a grid of solenoids. So if you wiggle a coffee cup in front of the camera, you're feeling that in your back, and amazingly, blind people got pretty good at being able to determine what was in front of the camera just by feeling it in the small of their back. Now, there have been many modern incarnations of this. The sonic glasses take a video feed right in front of you and turn that into a sonic landscape, so as things move around, and get closer and farther, it sounds like "Bzz, bzz, bzz." It sounds like a cacophony, but after several weeks, blind people start getting pretty good at understanding what's in front of them just based on what they're hearing. And it doesn't have to be through the ears: this system uses an electrotactile grid on the forehead, so whatever's in front of the video feed, you're feeling it on your forehead. Why the forehead? Because you're not using it for much else. The most modern incarnation is called the brainport, and this is a little electrogrid that sits on your tongue, and the video feed gets turned into these little electrotactile signals, and blind people get so good at using this that they can throw a ball into a basket, or they can navigate complex obstacle courses. They can come to see through their tongue. Now, that sounds completely insane, right? But remember, all vision ever is is electrochemical signals coursing around in your brain. Your brain doesn't know where the signals come from. It just figures out what to do with them. So my interest in my lab is sensory substitution for the deaf, and this is a project I've undertaken with a graduate student in my lab, Scott Novich, who is spearheading this for his thesis. And here is what we wanted to do: we wanted to make it so that sound from the world gets converted in some way so that a deaf person can understand what is being said. And we wanted to do this, given the power and ubiquity of portable computing, we wanted to make sure that this would run on cell phones and tablets, and also we wanted to make this a wearable, something that you could wear under your clothing. So here's the concept. So as I'm speaking, my sound is getting captured by the tablet, and then it's getting mapped onto a vest that's covered in vibratory motors, just like the motors in your cell phone. So as I'm speaking, the sound is getting translated to a pattern of vibration on the vest. Now, this is not just conceptual: this tablet is transmitting Bluetooth, and I'm wearing the vest right now. So as I'm speaking -- (Applause) -- the sound is getting translated into dynamic patterns of vibration. I'm feeling the sonic world around me. So, we've been testing this with deaf people now, and it turns out that after just a little bit of time, people can start feeling, they can start understanding the language of the vest. So this is Jonathan. He's 37 years old. He has a master's degree. He was born profoundly deaf, which means that there's a part of his umwelt that's unavailable to him. So we had Jonathan train with the vest for four days, two hours a day, and here he is on the fifth day. Scott Novich: You. David Eagleman: So Scott says a word, Jonathan feels it on the vest, and he writes it on the board. SN: Where. Where. DE: Jonathan is able to translate this complicated pattern of vibrations into an understanding of what's being said. SN: Touch. Touch. DE: Now, he's not doing this -- (Applause) -- Jonathan is not doing this consciously, because the patterns are too complicated, but his brain is starting to unlock the pattern that allows it to figure out what the data mean, and our expectation is that, after wearing this for about three months, he will have a direct perceptual experience of hearing in the same way that when a blind person passes a finger over braille, the meaning comes directly off the page without any conscious intervention at all. Now, this technology has the potential to be a game-changer, because the only other solution for deafness is a cochlear implant, and that requires an invasive surgery. And this can be built for 40 times cheaper than a cochlear implant, which opens up this technology globally, even for the poorest countries. Now, we've been very encouraged by our results with sensory substitution, but what we've been thinking a lot about is sensory addition. How could we use a technology like this to add a completely new kind of sense, to expand the human umvelt? For example, could we feed real-time data from the Internet directly into somebody's brain, and can they develop a direct perceptual experience? So here's an experiment we're doing in the lab. A subject is feeling a real-time streaming feed from the Net of data for five seconds. Then, two buttons appear, and he has to make a choice. He doesn't know what's going on. He makes a choice, and he gets feedback after one second. Now, here's the thing: The subject has no idea what all the patterns mean, but we're seeing if he gets better at figuring out which button to press. He doesn't know that what we're feeding is real-time data from the stock market, and he's making buy and sell decisions. (Laughter) And the feedback is telling him whether he did the right thing or not. And what we're seeing is, can we expand the human umvelt so that he comes to have, after several weeks, a direct perceptual experience of the economic movements of the planet. So we'll report on that later to see how well this goes. (Laughter) Here's another thing we're doing: During the talks this morning, we've been automatically scraping Twitter for the TED2015 hashtag, and we've been doing an automated sentiment analysis, which means, are people using positive words or negative words or neutral? And while this has been going on, I have been feeling this, and so I am plugged in to the aggregate emotion of thousands of people in real time, and that's a new kind of human experience, because now I can know how everyone's doing and how much you're loving this. (Laughter) (Applause) It's a bigger experience than a human can normally have. We're also expanding the umvelt of pilots. So in this case, the vest is streaming nine different measures from this quadcopter, so pitch and yaw and roll and orientation and heading, and that improves this pilot's ability to fly it. It's essentially like he's extending his skin up there, far away. And that's just the beginning. What we're envisioning is taking a modern cockpit full of gauges and instead of trying to read the whole thing, you feel it. We live in a world of information now, and there is a difference between accessing big data and experiencing it. So I think there's really no end to the possibilities on the horizon for human expansion. Just imagine an astronaut being able to feel the overall health of the International Space Station, or, for that matter, having you feel the invisible states of your own health, like your blood sugar and the state of your microbiome, or having 360-degree vision or seeing in infrared or ultraviolet. So the key is this: As we move into the future, we're going to increasingly be able to choose our own peripheral devices. We no longer have to wait for Mother Nature's sensory gifts on her timescales, but instead, like any good parent, she's given us the tools that we need to go out and define our own trajectory. So the question now is, how do you want to go out and experience your universe? Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Can you feel it? DE: Yeah. Actually, this was the first time I felt applause on the vest. It's nice. It's like a massage. (Laughter) CA: Twitter's going crazy. Twitter's going mad. So that stock market experiment. This could be the first experiment that secures its funding forevermore, right, if successful? DE: Well, that's right, I wouldn't have to write to NIH anymore. CA: Well look, just to be skeptical for a minute, I mean, this is amazing, but isn't most of the evidence so far that sensory substitution works, not necessarily that sensory addition works? I mean, isn't it possible that the blind person can see through their tongue because the visual cortex is still there, ready to process, and that that is needed as part of it? DE: That's a great question. We actually have no idea what the theoretical limits are of what kind of data the brain can take in. The general story, though, is that it's extraordinarily flexible. So when a person goes blind, what we used to call their visual cortex gets taken over by other things, by touch, by hearing, by vocabulary. So what that tells us is that the cortex is kind of a one-trick pony. It just runs certain kinds of computations on things. And when we look around at things like braille, for example, people are getting information through bumps on their fingers. So I don't think we have any reason to think there's a theoretical limit that we know the edge of. CA: If this checks out, you're going to be deluged. There are so many possible applications for this. Are you ready for this? What are you most excited about, the direction it might go? DE: I mean, I think there's a lot of applications here. In terms of beyond sensory substitution, the things I started mentioning about astronauts on the space station, they spend a lot of their time monitoring things, and they could instead just get what's going on, because what this is really good for is multidimensional data. The key is this: Our visual systems are good at detecting blobs and edges, but they're really bad at what our world has become, which is screens with lots and lots of data. We have to crawl that with our attentional systems. So this is a way of just feeling the state of something, just like the way you know the state of your body as you're standing around. So I think heavy machinery, safety, feeling the state of a factory, of your equipment, that's one place it'll go right away. CA: David Eagleman, that was one mind-blowing talk. Thank you very much. DE: Thank you, Chris. (Applause)

We are built out of very small stuff, and we are embedded in a very large cosmos, and the fact is that we are not very good at understanding reality at either of those scales, and that's because our brains haven't evolved to understand the world at that scale. Instead, we're trapped on this very thin slice of perception right in the middle. But it gets strange, because even at that slice of reality that we call home, we're not seeing most of the action that's going on. So take the colors of our world. This is light waves, electromagnetic radiation that bounces off objects and it hits specialized receptors in the back of our eyes. But we're not seeing all the waves out there. In fact, what we see is less than a 10 trillionth of what's out there. So you have radio waves and microwaves and X-rays and gamma rays passing through your body right now and you're completely unaware of it, because you don't come with the proper biological receptors for picking it up. There are thousands of cell phone conversations passing through you right now, and you're utterly blind to it. Now, it's not that these things are inherently unseeable. Snakes include some infrared in their reality, and honeybees include ultraviolet in their view of the world, and of course we build machines in the dashboards of our cars to pick up on signals in the radio frequency range, and we built machines in hospitals to pick up on the X-ray range. But you can't sense any of those by yourself, at least not yet, because you don't come equipped with the proper sensors. Now, what this means is that our experience of reality is constrained by our biology, and that goes against the common sense notion that our eyes and our ears and our fingertips are just picking up the objective reality that's out there. Instead, our brains are sampling just a little bit of the world. Now, across the animal kingdom, different animals pick up on different parts of reality. So in the blind and deaf world of the tick, the important signals are temperature and butyric acid; in the world of the black ghost knifefish, its sensory world is lavishly colored by electrical fields; and for the echolocating bat, its reality is constructed out of air compression waves. That's the slice of their ecosystem that they can pick up on, and we have a word for this in science. It's called the umwelt, which is the German word for the surrounding world. Now, presumably, every animal assumes that its umwelt is the entire objective reality out there, because why would you ever stop to imagine that there's something beyond what we can sense. Instead, what we all do is we accept reality as it's presented to us. Let's do a consciousness-raiser on this. Imagine that you are a bloodhound dog. Your whole world is about smelling. You've got a long snout that has 200 million scent receptors in it, and you have wet nostrils that attract and trap scent molecules, and your nostrils even have slits so you can take big nosefuls of air. Everything is about smell for you. So one day, you stop in your tracks with a revelation. You look at your human owner and you think, "What is it like to have the pitiful, impoverished nose of a human? (Laughter) What is it like when you take a feeble little noseful of air? How can you not know that there's a cat 100 yards away, or that your neighbor was on this very spot six hours ago?" (Laughter) So because we're humans, we've never experienced that world of smell, so we don't miss it, because we are firmly settled into our umwelt. But the question is, do we have to be stuck there? So as a neuroscientist, I'm interested in the way that technology might expand our umwelt, and how that's going to change the experience of being human. So we already know that we can marry our technology to our biology, because there are hundreds of thousands of people walking around with artificial hearing and artificial vision. So the way this works is, you take a microphone and you digitize the signal, and you put an electrode strip directly into the inner ear. Or, with the retinal implant, you take a camera and you digitize the signal, and then you plug an electrode grid directly into the optic nerve. And as recently as 15 years ago, there were a lot of scientists who thought these technologies wouldn't work. Why? It's because these technologies speak the language of Silicon Valley, and it's not exactly the same dialect as our natural biological sense organs. But the fact is that it works; the brain figures out how to use the signals just fine. Now, how do we understand that? Well, here's the big secret: Your brain is not hearing or seeing any of this. Your brain is locked in a vault of silence and darkness inside your skull. All it ever sees are electrochemical signals that come in along different data cables, and this is all it has to work with, and nothing more. Now, amazingly, the brain is really good at taking in these signals and extracting patterns and assigning meaning, so that it takes this inner cosmos and puts together a story of this, your subjective world. But here's the key point: Your brain doesn't know, and it doesn't care, where it gets the data from. Whatever information comes in, it just figures out what to do with it. And this is a very efficient kind of machine. It's essentially a general purpose computing device, and it just takes in everything and figures out what it's going to do with it, and that, I think, frees up Mother Nature to tinker around with different sorts of input channels. So I call this the P.H. model of evolution, and I don't want to get too technical here, but P.H. stands for Potato Head, and I use this name to emphasize that all these sensors that we know and love, like our eyes and our ears and our fingertips, these are merely peripheral plug-and-play devices: You stick them in, and you're good to go. The brain figures out what to do with the data that comes in. And when you look across the animal kingdom, you find lots of peripheral devices. So snakes have heat pits with which to detect infrared, and the ghost knifefish has electroreceptors, and the star-nosed mole has this appendage with 22 fingers on it with which it feels around and constructs a 3D model of the world, and many birds have magnetite so they can orient to the magnetic field of the planet. So what this means is that nature doesn't have to continually redesign the brain. Instead, with the principles of brain operation established, all nature has to worry about is designing new peripherals. Okay. So what this means is this: The lesson that surfaces is that there's nothing really special or fundamental about the biology that we come to the table with. It's just what we have inherited from a complex road of evolution. But it's not what we have to stick with, and our best proof of principle of this comes from what's called sensory substitution. And that refers to feeding information into the brain via unusual sensory channels, and the brain just figures out what to do with it. Now, that might sound speculative, but the first paper demonstrating this was published in the journal Nature in 1969. So a scientist named Paul Bach-y-Rita put blind people in a modified dental chair, and he set up a video feed, and he put something in front of the camera, and then you would feel that poked into your back with a grid of solenoids. So if you wiggle a coffee cup in front of the camera, you're feeling that in your back, and amazingly, blind people got pretty good at being able to determine what was in front of the camera just by feeling it in the small of their back. Now, there have been many modern incarnations of this. The sonic glasses take a video feed right in front of you and turn that into a sonic landscape, so as things move around, and get closer and farther, it sounds like "Bzz, bzz, bzz." It sounds like a cacophony, but after several weeks, blind people start getting pretty good at understanding what's in front of them just based on what they're hearing. And it doesn't have to be through the ears: this system uses an electrotactile grid on the forehead, so whatever's in front of the video feed, you're feeling it on your forehead. Why the forehead? Because you're not using it for much else. The most modern incarnation is called the brainport, and this is a little electrogrid that sits on your tongue, and the video feed gets turned into these little electrotactile signals, and blind people get so good at using this that they can throw a ball into a basket, or they can navigate complex obstacle courses. They can come to see through their tongue. Now, that sounds completely insane, right? But remember, all vision ever is is electrochemical signals coursing around in your brain. Your brain doesn't know where the signals come from. It just figures out what to do with them. So my interest in my lab is sensory substitution for the deaf, and this is a project I've undertaken with a graduate student in my lab, Scott Novich, who is spearheading this for his thesis. And here is what we wanted to do: we wanted to make it so that sound from the world gets converted in some way so that a deaf person can understand what is being said. And we wanted to do this, given the power and ubiquity of portable computing, we wanted to make sure that this would run on cell phones and tablets, and also we wanted to make this a wearable, something that you could wear under your clothing. So here's the concept. So as I'm speaking, my sound is getting captured by the tablet, and then it's getting mapped onto a vest that's covered in vibratory motors, just like the motors in your cell phone. So as I'm speaking, the sound is getting translated to a pattern of vibration on the vest. Now, this is not just conceptual: this tablet is transmitting Bluetooth, and I'm wearing the vest right now. So as I'm speaking -- (Applause) -- the sound is getting translated into dynamic patterns of vibration. I'm feeling the sonic world around me. So, we've been testing this with deaf people now, and it turns out that after just a little bit of time, people can start feeling, they can start understanding the language of the vest. So this is Jonathan. He's 37 years old. He has a master's degree. He was born profoundly deaf, which means that there's a part of his umwelt that's unavailable to him. So we had Jonathan train with the vest for four days, two hours a day, and here he is on the fifth day. Scott Novich: You. David Eagleman: So Scott says a word, Jonathan feels it on the vest, and he writes it on the board. SN: Where. Where. DE: Jonathan is able to translate this complicated pattern of vibrations into an understanding of what's being said. SN: Touch. Touch. DE: Now, he's not doing this -- (Applause) -- Jonathan is not doing this consciously, because the patterns are too complicated, but his brain is starting to unlock the pattern that allows it to figure out what the data mean, and our expectation is that, after wearing this for about three months, he will have a direct perceptual experience of hearing in the same way that when a blind person passes a finger over braille, the meaning comes directly off the page without any conscious intervention at all. Now, this technology has the potential to be a game-changer, because the only other solution for deafness is a cochlear implant, and that requires an invasive surgery. And this can be built for 40 times cheaper than a cochlear implant, which opens up this technology globally, even for the poorest countries. Now, we've been very encouraged by our results with sensory substitution, but what we've been thinking a lot about is sensory addition. How could we use a technology like this to add a completely new kind of sense, to expand the human umvelt? For example, could we feed real-time data from the Internet directly into somebody's brain, and can they develop a direct perceptual experience? So here's an experiment we're doing in the lab. A subject is feeling a real-time streaming feed from the Net of data for five seconds. Then, two buttons appear, and he has to make a choice. He doesn't know what's going on. He makes a choice, and he gets feedback after one second. Now, here's the thing: The subject has no idea what all the patterns mean, but we're seeing if he gets better at figuring out which button to press. He doesn't know that what we're feeding is real-time data from the stock market, and he's making buy and sell decisions. (Laughter) And the feedback is telling him whether he did the right thing or not. And what we're seeing is, can we expand the human umvelt so that he comes to have, after several weeks, a direct perceptual experience of the economic movements of the planet. So we'll report on that later to see how well this goes. (Laughter) Here's another thing we're doing: During the talks this morning, we've been automatically scraping Twitter for the TED2015 hashtag, and we've been doing an automated sentiment analysis, which means, are people using positive words or negative words or neutral? And while this has been going on, I have been feeling this, and so I am plugged in to the aggregate emotion of thousands of people in real time, and that's a new kind of human experience, because now I can know how everyone's doing and how much you're loving this. (Laughter) (Applause) It's a bigger experience than a human can normally have. We're also expanding the umvelt of pilots. So in this case, the vest is streaming nine different measures from this quadcopter, so pitch and yaw and roll and orientation and heading, and that improves this pilot's ability to fly it. It's essentially like he's extending his skin up there, far away. And that's just the beginning. What we're envisioning is taking a modern cockpit full of gauges and instead of trying to read the whole thing, you feel it. We live in a world of information now, and there is a difference between accessing big data and experiencing it. So I think there's really no end to the possibilities on the horizon for human expansion. Just imagine an astronaut being able to feel the overall health of the International Space Station, or, for that matter, having you feel the invisible states of your own health, like your blood sugar and the state of your microbiome, or having 360-degree vision or seeing in infrared or ultraviolet. So the key is this: As we move into the future, we're going to increasingly be able to choose our own peripheral devices. We no longer have to wait for Mother Nature's sensory gifts on her timescales, but instead, like any good parent, she's given us the tools that we need to go out and define our own trajectory. So the question now is, how do you want to go out and experience your universe? Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Can you feel it? DE: Yeah. Actually, this was the first time I felt applause on the vest. It's nice. It's like a massage. (Laughter) CA: Twitter's going crazy. Twitter's going mad. So that stock market experiment. This could be the first experiment that secures its funding forevermore, right, if successful? DE: Well, that's right, I wouldn't have to write to NIH anymore. CA: Well look, just to be skeptical for a minute, I mean, this is amazing, but isn't most of the evidence so far that sensory substitution works, not necessarily that sensory addition works? I mean, isn't it possible that the blind person can see through their tongue because the visual cortex is still there, ready to process, and that that is needed as part of it? DE: That's a great question. We actually have no idea what the theoretical limits are of what kind of data the brain can take in. The general story, though, is that it's extraordinarily flexible. So when a person goes blind, what we used to call their visual cortex gets taken over by other things, by touch, by hearing, by vocabulary. So what that tells us is that the cortex is kind of a one-trick pony. It just runs certain kinds of computations on things. And when we look around at things like braille, for example, people are getting information through bumps on their fingers. So I don't thing we have any reason to think there's a theoretical limit that we know the edge of. CA: If this checks out, you're going to be deluged. There are so many possible applications for this. Are you ready for this? What are you most excited about, the direction it might go? DE: I mean, I think there's a lot of applications here. In terms of beyond sensory substitution, the things I started mentioning about astronauts on the space station, they spend a lot of their time monitoring things, and they could instead just get what's going on, because what this is really good for is multidimensional data. The key is this: Our visual systems are good at detecting blobs and edges, but they're really bad at what our world has become, which is screens with lots and lots of data. We have to crawl that with our attentional systems. So this is a way of just feeling the state of something, just like the way you know the state of your body as you're standing around. So I think heavy machinery, safety, feeling the state of a factory, of your equipment, that's one place it'll go right away. CA: David Eagleman, that was one mind-blowing talk. Thank you very much. DE: Thank you, Chris. (Applause)

Over the past couple of days, as I've been preparing for my speech, I've become more and more nervous about what I'm going to say and about being on the same stage as all these fascinating people. Being on the same stage as Al Gore, who was the first person I ever voted for. And -- (Laughter) So I was getting pretty nervous and, you know, I didn't know that Chris sits on the stage, and that's more nerve-racking. But then I started thinking about my family. I started thinking about my father and my grandfather and my great-grandfather, and I realized that I had all of these Teds going through my bloodstream -- (Laughter) that I had to consider this "my element." So, who am I? Chris kind of mentioned I started a company with my husband. We have about 125 people internationally. If you looked in the book, you saw this ... (Laughter) which I really was appalled by. (Laughter) And because I wanted to impress you all with slides, since I saw the great presentations yesterday with graphs, I made a graph that moves, and I talk about the makeup of me. (Laughter) So, besides this freakish thing, this is my science slide. This is math, and this is science, this is genetics. This is my grandmother, and this is where I get this mouth. (Laughter) So -- I'm a blogger, which, probably, to a lot of you, means different things. You may have heard about the Kryptonite lock brouhaha, where a blogger talked about how you hack or break into a Kryptonite lock using a ballpoint pen, and it spread all over. Kryptonite had to adjust the lock, and they had to address it to avoid too many customer concerns. You may have heard about Rathergate, which was basically the result of bloggers realizing that the "th" in 111 is not typeset on an old typewriter; it's on Word. Bloggers exposed this, or they worked hard to expose this. You know, blogs are scary. This is what you see. I see this, and I'm sure scared -- I swear on stage -- shitless about blogs, because this is not something that's friendly. But there are blogs that are changing the way we read news and consume media, and these are great examples. These people are reaching thousands, if not millions, of readers, and that's incredibly important. During the hurricane, you had MSNBC posting about the hurricane on their blog, updating it frequently. This was possible because of the easy nature of blogging tools. You have my friend, who has a blog on PVRs, personal recorders. He makes enough money just by running ads, to support his family up in Oregon. That's all he does now, and this is something that blogs have made possible. And then you have something like this, which is Interplast. It's a wonderful organization of people and doctors who go to developing nations to offer plastic surgery to those who need it. Children with cleft palates get it, and they document their story. This is wonderful. I am not that caring. (Laughter) I talk about myself. That's what I am. I'm a blogger. I have always decided that I was going to be an expert on one thing, and I am an expert on this person, and so I write about it. So, the short story about my blog: it started in 2001, I was 23. I wasn't happy with my job, because I was a designer, but I wasn't being really stimulated. I was an English major in college. I didn't have any use for it, but I missed writing. So, I started to write a blog and I started to create things like these little stories. This was an illustration about my camp experience when I was 11 years old, and how I went to a YMCA camp, Christian camp, and basically by the end, I had made my friends hate me so much that I hid in a bunk, They couldn't find me, they sent a search party, and I overheard people saying they wish I had killed myself -- jumped off Bible Peak. You can laugh, this is OK. (Laughter) This is me. This is what happened to me. And when I started my blog, it was really this one goal -- I said, "I am not going to be famous to the world, but I could be famous to people on the Internet." And I set a goal. I said, "I'm going to win an award," because I had never won an award in my entire life. And I said, "I'm going to win the South by Southwest Weblog award." And I won it -- I reached all of these people, and I had tens of thousands of people reading about my life every day. And then I wrote a post about a banjo. I wrote a post about wanting to buy a banjo -- a $300 banjo, which is a lot of money. And I don't play instruments; I don't know anything about music. I like music, and I like banjos, and I think I probably heard Steve Martin playing, and I said, "I could do that." And I said to my husband, "Ben, can I buy a banjo?" And he's like, "No." And my husband -- (Laughter) this is my husband, who is very hot -- he won an award for being hot. (Laughter) He told me, "You cannot buy a banjo. You're just like your dad," who collects instruments. And I wrote a post about how I was so mad at him, he was such a tyrant -- he would not let me buy this banjo. And those people who know me understood my joke -- this is Mena, this is how I make a joke at people. Because the joke in this is that this person is not a tyrant, this person is so loving and so sweet that he lets me dress him up and post pictures of him to my blog. (Laughter) And if he knew I was showing this right now -- I put this in today -- he would kill me. But the thing was, my friends read it, and they're like, "Oh, that Mena, she wrote a post about wanting a stupid thing and being stupid." But I got emails from people that said, "Oh my God, your husband is such an asshole. How much money does he spend on beer in a year? You could take that money and buy your banjo. Why don't you open a separate account?" I've been with him since I was 17, we've never had a separate bank account. They said, "Separate your bank account. Spend your money; spend his money, that's it." And then I got people saying, "Leave him." (Laughter) I was like, "OK, what? Who are these people? And why are they reading this?" And I realized: I don't want to reach these people. I don't want to write for this public audience. And I started to kill my blog slowly. I'm like, I don't want to write this anymore. Slowly and slowly -- And I did tell personal stories from time to time. I wrote this one, and I put this up because of Einstein today. I'm going to get choked up, because this is my first pet, and she passed away two years ago. And I decided to break from, "I don't really write about my public life," because I wanted to give her a little memorial. But anyways, it's these sorts of personal stories -- You know, you read the blogs about politics or about media, and gossip and all these things. These are out there, but it's more of the personal that interests me, and this is who I am. You see Norman Rockwell, and you have art critics say, "Norman Rockwell is not art. Norman Rockwell hangs in living rooms and bathrooms, and this is not something to be considered high art." And I think this is one of the most important things to us as humans. These things resonate with us, and, if you think about blogs, you think of high art blogs, the history paintings about, you know, all the biblical stories, and then you have this. These are the blogs that interest me: the people that just tell stories. One story is about this baby, and his name is Odin. His father was a blogger. And he was writing his blog one day, and his wife gave birth to her baby at 25 weeks. And he never expected this. One day, it was normal; the next day, it was hell. And this is a one-pound baby. So Odin was documented every single day. Pictures were taken every day: day one, day two ... You have day nine -- they're talking about his apnea; day 39 -- he gets pneumonia. His baby is so small, and I've never encountered such a -- just -- a disturbing image, but just so heartfelt. And you're reading this as it happens, so on day 55, everybody reads that he's having failures: breathing failures and heart failures, and it's slowing down, and you don't know what to expect. But then it gets better. Day 96, he goes home. And you see this post. That's not something you're going to see in a paper or magazine but this is something this person feels, and people are excited about it -- 28 comments. That's not a huge amount of people reading, but 28 people matter. And today, he is a healthy baby, who, if you read his blog -- it's snowdeal.org, his father's blog -- he is taking pictures of him still, because he is still his son and he is, I think, at his age level right now because he had received such great treatment from the hospital. So, blogs. So what? You've probably heard these things before. We talked about the WELL, and about all these sorts of things throughout our online history. But I think blogs are basically just an evolution, and that's where we are today. It's this record of who you are, your persona. You have your Google search, where you say, "What is Mena Trott?" And then you find these things and you're happy or unhappy. But then you also find people's blogs, and those are the records of people that are writing daily -- not necessarily about the same topic, but things that interest them. And we talk about the world flattens, being in this panel, and I am very optimistic -- whenever I think about blogs, I'm like, "We've got to reach all these people." Hundreds of millions and billions of people. We're getting into China, we want to be there, but there are so many people that won't have the access to write a blog. But to see something like the $100 computer is amazing, because blogging software is simple. We have a successful company because of timing, and because of perseverance, but it's simple stuff -- it's not rocket science. And so, that's an amazing thing to consider. So -- the life record of a blog is something that I find incredibly important. And we started with a slide of my Teds, and I had to add this slide, because I knew the minute I showed this, my mom -- my mom will see this, because she does read my blog and she'll say, "Why wasn't there a picture of me?" This is my mom. So, I have all the people that I know of. But this is basically the extent of the family that I know in terms of my direct line. I showed a Norman Rockwell painting before, and this one, I grew up with, looking at constantly. I would spend hours looking at the connections, saying, "Oh, the little kid up at the top has red hair; so does that first generation up there." And it's just these little things. This is not science, but this was enough for me to be really interested in how we have evolved and how we can trace our line. So that has always influenced me. I have this record, this 1910 census, of another Grabowski -- that's my maiden name -- and there's a Theodore, because there's always a Theodore. This is all I have, a couple of facts about somebody. I have their date of birth, their age, what they did in their household, if they spoke English, and that's it, that's all I know of these people. And it's pretty sad, because I only go back five generations, and that's it. I don't even know what happens on my mom's side, because she's from Cuba and I don't have that many things. Just doing this, I spent time in the archives -- that's why my husband's a saint -- I spent time in the Washington archives, just sitting there, looking for these things. Now it's online, but he sat through that. And so you have this record and -- This is my great-great-grandmother. This is the only picture I have. And to think of what we have the ability to do with our blogs; to think about the people that are on those $100 computers, talking about who they are, sharing these personal stories -- this is an amazing thing. Another photo that has greatly influenced me, or a series of photos, is this project that's done by an Argentinean man and his wife. And he's basically taking a picture of his family every day for the past, what is '76? -- 20 ... Oh my God, I'm '77 -- 29 years? Twenty-nine years. There was a joke, originally, about my graph that I left out, which is: You see all this math? I'm just happy I was able to add it up to 100, because that's my skill set. (Laughter) So you have these people aging, and now this is them today, or last year. And that's a powerful thing to have, to be able to track this. I wish that I would have this of my family. I know that one day my children will be wondering -- or my grandchildren, or my great-grandchildren, if I ever have children -- what I am going to -- who I was. So I do something that's very narcissistic -- I am a blogger -- that is an amazing thing for me, because it captures a moment in time every day. I take a picture of myself -- I've been doing this since last year -- every single day. And, you know, it's the same picture; it's basically the same person. Only a couple of people read it. I don't write this for this audience; I'm showing it now, but I would go insane if this was really public. About four people probably read it, and they tell me, "You haven't updated." I'm probably going to get people telling me I haven't updated. But this is amazing, because I can go back to a day -- to April 2005, and say, what was I doing this day? I look at it, I know exactly. It's this visual cue that is so important to what we do. I put the bad pictures up too, because there are bad pictures. (Laughter) And I remember instantly: I am in Germany in this -- I had to go for a one-day trip. I was sick, and I was in a hotel room, and I wanted not to be there. And so you see these things, it's not just always smiling. Now I've kind of evolved it, so I have this look. If you look at my driver's license, I have the same look, and it's a pretty disturbing thing, but it's something that is really important. And the last story I really want to tell is this story, because this is probably the one that means the most to me in all of what I'm doing. I'll probably get choked up, because I tend to when I talk about this. So, this woman, her name was Emma, and she was a blogger on our service, TypePad. And she was a beta tester, so she was there right when we opened -- you know, there was 100 people. And she wrote about her life dealing with cancer. She was writing and writing, and we all started reading it, because we had so few blogs on the service, we could keep track of everyone. And she was writing one day, and then she disappeared for a little bit. And her sister came on, and she said that Emma had passed away. And all of our support staff who had talked to her were really emotional, and it was a very hard day at the company. And this was one of those instances where I realized how much blogging affects our relationship, and flattening this sort of world. That this woman is in England, and she lives -- she lived -- a life where she was talking about what she was doing. But the big thing that really influenced us was, her sister wrote to me, and she said -- and she wrote on this blog -- that writing her blog during the last couple of months of her life was probably the best thing that had happened to her, and being able to talk to people and to share what was going on, and being able to write and receive comments. And that was amazing, to be able to know that we had empowered that, and that blogging was something that she felt comfortable doing, and the idea that blogging doesn't have to be scary, that we don't always have to be attack of the blogs, that we can be people who are open, and wanting to help and talk to people. That was an amazing thing. And so I printed out and sent a PDF of her blog to her family, and they passed it out at her memorial service, and even in her obituary, they mentioned her blog, because it was such a big part of her life. And that's a huge thing. So, this is her legacy, and I think that my call to action to all of you is: think about blogs, think about what they are, think about what you've thought of them, and then actually do it, because it's something that's really going to change our lives. So, thank you. (Applause)

Today I'm going to talk to you about the problem of other minds. And the problem I'm going to talk about is not the familiar one from philosophy, which is, "How can we know whether other people have minds?" That is, maybe you have a mind, and everyone else is just a really convincing robot. So that's a problem in philosophy, but for today's purposes I'm going to assume that many people in this audience have a mind, and that I don't have to worry about this. There is a second problem that is maybe even more familiar to us as parents and teachers and spouses and novelists, which is, "Why is it so hard to know what somebody else wants or believes?" Or perhaps, more relevantly, "Why is it so hard to change what somebody else wants or believes?" I think novelists put this best. Like Philip Roth, who said, "And yet, what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people? So ill equipped are we all, to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims." So as a teacher and as a spouse, this is, of course, a problem I confront every day. But as a scientist, I'm interested in a different problem of other minds, and that is the one I'm going to introduce to you today. And that problem is, "How is it so easy to know other minds?" So to start with an illustration, you need almost no information, one snapshot of a stranger, to guess what this woman is thinking, or what this man is. And put another way, the crux of the problem is the machine that we use for thinking about other minds, our brain, is made up of pieces, brain cells, that we share with all other animals, with monkeys and mice and even sea slugs. And yet, you put them together in a particular network, and what you get is the capacity to write Romeo and Juliet. Or to say, as Alan Greenspan did, "I know you think you understand what you thought I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant." (Laughter) So, the job of my field of cognitive neuroscience is to stand with these ideas, one in each hand. And to try to understand how you can put together simple units, simple messages over space and time, in a network, and get this amazing human capacity to think about minds. So I'm going to tell you three things about this today. Obviously the whole project here is huge. And I'm going to tell you just our first few steps about the discovery of a special brain region for thinking about other people's thoughts. Some observations on the slow development of this system as we learn how to do this difficult job. And then finally, to show that some of the differences between people, in how we judge others, can be explained by differences in this brain system. So first, the first thing I want to tell you is that there is a brain region in the human brain, in your brains, whose job it is to think about other people's thoughts. This is a picture of it. It's called the Right Temporo-Parietal Junction. It's above and behind your right ear. And this is the brain region you used when you saw the pictures I showed you, or when you read Romeo and Juliet or when you tried to understand Alan Greenspan. And you don't use it for solving any other kinds of logical problems. So this brain region is called the Right TPJ. And this picture shows the average activation in a group of what we call typical human adults. They're MIT undergraduates. (Laughter) The second thing I want to say about this brain system is that although we human adults are really good at understanding other minds, we weren't always that way. It takes children a long time to break into the system. I'm going to show you a little bit of that long, extended process. The first thing I'm going to show you is a change between age three and five, as kids learn to understand that somebody else can have beliefs that are different from their own. So I'm going to show you a five-year-old who is getting a standard kind of puzzle that we call the false belief task. Rebecca Saxe (Video): This is the first pirate. His name is Ivan. And you know what pirates really like? Child: What? RS: Pirates really like cheese sandwiches. Child: Cheese? I love cheese! RS: Yeah. So Ivan has this cheese sandwich, and he says, "Yum yum yum yum yum! I really love cheese sandwiches." And Ivan puts his sandwich over here, on top of the pirate chest. And Ivan says, "You know what? I need a drink with my lunch." And so Ivan goes to get a drink. And while Ivan is away the wind comes, and it blows the sandwich down onto the grass. And now, here comes the other pirate. This pirate is called Joshua. And Joshua also really loves cheese sandwiches. So Joshua has a cheese sandwich and he says, "Yum yum yum yum yum! I love cheese sandwiches." And he puts his cheese sandwich over here on top of the pirate chest. Child: So, that one is his. RS: That one is Joshua's. That's right. Child: And then his went on the ground. RS: That's exactly right. Child: So he won't know which one is his. RS: Oh. So now Joshua goes off to get a drink. Ivan comes back and he says, "I want my cheese sandwich." So which one do you think Ivan is going to take? Child: I think he is going to take that one. RS: Yeah, you think he's going to take that one? All right. Let's see. Oh yeah, you were right. He took that one. So that's a five-year-old who clearly understands that other people can have false beliefs and what the consequences are for their actions. Now I'm going to show you a three-year-old who got the same puzzle. RS: And Ivan says, "I want my cheese sandwich." Which sandwich is he going to take? Do you think he's going to take that one? Let's see what happens. Let's see what he does. Here comes Ivan. And he says, "I want my cheese sandwich." And he takes this one. Uh-oh. Why did he take that one? Child: His was on the grass. So the three-year-old does two things differently. First, he predicts Ivan will take the sandwich that's really his. And second, when he sees Ivan taking the sandwich where he left his, where we would say he's taking that one because he thinks it's his, the three-year-old comes up with another explanation: He's not taking his own sandwich because he doesn't want it, because now it's dirty, on the ground. So that's why he's taking the other sandwich. Now of course, development doesn't end at five. And we can see the continuation of this process of learning to think about other people's thoughts by upping the ante and asking children now, not for an action prediction, but for a moral judgment. So first I'm going to show you the three-year-old again. RS.: So is Ivan being mean and naughty for taking Joshua's sandwich? Child: Yeah. RS: Should Ivan get in trouble for taking Joshua's sandwich? Child: Yeah. So it's maybe not surprising he thinks it was mean of Ivan to take Joshua's sandwich, since he thinks Ivan only took Joshua's sandwich to avoid having to eat his own dirty sandwich. But now I'm going to show you the five-year-old. Remember the five-year-old completely understood why Ivan took Joshua's sandwich. RS: Was Ivan being mean and naughty for taking Joshua's sandwich? Child: Um, yeah. And so, it is not until age seven that we get what looks more like an adult response. RS: Should Ivan get in trouble for taking Joshua's sandwich? Child: No, because the wind should get in trouble. He says the wind should get in trouble for switching the sandwiches. (Laughter) And now what we've started to do in my lab is to put children into the brain scanner and ask what's going on in their brain as they develop this ability to think about other people's thoughts. So the first thing is that in children we see this same brain region, the Right TPJ, being used while children are thinking about other people. But it's not quite like the adult brain. So whereas in the adults, as I told you, this brain region is almost completely specialized -- it does almost nothing else except for thinking about other people's thoughts -- in children it's much less so, when they are age five to eight, the age range of the children I just showed you. And actually if we even look at eight to 11-year-olds, getting into early adolescence, they still don't have quite an adult-like brain region. And so, what we can see is that over the course of childhood and even into adolescence, both the cognitive system, our mind's ability to think about other minds, and the brain system that supports it are continuing, slowly, to develop. But of course, as you're probably aware, even in adulthood, people differ from one another in how good they are at thinking of other minds, how often they do it and how accurately. And so what we wanted to know was, could differences among adults in how they think about other people's thoughts be explained in terms of differences in this brain region? So, the first thing that we did is we gave adults a version of the pirate problem that we gave to the kids. And I'm going to give that to you now. So Grace and her friend are on a tour of a chemical factory, and they take a break for coffee. And Grace's friend asks for some sugar in her coffee. Grace goes to make the coffee and finds by the coffee a pot containing a white powder, which is sugar. But the powder is labeled "Deadly Poison," so Grace thinks that the powder is a deadly poison. And she puts it in her friend's coffee. And her friend drinks the coffee, and is fine. How many people think it was morally permissible for Grace to put the powder in the coffee? Okay. Good. (Laughter) So we ask people, how much should Grace be blamed in this case, which we call a failed attempt to harm? And we can compare that to another case, where everything in the real world is the same. The powder is still sugar, but what's different is what Grace thinks. Now she thinks the powder is sugar. And perhaps unsurprisingly, if Grace thinks the powder is sugar and puts it in her friend's coffee, people say she deserves no blame at all. Whereas if she thinks the powder was poison, even though it's really sugar, now people say she deserves a lot of blame, even though what happened in the real world was exactly the same. And in fact, they say she deserves more blame in this case, the failed attempt to harm, than in another case, which we call an accident. Where Grace thought the powder was sugar, because it was labeled "sugar" and by the coffee machine, but actually the powder was poison. So even though when the powder was poison, the friend drank the coffee and died, people say Grace deserves less blame in that case, when she innocently thought it was sugar, than in the other case, where she thought it was poison and no harm occurred. People, though, disagree a little bit about exactly how much blame Grace should get in the accident case. Some people think she should deserve more blame, and other people less. And what I'm going to show you is what happened when we look inside the brains of people while they're making that judgment. So what I'm showing you, from left to right, is how much activity there was in this brain region, and from top to bottom, how much blame people said that Grace deserved. And what you can see is, on the left when there was very little activity in this brain region, people paid little attention to her innocent belief and said she deserved a lot of blame for the accident. Whereas on the right, where there was a lot of activity, people paid a lot more attention to her innocent belief, and said she deserved a lot less blame for causing the accident. So that's good, but of course what we'd rather is have a way to interfere with function in this brain region, and see if we could change people's moral judgment. And we do have such a tool. It's called Trans-Cranial Magnetic Stimulation, or TMS. This is a tool that lets us pass a magnetic pulse through somebody's skull, into a small region of their brain, and temporarily disorganize the function of the neurons in that region. So I'm going to show you a demo of this. First, I'm going to show you that this is a magnetic pulse. I'm going to show you what happens when you put a quarter on the machine. When you hear clicks, we're turning the machine on. So now I'm going to apply that same pulse to my brain, to the part of my brain that controls my hand. So there is no physical force, just a magnetic pulse. Woman (Video): Ready, Rebecca? RS: Yes. Okay, so it causes a small involuntary contraction in my hand by putting a magnetic pulse in my brain. And we can use that same pulse, now applied to the RTPJ, to ask if we can change people's moral judgments. So these are the judgments I showed you before, people's normal moral judgments. And then we can apply TMS to the RTPJ and ask how people's judgments change. And the first thing is, people can still do this task overall. So their judgments of the case when everything was fine remain the same. They say she deserves no blame. But in the case of a failed attempt to harm, where Grace thought that it was poison, although it was really sugar, people now say it was more okay, she deserves less blame for putting the powder in the coffee. And in the case of the accident, where she thought that it was sugar, but it was really poison and so she caused a death, people say that it was less okay, she deserves more blame. So what I've told you today is that people come, actually, especially well equipped to think about other people's thoughts. We have a special brain system that lets us think about what other people are thinking. This system takes a long time to develop, slowly throughout the course of childhood and into early adolescence. And even in adulthood, differences in this brain region can explain differences among adults in how we think about and judge other people. But I want to give the last word back to the novelists, and to Philip Roth, who ended by saying, "The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living. Getting them wrong and wrong and wrong, and then on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again." Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: So, I have a question. When you start talking about using magnetic pulses to change people's moral judgments, that sounds alarming. (Laughter) Please tell me that you're not taking phone calls from the Pentagon, say. RS: I'm not. I mean, they're calling, but I'm not taking the call. (Laughter) CA: They really are calling? So then seriously, you must lie awake at night sometimes wondering where this work leads. I mean, you're clearly an incredible human being, but someone could take this knowledge and in some future not-torture chamber, do acts that people here might be worried about. RS: Yeah, we worry about this. So, there's a couple of things to say about TMS. One is that you can't be TMSed without knowing it. So it's not a surreptitious technology. It's quite hard, actually, to get those very small changes. The changes I showed you are impressive to me because of what they tell us about the function of the brain, but they're small on the scale of the moral judgments that we actually make. And what we changed was not people's moral judgments when they're deciding what to do, when they're making action choices. We changed their ability to judge other people's actions. And so, I think of what I'm doing not so much as studying the defendant in a criminal trial, but studying the jury. CA: Is your work going to lead to any recommendations in education, to perhaps bring up a generation of kids able to make fairer moral judgments? RS: That's one of the idealistic hopes. The whole research program here of studying the distinctive parts of the human brain is brand new. Until recently, what we knew about the brain were the things that any other animal's brain could do too, so we could study it in animal models. We knew how brains see, and how they control the body and how they hear and sense. And the whole project of understanding how brains do the uniquely human things -- learn language and abstract concepts, and thinking about other people's thoughts -- that's brand new. And we don't know yet what the implications will be of understanding it. CA: So I've got one last question. There is this thing called the hard problem of consciousness, that puzzles a lot of people. The notion that you can understand why a brain works, perhaps. But why does anyone have to feel anything? Why does it seem to require these beings who sense things for us to operate? You're a brilliant young neuroscientist. I mean, what chances do you think there are that at some time in your career, someone, you or someone else, is going to come up with some paradigm shift in understanding what seems an impossible problem? RS: I hope they do. And I think they probably won't. CA: Why? RS: It's not called the hard problem of consciousness for nothing. (Laughter) CA: That's a great answer. Rebecca Saxe, thank you very much. That was fantastic. (Applause)

It's a great pleasure to be here. It's a great pleasure to speak after Brian Cox from CERN. I think CERN is the home of the Large Hadron Collider. What ever happened to the Small Hadron Collider? Where is the Small Hadron Collider? Because the Small Hadron Collider once was the big thing. Now, the Small Hadron Collider is in a cupboard, overlooked and neglected. You know when the Large Hadron Collider started, and it didn't work, and people tried to work out why, it was the Small Hadron Collider team who sabotaged it because they were so jealous. The whole Hadron Collider family needs unlocking. The lesson of Brian's presentation, in a way -- all those fantastic pictures -- is this really: that vantage point determines everything that you see. What Brian was saying was science has opened up successively different vantage points from which we can see ourselves, and that's why it's so valuable. So the vantage point you take determines virtually everything that you will see. The question that you will ask will determine much of the answer that you get. And so if you ask this question: Where would you look to see the future of education? The answer that we've traditionally given to that is very straightforward, at least in the last 20 years: You go to Finland. Finland is the best place in the world to see school systems. The Finns may be a bit boring and depressive and there's a very high suicide rate, but by golly, they are qualified. And they have absolutely amazing education systems. So we all troop off to Finland, and we wonder at the social democratic miracle of Finland and its cultural homogeneity and all the rest of it, and then we struggle to imagine how we might bring lessons back. Well, so, for this last year, with the help of Cisco who sponsored me, for some balmy reason, to do this, I've been looking somewhere else. Because actually radical innovation does sometimes come from the very best, but it often comes from places where you have huge need -- unmet, latent demand -- and not enough resources for traditional solutions to work -- traditional, high-cost solutions, which depend on professionals, which is what schools and hospitals are. So I ended up in places like this. This is a place called Monkey Hill. It's one of the hundreds of favelas in Rio. Most of the population growth of the next 50 years will be in cities. We'll grow by six cities of 12 million people a year for the next 30 years. Almost all of that growth will be in the developed world. Almost all of that growth will be in places like Monkey Hill. This is where you'll find the fastest growing young populations of the world. So if you want recipes to work -- for virtually anything -- health, education, government politics and education -- you have to go to these places. And if you go to these places, you meet people like this. This is a guy called Juanderson. At the age of 14, in common with many 14-year-olds in the Brazilian education system, he dropped out of school. It was boring. And Juanderson, instead, went into what provided kind of opportunity and hope in the place that he lived, which was the drugs trade. And by the age of 16, with rapid promotion, he was running the drugs trade in 10 favelas. He was turning over 200,000 dollars a week. He employed 200 people. He was going to be dead by the age of 25. And luckily, he met this guy, who is Rodrigo Baggio, the owner of the first laptop to ever appear in Brazil. 1994, Rodrigo started something called CDI, which took computers donated by corporations, put them into community centers in favelas and created places like this. What turned Juanderson around was technology for learning that made learning fun and accessible. Or you can go to places like this. This is Kibera, which is the largest slum in East Africa. Millions of people living here, stretched over many kilometers. And there I met these two, Azra on the left, Maureen on the right. They just finished their Kenyan certificate of secondary education. That name should tell you that the Kenyan education system borrows almost everything from Britain, circa 1950, but has managed to make it even worse. So there are schools in slums like this. They're places like this. That's where Maureen went to school. They're private schools. There are no state schools in slums. And the education they got was pitiful. It was in places like this. This a school set up by some nuns in another slum called Nakuru. Half the children in this classroom have no parents because they've died through AIDS. The other half have one parent because the other parent has died through AIDS. So the challenges of education in this kind of place are not to learn the kings and queens of Kenya or Britain. They are to stay alive, to earn a living, to not become HIV positive. The one technology that spans rich and poor in places like this is not anything to do with industrial technology. It's not to do with electricity or water. It's the mobile phone. If you want to design from scratch virtually any service in Africa, you would start now with the mobile phone. Or you could go to places like this. This is a place called the Madangiri Settlement Colony, which is a very developed slum about 25 minutes outside New Delhi, where I met these characters who showed me around for the day. The remarkable thing about these girls, and the sign of the kind of social revolution sweeping through the developing world is that these girls are not married. Ten years ago, they certainly would have been married. Now they're not married, and they want to go on to study further, to have a career. They've been brought up by mothers who are illiterate, who have never ever done homework. All across the developing world there are millions of parents -- tens, hundreds of millions -- who for the first time are with children doing homework and exams. And the reason they carry on studying is not because they went to a school like this. This is a private school. This is a fee-pay school. This is a good school. This is the best you can get in Hyderabad in Indian education. The reason they went on studying was this. This is a computer installed in the entrance to their slum by a revolutionary social entrepreneur called Sugata Mitra who has conducted the most radical experiments, showing that children, in the right conditions, can learn on their own with the help of computers. Those girls have never touched Google. They know nothing about Wikipedia. Imagine what their lives would be like if you could get that to them. So if you look, as I did, through this tour, and by looking at about a hundred case studies of different social entrepreneurs working in these very extreme conditions, look at the recipes that they come up with for learning, they look nothing like school. What do they look like? Well, education is a global religion. And education, plus technology, is a great source of hope. You can go to places like this. This is a school three hours outside of Sao Paulo. Most of the children there have parents who are illiterate. Many of them don't have electricity at home. But they find it completely obvious to use computers, websites, make videos, so on and so forth. When you go to places like this what you see is that education in these settings works by pull, not push. Most of our education system is push. I was literally pushed to school. When you get to school, things are pushed at you: knowledge, exams, systems, timetables. If you want to attract people like Juanderson who could, for instance, buy guns, wear jewelry, ride motorbikes and get girls through the drugs trade, and you want to attract him into education, having a compulsory curriculum doesn't really make sense. That isn't really going to attract him. You need to pull him. And so education needs to work by pull, not push. And so the idea of a curriculum is completely irrelevant in a setting like this. You need to start education from things that make a difference to them in their settings. What does that? Well, the key is motivation, and there are two aspects to it. One is to deliver extrinsic motivation, that education has a payoff. Our education systems all work on the principle that there is a payoff, but you have to wait quite a long time. That's too long if you're poor. Waiting 10 years for the payoff from education is too long when you need to meet daily needs, when you've got siblings to look after or a business to help with. So you need education to be relevant and help people to make a living there and then, often. And you also need to make it intrinsically interesting. So time and again, I found people like this. This is an amazing guy, Sebastiao Rocha, in Belo Horizonte, in the third largest city in Brazil. He's invented more than 200 games to teach virtually any subject under the sun. In the schools and communities that Taio works in, the day always starts in a circle and always starts from a question. Imagine an education system that started from questions, not from knowledge to be imparted, or started from a game, not from a lesson, or started from the premise that you have to engage people first before you can possibly teach them. Our education systems, you do all that stuff afterward, if you're lucky, sport, drama, music. These things, they teach through. They attract people to learning because it's really a dance project or a circus project or, the best example of all -- El Sistema in Venezuela -- it's a music project. And so you attract people through that into learning, not adding that on after all the learning has been done and you've eaten your cognitive greens. So El Sistema in Venezuela uses a violin as a technology of learning. Taio Rocha uses making soap as a technology of learning. And what you find when you go to these schemes is that they use people and places in incredibly creative ways. Masses of peer learning. How do you get learning to people when there are no teachers, when teachers won't come, when you can't afford them, and even if you do get teachers, what they teach isn't relevant to the communities that they serve? Well, you create your own teachers. You create peer-to-peer learning, or you create para-teachers, or you bring in specialist skills. But you find ways to get learning that's relevant to people through technology, people and places that are different. So this is a school in a bus on a building site in Pune, the fastest growing city in Asia. Pune has 5,000 building sites. It has 30,000 children on those building sites. That's one city. Imagine that urban explosion that's going to take place across the developing world and how many thousands of children will spend their school years on building sites. Well, this is a very simple scheme to get the learning to them through a bus. And they all treat learning, not as some sort of academic, analytical activity, but as that's something that's productive, something you make, something that you can do, perhaps earn a living from. So I met this character, Steven. He'd spent three years in Nairobi living on the streets because his parents had died of AIDS. And he was finally brought back into school, not by the offer of GCSEs, but by the offer of learning how to become a carpenter, a practical making skill. So the trendiest schools in the world, High Tech High and others, they espouse a philosophy of learning as productive activity. Here, there isn't really an option. Learning has to be productive in order for it to make sense. And finally, they have a different model of scale, and it's a Chinese restaurant model of how to scale. And I learned it from this guy, who is an amazing character. He's probably the most remarkable social entrepreneur in education in the world. His name is Madhav Chavan, and he created something called Pratham. And Pratham runs preschool play groups for, now, 21 million children in India. It's the largest NGO in education in the world. And it also supports working-class kids going into Indian schools. He's a complete revolutionary. He's actually a trade union organizer by background, and that's how he learned the skills to build his organization. When they got to a certain stage, Pratham got big enough to attract some pro bono support from McKinsey. McKinsey came along and looked at his model and said, "You know what you should do with this, Madhav? You should turn it into McDonald's. And what you do when you go to any new site is you kind of roll out a franchise. And it's the same wherever you go. It's reliable and people know exactly where they are. And there will be no mistakes." And Madhav said, "Why do we have to do it that way? Why can't we do it more like the Chinese restaurants?" There are Chinese restaurants everywhere, but there is no Chinese restaurant chain. Yet, everyone knows what is a Chinese restaurant. They know what to expect, even though it'll be subtly different and the colors will be different and the name will be different. You know a Chinese restaurant when you see it. These people work with the Chinese restaurant model -- same principles, different applications and different settings -- not the McDonald's model. The McDonald's model scales. The Chinese restaurant model spreads. So mass education started with social entrepreneurship in the 19th century. And that's desperately what we need again on a global scale. And what can we learn from all of that? Well, we can learn a lot because our education systems are failing desperately in many ways. They fail to reach the people they most need to serve. They often hit their target but miss the point. Improvement is increasingly difficult to organize; our faith in these systems, incredibly fraught. And this is just a very simple way of understanding what kind of innovation, what kind of different design we need. There are two basic types of innovation. There's sustaining innovation, which will sustain an existing institution or an organization, and disruptive innovation that will break it apart, create some different way of doing it. There are formal settings -- schools, colleges, hospitals -- in which innovation can take place, and informal settings -- communities, families, social networks. Almost all our effort goes in this box, sustaining innovation in formal settings, getting a better version of the essentially Bismarckian school system that developed in the 19th century. And as I said, the trouble with this is that, in the developing world there just aren't teachers to make this model work. You'd need millions and millions of teachers in China, India, Nigeria and the rest of developing world to meet need. And in our system, we know that simply doing more of this won't eat into deep educational inequalities, especially in inner cities and former industrial areas. So that's why we need three more kinds of innovation. We need more reinvention. And all around the world now you see more and more schools reinventing themselves. They're recognizably schools, but they look different. There are Big Picture schools in the U.S. and Australia. There are Kunskapsskolan schools in Sweden. Of 14 of them, only two of them are in schools. Most of them are in other buildings not designed as schools. There is an amazing school in Northen Queensland called Jaringan. And they all have the same kind of features: highly collaborative, very personalized, often pervasive technology, learning that starts from questions and problems and projects, not from knowledge and curriculum. So we certainly need more of that. But because so many of the issues in education aren't just in school, they're in family and community, what you also need, definitely, is more on the right hand side. You need efforts to supplement schools. The most famous of these is Reggio Emilia in Italy, the family-based learning system to support and encourage people in schools. The most exciting is the Harlem Children's Zone, which over 10 years, led by Geoffrey Canada, has, through a mixture of schooling and family and community projects, attempted to transform not just education in schools, but the entire culture and aspiration of about 10,000 families in Harlem. We need more of that completely new and radical thinking. You can go to places an hour away, less, from this room, just down the road, which need that, which need radicalism of a kind that we haven't imagined. And finally, you need transformational innovation that could imagine getting learning to people in completely new and different ways. So we are on the verge, 2015, of an amazing achievement, the schoolification of the world. Every child up to the age of 15 who wants a place in school will be able to have one in 2015. It's an amazing thing. But it is, unlike cars, which have developed so rapidly and orderly, actually the school system is recognizably an inheritance from the 19th century, from a Bismarkian model of German schooling that got taken up by English reformers, and often by religious missionaries, taken up in the United States as a force of social cohesion, and then in Japan and South Korea as they developed. It's recognizably 19th century in its roots. And of course it's a huge achievement. And of course it will bring great things. It will bring skills and learning and reading. But it will also lay waste to imagination. It will lay waste to appetite. It will lay waste to social confidence. It will stratify society as much as it liberates it. And we are bequeathing to the developing world school systems that they will now spend a century trying to reform. That is why we need really radical thinking, and why radical thinking is now more possible and more needed than ever in how we learn. Thank you. (Applause)